Constructive or destructive? Informative or uninformative?

You be the judge.

By Linda Felaco

At the January 9 Town Council meeting, Council President Tom Gentz asked the town to focus on “politics, not people” and to be “constructive, not destructive.” Mike Chambers praised Gentz’s speech at the January 23 Citizens Forum and said he was going to stop reading “the Democrat site” because it’s just a lot of “mudslinging and character assassination” and is “uninformative.”

This comment puzzled me, because the web site of the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee strictly deals with party positions and events and the only people named there are committee members or members of our statehouse delegation, which happens to be Democratic. Then it occurred to me that Chambers might have been referring to Progressive Charlestown. Of course the blog is not affiliated with the town committee, so I can only assume that Chambers was probably trying to spread disinformation about his political opponents in order to curry favor with the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (even though they have no “membership” per se).

So in the spirit of the new year and new beginnings, I thought I’d try to quantify where Progressive Charlestown falls on those two axes, constructive vs. destructive and informative vs. uninformative. I focused on several areas with broad ramifications that we’ve covered extensively.

Of course, this is Progressive Charlestown, not Conservative Charlestown. We don’t pretend to be neutral, and we’ve certainly written about our share of polarizing subjects. So your view of our efforts is likely colored by your political views. Indeed, there’s a well-known psychological phenomenon called “myside bias” in which people tend to believe information that confirms their preconceived worldview and disbelieve anything that clashes with it.

As you’re no doubt aware, we’ve been covering the various Lisa DiBello revelations extensively, starting with her legal action against the town and then the dust-up at the June Town Council meeting, which led us to investigate the awarding of the beach concession contracts, her charity, her game and reality show appearances, and possible ethics violations, including the many ethics questions raised by her suing the town while sitting on the Town Council. Has our coverage been constructive or destructive? How informative are we being?

She's serving! She's suing! She's serving! She's suing!
She's serving AND suing!

Well, if you’re Lisa DiBello or one of her friends, you’d likely call it destructive. If you’re someone who thinks DiBello is the “swing vote” on the Council and that any improprieties should be covered up to court her favor, you probably don’t like the facts we’ve publicized. If, on the other hand, you’re a voter, taxpayer, someone who lost a bid for the beach concessions to DiBello’s roommate, or someone who contributed money to her charity that has not been properly accounted for, you may think otherwise. And the series has been nothing if not informative—far too informative for some people’s comfort, as a matter of fact. Some might think that the Price Is Right and Judge Mathis stories were gratuitous, except for the possible on-air misrepresentations she may have made, which have a bearing on the rest of the story.

Another topic we’ve delved into is the proposed purchase of the old YMCA camp on Watchaug Pond. We favored the initial (and subsequently defeated) plan to turn it into a conservation development and sought to provide factual analysis to counter the anonymous, often distorted or flat-out factually incorrect comments opposing the project that were being published without comment by the Charlestown Citizens Alliance.

If you stand to make over $700,000 profit on a property sale, I suppose you’d find our criticisms of the current proposal for the town to buy the property as open space destructive. Ditto for anyone who thinks we should buy the camp at any price, to rescue it from predation by the evil greedy developers, to provide the Sonquipaug owners with open space, or as a donation to the Y. However, if you think we should look carefully at how our tax dollars are spent and how to put them to best use, I think you’d find our airing of the issues to be constructive. Whether the town ends up making this “donation” to the YMCA or not, we will be satisfied that we brought out factual information that most citizens would not have known otherwise.

Regarding the Charlestown Democrats’ proposed Homestead Exemption, if you’re a nonresident property owner, you made your feelings on this subject quite clear at the December 12 Town Council meeting. If, on the other hand, you understood the proposal’s aims, namely, to rebalance the tax load, which was shifted toward middle-class homeowners in the last revaluation, you might be inclined to take a more constructive view of the proposal itself and therefore our coverage of it. If you know that state money resurfaced South County Trail and rebuilt Old Post Road while the state has reduced financial support to the town and Chariho, and that out-of-state landowners contribute no income tax to the state, you might also take a more favorable view.

	Average home value (new assessment)	Average change in taxes for 2011-12
CCA Leadership	$722,000	+3.4%
Town Council	$581,000	+7.2%
Charlestown Dems	$379,000	+11.25%

Ironically, some people have told us that we should not have been so informative in our explanation of the financial details of the proposal; it was our own “magic tax calculator” that gave the nonresidents the tax numbers they got so up in arms about.

Here’s one Councilor Dan Slattery probably doesn’t rate as constructive: the “Deputy Dan” series. How others rate it probably depends on their taste for cheekiness and repurposing old children’s books, and their appreciation for literary devices and metaphor, without which most writing becomes deadly boring. How much respect the reader thinks elected officials deserve simply by virtue of their office irrespective of their official conduct is also a factor. If, however, you think voters have the right to know what their elected officials are getting up to and whether they’re following council rules, I think we’ve been constructive and informative.

Affordable housing has been another hot-button issue, both around town and here on the blog. If you think affordable housing is a plot by evil greedy developers to destroy our bucolic little haven, you likely find our advocacy of affordable housing destructive. Another oft-heard objection to affordable housing is that because the recipients are living there for “free,” they won’t maintain the property. These critics might be surprised to learn that two of the most impassible (meaning difficult to move around in because of detritus piled up everywhere) homes I’ve ever set foot in were owner-occupied homes valued at ~$800,000 each in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the wealthiest suburbs of Washington, D.C.

If, on the other hand, you actually care whether people have affordable housing, you’d be inclined to think we’ve been constructive and informative in our efforts to stay on top of the various Town Council and Planning Commission actions and inactions in this area.

Speaking of the Planning Commission, if you’re a planning commissioner, you probably think we’ve been destructive. But you have the power to put our criticisms to constructive use. In fact, one of our key criticisms is just how much power the Planning Commission has usurped by fiat. Those who have been subjected to the arcane and arbitrary dictates of the Planning Commission could be expected to hold a different view of whether we’ve been constructive and informative.

How you feel about wind turbines likely colors your view of our coverage of the subject. Contrary to what some seem to think, Progressive Charlestown has never advocated industrial-scale wind turbines in Charlestown. Those who view wind turbines of any size as the devil’s invention seem to find our advocacy of small-scale turbines for residential use to be destructive. If, on the other hand, you think wind turbines are a sensible move toward addressing the twin problems of climate change and fossil fuel depletion, you’d be more inclined to find our take on the issue constructive. But with 123 stories on wind turbines, I think it would be difficult to argue that we haven’t been informative.

On the dark sky ordinance, the beach pavilions, and the proposed red-light cameras on Route 1, we’ve explored a wide range of views, including differing opinions among the blog editors and anonymous (and sometimes intemperate and even hateful) objections the CCA published without clarifying the writers’ many errors of fact (see here and here for our annotated versions of the beach pavilion comments and here, here, and here for the red-light camera comments). Our inclusion of opposing viewpoints I think puts our coverage of these topics firmly in the category of constructive and informative.

In short, if you want to impose your views on the town without input or discussion, then you probably don’t see our efforts to present our views as constructive. But if you want to make up your own mind based on input from multiple sources, then you probably see this blog as a constructive addition to the usual sources of town information.

Rather than merely pay lip service to the idea of openness and transparency, we actually practice it. When we have been accused of spreading “lies and slander,” we have repeatedly asked for any pertinent facts that would contradict those we have presented in our articles, to no avail. We work hard to get the facts right, but some people have a vested interest in making inconvenient truths difficult to uncover, and like any other publication, we have had to make the occasional correction. But it seems that our accusers just want us to stop writing, period, because they are attacking the messenger rather than the message.