What’s next for the CCA?

Y-Gate…”Kill Bill”…the Battle for Ninigret…RHOTAP and the CCA War on Families

By Will Collette

Charlestown’s shadow government, the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA), has taken a big roll of the dice. At Monday night’s Town Council meeting, the CCA got a chance to see how well its major initiatives play out when put to the test.

Let’s take a deep breath and review some of their major policy initiatives and think about what might come next after a pretty bad night for the CCA agenda and their two champions on the Town Council, Boss Tom Gentz and his henchman, Deputy Dan Slattery.

Among the big “ideas” the CCA is promoting:

Y-Gate, the heist engineered by Planning Commissar and CCA strategist Ruth Platner to spend $475,000 of town taxpayers’ money to buy a worthless easement from the Charlestown Land Trust. The Land Trust will then combine the town money with a hoped-for, but not yet received, state grant of $367,000. They will give $730,000 of that money to the Westerly YMCA for an overpriced, trashed-out old campground. That campground will become a de facto extension of the backyards of the nonresident vacation homeowners in the Sonquipaug neighborhood.

The Monday Night Surprise: Budget Commission chair Richard Sartor announced the Commission’s recommendation that rather than use bond funds – which have been approved by the voters – to buy the camp, the town pay for the land outright from undesignated surplus funds.

Town Administrator Bill DiLibero - not dead yet

“Kill Bill.” The CCA has launched an all-out scorched-earth campaign to fire Town Administrator William DiLibero by any means necessary, including deception, twisted interpretation of documents, false recitations of history, using the Interior Department as a patsy, and flat-out lies. The purge, if successful, will not end with DiLibero and will almost certainly include other town hall staff. The spearhead of this campaign is Deputy Dan Slattery, who applied for DiLibero’s job but was not hired.

The Monday Night Surprise: Slattery and Gentz were counting on Councilor Lisa DiBello’s vote to give them the three votes they needed to Kill Bill. There was certainly no doubt that DiBello hates DiLibero – after all, he fired her from her 19-year position as head of Parks and Recreation and he is one of the lead defendants in DiBello v. Charlestown. But precisely because of her lawsuit, the often ethically tone-deaf DiBello announced that she would recuse herself and not take part in any decision involving DiLibero. Even she could see that firing the person you are suing because he fired you might seem just a little like revenge to the RI Ethics Commission.

Ninigret Park (click to enlarge) from the National
Fish & Wildlife Service. Note the blue section -
town land AND the subsection at the upper end.
That is the exclusively town owned 55 acres
which is OUTSIDE Interior Dept. jurisdiction

The Battle for Ninigret. The CCA, through Deputy Dan and Boss Gentz, created a firestorm over whether Charlestown has the right to do what it wants with its property at Ninigret Park. They concocted a phony history that the Interior Department has the power to veto any use of the Park that they consider to be incompatible with the wildlife refuge. Boss Gentz in particular raised the specter that if we fail to submit to federal authority, the feds might take Ninigret Park away from us. Deputy Dan had prepared a string of resolutions that would have cancelled the Ninigret Park Master Plan, neutered the Parks and Recreation Commission, and given control of Ninigret to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Frosty Drew Observatory and the adjacent neighborhood.

The CCA was willing to give up the town’s rights to Ninigret in order to buttress their Kill Bill Campaign and to cover up their botched dark-sky ordinance. The added bonus is the CCA’s out-of-state constituents would probably prefer having the feds absorb the town Park into the wildlife refuge.

Monday Night Surprise: The tag team of Deb Carney and Cheryl Dowdell produced the documents and evidence that showed that Boss Gentz and Deputy Dan Slattery have no clothes. There are, in fact, two parts to Ninigret Park, the town’s 55 acres, which the town purchased and is totally outside of the Interior Department’s jurisdiction, and the 174 acres of town land that is designated as a buffer for the wildlife refuge. Slattery eagerly allowed his motions to slide into the next Town Council meeting agenda (April 23^rd) and looked like he wanted to puke.

Richard Sartor - front man for this terrible idea

RHOTAP and the War against Families. The CCA has made its contempt for working families, especially those North of One, abundantly clear on many occasions (click here). They have tried to block any housing that might attract families with children. They have tried to hack away at the Chariho Schools budget. They tried to block construction of decent toilet facilities at the town beaches, and more. They killed a Democratic proposal to give every Charlestown resident homeowner a $1000 Homestead Tax Credit.

This month they offered their own crabbed, twisted alternative – a proposal to create a new Game Show called RHOTAP that would permit a dozen or so unlucky families to apply for tax relief if they are in danger of losing their homes. They would be required to write an essay and then try to convince a panel of five volunteer judges that they are (a) in need; (b) worthy of assistance and (c) that the assistance will help them save their homes. I predict no one will apply. If anyone actually does apply, they will probably be so bad off that they will be too bad off to qualify. 

There is no provision for confidentiality. Indeed, because of the state’s open meeting law, the odds are that the RHOTAP Game Show will be open to the public. The identities of people asking for help will probably become public record.

Budget Commission head Richard Sartor fronted this proposal last Monday, but this plan is Deputy Dan all the way. Incidentally, they are calling their Game Show RHOTAP because "Hunger Games" is already taken.

Monday Night Surprise: RHOTAP was allowed to go forward, pretty much without a stink. That’s largely because hardly anybody knows about it. The next step is for the Town Solicitor to come up with some draft ordinance language.

My predictions. All of these battles will be fought throughout the months leading up to the election in November. Even though each of these CCA initiatives is deeply flawed, if not deeply unpopular, the CCA will charge ahead with them all full-steam.

I predict that if the CCA Town Council majority does not put the $475,000 Y-Gate expenditure on the ballot as a separate ballot question, there will be more lawsuits to block them from giving away taxpayer money.

I predict the Ethics Commission will rule that DiBello cannot participate in any personnel decisions regarding DiLibero and the Town Council will remain deadlocked 2-2. I also predict that the obvious rift between the town staff and the CCA Town Councilors is going to get a whole lot worse.

From the Ethics Commission's recent ruling

I predict that the Interior Department is going to want to lower its profile and withdraw from the middle of Charlestown’s ugly little fights. Slattery and Gentz have their weird plan for Ninigret, and they have apparently made some promises to interest groups who want the Park’s Master Plan nullified and a new decision-making process adopted. They started this, and now they’re stuck with it.

The CCA will try to figure out some way to spin this tale in a way that makes them look less ridiculous.

Councilors Marge Frank and Gregg Avedisian will oppose giving up the town’s rights to Ninigret.

The swing vote will be Lisa DiBello, who is not likely to be ethically barred from participating in this matter. She has been tied to the CCA Councilors. She is also suing Councilors Frank and Avedisian in DiBello v. Charlestown. But she also has pretty deep emotional ties to Ninigret. The question is whether those ties are stronger than her alliance of convenience with the CCA and her animus toward Avedisian and Frank.

Toss-up.

Finally, there’s RHOTAP and the CCA War Against Families. The CCA has come out of the closet as the town’s party of the elite. Their principal constituencies are millionaire homeowners, especially those from out of state, and radical open-space fanatics.

RHOTAP is, at best, grossly insensitive to the needs of struggling households. At its heart is an ugly disdain for working families. I predict that while few will know what words make up the acronym RHOTAP, a whole lot of people are going to learn what this awful program is all about.

We won't have to wait long for the CCA Town Council majority's next move. There is a second "regular" (as if any of them are) meeting to cover all the agenda items that weren't covered last Monday that is scheduled for Monday April 23.

The CCA has declared its agenda and set out its program priorities, and they will have to live with them. And we’ll be there, step by step, to uncloak their radical agenda for our beautiful town.