The Y-Gate Scandal – more deception surfaces

Discoveries from deep within town records

Sort of like the way Y-Gate was handled from the start.
Read the rest of this Dilbert cartoon here.

By Will Collette

Sparked by revelations in the sworn testimony of Council member Gregg Avedisian, old Y-Gate records are now getting a lot of deep scrutiny, and not just by your Progressive Charlestown staff, with some surprising results.

Read Avedisian’s sworn deposition in the Y-Gate Scandal by clicking here.

Readers are e-mailing in tips about records they are finding by going back into attachments to minutes of meetings from over a year ago.

A picture is emerging of a Town Council all too willing to be played and manipulated by such Y-Gate players as Boston lawyer and de facto “mayor” of the Sonquipaug neighborhood Joanne D’Alcomo, Charlestown Land Trust Treasurer Russ Ricci and Planning Commissar Ruth Platner.

Sonquipaug "Mayor" Joanne D'Alcomo played
much bigger role than previously made public

Let’s look at some interesting paperwork regarding D’Alcomo. One record comes courtesy of Deputy Dan Slattery. The other from D'Alcomo herself.

Up until May 2011, the Council seemed likely to grant the Westerly YMCA a zoning change on its derelict and abandoned campground from “open space/recreational” to residential. The Y came forward with this proposal to accommodate the plan for a conservation development by Ted Veazey. This conservation project was so nice, and land friendly, that even the Planning Commission liked it (at least, on the surface).

The neighbors to the north of the Y camp, permanent residents mostly, voiced their support for the project through their group, the Watchaug Heights Homeowners Association. CCA Council member Deputy Dan Slattery was a leader of that group.

But trouble was brewing along the southern border of the Y camp. Under the banner of the Sonquipaug Association, Joanne D’Alcomo mounted a vicious attack on the proposal, mischaracterizing it as a land-rape being done by a devious “developer.” This vile attack led to a split vote in the Town Council to deny the YMCA the zoning change it requested so Veazey could buy the land, clean it up and build ten clustered homes while leaving most of the land as open space.

At this point, Planning Commissar Ruth Platner and D’Alcomo teamed up with an unlikely ally, Councilor Gregg Avedisian, to come up with a process that would lead to an alternative plan that had some chance of creating a community consensus and a winning Council vote.

The first step was to form a new town-sanctioned citizens’ panel that would come up with an alternative plan.

Y Board Chair Mal Makin could have
served on ad hoc group but didn't

This is when things started to turn very sour. The ostensible idea was to have a panel representing a broad range of town interests, comprised as all town-sanctioned panels must be of town residents who would conduct an open and transparent process to arrive at an alternative use of the abandoned campground.

That first step was a problem. The Westerly YMCA wanted a seat. So did the Sonquipaug Association. While no one disputed their right to be part of the process, these two groups needed to come up with town residents to represent them.

No can do – even though the Y’s Board chair, financial guru Mal Makin, is a Charlestown resident.They wanted their executive director, Maureen Fitzgerald who is not a Charlestown resident, to be the designated rep instead.

According to the records, the Sonquipaug Association even sought to undermine the representation of the Watchaug Heights Homeowners Association by proposing one of their own members, Lise Gramolini, who is not a full-time resident of Charlestown, never mind the Watchaug Heights neighborhood.

Deputy Dan was the one who caught this flagrant attempt to stack the deck, and he wrote this memo to Town Clerk Amy Rose Weinreich:

This e-mail appears in the Council minutes for August 10, 2011 on the last page of a three-page attachment (click here).

Of course, at this point, Joanne D’Alcomo was not a household name in Charlestown, so Deputy Dan got her name wrong when he called her “D’Amico.”

Slattery, by the way, consistently recused himself throughout the Y-Gate deliberations because the back of his property line is right on the Y camp property line. The one time he spoke publicly about Y-Gate was when he stepped off the Council platform and went to the public speaker’s podium to speak as a member of the Watchaug Heights Homeowners Association in favor of Ted Veazey’s proposal.

Slattery did not talk publicly about his e-mailed condemnation of D’Alcomo’s deceptive acts, and no one else brought it into the public eye. Until now.

Weeks went by as the members of the special interest groups with very significant self-interest in the Y-Gate deal tried to mold this town advisory body into a useful tool.

Because D’Alcomo, purportedly with the support of her members, was unshakeable in insisting she be made a voting member of the group, the Y-Gate players needed some way to get around the town’s rule requiring members to be residents.

According to Gregg Avedisian’s sworn statement, Planning Commissar Platner and D’Alcomo teamed up to push for a new configuration of the group, one that allowed this group to deliberately skirt town residency requirement rules .

Since the group had been meeting with ineligible (i.e. non-residents) members participating, it appears this motion was intended to "fix" that violation and allow the non-conforming group to go forward. There are no agendas or minutes showing on Charlestown's official website, so in the absence of that, it looks like this group was not only violating the town rule about residency, but also the state Open Meetings Act, as Dr. Donoghue alleged in Donughue v. Charlestown.

On July 11, the Town Council approved the proposal by Platner and D’Alcomo to change the configuration of the group that was presented as a resolution by Councilor Avedisian.

That’s when applications for the newly configured group came in, prompting Deputy Dan Slattery to cry “foul” at D’Alcomo’s attempt to stack the group with a “representative” of Watchaug Heights who’d been hand-selected by D’Alcomo to represent Sonquipaug’s interests instead.

As for D’Alcomo’s application (click here), she claimed that not only was she the anointed representative of Sonquipaug, but that she was “one of the chief authors of the grant application to DEM for the site on May 27, 2011 and spent more than 50 hours working on it.” This is the same grant application that said that no town funds would be used in the purchase of the Y camp. Read it for yourself: 

From the DEM proposal that D'Alcomo says she wrote - see the blank spaces after "Local" funding. See the description of "Private" funding. Why are Charlestown taxpayers on the hook for $398,000? WHERE'S THE PRIVATE MONEY?

In her application for membership to the ad hoc group, D’Alcomo stated, “I have offered to raise and contribute funds for the property’s preservation.”

Indeed. And thus, I must repeat the question I raised in an earlier article  – WHERE’S THE MONEY? Since February 2012 when the Town Council majority voted to put town taxpayer money into Y-Gate, there has been no mention – or accounting – of the public fund-raising done by the Charlestown Land Trust or anyone else. Where’s the damned money?

In his sworn statement, Avedisian was asked about the money:

Q. During your meetings with the group, the ad hoc or advisory, as the case may be, were there any discussions as to sources of funding other than the Town of Charlestown and the grant, the DEM grant?

A. I believe the group did discuss the fact that the Land Trust would seek private sources of money, whether to assist with the purchase or the development or remediation department.

Q. Did the Land Trust representatives report to the group at any time during any of its meetings, as to its success or lack thereof in its fund- raising?

A. No.

The Y-Gate Scandal is one of those stories where is easy to run out of adjectives. It’s also a story where you really don’t need many adjectives to convey how dirty it is.

Y-Gate has left many Charlestown residents baffled – why would such revered institutions as the Westerly YMCA and the Charlestown Land Trust get in so deep? Why would they imperil their reputations and their standing with their financial supporters? How could they make so many mistakes just on one deal?

As for the CCA, they have chosen to throw away whatever credibility they have ever had about their commitment to open, honest and transparent government and to prudent stewardship of the town's money. They threw it all out to try to buy a rural junkyard. Planning Commissar Ruth Platner’s many twists and turns on this issue create a whole passel of very hard questions she will have to answer if she plans to run for re-election.

Gregg Avedisian has all but thrown away whatever political future he may have had, unless he decides, in the end, to cast the deciding vote to slay the Y-Gate zombie. 

And Boss Tom Gentz is going “all in” on this deal.

Why have all these players risked so much on something so incredibly stupid?

Let’s see what happens on Monday night, at the June 25^th continuation of the Town Council’s June meeting.

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