Only four months to go till Election Day

And already the mud is flying hot and thick

Charlestown Town Council as the CCA would like it to be...

By Will Collette

I have only lived in Charlestown for ten years. I am told by Charlestown lifers that politics in town have always been raucous, nasty and personal. That’s pretty normal for small town politics where everybody knows everybody and everybody gets into everybody’s business.

Every election year, there are always some candidates who make a big deal about “civility” and “decorum.” They also usually invoke the values of “transparency” and “openness.” This litany is usually used as a criticism of and warning to others, not necessarily as a code of conduct they themselves actually follow.

...And the reality

Long-time residents point to the period of relative calm in Charlestown politics during the four years (2002 to 2006) when Deb Carney and Donna Walsh were the top officers of the Town Council. Yes, there were fights, harsh exchanges, threats, complaints and all of that, but the Council operated with much higher degree of effectiveness than we have seen since then.

That’s what the history of Charlestown politics over the past six years has shown.

For the past six years (2006 to the present), Charlestown politics has been a mess. During the 2006-2008 Council term when Jim Mageau was in charge, the Charlestown Citizens Alliance organized as the resistance front to him. The attacks against Mageau were personal, bitter, nasty and disruptive. They often complained about Mageau lack of "civility" while they were screaming at him. Click here for Progressive Charlestown's "Field Guide" to the CCA.

Mageau was quite up to the task of dishing out as much as he got, and then some.

For most of the 2006-2008 Council term, the Council was deadlocked, two to two. When Council President and Mageau ally John Craig quit in mid term out of disgust and frustration, sick of the constant attacks from the CCA, he literally left town and left the Council divided 2 to 2 with Mageau and Bruce Picard on one side and Kate Waterman and Harriet Allen on the other.

On occasion, the Council could not assemble a quorum when Councilors Allen and Waterman decided to boycott the sessions. Aside from the most basic tasks needed to keep the Town going, very little was done during the 2006-2008 term other than fight.

This set the table for the CCA to sweep all five Town Council seats in 2008, as well as take total control of the Planning Commission.

Slattery - as CCA Prez, led purge of 2008 CCA Councilors

But shortly into the 2008-2010 term, the wheels came off this new CCA-controlled town government. The CCA-endorsed Council members embraced the idea of Charlestown getting into alternative energy in a major way and, for a time, it looks like the CCA was setting itself up as a “green energy” organization.

The CCA had strong poll support from their e-mail list. Their President at the time, Dan Slattery, publicly supported wind energy, while privately working against it.

CCA Steering Committee member Tom Gentz made a major pro-wind power presentation to the Town Council on behalf of the CCA.

But then the 2008 CCA Council made the mistake of backing the wrong project – Larry LeBlanc’s Whalerock industrial wind farm – and going about it in a way that raised the hackles of the Planning Commission and many town residents.

Sixteen years of torturing Charlestown - going for 22

The 2008 CCA Council also started planning and fund-raising for a municipal wind turbine project that was to be built on town land in Ninigret Park to help defray the town’s electric bills for municipal buildings and Chariho Elementary. This project raised the hackles of neighbors in Arnolda, another CCA stronghold.

Under Ruth Platner’s now dominant leadership, the Planning Commission was on the road to asserting itself as the most powerful body in Charlestown.

A new NIMBY group, Ill Wind RI, formed to fight the Whalerock wind farm. They quickly aligned with Ruth Platner and the CCA-controlled Planning Commission to fight the CCA-controlled Town Council.

I guess the opposite of “civility” is civil war, and that’s what Charlestown had during the 2008-2010 Council term. By the end of the term, the CCA Council incumbents were effectively excommunicated from the CCA.

Ruth Platner’s faction of the CCA inherited the title but lost many of its long-time supporters, and the CCA became the secretive, reactionary and almost paranoid organization it is today.

In the 2010 election, Charlestown witnessed the bizarre phenomenon of a contest pitting the “old” excommunicant CCA slate (four incumbents who decided to run for re-election) versus the “new” CCA slate consisting of Gentz, Slattery and Cliff Vanover. Jim Mageau ran again with David Mars as his running-mate. Independents Lisa DiBello (“Because I care not because I want pay-back”) and Joe Dolock rounded out the field.

It was a bitter, nasty, personal campaign with all sides blazing away at each other. The 2010 election results were close. Two excommunicated former CCA incumbents – Marge Frank and Gregg Avedisian – were re-elected and two “new” CCA candidates – Tom Gentz and Dan Slattery – were elected.

Because she cares....

The tie-breaker was Lisa “Because I Care” DiBello. She provided the new CCA bloc of Gentz and Slattery with the controlling vote. Even though Lisa DiBello’s leading patron is Jim Mageau, the arch-enemy of the CCA, she still went with the CCA bloc because she really hates Gregg Avedisian and isn’t too thrilled with Marge Frank, either.

In fact, after only a couple of months, Councilor DiBello initiated legal action against the Town and nine present and former town officials, including Avedisian and Marge Frank. Indeed, Avedisian plays a starring role in the narrative of DiBello v. Charlestown.

The current Town Council’s term has been marked by some terrible and rancorous conduct. In their very first Council meeting, the new Town Council majority flouted the Attorney General’s ruling in the Open Meetings Act decision on Cliff Vanover’s complaint against Jim Mageau, by walking in with a deal to pass a pre-drafted resolution banning all wind energy in Charlestown. The three votes were already lined up. The only compromise was to amend the resolution to allow the municipal wind project at Ninigret Park to continue - the one that later led to the ouster of then CCA darling Town Administrator Bill DiLibero..

Since that opening meeting, this CCA-controlled Council has taken Charlestown into one bitter, divisive battle after another. Though they preached civility and decorum during the campaign,

Councilors Gentz, Slattery and DiBello have mounted personal attacks from the Council platform and misused their official positions to conduct witch hunts against town citizens

They destroyed a good man’s attempt to bring beauty to a rural dump, the derelict YMCA camp, while pandering to non-residents who want to raid the taxpayers’ pocketbooks to carry out the scandalous Y-Gate scam.

They vilified a well-meaning, hard-working Town Administrator they once professed love and admiration for and drove him out of town. They initiated a phony crisis over Ninigret Park.

They kicked around a lighting ordinance that should have been easy to pass, if only their CCA colleagues in the Planning Commission had the good sense to consult with town residents and businesses before proposing to micro-regulate homeowners and town businesses..

They adopted a retrogressive, anti-environmental wind ordinance that makes Charlestown the most restrictive community in the US on wind energy.

They have handed the Planning Commission powers it has no right to hold under the Town Charter, and have made the CCA-controlled Commission the primary legislative and regulatory body in town.

They have attacked families with children, insulted working families suffering hardship in these tough economic times, hurled contempt at town businesses and even tried their hand at censorship.

While preaching openness and transparency, they have withheld records and repeatedly violated the Open Meetings Act.

They have turned the Planning Commission into the true center of power by allowing it to become the town's leading legislative and regulatory body.

Every month has brought new nightmares.

The Mageau Years (2006-2008) were marked by bitter battles and a 2-2 Council deadlock. The First Reign of the CCA (2008-2010) was also marked by bitter battles as well as paralysis caused by the CCA civil war.

But the Second Reign of the CCA, 2010 to the present, has not only been as ugly and nasty as the prior two Council cycles, but real harm has been done to Charlestown citizens through the enactment of bad town legislation.

When you hear candidates utter the mantra of “Civility, decorum, transparency and openness,” remember this history.

Frankly, I would settle for politicians who back up what they say with solid facts and, please, maybe a little humor. Charlestown has been a very grim and humorless place for the past six years.

Nearly all of this history took place before there was a Progressive Charlestown, so despite what Councilor DiBello or Boss Gentz may claim when they abuse the Council platform for their unsubstantiated personal attacks, Progressive Charlestown didn’t cause all of this carnage simply because we weren't in operation. .

But since February, 2011, we have reported on all those things that used to go largely unnoticed or under-reported.

And that is one important difference. In the days when newspapers were newspapers, Charlestown’s crazy politics got coverage in the Westerly Sun, Chariho Times and Providence Journal.

The Journal practically never writes about Charlestown anymore except to pick up on the rare wire story and the Times’ parent company has cut back. We still have a very good assigned reporter from the Sun. But that's about it from what some like to call the main-stream media.

The CCA provides its own "news" coverage of Charlestown, but it is sporadic, rarely sourced and it is the history as is written by the victors.Mostly we get "the Voice of CCA" Mike Chambers' punditry.

Tom Ferrio and I started Progressive Charlestown to provide Charlestown with lots more intensive coverage of Charlestown politics, life and culture. We didn’t set out to do it so intensively, but it’s so easy to get sucked in.

From a research, writing and reporting standpoint, Charlestown is a rich subject. So now we provide daily coverage, with links to documents. We have developed sources that often mean we get the scoops. And we do in-depth analysis that challenges the CCA-dominated town government.

Without apology, we focus on those who hold the reins of power, those who back them, and those who benefit from their actions because what they do or don’t do affects the rest of us.

We research what we write. We present our source material. We are clear that we have a point of view but we lay out facts that bring us to our conclusions with links to original source material as much as we can.  And we intend to keep doing that, day-by-day, for the next 120 days.