Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Cui bono?



Marcus Tullius Cicero
(Wikimedia Commons)
By Linda Felaco

I tweak logorrheic* CCA blogger Michael Chambers from time to time, but he and I share a fondness for Roman orator Cicero. Michael’s favorite Cicero quote is “The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves.” Which, I grant you, is an excellent quote to keep in mind when considering the actions of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance.

My favorite Cicero quote is “Cui bono?,” or “To whose benefit?” I’ve frequently asked this question about the inner workings of the town.

Who benefits, for example, from all these multiple, conflicting, intrusive town ordinances we have on the books? Who benefits from ordinances against spitting, or throwing snowballs, or camping in your own back yard?

Who would have benefited from the town’s planned purchase of a conservation easement on the YMCA’s abandoned campground on Watchaug Pond? The Y, obviously, and the Charlestown Land Trust. And the Sonquipaug Association, who would’ve thereby been spared from potentially having a few new neighbors to the north. And anyone who felt there was some need for a few hundred extra feet of pond frontage in addition to the miles and miles of state-owned frontage, perhaps because they dislike having to rub elbows with the unwashed masses at the state campgrounds. But the rest of us, not so much.
We've already got plenty of access to Watchaug Pond.
(Note: This does not count toward our
affordable housing quota.)

Who benefits from Planning Commissar Ruth Platner’s cynical “solution” to Charlestown’s affordable housing problem, the ordinances creating “Accessory Family Dwelling Units” and “Income-Restricted Accessory Dwelling Units,” which she herself admitted she didn’t expect anyone to ever build? These ordinances don’t benefit people looking for affordable housing who are not family members of Charlestown homeowners. Who’s going to sink the money into building an accessory structure to rent out at below-market rates when they could rent at a premium during the summer?

Nor does it benefit the distressed homeowner who might need to rent out, say, an in-law suite in order to avoid foreclosure.

Nor does it benefit out-of-work construction workers or home remodelers, many of whom live here in Charlestown, who could potentially get some business constructing new housing units or converting vacant properties into rental units. Not that Ruth and her minions are any friends to anyone in the construction trades.

Who benefits from the CCA’s efforts to overturn the state affordable housing law or get Charlestown exempted from it? Not the sons and daughters of Charlestown families who would like to start new families in their hometown, or town workers who would like to live where they work, especially considering that there are no bus routes here in town.


With the right color shingles, this might pass
muster with the Planning Commission
as affordable housing.
Who benefits from Planning Commissioner and Town Council candidate George Tremblay’s ongoing “analysis” of low- and moderate-income housing in Charlestown and neighboring rural towns? Such dithering doesn’t help people in need of affordable housing, or people in the construction trades who are in need of work. Nor did it help Melina Lodge, the only candidate to apply for the position of analyst, who Tremblay refused to hire despite her eminent qualifications.

Who benefits most from our low property tax rate that the CCA is so fond of crowing about? Each percentage point of difference in the rate means more in dollar terms to the owners of high-end properties than it does to those of us in more moderately priced homes. But what do we actually get for what we do pay in taxes? No trash collection. No sidewalks. No public water supplies or sewage treatment. No public transit. Hardly any streetlights (and the CCA wants to get rid of the few we have). Volunteer firefighters, for which we’re taxed separately, meaning that extra fraction of a percent should be added to the overall tax rate. Only token social services in the form of a small contribution to RI-CAN and paying RI-CAN Director Deb Nigrelli a stipend to act as Town Welfare Director. Minimal staff, supplemented by volunteers of whom there’s a chronic shortage.
Sure, we call the RI-CAN volunteers "Hometown Heroes,"
but how much do we actually fund them?

Has anyone who’s served on a commission ever thought that maybe they’d rather pay a little more in taxes in order to have a paid staffer do the job instead? Or to at least have their steady support, rather than just wing it as some of our commissions do (think Charter Revision Advisory Committee)?

When I look around the state at what friends and family in other cities and towns pay in property taxes, I can’t help but notice that they get a lot more too. My mother pays a higher property tax rate in Cranston than we do—but she’s spared the expense of owning a car, since she can get around on the bus. My friend in Bristol pays a higher property tax rate than we do—but she owns waterfront property and her neighborhood association owns its own private beach. Plus she gets front-row seats to the Bristol Fourth of July parade, the oldest in the country.

It’s one thing to want low taxes on the federal or even state level because you don’t see enough direct benefit to yourself, or you don’t feel like the taxing authorities are responsive enough to your needs. But to demand low taxes in a small town like this is really saying that you don’t trust your neighbors to spend the money effectively.

And still our nonresident property owners complain they are overtaxed. Most commonly, they complain because they don’t use the Chariho school system. Well, neither do I and neither do many other residents—but we understand that things like schools and police protection are for the common good, even if we don’t use them. And anyway, Chariho is a bargain compared to the cost of housing an incarcerated inmate at the ACI, which is where people tend to end up who don’t get a decent education. Though that’s another cost the out-of-staters don’t bear, since they don’t pay RI taxes.
Sure, we'd have lower taxes if we hadn't built these,
but some things are worth paying for.

What they (and the CCA) never seem to talk about is what it costs those of us who live here year-round to maintain roads and infrastructure and emergency services for all those summer visitors. We spend much of the off-season picking up the trash left behind by each summer’s guests. We even voted to tax ourselves a million and change to build bathrooms at the town beaches that we wouldn’t have to be embarrassed about. Charlestown is a bargain compared to the Hamptons or the Connecticut shore. That’s why our guests come here—and then they complain about paying their fair share.

In addition to being an orator, Cicero was a lawyer, and his “who benefits?” question is also key in legal matters, especially when judging motives. Usually, if you can puzzle out “who benefits” from an action, you will also know who is driving it: “Look first to he who has the most to gain.”
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*Logorrheic = suffering from logorrhea, from the Greek logos, word, and rhoia, or flow. In other words, verbal diarrhea.