Tremblay throws the baby AND her grandma out with the bathwater
By Will Collette
CCA Town Council candidate George Tremblay has decided to again
start pumping his
crackpot theory that affordable housing will attract wealthy elderly people
intent on ripping off everybody else by moving into affordable senior citizens
housing. You’ve just got to read his
latest off-the-charts missive in the Westerly Sun’s Letters to the Editor
column.
This is becoming truly embarrassing. First, Tremblay wasted
town resources and a lot of people’s time on a disturbingly bad “research[1]”
report on affordable housing. Tremblay ended up writing the report himself even
though the Town Council actually authorized spending town money to hire a
consultant to do the research and write the report.
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| Tremblay wants to stop this menace before it spreads |
However, the only person who applied for the consultant
position was unacceptable to Tremblay, even though she had all the right
credentials, lives in Charlestown and offered to do the work at a fraction of
what Tremblay had expected to pay. But, uh-uh, no
contract for Melina Lodge, no matter how good her credentials, because she
was politically unacceptable to Tremblay and his CCA masters.
So Tremblay’s report, rife with errors, bias and missing
critical data on year-round rentals, was presented first to the Planning
Commission and then to the Town Council without
ever consulting with the Affordable Housing Commission.
In fact, it seems
he kept the “report” so close to his chest while he was compiling it that he
didn’t even want to give the appendices to a typist to type up for him and his
handwritten lists of “data” appear in the final report. Then the Town Council voted to send it all over the state, including to
every state legislator, again without consulting the Affordable Housing
Commission and over the objection of the AHC Chair.
Tremblay’s “findings” supported the CCA’s long-standing position
that we do not need any more affordable housing in Charlestown, thank you very
much, because housing prices have been depressed due to the recession. Let’s
just call all those properties “affordable” and then see if the state has the
cojones to stop them.
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| "Bring me back some ice-cold affordable housing...and make it snappy!" |
Now, in his October
16 Sun Letter to the Editor, Tremblay has upped the ante by claiming there are
BILLIONAIRES exploiting affordable housing in Manhattan. He cites a CNBC
discussion from October 11 (except it was actually reported on the 10th,
but who can fault Tremblay for getting this number wrong. It’s not like Tremblay
claims any expertise in math or research or accuracy or technical stuff
like that.).
Anyway, in that October 10 CNBC report, a reporter described a
sketchy story he was working on that a New York City condo developer was going
to get affordable housing tax credits for his luxury condo building.
The reporter admitted that the October 10th story
was far from complete since he had not heard back from city officials but, as
things work on TV these days, what the hell, let’s put it on the air.
Then, Tremblay apparently missed the October 12th follow-up story,
written after officials of the City of New York said the developer had not received the tax credits and that
the developer’s application was incomplete and would not be processed until the
city was satisfied it had the information it needed.
Tremblay also does not acknowledge that the unique “421a”
New York City program tax break program has nothing whatsoever to do with Rhode
Island.
Nonetheless, George Tremblay urges voters to reject Rhode
Island ballot question #7, which would provide more funding for affordable
housing, because maybe his fuzzy version of events in Manhattan will somehow
happen in Rhode Island.
First it was elderly millionaires running amok, and now it’s
billionaires. Never mind how sketchy the story is, never mind that it has nothing
to do with Rhode Island – it is a menace that must be stopped at all costs. Just
in case. Even if it doesn’t exist.
And this guy wants your vote for Town Council based on yet
another CCA-concocted Fear Factor phony issue.
The bad news is that Tremblay is also still sitting on the
Planning Commission till 2016 and if voters rightfully decide not to elect him
to the Council, we’re still stuck with him on Planning. Hmmm, let’s go back and
read that Town
Charter provision on recall.
[1] In
his CCA campaign bio, Tremblay cites his long career as a science researcher at
URI. I am now even more convinced than ever that URI really needs to take a
close, hard look at his work there to see if he used the same “research
methodology” that he has displayed for us here in Charlestown.