Snagged
on the Epilog Epic-Log
By Robert Yarnall
Read the rest of the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot series:
Episode 1 – Getting Ready To Fish
Episode 2 – Watchaug Bites
Episode 3 – Avoiding Car Sickness
Episode 4 – Bait & Switch (Not!)
Episode 5 – Still Baiting, Still Switching…
Episode 6 – Mother Gooser & Friends
Episode 7 – Under the Radar with L-T
Episode 8 – Steering Committee Syndrome Unleashed, The Prelude
Episode 9 – Steering Committee Syndrome Unleashed, The Kiss
Episode 10 – Snagged on the
"I think I fish, in part, because it's an anti-social, bohemian business that, when gone about properly, puts you forever outside the mainstream culture without actually landing you in an institution." - John Gierach
I had hoped to be done with
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by now, planned to wrap up the entrails of the Whalerock
blowfish in last month’s cyber-newspaper and bury the remains in the compost
partition of my aging Macbook hard drive.
I had hoped to be
unencumbered by any nonfamilial responsibility, completely unconstrained by
self-imposed obligations, real or imagined. No deadlines. No guidelines. Just
fishing lines attached to my diverse (I’m writing for a progressive blog; got
to work the d-word in somewhere...) collection of spinnerbaits, ready for
prime-time autumn fishing, catch & release style. Nirvana for this
bohemian.
Hope changed six weeks ago. Superior
Court Associate Justice Judith Savage tossed Whalerock back into the muddy waters
of Charlestown politics in a quintessential WTF moment of jurisprudence.
Her Honor apparently didn’t
appreciate the puppy chow served up by legal beagles Donnelly, Gorham and Ruggiero
the year before. She suggested that they had not been sufficiently
paper-trained prior to being unleashed by their respective owners, the
neighborhood activist group known as Illwind, Larry LeBlanc’s Whalerock LLC,
and the Town of Charlestown, to frolic in her courtroom.
Time for proper obedience training
at the Chucksville Zoning Board Kennel Club, sayeth the Judge. Put ye tails
between ye legs, scamper outta here, stay off the grass, and do your business
as prescribed by the doggie licenses. Just “Git-R-Done” so Larry the Turbine
Guy can get on with his life.
Man, this stuff could take a
while. All the waters of the earth could dry up before the doggie-do gets a
do-over. So I’m just going to cut the bait, then I’m going fishing for real, no
more of this metaphoric serialized tiptoeing.
Here it is…
When Whalerock first surfaced
and Illwind rose up to confront it, no one was more pissed off than yours
truly. In the initial phase of the neighborhood resistance, I employed my marginal
writing skills to lambast the style and substance of then-media newbie
Progressive Charlestown, especially its point man, punk-blogger Will Collette,
in an Illwind group email.
Within a few hours, I
received a private email from a gentleman who lives on Sanctuary Road, a
rough-hewn dirt pathway skirting Watchaug Pond, the local cathedral for
smallmouth bass in southern New England. The sender was Irwin Birnbaum. His
message was succinct, eight words:
“You really know how to form
a coalition.”
If there had been a large
rock near my computer workstation, I would have crawled under it. Irwin Birnbaum
is not your average Charlestown retiree. Not even close. He is a humble
gentleman whose distinguished career combines law and medicine. He served the
Yale University School of Medicine both as Chief Operating Officer and Assistant
Professor of Medicine.
I was mortified that I had
managed to attract The Barrister’s attention in a less-than-positive manner,
although “sophomoric” would be a more apt descriptor of my stylistic output
that day. In any event, I replied to Dr. Birnbaum as meekly as I could:
“Dr. Birnbaum, I value your
opinion and I apologize for my comments.”
To which he cordially replied,
“Thank you. Irwin.”
The thing about high-achieving
people, especially academics such as Irwin, is that the best among them are neither
didactic nor authoritarian in their instruction or counsel. Instead, they
suggest a number of alternative directions to explore and trust you to use your
common sense to make an informed decision.
I took Irwin Birnbaum’s
advisory that day to mean that I needed to acquaint myself with the entity known
as Progressive Charlestown and its lead protagonists, Will Collette and Tom
Ferrio, that the eventual outcome of Whalerock would hinge more on cooperation among
factions rather than competition among them. In other words, coalitions needed
to be nurtured, not dismissed.
Soon thereafter, I met with
Messers Collette and Ferrio at The Cove.
I was familiar with their respective professional backgrounds based on
their online biographies, and I shared mine at that time, focusing on my
journalism background and my knowledge of local history culled primarily from
friendships with members of both town Republicans and town Democrats dating
back to 1984, when my wife and I bought a house lot in the Sachem Passage
development from realtor Doug Randall.
The three decades of
Charlietowners I have been privileged to know are starting points for other
stories. What is relevant right now is the nature of my initial meeting with
Will and Tom. I was curious about how they thought they could establish
substantive credibility for their local news analysis while embedding it in a
snarky style made popular by the Madison, Wisconsin-based online parody, The
Onion.
Will Collette wasted no time
in explaining his utilization of the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) and the
Access to Public Records Act (APRA) to obtain documentation either supporting
or refuting claims made by local politicians. He dealt me in on the email
threads shared by PC editors and contributors so I could watch the stories
develop and/or collapse, as the case may be.
So here’s another
inconvenient truth: In too many cases, claims made by local government leaders
regarding phone calls allegedly placed to federal officials, documents allegedly
received from intergovernmental agencies, or land use opinions allegedly forwarded
via email by assorted federal bureaucrats couldn’t be verified as described by
the claimant. The Ninigret Park “ownership” brouhaha is a perfect
example.
Either our elected officials
are intentionally misleading the public or, as policymakers, they just aren’t
as smart as they pretend to be. I subscribe to the latter view and respectfully
apply the concept of Hanlon’s razor to the current
reincarnation of the CCA, aka Conflicted Citizens Anonymous: “Ascribe not to
malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
When I left journalism school
in 1970 to become a teacher, the FOIA and APRA were not available as standard
tools for investigative reporting. Woodward & Bernstein’s Watergate model
led to the changes now embodied in public records access laws. Before the early
‘70s, reporters plied prospective news sources with beer and cigarettes in late-night
bars. As a consequence, the life expectancy of veteran newsmen was about 60
years.
The FOIA and APRA public information
access tools utilized by Progressive Charlestown are double-edged swords. Both are
time- and labor-intensive research exercises and can tax the limited resources
of mainstream media outlets, which are necessarily constrained by deadlines and
economics. But both are the weapons of choice for new-age cyber-journalists who
utilize them to combat political malfeasance, whether such activity is the
result of targeted malice or generalized incompetence.
If you care enough to apply
the Woodward-Bernstein model of investigative journalism, essentially a storyboard
that requires a writer to link specific events to specific time frames to
verify that specified events occurred as alleged, you will find, as I did, that
a number of recent scenarios described and detailed by elected town officials just
don’t pass the test.
Start off with the Ninigret
Park “stadium lighting” controversy for an appetizer. Chow down on the DiLibero termination proceedings for the main course. Enjoy a piece of Y-gate layer
cake like Ed Veazey did. He won’t soon forget that treat, unlike pastry chef Russ Ricci. Any combination leaves a bad taste in an impartial
observer’s mouth.
When I suggested to my
neighbors Ron & Maureen Areglado that Irwin Birnbaum’s characterization of
the DiLibero firing as a “hatchet job” seemed dead-on based on the application
of the Woodward-Bernstein storyboard exercise, they were politely dismissive,
apparently unwilling to reconstruct the story themselves.
Sad. It would have been an
easy task for the former elementary school principals, presumably well versed
in reading and writing skills development tasks, to arrive at the same
conclusion that Irwin did, and that I had as well. I considered then, as I do
now, their position on the DiLibero proceedings to be both curious and
conspicuous, given their respective academic backgrounds. I’m going to revisit
this issue in the near future. It deserves further study, as the saying goes.
Concurrent with my
conversation with the Areglados, I emailed Town Council Vice President Dan
Slattery, who had led the charge to defrock town administrator William DiLibero.
Slattery claimed he had amassed a number of documents and related
communications from federal sources pegging Bill for a number of transgressions
with respect to federal policies and protocols. [1]
I referred to Dr. Birnbaum’s
commentary on the blog, as well as his Westerly
Sun Letter to the Editor, in an email to Councilman Slattery. Slattery
responded by telling me that the salient facts relating to DiLibero’s
termination were proprietary information shared in Town Council executive
sessions and, therefore, he could not comment further. CYA. Nice.
Slattery deftly (he thought)
avoided commenting on the actual subject of my email, that being the litany of
unsubstantiated allegations he had been trumpeting in public discourse for
several months prior to DiLibero’s termination. Instead, he seemed to imply that
DiLibero had been engaged in some form of criminal activity involving unnamed
co-conspirators, perhaps land developers, energy consultants, park event
vendors, etc. Whatever. You bet.
If DiLibero had been engaged
in such scurrilous activity, Slattery, allegedly a former Department of Justice
official, would have been obligated to report it to the Charlestown Police,
lest he open himself up to an obstruction-of-justice charge. Right? Yes? No?
The fact of the matter is
that the entire Whalerock fiasco, from start to whenever-finish, was an anomaly
of epic proportions. Longtime business competitors, who ordinarily wouldn’t share
a foxhole in a rocket attack, concocted alliances and partnerships that even
Satan wouldn’t underwrite. Relative newcomers to town accused longtime
residents of accepting bribes, offering bribes, or arranging bribes, involving
cash, property, house pets, farm equipment, and/or auto body supplies.
Whalerock abutter and current
Planning Commission candidate Joe Dolock had all this figured out a long time ago. As detailed in previous WTF episodes,
Illwind’s intelligentsia, Areglado et al.,
dismissed his input as being not particularly relevant to their cause, whatever
that may turn out to be.
Every town has a Whalerock of
one sort or another. Otherwise rational people make irrational, emotion-laden
decisions, so outraged are they by the injustices foisted on them by the ruling
oligarchies, whatever flavor-of-the-month politics they feature. So it goes.
Always.
I leave you with this one
tidbit of insanity, heretofore unbeknown to average Whalerockers and Whalerockettes…
The very afternoon that
Illwind Attorney James Donnelly filed the final injunction to logjam Larry
LeBlanc’s desperate attempt to reconstitute Twin Turbines on the Rocks, the
Illwind intelligentsia, that being the Areglados, the Chamberses, and Kristan
O’Connor, had somehow made a unilateral decision to fire him.
As dumb luck would have it, they
couldn’t find Donnelly to give him the good news before he saved their
collective butts. Apparently they felt he had not kept them fully informed of
his every move. Perhaps they felt he wasn’t micromanageable enough.
Gee, that sounds familiar.
Must be an epidemic.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Gone fishing.
[1] Progressive Charlestown examined the sum and substance
of Slattery’s allegations in Will Collette’s “Kill Bill” story. Over the
course of the seven-part series, Irwin Birnbaum complimented Collette on the
scope and sequence of his research, signing onto the blog only as “irwinb”,
absent any reference to his full identity and distinguished professional background.
But we all knew, by that time, the true measure of the man.