Ruth Platner: Six More Years?

Sixteen years are more than enough

By Will Collette

To read all of Progressive Charlestown’s coverage of Ruth Platner’s tenure as head of the Planning Commission, click here.

Charlestown Planning Commissar Ruth Platner is easily the most powerful person in Charlestown. If you’re looking for the true leader of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance, look no further, even though she pointedly notes on the CCA website that she holds no official office other than as CCA’s webmaster.

From her perch as head of the Planning Commission, Platner has grown and consolidated her power over every Charlestown home and business over the four years since every single Planning Commission seat has been taken by a CCA-supported commissioner. Under Platner, the Planning Commission has assumed powers never contemplated under the Charlestown Home Rule Charter and has become the actual legislature for the town, writing ordinance after ordinance that have been rubber-stamped into law by the CCA-controlled Town Council.

Aside from power, Platner’s other clear passion is for open space. Now, I think we all agree that open space is a good thing, but not above all else. It is an important priority, but not Charlestown’s only priority.

Throughout her sixteen years on the Planning Commission, Platner has insinuated the power of town government into every home and business to the point where the town’s zoning ordinance, frequently amended under Platner to cover more and more activity, controls town businesses – often to their detriment – and governs what property owners can do with their land and property down to fine details.

Indeed, Platner took an obscure, and controversial, passage within the zoning ordinance and expanded it to become what I have called the “Platner Principle.” Stated simply, the Platner Principle holds that all land uses are banned unless they are expressly permitted in the zoning ordinance.

Platner held this project up for months because she didn't want a
firehouse made of brick

Examples abound of Platner’s use of her power to obstruct and frustrate worthy efforts. She personally led an effort to obstruct the construction of the recently opened Cross Mills Fire Station. Why? Because the structure is made of brick, not mud-and-wattle or some other 17^th century “traditional village” material. Even though brick is actually listed as one of the acceptable building materials in Charlestown’s zoning ordinance. Platner, for whatever reason, doesn’t like brick, so she subjected the volunteer firefighters to almost a year of costly delays, refusing to accept the common sense that brick is an appropriate material for a firehouse.

After voters approved construction of the new beach toilet facilities, Platner tried to torture that project to death as well, subjecting it to two full nights of hearings over every minute detail, including many that were totally outside the scope of the project (such as traffic-control devices to cut down on speeding along our beach roads). 

As if that wasn’t enough, as the project neared completion, the beach committee – as a courtesy – informed Planning that they planned to use some nice blue shingles at the Blue Shutters beach facility. That led to an agonizing discussion over what shade of blue and what shape of shingles would be used. Some planning commissioners actually wanted the project stalled – potentially past the opening of the 2012 beach season – while Planning deliberated over the shade and shape of the shingles. I’m not making this up. Click here to listen to the the discussion.

Platner and her Planning running mates have bragged that one of their greatest achievements was the passage of the Dark Skies Lighting Ordinance. While I’m happy that an ordinance was finally passed, there’s lots more to the story.

Because our dark-sky view is something most Charlestown residents really love, it should have been easy to craft an ordinance that protected that view. Except under Ruth Platner, Planning does not build consensus – it tells people what to do. It would have been easy to involve town businesses and residents in crafting a sensible dark-sky policy that was based on community spirit and cooperation rather than the micromanagement and unfunded mandates that made Planning’s draft ordinances a source of division rather than community building.

Instead of working together, Platner and her planners tried to bull through regulations that would have subjected town businesses and homeowners to minute regulations – at one point, they even considered banning those little solar sidewalk lights that hardly put out more light than a candle. 

Under four years of Platner’s misguided leadership, this popular idea became an unpopular ordinance that had to go through draft after draft until when it finally emerged, it really does practically nothing to protect the dark-sky view except ban new commercial lights taller than 15 feet, even though many of our dark-sky-friendly businesses have shown that the 15-foot limit has no practical basis. But no matter, now we have an ordinance. And Platner claims bragging rights.

In similar fashion, Planning has written and had enacted ordinances to regulate signs, driving at least one business out of town and putting several others on the brink of bankruptcy because potential customers don’t know they’re there. They enacted a public tree ordinance that minutely regulates what you can and can’t do with trees and shrubs along your land’s public right-of-way. Except there is no mechanism to enforce it[1].

Planning led the charge to ban wind energy in Charlestown. Not just the unpopular Whalerock industrial wind farm, but all wind energy. Platner and her planning running mates point proudly to the passage of the town ordinance on residential wind energy. They claim they have made it possible for homeowners to install small wind generators to power their homes with green energy. Except the ordinance actually makes it impossible for the average homeowner to get a permit. Read the conditions you have to meet to install a small wind generator by clicking here. It’s no wonder that since the enactment of that ordinance, not one single permit has been issued.

Platner grabbed more power through the enactment of Ordinance #349, which she and her running mates claim is pro-business. Now they claim this ordinance allows the town more discretion to grant businesses waivers rather than require strict compliance with the zoning ordinance. But what Ordinance #349 does is consolidate that “discretionary” power under Planning, which has already shown how stubborn and obstructive it can be. Think about the brick at the Cross Mills firehouse or the shingles at Blue Shutters Beach. Under Ordinance #349, Charlestown will regulate the pitch angle of roofs, how signs will be attached to hangers and what color covers businesses can put on outside electrical outlets, among many, many fine details. Click here to read the ordinance for yourself.

AFDU - Accessory Family Dwelling Unit. Not one
has been built after almost two years.

Platner and her planning running mates claim credit for creating alternative approaches to affordable housing. All they have actually done is pass two ordinances on accessory dwelling units (add-ons or annexes to existing structures) that so muddled the original proposals that they have produced no new housing units. Platner’s other contribution to affordable housing has been to craft an unworkable, indeed counterproductive, scheme to simply slap an “affordable” label on the homes of people in town whose homes have dropped in value due to the recession[2].

This scheme does nothing for the people who live in those devalued homes, other than make it harder for them to see any price rebound. Nor does it address the need for a true affordable housing policy that addresses the desperate need for senior citizen housing and for year-round rentals.

On affordable housing, as on wind energy and lighting, Platner and her colleagues have bent and twisted data and science to fit their conclusions. Most recently, Platner’s Planning colleague (and CCA candidate for Town Council) George Tremblay produced an incredible report on affordable housing that not only played fast and loose with the data but also completely ignored the issue of affordable year-round rentals. Tremblay also engaged in the flight of fantasy that affordable housing is prone to exploitation by elderly millionaires who somehow disguise their wealth and seek to buy affordable housing units as investment properties[3]. 

Tremblay went on at length about this threat even though he presented not one single shred of evidence of the existence of this peculiar class of predator.

Of course the Planning Commission endorsed Tremblay’s report and forwarded it to the Town Council. The CCA members of the Council thought this was a great report and have ordered it sent to every city and town, every legislator and anyone else they could think of. It’s bad enough when we embarrass ourselves within the privacy of our town borders, but why Platner and her CCA colleagues in town government want to subject Charlestown to statewide ridicule is beyond me.

This cartoon ran in the Charlestown Land Trust
newsletter

While Tremblay charges up the troops to attack the elderly, Ruth Platner has concentrated much of her ire on families with children, especially school-age children. In Platner's view, childen are an option, an expensive option, not the future of our community. Actually, she treats them like an indulgence to be avoided. She even created a pseudo-scientific formula - I'm not making this up - that purports to show what terrible parasites children are. Don't believe me? Click here.

In addition to an indefensible public record, Ruth Platner has also done plenty of harm to Charlestown behind the scenes. Her fingerprints are on most of Charlestown’s most bitter controversies, especially the Y-Gate Scandal and the Battle for Ninigret Park. In the Y-Gate Scandal, she gave Ted Veazey and the Westerly YMCA signals that she supported Veazey’s conservation development plan, only to stab him in the back to push for the scheme of having taxpayers pay an inflated price to the Westerly YMCA for their busted-out abandoned campground and giving title of the land to the Charlestown Land Trust.

Charlie Vandemoer - suckered into playing roles in
Platner's games

In the case of the Battle for Ninigret Park, Platner was the one who cranked up Charlie Vandemoer at the National Wildlife Refuge to push for veto rights over projects on the town-owned Ninigret Park.

Platner’s efforts are not entirely about her radical conservationist ideology, however. Sometimes she operates on a purely personal agenda, as in the case of the Y-Gate Scandal, where she tried to steer town resources to an organization she founded.

In the infamous Win-Dor dispute, where the company laid asphalt pavement at their Old Post Road business without obtaining a proper permit, Platner was willing to overlook her usual disgust for asphalt and allow Win-Dor to keep the paving provided they paid a “fine” in the form of a contribution to the Nature Conservancy, the organization that just happened to give Ruth Platner an incredible deal on six acres of land. Platner got not only a nice piece of land but also favorable tax treatment (land assessed at only $8,836 an acre compared to the $50-90,000 an acre for the average house lot).

The Planning Commission does not have the authority to levy fines, nor to waive requirements under the zoning ordinance (remember the Platner Principle). Nor does the Planning Commission have the authority to direct a business to send a donation to a specific group, particularly not one with whom the Planning Commission chair has had beneficial business dealings.

But throughout Ruth Platner’s 16-year run on the Planning Commission and certainly during the four years she has been in charge, she gets to make up her own rules. And her own facts. And the town’s laws. And who must obey those laws, and who does not[4].

The Planning Commission has an important role to play under the Town Charter. The Town Charter also contains some important checks and balances on the Planning Commission. Under Ruth Platner, the Planning Commission has become the town’s most important body – outside the law and to the detriment of Charlestown.

Rather than return Ruth Platner to office for another six-year term, and elect her CCA running mates who share her philosophy of ever-expanding control over Charlestown businesses and homeowners, we need new Planning Commissioners who believe in restoring the balance and roles set out in the Town Charter – a “law-and-order” Planning Commission, not the renegade body Platner has created.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] The ordinance requires a Tree Committee, except no one has ever signed up for it. It also requires a certified, trained arborist to volunteer to be the Town Tree Warden. Volunteer = no pay. Again, no willing takers. Maybe if the ordinance provided for the Tree Warden to get a snazzy uniform and carry a rifle, they’d get some volunteers. 

This ordinance is a textbook example of the kind of pointless, unenforceable ordinance Platner has foisted on Charlestown.

[2] Perhaps you sense a pattern – success to Ruth Platner and her Planning colleagues is the passage of ordinances. It doesn’t matter whether they actually work, or make sense, or are enforced, or are enforced selectively. All that matters is the ability to make the CLAIM of success. 

By the way, Platner's Planning running mates are: Gordon Foer, Connie Baker (who hates affordable housing even though she's currently on that commission, and hates meetings that last more than 90 minutes), Jan Knost and Peter Herstein.

[3] Normally I’m a sucker for conspiracy theories that involve greedy, rapacious rich people, but this one was WAY too much, even for me.

[4] The late Christopher Hitchens wrote “the essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.”