It’s all about land, money and power – they want it all and they are afraid of anyone they think might take it away.
By Will Collette
For Part One, click here.
For Part Two, click here. Just about all of the predictions I made in Part 2 about the way the CCA Party would conduct their campaign have already come true. Check it out for yourself.
The Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party) did not appear all of a sudden out of nowhere in 2006 to fight Jim Mageau, who they depicted as an evil tyrant. Their ability to raise boatloads of campaign contributions and run the kind of vicious political campaigns that have given them control over Charlestown town government since 2008 was not an accident.
There is a history, a guiding philosophy and a network of relationships that you can see and begin to understand, if you know where to look.
What drives the CCA Party is not the Pablum® they put into their platform every two years, but the determination to control the land in Charlestown – all of it, whether it is your land, other people’s private property, Tribal land, or commercial land – and wealth. And the fear that someone will try to take either of those two commodities away.
As I wrote in Part 1, the CCA Party and its parent, the RI Statewide Coalition (they now call themselves Rhode Island Taxpayers), are part of the new types of “Rich People’s Movements” we’ve seen around the country that have spawned the Tea Party, the new secessionist Libertarians (e.g., Blake Filippi), and other forms of right-wing radicals.
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| The Narragansetts never left |
To be clear, not all non-Indian Charlestown residents bear animus toward the Tribe, but the leaders of the CCA Party and RISC certainly do. And every election cycle, they gin up fear of the Tribe among the rest of the non-Indian population by claiming that every effort by the Tribe to improve the lives of its members is just a Trojan Horse for a casino.
They keep attorney Joe Larisa on a $25,000 a year retainer to be on call to fight the Tribe. Taxpayers pay his bills.
The CCA’s own fear – and hatred – for the Tribe is one of the few genuine things about them. They really do fear the Tribe will spoil this nice little retirement village they are crafting for themselves, to the exclusion of all others.
A little history. First, believe it or not, the Narragansetts were here first. They helped the original settlers stay alive and made room for them. In 1675, the Tribe was repaid for its hospitality by an effort at genocide by militias from Massachusetts and Connecticut at Great Swamp. Some survivors escaped into the woods. Others were sold into slavery with the permission of Roger Williams. Some ended up working as slaves for some of this town’s most familiar names on Charlestown’s plantations.
In 1880, the RI General Assembly “de-tribalized” the Narragansetts, declaring they no longer existed as a tribal community. 15,000 acres of tribal land in Charlestown was taken from them to be bought up by Charlestown’s leading families in a two-day auction in July 1882 (Historic Cross' Mills by Jean Boughton Pellam, 2013). Much of Arnolda and our other wealthy shoreline neighborhoods were part of those lands.
But despite the CCA/RISC myth, detribalization notwithstanding, the Tribe never left Charlestown. They were murdered, enslaved, beaten down and robbed, but never left.
In the 1970s, the Narragansetts fought back. They filed suit to regain the lands that were stolen from them in 1882. They won back tribal recognition by the settlement agreement between the Tribe and the state and federal government. The settlement had a catch — the unique caveat that they were restricted in what they could do with settlement lands and relinquishing all further claims for compensation against the state and the town for the crimes committed against them.
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| Harry Staley |
Eventually, the white opposition to the Tribe formally organized itself. Harry Staley, recently deceased RISC founder and godfather to the CCA Party, built RISC on a platform that called for:
- Unceasing vigilance against and oppression of the Narragansett Indian Tribe plus
- Voting rights based on the ownership of property, not residence and
- Resistance to taxes in whatever shape or form they come in.
When I read Staley’s obituary, I learned that one of the other triggers that led him to organize RISC were threats to strip the Shelter Harbor Fire District of its status as a fire district because it, like several other local fire districts, have nothing to do with fighting fires.
Instead, these phony fire districts offer residents a variety of amenities (beach front, docks, public water, trash pick-up, snow-plowing, tennis courts and so on) wrapped up in their fire district property tax. This allows these wealthy beach property owners to write off all these services on their state and federal income taxes, something the rest of us can’t do.
Oh, and the properties owned by these Fire Districts are assessed way, way lower than your property (click here for more on the disparities in assessments).
Click here for my detailed article on phony fire districts (in Charlestown, Quonnie and Shady Harbor).
Staley was also concerned that if Shelter Harbor lost its Fire District status, they would no longer be able to continue to allow non-resident property owners the right to vote in defiance of the principle of one man, one vote, since they already get to vote where they live.
| There shall be no Homestead tax credit for middle class Charlestown homeowners |
When Charlestown Democrats proposed that Charlestown consider a Homestead Tax Credit which would allow full-time residents a reduction in their property taxes, Staley organized what came to be called “The Riot of the Rich” to attack and kill this proposal dead.
Of course, the CCA Party Council members hated the idea of lowering taxes for the average Charlestown family both because it would mean a small tax hike for their true constituents, the non-residents who own waterfront property around town, and because it would make it more affordable for more people to live here. In fact, the CCA Party has raised property taxes every single one of the six years they’ve controlled town government.
The CCA Party loves going through the exercise of publishing its platform on its website and making regular reference to it. They don’t tell you how they arrived at the platform, since the CCA Party operates totally in secret. They haven’t held an open meeting in years.
They say on their website that they hold monthly meetings but you can’t know where or when. You can’t join – seriously, they say they have no mechanism for allowing people to join, though somehow people seem to get inducted occasionally. The best they can offer you is to sign up for their e-mail bleats.
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| Secret CCA Party headquarters |
They have a Steering Committee that gets elected or selected by some unknown means. The only way to know when there is a leadership change – which happens rarely – is to drill down into their website to this page and watch it regularly or to check their filings with the Board of Elections.
But the platform and all the other trappings the CCA Party puts on display on its official website are actually quite irrelevant since they don’t mean any of it. If you look at their actual track record on open and transparent government and look at their repeated violations of the state’s open meetings and open records acts, you’ll see just how meaningless.
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| From the Charlestown Tax Assessor's webpage |
By all means, read their platform. But then compare it to their actual record on issues like six straight years of tax hikes, defiance of state open government laws, draconian business regulation, hostile relationships with the Narragansetts, attacks on affordable housing and their corrupt “pay to play” practices:
- The Narragansett Indian Tribe is the enemy. The CCA Party would have you believe they are the “other.” They want to take your land. They want to turn Charlestown into a mini-Las Vegas. Every project or program the Tribe undertakes is a plot to turn the clock back to before 1882, to before 1675. Just see the CCA’s rhetoric against the Tribe and how it has bottled up the deeding of Camp Davis over to the Tribe.
- Higher taxes – each year, the CCA Party majority on the Town Council has raised town property taxes, whether the budget numbers warranted it or not. The flip-side is they are completely opposed to tax relief for middle-class families.
But one of the big secrets the CCA Party doesn’t want you to know is that many of their friends and funders have figured out how to game the system and pay less taxes. The phony Fire Districts are but
one of several examples. We’ll get to others in detail.
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| The CCA Party is willing to kill oyster aqua-culture in Ninigret Pond even though oysters clean the pond. From the Saffina Center, pond water on the left without oysters and on the right WITH oysters. |
- “Pay-to-play.” If you want something from town government, you must be on the CCA Party’s donor or supporter list. Ask the neighbors of the Copar quarry (or Charlestown’s other quarries) what happens if you’re not on the donor list. On the other hand, see what the CCA Party was willing to do for Ron Areglado’s anti-wind power cult, or the non-resident summer colony at Sonquipaug, or property owners on the salt ponds, or the Arnolda neighborhood.
The CCA Party has achieved what Harry Staley could only dream about – town-wide voting rights for non-residents. Except the way the CCA Party does it, non-residents don’t go into the election booth, they drop a check off with Party Boss Tom Gentz or one of the other CCA Party leaders. The weight of your voting rights is in direct proportion to the size of the checks from your neighborhood.
- The only real environmental issue is open space, except that’s not even true anymore. The CCA Party has either botched or failed to act on a broad range of environmental problems facing Charlestown. These include our terrible recycling rate, half a dozen unmonitored hazardous waste sites, green energy, and lack of public transportation.
The CCA Party recently decided to oppose the state Water Resource Board from entering into a private land sale with the Glista family to put some water-rich property under protection as open space. This action turns the CCA Party’s historic devotion to open space into yet another example of hypocrisy. Now I don’t know what they believe in other than more for them and less for everybody else.
- Families with school-age children are the enemy. The CCA Party has published its own mathematical formula by which they claim to show that school-age children are parasites. CCA Party governing policies have been a blanket resistance to any home-building that might attract families with children.
- Personal freedom is the enemy. Under the CCA Party, virtually every facet of people’s lives and businesses’ operations are controlled in minute, excruciating detail by the town government—down to the color of switch plates on outdoor electrical outlets on commercial buildings. Even though, in many respects, the CCA Party resembles the Tea Party, they are poles apart on the issue of personal freedom. Most recently, the town is trying to assert its right to control over private property transactions despite the complete lack of legal authority.
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| This photo has been on the Tax Assessor's database for several years. The photo has not been updated to show progress on the construction |
However, like taxes, the rules set by the CCA Party that detail what uses average property owners may make of their property don’t really apply to the CCA Party elite.
Want an example? Check out how Ruth Platner and Cliff Vanover have built an addition to their house without an increase in valuation—in fact, their property went down in value in the most recent revaluation—by simply keeping the building permit open for over a decade*.
In 2012, Ruth and Cliff even bragged about the addition: "Ruth and her husband built their passive solar home themselves in 1983. They are currently expanding the house with a structure built from native granite. They cut and shape the stones themselves. Their home uses very little energy - they have never had a heating bill."
In 2012, Ruth and Cliff even bragged about the addition: "Ruth and her husband built their passive solar home themselves in 1983. They are currently expanding the house with a structure built from native granite. They cut and shape the stones themselves. Their home uses very little energy - they have never had a heating bill."
It’s all about control. Control for them. Control over you.
In a nutshell, the CCA Party wants to turn Charlestown into a government-subsidized retirement village for their friends and funders. They would like to depopulate the town to the extent they can by making it hard to live and do business here.
But more than that, they want control. That’s how it’s been for the past six years and, unless you stop them on November 4, that’s how it will continue to be.
* Here’s how they do it in case you want to try it for yourself: No “certificate of occupancy” can be issued while a building permit is still open, and without a “certificate of occupancy,” the additional square footage is not added to the total square footage of the building. So you just march down to Joe Warner’s office every six months and renew your building permit, and your property assessment stays the same. Easy-peasy! It also helps to be the chair of the Planning Commission.
