Ninigret
– past, present and future
By
Will Collette
This
year is destined to be another contentious year for Ninigret Park as voters go
to the polls on June 1 to decide whether to actual put some funding, $1 million in
this case,
into actually going forward with the Ninigret Park
Master Plan.
The ruling CCA Party is totally opposed to this bond petition and only allowed
it to appear on the special Town Financial ballot because they have to (more
than 300 Charlestown residents signed the petition).
If
that bond issue passes, and I hope it does, the next struggle will be to get
our CCA Party rulers to actually spend the money. I am willing to bet that they
will simply impound the
money.
Rhode Island is one of several states that forbid the Governor from impounding
funds appropriated by the General Assembly, but it’s an open question whether a
municipality can do that.
I
predict another major fight over Ninigret – and this ties in very closely with
the reasons why we celebrate Memorial Day – if the Quonset Air
Museum decides to try to relocate to Ninigret Park.
Ninigret Park is on their short list for a new location.
Quonset
Air Museum Director David Payne says they would want a spot near the current
NAAF Memorial and would need around 8 acres. The Westerly Sun
reports
they would bring their 23 planes with them and would build a new hangar for
restoration of aircraft, plus space for displays, offices and restrooms.
The
non-profit Museum raises its own money and has an annual budget of $150,000.
Frank
Glista told the
Westerly Sun,
“The air museum would be a great addition and
improvement to our park. This would allow our tourist season to expand from
just the summer months into the winter as well… It would be great to get some
of those planes back to Ninigret again. There’s a tremendous
amount of history here. The air museum just has so much that relates to
Ninigret.”
Not
to mention that this project would be very
cool.
Which
is why I expect the CCA Party will do everything in its power to make sure the
Museum never happens. Already, the CCA Party is making its moves to roll back
human activity in Ninigret Park. They pushed out Park booster Jay Primiano who
was forced to resign as Director of Parks and Recreation in April.
They
have not even posted his job as vacant, even though Primiano’s predecessor,
former Town Councilor Lisa DiBello,
has begun her effort to get her old job back.
Residents
of the Arnolda neighborhood, a CCA Party stronghold, already raised hell over
a small and simple open-air shelter so kids who come to the summer day camp
at Ninigret can get out of the rain. Listening to their remarks about the kid’s
shelter, you would think it was going to be a 100,000 seat sports stadium.
(Hmmmm, I wonder if the Pawsox might consider…..Nah….).
Anyway,
if the CCA people went so crazy over a 2500 square foot shelter for children,
imagine their reaction to an eight-acre project that includes actual
construction of a building. Somebody grab the smelling salts for Ruth Platner
and go door-to-door in Arnolda with defibrillation paddles.
Anyway,
that’s what’s ahead. We also hope that readers who check out the Memorial Day
special coverage will also reflect on the land’s past.
Ninigret
Park and the National Wildlife Refuge are covered in the 2013 Charlestown
history, “Historic Cross’ Mills: A Self-Guided Tour” by Jean Pellam (and
available from the Charlestown
Historical Society).
Ms.
Pellam notes that the area was used as a summer encampment by the Narragansetts
for at least a thousand years. In 1661, by some undescribed means, the land
came to be owned by Jeffery Champlin, one of the original settlers and was
turned into a plantation that used both African and Narragansett Indian slaves.
The
total land mass of the Champlin plantation was expanded by both hook and crook
to reach from the shore of Ninigret Pond north to Watchaug Pond.
Most of the land was farmed until 1942 when the US
Government bought 600 acres to set up the Naval Auxiliary Air Field. At its
peak, 1,500 people lived on the base. Of all the flyers, 62 lost their lives in
crashes.
NAAF was closed in 1949 but was reopened during the Korean
War. But by the 1960s, according to Ms. Pellam, the runways’ main use was for
drag racing.
The Air Field was decommissioned and declared excess
property in 1974, setting off an array of competing uses for the land. The most
controversial was to build a nuclear power plant that led to a major public
uprising. A lot of people, including, for example, former state Representative
Donna Walsh, had their first involvement in politics through the fight to block
the nuclear power plant.
In the end, the NAAF land was divided into three parts, the
409-acre federal Ninigret
National Wildlife Refuge, and the second, a
restricted use parcel (172.4 acres) that was given to Charlestown by the feds
to be used only for uses that don’t have any negative impact on the Wildlife
Refuge.
The third and the final parcel is land (55 acres) that
Charlestown bought outright and comes with no restrictions or strings.
In 2012, Charlestown was torn apart by the CCA-instigated
Battle for Ninigret Park over whether Charlestown
needed federal permission to install dark sky-friendly lights on its sports
field. Though the CCA Party lost its effort to turn over control of Ninigret
Park to the feds and oversight to a hand-picked ad hoc committee of CCA Party
supporters, they did succeed in ousting former Town Administrator Bill DiLibero
and this battle made Jay Primiano’s ouster an inevitability.
My colleague Linda Felaco just produced a bibliography of our coverage of the big battles of the past five years
over town land use priorities. “
The
Ninigret lands are an interesting historical and ecological study. They went
from natural tribal hunting and fishing land to intensive farming to being
heavily impacted by the construction of the Navy air field.
Thousands of tons
of concrete, dozens of buildings, underground piping and wiring and untold tons
of toxic waste went onto and into that property.
You
can see how hard Nature has been working over the past forty years at taking
back the land but the air strips are still the most prominent features in both
the Park and the Refuge. Ninigret is still very much a work in progress.
Ninigret
is where Charlestown’s cultures clash, with wealthy retirees squared off
against working families. Issues are often cut as environment versus the
economy. But you would think that with over 600 acres total, there would be
more room for accommodation – a balance between silver-haired retirees watching
the birds and kids playing games and sports. Between long walks in the coastal
brush and woods and adults enjoying music or good food.
Or
we can continue to fight about it.