In the face of major community opposition,
Charlestown Town Council votes 3 to 2 against rumble strips on Route One
By
Will Collette
Rarely
do the members of the all-CCA Party Charlestown Town Council have a split vote or
even a close vote, but on June 8, we saw an exception. The Council took up the question of whether to give the state DOT the green light to install rumble strips along the edges of Route One through Charlestown as part of their major highway re-paving project. Click here for more detail on the rumble strip controversy.
The
vote
to withhold Charlestown’s approval of the work, which DOT says it needs in
order to install the rumble strips, got YES votes from Councilors George
Tremblay, Virginia Lee and Denise Rhodes.
Council
Boss Tom Gentz voted NO, as did the Councilor Bonnie Van Slyke, the CCA Party Councilor who represents
Arnolda.
Both
Gentz and Van Slyke voted no after their proposal to allow DOT to install test
strips pretty much in front of the Sachem Passage neighborhood received no
support from their colleagues.
Since Charlestown already has a roadful of “test
strips” – the rumble strips along Carolina Back Road – this Gentz scheme sound
more like “stagecraft” than a serious counter-proposal.
The
Route One neighbors who opposed the rumble strips were happy to take the 3-2
victory - and they earned it. They turned out a couple dozen opponents at the June 8 meeting and
delivered a petition with almost 100 names to the Council.
However,
there is an odd smell about this whole affair.
As most observers of Charlestown politics know, this new 100% Charlestown Citizens Alliance Town Council runs carefully orchestrated meetings where most of the votes are lined up in advance. I believe the CCA Party uses its secret monthly Steering Committee meetings to decide what will happen in each of the key town bodies they control – the Council, Planning Commission, Budget Commission and Zoning Board.
Most likely, they are violating the state Open Meetings Act by using their Steering Committee as a secret government, but that's hard to prove without one of their insiders coming forward. And that's unlikely.
Boss
Gentz spent the past couple of months trying to placate residents along Carolina
Back Road who are angry about the rumble strips DOT installed there, and gave a
lot of assurances to the people along Route One who were angry about the
prospect of rumble strip installation.
So
why did Boss Gentz (and Van Slyke) vote no?
And
why did they propose a “test” section to be installed right in front of the
neighborhood containing some of the CCA Party’s most rabid supporters and most
vociferous NIMBYs? Why propose any test strips at all, given they’re already in
place on Carolina Back Road much to the neighbors’ dismay?
The
most cynical explanation I’ve heard – and the one that makes the most sense to
me – is that this 3 to 2 vote was thoroughly choreographed and totally fake. Like professional wrestling, it only looked like there was a split.
For
one thing, there is no way this Council was going to vote to approve more
rumble strips given the uproar along Carolina Back Road and the major new
opposition to the Route One proposal. The CCA has given up on things they wanted far more – e.g. the
Y-Gate Scam and the hand-over of Ninigret Park to the feds – in the face of
similar community opposition.
Arguably,
it was in the CCA Party’s self-interest to vote down the rumble strips because
of the potential shit-storm excrement shower it would have provoked from the
Areglado-Chambers-Quadrato Morainiacs.
But
instead, they gave us some intriguing theatre.
With this one pre-arranged split vote, the CCA Party offers a counter to charges that
they are all in lock step, that they pander and that they show
favoritism (and even “pay-to-play”) to their political supporters like
those in Sachem Passage.
But
in the end, they vote 3-2 to block the rumble strips, and figure that residents
will remember the positive outcome, not how individual Councilors voted. They
now have a story they can use in the 2016 election.
If
this scenario is true, it’s diabolically clever.
However,
if Boss Gentz and Van Slyke really wanted
to sell this, they should have proposed that the test rumble strip patch be
placed HERE:
 |
| Google Earth image of West Beach Road (Boss Gentz lives on Seabreeze) |
 |
| Google Earth image of Route 1a as it passes Arnolda |
The
more I think about the split vote, Charlestown’s political realities and the
way the CCA Party games this town, the more I think the cynical theory that
this vote was orchestrated is more plausible than this being a simple matter of
principled differences.