Charlestown Council decides on “no action” on sketchy land deal
By
Will Collette
The
CCA Party, a conservative political action committee funded mostly by
non-residents, has held control of Charlestown since 2000. Today, they still
hold a 3-2 majority on the Town Council.
Aside
from the optics of yet another insider pay-to-play deal, the land value was
grossly over-estimated, the mechanics of actually doing the deal were murky and
the question of whether the town actually needs to buy this property were never
answered.
Added
to that, SPA-Gate revealed the extraordinary measures town administrator Mark Stankiewicz,
under CCA direction, would go to in order to hide the deal from public
scrutiny.
The property is around 4 acres and leads off Route 1 North down Oyster Drive to a small beach on Foster Cove. The lot is bounded by two Town-owned open space parcels as well as the Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge.
The lot itself is unbuildable for a number of reasons, but mainly because it consists almost entirely of wetlands. Whether Charlestown bought the land or not, the property was and is going to remain in its natural state.
One
reader had another name for this shady deal, calling it “Oyster-Gate” because the land is basically the length of Oyster
Drive. Geez, I wish I had thought of that – Oyster-Gate is so much better title
than SPA-Gate.
The
property belongs to the Sachem Passage Association and approximately 100
households in the Sachem Passage neighborhood have a deeded right of access to
use the property, though apparently few of them actually use it.
So Ron Areglado, a SPA officer, approached the town on April 24, 2020 with an offer to sell and
an appraisal attached to their proposal that pegged the value of the land at
$426,000. Except that the appraiser set that value based on what he (the
appraiser) called the “extraordinary
assumption” that the lot was buildable, which it is not.
Town Planner Jane Weidman prepared a grant proposal to DEM, presumably under the direction of Planning Commissar Ruth Platner – I say “presumably” because Platner controls these deals though she rarely leaves a paper trail and does not use her official Town e-mail account for Town business.
The
DEM funding was important as it would provide state funding for up to 50% of
the land value.
Before
sending in the application, Weidman asked Town Tax Assessor Ken Swain to
explain how the town came up with its tax assessment of only $61,900. On June 1,
Swain responded by clearly detailing why the land was only worth $61,900 and nowhere
near $426,000 figure in the SPA appraisal.
However, three days later on June 4, Weidman apparently decided – or more likely, was told – to disregard Swain and submit the grant application to DEM using the imaginary $426,000 number on the appraisal submitted by SPA.
On
July 30, DEM approved the
grant to Charlestown for $213,000 – at the maximum rate of 50% of the
land value – but required a new,
independent appraisal.
Getting
that new appraisal took a while but finally it came in and was put into the
public record as part of the Town Council’s agenda for its January 11, 2021 meeting.
The
independent appraisal for Oyster Drive property was $75,000 based on the correct assumption the lot is unbuildable.
Since DEM will only fund a maximum of 50% of the true appraisal, the state
share available for the deal fell from $213,000 to $37,500. Further, as Ruth Platner herself admits, DEM "
On January 11, the
Town Council directed Town Administrator Mark Stankiewicz to talk to the SPA to
find out if this new valuation changed their proposal to sell the property. Here is the illuminating e-mail Stankiewicz sent to Ron Areglado as it was provided to me under the state open records law.
Here is Areglado's reply to Stankiewicz as revealed under the APRA:
Gotta love "open and transparent" government!
Stankiewicz reported back at the February 8 Council meeting that the SPA leaders were not interested in negotiating a sale at around that price.
The
CCA-sponsored Council members seemed interested in keeping the deal alive and
asked whether DEM approved the original $426,000 bogus appraisal. Stankiewicz said “yes.”
That was not actually true: Stankiewicz left out the important catch that DEM would not fund the deal based on the bogus appraisal but instead would pay no more than 50% of the $75,000 figure given in the independent appraisal.
No big payday for the SPA folks is possible
unless all of the money comes out of Charlestown taxpayers’ pockets.
At
this point, the CCA Council members, as well as Stankiewicz, seemed eager to
drop the whole thing without the Council adopting any official position such as
rejecting the deal and notifying DEM we would not need the funding. Instead,
they pushed for simply having the minutes reflect the Council took “no action”
on SPA-Gate.
My
conspiracist mind leads me to wonder if they plan to huddle with Ruth Platner
and SPA leader Ron Areglado back at the CCA’s secret clubhouse to see if they
can find a work-around to revive the deal.
Several
readers have likened the SPA-Gate (aka Oyster-Gate) deal to the 2012 “Y-Gate”
scandal.
That was another insider pay-to-play land deal that shared many of SPA=Gate’s
characteristics: backroom deals, political favoritism, secrecy, a bogus
appraisal, DEM funding, etc. The CCA had its ass handed to it when a public
outcry stomped the deal flat.
One similarity between Y-Gate and SPA-Gate concerns me. The indecisive way the Council left the matter could allow the deal to re-surface. The Y-Gate deal was resurrected several times before it was finally killed. Saying “no action” to SPA-Gate leaves the proverbial gate open for this walking dead deal to totter back into the scene.
Other unresolved issues.
For
example, there’s this section in the Rhode Island General Laws:
§ 11-18-1 Giving false document to
agent, employee, or public official. – (a) No person shall knowingly give to any agent,
employee, servant in public or private employ, or public official any receipt,
account, or other document in respect of which the principal, master, or
employer, or state, city, or town of which he or she is an official is
interested, which contains
any statement which is false or erroneous, or defective in any important
particular, and which, to his or her knowledge, is intended to mislead the
principal, master, employer, or state, city, or town of which he or she is an official.
(b)
Any person who violates any of the provisions of this section shall be deemed
guilty of a misdemeanor, and, upon conviction, shall be imprisoned, with or
without hard labor, for a term not exceeding one year or be fined not exceeding
one thousand dollars ($1,000).
Consider this statute and whether it applies to two actions by SPA-Gate principals. The first is the April 24, 2020 offer to sell by Ron Areglado on behalf of SPA that used the $426,000 appraisal that was clearly, to use the language of the statute, “false or erroneous, or defective in any important particular” and "intended to deceive."
The second and perhaps more egregious act happened on June 4, 2020
when Town Planner Jane Weidman submitted a grant proposal to DEM based on the
bogus appraisal.
This is made worse by the fact that she asked Ken Swain for the
reasoning behind the town’s $61,900 tax assessor and he gave it to her three
days before she sent in the grant application.
This indicates Weidman, in addition to submitting a false document, “intended to mislead the
principal, master, employer, or state, city, or town of which he or she is an official.”
At the February 8 Council meeting, there was no decision or instruction given to let DEM know Charlestown doesn't need the $213,000 DEM has earmarked for Charlestown so they could re-direct it to some other worthy project. That might also mitigate Charlestown’s exposure under RIGL § 11-18-1.
The fight for full disclosure
Throughout
this whole Oyster-Gate mishegoss, I sparred with
Town Administrator Mark Stankiewicz over the release of records to shed light
on what was happening. Stankiewicz had directed our town clerk to refuse
release of any record the state open records law allowed the town to
withhold. Over 100 records were either denied in toto or almost totally blacked out.
The most common types of records the town withholds are communications, especially e-mails, that were written by, sent to or even just cc’d to an “elected official.” Then you get the document almost entirely blacked out like the two samples above.
It’s a quirk in the law and Charlestown
exploits it to fullest. All you have to do to make a document private is slap
an elected official’s name (e.g. Ruth
Platner) in the “c.c.” line.
I
especially wanted these records so I could track who was driving this deal and
making the decisions. In particular, I want to know why Jane Weidman submitted the $426,000 DEM grant application after she was told by Tax Assessor Ken Swain the property was only worth $61,900.
Charlestown
does have the legal right to withhold such records, but as the chief of the
Attorney General’s open government unit Kathy Sadeck told me that just because a document CAN be
withheld doesn’t mean it MUST be withheld or even SHOULD be
withheld especially in instances where public corruption may be involved.
In
Rhode Island, public corruption is first investigated by the State Police and then prosecuted by the Attorney General’s Public Integrity Unit. The loophole in the
public records law that Town Administrator Mark Stankiewicz used to withhold
over 100 documents does not shield these records from their investigations. Or
from a grand jury.
Video vagaries
Back
in 2014, when Mark Stankiewicz was still talking to me, he told me the town was
shopping for new software to replace the obsolete Clerkbase system the town had
been using to allow citizens to gain remote access to town meetings and records.
He
said he was interested in IQM2 and asked me to check it out. I ran a corporate
background check and then audited the system which was then being used by
several nearby municipalities. It checked out and the town switched to IQM2 in
2015.
Unfortunately,
Charlestown’s deployment of IQM2 is not nearly as good as what I saw in the
other towns’ websites as I reported in this
2015 article after it was first deployed. It has gotten worse ever since.
The
first and maybe biggest problem is simply finding it.
It’s
not on the town’s front page. The table for “Virtual Meetings” takes you to
Webex, the software the town uses to allow you into LIVE virtual meetings.
It’s
not under the “Government” tag either at “Agendas and Minutes” or
“Meeting/Event Calendar.”
I
used the site map and the search engine and finally found the IQM2 here. You must then click on Media and
then pick your poison from among the meetings that have been put up on the
menu. There are dozens of them arranged alphabetically by town department and
then chronologically. The font size is very small so you will probably need to increase
the magnification.
Click on the meeting you want and then a new window opens up
with a split screen that allows you to see the whole agenda or a document you
want to examine as well as watch the video.
While watching a meeting, you will probably want to zero in on a
particular topic and will try, as I did, to click on the link in the agenda for
that topic. Except it won’t take you to that discussion. You have to either
watch the whole video or try to find the right place by skipping around.
Meetings are not posted on IQM2 for a while. The Feb. 8 Council
meeting was not available to watch until almost a week later.
It’s a pain in the butt and frankly not nearly as good as the
sites I audited back in 2014 when I gave my recommendation to Stankiewicz. After
almost 7 years, it’s gotten worse when you would expect advancing technology to make it better.
Charlestown
needs to fix this perhaps starting with a clearly identified link on the Front
Page and at least a little guidance for how to use it. I know that runs against
the town’s – meaning the CCA’s - natural inclination to give the public as little information as possible, but, hey, this is your chance to prove me wrong.
Sit luceat.