CCA Council candidate Van Slyke wants you to forget what they did
By Will Collette
She and I are dueling in the Letter to the Editor pages of the Westerly Sun, something I'd rather not do. Generally, I'm content to watch the cranks bang away at each other.
But Van Slyke's recent efforts to re-write history to canonize ex-Town Administrator Mark Stankiewicz and now ex-Budget Commission chair Richard Sartor as well as erase the financial screw-ups that cost the CCA the 2022 election demanded a response.
Tenacious deep-digging by Steve Hoff and Council President Deb Carney uncovered years of financial mismanagement by Sartor, Stankiewicz and the CCA Council majority.
Van Slyke's position was that both Stankiewicz and Sartor deserved to continue in their jobs because they were there a long time and, hey, how 'bout that tax rate? Bonnie says everything was fine and nothing happened because...low tax rate.
How do you argue with Charlestown Citizen Alliance Council candidate Bonnita Van Slyke when she just makes stuff up?
My rebuttal letter to Van Slyke's rebuttal appears below. No doubt, there will be another Van Slyke letter, then another and another as we find ourselves in an Escher's Loop. Unless someone else wants to get into this game of ping-pong.
At some point, I'm going to get bored with this and simply stop. But for now, if Van Slyke wants to keep reminding voters how badly the CCA screwed up the money, then fine. That really worked well in the 2022 election.
Here's my letter to the Sun:
I challenged Van Slyke’s glorification of former Budget Commission Chair Richard Sartor and former Town Administrator Mark Stankiewicz. I argued both should have resigned after facts revealed they mismanaged Charlestown’s money for years.
Van Slyke says there was no mismanagement. She ignores the expansive cover-up where Stankiewicz used every trick in the state open records law to delay, deny and black out public records showing the extent of that mismanagement.
Here’s how that worked. You ask for public records. You are stalled until the last possible hour when you receive an astounding price quote for the cost of retrieval and review. Nothing happens unless you agree to pay. If you pay, you get page after page of documents almost completely blacked out. You can appeal but that takes adds more delay.
After a struggle, the truth did come out – at least enough to verify the “misallocation” of $3 million, as Stankiewicz called it and some of the underlying problems.
But not all. That’s why many Charlestown residents called for an outside review, including a forensic audit, to get to the heart of the matter.
Van Slyke and her CCA Council colleagues refused to even placean outside review on the agenda for discussion and had Sartor and Stankiewicz conduct a self-audit that of course found them blameless. Later reviews found serious systemic financial management issues. Van Slyke says they came out clean every time only showing she didn’t read them.
Van Slyke repeats her lie that poor Mark Stankiewicz was “forced out” by the new Council majority when records show Stankiewicz had lined up a new job in Berkley, MA months before the 2022 election while Van Slyke and her CCA colleagues still assumed they were invincible at the polls.
Bonnita declares I have no right to raise these issues because it hurts Sartor’s and Stankiewicz’s feelings so the Democratic Town Committee should silence me. Maybe the CCA can control what its followers say, but not the rest of us.
For a decade, Sartor, Stankiewicz and the CCA Council majority failed their primary responsibility: properly manage the taxpayers’ money. They claimed – Van Slyke still does – that everything was fine because Charlestown has a low tax rate.
Van Slyke wants to return to the Council. The CCA wants to regain the majority on a campaign crafted from a tissue of lies. They will say or do whatever they can to win.
In 2022, Charlestown voters pierced the CCA’s fog of deception and voted them out. On November 5, I hope they will do it again.
