Ex-Charlestown Town Council member Bonnie Van Slyke is upset that the new Town Council majority is holding too many meetings (“Charlestown special meetings inefficient, not transparent,” May 8). She and what’s left of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance can’t keep up. That’s not “transparent,” she says, and it’s “inefficient.”
In the decade-plus the CCA ruled Charlestown, council decisions were handled very efficiently. The CCA would hold its secret steering committee meetings at undisclosed locations and make the decisions the CCA council members would vote in lockstep to enact.
Very efficient and, in its way, transparent, since we all knew that was how the CCA ran the town.
They made sure their compliant town administrator clamped down on public access to information on shady land deals, financial foul-ups and imaginary threats concocted by the CCA to drive fear among the voters.
It took more than a decade of this, but last November, Charlestown voters wised up and ousted the CCA from power. The new council majority has indeed been calling a lot of meetings because it takes time and effort to clean up the mess the CCA left behind. They don’t consider it an option to make those decisions in secret.
Will Collette Charlestown This article appeared as a Letter To the Editor in The Westerly Sun on May 10, 2023.
Republished here with permission of the author.