Cliff Vanover: Elections Should Be About Issues And Qualifications, Not False Attacks

The following letter was submitted to local newspapers and is reprinted here with permission of the author Cliff Vanover. Mr. Vanover is a member of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance Steering Committee.

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The Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) has promoted our candidates by listing their qualifications, many achievements, and commitment to Charlestown’s low tax rate, beautiful environment, natural resource based economy, and our children’s future through support of quality education.

By contrast our opposition has based their campaign on attacking CCA with deceptive or outright false claims. We know little of what they are for, only what they are against. Even their name, “Charlestown Residents United” (CRU), is a misnomer, when their tactics serve to divide.

We have rarely mentioned CRU, but a recent letter by Frank Glista was so full of false statements, that I must respond.

• CCA receives 100% of its funding from Charlestown property owners, nearly three quarters of donations are from year round residents and the rest from seasonal residents. Seasonal residents contribute to CCA for the same reason full time residents do, because they want Charlestown to remain a beautiful community with taxes they can afford.
• CCA’s Steering Committee is deeply rooted in Charlestown. Our members are year-round residents and in addition we have two long serving members whose wisdom we value who have retired to senior communities. From our inception in 2006 we have published the names of our steering committee. By contrast, CRU only publishes the names of their President and Treasurer, which are required by state law. They do not disclose any other members of their board except to say it has 20 members.
• CRU calls our support of conservation easements “land give aways”, but CCA believes easements protect land that has been set aside for parks, preserves, or drinking water from being converted to development.
• Charlestown spends over $600,000 per year on active recreation with much of that spending in Ninigret Park. The Town Council in 2015 objected to the fact that a $1 million bond question for Ninigret did not have a plan for how the money would be spent. With or without the bond, spending would have continued in Ninigret Park.
• No one in Rhode Island knew the details of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) plan until December 2016 when CCA published detailed maps that I prepared showing the path of destruction from Westerly to East Greenwich. Even those in state government who did know about the plan had never seen detailed maps.
• CCA supports land conservation. Members of CCA have written grants or have had a key role in preserving thousands of acres of land in Charlestown, including the Francis Carter Preserve, South Farm, Pasquisett Preserve, and many more.
• CRU insists that the Town Council should have appointed someone to a vacant Council seat who was so gravely ill that they never could have attended meetings. Such an appointment would have been the same as leaving the seat vacant.

Elections should be about issues and qualifications, not false attacks. I urge voters to consider Town Council candidates Julie Carroccia, Virginia Lee, Bonnie Van Slyke, David Wilkinson, and William Wilson and learn much more about them at https://charlestowncitizens.org/election/