Ruth Platner: Voters Should Rely On Facts And Not Political Fiction

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The following letter appeared in local newspapers and is reprinted here with permission of the author Ruth Platner. Ruth is Chair of the Charlestown Planning Commission and a candidate for Planning in the 2020 election.

There are things I love about social media. It has reunited me with childhood friends and allows limitless sharing of photographs, but it is really harming political discourse, especially in Charlestown.

On Monday, July 13, the Charlestown Town Council’s agenda included a formal offer from a property owner to sell one acre of beachfront property, adjacent to Charlestown Town Beach, to the town. Because it was a unique property, which might not be available again for 20 years, and because of its size and location and the ongoing problems with crowding at the beach, the Town Council wanted to discuss the offer made to the town by the seller.

As soon as the agenda item was published the conspiracy theorists went to work on local Facebook and Nextdoor groups saying the town council was going to “use the surplus,” “create a bigger parking lot,” “force this through,” “no notice,” “paying off friends,” “being sneaky,” “dirty deal” – and other things I hesitate to repeat. In all their posts they buried the fact that what was on the agenda was a discussion about possibly putting this on the November ballot for the voters to decide – the voters – not the Town Council. Also not mentioned was that the offer was from the seller to the Town, that no one in town had ever proposed or agreed to the terms and conditions, and that all members of the Town Council had received the offer at the exact same time.

As Town Council President Virginia Lee explained at Monday night’s meeting, this was put on the agenda so that the Town Council could have an open and public discussion about the offer from the property owner.

In the end, the Town Council voted unanimously to reject the offer, largely because of the seller’s insistence on a nonrefundable deposit of almost $50,000. The councilors briefly discussed some pros and cons of the purchase, but all agreed the discussion could go nowhere because paying taxpayers’ money for an uncertain outcome would violate their fiduciary duty.

The initial Facebook post on this topic said the Town Council “will consider whether to purchase this property for $2.5 million dollars, over $1 million above the appraised value” but skillfully buried the referendum discussion that would have had the voters decide, and the fact that the proposal was not even the Town Council’s. That original misleading post was authored by CRU, our political opposition in the November election, and the dozens of slanderous comments that followed it to different social media sites were managed and fueled by their members. This is not the first time that CRU has misconstrued facts and created false rumors for their political advantage. The facts don’t matter when you are willing to lie to get elected and the flow of social media makes countering lies more difficult than fighting fires. It’s going to be a rocky campaign, and I hope that the voters of Charlestown will rely on facts and not political fiction created to divide our community.

Ruth Platner

 

 

You can learn more about the author, Ruth Platner, at her profile page.