Career Damaging, Untrue Assertions Should Be Out Of Bounds

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The following letter was printed in local newspapers in response to a letter attacking a former town employee and is shared with us here by the author Bonnie Van Slyke. Bonnie Van Slyke was a member of the Charlestown Town Council for 8 years and is a current candidate for Town Council.

Let’s get this straight. Three million dollars of Charlestown taxpayers’ money was NEVER lost, missing, misappropriated, or misused.

This whopper was fabricated in 2021 by an individual who claimed at the time to be a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) but was not. The whopper was repeated by Deb Carney, who was then president of the Charlestown Town Council, and amplified by social media.

Fast forward to 2024, I recently wrote that the current Town Council had removed experience and skill from the Charlestown Budget Commission (Westerly Sun, “Silencing a voice of experience in Charlestown,” July 11, 2024)—another terrible decision for the people of Charlestown made by the current Town Council majority.

In response, Will Collette has decided to distract readers from this awful decision by recycling a debunked whopper (Westerly Sun, “Richard Sartor should have resigned,” July 19, 2024). It must be election season.

However, in his discussion of the supposedly “lost” $3 million, Mr. Collette ignores the fact that a previous Town Council had been directed by Charlestown’s voters to use the $3 million to pay into the Charlestown Police Department’s pension plan and to reduce the tax rate. This has been confirmed in three town audits by reputable accounting firms and in a study of the town’s financial functions by an independent consulting firm.

For sure, Charlestown’s finances were not “allowed to drift into disarray over several years” as Mr. Collette claims. More facts:

–> Charlestown has been for a decade one of the most solvent towns in the state.

–> Charlestown’s tax rate was almost halved during the decade prior to the current Town Council being elected in 2022 to the third lowest in the state in 2021.

–> Charlestown’s residents, as expressed in the 2021 Community Survey, were overwhelmingly happy with their town.

For some reason, Mr. Collette appears to believe that taking personal potshots at a former town employee who was honest and worked hard, one who did an excellent job for 10 years, is OK. It’s not. Unproven, and untrue, assertions that live online can be damaging to a person’s career and should be out of bounds. Mark Stankiewicz was forced out because the Town Council president could not get along with him, a fact that was obvious during her entire time on the Town Council.

I find it distressing that Mr. Collette is now throwing mud at a dedicated volunteer who served the town well on the Budget Commission and, in the past, as a Town Administrator in Charlestown. The Budget Commission is advisory; the decision makers, as the Councilors will gladly tell you, are the people sitting on the Town Council.

The forensic audit that Mr. Collette mentions was not conducted because it was clear there was “no there, there.” However, Ms. Carney and other CRU members have held a majority on the Town Council for almost two years, and they could conduct a forensic audit if they so choose. They have instead not been able to complete the most recent regular audit on time.

One would hope that the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee might put an end to the telling of whoppers such as this one spouted by someone who is a CDTC member.

Photo of Bonnie Van Slyke
Bonnie Van Slyke

Bonnie Van Slyke, the author of this post, is a candidate for Town Council in the 2024 election. She was a member of the Charlestown Town Council from 2014 to 2022. She was the Town Council Liaison to the Planning Commission, Parks and Recreation Commission, and Senior Citizens Commission. She is a former officer and member of the Board of Directors of the Frosty Drew Observatory & Science Center, a former Chair of the Zoning Board of Appeals in Harvard, MA and a former member of the Board of Trustees of the Harvard Conservation Trust. Bonnie is a freelance copy editor, technical writer, and publications specialist. Bonnie writes occasionally about governance issues in Charlestown.