Justin Katz
To provide some perspective on yesterday’s stark warning of calamity, it’s worth mentioning that I made it home to Tiverton from Newport in not much more time than usual — about an hour, with three short stops (coffee, money, and newspaper). In other words, Will Ricci’s nine-hour trip from East Providence to South Kingstown and…
An editorial in yesterday’s Newport Daily News makes an excellent point with reference to recent departures of town administrators: … the lack of information about why the (Middletown and Tiverton) administrators are departing — whether because of poor performance, personality conflicts or political pressure — is frustrating, as is the fact that neither agreement has…
I just saw a report on channel 10 that there are still — at 9:00 p.m. — children on buses from schools that let out at 12:30 or 1:00. People abandoning their cars because of traffic generated during a modestly heavy snow storm? This state is embarrassing. Heads ought to roll in government offices tomorrow…
This is a plea to the teachers of Tiverton: Please step back for a moment and consider the depths to which your union is bringing you: Tiverton teachers plan to picket the workplace of School Committee Chairwoman Denise deMedeiros on Monday afternoon and have notified the president of St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River, Mass.,…
Andrew and I are at the Ocean State Policy Research Institute dinner with Grover Norquist at the Cuban Revolution in Providence, and as you can see, the atmosphere is full of thematic incongruities: ADDENDUM: All throughout dinner, something in Fidel’s eyes distracted me. As everybody filtered out of the room, I walked over for a…
The school committee is looking for a temporary classroom because a school that’s being phased out as new construction completes after this year is substandard. The idea is, as soon as possible, to spread the children out in (and out of) a building that is too small to accommodate them, for health and noise reasons.…
Not a group to let some rain disrupt their protest, the teachers stood at their seats in the auditorium before tonight’s Tiverton School Committee meeting: My habitual area for sitting is occupied, so I thought it best to hide in back. (That, and I’m afraid that Pat Crowley might be in the audience and offend…
Lee Drutman’s musing against the scourge of lobbyists is telling in the solution that he fails to consider: The challenge then is two-fold. One is to figure out ways to make public service more of a career in itself and less of the stepping-stone it is increasingly becoming. This may mean such things as better…
My observation of Tiverton government began too recently — and I’m insufficiently inside — to really get the significance of the move, but Town Administrator Glenn Steckman offered, and the town council accepted, his resignation tonight. Apparently the “arising rift” in town government noted in recent Providence Journal coverage was more of an arisen rift.…
One hesitates to take Pat “The Finger” Crowley’s comments on taxation too seriously. His branch of mathematics, after all, takes progressivism to be a fundamental principle and unionism to be the standard of comparison. That said, anybody who finds merit in his question marks should consider, first, that he highlights two components of taxation, with…
