Adventures in Town Government
For several generations, Little Compton, RI, has been practicing a community school choice by sending its teenagers elsewhere for high school. The obvious choice should be Tiverton, just over an indistinguishable border, but at least since the ’70s, the kids of LC have been traveling to Aquidneck Island. My Patch column, this week, looks at…
John Kostrzewa sees municipal deficits as “the next big bubble,” specifically related to municipal bonds. If cities and towns begin to default, then investors will stop considering them so safe and, per those who support public debt, the sky would fall. In outlining options for Central Falls, Mark Pfeiffer, the state receiver, said bankruptcy should…
As I write in this week’s Tiverton-LittleComptonPatch column, the two aspects of a local budget controversy are diplomacy and accounting. That is, one controversy is over communication and process, and the other is over actual tax dollars and how they should be allocated: The starkest delineation of this dynamic came during a special meeting of…
I got a little philosophical on the topic of small-town New England democracy for my Patch.com column this week: At such times, one marvels at the brazen perpetuation of democracy in a society so diverse that even some few dozen square miles contain irreconcilable lives. New England, with its proud tradition of town meetings, raises…
Although the majority of the teachers probably just wanted to keep their jobs, observers with a cynical (I would say “realistic”) opinion of labor unions likely foresaw the Central Falls teacher absences issue back when Superintendent Fran Gallo unfired the high school faculty back in May. There is no way union organizers want the transformation…
A local controversy with statewide implications is the subject of my Patch.com column, this week. In short, the Tiverton school department spent $367,165 in local funds to make up for estimated state funds that didn’t materialize, and now the municipal government is taking it back. Of course, given the season, I couldn’t treat the topic…
Everybody supports economic development, even in a proudly ruralish town like Tiverton, but as I suggest in my Patch.com column, the details are decisive: At least in the recent past, it has seemed that Tiverton’s policy for economic development has been that it should occur only in places in which businesses struggle to succeed –…
My Patch.com column this week takes up a minor local controversy over residents’ holding multiple town positions, in light of the relevance to local politics to larger political battles: The potential for conflicts of interest and corruption is remote between the school district and oyster farming; it is less so between those who draft the…
I’ll be writing a weekly column called “15 Miles of Main Road” for the Tiverton-LittleCompton Patch.com, and my first offering seeks to set the stage for what could be an extremely interesting couple of years in Tiverton politics, perhaps with implications for politics across the state: The infamous Tiverton Financial Town Meeting of May 2010…
Remember when a raucous School Committee meeting in East Providence gave reason to hope that the game might be up for the National Education Association’s unchallenged control of Rhode Island education? If so, odds are that Anchor Rising plays in that memory. We liveblogged, photographed, recorded, and analyzed. And it made a difference. Two days…