Tiverton
The first thing of note at tonight’s Tiverton town council meeting is consideration of appointments for the moderator at the financial town meeting. Apparently, the town has received a single réumé to date. It’s not like the moderator has to do anything important; as we learned last year, he or she mainly relays town solicitor…
On the last page of the main section of the recent Sakonnet Times comes news of a petition that has succeeded in putting a ladder truck for the fire department on the docket for the financial town meeting. The meat of the petition is as follows: This petition seek [sic] to appropriate and expend the…
Tiverton Town Clerk Nancy Mello has reason to fear that the town council may consider her to be the default appointee for the position of moderator at the pending financial town meeting. So, as she and I spoke amidst children hunting for Easter Eggs this weekend, I promised to make some inquiries. Count this as…
Interested in the process of the town’s postponing the financial town meeting, I made room in my schedule to attend a special meeting of the town council at which we’ll find out whether the town solicitor believes the town can legally seek to move the meeting to September. Immediately upon opening the meeting the council…
The contrast is huge between these school committee meetings when there’s no contract under negotiation versus when there is. An interested resident who came to tonight’s meeting and took it as representatives would surely have trouble motivating him or her self to come to others. They’re discussing the budget, but a viewer would have to…
While the town council discusses sewage-related matters, I’ve revisited a recent Sakonnet Times article and found the following more significant in light of my subsequent confusion about the sudden drop in the projected tax increase: The council adopted a new schedule of fees and fines for over 150 services that will generate revenues for the…
Missing a town meeting or two reminds the active citizen how nice it is to have nights at home. Ah, well. If we’re going to have a democracy… When I walked in (yes, a few minutes late) RI Rep. John Loughlin (R., Tiverton, Little Compton, Portsmouth) was giving the council the newly regular update of…
So Rhode Island — indeed, Tiverton — may be providing the first instance of the federal stimulus at work: It will surely be the first in Rhode Island and there’s a chance that a Main Road, Tiverton, rebuilding job could be the first federal stimulus job in the nation. “We’ve already had some inquiries from…
I hadn’t planned to attend the Tiverton Budget Committee meeting on Wednesday night, so when my eyelids became heavy around 9:30, and with the meeting looking as if it had settled into a series of unanimous votes on heavily debated dollar amounts, it was easy to talk myself into heading home. I wish I’d stayed:…
I’ve arrived late to a Budget Committee meeting, having had other obligations. I feel like I’ve missed something; somehow the predicted tax levy increase for the coming year has dropped from low-to-mid teens to 3.75%. I know the school department has laid off some people. The town has made a bunch of cuts. But that…
