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Community Corner

Positions: One Per Resident

The Tiverton Town Charter is wise to limit politically inclined residents to one official "position" each.

The underlying action of local politics can be so subtle as to seem of little consequence. The rules laid out in governing documents - from a town charter to the U.S. Constitution - become obstacles and tools in a collegial competition of smiling neighbors. When application of the rules is uneven, however, the thin, pleasant thread may weave the sort of political advantage that has nearly doubled Tiverton's tax levy in a decade and, on a larger scale, has hobbled the state of Rhode Island.

This dramatic introduction purposefully precedes the much humbler admission that the topic under my microscope is the minor controversy over Laura Epke's suspended elevation to a seat on the Tiverton Budget Committee. When the Town Council took up the task of filling the vacancy, which Committee Vice-Chairman Rob Coulter created when he resigned upon winning election to the Council, the matter had an air of preordained inconsequentiality.

In light of the fact that Ms. Epke missed her bid for election to the committee by a mere 15 votes (0.1 percent of the total), it would have been a politically contentious act for the council to look elsewhere for a candidate. Mr. Coulter, himself, made the official motion on Epke's behalf, despite counting among . Council member Cecil Leonard affably inquired as to the candidate's capacity to undertake the office's duties, given her position on the town's Municipal Building Feasibility Advisory Committee. And thereby the obstacle tumbled into view.

"We actually have a problem with that," interrupted Town Solicitor Andrew Teitz.  Section 701 of the Town Charter states that "Budget Committee members shall hold no other town position." Although the buildings is solely advisory and ad hoc, the plain meaning of the charter's language will likely force Mr. Teitz to argue, when the council revisits the question on Dec. 13, that Epke's role as chairwoman qualifies as a town position.  

An echo of that meaning can be found in Section 1213, which states that "no elected member of the Tiverton town government shall hold an appointed position at the same time." This section may not apply to Epke, insofar as she would be appointed, not elected, but it does clarify that appointments are to "positions." Moreover, it makes absolute sense that Budget Committee members, who have final responsibility for allocating the expenditures on which electors vote at the financial town meeting, should not have official biases toward particular government activities.

So clear ought this to have been to those who - like Solicitor Teitz - are steeped in the laws of the town that one struggles to understand why the Town Council had to be surprised by a disruption of its intentions. The first question put to Ms. Epke should not have been whether she has spare time, but whether she'd be willing to resign from her prior appointment.  

One speculation concerning the sequence of events is political theater. Establishing the principle of "next highest vote getter" through a public feint toward Epke might smooth the way for the much more polarizing figure of Louise Durfee, who missed a seat on the Budget Committee by 622 votes. If that's the ploy, though, the single municipal candidate whose Tiverton Citizens for Change-endorsed candidacy did not succeed may complicate matters by expressing interest in Coulter's vacancy. Granted, Jeffrey Belli's campaign was for Town Council, not Budget Committee, but he can nonetheless claim 133 more votes than Durfee.

Whoever finally takes the empty chair when budget season arrives, the emergence of this particular rule of Tiverton government into public consciousness may force consideration in other bodies. Newly elected School Committee member Deborah Pallasch, for example, is simultaneously an appointed member of the Financial Town Meeting Changes Advisory Committee, which the Town Council asked in August with proposing an alternative to the much-despised process by which voters currently approve the annual budget. In fact, Pallasch and Epke both sit on that committee and were both nominated by the cochairman Brian Medeiros to counterbalance those nominated by the yellow-shirted Jeff Caron.

Further still, in 2007, the Town Council appointed Carol Herrmann as a liaison to the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Committee to act as the local voice when cases involving Tiverton properties are contested.  (State law requires the CRMC to include at least one town resident on the relevant subcommittee.) In 2008, Tiverton voters elected Herrmann to the School Committee. Thus far, no CRMC actions have arisen to test the legitimacy of the dual roles, but her subcommittee will soon have a hearing on the matter of a Nanaquacket Pond oyster farm.

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 school and municipal budgets and a committee addressing the method by which those budgets are approved. However obscure these specific instances may be, the principle that transforms minor town hall expectorations into webs of state and national intrigue is easy to see: The people invest every office, council, committee, board, panel, and subcommittee with a certain amount of its collective power. Factions inevitably labor to collect enough of them to achieve their ends, and the competition can, itself, be healthy...provided they must find enough politically palatable members that each need only hold one government position at a time.

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