According to the fiscal year 2011-12 budget document currently posted on the town's Web site, Rubbish/Recycling Collection is going to cost the taxpayers of Tiverton $556,664. That's the baseline. Thanks to a brand new Pay as You Throw (PAYT) system that will begin draining residents' wallets on May 16, the real cost will likely be more than twice that. Beginning on that spring week, all regular garbage that residents discard - whether they put it out on the curb or deliver it to the dump themselves - will have to be placed in official town bags, manufactured and administered by South …

The thing about transparent government and readily accessible public data is that the population has to take sufficient interest to become informed and then to make a stand. Taking as an indication the local reaction to Tiverton Schools' failure to offer even a competitive argument for the transfer of Little Compton's high school contract from Portsmouth to Tiverton, transparency and access to data may not be the catalysts for good, efficient government that many reform groups assume them to be. As has been widely covered, including in this space, the Little Compton school district, with no …

Maybe it was the comment that a socially liberal young professional with economically conservative tendencies left on AnchorRising.com that pushed me over the edge: "Yes, the end result [of Governor Chafee's proposed sales tax increase] will be $165 per-capita, per year," he wrote. "Still a drop in the bucket." It's a worrisome statement for two reasons. First, such dollar amounts are a misleading sales pitch. At last year's Financial Town Meeting in Tiverton, the common declaration was that even a massive tax increase of around 8 percent would only amount to about $300 per year for the …

The connection is indirect, to be sure, but the controversy over an old prayer banner in Cranston High School West brings to mind the Chafee administration - and not (only) because Rhode Island's new governor has me so worried that I think a school-system-wide prayer initiative might be beneficial. Rather, what connects the items, in my mind, is an aspect of newly confirmed Board of Regents Chairman George Caruolo's not-so-surprising hesitance to embrace the reforms that Commissioner of Education Deborah Gist has been pursuing with such zest: "I've never seen a turnaround in anything with an …

The danger in offering commentary on the process that turned aside my application to become the interim town treasurer of Tiverton is that readers may assume the result to have determined my opinion more than my honest observation. Nothing written here will dissuade those predisposed to see sour grapes as my motivation, so I'll sidestep the charge with two statements. First, during the hour or so between the Personnel Board's opening of the 10 applications and its selection of six for interviews, its members gave no reason to suspect their motivation to be anything other than responsible. The…

A relatively new acronym has entered the lexicon of Rhode Islanders who strive to comprehend the financial condition of the state and its cities and towns. OPEB stands for "other post-employment benefits" and, in Tiverton for example, includes health, dental and life insurance covering employees and their families after their retirement. According to a press release announcing the issuance of the final report from the Rhode Island Senate Municipal Pension Study Commission, the unfunded OPEB promises that cities and towns have made to their employees amount to $2.4 billion. As the Providence …

This statement from the executive summary of the Rhode Island Department of Education's Fall 2010 RI NECAP Results report should be cause for concern: "In mathematics, only grade 11 had a statistically significant gain over last year's results." Of itself, that gain, 6%, is good news - albeit tempered by the fact that only 33% of high school students are proficient in math. To the extent that New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) tests count toward graduation, the iteration taken junior year is the critical one, so it is correspondingly important that improvements be seen there. Math …

After a decade of reasonably regular publication of political commentary, I'm growing weary of rhetorical tricks. No party or faction has a claim to purity, in this regard. Indeed, no individual can claim never to have slipped into the loping, dramatic stride of an argument that emphasizes the attractive swing of the arm over the direction in which the argument is headed, myself included. Put differently, too often disputes about public policy hinge more on which side can use prettier words than which side better captures the will of the public, let alone adhering more closely to the truth. …

How can government officials describe a tax-and-spend plan as reasonable without taking into consideration the context of its history? A budget that increases taxes by 15% might be very reasonable after a decade of 50% tax cuts. Conversely, any increase at all might be unreasonable after a decade that has seen taxes double. Locally, the elected official for whom the foregoing question is most relevant is newly reinstated Tiverton Budget Committee Chairman Christopher Cotta. According to Tiverton-LittleComptonPatch Editor Matthew Sanderson's description of a joint session of the Budget …

Agreement appeared total among the elected representatives and hired administrators in the Tiverton High School library for the January 13 School Committee meeting. Regarding a proposal from state Education Commissioner Deborah Gist and the Board of Regents to move to a three-tiered diploma system, capped with a "certificate" for those not able to reach the bottom tier, the consensus of the room was that it's a bad idea. The first contention is that a shift affecting students who are only a year and a half away from graduation would unfairly change the rules in the middle of the game.  …

Yes, it's true: I'm suing the town of Tiverton. As one of sixteen plaintiffs listed in O'Dell vs. Tiverton, I stand to receive a tax refund sufficient to keep the power on at home for another month. Or perhaps next year, the dedicated folks who run extracurricular youth sports in Tiverton won't have to wait extra months for my family's registration fees. That's the approximate amount that the town raised my property taxes beyond the limits of the law in order to support a 7.8% increase of its tax levy, well above the 4.5% to which it should have been restricted for fiscal year 2011. …

Among the issues rumbling across the towns of Tiverton and Little Compton, this year, is the decennial question of whether teenagers from the latter will continue to drive right through the former to attend public high school on Aquidneck Island, as they have for the past 36 years or so. Little Compton's ten-year contract with Portsmouth is expiring for the 2012-2013 school year, and Tiverton, Portsmouth, and Middletown are competing for the boost of more than one-hundred paying customers per year.  For the 2010-2011 school year, that equates almost to $900,000 in additional revenue. By the …

One might be tempted to characterize the distinction as the diplomats against the accountants, but that would wrongly imply that both approaches could lead to something like a reasonable and democratic resolution. The controversy over the third of a million dollars in Tiverton property taxes that the school department spent in excess of its local appropriation has two components: a dispute about cooperation, on the one hand, and an investigation of revenue, on the other.It's the subjective versus the objective, and frankly, the subjective is a distraction - perhaps a strategic distraction - …

The annual routine to which we become habituated during our years of schooling makes this week a peculiar slice through time for those of us who proceed to careers that aren't directly related to serving students. We learn as children to depart our place of daily occupation prior to Christmas with a sense of "see you next year." Even decades into a career that lumbers through the holiday season like a bear through a rare winter flowerbed, touching down in the final week of December for a few days' work feels a bit like coming to an unexpected hill at the end of a long journey.It doesn't help…

The largest portion of my workdays, over the last decade, has been spent remodeling houses in neighborhoods of Newport that appear zoned to require airy names rather than street numbers. Tourists who venture away from the Breakers, Chateau-sur-Mer, and the rest of the Bellevue arcade of opulence may spot plaques and embossed stones labeling the homes of families still in the flesh and still in the money. My sense of humor being what it is, I've dubbed my North Tiverton cottage Piddlinghouse and await only the free time and resources to whittle a name-post at the end of my driveway.The title …

Tiverton Town Council President Jay Lambert no doubt captured the sense of all involved when he said, "It would be hard to imagine that anybody is opposed to some sort of economic development in this town." Nobody's opposed to economic development, just like nobody wants higher taxes, just like nobody wants to give town and school employees blank checks, while everybody wants to pay them as much as possible. These are all meaningless statements without the details of what, where, and how much. Speaking to the council on November 22 on the perennial topic of securing a town grocery store, …

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 …