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Taxpayers Get No Discount from Pension Investments
Question: Is Tiverton’s police pension doing OK? Reading through the plans that Rhode Island cities and towns have put together to address their massive pension debts, one gets the impression that hiding the size of the problem from taxpayers is the goal that drives every …
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Jeffrey Caron: For Voters Concerned About Tiverton’s Taxes
With 18 candidates running for seven Town Council seats and nine candidates running for six Budget Committee seats, I created the below chart as an aid to those who want to support “low tax” candidates. I found this especially important because on the issue of …
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Durfee Should Budget for the Living
A recent letter by Budget Committee Member Louise Durfee deserves response on two points. First, Ms. Durfee’s attempt to spin her role in attempting to take trash pickup away from Tiverton residents actually puts her actions in a worse light. The video of the relevant …
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The Value of Transparency After the Investigative Report
In 2014, Tiverton Fact Check noted that the second-highest-paid employee in town was Police Lieutenant Timothy Panell. In fact, our transparency application shows that he was the second-highest-paid employee for three of the four years for which we have data (we don’t yet have fiscal …
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Tiverton 1st Set Out to Teach Taxpayers a Lesson
If the Town Council follows through with the Budget Committee’s threat to end trash pickup in Tiverton (or charge extra for it), it will be because elected officials and their supporters want to teach taxpayers not to attempt to control their taxes. But the real …
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Driggs and Cook: Response to Reckless Comments from Activist Budget Committee Member
We are responding to Tiverton Budget Committee Secretary, Deb Scanlon Janick’s dangerously reckless statements, made in her recent letter to the editor of this paper. We did not vote for the final Budget Committee recommended budget, as the record clearly shows. We voted against the …
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Nancy Driggs: Apologies Are Due to Tiverton Budget #2 Voters
Following the FTR vote the Budget Committee re-convened on June 9, 2016 to carry out its remand responsibility to “determine docket line items(s)”, as required by Tiverton’s Home Rule Charter. Some, including Louise Durfee, threatened not to show up and participate. However, all but one …
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Town Council Should Reject Budget Committee’s Vindictive Scheme to Kill Trash Pickup
The Tiverton Budget Committee has no authority to eliminate residential trash pickup, but in order to make a political statement with next year’s budget, a majority of its members voted to do just that. Tiverton residents should not be fooled. The threat of eliminating trash pickup is …
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No Need for Budget Committee’s Reckless Vengeance of Ending Trash Pickup
By far the most controversial move in the recent history of Tiverton budgeting was the Budget Committee’s decision to reduce the budget for rubbish/recycling collection by $500,000 — from $644,697 to $144,697. Effectively, if the Town Council follows the budget, this move kills the long-standing …
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Strategy for Addressing the 0.9% Budget #2 Remand to the Budget Committee
Now that their petition has won at the 2016 financial town referendum (FTR), the supporters of the 0.9% Budget #2 are being accused of unfairly saddling elected officials with the task of finding reductions that they don’t believe should be made. The accusation itself is …
