I stopped watching network news awhile ago. I cannot bear to see both sides of the aisle parade around expressing how they are on the moral high ground. These people, however, are merely faces and talking heads…they aren’t my friends and neighbors.

Before I get into this, I want to say I appreciated the efforts of Councilwoman Bergner and Councilwoman Rose for trying to allow this to play out. I appreciate that Councilwoman Bergner attempted to let Nicole Solas answer some of her questions before being asked to leave, which in my opinion, was a poor move.

In November 2020, millions of voters like me went to the polls and cast a ballot for Joe Biden.

Now, with a relentless GOP attack on our voting rights underway, I’m asking President Biden to return the favor. It’s time for Biden to go further than talking about supporting voting rights legislation. We need him to come out and fully support ending the filibuster so the Senate can finally pass voting rights legislation like the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Several months after our council deliberated at multiple Town Council meetings, I recently received two inquiries about the proposed roundabout at the intersection of Boston Neck, Philips, and Brown streets. In light of the questions posed by these citizens I thought I would write to our community to explain the process, what has transpired, and the current status of the proposed roundabout.

In an intercollegiate sailing race years ago, an opponent lied to race officials in order to have my team disqualified and his standing improved, something he boasted about when he did not recognize me at a different event a few months later. Refusing to be embarrassed, he said it couldn’t have been cheating because the officials were involved. I learned then that some people imagine winning is always justified, by any means necessary.

I am disappointed as we near the beginning of school that neither the School Board nor our superintendent have yet to develop plans to incorporate outdoor-based education into our student and teacher activities.

We know that sometimes politicians make promises during their campaign. These promises may be ignored and forgotten after the person is elected.

Seldom do these broken promises result in hardship to thousands of people.

Unfortunately, with Councilor Ewa Dzwierzynski’s recent vote to support the three college student limit ordinance, she has broken her promises and negatively impacted thousands of people – students, parents and families, homeowners and voters.

Happily, on Aug. 18, 2021, three members of the Narragansett Town Council acted on behalf of the residents. By a three-two vote, Councilmembers Jesse Pugh, Ewa Dzwierzynski, and Deborah Kopech passed a no-more-than-three students per rental unit ordinance residents have been waiting 25 years to achieve.

North Kingstown school committee member and co-founder of a group calling itself TANK (“Towards an Anti-racist North Kingstown”) Jennifer Lima and her friends desperately continue their effort to convince us that North Kingstown is a “systemically racist” community – especially in its schools.

Aquaculture, and especially oyster farming in the Wickford area, has a long history of commercial, small business, activity that has, does, and should continue be allowed to prosper.

I have had to adopt a blank face to hate in our community and it is not easy. It has my heart pounding and my blood pressure up in the too high zone. If hate has such a powerful negative effect on my body and in my spirit as a grown person in a public school, how does it affect the children? All of the children? 

The public’s business should be open to the public. And under Rhode Island law, it is. Yet when mom Nicole Solas sought to attend the meeting of a publicly funded committee that meets weekly to discuss and make recommendations on policies that apply across her daughter’s school district, she was told that the meeting was closed and parents were not welcome.

Now, the Goldwater Institute is pushing back: We’ve joined with the Stephen Hopkins Center for Civil Rights in Rhode Island to represent Nicole in a complaint before the state attorney general asserting that the school district has violated Rhode Island’s Open Meetings Act (OMA) by closing these meetings to the public. 

The head-spinning piece by state historian laureate Patrick Conley (“Remembering RI’s overlooked Olympian,” Aug. 5) should win a medal for logical long jump. With no effort he pivots in one brief paragraph from the approach, an appreciation of a 1912 Olympic track medalist, to a ridiculous leap in which George Washington is in an airplane – his point being to scorn those of us who think the Founders might have done more to bring American freedoms to the enslaved people that enriched them.  

It is time for the Town Council to pass the Three College Student Ordinance – again.

Earlier this year, Narragansett 2100 sued the town regarding the process of passing the ordinance over Zoom meetings.  Judge Taft Carter ruled that the town must go through the hearing process again because of a process technicality. The ordinance itself is sound.