PORTSMOUTH — Twelve candidates are running for a seat on the Town Council in next month’s election, and we asked each one the same question: “What issue(s) should be given the biggest priority over the next two years if you are elected to the Portsmouth Town Council? Feel free to elaborate.”

Responses were limited to 300 words, and a few answers were edited to meet that requirement.

Here are the responses from 11 of the 12 candidates, listed in alphabetical order. Michael DiPaola did not reply to the questionnaire.

Daniela Abbott

Portsmouth navigated the challenges associated with the Covid pandemic quite well, and our town staff should be proud of the level of service and support provided to our residents. As we come out of a very tumultuous time, it will be important to focus on long-term planning and strategies for addressing the big issues facing Portsmouth. 

We have enormous capital improvement needs across all town-owned properties, in addition to new and improved facilities and services that have been identified as priorities by our residents. We need to continue to monitor the plans for East Main Road and West Main Road, and work closely with RIDOT on the critical improvements needed for both roads. 

We need to follow through on the proposed replacement for the Senior Center and develop a plan for a multi-purpose community center that addresses the needs of all our residents. We need to identify improvements to alternative transportation by pursuing projects that add sidewalks and shared-use paths to our major arteries. And, we need to continue maintaining and improving our schools, so that we can continue to provide a top-tier education for Portsmouth children. 

Most importantly, we need to develop a robust and realistic plan for how we can fund all these needs, in addition to the ever-increasing operational costs of our municipal services, and continue to support an excellent quality to Portsmouth residents.

Kevin Aguiar

The top priority facing Portsmouth is our municipal budget. By many accounts we are currently in a recession, and we cannot predict how long it will last or how severely it will impact us. The challenge for the Town Council will be how to keep Portsmouth affordable for all citizens, while improving our quality of life and providing the municipal and community support services that are essential to our everyday lives.

My approach to the issue is to work with the Town Council and the town administrator to provide fiscally responsible budgets and establish policies that benefit the citizens of Portsmouth. The budget process takes several months to develop prior to being presented to the Town Council in early April. In my opinion, this process has consistently improved over the years and as town councilors we must continually look for opportunities to improve the process and control expenses. For example, the town has recently entered into new five-year contracts with the Police and Fire departments. These contracts replaced the previous three-year contracts and provide two additional years of cost certainty for budget purposes.

I believe a high-performing school system is critical to maintaining and attracting new families to our community. We need to provide the resources and opportunities for children in our schools to achieve their potential.

Finally, I will continue to find ways within the budget to support our municipal infrastructure programs because it is important to have safe roads and address road flooding within some areas of the town.

My goal is to make Portsmouth the most-desired community in the area to live in. A community that is affordable for families, has a top-tier school system, and provides the municipal services that are essential to our everyday lives.

David M. Gleason 

I think of the affordability of being able to live in Portsmouth and ways to sustain this. The town’s budget is sure to increase yearly and with a supply of 7,500 families living here, there will always be plenty of money to pay those bills.

I believe that our tax money needs additional supplementing by commercial and industrial taxes. One suggestion is that our Economic Development Committee work with the director of business development to expand the boating and marine industry already established at Melville and at the four or five marinas in town.

Portsmouth also has some enterprise business tenants that should be closely monitored. We recently entered into an agreement with a caterer, Russell and Morin, to run the wedding business and to provide all maintenance and care-taking services, at the Glen Manor House. It will take a few years to ramp up and provide substantial income to the town while keeping up with the facility’s maintenance.

We have other established enterprises, namely the Melville Campgrounds and the Glen Farm barns. The campground seems well-established and should be looked at for additional revenue. The operation of the historic barn complex has not brought in the revenue that was touted in their proposal in 2017. My March 6 letter to The Portsmouth Times shared my concerns that they did not comply with the contract. Told that this contract, written by the town’s solicitor, may not be enforceable, I suggested a new contract. Sadly, the same contract was renewed in April with similar non-compliance occurring to date.

Unfinished business: How about a playing field(s) on the 3S property, a review of our ordinances, and part-time summer help for town building painting and repairs!

Timothy Grissett

My name is Timothy Grissett, and I am running for Portsmouth Town Council. I am the supervisor for a regional community-oriented bank in Portsmouth. My husband Karl and I have lived in Portsmouth since January 2020; we are licensed to provide foster care through DCYF and recently took in a sibling pair whom we enrolled in the Portsmouth school system. 

The lack of affordable housing is an issue in Portsmouth and everywhere. I think a good place to start addressing this issue is with the town’s agreement with the Church Community Housing Corp to develop a new senior center in Portsmouth that will include several affordable senior housing units. 

The proposal from Mayflower Wind to run high-voltage transmission cables through Portsmouth from the offshore wind farms. The town doesn’t have an in-house subject matter expert for this issue, and I think it is vital for us to consult third parties to help assist and advise us on the facts and figures Mayflower has presented. 

The lack of reliable internet on Aquidneck Island is a huge issue. The only internet service provider’s monopoly has left our community with unreliable and subpar internet. During the lockdown period of the Covid-19 pandemic, there were times when I could not get Google.com to load because the internet transmission lines were overloaded. Portsmouth has fiberoptic internet lines traversing East Main Road, and we should collaborate with our neighboring communities to have reliable and affordable broadband fiber optic internet available to every household. 

Last and certainly not least is our local economy. Portsmouth must continue fiscal responsibility while maintaining capital improvements, infrastructure, quality of life, and climate resiliency. 

Keith Hamilton

The next council will be faced with multiple issues and they are all important. 

We will need to make sure the school bond is executed effectively and under budget. We will need to review the Mayflower proposal and protect the interests of Portsmouth and the environment. We need to maintain minimal increases in the budget while continuing to repair our roads and buildings. 

We will have the full recreation master plan that will have to woven into our future plans. Finally we will have to make sure we effectively work with Church Community Housing to create a great new senior center and senior housing for our aging population.

Leonard Katzman

Top priorities include keeping taxes down by leveraging other revenue sources. Portsmouth was able to spend $1.18 for every $1 of tax revenue by securing outside funding. Taxes pay for our priorities, high-quality public schools, fixing roads and funding professional police, fire/rescue, and emergency management services.

Of course the truth is, candidates don’t know what the top priority will be. In 2018 who knew they’d know face the challenge of keeping things running during the pandemic? Past councils mobilized to keep a big-box store out, or fought the state to stop Sakonnet River Bridge tolls. The top issues are unexpected crises. Portsmouth needs people on the council who can make calm, clear-headed decisions when unforeseen events unfolds. That’s true no matter what we may all think is today’s “priority.”

There’s another kind of top issue voters should be wary of — fake issues. Every election we hear some candidates using scare tactics, making baseless claims, to get you to vote for them. We’ve heard people spout alarming pension figures, as though all the dollars come from taxpayers, not voluntary contribution increases from employees. We’ve seen people run their whole campaign based on claims that opponents want to force a $100 million sewer project on the town — even though not one single town council candidate that I know of going back to at least 2004 has ever supported such a thing, whether Republican or Democratic party or independent. Not one. Yet scary “Stop Sewers!” flyers landed on voter’s doorsteps.

This year, please don’t listen to scaremongers — or at least fact-check them before letting your blood pressure rise. Beware of those who peddle false information. Support Portsmouth Democratic Party candidates who, like me, have a commitment to good open government and civil public discourse. 

Charles Levesque

I am a candidate for Portsmouth Town Council I am a retired magistrate of the Rhode Island family court. I believe the most important issue facing our community our state and our country is respect for the process by which we are governed that is the electoral process. 

I believe that each candidate should fully commit to respecting the election and the will of the people. There are certainly many other issues facing the town of Portsmouth. We must continue to have a government that respects the needs of our community and the ability of our community to pay for those needs. 

I would like to be a person who seeks other sources of income and other resources in order to fulfill our obligations particularly to our children and to our elderly.

Sharlene Patton

I believe one of the biggest priorities should be to listen to all residents, understand their concerns and respond accordingly. Everyone should be heard during Town Council meetings, and no one should be dismissed or ignored.

Another big issue that should hold priority for Portsmouth is the need to balance the town’s future development with the desire of most residents to maintain our rural, small-town character. In the last several years the present council has allowed the balance to swing way too far toward interest of the developers. The impact of this can be seen by the industrial solar and wind electric generation sites within or adjacent to our residential zones and more recently the senior center. 

Balance can be restored to this process which would allow Portsmouth to grow in a more reasoned manner. I have no desire to eliminate development in our town, but I do believe that with proper resident notice and involvement, development can happen in a way that is consistent with preserving the rural character of our town.

I pledge to listen to all residents, understand their concerns and respond accordingly. It’s time to change the dynamics of Portsmouth politics.

Juan Carlos Payero

The biggest issue that I would like to address during the coming term would be maintaining the financial stability of our budgets. As we move towards the endemic stage of COVID, we need to make sure that the federal and state assistance that Portsmouth has received does not create structural deficits in the town budget. 

We must also balance modernizing our infrastructure while finding efficiencies that yield positive budgetary impacts for taxpayers. This does not mean just going with the cheapest or traditional option; sometimes it means making an investment and improvement to our services that have long term cost reductions. This must also be balanced with ensuring that we consider other factors such as the environment, the protection of our open spaces, and enhancing the quality of life for all. 

The most important objective must be to make Portsmouth a place where families want to raise their children and companies want to do business in and with our town.

David G. Reise

I believe it’s important to keep Portsmouth affordable while maintaining the quality of life that we enjoy in our town so that our children and grandchildren can continue to live in this area.

I will work to control spending and overbearing regulations. Improving and maintaining present assets and infrastructure is crucial. Roads, buildings, parks and beaches need to be improved and maintained first. New proposals will be examined for the true long-term costs which can mushroom out of control, burdening the taxpayer.

Open space is important, but also a byproduct of farming, so we must support our farmers, both large and small. I am quite familiar with this issue since I am an owner of a farm which dates back to 1914 and incorporates various animal habitats and open space. For this reason, I was awarded entry into the Stewardship Program from the National Resource Conservation Service Program. This is one of the few properties in this region selected for this program.

With good stewardship of our budget and resources, we can preserve the Portsmouth we all know and love. With your vote, I hope to contribute my skills and expertise to the town so we can make this vision a reality.

J. Mark Ryan

The immediate threat facing so many Portsmouth residents is the high cost of living, especially with respect to housing and energy costs, and the larger threat of severe weather resulting from climate change. We need to take actions to allow seniors to age in place, young people to stay in the community in which they grew up, and workers to live in the community where they work. We need to make sure our coastal community can remain safe and resilient.

I’ve been on the Portsmouth Town Council since November 2016, and during that time I have helped the council successfully address the challenges faced by our town and the concerns of Portsmouth residents.

​Because of fiscally prudent policies, we have been able to support our schools, maintain our roads and make needed capital improvements, manage COVID-19 and severe weather challenges, and partner with a non-profit to build a new Senior Center with over 50 units of affordable senior housing — and at the same time, keep Portsmouth in the bottom third of tax rates for all R.I. municipalities and in the bottom 25 percent of towns with comparable services.

I have also helped ensure we hired and retained excellent staff that allow us to pursue judicious fiscal management and emergency preparedness, institute a program allowing residents to choose affordable electricity rates, and aggressively pursue state and federal grant money. The budgeting process is more transparent and focused and discourages approval of unjustified, ad hoc expenditures. While COVID-19 prevented other towns from passing FY 2020-21 budgets, Portsmouth remained on schedule, reduced our budget, and created an emergency COVID-19 contingency fund. 

I will make sure that we pass ordinances that support the publicly vetted and supported vision of our town set forth in our new Comprehensive Plan.