To the editor:

The devil must have been busy, so instead the Tiverton Planning Board made a deal with Joe Pierik and the Carpionato Group.  Carpionato is a developer suing Pawtucket over breach of contract.

But  Carpionato are the ones who breached the contract!  Six years ago, Pawtucket sold Carpionato prime riverfront property for one dollar. A stipulation was that construction on a hotel would begin within one year or Carpionato would forfeit the land. Nothing major happened for five years, so Pawtucket (finally) moved to take its land back. Now Carpionato is suing Pawtucket over it. This is who the Planning Board wants Tiverton to do business with? Unbelievably short-sighted.

Though, this is the same Planning Board that couldn't plan far enough ahead to make sure the sound system worked properly for the Carpionato hearings.  Monthly hearing after monthly hearing went by that could only be partially heard, culminating in an April hearing where half the microphones were completely dead.  My wife and I have attended plays and musicals in that auditorium with no audio problems. What gives?

What — nobody on the "Planning" Board could "plan" a month ahead by maybe calling the school to see if a helpful drama student or faculty member would correctly set-up the sound-system for  hearings? Yet this same Planning Board is irrevocably altering (in a bad way) the very future of Tiverton?

Chairman Hughes also steadfastly refused to speak directly into his microphone while reading from prepared documents, thereby rendering himself even more inaudible.  At various hearings, calls by Tiverton residents for him to please speak directly into his microphone were met with a most contemptuous glare.

At the final approval hearing, the Comprehensive Community Plan "tax-relief" program was brought up. Planning Board Chairman Hughes suggested recommending to the Town Council not to allow Carpionato to use it as a condition of approval. That didn't sit well with board member/developer David Saurette, who said, "It's not appropriate for the Planning Board to circumvent a program put in place to promote economic development."

Really? Because Mr Saurette and his Planning Board cronies had no problem at all with "circumventing" large swaths of our Community Plan to accommodate Carpionato's mega-mall! One of the Planning Boards jobs is to make sure any development conforms to our Community Plan. But this board is doing the complete opposite, gutting our Community Plan to conform with the developer’s (and their own) wishes.

And just where is our Town Council during all this? Board members can be recalled by our Town Council for good cause, like grossly overstepping their bounds!  Their silence alone condones the Planning Board's renegade actions. It's an abomination they let it come this far. Now our Town Council will be voting on these outlandish alterations, making themselves complicit in the board’s unprecedented hijacking of our Community Plan.

Recently Town Councilman Joe Sousa gave a big "God Bless" to the Planning Board. I'll bet that's a sentiment expressed each and every day by Joe Pierik and the Carpionato Group.

Ralph G Doliber

Tiverton