Saturday, December 22, 1990
When They Split Up CF, Everybody Wants Stanley’s!
By JIM BARON Times staff reporter
THE BIG DIVVY – One of the funny things about the city’s financial problems is that it’s tough to get a real argument going about it.
First of all, it’s all about finances and deficits and stuff that’s not fun to talk about. Second of all, everybody seems to agree on the single overriding issue; the city is broke. What is there to say after that? But we managed to get a good conversation kicking around The Evening Times’ newsroom this week with this topic:
“If Central Falls eventually gets sliced up and divvied out to Pawtucket, Cumberland, and Lincoln, as many say will happen, who will get what and why?”
First of all we agreed, everybody’s going to want to lay claim to Central Falls’ principal cultural institution: Stanley’s Famous Hamburgers. Strike up a conversation with any non-Central Falls Rhode Islander about Sparkle City, and I will guarantee that within 10 minutes the talk will turn to Stanley’s.
Anybody who has ever been out after 10 p.m. has been to Stanley’s at least once, and each of them will applaud management’s decision to return to a late-night schedule on weekends.
So it’s clear we are going to need a blue-ribbon, ad-hoc, official commission to decide which municipality gets Stanley’s.
The clear winner in all this would be Lincoln.
Common sense would dictate Lincoln annexing the part of the city where the state is supposed to build the incinerator that Lincoln officials have vowed to fight to the death.
Let’s face it, the only reason the General Assembly and Solid Waste Management Corporation decided to build a trash incinerator in the smallest and most densely populated city in Rhode Island is that all the residents voted to accept it and not to give them a hard time about siting and building the thing. Developers these days calculate the cost of defending against citizen-group lawsuits as part of the routine costs of doing business. That’s why C.F. was such a bargain.
So if all of a sudden SWMC finds itself dealing with a hostile Burt Stallwood (Lincoln’s Town Administrator) instead of an accommodating C.F. Mayor Tom Lazieh, it will drop Higginson Avenue like a hot potato.
Then there is the city’s biggest tourist draw, the sidewalks of Broad and Dexter streets close to the city line, near Pawtucket’s Barton Street. This area, of course, would go to adjacent Pawtucket. If Central Falls territory were added, perhaps Pawtucket could get state or federal grants for a Barton Street enterprise zone. If I were an ambitious employee in Pawtucket’s planning department, I would start to work right now arranging a Congressional junket to the area. “Hey Senator! Wanna date?”
Cumberland would do okay, as well, as it would be the recipient of Central Falls’ only real cash cow: GTE Products Co. Plopping a mega-taxpayer in the far corner of a rapidly growing bedroom community give a whole new meaning to the phrase “expand your tax base.”
Not to mention that all three communities would enjoy the cachet of saying they own part of the (at least former) Cocaine Capital of the Northeast.
As you can see, the carving up of Central Falls would satisfy the single guiding of politics: “You gotta have a little something for everyone.”
