Divisive politics cause Tiverton councilor to take a step back

So many people want to be elected to a seat on the Town Council in November — 18 are on the ballot hoping to get one of the seven seats — but Councilwoman Christine Ryan isn’t one of them.

TIVERTON — So many people want to be elected to a seat on the Town Council in November — 18 are on the ballot hoping to get one of the seven seats — but Councilwoman Christine Ryan isn’t one of them.

She is the only one of the current seven council members not seeking re-election. She’s served just one two-year term.

Many people in the community have asked her why she is not running again.

“I haven’t finished with politics. I just need to step back a little bit,” Ryan said.

“I got tired of people shouting at each other and not listening to each other,” she said of people on the Town Council and people in the town. “You have got to listen to people. That’s not happening and I think it’s a shame.”

Ryan is retired as a researcher of psychiatric illness and was on the staff of Butler and Rhode Island hospitals; she also was a research faculty member at Brown University’s medical school.

She was used to sitting at meetings with lots of people in the room talking about problems and how to best solve them. No one shouted. People listened to each other and tried to find some common ground. Often it took a long time.

“In academia, everything takes forever,” Ryan said.

She found it to be true in town government as well.

She was one of five new council members elected in November 2016. It took a long time to learn what was going on in town and in town government when she first took her seat on the council. There is so much to learn about how things work, who is doing what, why things are this way and not that way, and issues that needed to be dealt with in a timely manner, including lawsuits, contract negotiations, searches for town department heads, and in some cases firing town employees.

Asked to describe her experiences on the council over the past two years, Ryan said it was “fascinating in a good sense. I learned a lot,” including that a lot of people who serve on volunteer boards and commissions “are smart and very talented. They really work like crazy.”

“Frustrating” was another word she used. “It is frustrating to hear shouting, people calling each other names. There was not even a suggestion that another person could be right. Right now, so many people are so sure they are right and are the only ones right,” she said.

“It worries me, the close-mindedness of some people,” Ryan said.

Ryan didn’t set out to be on the council when she decided to get more involved in the town. She was on the board of directors of the Tiverton Land Trust when Carpionato Group was proposing a large retail and commercial development on Souza Road that spawned the formation of the group Don’t Mall Tiverton.

Her interest at the time was to get a seat on the Planning Board but she didn’t get appointed by the Town Council. That’s when she decided she might try to get elected to the council, and she did. The visits to people’s homes during the weeks leading up to the election were “eye-opening,” she said, and she loved meeting so many new people and hearing their concerns.

“Anybody who says they know what 98 percent of the town is thinking, I wouldn’t vote for them. I don’t think that’s possible,” Ryan said.

“I like to keep learning, which is why this was good,” she said of her time on the council.

And even though there is discord on the council, it still got things done, she said.

“I’m not done,” Ryan said of being involved in the town — she just needs to figure out what she’ll do next to stay involved.