By Patrick Gallagher

Recently, due to unfortunate mutual confusion, the Food Truck festival planned for Stanley Deming Park in Warwick had to be relocated at the very last stage of a complicated planning effort.

The Village of Warwick refused the applicant a permit because alcohol is not allowed in village parks. That was for just one event.

The village, like all wise municipalities, knows that the insurance risks related to sponsoring an event where alcohol is served are gigantic.

So why do the trustees and planning board think a gigantic bar in a quiet village neighborhood is OK?

Are they confused again?

Two blocks away from downtown, something they will not even consider in a village park would be permitted 365 days a year till 1 and 2 a.m. Bell to Bell.   

The same risk management principles apply to residents on Van Buren and West Streets as on South Street, but since it’s not village property, they can wash their hands of local concerns. But drunks can drive or fall or crash on any street. Wheeler, Welling, Orchard, Main Street, all the same.

All the liability belongs to the walkers, long-term residents and folks crossing streets. The village wants to allow the neighborhood to soak up all the risk to homeowners. All the traffic problems all the concerns for kids walking home from school or activities at a village park or friend’s house  just fall on the residents.

Responsible citizens and homeowners can’t accept this liability shifted to our front doors. Poor planning that creates extraordinary risk is uninsurable and unacceptable.

Pretend we are part of the village. Adopt a moratorium. Put the PLAN back in planning board.

Please, residents, come out and help us prevent Warwick from becoming Barwick. Come out and represent yourself at the next Planning Board meeting on June 15 at 7:30. Speak for your community.

Patrick Gallagher lives in Warwick.

Fossil fuels are polluting the planet.

By Patrick Gallagher

Recently, lots of energy has gone into trying to convince universities to withdraw support from the fossil fuel industry. Polluting for profitability is slowly becoming as attractive an investment as apartheid or a slave-based business model.

Student and activist efforts have begun to sway the investor culture we live in while farsighted analysts are beginning to perceive murky futures for securities that rely on profits from smokestacks, pipelines, industrial runoff, groundwater degradation, air pollution and mountaintop removal.

In Silicon Valley, at the heart of 21st century emerging industries, Stanford University has joined 11 other colleges and universities nationwide in removing coal from its investment portfolio.

Foundations, cities and states are recognizing they are made up of people who want to breathe clean air. Seattle, San Francisco and Portland are climbing on board the divestment train, having decided to join the smarter money by divesting of coal and investing elsewhere.

During Hurricane Sandy, many buildings around Wall Street in lower Manhattan could be accessed by pontoon boats via second-floor windows. This winter, the UK experienced otherworldly flooding attributed to carbon-driven climate change.

Worldwide banking customers are persuading their banks to not lend to fossil-fuel producers.

Major financial player Blackrock has teamed with the Natural Resources Defense Council NRDC to create a fossil free stock index. Blackrock is not chartered or known as a green or particularly socially responsible index group, but it is the world’s largest asset manager with $4 trillion (with a T) in assets.

The London Financial Times calls this move a sure signal that the global campaign against fossil fuels is entering the financial mainstream. Strictly business. In fact, options for alternate investments are now easily available with all the data to support wise decisions at hand for review. The fossil-free indices exclude companies that extract or explore for fossil fuels.

It’s an absolute truth that for the moment we all share the sun and that alternatives energies of all stripes are rapidly achieving parity with fossil fuels.  At this point, the first steps towards clean and sustainable energy independence are going to have to come from a sea change in how we subsidize the choices we make.

Divestment is right in front of us. Clean, renewable choices are at our fingertips.

To me it’s very simple.  I will not invest in handing a cup of dirty water to any of the kids in my neighborhood. I don’t wanna and I’m not gunna. If there are two canisters filled with oxygen and one is polluted I want the clean one. If the earth’s atmosphere is the only canister available I want it to be cleaned up.

I’d also like to share it with my neighbors.

If I can eat real food that is not densely laden with hydrocarbons and grown in mercury-rich soil brought to me by coal emissions from neighboring states, I’d just rather have the local healthier stuff, thank you very much.

I ‘m not interested in a dirty atmosphere in my home so I need to act accordingly by withdrawing my implicit financial permission in the form of investments from extractive and pollutive industries.

In taking this approach, we can launch a truly new era of investment and job creation that broadens the opportunities for the generations that will be forced to clean up this mess.

Ask the 300,000 folks in Charleston, West Virginia, if they wanted to divest themselves of the entire cities supply of contaminated drinking water last February and then maybe ask yourself, “What’s in my wallet?”

Patrick Gallagher lives in Warwick.