Ocean State under fire

City councilors ripped into Ocean State Job Lot Wednesday.
On the heels of a state Supreme Court ruling that upheld a lower court decision calling on the Rhode Island-based discount retailer to get out of the downtown mall, the council unanimously told municipal attorneys to seek to get the store out as quickly as possible.
“Ocean State ran us around for two years,” said city Councilor Mike Rimcoski, “They played the game. They rolled the dice. They lost. Let’s get ‘em out.”
Democratic mayoral candidate Art Ward said the city should push hard to get Ocean State out.
“The ball should not be in their court to prolong this,” Ward said.
The councilor who prodded colleagues to act, Democrat Frank Nicastro, blasted Mayor William Stortz for failing to tell the council about the court ruling until members read about it in The Bristol Press on Monday.
Nicastro also got the council to back an effort to recoup $235,000 in legal fees the city spent fighting the case.
The city attorney, Edward Krawiecki, said the city is already acting on both ideas.
Stortz said earlier in the day that he told attorneys to get moving. He said, too, that the ouster may not be as simple as some would like.
The mayor said, though, that he couldn’t talk about possible complications in public.
The city s trying to clear out Ocean State to pave the way for demolishing the mall, a crucial first step toward redeveloping the 17-acre site. The Bristol Downtown Development Committee is working on a plan for the property.
The delay in news of the decision reaching officials drew Nicastro’s wrath.
Nicastro called Stortz’s three days of silence “very disturbing” and chided him for not phoning the council.
“That bothers me immensely,” Nicastro told the mayor.
He said that if the city had lost the case, which would have made the council’s March decision to reject the mayor’s efforts to settle the case look foolish, Stortz would have called immediately.
“I probably would have got the first call,” Nicastro said.
Stortz zinged Nicastro in turn for neglecting to tell him back in March about a court date for the case that he insisted he didn’t know, but Nicastro did.
Nicastro said that Stortz knows “anything serious” should be told to councilors. He called it “common courtesy.”


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Copyright 2007. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com