1. S0266: Creates an “inspector general” position for the state of Rhode Island, to be appointed “by a majority vote of the governor, the attorney general and the general treasurer”. (S Finance; Tue, May 21) I’ve been lukewarm to this kind of proposal in the past, but given how an Inspector General was critical in uncovering the political targeting done by the IRS, I am reconsidering. I do remain skeptical of the provisions that lay out specific qualifications for an IG, as there is a strong case to be made that in a democratic republic, top government positions should be open to everyone.

2. H6098: Requires General Assembly ratification of rules promulgated by any state agency. Pre-ratification regulations have “immediate effect”, but “permanent effect” does not occur until post-ratification. (H Judiciary; Tue, May 21) If this doesn’t mean that the legislature wants to reserve for itself the right to change administrative rules that have the force of law, without having to pass a law via the regular lawmaking process, then what does it mean?

3. S0312: Requires the school committee and town/city council of every community that would send students to a proposed mayoral academy to approve the mayoral academy’s charter school application. (S Education; Wed, May 22)

4. H6101/H6111: Bills to allow Coventry fire districts (but really just the Central Coventry Fire District) to adopt a four-part property tax classification scheme, and to impose the previous year’s budget on taxpayers if the current year budget referendum fails. (H Municipal Government; Thu, May 23)

5. S0826: Authorizes cities and towns to enact separate tax rates for owner versus non-owner occupied residential properties. (S Finance; Tue, May 21)

6. S0133: Some adventures in legislative grammar are involved in interpreting this one; I think this bill creates a refund of the minimum corporate income tax (currently applied to C-Corps and LLCs in Rhode Island) in cases where a corporation would owe less than the $500 minimum calculated as a percentage of annual gross receipts. The refunded amount would be the difference between the gross-receipts percentage and the $500 minimum, meaning that although C-Corps and LLCs would not owe an annual automatic minimum, the first $500 they made would go to the government. (S Finance; Tue, May 21) Rube Goldberg procedures, to make sure the government gets its cut first. What could be more Rhode Island!

7. S0939: Maintains a 1% “regionalization bonus” (currently scheduled to drop to 0%) as part of the state’s education-aid “funding formula”. (S Finance; Tue, May 21)

8. S0181: Adds a five-dollar surcharge to traffic offenses “for the sole purpose of funding the cost of highway repair and maintenance”. (S Finance; Tue, May 21)

9. S0816: “Not later than July 1, 2014, and thereafter, all heating oil sold in the state shall contain not less than five percent (5%) of a biobased product”. (S Environment and Agriculture; Wed, May 22)

10. H5981: Allows city housing authorities to obtain information on “unemployment compensation, child support, alimony, supplemental nutritional assistance and public welfare payments…for the purpose of determining the current income of any applicant regarding rental calculations”. (H Finance; Tue, May 21)

11. S0662: Eliminates the State Police’s Workers’ Compensation Investigation Unit (at the request of the State Police). (S Labor; Wed, May 22)

12. H5562: Bans government agencies from obtaining location information from a telecommunications company, as part of child support collection. (H Judiciary; Tue, May 21) This bill probably wouldn’t have made the list two weeks ago, prior to knowledge being made public of the government’s dubious choices to use its information gathering authority against Tea Party groups and the Associated Press.

13. H5768: “In the event that any party is aggrieved” by a retirement board disability decision concerning a police or fire injury that occurred on the job, the time limit for an appeal is 20 days from the decision. (H Judiciary; Tue, May 21)

14. S0309: “Notwithstanding any general or public law to the contrary, the [Public Utilities Commission] and the division shall have no jurisdiction or authority over wireless service”. (S Commerce; Tue, May 21)

15. H5195: The substance of this bill states that the “reimbursement rate for direct support professionals employed by private development disability organizations shall be increased from $11.30 to $12.03 per hour… (H Finance; Tue, May 21) …but the part that caught my attention reads “The director shall adopt a state reimbursement system for community and nonprofit agencies that will encourage the hiring and retention of competent, qualified, and caring individuals”. Is it a policy elsewhere in government to hire incompetent, unqualified, and uncaring individuals?

16. S0380: A number of changes intended to improve the monitoring of fire-department compliance with NFPA 1500: Standard on Fire Department Occupational Safety and Health Program. (S Housing and Municipal Government; Tue, May 21)

17. H5935: Changes to municipal street-light financing. (H Municipal Government; Thu, May 23) Previous generations seemed to have handled this issue with much less difficulty. Are we just not as smart as they were?

Not sure where to rank: H5404: Increases the maximum tax on certain rent and/or income controlled properties that have been rehabilitated from 8% to 15% of “the property’s previous 10 years’ gross scheduled rental income”. (H Finance; Tue, May 21)

Not sure where to rank II: S0809: Creates a 9-member board, including several “cabinet” heads or their designees, to decide on criteria to let businesses advertise their products as “Made in Rhode Island” and to study ways to increase the production and demand of locally produced goods and services. (S Commerce; Tue, May 21)

Not sure where to rank III: S0523: Changes the process for state education funding associated with “conventional public housing units owned by public housing authorities which are not on local tax rolls”. (S Finance; Tue, May 21)

Local Impact: Central Falls, Chariho/Cranston, Cranston, East Greenwich, Middletown, Portsmouth 2, Providence, Woonsocket 2.

Revelations about this deeply disturbing nastiness came fast and furious this week so it would have been easy to have missed some items.

Treasury became aware of this targeting as early as June.  Was the upcoming election a factor in their failure to disclose this egregious activity?

To what extent was the IRS carrying out the wishes of Senate Democrats, including Rhode Island’s own Sheldon Whitehouse?

In just one example of the IRS’ complete overreach, the agency asked a group about the content of their prayers and

unlawfully insisted that all board members sign a sworn declaration promising not to picket/protest Planned Parenthood.

Did someone say tolerance?  Oops, as RI Taxpayers’ Executive Director Donna Perry pointed out in Thursday’s GoLocalProv, it appears that

the concept of “tolerance” only works in one direction. As his White House comes under siege from huge dueling scandals involving the IRS and the Department of Justice, (Benghazi is still out there as number 3), it’s becoming more and more clear that the crowd which preaches tolerance has carried out, at the highest levels, a “No Tolerance” policy for all critics.

The Washington Post reports that while it took some conservative groups years (and in many cases, still not yet) to get their tax-exempt status from the IRS, interestingly, a non-profit run by the President’s half brother and named after his father got their status in only thirty four days – AND was given it retroactively two years.

It’s beginning to look like the audit of Rhode Island tea partier Marina Peterson might not have been random.

It turns out that the initial report about this thuggish behavior was the result of a planted question in an attempt by the IRS to get ahead of an about-to-be-released report by the Inspector General critical of the IRS’ activity.  USA Today observes, almost drily, that this strategy seems to have back-fired, not the least because the official who planted the story failed to inform Congress about it in her testimony ten days ago … and, of course, at that hearing, also failed to disclose the awful extent of the targeting.

Though the administration is Democrat, more thoughtful commentators on the left have wisely not defended the IRS.  They see the danger down the road, if this activity is not properly punished, that less thoughtful lefties have missed:  imagine several Karl Roves in charge of these units at the IRS, dragging out the application process; demanding donor names, volunteer lists and back door entry to websites; leaking this information to organizations friendly to the next George Bush/Ronald Reagan/Richard Nixon in the White House; eliciting promises from the applicant not to picket the National Organization for Marriage or Halliburton; and vengefully choosing for audit (sometimes at the suggestion of a stooge at the state level) those individuals or organizations who dared to speak out against either George/Ronald/Richard or, more generally, against their policies at any level of government.

In a gasp-of-horror inducing develpment, we learned later in the week that the IRS official in charge of the tax-exemption unit from 2009 – 2012, Sarah Hall Ingram, has been put in charge of the IRS’ ObamaCare unit.   So now, we cannot help but wonder:  will the administration of healthcare be utilized as a weapon – endless delays, highly intrusive questions – against political enemies just as the tax exempt unit (and almost certainly the audit section) was?  Except that this time, it won’t be tax status at stake but a life-saving or life-improving medical procedure.

The lawsuits over the targeting have begun.  Such a time-consuming recourse would be far less effective, for obvious reasons, if ObamaCare gets run in a similar, highly partisan manner.

In part for that reason, Speaker Boehner was correct to have pointed out Wednesday that the question is not who is going to resign (what, to a cushy, publicly funded retirement lounging on the beach?) over these actions but who is going to jail for them?

[Monique is Editor of the RI Taxpayer Times newsletter.  Her views do not necessarily reflect those of the organization.]

Tomorrow at 1:00 pm, the House Finance Committee will hear H-5365, “Sales & Meals Tax Repeal Act”.  (Side note:  how often on Smith Hill do you see the words “tax” and “repeal” positively juxtaposed in a bill?)  As it sounds, the bill would repeal all of Rhode Island’s sales and meals tax.

The Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity contends that

For little more than the $75 million the state wasted on 38 Studios chasing only 400 jobs, first year budget cuts of $105 million to pay for Zero.Zero could put the state on a path to produce 25,000 jobs!

Even phasing out the sales tax over 4 years, would produce more than 5000 jobs per year.

It was a revelation to me that the basis for these assertions, a computer modeling tool called STAMP (customized for Rhode Island), was not invented just last year but, in fact, is over ten years old and has been customized for and utilized in twenty four other states.

Mike Stenhouse summarizes well  in this GoLocalProv  article the approach that our leaders have taken both to our tax policy and to the larger issue of economic development.

For too long, policymakers have considered only two options: raising taxes or doing nothing … Both of these have clearly failed our citizens.

It will be interesting to see whether any attempt tomorrow to refute the conclusions of the STAMP model is based on an equally in-depth, dare one say, scientific analysis or is merely couched in vague, intransigent, status quo-embracing generalities.

The hearing will take place tomorrow at the State House in Room 35 at 1:00 pm.

1. H5365: Eliminates the sales, meals and beverage, and use tax in Rhode Island, beginning on October 1, 2013. (H Finance; Wed, May 15)

2. H6060: Tax-credits for the “qualified rehabilitation expenditures for the substantial rehabilitation of a certified historic structure”, with at least two notable limitations (H Finance; Tue, May 14):

• (c) Maximum project credit. – The credit allowed pursuant to this chapter shall not exceed five million dollars ($5,000,000) for any certified rehabilitation project under this chapter.
• (d) Maximum aggregate credits. – The aggregate credits authorized to be reserved pursuant to this chapter shall not exceed thirty million dollars ($30,000,000) annually.

3. H5019: Repeals the banking laws that allow pay-day lending. Also, H5128 reduces the maximum “deferred deposit transaction” fee from 10% to 5% “of the funds advanced” (probably as an alternative to the full repeal of payday lending) (H Finance; Wed, May 15)

4. H6059: The General Treasurer’s plan (sponsored by Speaker Fox) to use the Rhode Island Clean Water Finance Agency to create and administer a state-funded “revolving loan” program “to make and enter into binding commitments to provide financial assistance to local cities and towns from amounts on deposit in the revolving fund” and “to enter into binding commitments to provide subsidy assistance for loans and city and town obligations from amounts on deposit in the revolving fund” (amongst other objectives). (H Finance; Tue, May 14)

5. S0826: Authorizes cities and towns to enact separate tax rates for owner versus non-owner occupied residential properties. (S Finance; Wed, May 15)

6. H5279: Requires qualified campus police officers at public colleges and universities to carry firearms. (H Judiciary; Tue, May 14)

7. S0252: Creates an automatic (and presumably non-refundable) $99,600 tax-credit against any required estate tax, which based on figures presented in a previous bill would create an exemption for the first $3M of an estate. (S Finance; Wed, May 15)

8. H5633: Allows a city or town to exceed the property tax cap to fund a local “community preservation fund” for “the acquisition, creation, and preservation of open space; for the acquisition, preservation, rehabilitation, and restoration of historic resources; for the acquisition, creation, preservation, rehabilitation, and restoration of land for recreational use; for the acquisition, creation, preservation, and support of community housing; and for rehabilitation or restoration of open space and community housing that is acquired or created as provided in this section. (H Finance; Tue, May 14)

9. S0310: Writes in-state tuition at public colleges and universities for illegal immigrants into law. (S Finance; Tue, May 14)

10. S0245: This bill claims to repeal the $500 corporate minimum income tax. However, since it does nothing to impact the $500 minimum franchise tax (a separate tax under Rhode Island law), it would have no impact on anyone’s tax liability. (S Finance; Wed, May 15) More detail about the minimum corporate income versus the minimum franchise tax is available here.

11. H5029: Requires that EBT cards include a photo of the benefit recipient. (H Finance; Tue, May 14)

12. H5255: Establishes a social media privacy policy for public and private educational institutions, mostly placing limits on the institution side. (H Judiciary; Tue, May 14)

13. S0538/H5400: Extends from July 1, 2013 to July 1, 2016 a moratorium on initial licenses for nursing facilities, and on any increase of greater than 10% in bed-capacity at an existing facility. (H Corporations; Tue, May 14 & S Health and Human Services; Tue, May 14)

14. S0116: Allows public schools to count the length of the school year as 1080 hours instead of 180 days. (S Education; Wed, May 15)

15. S0309: “Notwithstanding any general or public law to the contrary, the [Public Utilities Commission] and the division shall have no jurisdiction or authority over wireless service”. (S Commerce; Tue, May 14)

16. S0638: Mandates that “all higher education institutions in the state shall honor the military training, experience, correspondence courses and occupations of an individual who has served in the military or armed forces of the United States by accepting for transfer the academic credits that meet the standards of the American Council on Education or equivalent standards for awarding academic credit”. (S Education; Wed, May 15)

17. H5250: “Each year that there is a state minimum budget surplus of twenty million dollars ($20,000,000) for any fiscal year, then each city and town shall receive an additional one percent (1%) of the sales taxes collected by businesses located within that municipality.” (H Finance; Wed, May 15)

18. S0908: Allows inclusionary zoning ordinances to incorporate “off-site construction or rehabilitation, donation of land suitable for development of the required affordable units, and/or the payment of a fee-in-lieu of the construction or provision of affordable housing units”. (S Housing and Municipal Government; Thu, May 15)

19. S0905: As per the official description, this bill sets standards for “licensing and regulation of naturopathic physicians”. (S Health and Human Services; Tue, May 14)

20. S0659: Redefinition of the meaning of red, yellow and green traffic lights. (H Judiciary; Tue, May 14)

Not Sure How High or Low to Rank This: H6030: Creates a 9-member board, including several “cabinet” heads or their designees, to decide on criteria to let businesses advertise their products as “Made in Rhode Island” and to study ways to increase the production and demand of locally produced goods and services. (H Small Business; Tue, May 14)

Local Impact: Central Falls 2, East Greenwich, Newport, New Shoreham, North Kingstown, North Providence, Portsmouth, Richmond, Woonsocket.

Heh – I heard, while running around at work doing about ten things simultaneously, Mike Stenhouse mention this on the radio Friday.

Get it?  Thirty eight questions?  38 Studios?  (I like it.)

Click here to see the whole list.  Below are some that stuck out for me.  However, any elected official who votes for taxpayer funded tax credits or loan guarantees or corporate welfare of any form, whether or not the beneficiary is actually identified in the legislation, must examine and answer all thirty eight of these questions (at which point, of course, s/he could not vote in favor).

5.    If you call it a tax credit, but you then let the developer sell it to other taxpayers, isn’t it just a really inefficient way of handing out a multi-million-dollar corporate welfare check?

12.    And while we’re at it, how can the HR&A report (page 30) claim that the “magnitude” of the project implies that the spending is “net new”?  They seem to be arguing that 95% of the spending is “new to the region” because a project of this size “would not have otherwise taken place” without the taxpayer subsides.  If Rhode Islanders have that much money lying around doing nothing, perhaps the developers should just take up a collection.  Or maybe there’s a reason the project can’t gather funding without involving politics and taxes.

13.    Why does the developer get to retain $15 million in declared value while arguing functional obsolescence at the same time?  If you need this bailout to keep the lights on (literally), isn’t the building really worth nothing?

18.    Who’s on the hook for the bad investment?  Who invested the equity to allow the company to purchase the property, and who loaned them the money?  Who are we really bailing out here?

19.    More bluntly, does our proposed multi-million-dollar subsidy go to the new development, or does the plan include paying off old debt or old investors?

24.    Specifically, what do we get for $3,105,678 in “legal & professional” fees and $3,342,050 in “administration & development” fees?  (Would it be too bold to ask who exactly gets that $6,447,728?)

31.    Man of Steel aside, if we’re subsidizing “stainless steel appliances” and “granite kitchen and bathroom counters,” can we leave our doggie bags there when we go out for a night on the town after dinner? How about using the “24 hour fitness center” and “24 hour concierge/security”?

32.    Given the roughly $75 million in total proposed handouts, the proposal amounts to a subsidy of about $200 per square foot for 265 new households (HR&A, page 34.)  That kind of money builds a nice house; how about we just build a bunch of those and give them away?  That certainly seems more equitable than subsidizing one tall building in a single bound.

A little history before we get to one of yesterday’s Friday-afternoon-news-dump items.  (If any of this is wrong, please let me know.)

In 2007, then-Senate President Joseph Montalbano (D, Nort Providence) was rumbled

engaging in a conflict of interest by voting to put a casino proposal before voters while he was profiting from legal work for the town of West Warwick involving real estate neighboring the proposed casino site.

He also failed to report this income on mandatory financial disclosure forms.

The RI Ethics Commission called him on it.  He demanded and got a trial of these ethics charges by jury.

In an effort to get him off, his defense team set out the following defense:  the Senate President’s highly dubious actions was protected by speech-in-debate immunity.   Andrew did a terrific job contemporaneously on Anchor Rising, here and here, outlining the speech-in-debate argument and its … er, very limited validity.  One excerpt from the first link:

[Senator Montalbano] is asking the courts expand immunity for legislators into a realm where it does not currently exist and, ultimately, for the courts to overrule the plain meaning of the Rhode Island Constitution and create a brand-new legal principle that a blanket immunity from ethics laws is necessary for legislatures to carry out their function.

Senate President Montalbano ultimately pled out before his trial concluded, agreeing to settle the charges with the Ethics Commission by paying a $12,000 fine, the third highest levied in the state.

So, as I understand, the speech-in-debate defense put forward by Montalbano and his legal team was not actually tested in his trial.  It was, however, eagerly taken up by former Senator William Irons, then facing ethics charges for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions from CVS and Blue Cross and allegedly (cough) using his considerable official power for the benefit of those companies.  Irons went to court to block the Ethics Commission’s charges against him, citing the Montalbano speech-in-defense argument.

Rhode Island courts, first the Superior Court then the Supreme Court, found in favor of Irons and, thereby, of the speech-in-debate defense.

Thus was ethics in Rhode Island government vanquished.  Thanks to the legal argument dreamed up for and embraced by Joseph Montalbano, no connection can be made or legal inference drawn when a legislator receives compensation from an interested party and votes on legislation beneficial to that party.

Now to the interesting and unfortunate news item from yesterday afternoon.  (Why was this announced Friday afternoon and not Monday morning, I wonder?)

Governor Chafee on Friday nominated former Senate President and current District Court Magistrate Joseph Montalbano to the Superior Court bench.

If confirmed by the Senate, Montalbano would take the $149,207-per-year lifetime seat vacated when Superior Court Judge Francis J. Darigan Jr. retired in March 2012.

Gov Chafee has made many wildly misguided proposals and decisions as governor.  There wasn’t much doubt, however, that he was committed to honesty and ethics in government.  His motto and ad libbed tag line – “My motto is Trust Chafee.  You can take that to the bank.” was annoying but not particularly in question.

Until now.  By elevating to Superior Court – effectively; is there any doubt that the Senate will confirm Mr. Montalbano? – a former official who 1.)  paid the third highest ethics fine in RI history and 2.) established the legal argument for the eviscerating of the Ethics Commission, Governor Chafee has made it clear that ethics and honesty in government are no longer a priority for his administration.

For decades, Rhode Island has had a reputation for corruption.  The implementation of the Montalbano argument by Rhode Island courts and now the nomination by Governor Chafee of the ethically challenged and ethics challenging Joseph Montalbano to one of the VERY COURTS THAT IMPLEMENTED HIS ETHICS-GUTTING DEFENSE only serves to reinforce this deplorable image.

By way of providing a sampling of the bills that have driven me to anxiety while reading through the entire collection of them in both chambers of the General Assembly (now nearing 1,500), here are two introduced in the House this week.

The first is H6088, sponsored by:

• Eileen Naughton (D, Warwick)
• Larry Valencia (D, Exeter Hopkinton, Richmond)
• Elaine Coderre (D, Pawtucket)
• Scott Slater (D, Providence)
• Raymond Gallison (D, Bristol, Portsmouth)

The bill’s intention is to grant the recipients of any (vaguely defined) care and education services a right not to be restrained for anything short of an emergency, whether with one’s body or by some other method.  Its effect, though, would be to cost businesses and customers (for private providers) and taxpayers (for public schools and providers) more money for training about the new law as well as alternate strategies for dealing with people whom they might previously have restrained.

More importantly, it would force the professionals in such organizations to second-guess every decision in circumstances in which failing to react quickly can be dangerous or even deadly.

But with a focus on the legislators’ beliefs about the world, the relevant point is that they think potentially dangerous and disruptive people have a nearly absolute right not to be held back, down, aside, or any other way.

Now move on to one of the most frightening bills I’ve come across this season, H6099, which would create a quasi-public statewide water district called the Ocean State Water Authority.  Here are the sponsors (take a moment to make note of their names, if you’re so inclined):

• Christopher Blazejewski (D, Providence)
• Stephen Ucci (D, Cranston, Johnston)
• Elaine Coderre (D, Pawtucket)
• Scott Slater (D, Providence)
• Raymond Johnston (D, Pawtucket)

Here’s the description that I’ve written for use on RIVotes.com:

to create a quasi-public statewide Ocean State Regional Water Authority, with a board consisting of a majority of members appointed by the mayors of Providence, Cranston, and North Providence. The authority would be available to purchase water systems from the local organizations that currently operate them and to bring in water from out of state. It would be able to issue bonds, and would have the power to enter without permission onto any property in Rhode Island to examine the land and drill and dig into the ground. It would also have powers of eminent domain, to take land that the board determines it needs for current or future use. It would also set rates for water and have authority to place liens on properties of delinquent customers, as well as to shut off their water.

But don’t take my word for it and therefore deprive yourself of the experience of reading about how “agents or employees… shall so far as possible restore the land to the same condition as prior” to their traipsing around on it.  (While you’re reading the bill, double check that I didn’t miss a requirement that the owners of the property will be notified that the water authority will be digging up their land; I didn’t see one.)  And read for yourself how state and local governments would have to give permission for their own land to be taken, with the local municipal government authorized to grant permission on behalf (so to speak) of residents and other organizations whose property is to be condemned and confiscated.

So, turning back to beliefs about rights, the collective rights of people threatened by a dangerous patient have to be immediate and otherwise impossible to protect in order for that person to be restrained, but the collective rights claimed by the State of Rhode Island (though mainly its urban core) to plan and operate water systems mean that a new unelected board should be able to modify your land without even telling you and take that land away if there’s a chance it would be useful to its purposes.

Given that it was my first time testifying in my capacity as research director for the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, I didn’t think it appropriate also to be there in a media capacity liveblogging.  Consequently, I’d note one thing that doesn’t come through in Kathy Gregg’s Providence Journal article on the hearing: The audience was of the regular-business-of-the-legislature variety, as compared with the standing-room only hearing on these bills last year, during Occupy season.

That does come through, though, in the Capitol TV video, online here.  (Try this link if that one doesn’t work.)

I’m on the first panel after the bill sponsors, and my written testimony, which I didn’t follow very closely in person, is available as a PDF on the Center’s site.  But some interesting points are worth expanding upon, here.

Enter the Mysterious Rich

While the subsequent panel was answering the legislators’ questions, the mystery of around 2,000 new wealthy taxpayers appearing on the 2011 tax rolls came up.   By that year, the state had completely reversed its attempt at capital gains tax reform and essentially frozen the flat-tax phase-down before it had reached its targeted rate.  If tax policy affects behavior as free-marketers suggest, why would that happen?

The Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council’s John Simmons, to whom the question was addressed, said RIPEC intends to look into that, but as of the hearing, he could only note that the economy had been improving.  Looking at the data, I’m pretty sure that’s not the answer.

Comparing the tax data available from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and from the state Division of Taxation shows that they don’t match.  Measured by federal tax returns, the number of Rhode Island taxpayers with adjusted gross income (AGI) over $200,000 increased from 13,389 in 2010 to 14,333 in 2011, or about 7%.

That’s closer to a plausible range for economic growth, if we also consider that the top tax brackets uniquely reflect income inflation. As income numbers go up in current dollars (because they’re worth less in real dollars), it’s relatively easy for somebody in the $75,000 to $100,000 bracket to move upward out of it, compared with somebody in the $200,000 to $500,000 bracket.

In Rhode Island, however, the number of residents with state tax returns over $200,000 AGI increased from 11,643 to 13,570, or 16.6%.  That indicates that something uniquely related to the state’s tax structure might be in play.  Either the various income tax changes in Rhode Island over the past few years designed the system to move people into the top tax bracket or behavior changed in a way that Rhode Island captured more than the IRS.

Policy Does Affect Behavior, Especially at the High End

Trying to come up with an explanation for what those differences might be is, as Simmons suggested at the hearing, a tricky business. But the exercise does illustrate that policy can change behavior.  That’s especially true for the people for whom larger dollar amounts are in play.

In 2002, the General Assembly passed, and Governor Donald Carcieri signed into law, an elimination of the state’s tax on income from capital gains.  The first year in which taxpayers would realize savings from that policy was 2007, and the tax would phase down from there.  But during the 2007 legislative session, the government froze the rate where it was, and in 2009, it eliminated special treatment and made capital gains taxable at the regular income rate, several times higher, as of 2010.

Looking at the number of tax returns in the $200,000 bracket with capital gains, the 8,722 in 2006 jumped to 11,023 in 2007 (26.4%) and then plummeted to 4,168 in 2008, 2,025 in 2009, and (obviously) zero in 2010.  That’s a dramatic change of behavior, with a total economic effect probably over $1 billion.  And while it’s likely that some of the people in that count were reacting to the recession, it’s not inconceivable that some of the effect went the other way — with the incentive to cash in on productive investments helping to ensure that Rhode Island’s recession was even deeper than it otherwise would have been.

As for the upswing of wealthy taxpayers in 2011, part of it might have been a ripple effect.  Investors who could cash in during 2007/2008 did so, creating a lull that finally eased in 2011.  Conspicuously, the 13,570 “rich” tax returns that year is just a few dozen away from the number in 2007.  (Of course, even with the much lower capital gains rate in 2007, the total tax liability of this bracket was $25 million higher then than in 2011.)

In a similar vein, sources in the Department of Revenue tell me that, after conversation with some CPAs, they attribute the increase in high-end income taxpayers to shareholders in pass-through companies (like S-Corps) who had used up all of their offsets from business losses in the recession by 2011.  That would have made the AGIs on their personal income tax returns significantly higher, moving them into the upper brackets.

So, What Will Tax Policies Do?

This all leaves unanswered the question of what the various tax policies currently under review would actually do in the future.  To answer that question, I ran them through the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s tax policy modeling tool, RI-STAMP.  As part of my testimony, I presented the following chart of the results:

Our expectation is that the tax-the-rich proposal submitted by Representative Larry Valencia (D, Exeter, Hopkinton, Richmond) would kill one job for every $61,149 more that the state takes in through taxation.  By contrast, for an investment of $12,298 per job, eliminating the sales tax would allow the economy to create 25,426.

At next Wednesday’s hearing for Warren Democrat Jan Malik’s sales tax bill (1:00 p.m. in House Finance), I’ll be on another panel that will offer some explanation of how the sales tax projection will come to be and how the state government can track and adjust as the policy takes effect.  That’s quite a different approach than trying to unravel the mystery of taxpayers’ appearance and disappearance after policy changes five years ago.

Rhode Island residents looking for property tax relief in communities that never fail to increase their school and municipal budgets can only look with some wonder at the success of their counterparts in Richmond, Hopkinton, and Charlestown.

On Tuesday, April 9, voters from the two towns rejected the proposed budget of the regional Chariho School district by a vote of 727 to 410.  Only in Charlestown was the budget approved.

Because of the way the district calculates the cost to each town, the effect of the budget differs from one to the other.  And their estimated payments correspond with their vote totals.  Richmond would have seen a 2.42% increase, to $18.5 million, and Hopkinton would have seen a 1.42% increase, to $18.8 million, while Charlestown would have reduced its payment by 0.48%, to $14.8 million.

The flat budget will leave Richmond with a 1.18% increase, while Hopkinton’s increase reduces to 0.19% and Charlestown’s payment actually falls 1.67%.

That’s still too high for Clay Johnston, a Richmond taxpayer advocate who lost his race as Republican for the Rhode Island House by 444 votes against Democrat Larry Valencia. “Using the surplus to create a level funded budget is a fraud.  This is taking a loan from the taxpayers.  It is a guarantee of future tax increases,” he told the Current.

The new proposal shaves $627,617 from the $52,098,252 budget request, or 1.2%.  Nearly two-thirds of that, or $390,470 is the result of a higher withdrawal from the district’s “re-appropriated fund balance.”  Superintendent Barry Ricci explained, via email, that school committee policy “requires it to maintain between 2 and 4% of the previous year’s expenditures in the fund balance (surplus).”  To reach a level budget, Ricci lowered the fund from 2.75% to 2%.

Almost two-thirds of the remainder, $145,379, comes from the transportation expense, including a reduction of bus routes.  The rest is a collection of smaller changes, such as $10,965 from charter school tuition that would have been subtracted anyway, and $22,360 in assumed savings from utilities.

If these or other savings are not realized, the district would be able to take less from its re-appropriated fund balance.  School committee policy would then require next year’s budget to bring it at least back to where it had been.

Behind all the fine details, however, is the unspoken point of contention: 85% of the entire budget goes to employee pay and benefits.  In reworking its budget, the school department found only 0.02% savings within that total, most of which is locked in by contract.

Among the victories that taxpayer groups around the state periodically win during budget battles, the one in Chariho is substantial. But to have a real effect on the ratcheting growth of taxes, they would have to begin claiming majorities on school committees and town councils.  That would require finding talented people willing to donate substantial amounts of time in the face of hostile opposition from groups with direct financial and personal interests that far exceed a few hundred more dollars in taxes each year.

1. On Tuesday, May 7, the House Finance Committee will hear several bills that reorganize government with respect to the regulation and promotion of commerce in the state of Rhode Island. The most interesting contrast is the difference between H6074, a GOP sponsored proposal to terminate the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation and pull some of its current functions into an Executive Office of Economic Development within government, versus the combination of H6063/H6071: which would add an Executive Office of Commerce to a largely unchanged but renamed Economic Development Corporation (it would become the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation), both of which be headed by a Secretary of Commerce, who would not be subject to Senate advice and consent.

2. H5207: Creates a “Joint Committee of the Repealer” within the legislature, to recommend laws & regulations to be repealed. (H Judiciary; Thu, May 9) IMHO, it is possible that this is the best economic development bill currently before the General Assembly.

3. A series of pro-life bills concerning abortion.  H5566 bans abortions as a means of sex-selection of a child.  H5488 requires the “voluntary and informed consent” of a woman seeking an abortion before it is performed, and the Department of health to distribute public service and physiological information relevant to abortion. H5435 requires that an obstetric ultrasound be performed, before informed consent can be given for an abortion.  H5334 adds some specificity to the definition and the penalties in Rhode Island laws that prohibit partial-birth abortion. H5104 establishes crimes of murder, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, battery and assault of an unborn child. (H Judiciary; Wed, May 8)

4. S0768: The title of the bill is “Drivers license for foreign nationals”. The text of the bill makes no reference to illegal or legal immigration status, though it’s hard to see why a legal immigrant to Rhode Island would want the second-class driver’s license created by this bill, if he or she is eligible for a regular one. The bill requires “foreign nationals” to “present evidence of pre-paid liability insurance for the term of one year or proof of financial responsibility” and to “submit fingerprints to the Rhode Island state police who shall conduct fingerprint-based criminal background checks” when applying for a license. And when renewing the license, the foreign national must “provide evidence of having filed both state and federal taxes”. (S Judiciary; Tue, May 7)

5. H5751 creates a new 8% tax-bracket for income above $250,000 per year (currently, the highest tax bracket is 6% beginning at $125,000 per year); H5805: extends the 6% bracket up to $200,000 and creates a new 10% bracket for incomes of $200,000 or above. (H Finance; Wed, May 8)

6. H6051: Proposed constitutional amendment 1) stating that “artificial entities established by the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state” (read “corporations”) “shall have no rights under this Constitution” and 2) rolling back Constitutional freedom-of-expression guarantees, by mandating that the government restrict the amount that individuals are allowed to spend on political communications. (H Judiciary; Thu, May 9) This amendment would have very far reaching consequences, which I’m going to guess that our legislators haven’t really thought through. To name just a few a) the news content of large newspapers or television stations could be subject to regulation, if media “corporations” were stripped of the constitutional-level freedom of speech b) there is no bar to seizure of property owned by corporations, if they do not possess property rights c) collective bargaining organizations wouldn’t automatically be covered under the US Constitution’s “no impairment of contracts” clause, if it cannot be presumed that organizations possess a right to enter contracts d) even for an individual candidate who does nothing but collect money in small donations from other individuals, a simple act like buying a printer cartridge to print out a few flyers could run afoul of the law, if it occurs after a campaign expenditure limit has been reached.

7A. S0833: Creates a “program integrity division within the office of health and human services…to oversee and coordinate state and local efforts to investigate and eliminate Medicaid and public assistance fraud and to recover state and federal funds”. Submitted at the request of the Governor. (S Health and Human Services; Tue, May 7)

7B. H5059: Makes conversion of food stamps into cash into a felony. (H Judiciary; Tue, May 7)

8. S0794: Unionizes child-care providers who receive financial assistance from the department of human services, and allows the union to collect dues from qualified providers who choose not to join the union. (S Labor; Wed, May 8)

9. H5930: Places fire-districts under the state property tax cap. (H Finance; Thu, May 9)

10. H5765: “Any employee or official of [a city, town or fire district] shall not be sued in his or her personal or individual capacity except upon a showing, by clear and convincing evidence, that the act or omission was not within the scope of employment, or the act or omission was because of actual fraud, actual misconduct, or actual malice”; H5766: “A city, town, or fire district employee or official may be sued in his or her individual capacity, only if it can be established that his or her act or omission, upon which the cause of action was based, was not performed within the scope of his or her employment or involved actual fraud or malice or willful misconduct”. (H Judiciary; Wed, May 8)

11. H5497: Defines a section of crimes against the public trust in Rhode Island law. (H Judiciary; Thu, May 9)

12. H5770: As a condition of eligibility for certain state-funded medical assistance programs, “every applicant or recipient who owns a life estate in property with retained rights to revoke, amend or redesignate the remainderman must exercise those rights as directed by the executive office of health and human services”. (H Judiciary; Tue, May 7)

13. H6005: Allows campus police officers at RI colleges and universities to carry firearms. (H Judiciary; Thu, May 9)

14. S0751: Creates a tax-credit program for employers that establish “wellness programs” at work. (S Health & Human Services; Thu, May 9) In order to get a “wellness seal of approval” from state government, one factor the department of health is to consider is the “participation rate by employees”. Raise your hand, if you’d like to have your employer taking an interest in your individual health as a possible condition of getting a tax break.

15. S0832: Converts the “health care planning and accountability advisory council”, an in-government advisory panel, into the “health analytics, policy and planning commission”, a quasi-public body (with an executive director who “shall set his or her compensation and terms of employment”(?)), responsible for performing analyses on financial and quality reports for licensed health care providers, health outcomes and health expenditures”. Submitted at the request of the Lieutenant Governor. (S Health and Human Services; Tue, May 7) Why should this be a quasi-public agency outside of the main government be performing this function; perhaps so it can eventually become a state level version of the Federal IPAB?

16. S0145: “The Comprehensive Racial Profiling Prevention Act of 2013″, including such provisions as requiring police officers to document the grounds of their “reasonable suspicion” or “probable cause” searches, to contact a dispatcher or supervising officer where practicable before conducting a search, and requiring traffic stops to be recorded when a police vehicle is equipped to do so. (S Judiciary; Tue, May 7)

17. On Tuesday, May 7, the Senate Finance Committee will hear a group of significant local-impact bills. S0820 allows the City of Woonsocket to levy $2.5M worth of supplemental taxes for this year.S0677 exempts the property of the Stadium Theater in Woonsocket from state and local taxes. S0856 changes the boundaries of the Coventry, Western Coventry, and Hopkins Hill Road Fire Districts, presumably to break the Central Coventry Fire District up amongst them, and states explicitly that “this act should not be construed to mean, under any circumstances, that the Coventry fire district, Western Coventry Fire District, Hopkins Hill Road Fire District shall assume any of the Central Coventry Fire District’s debts and liabilities”.

18. S0357: Prohibits employers from asking if potential employees have been convicted of a crime on a job application (the question could be asked if the applicant is made a finalist, or given a conditional offer of employment). (S Judiciary; Tue, May 7)

19. S0819: Requires the I-195 commission to pay property taxes on land that it owns to the City of Providence. (S Finance; Thu, May 9) Exactly how much revenue can government raise by taxing itself?

20. H5854: Increases the fee for a marriage license by $46, and gives $44 to the “the Rhode Island coalition against domestic violence”. (H Judiciary; Thu, May 9) Is it “pragmatism” or ideology to think of newlyweds a source of funding for domestic violence programs?

21. H5877: Bans unsolicited telemarketing calls to cell phones. (H Judiciary; Tue, May 7)

22. S0816: “Not later than July 1, 2014, and thereafter, all heating oil sold in the state shall contain not less than five percent (5%) of a biobased product”. (S Environment and Agriculture; Wed, May 8)

23. H5944: Allows antitrust lawsuits by persons or public bodies “who have not dealt directly” with the party being sued. (H Judiciary; Thu, May 9)

24. S0576: Directs the state board of education to create a policy for awarding academic credit for suitable military training and coursework, and to give combat veterans preference in class registration at the state’s public colleges and universities. (S Special Legislation and Veterans Affairs; Wed, May 8)

25. H5899: Requires that use of ignition interlocks be part of the sentence for driving under the influence. (H Judiciary; Thu, May 9)

26. H5827: Requires parents of drivers license applicants who are under the age of 18 to take a course on drivers’ education curriculum and licensing. (H Judiciary; Thu, May 9)

27. S0136: Adds Federal military installations to the list of properties eligible for payments-in-lieu of taxes (PILOT) paid to their hosting communities. Note that PILOT amounts are computed as a percentage of taxable value, so this would impose an additional cost on state taxpayers, not simply redistribute existing payments. (S Finance; Thu, May 9)

28. H6021: Lowers the retail sales tax on alcoholic beverages from 6% to 3%, while changing around some other volume-based “manufacturing tax rates” on “beverages manufactured, rectified, blended, or reduced for sale in this state”. (H Finance; Thu, May 9)

29. S0067: Eliminates the sales tax on taxicab services. (S Finance; Thu, May 9)

30. S0755: Allows “developmental disability agencies” to operate their own “self-insurance” plans for “employees, retirees and other beneficiaries”. (S Health and Human Services; Thu, May 9) From the text, it’s not immediately clear whether this bill is closing a loophole or defining an exception, but it does raise an interesting question of why a specific type of employer needs its own health insurance section of the law.

31. H5425: Prohibits local governments from setting any on-site sewage disposal or wetland setback standards that are “inconsistent with or in excess” of DEM or CRMC standards. (H Environment and Natural Resources; Wed, May 8)

32. H5228: “The tax on sugar-sweetened beverages shall be one dollar and twenty-eight cents ($1.28) per gallon of sugar-sweetened beverage” (H Finance; Wed, May 8)

Not Sure How High or Low to Rank This: H6030/S0809: Creates a 9-member board, including several “cabinet” heads or their designees, to decide on criteria to let businesses advertise their products as “Made in Rhode Island” and to study ways to increase the production and demand of locally produced goods and services. (H Small Business; Tue, May 7 & S Commerce; Tue, May 7)

Not Sure How High or Low to Rank This II: On Tuesday, May 7, the House Corporations Committee will hear several bills on the regulation the insurance and real estate businesses, e.g. S0667 updates the current “Credit for Reinsurance” law, so that it matches the National Association of Insurance Commissioners model law. Someone needs to remind me. Is “model legislation” inherently good or inherently bad this week?

Local Impact: Charlestown, Newport (and cruise ships docking there), North Providence, Pawtucket, Portsmouth , Scituate.

Paul Connolly says he doesn’t much care for watching hockey, basketball, baseball or other spectator sports on TV.

Instead, he likes getting outside where he can hunt, fish and trap. Above all else, Connolly is particularly passionate about his firearms.

“What began as a hobby turned into a life-long business venture,” he said during a phone interview with Watchdog.org.

He’s the owner  of Bullseye Shooting Supplies in Woonsocket, R.I., a full-service firearms retailer that has been on the receiving end of a steady stream of customers. That’s the good news.

Unfortunately, Connolly’s business also is on the receiving end of some very disconcerting correspondence that may be part of a larger national effort aimed at diluting Second Amendment rights. That’s the bad news.

“We’ve done very well over the past several months,” he said. “I think President Obama actually helped us to sell guns. In fact, back in January and February we were selling them as fast as we were getting them in.”

In response to the December mass shooting of schoolchildren in neighboring Newtown, Conn.,  Obama said gun control would be a priority in his second term.

“I will use all the powers of this office to help advance efforts aimed at preventing more tragedies like this,” Obama said during a speech at the White House.

Connolly and some of his long-time associates suspect those “powers” may be partly responsible for a caustic letter he received from Sovereign Bank, dated April 1, that said the bank was closing both his business and personal accounts.

Jack Peters, a Rhode Island gun-rights activist, was in the shop the day Connolly opened the letter.

“I knew instantly there was something wrong when I walked in,” Peters said. “I’ve known Paul for over 30 years, and he’s always calm and collected. But not this time, so I asked him what was up.”

Connolly was forced into a situation where he had to scramble to cover payroll obligations and business expenses in very short order.

“I was told that I had 30 days from the date of the letter to withdraw all funds from Sovereign Bank and to close my safety deposit box,” Connolly said. “This means my personal checking, my business accounts and my wife’s personal savings account. I really had to scramble, and I went nuts opening up new accounts.”

All told, Connolly withdrew $300,000 from Sovereign Bank and transferred the funds into a local credit union. Prior to receiving the letter, Connolly said he had a congenial and productive relationship with the bank.

“I was with Sovereign Bank before it was Sovereign Bank when it was under different names,” he said. “I had more money in there over the past few months than I’ve ever had before. Financially, we were doing well. So that can’t be the issue. I asked the bank manager for an explanation, but I never got one.”

Connolly said he suspects he was cut off because the bank no longer wants to do business with the gun industry for political reasons.

Peters, who serves as the legislative chairman for the Federated Rhode Island Sportsmen’s Clubs, said he sees an organized, concerted effort at work to undermine the Second Amendment.

He points out that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former chief of staff to the president, already has urged some of the nation’s larger banks to severe their relationship with gun manufacturers. The idea, he said, is to put gun manufacturers under a financial strain so they will be less likely to spend money lobbying against stricter gun-control laws.

“I do view a lot of what we’re seeing as an all-out assault on the Second Amendment,” Peters said. “It’s happening at the national level and it’s happening here locally. Sovereign Bank (and) Bank of America … are … known to be hostile to gun shops. But the credit unions are a viable alternative.”

On April 9, Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee rolled out a nine-bill “gun safety package” that was closely timed with a speech Obama delivered in Newtown that pressured congressional leaders to pass gun-control legislation.

“The goal here is to ban all firearms in Rhode Island and to ban the manufacturing of guns,” Peters said. “But there’s more going on here than just the constitutional question, as important as that is. There’s also an economic impact.”

He cites figures from the National Shooting Sports Foundation that show hunting, fishing, trapping and target shooting accounted for about $201 million in business activity for Rhode Island in 2012.

“This is the one industry that’s growing in Rhode Island,” he said.

Watchdog.org contacted the local Sovereign Bank branch in Rhode Island that cut off  Bullseye Shooting Supplies and was referred to the parent company’s media relations department. Mary Ellen Higgins, vice-president of public relations for Sovereign Bank, told Watchdog.org that the bank was “unlikely to offer any response” since it does not typically discuss customer accounts.

Mike Stenhouse, president of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, said he would like to see a larger investigation into the actions banks appear to be taking against gun shops.

“If this is true, if the banks are systematically cutting off funds for political reasons and not business reasons, then we need to find out where this pressure is coming from,” Stenhouse said. “There are too many unholy alliances between big government and big business that trample on the rights of law abiding citizens.”

Bank of America reportedly has terminated its business ties with gun manufacturers across the country.

Stenhouse also called on state lawmakers to rethink the gun-control package Chafee is pushing.

“For too long our state leaders have offered up knee jerk, emotional reactions that result in public policy decisions that have unintended consequences,” he said. “We are talking about documented, verifiable instances where these policy choices undercut our economy. What we need is a more thoughtful, constitutional, economically viable approach.”

Reprinted with permission from Watchdog.org, a project of the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity.

On WPRI Eyewitness News (channel 12), Tim White nabs another public employee whose workday appears to involve strange behavior.  This time, it’s a weatherization specialist parking his government vehicle behind his house for much of the day and moving it around to his driveway when his shift is over.

Out of curiosity, I looked the employee, Dennis Lopes, up on the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s RIOpenGov site.  It’s important to emphasize that this data does not overlap with White’s investigation chronologically, so there’s no evidence that Lopes’s practices aren’t recent developments.

That said, in both 2010 and 2011, the only Dennis Lopes listed on the payroll managed to enhance his regular pay by about 4% with payments that the state categorizes as overtime.  In 2010, he added $2,059 to a base of $50,086; in 2011, he added $2,003 to $51,482.

It’s interesting to note that the only other person listed in the same division, John Costello, who has the same job title, had no overtime during either year.  That division is HHS/Weatherization.  There’s also a DOE/Weatherization division listed, and the only employee in it, Julie Capobianco, had no overtime either.  (Although, her job title is different.)

The most important part of the WPRI report, however, is this:

The Weatherization Assistance Program is funded through federal tax dollars and a surcharge on National Grid bills.

In 2009, the program saw a massive influx of money from the federal stimulus program, money targeted at weatherizing 2,500 homes for Rhode Island’s needy families. In all the state received $20.1 million in stimulus money, according to data from the Dept. of Energy.

In 2012, the program received $4.2 million in federal money, according to Anthes, and $2.7 million from National Grid.

In its multiple stories on the high overtime pay of employees in various job categories in the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH), the Ocean State Current found a similar thread. (See here for the latest, with links to prior stories.)  When federal money flows in as a funding source, along with other non-state funding, in order to accomplish a charitable or trendy goal, it appears that the incentive to keep an eye on costs is weakened from what it ought to be. White’s report suggests that, in some cases, the incentive may not even be enough to check whether work is actually being done.

In those stories about federal stimulus programs that rapidly faded from public memory, many people wondered where all money went.  In response to waste and fraud investigations into social service programs, many people wonder where all that money goes.

We’re gradually finding out.

State officials in the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH) recently offered their defense of the Ocean State Current’s series of articles on the significant amount of money the state spends on overtime payments.

Recent articles have started to lay out how the $89.6 million dollars spent on overtime and other salary premiums in fiscal year 2011 was spent on state employees like nurses, laundry workers, institutional attendants, and community living aides.

In response to the articles, Craig Stenning, director of BHDDH, said he felt that there are two different issues at play: the amount the department is spending overall on overtime, and why some individuals earn so much more than others for overtime.

Stenning said it was the combination of a statewide public employee hiring freeze instituted in 2009, and the high number of retirements after the overhaul of the state pension system, that led to the high reliance on overtime to staff BHDDH’s facilities.

According to figures provided by BHDDH, the department spent $19.8 million in overtime in 2010, $20.0 million in 2011, and $18.3 million in 2012. The department is estimating the 2013 cost at $17.9 million.

Included in those figures are the salaries of nurses who made over $250,000 a year, community living aides who made close to $130,000, and laundry workers who made over $100,000.

“We have some high hitters,” said Stenning. “There is no way to mitigate that unless we renegotiate the way the call system works.”

Different categories of employees have different rules for who gets first dibs on overtime shifts, but almost all involve giving senior employees discretion. Overtime rules are all part of contract negotiations with public employee labor unions.

Stenning said there are some employees who will take every shift that comes open, and there are others who refuse overtime shifts altogether.

“Yes, there are some people who will work as many or more hours of overtime as they do their regular hours. I’ve asked some of them if they’d like me to suggest some hobbies for them,” said Stenning.

But Stenning also was quick to say that the numbers listed under “overtime” include more than just payments for extra hours worked.

The state lumps all salary enhancements under the heading “overtime.” Numbers reported under overtime also include:

• Longevity payments — similar to an automatic bonus — that range from 5 percent to 20 percent of an employee’s regular pay. The top rate is paid when an individual has worked for the state for more than 25 years. Longevity payments are no longer paid out to new hires, and current state employees are frozen at their 2011 rates.
• Supplemental payments for higher degrees, which range from $1,000 a year for one certification to $4,200 a year for a master’s degree and two nursing certifications.
• Weekend stipends added to pay, from $36 a shift to $144 a shift depending on how many hours an employee has worked on a weekend.
• Employees are also paid overtime pay for their regular work hours if a state emergency is declared and other state employees don’t have to work.

Even with these extras, the amount the state was paying out in just overtime was high, but Stenning said that was primarily because the department was not adequately staffed.

When he came in to BHDDH at the beginning of Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s term in office the department was filling regular shifts with overtime because it did not have enough employees to cover all of the shifts, Stenning said.

Just as the department was trying to fill those positions, a number of state employees left after the pension overhaul.

“That was the hole we were working ourselves out of,” said Stenning.

Given the nature of the department’s work with the state’s developmentally disabled and severely mentally ill residents, even with the cutbacks the department had to continue to staff its facilities, which run around the clock.

The main facilities run by BHDDH include Eleanor Slater Hospital, including its Zambarano Unit, and a series of 25 group homes for developmentally disabled adults, listed as part of the Rhode Island Community Living and Supports (RICLAS) division.

Stenning said his department has taken several steps to reduce its overtime payments, including reducing the amount of time it takes to hire a state employee.

The department asked for and received permission to start a “continuous recruitment” process, which was up and running by last summer. Before continuous recruitment, it took up to six months to hire a new employee and included 22 separate steps. It now takes the department about two months to hire a new employee, said Deborah George, human resources director for the department.

The department also negotiated with unions to increase the number of “seasonal” employees — who are more like temporary employees — who can fill positions as they open up. Seasonal employees are not paid state benefits.

Under union stipulations, seasonal employees can work for no more than 90 days before being moved to permanent positions, and the state is limited as to the number of seasonal employees it can have on staff at a time.

The state wanted to include seasonal IAPs — psychiatric institutional attendants — but the union would not open discussions on hiring seasonal IAPs because the position is seen as a step-up from a certified nursing assistant, said Paul Despres, CEO of Eleanor Slater Hospital.

Right now the state only has 85 IAPs out of 130 open positions, he said.

Despres pointed out that IAPs, and other caregivers at Eleanor Slater, are dealing with adult psychiatric patients, who are “the most compromised, the most challenging population.”

The department recently held two job fairs to recruit for open community living aide and certified nursing assistant positions.

In the meantime, Stenning said he has put a hold on overtime utilization by employees who are not in direct-care positions, like laundry workers, and he said the department is continuing to try to fill open positions.

Another group of state employees who have enjoyed generous amounts of overtime pay are community living aides (CLAs), but state officials recently said they are trying to hire more to bring down the costs.

The state paid $89.6 million dollars in overtime and other premiums in fiscal year 2011, as first reported by the Ocean State Current. Besides CLAs, state employees who have benefited from generous overtime usage include nurses, laundry workers, institutional attendants, and others.

In fiscal year 2011, there were 228 community living aides listed on the state’s central payroll. Of those, 14 earned more than $100,000, including their overtime pay. The total amount the state paid in overtime and other salary premiums to CLAs was almost $5.3 million. The average overtime was $23,232 added to an average regular pay of $35,599, as illustrated in the following chart.

The other premiums listed under the catch-all category “overtime” in the state’s figures include extra pay for things like longevity and additional degrees or for working weekends or holidays.

The top-paid CLA in 2011 was Felix Adefusika, who earned $90,413 in overtime and premiums on top of his salary of $39,462, to give him a total gross pay of $129,875. Mary Leite was close behind with $129,594, which included $88,416 in overtime.

CLAs are required to have a high school diploma and be at least 18 years old. All but one of the 14 top paid CLAs worked for Rhode Island Community Living and Supports (RICLAS), which is part of the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities, and Hospitals (BHDDH).

RICLAS runs 25 group homes in the state, where four to six adults with developmental disabilities live. Each home must have at least two CLAs per shift, and the homes are staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to Charles Williams, RICLAS administrator.

According to figures provided by Williams, RICLAS paid $7.6 million in overtime and salary enhancements to all employees, including CLAs, in fiscal years 2010 and 2011. According to the table, that number was reduced to $6.5 million in FY 2012, an almost 15 percent reduction. The projection for the current fiscal year is $6.6 million, or a 14 percent reduction from 2010.

But the figure remains high, and Williams said that is partially because the department has been understaffed.

In a memo, he said the state is working to reduce the amount of overtime pay by hiring more CLAs and by adding seasonal employees. The state’s budget for RICLAS allows for 294 CLAs, and it currently has 272 on staff.

“We are aggressively moving toward reaching 294,” said Deb Varga, BHDDH spokeswoman.

There are no CLA positions listed on the state’s job boards, but BHDDH has held job fairs recently to recruit CLAs and certified nursing assistants (CNAs). Most of the jobs were for “seasonal” employees — who would be better classified as “temporary” employees — but the state is limited as to the number of seasonal employees it can hire and how long they can remain on staff under an agreement with the American Federation of State and County Employees Local 1293, the union that represents the state’s CLAs.

The union agreement says that RICLAS can have no more than 30 seasonal employees at a time, and they cannot work for more than 90 days unless they are moved to permanent positions. Seasonal employees are not paid state benefits.

BHDDH Director Craig Stenning said his department is “more aggressively negotiating” with unions to increase the number of seasonal employees, who are used to fill positions as they open up. The department is also hiring workers now on a continuous basis instead of starting the process when a position opens up.

Ten years ago, the state tried to address overtime costs at RICLAS’s group homes by listing a “float” function on all CLA job descriptions — meaning employees would be expected to be assigned to other group homes if a shift came open or someone failed to show up to work. The union said that this was unfair to workers, and would only agree to 10 floater positions.

When the state went ahead with its plan to change the job description, the union filed a complaint with the State Labor Relations Board. In 2003, the board decided in the union’s favor.

Union agreements also dictate what order RICLAS must follow when it offers overtime to employees, which includes provisions based on seniority and location. CLAs can place their names on overtime lists for as many of the group homes as they like.

Williams said he is now looking at all time sheets for RICLAS in an effort to keep overtime to a minimum.

In a Rhode Island Health and Human Services Waste and Fraud Project report, compiled by Simpatico Software Systems, RICLAS was called a “very expensive and unique system when compared to the rest of the country for the provision of group homes to Rhode Islanders with developmental disabilities.”

According to the report, one of the reasons the cost is so high is that the state owns the group homes and pays for all of their maintenance, but still pays the operators of the homes similar rates as in other states where the operators own and maintain the homes.

The report also suggests that the state could save money by moving developmentally disabled adults who need extra care into a common facility to bring down staffing costs.

The job listings for “institutional attendants (psychiatric)” positions in the state Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities, and Hospitals (BHDDH) offer a salary in the mid-$30,000s, and payroll information available through the RIOpenGov project of the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity suggests top regular pay in the low-$40,000s.

In 2010 and 2011, however, almost all of those employees added significantly to their pay by working extra hours, as well as other salary enhancements and bonuses that the state reports as “overtime.” A significant number of them doubled their base pay or more.

Last week, in an article on the Ocean State Current about the high take-home pay of some nurses at government-run Eleanor Slater Hospital, state and union officials pointed to low staffing levels as the reason for high overtime payments. In other media outlets, Craig Stenning, the director of BHDDH, of which Eleanor Slater is a division, stated that eased hiring rules are now helping to bring down the need for overtime.

However, reporter Suzanne Bates noted on the Current that the only job openings for the hospital listed on the state’s official online job board were for “institutional attendant (psychiatric)” positions. As of Wednesday morning, April 3rd, the job listings for the entire department of BHDDH included eight for institutional attendant (psychiatric), one for mental health worker, two for social caseworker II, and two for janitor.

Institutional attendants are not registered nurses, but nursing assistants represented by the Council 94 labor union.  The job notices describe the education requirement as “completion of 8 school grades” or experience that provided an equivalent level of knowledge. Candidates must also complete a training course and pass a certification examination.

The Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) did not return multiple emails and calls for additional, specific information.  However, of the 85 employees on the 2011 payroll for whom the Current was able to confirm the institutional attendant (psychiatric) job title, 18 made more in overtime than in regular pay. In 2010, 20 of the 93 employees with that title did the same.

Of the 18 in 2011, four collected more than $100,000 in total pay, despite having regular pay of less than $43,000.  In 2010, seven collected more than $100,000. The following chart shows all attendants’ 2011 gross pay, with regular pay and overtime.

According to the program page on the Web site of the Community College of Rhode Island, the required training course lasts six to ten weeks. A candidate handbook available on the Web site of Pearson Vue, which administers the examination for the state, gives samples of the questions and skills necessary to pass the test, mainly including general hygiene and living assistance, as well as basic medical tasks.

The handbook also makes clear that an oral examination is available for applicants who have difficulty reading English. To determine which test to take, the handbook includes vocabulary and reading comprehension questions. One multiple choice question is: “Fish live in [blank].”

The Current was unable to confirm through EOHHS the number of institutional attendant (psychiatric) employees actually on the payroll for each year. However, officials with the state Budget Office pointed to the payroll supplements published with every year’s budget.  The total full-time equivalents (FTEs) shown on these documents are not the number of employees in each position currently working for state government, but rather, the appropriated number, or the number whom the departments were authorized to hire.

Even so, the total FTEs for the institutional attendant (psychiatric) position consistently fell, from 108 in 2009 to 98 in the 2013 budget.  The 2014 budget, if passed, would return the number to 108.  As of March 15 of this year, there were 86 institutional attendants (psychiatric) actually on the payroll.

The following seven attendants earned gross pay of more than $100,000 in 2010, 2011, or both.

Editorial change: Inserted “collected” in the place of “took home” in paragraph seven. 3:22 p.m. 4/4/13.

State reluctant to detail how nine employees of taxpayer-funded Eleanor Slater Hospital pull in over $100,000 each in extra pay

Stella Adeniyi has worked for the State of Rhode Island as a registered nurse at Eleanor Slater Hospital in Cranston since 1990. In 2011, on top of her regular pay of $97,460, Adeniyi took home $172,398 for working overtime, putting her gross pay at $269,858.

The standard workweek for registered nurses in the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH) is 40 hours. If Adeniyi were to make 1.5 times her normal hourly salary for overtime, she would have had to work 87 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, in order to earn her total pay.

According to data collected by the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, Adeniyi topped the list of overtime payments to the 17,206 employees on the state payroll that year.

She is one of nine staff members — six nurses and three psychiatrists — currently at Eleanor Slater who took home more than $100,000 in overtime pay in fiscal year 2011. Another three nurses on the 2011 payroll list for BHDDH, all hired in the 1980s, are no longer among the department’s personnel. The total cost of paying just overtime to those twelve employees was $1,485,346. The year before, the same dozen employees took home $1,379,769 in overtime.

Nurse supervisor Sylvia Macagba was second to Adeniyi in her overtime earnings for 2011. She was paid $158,462 on top of her regular salary of $104,590, to give her total pay of $263,052.

Employees at the hospital did not return calls for comment. Instead, a spokeswoman for BHDDH, Deb Varga, asked that all requests for information go through her.

But after three days, Varga said she was unable to provide specific information on why the state employees were able to more than double their salaries through overtime payments.

“You should know that the numbers include a number of additions including overtime, shift differential, longevity, on-call, special care agreements, etc.,” she said in an email.

Getting access to the payroll data that revealed the employees’ overtime pay was also difficult. After nearly a year of back-and-forth communications and meetings, the Department of Administration denied the Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s request. The Center’s transparency partner, Visible Government Online, ultimately acquired the information from a watchdog group at Northeastern University.

Michael Walker, a founding partner of Visible Government, said that Rhode Island proved to be the most difficult of the 25 states from which he’s requested this data — “by a considerable margin.”

Eleanor Slater plays a unique role among hospitals in Rhode Island because so many of its beds are devoted to psychiatric care and complex medical cases. Most of its patients are eligible for Medicaid, according to David Burnett, chief of government and public affairs for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS). That means the state and federal governments end up paying for most of the care the patients at the hospital receive.

According to a recently released Rhode Island Waste and Fraud Report, it is more expensive to treat patients at Eleanor Slater than at other long-term healthcare facilities.

The report says that Eleanor Slater had an “average cost of $957 per day per patient, compared with an average nursing home cost of $155 per day per patient.” It goes on to describe the hospital as operating “far below maximum patient capacity.”

Burnett said Eleanor Slater’s unique mission makes it difficult to compare to other facilities. He also explained that the Medicaid reimbursements are not based on fixed rates for service, but rather are based on the costs at a particular facility, so if it costs more to run a hospital, it can charge Medicaid higher rates.

In the case of Eleanor Slater, EOHHS pays each claim in full and periodically applies to the federal government for the matching payments.

The state’s behavioral healthcare department overspent its budget in at least the past two years, in part because of overtime payments, according to state financial reports. The reports blame staff vacancies for the need to spend extra state money on overtime. Linda McDonald, president of United Nurses and Allied Professionals, a labor union representing nurses at Eleanor Slater Hospital, also cited the number of nurses on staff to explain the high overtime payments.

The current list of job openings in the state includes five psychiatric institution attendant listings at Eleanor Slater. Those positions require an eighth grade education, some work experience, and state certification as a nursing assistant.

The twelve nurses and doctors with BHDDH who received over $100,000 in overtime were among 33 state employees who pulled in six figures in overtime last year. Most of those same employees were near the top of the list for overtime the year before.

The other individuals who were paid over $100,000 in overtime in BHDDH in fiscal year 2011 include:

• Abella Corpus, Nurse Supervisor, salary: $104,878, overtime: $142,060, total: $246,938
• Pedro Tactacan, Assistant Chief of Psychiatric Services, salary: $135,960, overtime: $109,700, total: $245,660
• Sung Lee, Registered Nurse, salary: $92,443, overtime: $140,507, total: $232,950
• Angela Lacombe, Psychiatrist, salary: $111,895, overtime: $105,121, total: $217,016
• June Nwanna, Registered Nurse, salary: $84,153, overtime: $130,420, total: $214,573
• Carl Langley, Nurse Supervisor, salary: $100,996, overtime: $100,080, total: $201,076
• Cecilia Falguera, Registered Nurse, salary: $92,337, overtime: $106,355, total: $198,692
• Josephine St. John, Registered Nurse, salary: $84,259, overtime: $109,946, total: $194,205
• Thelma McGuirl, Registered Nurse, salary: $90,943, overtime: $102,017, total: $192,960
• Kerstin Uy, Psychiatrist, salary: $63,275, overtime: $108,280, total: $171,555

Suzanne Bates is a freelance writer and a research fellow at the Yankee Institute for Public Policy in Connecticut.

Rhode Island resident and former human services chief Gary Alexander has been making news back home related to his current job as Secretary of Public Welfare in Pennsylvania.

About two weeks ago, Alexander’s work came up on the Current and Anchor Rising regarding a chart suggesting that a single-mother in the PA public welfare system is better off not making more than $29,000 in gross income unless she can leap above $69,000, because her public assistance payments drops so much.

This week, Alexander caught the attention of Rhode Island Public Radio reporter Ian Donnis after the Pennsylvania Independent published a story about his use of a state vehicle to travel to and from his family’s home in Rhode Island:

Alexander spent more than $4,700 in state expenses the calendar year 2011, according to state records. Purchases were made at gas stations in Harrisburg, throughout Pennsylvania and in Rhode Island.

During a 52-week period, Alexander made 29 trips from Rhode Island directly to Harrisburg, and 14 trips from Harrisburg directly to Rhode Island. Those trips are around 350 miles each way, taking about six hours.

An additional 44 trips cited Rhode Island as a point of departure or final destination with a stop along the way, like Philadelphia.

In emails, yesterday and today, Alexander told the Ocean State Current that the initial news reports failed to mention that his department operated at “a $140 million surplus, last year,” or that he negotiated vehicle use as an employment benefit, for which he pays $11,000 in federal taxes, as reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer today.  “The administration gave me permission to use the vehicle, and I was upfront before I took the job that I needed to be home every week for my family,” Alexander told the Current. “I wouldn’t have taken the job otherwise.”

The Inquirer puts the story in the context of Alexander’s vocal presence among state officials who oppose aspects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is popularly known as ObamaCare, including the Medicaid expansion to cover able-bodied childless adults for the first time.

Today, GoLocalProv editor Dan McGowan put Alexander in the “Who’s Not [Hot]” section of his “Side of the Rhode” column, saying that government officials “can’t get away with” such activity during “a time when people around the country are so concerned with debt.” Whether debt is a concern to Rhode Islanders may not be so clear, however.  Ocean State voters overwhelmingly approved every debt opportunity on the ballot, in November, committing taxpayers to borrow $208,164,000 at an additional anticipated financing cost of $99,407,716.

The PA Independent reports Alexander’s earnings at $146,579, which compares with the $141,828 that Rhode Island pays to its own Secretary of the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, Steven Costantino.  Alexander says his role is more like Costantino’s than that of RI Director of the Department of Human Services Director Sandra Powell, who makes $129,627 per year.  But he notes that Powell’s position represents an additional layer of management that Pennsylvania doesn’t have.

Pennsylvania’s population is approximately twelve times the size of Rhode Island’s, and the people are spread over a land area that is more than forty times larger.

Contrary to what was alleged in a complaint filed with Attorney General Peter Kilmartin, the East Bay Energy Consortium (EBEC) has pursued a proposed wind power project in a fiscally responsible, open and transparent manner, according to some of the government figures named in the complaint.

In 2009, nine municipalities entered into a “memorandum of agreement” to obtain grant funding to support a study assessing the feasibility of a wind power project. Those nine municipalities were Bristol, Barrington, Little Compton, East Providence, Middletown, Newport, Portsmouth, Tiverton, and Warren.

The agreement called for Bristol Township to obtain grant money for a feasibility study in partnership with the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (RIEDC), the Rhode Island Renewable Energy Fund (RIREF), and the EBEC. If the feasibility study supported the construction of a wind power turbine facility in Tiverton, the partners would then lobby commercial investors to come into play. But the feasibility study showed that “significant risks” were associated with the proposal. Moreover, a subsequent wind resource test in August 2011 produced “unfavorable results,” according to the complaint.

What happened from this point forward has become a matter of intense dispute between the Consortium and its leading critics. Benjamin Riggs, the retired manufacturing executive in Newport who authored the complaint, insists that EBEC has worked deliberately and methodically to prevent public scrutiny of its work and expenditures.

“In its meeting of December 5, 2011, the EBEC voted to keep the (presumably) unfavorable results of the wind power tests from the public,” the complaint says. “The concealment was reaffirmed at the Bristol Town Council meeting of August 8, 2012. EBEC also made a habit of not giving proper meeting notices and not sharing documents with the public, or even its members.”

Jeanne Napolitano, who chairs the EBEC and also sits on the Newport City Council, takes issue with these allegations. She told the Ocean State Current in an interview that the Consortium’s actions have been open to public scrutiny and debate.

“Our meetings have been open to the public. Mr. Riggs has attended those meetings,” she said. “The money we receive all goes to experts we have looking at this project; none of the board members [on the EBEC] are paid. It’s not accurate to say that we have been concealing our efforts from the public. If we can’t get together in some way to fix this economy, then we are doomed in Rhode Island. Not one dime has gone to us, it has gone to attorneys, engineers, and wind experts.”

Another point of contention concerns the legislation that was advanced earlier this year to turn the EBEC into a “quasi-governmental” entity with the power of “eminent domain,” which would enable it to seize private property for public use. The East Bay Energy Consortium Act will likely be reintroduced next year, without the eminent domain provision, Napolitano said.

“We never wanted eminent domain, and the legislation has been repackaged,” she explained. “On the recommendation of our attorney, we pursued quasi-governmental status because this would allow us to obtain government funding.”

Initially, the group requested the power of eminent domain in order to offer tax-free bonds. Having that ability requires an organization to have one of three powers indicative of a government entity: the power to tax, the power to police, or the power of eminent domain.

Napolitano also said that renewable energy initiatives, like wind power, could save the Rhode Island taxpayers money over long term and also work to the financial benefit of the participating municipalities. She estimates that the current wind power proposal could cost anywhere from $50 to $70 million for the 10 wind turbines that would be erected in Tiverton.

“We didn’t know how complex the wind power project would be going into this,” Napolitano acknowledged. “Our project, the way we are presenting it, is self-sustaining. In other words, if we received energy money for let’s say the whole project, it would only be done if we had an association with a private contractor to provide renewable energy, and it would have to be able to pay for itself, the loan we received, in 20 years. And that’s how we were looking at it. We were going to be non-profit, and the only way there would be a profit is by going to each participant, each city and town, to reduce the cost of their budgets, particularly in the areas of electricity. It is complex; I don’t think we realized when we started this that it would be as big as it was.”

The problem with renewable technology is not just its complexity, but its actual cost, Riggs said in response. He is not convinced the wind power proposal will save money. In fact, he views the wind power proposal as financial liability.

“Renewables cost three times what conventional energy costs,” he said, “but I would agree, under the EBEC scheme, create a profit for the consortium municipal members. I point out in my complaint that this profit is at the considerable excess cost to all of the citizens and businesses of RI, in all the municipalities. It will not save a single Rhode Island taxpayer money.”

Under the section of the complaint entitled “Violation of the Law and Public Policy,” the complaint from Riggs also names Ken Marshall, president of the Bristol Town Council. Riggs claims “Mr. Marshall caused the funds from EBEC to be co-mingled with municipal funds” and lists a number of other allegations.

The Current invited Marshall to comment and present his side of controversy. He emailed in a detailed response, which is as follows:

 I have gone out of my and others’ way to provide any and all opportunities to vet the facts and attempt to due the necessary due diligence to meet theirs and the public at large concerns. The original intent of this exercise was and continues to be an exploration of cities and towns working together to benefit from the efficiencies of scale when it comes to any energy efficiency project. The benefits from these efficiencies of scale through economics would in turn potentially have offered an alternative to our current single source electrical supply as well as provide backup energy in times of emergency needs during a natural/national crisis. I personally have witnessed a Country that has been at the mercy of global energy supplies which in turn jeopardizes our Country’s economic health and well-being.

Our future and security as a town, city, state, Country, and World depend on elected leaders being proactive rather than reactive to any situation. After physically watching one town after another attempt and fail with renewable sources, and the facts and benefits surrounding the possibility of doing onshore -vs- the costs and challenges of doing offshore, and being part of and witness to the continual financial cutbacks and deficits that each and every city are facing while all around us energy costs continue to rise further hampering our collective ability to succeed as a State, coupled with continual rising unemployment and the attempts to keep property taxes in check without reducing services, there comes a time when we as elected officials are required to think outside the box and comfort zones and work together towards the Public Good that we were elected to do.

I know firsthand that the Governor is working with Canada and the rest of the New England States to bring in hydro-power electricity that is more financially attractive and renewable along with the possibility of increasing natural gas pipelines to Rhode Island. If he is successful in this endeavor, the entire New England region will be poised to become a more attractive region for economic growth and vitality. I personally look forward with great anticipation for my family and future generations to that hopeful day.

(On Jan. 1,  Marshall will be inaugurated as a representative in the General Assembly from District 68.)

Napolitano told the Current that she would supply additional about studies that show renewables could benefit Rhode Island taxpayers and municipalities. Riggs, and other opponents of the EBEC, continue to view renewable efforts has costly and misguided. In October, the Bristol Town Council voted to withdraw from the Consortium.

PHOTO: Jeanne Napolitano testifies in favor of the EBEC before the House Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, April 5, 2012.

Nevermind the results of a feasibility study that show “significant risks” are attached to a proposed wind power project. For that matter, why not ignore public input and the legislative arena altogether?

According to concerned residents, this appears to be the attitude of top officials within the East Bay Energy Consortium (EBEC), the Bristol Township, and the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (RIEDC). They are all named in a complaint filed with Attorney General Peter Kilmartin built around “fraud and misrepresentation” allegations.

In 2009, nine municipalities entered into a “memorandum of agreement” to obtain funding for a wind power feasibility study. The grant applications for the project were done in partnership with the EBEC and the Rhode Island Renewable Energy Fund (RIREF). The agreement made it clear that any grant money would be limited to the feasibility study. However, a “subsequent grant application” to RIREF demonstrated that the EBEC planned to construct and operate the wind power facility itself, according to the complaint.

Benjamin C. Riggs, a retired manufacturing executive residing in Newport, is responsible for filing the complaint. He told the Ocean State Current in an interview that the attorney general’s office has agreed to investigate the matter and has followed up with him seeking clarification on alleged legal infractions.

Since the EBEC is not a legal entity, it should not be permitted to seek taxpayer funding, Riggs has argued.  Yet, it is evident that the EBEC operated beyond legal parameters outlined in the memorandum to secure funding for a project that lacked legislative approval, the complaint says. Moreover, the EBEC also secured the services of a lobbyist and an attorney in an effort to pass legislation that would provide it with the power and authority of a “quasi-governmental agency,” Riggs explained.

In the complaint, Riggs calls on the attorney general to investigate whether or not the key players in the EBEC, Bristol Township, and the director of the Rhode Island EDC “engaged in fraud and misrepresentation in connection with the funding and expenditures associated with EBEC that approximate $435,000 to date.” Furthermore, the complaint asks “whether the same participants engaged in an unlawful scheme designed to surreptitiously tax all residents of the State of Rhode Island without their consent for excess utility costs, the profits from which would then be used to the exclusive revenue benefit of EBEC members.”

The relationship between the EBEC and Bristol Township was particularly problematic, according to the complaint.

“And because EBEC was not a legal entity and could not open a bank account, and because the EDC grant was applied for by the Town of Bristol, Bristol became the ‘banker’ for EBEC, with funds being disbursed at the sole direction of the EBEC, not the Town, which was the entity that applied for and received the grant money.”

The feasibility study, which was released in October 2010, identified certain risks with the project, according to the complaint. A separate wind tower test that began on Aug. 18, 2011also came back with “unfavorable results” that were not disclosed to the public at the time.

“There are no environmental benefits here,” Riggs laments. “The only thing green about this scheme is money that would go to certain government officials and to the East Bay Consortium.”

“The concealment was reaffirmed at the Bristol Town Council meeting of Aug. 8, 2012,” the complaint says. “EBEC also made a habit of not giving proper meeting notices and not sharing documents with the public or even its members.”

During the August 8, 2012, meeting, EBEC Vice Chairman Andrew Shapiro acknowledged “that EBEC had departed from its members’ mandate, and the legality of this departure so concerned legal counsel at the time that they withdrew their representation,” the complaint says. Riggs also singles out Bristol Town Administrator Diane Mederos for withholding the wind tower test results from public scrutiny at the same meeting.

The relevant portion of the public meeting is available here online, about 22 minutes into the video.

The Ocean State Current contacted several of the leading figures named in the complaint, including Diane Williamson in Bristol Township and Jeanne Napolitano from the Newport City Council, inviting each of them to comment, but did not receive a response. The Current also contacted Melissa Chambers, the spokesperson for the the Rhode Island EDC, but did not receive a response.

The legislation advanced on behalf of EBEC has been tabled until the General Assembly reconvenes in January.

For the Current’s coverage of the EBEC during the 2012 legislative session see:

• “04/05/12 – House Floor Session & Committee on Environment and Natural Resources“
• “Putting the EDC in the Wind Farm Business“
• “06/05/12 – House Floor & Committee on Environment and Natural Resources“
• “06/11/12 – Senate Floor and Committees“
• “06/12/12 – The Whole Mad Jumble of the Last Day“

In response to blackmail allegations that his Republican opponent has directed against him and others, Johnston Mayor Joseph M. Polisena, the Democratic incumbent, has decided to incorporate the controversy into his campaign messaging: “I’m running on my record of accomplishment, while Peter Filippi is running on his criminal record.” But at the same time, Polisena does acknowledge that his Republican challenger has raised legitimate questions about public employee benefits that need to be addressed in short order.

Filippi has presented the Ocean State Current with several of the mailings to his home. These include documentation and photos from his arrest record. He does not deny being involved with altercations with the police and various bar bouncers over the past several years. But Filippi disputes specific details included in police reports.

As the Current has previously reported, Filippi has written a series of opinion pieces on the JohnstonPatch.com that are highly critical of the pension, overtime, vacation, and salary package that public employees receive, especially the police and firefighters. “That’s why these mailings are coming to my home, because I’m calling attention to all of these taxpayer funded benefits that are bankrupting Johnston and other parts of Rhode Island,” Filippi said. “I’m working to bring light and to bring scrutiny to the hidden costs that taxpayers don’t know about.”

For his part, Mayor Polisena said he is open to reforms that alleviate taxpayer burdens, but also preserve retirement plans for public employees. “We have to strike a balance,” he said. “Rhode Island is a unionized state, and that’s the reality. I agree with Peter [Filippi] in some areas, but you can’t just uproot everything. That’s not realistic. He’s attacked just about everyone, so it’s not surprising that he has come in for criticism.”

Blackmail Letters Addressed to Filippi’s wife 

One of the letters Filippi provided to the Current addressed to his wife reads in part as follows:

As your husband continues with his political career these copies of his criminal past and other great photos will be in every home and be dropped off in many local shopping places. The town must know about your husband’s perverted past as he runs for office … I thought your husband was a Christian, why does he gravitate towards strip clubs and it sounds like perverted behavior to me … And we wonder if the nursing homes and assorted living facilities that your dearest husband sings/performs in will continue to accept him.

Filippi does volunteer work in some of the Johnston nursing homes. He suspects Mayor Polisena and some top union leaders are behind the mailings.

The mayor adamantly denies the allegations. “I have absolutely nothing to do with these mailings,” Polisena said. “Peter Filippi is an incumbent’s dream. Why would I want him out of the race? He is going to the press in an effort to resurrect his failing campaign.”

By calling attention to public employee perks and benefits that have thus far escaped taxpayer scrutiny, Filippi is convinced that he has dealt a serious to blow to entrenched union interests the incumbent politicians they have helped to elect. “There is a blackmail campaign because entrenched interests do not want taxpayers to know how much there are putting up to support lavish benefits,” he said. “My wife continues to receive mailings. The lesson here is that anyone who raises questions about the public sector can expect to come in for this kind of treatment.”

Filippi has persistently challenged the salary and benefit structure that supports government employees. With regard to the firefighters, for example, he wrote: “Johnston firefighters make approximately $100,000 when you include benefits, and 95 percent of the time, they’re responding to fender-benders and transporting people to hospitals. If our rescuers are idle and someone is in dire need in the next community, how could we in good conscience not respond? The unions have bankrupted Providence and soon we may be at the mercy of other communities as ourselves; all because of unionized labor costs in which we need leadership that has the courage to examine the alternatives.”

Filippi favors making “all shifts” for firefighters part-time shifts and privatizing certain rescue operations. He also supports “right-to-work” legislation that would allow workers to choose whether or not they would like to join a union.

The latest letter addressed to his wife reads as follows: “This is our way of paying him back for all the insults to town workers, police, firefighters and teachers. Now it is your turn to let the Johnston residents know what a sexual deviant your hubby is, and his love for the titty bars. Your hubby is a phony, fraud,hypocrite, deviant, sexual pervert and drunk  … this is payback with interest.”

Filippi Offers His Version of Events

In an email message to the Current Filippi discussed his various altercations and run-ins with the police.

About 14 years ago I received a bad check in which the police sat on it for over 2 months in which they finally told me the felon had moved and there was nothing they could do. However about a month later a lawyer told me that the police should have gone to the bank to request a forwarding address. When I told the detectives I was going to make note of it in my election literature I got my money 3 days later. Also, one election eve about 16 years ago a cop kept poking his finger in my chest complaining that I wanted to take his job away and that I should be ashamed and more appreciative; that next day I had bruises.

As for Mario’s, it was about 11 years ago on a Saturday night about 8:00 pm. My old buddy wanted to stop there for a drink on the way going home. I didn’t really want to but I remembered an ex councilman who was seen in there in which he said he wanted to see what the place was like, so I figured no harm would be done. We walked in and sat down and the stripper immediately came over and was very aggressive. I frantically looked in my wallet for a dollar to get rid of her as I felt incredibly embarrassed. My smallest bill was a $20. I then put my wallet away and immediately asked my buddy for a dollar. As he was going into his pocket 3 bouncers came over and told us to leave in which I had no idea why they were telling us that. I asked what we had done wrong and he just repeated himself in which I asked again at which point we were grabbed, shoved to the back door where I was thrown down a flight of cement steps as my buddy was slammed down on the top landing in which a few days later he received surgery.

As we walked around to our cars I kept asking what happened as I was still in shock. My buddy told me because I put my wallet back the stripper took it as an insult and signaled the bouncers to remove us. At our cars we were looking at our injuries as I was begging him to go to the station with me. We talked about how my wife would blame him and how it would look for me because of my politics which I didn’t care. Within about 10 minutes 3 cops arrived. As I was telling them what happened one of them said, “I know you.” “I read your stuff” and “I know how you feel about my men,” at which point I asked for his name, in which he took his wallet out and put his badge in my face and said, “Remember that number because you discuss me,” and we were arrested. They refused to let me call my wife and when the rescue came I was only handed a gauze pad and ice pad when I was in dire need of medical attention; my face was broken badly with blood everywhere, which can clearly be seen in the pictures.

Also, over the course of that night over the intercom they continuously asked me if I wanted change for a dollar. My buddy is diabetic and needed something to eat because he was getting the shakes and all they did was asked him if he wanted a banana. The following day when my wife came to get me after crying all night thinking I was dead we went to the emergency room in which the doctor had to take an x-ray of my face to see if there were any broken bones. In the police report the stripper stated that the big bald headed guy flicked his fingers at her breast; which he did not. However, in court the stripper said that I was the one who flicked my fingers at her and that when the bouncers told me to leave I jumped from my seat and threw punchers at them. However, when the bouncer took the stand he said when he asked me to leave “I left the building in a gentlemanly fashion.” At the very moment that judge put his hand over his heart and said he didn’t feel well and stopped the trial. A week later the case was dismissed and the town solicitor hoped there would be no hard feelings; what an ugly state and town we live in indeed.

The past week of scandals makes skepticism of government employment data a bit more reasonable.  Communications related to Benghazi suggest a federal administration, with emphasis on the State Department, preparing to deceive the public on a matter of international security shortly before an election.  Over the past couple of years, the IRS slow-rolled and intimidated Tea Party and other conservative groups, and apparently pushed revelation of the scandal until after the election.  Mix in the Department of Justice’s wide-netted drag of Associated Press phone records.

In the context of these examples of multiple Obama Administration departments’ malfeasance, noting the curious pattern of revisions made to employment data by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Dept. of Labor seems a bit less conspiratorial.  By the way, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis resigned suddenly in January, after a controversial time in office and before the revisions were released.

All that said, the numbers that the federal government provides are by far the most comprehensive available, and even suspicious vacillations of the data involve minor discrepancies for most purposes.

The Rhode Island headline for the April data is that the unemployment rate has fallen to 8.8%.  As Kate Bramson’s Providence Journal article today notes, a significant portion of the “improvement” can be explained by the fact that many fewer Rhode Islanders are actually looking for work. Bramson later tweeted that Rhode Island now has the sixth highest unemployment rate, which actually feels like an improvement after years spent hovering in the top three.

There are complications, though.  First, looking at the broadest BLS measurement of employment, which includes those who’ve given up looking for work recently as well as those who aren’t able to work as many hours as they’d like brings Rhode Island’s rate up to 16.7%, the fourth worst in the nation.  Looking at hours worked, people working in Rhode Island are actually working fewer hours, on average, than they were a year ago.  And the two states with which Rhode Island shared the bottom 3 for so long have generally been seeing more people looking for work, not fewer, as in the Ocean State.

The following chart shows how stagnant employment numbers and a falling labor force (those working plus looking for work) is leading to a lower unemployment rate — because the rate is nothing but the gap between the two lines.

Putting our neighbors on the chart (as a percentage of January 2007 labor force) shows that the only silver lining is that Connecticut’s precipitous decline (after the end of some federal spending and the substantial increase in taxes) makes Rhode Island’s stagnation look relatively positive.

On a national level, Rhode Island remains the second-farthest state from its employment peak. It isn’t surprising, based on the previous charts, that the Ocean State’s placement on this chart has remained pretty stationary.

The same is true of employment growth since the employment recession’s end in 2010.  Connecticut captures the spotlight on this chart, as the state most rapidly falling away from its level when the nationwide recession had decisively ended.

This is one of those investigations for which curiosity took hold and insisted that it be worked through.  Each month, I’ve been posting a chart of every state’s distance from its peak employment level prior to the recession, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Color-coding that chart for various policies produces some interesting results.  For example, seven of the ten states that currently exceed their peaks are right-to-work states; if you take out the two states that became right-to-work just last year, only four of the bottom ten are in that category.  States with no income tax tend to be doing a little better than states with no sales tax, although there are relatively few of either.  Same-sex marriage doesn’t look like it has much effect; none of the states with it are either significantly above their peaks or at the bottom of the chart.

But what about party?  Of those (relatively) healthy ten states at the top, six have legislatures completely controlled by Republicans, one more was Republican until the last election (Minnesota), one has a split chamber, meaning that the House and Senate are controlled by different parties (Virginia), and one has a unicameral, non-partisan legislature (Nebraska). That leaves Maryland as the lone state above its peak employment that was completely controlled by Democrats prior to the 2012 elections.

Of course, Democrats only control three of the bottom-ten states’ legislatures, so the next question is what the chart has looked like as states have changed hands from election to election.  Obviously, the governor matters, too, but major policy shifts have to come from the legislature, as illustrated when Indiana and Michigan turned right-to-work.

So here is the state of play in November 2008, just after the election.  Red markers are states with fully Republican legislatures; blue are for Democrats; orange is split; and purple is Nebraska.  The results (and the color selections ) come from maps available through the National Conference of State Legislatures’ StateVote project.

(Perhaps the most helpful way to compare these charts is to right click and open them in different windows or tabs.  That will allow readers to toggle between them and watch the markers move.)

Three observations of note are that (1) the states are pretty much clustered between 95 and 100% of peak employment, with (2) one of the exceptions being Rhode Island already an outlier in the bottom three, and (3) the brunt of the recession hadn’t hit yet.  To see how the states spread apart during the recession and its aftermath, we advance the clock to November 2010, with the colors being legislative control just before the election.

The Republican-controlled states still span the scatterplot, but they’ve got a majority (six) of the top 10 and only three of the bottom 10.  The Democrats hold the middle cluster, while split legislatures appear to be weighted to the downside.  But watch what happens when the colors change to reflect the results of the election that year.

Many states that were Democrat or split flipped to Republican control, and they were mostly in the bottom half of the ranking. Iowa and Colorado went from Democrat to split.  So what if we advance another two years?

There is clearly a general upward shift, but Republican states continued to dominate the top 10 and, in general, improved at a greater rate than Democrat-controlled states.  In the space since then, the trends give the impression that the country is either hovering in anticipation or cresting the top of the new normal.  Some states went up; some went down.

It’s interesting to note that Arkansas, which had hovered around the 96% line and is now in the bottom 10, around 95%, switched to Republican last November. New York has also hovered around 96%, and moved to the split column in November.

For Rhode Islanders, the primary takeaway is — as it all too  usually is — the lack of substantive change.  With a huge burden of work, it would be possible to make a chart that shows which states have reorganized their economic development agencies or decided to permit employers to issue paychecks less frequently than weekly, but nobody really, honestly, truly expects such things to have substantial effects on the employment situation, do they?

Watching the employment statistics, as presented by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) from month to month, offers an interesting perspective on how people can develop different understandings of objective reality.

Tracing the unemployment rate, one might think Rhode Island is undergoing a strong recovery. In January 2010, it was 11.9%, and for years the state was among the worst three, periodically claiming the lead spot.  This past March, though, the rate was 9.1%, which puts five other states in a worse position.

But viewing the statistics in terms of employment, not unemployment, changes the picture entirely.  That fact is most starkly seen in comparison with the worst two states for unemployment, California and Nevada, with which Rhode Island shared the bottom three for so many months: Both of them added employment from February to March, while the Ocean State lost employment. Yet, they’re still at the bottom for unemployment, while Rhode Island is moving away from it.

The difference is that many more people have decided to look for work in those Western states, while the story of Rhode Island is one of people giving up.

The evidence is also visible in the following chart, particularly in the line for labor force.  That’s the number of people who say that they are either employed or looking for work.  The sharp decline is the entire reason for the ostensible improvement of the unemployment rate.

Putting Rhode Island in the context of its two neighbors doesn’t improve the image.  The following chart shows labor force and employment as a percentage of its level during January 2007.

The picture bringing in national context is notable mainly because it doesn’t show much difference for Rhode Island.  The state is still the second farthest from its peak employment… although Michigan has begun to close the gap. Unless Rhode Island does something drastic, it will be an interesting experiment to watch what happens to the other two states in the bottom three by comparison; both enacted right-to-work legislation last year.

Meanwhile, a chart showing each state’s distance from its employment level from February 2010 (when the jobs decline had pretty clearly ended nationwide) is notable for the fact that the number of states in the red actually increased, with the addition of Arkansas.

The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has posted state payroll information to its transparency Web site, RIOpenGov.org.  The site lists all state employees by name, department, and division, and presents their pay, including overtime, for the years 2010 and 2011.

The Ocean State Current drew some attention to this data last week, with reports on the high pay of nurses and laundry workers, as well as high overtime payments across state government.

The articles also drew attention because of the difficulty they describe when it came to getting access to the data. Working with its transparency partner, Visible Government Online, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity spent nearly a year in back-and-forth exchanges with the state, and its request was ultimately denied.  Ultimately, the spreadsheets came from Watchdog New England, an investigative reporting project of Northeastern University.

Unfortunately, Northeastern only had data for 2010 and 2011, and its information did not include the cost of benefits.  The Center knows all of this information to be available to the public and will post it as the state provides it.

Also conspicuous on Northeastern’s page is a now-defunct link to the 2009 payroll information that once was available on the transparency site of the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition (RISC), which is now RI Taxpayers.  The loss of RISC’s Money Trail site, as well as the Ocean State Policy Research Institute (OSPRI) Transparency Train site illustrates the difficulty not only of getting such information, but also of maintaining the tools to offer the public access to it.

It shouldn’t be this difficult.

If the expenditures of taxpayer dollars are being made as efficiently as they should be, and if every apparent excess has a reasonable explanation, government officials should be eager to present the information in a clear, digestible format as an opportunity to explain the unique constraints that it faces.  Anything short of that approach is apt to give the impression that things are going on that cannot be explained.

In the meantime, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity will continue to work to gather the information and maintain the infrastructure to grant the people of Rhode Island the access they deserve.

For many months, Rhode Island has been exchanging places with two other states for worst, second worst, and third worst official unemployment rate in the United States.  February marked the milestone of Rhode Island’s breaking free from the dance.  The Ocean State’s 9.4% unemployment rate tied with North Carolina for fifth worst, behind California, Nevada, and Mississippi (all 9.6%) and Illinois (9.5%).

But the numbers deserve a closer look.

People who are considered “unemployed” have told surveyors that they are unemployed and have looked for work within the past month.  The labor force adds these people to the total number of people who say they are employed (even part time).  The unemployment rate is the unemployed people’s percentage of the total labor force.

Consequently, the rate can go down not just because more people find work, but also because fewer people are bothering to look.  Therefore, as the employment outlook improves, the unemployment rate might actually go up, because more people come to believe that it’s worthwhile for them to kick off or resume their job searches.

That is arguably what is happening for Rhode Island’s long-time companions in the bottom three: California and Nevada. Since December, California’s number of people who say they are employed has gone up 0.6%, but the total number of people in the labor force went up 0.5%.  In Nevada, employment went up 0.3%, and the labor force went up 0.1%.  In Rhode Island, by contrast, employment is up 0.1%, while labor force is down 0.3%.

This means that Rhode Island’s unemployment rate has fallen from 9.9% to 9.4%, while California and Nevada, which both had stronger employment growth, only went from 9.8% to 9.6%.  If Rhode Island’s labor force had just held steady, its unemployment rate would still be a last-place 9.8%.  If its labor force had increased as much as California’s, it would be back over 10% unemployment, based on its current employment.

By contrast, if California and Nevada had lost labor force like Rhode Island, their unemployment rates would be 8.9% and 9.2%, respectively.

The following figure gives some visual sense of what’s going on in Rhode Island. The blue line shows the labor force, which is nearly the smallest it’s been since early 2005, while the red line shows employment, which is still a long, long way from where it was when the recession began, here.

Putting these lines in the context of our neighbors, Connecticut and Massachusetts, produces another cynical silver lining: If Connecticut continues in its rapid decline while Rhode Island manages to hold relatively stagnant, the Ocean State may begin to be a little less conspicuously woeful in its region.

On a month-to-month basis, stasis is pretty much the rule across the country, although Texas and North Dakota continue to float well above their pre-recession employment peaks.  Rhode Island remains stuck as second farthest from its own peak.

Similarly, state-level employment numbers since the end of the national recession in February 2010 show general stagnation, viewed from month to month.  However, they do give some context to Rhode Island’s current rut.  Although it is tied with North Carolina when it comes to unemployment rate, the number of employed residents, compared with the recession’s trough, does not compare.

This, again, shows the effect of labor force size on unemployment rate in a way that doesn’t necessarily reflect the health of the job market. A 9.4% unemployment rate means something different when a state has nearly recovered to its peak employment and has added 5% to its employment in a few years, versus a state that is nearly 8% below its peak and has grown employment less than a percent over three years of recovery.

Putting all of the charts together, Rhode Island’s path out of the worst three when it comes to unemployment rate suggests an urgency to find its way out of the worst three when it comes to distance from employment peak.  As the scatter chart above shows, Rhode Island’s company on the latter list is Indiana and Michigan.  Both of those states took dramatic action, last year, by becoming right to work states.

It isn’t necessary for the Ocean State to pursue that particular policy, but residents should be looking for something that will improve the statistic by improving the actual health of the economy.  Eliminating the sales tax would be one option.

The State of Rhode Island spent $89.6 million on employee overtime in 2011, according to payroll data acquired by the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity.  In 2010, the total was $82.8 million. The free-market think tank will make the individual payroll data for fiscal years 2011 and 2010 available next week through an interactive transparency Web site.

The average overtime payments of the 9,415 employees receiving at least some overtime in 2011 was $9,516, but removing those who claim relatively small amounts reveals some startling totals.

In 2010, the state paid $66.1 million in payments to the 2,643 employees who claimed more than $10,000 in overtime, for an average of $25,023. In 2011, the comparable 2,712 employees claimed an average of $26,765, for a total of $72.6 million. That’s fast approaching the equivalent of a 38 Studios loan guarantee every year.

Narrowing the range more, $20.4 million went to those claiming over $50,000, for an average of $70,440. And $3.9 million went to just the 33 claiming over $100,000 in overtime payments, averaging $117,524.

In total, 579 employees made more in overtime than they did in regular pay.  Assuming all overtime hours at time and a half, 526 employees would have had to work at least an additional 50% of their ordinary hours (e.g., 60 hours on a 40 hour workweek) in order to achieve the overtime that they were paid.  That’s every single week of the year, including vacation weeks and holidays.

Honing in on the top 33 overtime recipients, it appears that these massive amounts of money are not one-year spells of heavy workloads or understaffing, but have become regular features of state government workers’ income. The following table shows the gross pay, overtime, and regular pay (gross minus overtime) of each employee who took home more than $100,000 in overtime pay in 2011, as well as his or her department.  (The table assumes that no two people with the same first and last names work in the same department and switched places with regard to who had more overtime.)

On Tuesday, an article by Suzanne Bates on the Ocean State Current looked into the twelve employees in the table from the Dept. of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH).  Yesterday, we pointed out that overtime excesses aren’t merely a factor for highly skilled employees, driving laundry workers’ total pay over the $100,000 mark.

Editing note: Added 2010 total to first paragraph at 3:55 p.m., 3/28/13.

The message making the rounds on Rhode Island’s January employment numbers is that it represented a slight, if mixed, improvement, because the unemployment rate fell to 9.8%, the lowest it’s been since early 2009.  A large reason for that fact, however, is that a methodological revision by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics made more people disappear from the Rhode Island labor force than it did from the employment rolls.

Now, the January numbers show another large drop in the labor force, nearly 1,400 people, thus “improving” the unemployment rate, even though actual employment fell for the first time since September 2011. The reason is that only 681 fewer people reported being employed.  That’s quite a different picture from Rhode Island’s new partner in last place for unemployment, California. The latter has continued to add employment, but people entering and/or returning to the labor force have kept its unemployment rate from going down.

The context of our neighboring states doesn’t offer much improvement to the picture.  Despite a long decline in Connecticut, in recent years, Rhode Island still trails by quite a bit, and its gains — which have now completely stopped — have not been at all rapid.

The national picture shows not much change, from the prior month.  Maryland has crossed the line to join those states that have recovered to their pre-recession peak employment.  But Rhode Island is still second to last, between two states that took bold action to become right-to-work states last year.

Meanwhile, employment growth since the national jobs free fall ceased in February 2010 has been minimal in Rhode Island, and it would only take a few more months of January’s trend to put the state back in the red.

Rhode Island’s unemployment rate dropped to 10.2%, after spending a couple of months at 10.4%, but at the same time, the Ocean State remains one of only two states above 10%.  Moreover, the other one, Nevada, has made up more than a 1-percentage-point gap to reach a tie for last place.

That said, the following chart shows that employment has certainly been on the upswing. (Although, to be honest, the sudden leap continues to look peculiar, given that it suggests the state’s economy is in an historic boom, whatever people’s impressions might be.)

The context of our neighboring states, however, really shows Rhode Island’s almost visible rut, even if Connecticut’s tax increases and wrap-up of stimulus spending are driving that state rapidly in our direction.

Looking at the fifty states shows not a whole lot of motion toward recovering pre-recession peaks in employment, which means Rhode Island remains second farthest from its own peak.  The last, Michigan, continues to slide, though, making Rhode Island look like less of an outlier.

Growth in employment from February 2010 is pretty much the same story of stagnation.  That’s the month that the nation’s employment cascade finally ended.

Unfortunately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from which all of this data comes, has announced its intention to change methodology on how it comes to its final numbers, so the results that will be published starting for this month’s employment situation will not be directly comparable to the decades of archives.  Stay tuned, though, to see which way they move as the math changes.  Any wagers?

After two months of unexpectedly strong employment growth, Rhode Island’s surge abated. Unemployment held at 10.4%, leaving the state at second worst in the nation, with Nevada rapidly making up the distance, and the number 3 California finally slipping below 10%.

According to survey data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the pace at which increasing numbers of Rhode Islanders say that they are working fell to about a third of what it had been for September and October, to 1,501.  Meanwhile the labor force increased by 1,411.

The following chart shows the dramatic leap up and subsequent leveling of labor force and employment, which are still well below their numbers before the Great Recession:

The following chart puts Rhode Island in the context of its two neighbors, with data for each state shown as a percentage of its level at the start of 2007.  Massachusetts continues to hold its own, while Connecticut continues its free fall, following a year of decreased government spending and increased taxes.  Regardless, barring dramatic improvement, Rhode Island looks likely to remain the bottom of Southern New England’s barrel for the foreseeable future.

A national  chart of states’ current percentage of their pre-recession peak employment shows Rhode Island still somewhat of an outlier, although Michigan is even more so.  It’s interesting to note that all three states at the bottom of this chart — Michigan, Rhode Island, and Indiana — began 2012 as non-right-to-work states, but only Rhode Island will end 2012 without having passed (or even considered) right-to-work legislation.  That may present an interesting comparison as policy in the other two states takes effect.

A final chart shows states’ progress since the nation’s employment collapse came to a decisive end, beginning February 2010.  Clearly, Connecticut’s troubles have brought it low: Out of nowhere, the state went from positive territory to worst in the country in just a few months, a reverse of Rhode Island, which trailed the nation by an even greater degree prior to its unusual burst of employment.

Single-family home sales in Rhode Island continued to edge toward equilibrium, in November, meaning that the number of sales increased at an accelerated rate, while the inventory of houses on the market continued to go down. The median sales price continued to go down, too, but its rate of decrease remained steady.

These trends are of the most recent twelve months compared with the corresponding twelve months the year before.  The data derives from a local real estate tool available on the Web site of William Raveis Real Estate.

As the state’s economy improves (if it improves), more demand should keep sales increasing, while the moderating inventory leaves fewer options, thus driving sales prices back up.  At the moment, the market appears still to be seeking the bottom at which sellers don’t have to continue lowering prices.  That’s the case in nine cities and towns, although as the size of the town decreases, the less reliable the numbers are, because individual cases can skew them so much.

The shaded cells in the following table mark results that point in the direction that is, in general, not desirable. This is the first month since I began collecting these numbers in July that none of the cells in the sales change column are shaded.

Rhode Island Cities and Towns Single-Family Home Sales, Twelve Months Ending in November, 2011 to 1012

The Downward Spiral Index that I’ve been compiling — sales change minus inventory change plus median price change — is a bit of a misnomer, at this point, inasmuch as no cities or towns are in negative territory, but the five worst-performing communities are the following (with October’s rank in parentheses):

1. North Kingstown (6)
2. Central Falls (1)
3. Tiverton (3)
4. West Greenwich (4)
5. Woonsocket (2)

The following are the top 5 communities on the desirable side of the index:

1. Narragansett (2)
2. Foster (1)
3. Little Compton (8)
4. Coventry (4)
5. Newport (3)

The other angle that I’ve been taking to present these numbers is an index of the time that houses have spent on the market before being sold and the ratio of average sales price to average asking price. It’s important to note that this ratio isn’t the sales price compared with the asking price for the actual property sold.  Rather, it’s the sales price compared with the asking prices of houses still on the market.

Last month, the average time on the market statewide was 95 days, with the sale-list ratio as 59.9%, so the improvement by this measure has been very slight.

Rhode Island Cities and Towns Single-Family Home Sales, Time on Market and Average Sales Price to Average List Price Ratio, November 2012

1:19 p.m.
As tends to happen when the people of Rhode Island rouse themselves to attend a committee hearing in the middle of the day, there wasn’t much parking around the State House, and there was a line to get through the metal detector. Regulars move more quickly, because we’ve got everything ready to go through the scanner.

One regular, Linda Katz of the Economic Progress Institute, managed to skip through the process altogether with a nod and elbow touch to Capitol Police. (I don’t know if I’m that regular… and Linda and I are not related, by the way.)

1:24 p.m.
Difficulty getting into the city and parking led me to miss the anti-toll rally, but I saw a few people I know from around Tiverton heading out. The hallway outside of House Finance is full, and there’s apparently a spillover room.

The committee is sparsely populated: Ray Hull (D, N. Providence and Providence), Larry Valencia (D, Exeter, Hopkinton, Richmond), Agostino Silva (D, Central Falls), William San Bento (D, Pawtucket). None of them, incidentally, are from communities that would be most heavily affected by the toll.

(I’d note that the committee moved the toll legislation to the end, so it’s possible representatives will make their way down in time.)

1:35 p.m.
Lisa Blais from OSTPA had been kept in the hallway, and the committee called her name to testify on unrelated legislation. One of the toll opponents ran out to get her, and she rushed in to start testifying on the toll bills. She got a good couple minutes in before acting chairman Silva managed to alert her to the fact that they’re on a different bill.

The error made her a minor hero, though, among the people in the audience, who began holding up their signs.

1:43 p.m.
Haven’t seen this happen before: a man testifying on behalf of arts-related tax legislation had his cell phone go off right in the middle of his testimony. His ringtone was the guitar riff from “Bad to the Bone.”

1:54 p.m.
When did I stop being able to sit on the floor for hours at a time…

Incidentally, Rep. Valencia’s bill for an office of inspector general got a smattering of applause from the toll opponents.

1:57 p.m.
Taxi drivers are testifying on behalf of a bill to repeal the sales tax on taxis that was enacted last year. One taxi driver, “a regular guy from Providence,” says he doesn’t pass the tax on to his passengers, because they think he’s ripping them off, so he just pays it out of his own pocket.

A woman who works with one taxi company is confirming that the previous speaker’s experience is common. She adds the statement that many passengers just don’t pay it and walk away.

2:01 p.m.
The next man, from Airport Taxi, says that riders ask about the tax, so instead of talking about the wonderful things about Rhode Island, and the many things to do here, he spends the ride explaining the tax.

Funny, a professional associate recently flew in to the airport, and he told me that, with no prior conversation, the taxi driver jumped into badmouthing the tax.

Gio Ciccione (hired lobbyist for the taxi drivers) says there are 40 taxi drivers in the hall to show support, but that they won’t all testify.

Rep. Frank Ferri (D, Warwick), who has joined the committee, asked Gio what MA and CT do… whether they have a tax like this. Gio said they collect money from taxi drivers in other ways (like utilities tax). Of course, “Rhode Island does those, too…”

2:06 p.m.
The last witness testified that his job is specifically for disadvantaged communities, so he doesn’t expect tips, anyway, but he’s noticed a sharp job in calls for his service.  His interpretation is that people just can’t afford the seven percent increase in total price.

Rep. Hull: “Maybe this was enacted in a strange way, but we hear you.”

2:08 p.m.
And now to tolls. Rep. Silva is introducing the bills and can’t pronounce the name of the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge. “I’m not from there, sorry.”

Rep. John Edwards (D, Portsmouth, Tiverton) is introducing his toll-preventing legislation. His opening image is of a popular clam shack in Portsmouth, frequently visited by folks from Massachusetts. “People just aren’t going to pay $3.75 each way to get an 85-cent stuffy.”

2:12 p.m.
Other committee members who have arrived: Eileen Naughton (D, Warwick), Scott Slater (D, Providence), and John Carnevale (Johnston, Providence).

Isn’t there anybody from the East Bay on the Finance Committee?

2:15 p.m.
As if to answer the question: Rep. Ray Gallison (D, Bristol, Portsmouth) has arrived.

Where are Joy Hearn (D, Barrington, East Providence) and Deb Ruggerio (D, Jamestown, Middletown)?

Jeanne Smith, a key organizer of the push to “STOP” the tolls presented the two tubs of petitions that they’ve been carting around to all of the hearings.

Gallison notes that the new Pawtucket and I-Way bridges have no toll at all.

2:19 p.m.
Silva asks the audience to hold off applause until the end of testimony. He then voted to… hey, wouldn’t you guess it… to hold all bills for further study.

2:21 p.m.
Senator Walter Felag (Bristol, Tiverton, Warren) is testifying for the bills.

By the way, for those interested in the guy in the chicken suit, I’m pretty sure he/she won’t go without plenty of coverage [see below for explanation]. Rep. Edwards called the bridge toll a “cash cow” for the Bridge and Turnpike Authority. How a bridge toll becomes an animal farm issue, I don’t know…

2:25 p.m.
Edwards and Felag both hit on the point that this is a brand new bridge. Edwards said a maintenance toll would only have to be eight cents. The toll is, obviously, intended to fund the maintenance of the older, higher-maintenance bridges and free up transportation money for the rest of the state.

Felag says the solution will come with the May revenue conference next week. He thinks they’ll find that there’s been more revenue than predicted.

2:28 p.m.
Tiverton Town Council President Ed Roderick managed to make it to this hearing: “This is not a tourist bridge; it’s a working-man’s bridge.” Many of the people who cross this bridge are minimum wage workers, many from out of the state, and this would be a huge reduction in their take-home pay.

2:30 p.m.
Keith Hamilton, from the Portsmouth Town Council, is testifying for the legislation.

2:33 p.m.
Next panel: Tiverton School Committee Chairwoman Sally Black, Tiverton Town Council Member Bill Gerlach, and state Representative Dennis Canario (D, Portsmouth, Tiverton, Little Compton.

2:36 p.m.
Black gives the origin of the chicken (she has a sign that says “Cash Cow Squawk”): apparently somebody from government, in a moment of candor, said the toll’s motivation is that the East Bay community “can be plucked without much of a squawk.” (That’s more of a paraphrase than a quote.)

2:39 p.m.
Canario notes that people populated the community and ordered their lives around the understanding that the bridge is not a toll bridge.

2:42 p.m.
Wow, the air conditioner in this room is loud and distracting. While I’m offering meta-commentary, I should note that this room is a more difficult one from which to liveblog than others (like Senate Judiciary), so this won’t be as comprehensive as I sometimes manage to be (which is still not comprehensive enough for some).

Anthony Viveiros just testified, now up is Larry Fitzmorris, from STOP and various taxpayer groups. He says he thinks the number of signatures that they’ve collected might be a record in the state, and they could have kept collecting them.

He says the state is using a “divide and conquer” system to fund our infrastructure.

2:48 p.m.
Silva interjects that they’ve got five pages of people signed up to testify, and they’re not even halfway down the first one. I’d wager they’re going to have to break in order to go up to the floor session and come back down. Don’t know why they scheduled it for midday.

2:51 p.m.
It just occurred to me that the House leadership is going to be unveiling an economic development plan in a few minutes, while the hearing rolls on to stop a toll on a bridge to an island that has been especially badly hit, economically, over the past decade.

Don’t know if that’s ironic or typical.

2:54 p.m.
Roy Berberick, who testified very eloquently about studying the economic implications of the tolls at the Senate hearing, was in the middle of testimony, and Rep. Silva cut him off, noting that he’d gone well beyond his allotted time (there was no announcement of allotted times).

Walter Guertler, who testified about his German food restaurant at the Senate, stood up in the audience and said he would defer his time to Roy Berberick. “He knows more about this than anybody else.”

Silva said they’re going to follow the rules, and “if you cannot control yourself, we would ask you to step outside.”

3:01 p.m.
Rep. Kenneth Marshall (D, Bristol, Warren) noted the economic development press conference about to happen.

Rep. Spencer Dickinson (D, South Kingstown) is suggesting that they should continue the tolls on the Newport Bridge and subsidize the other bridges. He says that, when the Newport Bridge was new, folks in 1969 were happy to pay $13.06 to cross rather than take a ferry. He gets there by adjusting the original 83-cent tokens for inflation.

He’s not calling for that much, but for $6 a crossing.

3:04 p.m.
Silva cut off Rep. Dickinson, too. Now Sen. Lou DiPalma (D, most of the East Bay) is speaking.

Two cents from me: if only these fiscal issues had as enthusiastic backers as social issues. Imagine if people refused to get up from the microphone and Silva was forced to have one after another removed from the room. Really: some hearings go into the early mornings of the next day. Why should people from the East Bay be so constricted in their testimony?

3:09 p.m.
The committee is down to three members of 15. Remaining: Silva, Gallison, Carnevale. What is this?

John Vit offering testimony just pointed out that RI has a lot of deficient bridges. Let’s toll all 1,000 of them, he says.

3:12 p.m.
I was just wondering if any of the Rhode Islanders on the testimony list, who as I said, are not State House regulars, would comment on the empty committee chairs, and Pete Hewitt just said, “Good afternoon, gentlemen, all two of you.” (He must have missed Carnevale, off to the side.)

Silva explained that there’s a press conference going on. Hewitt responded that he feels like he’s testifying in Congress, like “people speaking to walls.”

3:17 p.m.
Gallison jumps in, between testimonies, to stress that the fact that 12 out of 15 members of the committee found something else more important than sitting before the people of the East Bay should not be taken as a sign of a lack of concern. The hearing is videotaped, and the written testimony will be on the record, he says.

Be that as it may, it’s definitely an apt microcosm of the issue, and the way legislators from the rest of the state think the East Bay is some distant land of people who can just absorb a toll in order to prevent tolls on their own local bridges and roads (or, obviously, other reductions in the state’s many programs and plush spending).

3:29 p.m.
The current speaker says that, when the state changed the student funding formula, East Bay communities took a hit and didn’t protest, but raised taxes. When the government imposed a dog-groomer tax, they accepted it, in part because “many of us can’t pick up the dogs to put them in the tub.” When the government put a marijuana dispensary in town, the people worked together to make it non-disruptive.

But now: “We’re oppressed with taxes, we’re oppressed with rules and regulations, and we look at what you’re spending on some budgets at the expense of others. Neglect of roads and bridges have been a primary victim.”

3:35 p.m.
Pat Silvia, who lives in Portsmouth but grew up in Tiverton, likened the toll to a ransom.

“The only two tolls in the whole state happen to be to the same island.”

3:39 p.m.
Howard Benesch says realtors have told him to expect property values to drop. “I don’t know of any state that has achieved success through taxation.”

3:42 p.m.
Benesch notes the “astonishing and irresponsible leadership” behind a process that never does a study of the economic impact and then targets a politically weak community as a “cash cow.”

3:46 p.m.
Benesch’s wife says she was a victim of identity theft and has been advised not to get a transponder. That would force her to pay the huge toll for crossing without one ($5.25 per crossing).

3:47 p.m.
Current speaker says he worked for 50 years as a transportation planner, and none of the common practices in the field have been followed on this issue.

3:51 p.m.
“You’re changing the entire fabric of an urban area when you put that kind of barrier in the way.”

3:56 p.m.
As Tiverton resident Pat Curran reads her testimony, Silva urges her to move quickly, because they have to break at 4:00 for the floor session, and then they’ll come back.

Curran: “When you have someone’s hands in your pocket taking more than you can give, that is greed at its finest.”

(I should note, once again, that it creates a bit of cognitive dissonance to hear people who’ve fought for tax increase after tax increase on the property owners of Tiverton now come to the State House and talk about hands in pockets.)

3:58 p.m.
Town Clerk Nancy Mello says people coming in to town hall to pay taxes and do other town business are expressing real concern about signing up for transponders, even apart from paying more money in taxes/tolls. She says it’s lucky that she’s closed and sold all of the small businesses with which she’s been involved.

That’s a healthy attitude for the state government to encourage!

4:08 p.m.
Anne Dupree says she’s very disappointed at all the empty seats on the committee. Silva objects that they’re all very busy and will be in and out. Jim O’Dell, sitting at the testimony table to speak says, “Sure.”

“They should be here,” said Dupree.

Laughter from the audience when Dupree mentions the governor’s going on TV talking about supporting small businesses.

4:12 p.m.
Dupree calls out Governor Lincoln Chafee for not being here. She says the toll will be a hit to the whole state.

“The alarms are blaring, and for some reason, he keeps hitting the ‘sleep’ button.”

“Rhode Island’s not going to get anything from these tolls; we’re just going to get hit.”

4:19 p.m.
O’Dell: “I told the governor, ‘change your moniker to killing Rhode Island one small business at a time.‘” Though it might sound “antagonistic,” he vows never to pay the toll.

4:24 p.m.
Rick Hodges, of Hodges Badge Company in Portsmouth, says multiple Fall River mill owners have already approached him, trying to sell him on the idea of moving his business there. Tolls might push him over the edge to that, in part for the benefit of his workforce living on the other side of the bridge.

4:28 p.m.
Tiverton resident, Roger Bennis, says he and his wife go over the bridge 50 times in a given week. Silva paused him to say they’re going to have to go up to the floor in a moment.

4:29 p.m.
The committee is at recess. They’re about halfway through the testimony list.

4:32 p.m.
Overhearing a lot of statements of disappointment about how this whole operation runs. Folks feeling taken advantage of.

6:08 p.m.
With battery and scheduling issues, it would have been challenging for me to stay. A parking ticket from the City of Providence that I found when I went out to move my car was decisive. I wasn’t alone among those who left.

I see on Capitol TV that the committee is back. Chairman Helio Melo (D, East Providence) is in his seat.

The frustration of a Mrs. Martin speaking right now is so palpable it’s coming through the computer screen. She doesn’t understand what gives the state the right to let bridges fall apart and then rebuild them, promising no tolls and then implementing tolls. Do people understand, I wonder, that the legislators are part of the “they” whose authority to waste money Mrs. Martin is questioning?

6:23 p.m.
The woman who just testified said she’s the last of her family living in Rhode Island. Her sister left. Her father, a retired policeman, moved to Florida. Her brother, a retired policeman, moved to Texas.

6:30 p.m.
Somebody from the state Transportation Advisory Committee is arguing that they need new funding streams. Name-checks the sequester.

6:32 p.m.
He says he lives in North Providence. The audience erupted in “awwws.” Melo stopped the man and threatened: “That’s a very good way to end this hearing.”

6:38 p.m.
With no more testimony, Melo began to make a motion to “hold all bills for further study,” which (for those who don’t follow the legislature closely) means it goes into an un-voted-on limbo for deal making and legislative leaders’ personal discretion.

Recently, Representative Patrick O’Neill (D, Pawtucket) roiled the State House when he disrupted that process by leading a surprise vote to move an ethics bill forward to the floor of the House for a vote against leadership’s wishes. In that case, House Speaker Gordon Fox (D, Providence) came up with a (we’ll just say) interesting interpretation of the House rules to force the committee to undo that vote.

Back to the present: realizing that the bills had already been sent into back-room limbo, Melo ended the hearing by thanking everybody who came to testify. “That’s what makes Democracy work.”

A poignant way to end a rushed hearing, much of which was conducted with 12 of the 15 members of the committee not even in the room.

6:55 p.m.
I’ll end with a plea to everybody who is upset about these tolls: Please, please take the opportunity to consider whether the bad governance visible in the process of implementing tolls (and in the tolls themselves) is deeper than just the circumstances leading to this case. Reflect on whether, maybe, you’ve kinda sorta supported some variation of the mindset that brings a state to this point — from the spend-first-find-money-later method of budgeting to the political structure that turns community involvement nasty in order to get people in office who will further narrow political goals.

If you felt like the people who took time out of the middle of their days to testify were speaking to empty chairs, it’s partly because, well, they were.  But it’s also partly because these decisions are made on other floors and in other buildings, away from the committee rooms.  That’s only possible because of the political atmosphere that we tolerate in this state, in our apathy and fear.

12:18 p.m.
I’ve claimed my space at the limited-seating “conversation” that the RI Foundation and General Treasurer Gina Raimondo have arranged with Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution. The place is filling up (it’s fascinating to watch folks’ seating choices). Not all the tables are filled, so if you’re on the waiting list that RI Foundation head Neil Steinberg’s last email said exists and you’re standing by the door, you might want to get your car keys.

12:29 p.m.
I don’t see Linda Katz from the Economic Progress Institute. That might have been a record for me, with three unrelated Katzes in the same room.

The lunch at the Johnson & Wales culinary museum was literally a pick-your-own-sandwich bag lunch. Excellent sandwiches, but some audience grumbling about stale brownies. I thought it was maybe a culinary-specialty thing that my taste buds weren’t sufficiently developed to appreciate, but it did inspire me to eat an apple instead, which is a good thing.

12:34 p.m.
Steinberg is kicking the event off.

12:35 p.m.
Steinberg: “This is not an announcement of another report.” It’s “action oriented.”

12:36 p.m.
Treasurer Raimondo is up. The “they” who “have to fix the economy is you” (meaning the people in the room). (Apparently, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.)

12:37 p.m.
Raimondo is hitting on the theme that I always harp on at these events: this is fun and all, for us, but there’s a state full of people “out there” who are struggling to get by.

12:39 p.m.
Bruce Katz’s approach, she says, is “a bottom-up vision,” starting with grassroots, local efforts and buy-in. (If we think about those struggling Rhode Islanders, though, it might be better called a “bottoms-up vision.”)

12:40 p.m.
“Unless we all come together, and unless we all contribute something to the revitalization of the economy, it’s not going to happen,” Raimondo says. She ties this with the Make It Happen event, the legislature’s efforts, the governor’s “sustainable living” studies, saying it’s the perfect time to act.

(From her introduction, frankly, it sounds like Katz’s “approach” is already baked into the “equity” program the U.S. Housing and Urban Development grant that the governor is currently following.)

12:43 p.m.
Bruce Katz says he went to summer camp in Narragansett (Camp Fuller) and that’s when he decided to go to Brown.

12:44 p.m.
Katz says the “brutal challenge” that we face is high unemployment. Nationally and in Rhode Island, poverty has seen a “quantum leap” in the past decade, partly because of the Great Recession, but partly because of the “failed business model” that exports manufacturing.

He says by 2023, the federal government will have “left the state,” leaving “basically a failed state.” He says we’ll have to rely on local and state activity to advance. (That’s what I’ve been thinking as I’ve heard all the talk about what the sequester will do to Rhode Island… that it’s time to take control of our own destiny and stop expecting to be the “first in last out” of every recession, as the governor and speaker of the House have mentioned accepting.)

12:49 p.m.
Katz: We have to stop the “political rhetoric” about a green economy and just move forward with innovation.

Looking at metro areas, Katz says most of the rising cities are in Asia, with most of the failing cities in Europe and a few in the U.S. “Going forward, growth is going to come from without,” meaning exports to other areas of the world.

12:51 p.m.
Katz says the issue of increasing minorities isn’t an “equity” question, it’s a competitiveness issue: we’ve got to bring our growing minorities up to speed.

12:53 p.m.
He says Brookings loves Rhode Island because the whole state is a metropolitan area, 100%. We’re going through “a shock decade” because everything’s falling apart, here.

He says the jobs that we’re creating don’t pay as well as the jobs we’ve lost in Rhode Island: “You’ve got to intervene in the fundamentals of the economy.”

12:55 p.m.
Katz: Try to get your advanced industries growing at a faster rate in order to move forward the rest of the economy.

12:56 p.m.
On green jobs: “You need to understand what your specialties are and who your competitors are.” (This is the part of the presentation where I begin to wonder who “we” are? Is he saying that “we” need to hand the reins to the political class that runs the government to make the final decisions and plan our lives for us?)

12:57 p.m.
Mentions “smart growth” to make sure that people from around the state can get to the jobs that “we’re” creating.

Turning to the activities of Brookings, he says they don’t do reports. That’s “shelfware.” They offer action plans, as if they’re coaches. (From think tank to progressive consulting firm?)

The plan starts with:
* Know your market niche
* Identify a regional economic vision and mission
* Identify strategies and goals
* Specify products, services and policies
* Develop an operational plan
* Develop a financial plan

And one other that I missed. This is starting to sound like a sales pitch for Brookings’ new consulting services.

1:01 p.m.
He says people more and more want to live near where they work. (I’d suggest that there’s a free market app for that.)

1:03 p.m.
He’s going over some projects that they’ve done, offering a three-word imitation of Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago. Katz: Small family-run companies of 50 employees or so need government to take care of tasks like finding outside contractors for them.

1:05 p.m.
He says Brookings helped Chicago find hundreds of millions of dollars that is currently “slated” to be saved.

Brookings has also been active in Nevada, which is sort of the “wreckage of the recession,” because the state went crazy building houses. Then they worked with the Republican governor and Democrat legislature to implement the plan.

“Nevada is growing up, basically becoming an adolescent.”

1:08 p.m.
We need to “join up” all of the aspects of local society: business, philanthropic, government.

“You’ve gotta basically design the whole process, so that there’s a whole sequence of initiatives.”

1:09 p.m.
Scott Wolf gets the first question/comment. He highlights that RI doesn’t have great access to public transportation, but does have “good bones” (Katz’s phrase) for building the economy he’s talking about. He says we ought to have more investment in transportation.

Katz suggests the question: “how do you level the playing field so that redevelopment is as simple and affordable” as “greenfield” development. (He didn’t say whether “leveling the playing field” means bringing costs down in urban areas or driving it up elsewhere.)

“Every city in the United States would kill for that!” meaning the open land available from the 195 redirect.

1:13 p.m.
Katz says our “jobs problem” is issues numbers 1 through 5 for Rhode Island.

1:14 p.m.
Next question/comment from a businessman I don’t know, who asked if we can’t just do this without the government.

Katz: There’s one “category of stuff” that the private sector will drive, but there’s another category of stuff in which government is essential.

He used an analogy of who sets up the parade; I think he meant the government did that… clearing the road, organizing things, and so on.

1:17 p.m.
Responding to a question about manufacturing from a local entrepreneur, Katz says societies used to push manufacturing out of the living spaces because it was dirty, but it’s clean now, and we’ve got to “rebuild” to account for that change.

“The post-industrial economy is unbelievable nonsense.”

1:19 p.m.
Next question: “What are the critical elements of an innovation district?”

Katz: you set up an area where there’s a nucleus of innovative activity, and people want to live near where they work. The result is a “mash-up” of communities that ends up attracting new sectors, businesses, and so on.

Brown and the hospital cluster is “a potential innovation district.”

1:21 p.m.
Last question: what are the barriers that you’ve seen.

Katz: The number one barrier is waiting for the Federal government. After Reconstruction, Americans built up the Federal government. “They have ceased to function. They’re a failed state.”

“No one’s coming to save the state of Rhode Island.” It’s on us.

He says we’ve got “the best” Congressional delegation in the country, but they live in a dysfunctional setting.

“We’ve got to do this from the bottom up.” He calls it the “metropolitan revolution” that “has to happen this century.”

1:24 p.m.
In closing remarks, Steinberg says this event shows how unique Rhode Island is, because we could set something like this up in 24 hours.

Referring to the PolicyLink report showing the racial generation gap released last week, Steinberg says that if he were a young entrepreneur, he would focus his products on aging Boomers and young people “of color.”

1:38 p.m.
There’s a surprisingly high media attendance at what initially looked to be a generic “sustainable communities” meeting of the HUD Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Rhode Island Consortium. The meeting was initially scheduled for the DEM building, as I recall, but they moved it to the State Room in the State House. That was an unfortunate move, because the acoustics in here are really terrible.

1:43 p.m.
The reason this meeting became a big deal, I suppose, is that Fourth Economy will be presenting the initial component of its study of business climate in Rhode Island. I don’t think that’s the major story, but the major story will take months or years to develop (yes, that’s a tease).

1:43 p.m.
Danielle Bergstrom introduces her organization, PolicyLink, which is acting under a direct grant from the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to handle the “equity” piece of the grants that the federal government handed out to smaller-scale governments and groups.

1:45 p.m.
Victor Rubin of PolicyLink is going over the idea of an “equity driven” economy. That’s necessary, he says, because in the future, a majority of Americans will have darker skin, which he says is relevant somehow.

1:48 p.m.
Rubin says the “racial generation gap” is particularly notable, as older folks become more white and young folks more non-white. This has implications for “the nature and the quality of the community.” In 1980, there was a 7 percentage point gap between the percentage of young people and senior citizens who are POCs (people of color); in 2010, it was 28 percentage points.

1:50 p.m.
He says RI’s GDP kept up with the national rate, but employment didn’t. Moreover, most of our losses were in the middle-skill range, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody who’s paid attention to what I’ve been saying for the better part of a decade: that it’s productive-class folks seeking to be upwardly mobile who have been leaving.

1:53 p.m.
“The economy doesn’t treat people of different races and genders equally.” (I’m not sure whether Keynesian or Austrian economics is more racist. But I have often wondered whether particle physics is a force for bigotry in the universe.)

1:57 p.m.
Rubin says that equity requires us to start by asking ourselves what minority entrepreneurs need… as opposed to just making it easy to do business and interact with each other in the state.

2:00 p.m.
Now Fourth Economy is up. Their study focused on various areas of economic development. First was a business climate analysis: a lot of rankings “don’t speak well” to Rhode Island.

CEO Rich Overmeyer emphasizes that they looked more deeply into the rankings than the top-line number, to see where RI actually is doing poorly. (Incidentally, that’s what the request for proposals asked for… essentially looking for ways to change the rankings without adjusting the priorities of the governing class.)

2:04 p.m.
I’m still not sure why the state hired another group for tens of thousands of dollars to conduct a study of the same-old data.

2:06 p.m.
Overmeyer emphasizes that “sustainable” in their context includes community measures, not just “green” stuff.

RI performs better (middle of the pack) in diversity measures, especially business ownership. (But his slides are like the lower lines on a doctor’s eye chart. Maybe some of the money that taxpayers fork over for these studies and presentations should go to training on PowerPoint.)

2:09 p.m.
He says RI does alright on access to capital at later stages of business development, but not at the earlier, more-start-up level.

2:13 p.m.
Britt Page, of the eponymous consulting firm that Fourth Economy hired for help, who is speaking from the table because she’s on crutches, is offering a recitation of the sorts of businesses in the Ocean State.

She mentions “artificial skin.” No plug for the more-brains industry for which the Providence Chamber has been advocating.

2:18 p.m.
Overmeyer says RI has a lot of “smart people” looking into growing the RI economy, and “we need to come together” and come up with a coordinated plan.

It’s amazing to me that all of these discussions begin with the assumption that a technocratic ruling class can centrally plan a successful economy. Overmeyer keeps referring to a “grow your own” approach to economic development, or “economic gardening”; it’s curious that autonomous people acting to provide for their families and advance their careers are presented, in that analogy, as plants to be grown by a gardener applying fertilizer and water.

2:21 p.m.
Governor Chafee says that we just have to “accept” that we’re going to be a majority non-white society. (You know, I don’t think I’ve heard anybody within the past decade object to that as a concept or rebel against it.)

Chafee emphasizes that the people around the table are “planners,” which makes RI a “little bit unique” in how we’re going about economic development.

2:23 p.m.
One of the consortium members, Scott Wolf, is saying that our sales tax burden is actually pretty modest, claiming that it’s an “urban legend” that RI has high sales taxes. (Sadly, it’s pretty clear that the high tax rate, legend or not, has an effect on where people shop.)

2:27 p.m.
Another member is mildly objecting to a Fourth Economy suggestion that RI does alright with affordable housing, saying that it’s a bifurcated market, with newer homes that are unaffordable and older homes that may be affordable, but aren’t really desirable.

2:30 p.m.
Another member, Jeanne Boyle, says she’s concerned that the racial generation gap will present problems with education, going forward, as older white people with higher property taxes object to paying ever-growing prices to educate non-white children.

The next member to speak says that the number of white people in this room illustrates the problem that a number of “voices” are being missed.

(Why is everything racial, with the types of “planners” who end up in these sorts of seats?)

2:36 p.m.
Applause for governor as he makes his exit and the group goes forward with its meeting.

2:39 p.m.
Housekeeping type issues filling in the last of the meeting. No comments from the public.

4:32 p.m.
Terrible traffic in Providence — attributable, perhaps, to poor snow removal and massive road deterioration — made me a bit late for the Senate Finance committee hearing on the Sakonnet River Bridge tolls, but Capitol TV shows the legislators still chatting on the floor.

Room 313 of the State House is overflow capacity, at this point, but I’ll confess to being still skeptical about the odds of repealing the toll. As I’ve said before, if this many people had been present for the House Finance Committee hearing at which the tolls made their first appearance or in the gallery during the House floor debate, it just may have never gotten this far.

A lesson for the future, folks.

4:42 p.m.
A Capitol Police officer is announcing that there’s an overflow room next door for those who want some more space. I haven’t seen that announced before.

4:48 p.m.
It’s like a blending of my worlds, here, with all the Tiverton people in the room. The Newport Daily News even renewed its State House beat for the evening, sending Joe Baker up to cover the hearing. Upon introducing himself, he reminded me of a commentary spat we had a few years ago.

People have long memories. I’d forgotten about that.

4:56 p.m.
As the Senators filter in, I’ve refreshed my memory about the Joe Baker exchange: here, here, and here. Ah, the early days of the Obama administration.

5:06 p.m.
Senate Communications Director Greg Paré handed out to the press the sign-in sheet for witnesses. A little over 50 names on the list.

5:16 p.m.
Sen. Walter Felag (D, Bristol, Warren, Tiverton) introduced his bill (S0020). (My computer surprised me with one of those inexplicable automatic updates that restarts the computer, so I’m playing catch-up.) His basic message, he says, is that “we don’t want the tolls.” He suggested an alternative funding mechanism of removing the governor’s incentive payment for municipal pensions.

5:21 p.m.
Sen. Louis DiPalma (D, Newport, Middletown, Little Compton, Tiverton) is now introducing his alternative bill (S0242), which eliminates the tolls and increases vehicle inspection fees across the state. (Yeah, I’d say they can find the money in the budget as it is.) When the increased fees exceed the bridge maintenance costs, the excess money will go to road and bridge maintenance. “Putting us on the path” to funding infrastructure properly… didn’t the General Assembly say such things about increasing the gas tax? Wasn’t the sales tax implemented mid-century to make sure that schools could be adequately funded?

Seems to me that when they’re serious about something, they’ll find the money in other spending.

5:28 p.m.
Representative John Edwards (D, Portsmouth, Tiverton): “This toll is not about maintaining the Sakonnet River Bridge; it’s mainly about maintaining the other three bridges.” His point is that the new bridge won’t need much maintenance, so it’s unfair to hit up the folks who use it for all of the others.

Sen. Chris Ottiano (R, Portsmouth, Tiverton) spoke before Edwards.

Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed is sitting in on the Finance Committee dais. She asked Chairman Daniel DaPonte to ask everybody who testifies whether they would support tolls on the Mount Hope Bridge or an increase of the toll on the Newport Bridge.

Edwards says he would not.

Ottianno says this is a rare instance of a Republican supporting an increase in fees… namely DiPalma’s car inspection fee alternative. I’m not so sure he’s accurate that RI Republicans are habitually loath to raise taxes.

Newcomer Rep. Dennis Canario (D, Little Compton, Portsmouth, Tiverton) was of like mind with the other two legislators at the witness table.

5:37 p.m.
Resident Jonathan Cottrell, who signed in as an “independent man” says, “I’m here to say two things: fiscal responsibility and jobs. If we’re not about that, we’ve got nothing.” On the other hand, he likes the inspection fee alternative.

5:40 p.m.
Pete Hewett says the state has a “prioritization problem.” He says the funding can be found within the budget as it is.

5:44 p.m.
Resident Barbara Pelletier calls for giving everybody in Rhode Island a transponder so that the state can implement a mileage tax… oh, boy. (Can there be any doubt that such comments are music to the legislators’ ears?) She had some other ideas, like selling naming rights to the bridge.

5:46 p.m.
Former Tiverton Town Council member Rob Coulter notes his wife’s business on the island and his work on the Navy base as evidence of his standing to testify about the harm that tolls will do to a broad array of people.

“We have not been listened to.” He says various meetings related to the tolls have been postponed and open records requests to DOT have not been responded to. “The process has not been fair, and it has not been thorough.”

He points out that the toll bridge would create a barrier between Tiverton and the rest of Rhode Island… alludes to the town’s history of shifting between Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

“The bridge is a statewide asset” and ought to be funded statewide. He also thinks lowering the Newport Bridge toll would ultimately increase revenue.

5:52 p.m.
Peter Roberts, a resident of the Island Park neighborhood of Portsmouth, says he’s 100% disabled and on Social Security. He can’t afford even a small toll.

He also points out that the summer traffic in his neighborhood is all from Massachusetts, because the beach is free and the parking is free. A toll would shift the balance and destroy the businesses serving those visitors.

5:55 p.m.
Dennis Klodnell owns DePaul Diesel Service in Portsmouth, and several of his 11 employees live in Massachusetts, and his business goes over the bridge frequently. They also just invested a million dollars in a facility in Tiverton.

I’d suggest that folks around the state don’t really understand that the East Bay has developed to treat the Sakonnet River Bridge as more of a back road, not at all comparable to the Newport Bridge, or even the Mount Hope Bridge.

Tracy Anthony, of Clements Marketplace in Portsmouth is noting that people drive miles to save money on groceries, and tolling the bridge would have a disproportionate impact on their shopping decisions. “If I lose revenue, the state will lose revenue, and people will lose jobs.”

Tony Viveiros, now: “Rhode Island did not get into this situation overnight.”

6:02 p.m.
Larry Fitzmorris, a member of the Portsmouth Concerned Citizens and the STOP (the tolls) group, sat down with two totes completely filled with paper, for a stack about two feet tall. Chairman DaPonte asked, “You’re not going to read all that, are you?”

Fitzmorris turned the totes around and they’re labeled: “31,000 signatures.” They’re the petition to stop the tolls.

6:05 p.m.
He says that every municipal council except Newport has passed a resolution opposing the toll.

“The bridge is located right in the center of our society in the East Bay.”

6:08 p.m.
He notes that people without transponders will pay around $1,500 a year to go to work each day. I already know people from Massachusetts who work at low-paying jobs on the island who just won’t be able to continue with their jobs.

As Fitzmorris notes, more people will try to avoid the toll by going over the Mount Hope Bridge, turning Bristol into a parking lot.

6:10 p.m.
Sen. Felag asked if Fitzmorris has any analysis of the effect on the Newport Grand slot casino. Fitzmorris said the owner has projected that she’ll be out of business within five years, between Massachusetts casinos and the tolls.

6:12 p.m.
Roy Berberick of the Portsmouth Business Associations says that he also supports removing the toll on the Newport Bridge, with the silver-lining downside of causing parking issues in Newport because of the economic boom.

He goes on to say that the state could definitely find 1/2 of 1% of money out of the $8 billion budget to maintain all bridges with other revenue. He speaks from the experience of one who’s helped the military adjust to the “peace dividend” cuts to military spending that occur when the nation isn’t at war.

6:16 p.m.
Berberick says that the state did no adequate economic analysis (but I’d add that that’s nothing new… even when they do economic impact studies), and that the economic losses would prevent the toll from being “a pure revenue play.”

6:23 p.m.
Former Portsmouth Town Council President Joe Robicheau notes that the state has effectively been funding infrastructure by the equivalent of borrowing the down payment for a mortgage every year for fifty years, which he calls “the height of financial incompetence.”

6:27 p.m.
Now a collection of four business-community representatives. Messages are starting to repeat. (As long as nobody repeats the idea of a mileage tax…)

6:30 p.m.
Bill [something not on the list], of the local chamber, says that the toll would start to pull apart communities that are currently very tightly knit. He also expresses a belief that an in-depth analysis of the economics would find a net revenue loss to the state from the implementation of tolls.

6:33 p.m.
Bill Clark, Portsmouth Director of Business Development, notes that some businesses have a third of their customer bases over the bridge and large portions of their employees from nearby MA cities.

As he talks, I’ll say again: Folks, residents of Rhode Island and the surrounding area have to stop being reactive… waiting for the state government to do something bad and then trying to undo it. That’s why we have the annual cycle through various economic groups to see which can raise enough ruckus to get the Eye of Sauron off of them.

6:38 p.m.
Chris Boyle, of Newport Grand, says his company and others have estimated that upwards of 40% of their customer base comes from Southeast Massachusetts. He says that the recent toll increase on the Newport Bridge cost them 12-15% of their West Bay customers, which loss they’ve whittled away a little bit by pushing transponders.

6:44 p.m.
A Rhode Island moment: Sen. Susan Sosnowski (D, New Shoreham, South Kingstown) called witness Donna LaFleur back to the witness table to ask which town Island Park is in. It’s funny how folks across Rhode Island assume that everybody knows where their small neighborhoods are.

Tiverton Resident Martin Van Hof pointed out something that I’ve said before: if it’s like the Newport Bridge, the Sakonnet River Bridge will not offer discounts for people with work vehicles (whether or not they use them for work). That means about $2,000 just for a daily commute to work over the bridge.

6:51 p.m.
Howard Benesch from Tiverton says that a lot of Tiverton families have two or more members working on the island. If property values in the area fall, he asks, who’s going to make up the lost revenue for the already high-taxing local governments?

6:55 p.m.
Benesch has gone on to suggest that the lost local money is ultimately going to come out of students’ education (sports, libraries, and so on). I think he touches on a problem that we’ve got: people in the urban ring and the rest of the state just don’t believe that communities in the East Bay can’t pay more in taxes.

“If we continue with this piecemeal process, we’re not going to make progress as a state.” He points out that MA has half our unemployment rate. “This is a systemic problem.”

6:59 p.m.
Susan Benesch says Tiverton is “like a poor stepchild,” in that it has no state services, notably public transportation.

“I do not want to see the state of Rhode Island begin to become a third-world country because of unfair taxation.”

I can hear the television in the spill-over room echoing down the hallway. I hope a few ears perked up at Mrs. Benesch’s comment.

She says she has been a victim of identity theft, and that the problem will follow her for the rest of her life. The relevance is that she’s heard that the EZ Pass transponder would require her to give over her Social Security number to the transponder contractor.

7:03 p.m.
Ryan Raposa’s family owns the Green Valley country club on Aquidneck Island, and he’s already lost or on track to lose customers amounting to $25,000 of revenue per year, based on simply the threat of tolls.

7:09 p.m.
So far, my favorite quote may be: “Germans will drive 40 to 50 miles for wienerschnitzel.” Walter Guertler’s Bristol restaurant specializes in German cuisine, and many of his customers drive down from Massachusetts, and he does not think they’ll pay an extra $8 to eat dinner. Speaking for all small-businesses in the area, he says the increase in costs will be unsustainable.

“You’ll see a depression that you have never seen the likes of with this $4 toll.” He estimates a 20% business failure rate in Bristol.

“Stop crushing us with your foolish, unthoughtout” impositions. He says the whole process is corrupt. “This is a typical Rhode Island underbelly, and I understand that world, because I’m from New Jersey.”

“This puts some political hacks in total control of who gets the favors and who doesn’t.”

7:17 p.m.
Guertler says he knows a lot of wealthy people who drive through Rhode Island going to the Cape. They stop for a day in Newport and move on. He asked them about the tolls, and they all said they would change their route and their practices. It wouldn’t be because of the cost; it would be out of pique at “being abused.”

7:24 p.m.
Tiverton resident Joe Souza says, “we’re the smallest state in the nation,” so why can’t the Department of Transportation maintain all our roads and bridges?

7:27 p.m.
Ann Fiore owns Glen Ridge Farm, and she says the Newport Bridge toll has already cost her some of her suppliers, who just don’t want to deal with the toll (it’s more for vehicles with trailers).

She also offers the familiar anecdote that people go out of their way (around through Fall River) to avoid going over the Newport Bridge. Her mother, from Connecticut, started doing that when the Newport toll went up. Because of the change of route, she ceased her traditional stop to pick up lobsters and pastries.

The anecdote brings something to mind: I recently brought an out-of-state visitor staying in Providence down to Newport for breakfast. It was the first time I’ve been over the Newport Bridge in a while, because I usually just go around. But I thought the bridge would help to give his business trip a vacation-like feel.

He couldn’t believe the toll was $4 and each way. And it certainly tarnishes the advantage of Rhode Island’s size — that it’s possible to traverse the state for a meal, for instance — to tack $8 to the price of breakfast.

7:31 p.m.
Portsmouth Town Council member Liz Pedro points out that statewide tax dollars have gone to bail out Central Falls, Providence, and so on… she says the people on the East Bay don’t want to start being added to that list of failing communities, which the toll would accomplish.

7:40 p.m.
It appears that 7:30 was a sort of curfew for a large portion of the people in the room; a chartered bus to the East Bay is leaving.

Now speaking is Nancy Driggs from Tiverton. She expresses apologies to the committee members who are having to listen to the frustrations of people who haven’t been adequately allowed to speak.

I’d encourage Rhode Islanders not to be so deferential. These legislators are the ones who let these things happen, mostly under the instructions of the backroom deal-makers in the leadership. Sitting here and appearing attentive to testimony is their small task for the perks of office.

(I’ll confess, though, that I’ve never quite understood what those perks are, except of course where there’s corruption, second careers in lobbying, or favors to be traded.)

7:52 p.m.
I’m not going to name names, but it can be difficult to listen to people complain about poor management and government greed from the state when they’ve been at the forefront of the various municipal bonds and spending and public-sector contracts that doubled our property taxes over a decade. Essentially, they’re now making the arguments I’ve made against their poor management and government greed at years’ worth of financial town meetings. More often than not, they were among those jeering and shouting at me as I spoke.

7:58 p.m.
Rick Hodges, of Hodges Badge Company in Portsmouth says that, “ironically,” he moved his business to Rhode Island some years ago to avoid Massachusetts taxes. He says something like 60% of his employees cross a bridge to get to work, and he’s concerned for them.

“I don’t think Rhode Island can afford to be losing any more of its manufacturing jobs at this time.”

8:00 p.m.
On a somewhat silver lining note, he says he just rented out an apartment (in Tiverton, I presume) to a couple that’s moving out of the Common Fence Point neighborhood in Portsmouth so they don’t have to pay a toll to commute to work in Massachusetts.

8:02 p.m.
Former state representative Dan Reilly (which is how Sen. Felag, who’s running the meeting, referred to him) is testifying that the Sakonnet River Bridge was never built to be a toll bridge. That wasn’t its intent, and that’s why the money to build it originally came from the pot that it did.

8:09 p.m.
A representative of a Middletown business association stressed that much of the local economy relies upon day-trippers from nearby Massachusetts, especially during times when the weather is still good, but not necessarily predictable enough to attract longer-term vacationers, and a toll would affect their decisions.

8:12 p.m.
The president of the Portsmouth Town Council (whose name isn’t on my copy of the list, but somebody subsequently told me in the comments is Jim Seveney) says throughout the whole process, he’s felt as if all of the effort was for naught, because the decision had already been made, but tonight, he feels that maybe that’s not the case. We’ll see.

Sen. Felag stresses the importance of finding funding options. I’ll just say that, especially while researching the sales tax elimination, I’ve come across so much money that could easily be shifted in the budget. There’s really no need to dig for alternate funding mechanisms, like additional inspection or registration fees.

8:15 p.m.
Both bills held for further study, thereby handing decision-making authority to the Senate leadership.

9:42 p.m. (a coda from home)
Anchor Rising’s Monique Chartier caught the tail end of the hearing, and I was chatting with her as I packed up my stuff. Consequently, we were among the last half-dozen people in the hearing room. (We may have been among the last half-dozen people in the building, inasmuch as we had to find our way out of the building through the “sub-basement,” which I’ve never seen before. I do wish I kept a Slinky in my backpack for the rotunda stairs.)

Before we left 313, though, I overheard an insider-type whom I didn’t know ask a reporter from the Bay & Islands area: “Were you surprised that more people didn’t show up?”

The answer was “no.”

I wonder how the legislators weight this stuff. You’ve got 31,000 signatures on petitions. Well, the elected people might ask themselves, where are they all tonight? You’ve got horse farms and country clubs and high-end grocers and German cuisine specialists testifying about costs and lost jobs. Well, the urban legislators looking to grab government handouts for their poorer districts might think, my heart bleeds for you. You’ve got people worrying that East Bay schools will suffer the consequences of tax dollars drained from the area. Well, legislators from cities and towns that are already looking to charge parents additional fees for sports utter under their breaths, join the club.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m on the side of the witnesses. I’d be on their side if they were from Westerly or Foster-Glocester or Southern California. The economics of this are lunacy.

But the State of Rhode Island doesn’t run on economics. It runs on emotion and class warfare. It runs on party loyalty to Democrats almost as an ethnic identity group. It runs on redistributive political vanity. And the people of the East Bay are not much less culpable than anybody else. It’d be very interesting to see how the people who testified against the tolls tonight voted in the last election, and in dozens of elections before that.

Not one witness, tonight, vehemently took Sen. DiPalma to task for wanting to increase inspection fees instead of tolling the bridges. “I’d gladly pay that,” many said. No doubt! $20 every two years versus $2,000 every year. More than one witness called the plan “brilliant.”

But here’s the thing: By the same token, hundreds of thousands of voters, in the districts of every senator and representative who doesn’t represent the East Bay, would rather pay $0 than $20 every two years. Just so, while the price of signing a petition is very low, tens of thousands of East Bay residents apparently find 83-cents a crossing less costly than four hours of hanging out at the State House on a winter Wednesday night.

“Were you surprised that more people didn’t show up?”

The answer was “no.”

Moral vanity, partisan mindlessness, and not having to do the work of paying attention are just too attractive. After all, the people enjoying those benefits of Rhode-apathy won’t have to pay an intolerable price for it. Yet.

Local political post-script:
It occurs to me to note that two members of the Portsmouth Town Council attended the hearing, one of them waiting the full four hours to testify. Not a single member of the Tiverton Town Council bothered to take the stand (and I didn’t see any of them there). I should mention, though, that I was distracted and neglected to list Tiverton School Committee Chairwoman Sally Black and Town Clerk Nancy Mello among those who did testify; and they had to wait until around 8:00, as well.

Also, despite their prominent pledges during the campaign to “oppose the tolls,” the folks from local PAC Tiverton First were nowhere to be found, at least not the organizers.

5:00 p.m.
So, the Paff Auditorium at URI Providence Campus is much harder to access than Nazarian at RIC, but unlike the House, the Senate has provided peanuts and snack bars on all the tables.

5:07 p.m.
Sen. President Teresa Paiva Weed welcomed everybody and noted that this is the seventh Senate economic forum.

Now URI President David Dooley is offering another welcome. “I appreciate the work that the Senate has done” to focus the state’s attention on the economy.

At first, the only other media was WPRI’s Ted Nesi, and he and I each had our own table. The Providence Journal showed up, though, and chose to sit with Ted.

5:11 p.m.
Dooley says research universities, like URI, are unique in their role to create economic engines. He says URI can help (with reference to RIPEC’s “Moving the Needle” study) develop a strategic plan.

He especially supports RIPEC’s recommendation to increase funding for higher education (naturally).

5:14 p.m.
Dooley wants to extend the commuter rail from Wickford to the URI Kingston campus. (Incidentally, nobody here appears to be wearing red… or orange… pants. That’s too bad.)

5:15 p.m.
First panel is “State Rankings and Policy Recommendations,” featuring Marie Ganim, Senate Policy Office, and John Simmons, RI Public Expenditure Council.

5:22 p.m.
Ganim is going over the “Moving the Needle” study. They looked for all of the “credible” national rankings and such and intend to go through them every year. Red is bad, yellow’s OK, and green is good.

“This is a sampling of some of the things we can do just to begin” turning the state around.

5:25 p.m.
Simmons says the four measures they used to determine how we’re doing economically are per-capita personal income, state budget deficits, per-capita GDP, and total employment. The first two are green, the third is yellow, and the last is red. It seems to me the last one is the one that really matters. What do state budget deficits have to do with the economy? Rhode Island is its people, not its government.

5:29 p.m.
Minor Leader Dennis Algiere shouted out, interrupting the presentation to ask what “deficient” means when it comes to roads and bridges.

5:31 p.m.
Simmons jokes that he only has 30 seconds per slide, but all the slides are text only.

A note I’d offer on Algiere’s interruption: It seemed to me that he was implying that RI’s low ranking on infrastructure might not be “apples to apples.”

5:33 p.m.
Meanwhile, Ganim has gone on to point out that RI is red for business tax climate, regulatory burden, energy costs, and health insurance costs, and yellow in access to venture capital. She downplayed some of that though, saying that we’re in line with New England.

She also highlighted that RI is high for energy efficiency, which doesn’t seem to me to be inconsistent with high costs. You’ve got to be efficient just to bring the bills down. Frankly, I’ve always figured that’s the reason folks on the liberal side like to drive costs up, human suffering be damned.

5:35 p.m.
And then there’s the establishment-player favorite, quality of life. Green for crime and safety, green for health and wellbeing, and yellow for poverty rate.

I’ve suspected that the poverty rate ranking isn’t “apples to apples,” in the top Republican’s phrase a few minutes ago. Cost of living is high, around here, but the poverty level measures tend to be national dollar amounts. More dollars can be equal poverty, in this state.

5:37 p.m.
Ganim says both RIPEC and the Senate are committed to looking into the “benefit cliff” that makes it less attractive for people on public services to find their own income.

5:39 p.m.
Q&A
Sen. Walter Felag notes that he was on a Senate committee a few years ago that investigated and made recommendations related to the Economic Development Corp., but none of them were heeded. The question is how vital EDC should be. Simmons says EDC is important, but “not necessary” as the end-all, be all.

Felag says EDC said “to heck with this particular report.” “Maybe we should just blow them up, because they’re not doing what the legislature wants them to.” (I’m not sure the public should take that statement at face value.)

5:41 p.m.
Sen. Lou DiPalma says that fully half of the measures are red or yellow, and he asks if there’s “low-hanging fruit” they can focus on as a first step.

Paiva Weed says most of the lobbying activity of the business community is to try to stop things that the legislature is threatening to do, rather than for positive changes. She also says all of the interest groups lobby for their own narrow areas of concern. (I’d suggest that the legislature’s approach… tax this, not that, regulate this, not that… lends itself to that approach, and it seems to be a structural intention within the broken system that is our government.)

5:44 p.m.
Paiva Weed’s answer to DiPalma, “we’re going to do as much as we can.”

5:45 p.m.
Sen. Harold Metts refers to incarceration as the “new Jim Crow.” “I think as we move along this area… we can’t forget about that population.” He’s talking about the problem of recidivism of people who return to prison, having been released.

5:47 p.m.
Paiva Weed concurs. Sen. Juan Pichardo notes that minorities’ unemployment rate is more than twice as high as the overall number. He wants Simmons to “highlight two things that can be done in the inner city.”

That question seems to be much beyond the scope of this study, but Simmons answers citing programs in the Department of Education to address the education gap between whites and minorities. And apprentice programs.

I’d offer the suggestion that eliminating the sales tax would create tens of thousands of jobs, many of them in lower-skill areas. Meanwhile, very strong school choice reforms have been doing wonders to close the gap in Florida and would work here.

5:51 p.m.
Sen. Leonidas Raptakis raises the issue of regulation reform and taxes that hit small businesses.

5:53 p.m.
Simmons, “The Senate and others actually did that last year.” He’s referring to the office of regulatory reform and Leslie Taito. “That needs to be done systemically.”

5:56 p.m.
Sen. Daniel DaPonte asks how RI matches up with other states with similar personal income on the measure of disposable income.

He says he bumps into people who’ve moved just over the border, and they cite things like property taxes and car insurance as reasons that they moved.

Simmons says it needs more study.

5:57 p.m.
Sen. Edward O’Neill says manufacturing trends suggest that jobs are returning to the U.S., and he wonders if Rhode Island can offer incentives to capture some of that.

5:58 p.m.
Simmons answered by saying that there is a plan. The he segues into thanking Paiva Weed for her leadership and for bringing RIPEC on board for this study.

5:59 p.m.
Paiva Weed says that questions such as O’Neill’s are “ideal research topics” for the government-university higher education collaborative the governor announced last week.

Next panel: “A Shared Agenda for Economic Competitiveness,” featuring Michael Sabitoni, Construction and General Laborers Local 271, and Laurie White, Providence Chamber of Commerce.

Paiva Weed says these two have “really been working together to move this state forward.”

6:02 p.m.
White begins with statements of affection for Sabitoni and thanks to the Senate for their good work with this study.

White says the Moving the Needle study is by far the most important document related to economic development. The next best is a National Governor’s Association study that says that growing state economies requires essential policies to “put us into a growth mode.”

* Having a competitive tax and regulatory environment “sets the stage.”
* Putting entrepreneurial activity “at the very top of a state’s economic agenda.”
* Incenting large and small organizations to move into a “growth mode.”

6:06 p.m.
I apparently missed one bullet point, but the last was focusing on businesses that are growing.

“The key” is having a lot of motivated and innovative people in your state. (I’m glad somebody actually studied that; I’d have never thought of it.)

Somebody in the audience asked her to repeat the catch phrase that she used. White says it’s hard to say because of all the Rs: “the iron law of the modern economy.” I count two Rs, but then again, I’m from New Jersey.

6:09 p.m.
She says “our killer app” is “meds and eds.” Add in food services and oceanography, and “these are areas in which Rhode Island has a distinct competitive advantage.” Being a free-market kind of guy, I wonder why the state government should emphasize an area in which we’re already strong. If it’s advantageous to start a particular kind of business here anyway, people will do it.

Not everybody will want to (or be qualified to) go into government-specified areas. Why not just focus on making it easier for every Rhode Islander to live and work?

Lots of talk about “hyper growth mode,” “vision,” “a crying need for a long-term strategic plan.”

She’s going to put forward a “new idea” that everybody can “get excited about,” which she’s discussed with Dooley and Sabitoni.

It builds on the proposed joint nursing school between RIC and URI, and she challenges us to think even bigger and more inclusively: a health sciences facility, public-private partnership in the knowledge district opened up by the move of I-195. “A sprawling campus that really fosters an unprecedented degree of collaboration.”

She’s talking public-sector construction jobs. She’s talking “the big idea” of brain science, which is “the last frontier in modern medicine.”

6:15 p.m.
I’ll give White credit: this is the most specific proposal that I’ve heard anybody make with respect to a “vision” for Rhode Island, but it therefore falls to the biggest problem with those sorts of “visions.” Why should elected leaders, organizational business organization leaders, and labor leaders be authorized to survey the universe of markets and economic activities, pick a massive project costing millions (billions?) of dollars, and commit the state to a very specific economic direction with a 38 Studios level of speculative risk, using up public resources, high-value land not the least?

She’s running through all of the illnesses related to the brain. I have to say this is kind of weird. Why is she marketing brain research? It’s like a bunch of insiders did some brainstorming (wordplay intended) and jumped up and danced around the board room when somebody struck on the Big Idea of the Brain.

6:22 p.m.
Sabitoni’s up, and he’s emphasizing that jobs are great, but people need careers, including trades.

6:23 p.m.
He goes on to explain why people with projects would look to a construction labor union as a sort of contractor supplying workers. He says it’s the consistency of the workers. (As a former non-union carpenter who worked with a lot of various guys, including some who had been in the union but couldn’t get work, I’ll reserve comment in this context.)

6:27 p.m.
Sabitoni is disputing the notion that “government doesn’t create jobs,” and he’s listing a bunch of jobs that his members now have because of government spending.

I think the piece he’s missing is that government takes money from the economy in order to put it into the economy. All things equal, that’s a wash; I’d argue that government’s inefficiency (including mandatory union labor costs) results in a net loss of jobs and wealth. (Of course, there’s an asterisk for debt, where the government borrows money that nobody else could; then it’s taking wealth from the future.) What he means is, government creates jobs for his union.

Sabitoni is arguing for rebranding Rhode Island. (Status quo, status quo.)

He likes the brains idea.

6:30 p.m.
I wonder if White’s unstated motivation is to put Rhode Island at the forefront of the global economy after the zombie apocalypse that I keep hearing about around the Internet. Not sure whether roads and bridges are as necessary in that environment.

6:33 p.m.
These summits are lots of fun and all (especially when there’s free snack food on the table), but just once (once) I think it would be helpful for the hosts to find people who hold a fundamentally different view so that they could have a fruitful debate with the familiar voices that continue to call for mo’ money, mo’ money.

Sabitoni’s working toward wrapping up, and he says that we need to invest in higher ed so that they can build more facilities… smattering of laughter from the audience.

6:36 p.m.
Paiva Weed takes the podium, saying it’s “exciting to hear from the two of you.” She says Sabitoni should be prepared to attend a lot of hearings, because in the Senate, everything is going to be addressed through the lens of economic development. (Actually, the bills submitted thus far support that characterization, even if most of the proposals are tepid, at best.)

6:39 p.m.
We’re now in the dinner break. It’s funny: a few months ago, I attended a workshop on public speaking, and one of the spontaneous exercises was to grab a prop off a table and use it to talk about our home state. (It was in Philly.)

I picked up a rubber brain and said that if the whole room represented the land area of the United States, then Rhode Island was roughly the size of that brain. Perhaps I wasn’t the only Rhode Islander there.

6:57 p.m.
Break is still on. Lots of nodding and smiling going on. Meanwhile, the good thing about being a small-government guy is that it’s harder to accuse me of being ethically compromised because I ate a bag of government peanuts and a complimentary carrot cake rectangle.

7:01 p.m.
And we’re back to the final panel, “Business Reaction to ‘Moving the Needle.” Panelists: Hannah Chung, COO of Sproutel; Michael DiBiase, Senior VP of State Government Relations for Fidelity Investments; Tim Hebert, CEO of Atrion Networking Corp.; and Jonathan Fain, president and CEO of Teknor Apex Company.

7:05 p.m.
Hannah Chung says she’s not from RI, but grew up traveling between the Midwest and South Korea. Her company specializes in interactive toys for disabled kids, like a teddy bear to help children with diabetes. She’s in RI now because her cofounder attended a conference here and came across a program to help them out if they moved to the state.

Once here, they came across Betaspring, which helped them stay in Providence (while they finished their courses at Northwestern via Skype).

It’s a good story for non-government activity, I’d say.

7:10 p.m.
She highlights RI’s size as an asset, mostly for making contacts. The location between NYC and Boston is good, too.

One must wonder how hoppin’ RI’s economy could be if its government stopped abusing its natural advantages in order to leverage taxes and regulations for the benefit of inside interests.

By the way, I much prefer the teddy bear theme to the brains theme. Although, I can’t resist offering the suggestion that maybe RI should chase down the cutting-edge industry of teddy bears with brains.

7:15 p.m.
Chung says it would be “awesome to manufacture our bears in Rhode Island.” It would be “really, really amazing” if there were a way to attract the manufacturing side of high tech to Rhode Island.

She says there should be a way to help people with “these small, creative ideas.” (In my right-wing world, we call that the free market.)

7:16 p.m.
Chung also thinks it’d be a great thing if Rhode Island could devote some effort to attracting companies with female founders.

7:17 p.m.
Jonathan Fain is up, and he’s saying that manufacturing is critical. “You should be chasing guys like me,” because manufacturers make products here, but 98% of their clients are out of state, so they bring capital into the state.

7:19 p.m.
Fain: One of the things that makes manufacturing tough, in RI, is that the state is “very proud that we have the toughest fire codes in the country.”

He offers that as an example of the problems with RI’s regulatory environment. It makes it very difficult for the small tool shops and such to stay in business.

7:21 p.m.
Fain calls for making the Port of Providence a “fast port system.”

“Rhode Island doesn’t exist in this big, global economy.” A port, he says, would help to connect to it.

This week, Green airport lost its only international flight, he says. “We’re going in the wrong direction.”

7:23 p.m.
Fain wasn’t kidding at the outset when he said his message was going to be quite different from Chung’s. He’s going through all of the difficulties that make it tough going for businesses here and tricky to persuade people to come here to do business. Folks who live here know the list he’s working through… taxes, regulations, costs, education, etc. etc.

Manufacturing can move “a lot of those needles, but we’re not going to move any of them quickly.”

He thanks the legislators for creating legislation that lets his company go outside the state to bid for electricity. A moment before, he expressed concern that a small state like RI couldn’t get its hands around its healthcare costs… I think the two points might have a connection.

7:26 p.m.
Fain says “thank you” to the idea of cutting the corporate income tax, but points out that the state tax is a small part of the national tax, so the real challenge, to be competitive globally, is to stop fighting state against state, but to change the national attitude.

Now Hebert says it took him 30 years to be comfortable calling himself a Rhode Islander. Wants to teach people to use the turn signals in their cars. Other jokes about Rhode Islandese. He moved from Woonsocket to North Providence to Cranston and realized that he needed a translator along the way.

7:30 p.m.
Hebert has brought the “we need to be positive” vibe to the summit. He doesn’t think RI has an economic problem. We’re just too negative. “This is a belief issue.”

Got himself applause with that one.

7:31 p.m.
He says Rhode Island chases “the next big thing,” and that’s a problem. “I believe we’re sitting on a goldmine, here.”

He says his own research shows that getting a new customer costs him twice as much as expanding an existing customer, and it’s twice as much again to enter a new market. The government should focus on small businesses. He mentions 38 Studios. “If just 1% of that money had gone to a company” like his, they could grow quickly.

7:34 p.m.
He really emphasizes workforce development. “We need to adopt a model of lifelong learning.” (Sounds like he should advocate for school choice, to change the education model, letting people go where their interests, aptitudes, and life circumstances bring them.)

7:35 p.m.
Michael DiBiase starts by lavishing praise on the RIPEC report.

7:37 p.m.
He’s noting the importance of tax stability and reforms. Specifically, he mentions lowering the tax rate in 2010. (Even though, I guess, that amounted to a pretty substantial tax increase.)

7:39 p.m.
DiBiase wants improved trains to get around the region… greater speeds, more room for baggage. (The slogan is taking shape… better trains for teddy bears with brains.)

7:41 p.m.
Now he’s talking about the “national issue” (“this is not a Rhode Island problem”) of technology professionals, especially the shortage of women (apparently Fidelity doesn’t have binders full of them).

7:42 p.m.
“‘Strategy’ does not only mean having a plan, it also means making decisions,” such as opting not to pursue some options.

You know, with all of the innovative ideas and unique, very specific, interests being stated, I have to wonder: How is it even possible that nobody looks at this varied group of people touting the need for innovation and comes to the conclusion: “Hey, let’s get government out of the way!”

7:44 p.m.
Sen. Joshua Miller wants to know what the businesses use to attract young professionals to Rhode Island.

Hebert says they emphasize bringing in interns. (I wonder if that keeps his average salary up, by not having entry-level employees.) They also have a formal apprenticeship program to bring in career changers and such. Most of them are not from the state.

7:46 p.m.
Chung says the initial funding is very important. Help them get funding and space; increase grant programs.

7:46 p.m.
Now Senate Finance Chair DaPonte is offering closing remarks. He says they’ve heard some “pretty invaluable” suggestions.

7:48 p.m.
DaPonte says the currently proposed budget is the best that’s been put forward in the past five years.

And he mentions that Moody’s outlook was more negative for RI in November than it had been in May. The “dysfunction” in Washington, D.C., is a threat, he says, and Rhode Island needs to focus on “sound, practical, and sensible budgeting.”

Wonder if that means no high-speed trains for teddy bears and brains. One hears the echo down the economic hole: “status quo… status quo… status quo.”

12:34 p.m.
There’s gotta be some kind of twelve-step program for folks who show up forty-five minutes early for a five-hour conference put on by members of the state legislature.

Sapinsley Hall in the Nazarian Center for Performing Arts at Rhode Island College is a great theater, though. I think I saw a Russian pianist play here a decade and a half ago, but I wasn’t very familiar with Northern Rhode Island, in those days, so I might be mistaken.

So far, aside from paid staff, only a few legislators and two of the planned panelists look eligible to join the recovery program with me.

1:01 p.m.
Around 40 legislators are here. Four media types, including me. They’re starting the program now.

1:04 p.m.
Speaker Gordon Fox (D, Providence) says that he thought that it would be good to do something productive while the legislators aren’t busy. He says the legislature is critical to economic development.

1:05 p.m.
While waiting, one of the other early birds (a panelist) commented to me that he’s surprised this is open to the press but not the public. I responded that they might have worried about seating, but looking behind me, any such concerns were mistaken.

Fox just said: “You can’t do sound research without doing the homework.” He says folks in business and labor have to do sound planning and research and so should a legislature.

1:08 p.m.
Fox says he’s trying to make the House a “legislator-driven legislature.” I imagine most Rhode Islanders thought that’s what they already had.

1:11 p.m.
Karl Wadensten, of Vibco, is up first and gets out from behind the table, displaying his bright-red slacks.

He called Speaker Fox back onto the stage and had the audience stand to chant, “Rhode Island Number 1!”

1:13 p.m.
Wadensten asks what’s getting in RI’s way. He quotes Ben Franklin, saying there are three things that are really hard: steel, a diamond, and knowing one’s self.

1:15 p.m.
Wadensten: “From what I know about your customers, the people of Rhode Island, they don’t want a plough-horse economy.”

1:18 p.m.
Wadensten asked the legislators to raise their hands if they would like to be customers of the services they provide. Hesitant elevation of hands, but a majority gradually were up.

1:19 p.m.
“In industry, we don’t look for fixes; we look for possibilities.” He doesn’t just want fixes.

Says RI is one of only five states with legislation creating an ORR (that’s Office of Regulatory Reform), yet we’re on the bottom of every list.

1:22 p.m.
Wadensten offers to work with legislators and urges them to take one step at a time copying what other states are doing right.

1:23 p.m.
Cheryl Snead, owner of Banneker Industries, is speaking; she held up her company’s 3-year strategic plan and is encouraging the legislators to follow the recommendation from the RI Public Expenditures Council (RIPEC), including a proposal for such planning.

1:25 p.m.
She says election cycles tend to limit themselves to two-year plans (i.e., to ensure reelection). She’s also on the EDC board, by the way, as is Wadensten.

1:26 p.m.
She’s citing the difficulty of a services economy’s not having infrastructure to use as collateral for capital borrowing. (Of course, I’d note, they need less start-up money if they don’t have to build structures and buy equipment.)

“It’s great to bring in outside funding, but you always hear, ‘What skin in the game are you going to put in?’” She means the state should put public money into businesses.

1:29 p.m.
Snead says her company has a close relationship with Bryant University (which, I’d note, took the lead on creating the economic development collaborative that saw the EDC giving partial funding for the universities’ activities).

1:32 p.m.
Snead invites the legislators to come observe Six Sigma “continuous improvement” in action in her company.

Within one of the six steps of the program, she says there are no bad ideas… living in Rhode Island, I’m not so sure about that.

1:35 p.m.
Gary Ezovski says he’s going to speak mainly in his capacity as chairman of the Regulations Subcommittee of the Annual RI Small Business Administration Economic Summit.

1:37 p.m.
“The engineer in me tells me that the friction” that keeps RI in the policy doldrums is just like traffic friction, using the example of “a dolt stuck in a catatonic state using his cell phone in the left lane” forcing everybody to break one of the fundamental rules of the road: keep right pass left.

1:42 p.m.
Ezovski offered ten specific regulatory priorities, both things that the government should not halt (e.g., regulatory review and reform) and a bunch of things that it should change, right down to loosening rules on the length of pay periods to let businesses operate themselves. On the other hand, he wants the state to impose more restrictions on what cities and towns can do with their own zoning and regulations.

1:45 p.m.
Ken Block, Moderate Party founder and gubernatorial candidate and owner of Simpatico Software Systems, says he’s got a stack of recommendations that he can’t possibly fit into ten minutes, but he invites anybody to sit down with him.

“Business is all about competition,” and he says RI is in competition with MA and CT. He says he’s talked to an economic official in Fall River, who told him his office is daily full of RI businesses looking for a comparison to what they’re experiencing.

He says legislators ought to consider every piece of legislation in light of what it would do to employment/unemployment.

Speaks against raising income tax because it disadvantages local businesses. “When you tax my net profitability at a rate that is twice as high as in MA,” it “directly impacts competitiveness.”

He says when we talk about raising taxes every single year, even if it doesn’t happen, that “projects instability.”

1:54 p.m.
Block shows a slide illustrating that unemployment insurance looks like some minority of companies are using it as part of their compensation structure. An example I’d offer would be a construction company that lays off its employees for the winter every year, relying on the insurance to supplement the pay it’s able to offer in the other seasons.

1:57 p.m.
Owen Johnson is the last speaker on this panel. He’s also the only one not in a dark suit jacket. Also the only one with hair past his ears, a fact that he utilizes for an opening joke.

Says of his company: “We don’t look at competing with the Silicon Valleys of the world; we compete with the Detroits of the world.” (Not sure what to make of that.)

2:01 p.m.
He says the number 1 thing business decision-makers are looking at is excellent education for their children, “and that’s very hard to find here in the public education system.” (I’d note that most of the people in the room probably heard that as a reason to devote more money to the system as it is, when they really should take it as a reason to allow more innovation and loosening their constrictive grip.)

2:04 p.m.
First question is to Johnson to ask whether he could apply his experience with Connect Providence to Rhode Island and work with the EDC. He explains that Connect Providence was really just a social gather, and the core of its success was the connection of people to other people.

2:06 p.m.
House Minority Leader Brian Newberry asks the two EDC board members what the legislators can do to make EDC work better. Snead says it goes back to planning, which is unfortunately tied to the governor (“unfortunately” because the actual person changes), but the legislature needs to be part of the plan, too.

2:09 p.m.
Wadensten says the EDC doesn’t even have a customer database. “EDC is just as much grassroots as it is high-tech financing.”

2:15 p.m.
A question from Rep. Lisa Baldelli-Hunt asked about using funds (including unemployment insurance) to help place people in jobs. A little discussion at the table about whether the companies they all operate are looking for people. Ken Block said his company is not; one of the other panelists asked if he would take them if he were getting them for free.

He said, “no,” because there are no real entry-level jobs in his line of work. I wonder how many companies are more like that, especially small ones, for which even bringing on free labor creates a lot of work for existing employees who don’t have time to manage them.

By the way, Snead just stated that the thought of an income-tax increase is “scary to me.” Her company is national, having set up facilities elsewhere to be closer to clients. Whenever she fills out paperwork for new locations, she is “deluged” with calls and other contacts from officials in those states trying to persuade her to move their headquarters there.

Businesses in RI “are being challenged every day with lucrative opportunities” to move out of state.

2:24 p.m.
Asked about problems at the EDC, Wadensten said that all of the various proposals that people tend to put forward are “Band Aids” unless more structural issue are addressed… Who’s the point person? Who are the customers? Etc.

Wadensten inadvertently called Gordon Fox “governor,” to a smattering of applause. “Don’t get me in trouble,” Fox joked.

2:26 p.m.
First panel ends. Four minute break.

2:29 p.m.
There are more media folks here than I realized. One Projo reporter (Alex Kuffner) appears to be leaving, but Jennifer Jordan is here for the next panel. WJAR’s Bill Rappleye has hopped on the stage to interview some of the exiting panelists. Steve Klamkin from WPRO left about 45 minutes in, but the AP’s David Klepper appears to be settled in for the long haul.

2:32 p.m.
The first panel was on “Small Business Challenges and Recommendations,” and now the second one, on “Workforce Development Gaps and Opportunities,” is beginning. First up is Ronald Pitt, RI College VIP for Academic Affairs, apparently filling in for RIC president Nancy Carriuolo. He’s giving a quick summary presentation about RIC.

One good line: “Contrary to popular opinion, artists really like money.”

2:40 p.m.
Pitt notes a few programs the college offers to help students with the challenges outside of the classroom that usually are the cause of their dropping out.

He highlights the fact that more young women than men attend college, and yet they don’t choose science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) curricula, so there’s an “inadequate” representation of them there. He suggests (my words) social engineering, starting at early grades, to make girls as likely as boys to go into such areas.

2:44 p.m.
He positions the school’s arts programs as contributing to “quality of life,” which is very important, he says, to economic development.

2:45 p.m.
Ray DiPasquale, president of the Community College of Rhode Island, is now giving a summary presentation about his school.

2:46 p.m.
By the way, there are no exceptions to the dark-suit-jacket rule among the men now on stage, although Governor’s Workforce Board director Rick Brooks’s hair sticks out past his ears, and AFL-CIO boss George Nee has the liveliest tie.

2:49 p.m.
DiPasquale is describing some of the relationships that CCRI has with local businesses to provide training to their employees. He mentions the Tunstall deal that I pointed out here.

2:54 p.m.
He closes emphasizing the Governor’s Workforce Board’s thinking that internships are critical to economic development.

Now up is Rick Brooks, from that board. He’s describing what they do, noting that he represents the only organization on the stage that isn’t a household name.

2:57 p.m.
To be honest, I’m losing track of the many programs that the speakers are listing at top verbal speed. What I’m hearing is that the GWB has multiple multi-million-dollar programs using public money for workforce development purposes.

3:01 p.m.
Brooks says the bottom line is that Rhode Island just does not have enough jobs. If every current vacancy were filled with an unemployed Rhode Islander, there would still be about 50,000 too few.

He says the state is still 40,000 short of its peak employment, prior to the recession.

“Nonetheless,” he says, “many employers still report difficulty filling positions.” Top of the list of problems is a basic education and a basic understanding of professionalism (proper attire, punctuality, etc.). (I wonder how much of that is attributable to things like minimum wage laws that make it harder for teens and young adults to find jobs before they’re technically ready to enter the workforce.)

“Lastly, there’s not enough money,” Brooks said, with a chuckle.

3:06 p.m.
Nee is up. He says he’s been lobbying in RI since 1983, and he’s never seen a conference like this, that brought a whole chamber together.

Understandably, he’s speaking on the importance of having labor at the table as a third partner with government and the private sector. “We can be number 1. I think we will be number 1. And today might be the start of it.”

I’m hoping he addresses the business leaders’ objections to the tax increases for which he helps advocate.

3:08 p.m.
Nee emphasizes seeking policies that help the economic situation “today.” First example is the historic tax credit program, which he wants revivified, but with rules to make sure that the contractors are “reputable,” and that they be required to have apprentice programs.

He’s presenting the apprenticeship requirement as economic preparation for the future, but he doesn’t note that it’s also a way of creating barriers to entry for companies that would come in and compete with his union shops.

3:10 p.m.
Nee also likes the public colleges’ idea to take up land freed up by the I-Way project. He says a public-private cooperation would make that happen faster than a bond.

Other programs he likes are those that subsidize construction, public and private.

3:13 p.m.
Nee says Chafee’s budget, release last night, was “historic,” because it’s the first since 1991 that puts more money into job training. He also says kids don’t believe rhetoric about the importance of education when they attend classes in inadequate, technologically ancient buildings.

Yeah… if only there were a way to make a higher percentage of our education expenditures go to technology and infrastructure.

3:17 p.m.
University of Rhode Island President David Dooley says he’s going to highlight some successes that folks in the room are probably aware of.

He expands on the idea of the “skills gap” to talk about “the gap that exists frequently” between the colleges and universities and the communities in which they’re located. “One of the functions of a research university” is to address the lack of jobs by training employers. He cites Brown and URI as two excellent research universities in the state.

3:20 p.m.
He mentions that he’s already had “several conversations” with the new president of Brown to build on their relationship.

3:22 p.m.
Dooley says the institutions of higher learning are “magnets for talent,” and suggests that “we” have to create opportunities for them. As one of those sucked into Rhode Island through URI, I’d offer the suggestion that it would be more true to say that the state has to allow them to build their own opportunities

3:25 p.m.
One specific tool he lists is a Business Engagement Center, a “portal” to allow businesses, government agencies, and non-profits to find and access the work that’s already going on at the university.

3:26 p.m.
Rep. Jim McLaughlin asks Nee and Dooley if they feel that $2 million (per the governor’s budget) is “inadequate” for vocational training in the current budget.

3:37 p.m.
Dooley highlights the necessity of innovation for advancing the economy so that people have the resources to afford their own healthcare and other necessities.

3:40 p.m.
DiPasquale fields a question about the combined Board of Regents and Board of Governors for Higher Education saying that “we’re embracing it,” because the board will be more harmonious in ensuring that public schools prepare students for college.

“Right now as we sit here, we do not have a Board of Education or a Board of Governors.”

3:50 p.m.
Panel 3 is on “Local/Regional Experiences, Successes and Solutions.” Projo’s Phil Marcelo takes the torch for that publication.

Meanwhile, Wadensten has positioned an unlit cigar between his lips in the audience. Me, I’m still working on the same piece of gum I’ve had since I got here.

3:54 p.m.
Gregory Bialecki, MA Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, says he’s not going to offer suggestions to Rhode Island, but just give a view into MA’s activities.

He refutes the notion that the New England states are competitors, but rather, he says they’re all competing with regions around the world.

3:56 p.m.
Bialecki says his state focuses on long-term planning, competing nationally, emphasizing existing strengths, and (if I may insert the central planners’ lingo) equitable economic development that helps all people in the state equally.

It’s interesting to note that he listed Massachusetts’ strengths as technology and innovation, thereafter offering that Rhode Island has strengths in marine industries and tourism. Somebody who sees the states as in competition might have taken that as a subtle suggestion that Massachusetts has ownership of the exact areas that Rhode Island leaders have stated an interest in pursuing.

4:01 p.m.
“It’s not an accident that Massachusetts has recovered more quickly than the rest of the nation.” I’d note that that’s a little bit of a different attitude from those in Rhode Island who think our state will recover when the national economy recovers… we’re always first into recession and last out.

4:02 p.m.
Catherine Smith, Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, is describing an every-corner search of her state with the governor for information about helping businesses. Once again, we hear the term “strategic plan.”

(A theme is emerging there, and I expect it’s going to be an organizing principle of the policies that receive the “economic development” stamp in the State House this year. I’m not so sure that governments should be doing things that require “strategic plans.” Where does that leave the right of the people to shift direction every few years in elections?)

4:06 p.m.
This panel is the most fashionably diverse, by the way. Even Mr. Bialecki’s suit is lighter than the others that we’ve seen, and I think Smith’s suit jacket might be a perfect match with Wadensten’s pants.

4:13 p.m.
Smith credits two programs (sorry, I was distracted) with helping CT pull out of a recession that was, she said, worse than in Massachusetts. Actually, in terms of employment, Connecticut was doing much better than either of its New England neighbors, but it’s been in free fall in recent months. I wonder if these programs are to credit for that.

4:14 p.m.
RI Director of Regulatory Reform, Leslie Taito, says she’s going to “channel” Wadensten, because she wants the audience to become “souped” about regulatory review. (“Souped?” Did I hear that right? Where’s that from?)

She says everybody in RI is on the same page about a “clear, predictable, and reliable” regulatory system.

4:18 p.m.
Taito’s running through her description of what she does. I didn’t catch the specific numbers, but she said almost the same thing on the December 20 Positively Rhode Island show, if anybody wants to download the podcast. The upshot is that Rhode Island has a lot of regulatory government agencies and a whole lot of overlapping regulations.

4:24 p.m.
Interesting catch phrase from Taito, describing getting businesses “unstuck” from the regulatory system: If they’re not going to be successful in getting through the system, she wants them to “fail fast and fail cheap.”

4:25 p.m.
Responding to a question from Rep. O’Grady, Bialecki mentions Governor Patrick’s speech last night, proposing a major tax overhaul that would increase income taxes and decrease sales taxes “in a way that increases revenue.”

(Keep in mind, though, that he doesn’t see Massachusetts as a competitor to the states around it.)

4:32 p.m.
Smith is answering a question about the involvement of the legislature in CT’s economic development, saying she misspoke if she gave all of the credit to the executive branch, before. I missed some of her answer, though, because I was having a daydream in which at least one legislator knew enough about regional employment trends to challenge her on the effectiveness of an economic development regime in a state that’s been losing employment at a frightening pace.

4:35 p.m.
Smith said that traveling the state, she did get the sense that all businesses want government to be smaller, and that states are competing in that regard.

Rep. Frank Ferri notes that he attended a meeting with business leaders and Taito, and he’s never seen business folks open up so much to government officials, because they were so jazzed (my word) that the state might be doing something right.

But Ferri then went on to ask Bialecki about the possibility of a “Regional Economic Policy Council” that would involve governments in multiple states’ setting plans and pulling the strings for the regional economy. That doesn’t sound like competing for smaller government to me.

4:42 p.m.
Wadensten took a microphone to say that Taito has a four-star rating among all of the businesses he knows, and he’s asking the legislators “to support Leslie.”

4:45 p.m.
Important note: as we take a brief break before the next panel: the chemical bonds of my chewing gum finally gave out, and it became mush. I note the detail here so I’ll have evidence to describe when I find that 12-step program.

I’d also throw in a word of thanks for the magic of hard-drive camcorders. Still recording away, with no need to change a tape or a card. Think of that: technology for recording data-intensive video outlasts a simple piece of gum. (Of course, if I were chewing on my camera, that might make a difference.)

4:50 p.m.
Now on to the “Rebranding” panel.

4:53 p.m.
Martha Sheridan is president and CEO of the Providence Warwick Convention and Visitors Bureau. She says her work is no longer about developing a slogan and buying ads, because of all the competition “from the states to the north and south” and any city that has a convention center is fighting for events.

She says RI saw a 10% increase in hotel revenue, last year. The thing that’s missing is “a brand” to provide a “what does it mean” for people to visit RI, move here, start businesses here.

She cites a campaign in Michigan, although (again) I’m not sure how that comports with the reality that Michigan is the only state worse off than Rhode Island when it comes to recovering jobs lost in the Great Recession.

4:57 p.m.
Sheridan makes the most interesting point that I think I’ve heard all day: When her organization brings people in to preview Rhode Island, they always love it and see all of the state’s advantages, but they invariably express surprise that the people who live here don’t seem to see it.

Speaking for the Rhode Islanders I live among, I wonder how much of that is a problem of not having the time or resources to enjoy the state because they’re struggling to get by or figuring out how to move. That wouldn’t be a branding issue.

5:04 p.m.
John Bowen, Chancellor of Johnson & Wales University, opened with a story of two shoe salesmen who were sent to sell in Africa. One called back to the home office and said, “There’s no market here. All I see are people running around barefoot.” The second called back and said, “Send me shoes in every size. There’s a wide open market here.” He says that’s like Rhode Island.

He wants everybody to be positive and to stop complaining and start hiring and making people get to work. He’s tired of seeing elected officials going out and making great, positive announcements, and then the first three questions from the reporters are negative. (Sure does know his audience.)

Bowen also offered, if Leslie Taito has an empty office, that Johnson & Wales will find and pay interns to work with her.

5:10 p.m.
Bowen also wants his university to be like a venture capitalist, offering seed money for businesses.

5:16 p.m.
John Sheets of Boston Scientific Corp. says RI should be the Palo Alto of the East. He also told the story of police dragging four suspicious guys out of a white van outside of a shopping mall, and it turned out that they were from Toyota, doing research about how shoppers open their trunks with their hands full. Ultimately, that’s what led to remote openers.

The point, I guess, is similar to Wadensten’s “know your customers” admonition.

He also talked about the habit of Steve Jobs to call his employees with ideas at 3:00 a.m. Not sure what the point of that was, although it might be interesting for the owners of Rhode Island (i.e., the people) to be able to call the governor at that time.

5:23 p.m.
Neil Steinberg, head of the RI Foundation, joked that it’s tough to be the last person on the last panel. He listed many of the monetary contributions RI Foundation is putting into the recent economic development push, including $50,000 to Leslie Taito’s office for an e-permitting initiative.

5:25 p.m.
He says Rhode Islanders need to be sold on an “internal pride,” in the way the biggest obstacle to the old “I Love NY” slogan was public opinion of actual New Yorkers. He’s got a lot of examples. One was that you go to a Patriots game, spend $12 on a hotdog and $6 on a bottled water, grumble, and then sit down and say how great it is to be at the game. Point being that Rhode Islanders should have that attitude.

Steinberg thinks the top elected officials should get together, pick 10 big things to get done, and do them.

He goes on, “It is inconceivable to me that we do not have a War on Unemployment.” He can’t understand how people aren’t “appalled and agonized” about the 58,000 people who are unemployed.

“I’ve never seen us miss a recession; we have missed upturns.”

Three goals: Unemployment must be the national average, raise median household income to the level of Massachusetts and Connecticut (“Massachusetts ain’t as great as it thinks it is”), and closing income, education, and employment gaps that exist across diverse cross-sections of Rhode Islanders.

5:33 p.m.
Rep. Deb Ruggerio asked about combining all of the funds that regional marketing entities spend, but Sheridan said it’s not a good idea, because each target audience is so distinct and unique.

“I really, to the core, don’t think that it’s work that a single statewide entity could do.” (Wise observation that, I’d argue, applies to many more aspects of Rhode Island than tourism marketing.)

5:34 p.m.
As we move into the Q&A, I want to mention that Steinberg’s enthusiasm is definitely contagious, but I think there are two fatal problems to it. The first is that (again) for many Rhode Islanders, the state is a different place than it is for legislators, lawyers, and organizational executive directors, one where it’s extremely difficult just to get by.

Here’s an example: I wanted to go to a really intriguing woodwind concert at an antique building in Tiverton a week or two ago, but looking at $25 per ticket for adults and $10 for children, well, when taxes and fees and tolls and regulations and subsidies for green energy in my electric bills take such a huge bite out of disposable income (not to mention the employer’s market that high unemployment creates), $80 for an hour or two of entertainment, however valuable it might be for the kids, is hard to justify.

The question is: Quality of life for whom?

The second fatal problem is that a “pick 10 things and just do them” suggestion assumes that the answer is obvious and that the objections aren’t sincerely held, just needing some easing of unnecessary friction. I’d put eliminating the sales tax high on that list of things to “just do.” How many of the legislators in the room would accept that?

5:45 p.m.
And on that note, Rep. Pat Serpa stood up to issue a call to “journalists and radio hosts and wonderful bloggers” to stop being so negative and to partner with them to turn the state around, presumably through positive branding. (I’m kinda new to this, but I’m pretty sure that’s contrary to the design of a necessarily aggressive media challenging the powers who be.)

5:47 p.m.
Fox closes, saying that they could have spent five hours with each of the panelists. He’s going to ask certain representatives to take ownership of certain aspects of economic development.

He notes that they have all of the representatives’ budget books, for those “who just can’t wait to delve into them.”

7:08 p.m.
If I’ve ever seen this many people at Tiverton High School, it hasn’t been often. Clearly tolls are an unpopular proposition. I can only imagine the effect that it would have had if this many people had been at the State House to testify against tolls in the Finance Hearings and when the budget was on the floor of the House and Chamber.

At this point, the image that comes to mind is of the Whos, as in Horton Hears a Who, chanting, “We are here! We are here!” Frankly, I worry that the Whos had better odds of accomplishing their goal than the taxpayers of the East Bay have of accomplishing theirs.

7:14 p.m.
RIDOT chief Michael Lewis is explaining that all of the debt service from past transportation borrowing and all of the other uses of gas-tax money use up the better part of the state’s transportation money.

Rhode Islanders who voted for all of the bond issues on the last budget should learn their lesson, and the crowd in this room should focus its attention on the legislators. There are two options: stop spending and increase taxes, fees, and tolls. The bottom line is that people who want transportation to be among the first things budgeted for out of regular state funding need to start putting people into office who see things the same way.

7:18 p.m.
I see some of the area’s state legislators — Sen. Walter Felag, Sen. Lou DiPalma, Sen. Chris Ottiano. I’m sure there are more here, but I don’t see them. Rep. Doreen Costa has traveled all the way from the other side of the bay.

I don’t see Senators Reed or Whitehouse or Congressmen Langevin or Cicilline. Or, more importantly, Governor Chafee.

7:20 p.m.
Lewis says that this bridge toll only addresses the Sakonnet Bridge and the Jamestown Bridge. Funny thing is, a lot of the legislators who voted to put permission for the toll in the budget back in June really seemed to believe that the bridges in their parts of the state would be benefiting from the funds from this toll.

7:24 p.m.
By the way, here are the relevant vote tallies.

7:29 p.m.
Somebody in the audience raised his hand and said he has a letter from the federal government that says that there are no additional steps to be completed in order to authorize the tolls. Mr. Lewis said that is not true. The guy said he’d forward the letter, and then he left.

7:31 p.m.
Lewis says they need $38 million per year between the two tolled bridges to cover maintenance of all four bridges to the islands, and that the tolls will only be enough to cover that amount. Nobody joked that if you believe that he’s got a bridge to Aquidneck Island he’d like to sell you.

7:33 p.m.
While talking about the rates currently charged on the Newport Bridge, Lewis kind of glossed over the fact that “commercial” vehicles are charged the out-of-state rate, and that in RI standard work trucks are “commercial” whether or not they are, in fact, used commercially.

7:34 p.m.
On the Newport Bridge, about 15% of traffic pays the full $4, while 70% pay 83-cents. He says, “there may be opportunities” to only charge each car once in a 24 hour period. An audience member called out to say that the Bridge and Turnpike Authority would make that decision, so he can’t really offer that as a real possibility.

Lewis said it was a fair point, the audience started to bubble with unrest. New Town Council President Ed Roderick instructed the audience to “allow Mr. Lewis to go on with the presentation.”

I’m wondering why the Bridge and Turnpike Authority isn’t up in the front of the room.

7:39 p.m.
A Rick Gobeil from DOT is presenting a traffic analysis study. He says, at the Newport Bridge rate, 21% of the Sakonnet Bridge traffic would go away… some going through Bristol to go over the Mount Hope Bridge and some not crossing at all. He seemed to be hedging about the consequence and people started shouting out, “Say Bristol!”

Lewis is letting elected officials talk first. I don’t really get that. They should be up at the front of the room with Lewis.

Felag first.

7:42 p.m.
Felag says he “vehemently opposes” the tolls and that they are the biggest issue he’s faced as an elected official. The audience cheered… kind of a softball issue for an elected official.

I want to know why the elected officials weren’t running around town with their hair on fire when it began to look like the toll might actually go through. I also want to know if they’ll vow to refuse to support any legislation from leadership or anybody who won’t vote to repeal the toll.

7:45 p.m.
Boos at the mention of Gov. Chafee. By the way, this is very similar to what Felag said on the floor of the Senate when the tolls were up for a vote.

7:48 p.m.
Now he’s saying that he puts in legislation to reduce the gas tax because too many cars cross to MA to buy gas. I believe Mr. Felag’s sincerity, but with his contrary opinions, he should be much more disruptive of the status quo at the State House.

Felag finished up saying things like, “we helped out Central Falls; let’s help out Tiverton.” Loud cheers.

7:50 p.m.
Resident Nancy Driggs asked if it matters what sorts of complaints people make. “Is it just that you have to show that you filed this thing that you talked to us?”

Lewis says the feds take their responsibility seriously.

7:51 p.m.
Driggs asked why the idea of tolls on Mt. Hope went away. Lewis says that this toll obviated those discussions.

Driggs paraphrased and Lewis assented: “So anybody who voted for this budget cut short other options because this legislation superseded it?”

7:54 p.m.
Next questioner (from Bristol) was clearly at the meeting last night. He asks why other revenue can’t be found. Lewis said every change in revenue has an effect on somebody.

The speaker made the excellent point that with 60% of traffic being local, the money comes from them one way or another, whether they get daily discounts or whatever.

He also suggested that his town of Bristol will become a big traffic jam during rush hour.

7:59 p.m.
Town Council President Ed Roderick is reading a prepared statement about how the “hard working” people locally “are indeed part of Rhode Island.” Not for nothing, but I’d be curious to compare the cost of the average property tax increase that Roderick has supported over the years with the cost of the average bridge crosser with tolls.

8:04 p.m.
Town Council Member Jay Lambert is listing all of the big chain stores (and Clements Market) on the island that he regularly patronizes. I wonder why he doesn’t shop more often in town, like at Tom’s Market.

8:06 p.m.
Lambert asked what would happen if RIDOT has investigated the effect on the town if RI added a toll on the bridge and MA added a toll on the border. I’m not sure that would ever happen, though, because it’d be extremely easy to evade and, unlike Rhode Island, Massachusetts seems to want Rhode Islanders to shop and do business there.

8:12 p.m.
At this point, it’s going to take over an hour for the people already online to get to the microphone. Seems a little unfair that elected officials who attended the hearing last night are reading prepared statements at this one.

8:14 p.m.
Another speaker who attended last night and has more questions and a prepared statement. “We know that government grows when times are good, and government grows when times are bad.” He’s quoting Rep. Joe Trillo from the House Floor: “You people are a bunch of pickpockets.” He referenced the governor’s practice of splitting up his residences to decrease his tax burden.

Responding to a question, Lewis said the tolls will only pay for the bridges. Pressed, he admitted that the legislation allows it to be spent elsewhere, as well.

I really wish the people who are clapping opposition statements understand that even our representatives, who say the right things in this context, are no better than the others on all of the other taxing, spending, and regulation that constitutes the root cause of the problems that are bringing us the toll.

8:22 p.m.
Rep. Jay Edwards asked what happens with excess funds collected, asking whether they would reduce the toll. (I’m wondering: Isn’t that ultimately up to the legislature?)

Somebody from Lincoln is speaking in favor of the tolls. Shouts are raining down from the audience. “Sit down!” He says, “I wish I could live on an island.” He’s says Portsmouth, Bristol, and Tiverton are the richest people in Rhode Island.

Wonder what this guy is thinking.

8:26 p.m.
I should note, though, that he did us the favor of illustrating the attitude of the rest of the state toward this area. That’s part of why our representatives really need to step up their game at the State House.

8:34 p.m.
A man from Fall River apologizes because he was running for Congress, meaning that he didn’t have the ability to follow this issue as closely as it required.

He refers to the commentary on the Helen Glover Show this morning talking about economic effects.

8:39 p.m.
In response to a question from another Fall River resident Lewis is explaining that this process is not the same as some states are seeing, where a private company takes control over a road and collects tolls at a profit.

8:42 p.m.
A Portsmouth resident who operates a business in Tiverton says his wife is counting the family’s trips over the bridge, and it’s going to be “a huge tax.”

8:43 p.m.
The next speaker, who used to work for a governor in RI, thanked Lewis for being here and told the audience that he’s not the guy who should be here.

He says the traffic analysis has a built in fallacy, namely that the analysis should include the impact on the broader economy, not just the number of cars that cross the bridge.

8:46 p.m.
Lewis affirmed the assertion that, on day one, the tolls would begin paying debt service.

8:49 p.m.
It occurs to me to mention that even an 83 cent toll twice a day every day, which is probably going to be pretty common around here, adds up to over $600 a year.

Next speaker expresses hope that Governor Chafee (“the king”) is “never reelected.” He’s calling for people in the room to walk onto the bridge and block it on the day the tolls go into effect. That is, “civil disobedience.”

“Take the government back. We’ve got people dying overseas to promote democracy, and we don’t even have it at home.”

Frankly, I agree with the sentiment, but the reality is that we Rhode Islanders voted for this government. And we hardly ever change the incumbents. The tolls are the latest acute pain to a long, dull throb of apathy.

“You don’t ask the government to consider you. You tell the government what you want because you elected them.”

8:53 p.m.
The next speaker says she is an ironworker, and she says a toll will lead her to stop working with the state, because she’s sure the system is corrupt.

8:54 p.m.
Chris Cotta, who works for the Attorney General’s office and is one of the highest paid employees of the state, says he wants to talk about equity.

8:57 p.m.
Cotta points out all of the houses up for sale in Tiverton. Funny, I was telling him that for years as he worked as Budget Committee chairman and otherwise to double property taxes in a decade.

9:01 p.m.
A spokesperson for “Preserve Portsmouth” just read a statement promising legal action to protect the Constitutional rights that, she says, a toll would violate.

9:03 p.m.
The next speaker was also at the meeting last night. Now he’s saying he went home and asked himself, “What can I do,” but he realize the question is “what can you [Mr. State Official] do.” The speaker says he’s never gone to a public meeting before.

I really hate to be the gloomy cynic in the audience, but man, it’s hard not to wonder where all these people were back in June. Where were the state reps and senators from the East Bay, who should have been going door to door and warning people and making newsworthy stands at the State House… even promising never, ever to vote for leadership-backed legislation if a toll appeared.

That would have gotten attention, and it might have gotten all these hundreds of people to fill the State House. I wonder: Will they be at the State House now for the next affront to taxpayers? For that matter, will they be at the Town Hall and the School Committee meetings?

9:06 p.m.
A speaker says that a third of the gas tax goes to RIPTA, but RIPTA doesn’t offer service out here and the state road she lives on hasn’t been paved in years.

9:07 p.m.
Next speaker says the taxes are high enough in this town, “not to mention a flimsy garbage bag” that we now have to use for curbside pickup because the town didn’t properly plan for closing its dump.

He should have thanked the town council members whom everybody cheered earlier for that one.

9:12 p.m.
A speaker from Providence says she believes Rhode Island is a small state, and “we’re all in this together,” so she opposes the tolls. She says that not funding the bridges was wrong, that infrastructure should be the first thing paid for.

She thinks the state should reduce pensions of those who’ve been in government for years and years and failed to take care of the state. She also points out that the gas tax isn’t the only source of government revenue that can be used for roads and bridges. She also points out that our tax dollars went to create the PowerPoint presentations being used to sell the tolls. In closing, she says we shouldn’t pay off the Studio 38 bonds, because it’s a moral obligation, not a general obligation bond.

9:29 p.m.
A woman who runs her own one-person business caring for Alzheimer patients says she grew up on Aquidneck Island and moved to Tiverton 12 years ago. For years, she says, she went to meetings at the Portsmouth town hall at which the state declared that there would never, ever be a toll on the Sakonnet River Bridge.

9:35 p.m.
A woman who owns a local pet grooming business notes that she’s now collecting taxes for that, this year. She asks why gas tax revenue has been decreasing… and answers her question, saying that people are crossing the border to buy gas in MA.

She says her business pays 13 different taxes each month.

She also calculated out one crossing of the bridge per day at the 83 cent rate and made a point that it’s money for groceries and so on. I made a similar statement at a Tiverton financial town meeting about a property tax increase of about the same size a few years ago, and the local people who wanted more money in the budget (mainly the teachers’ union) jeered at me.

Some of them have spoken quite heatedly about how unfair the toll would be.

9:40 p.m.
Next speaker: “We’ve set up a psychological barrier around Rhode Island saying, ‘Don’t come here.’”

9:42 p.m.
Next speaker says nobody here should think showing up tonight is sufficient. “Wake up in the morning, have your coffee, and email the governor.”

He should expand it to include being involved more generally.

By the way, he clarified with Lewis that this is a public hearing, but that all of the comments will be in the record given to the federal government. The qualifier that nobody seems to be noticing is that the people who will review this record at the federal level will be looking at environmental impact, not economic impact.

9:52 p.m.
School Committee Chairwoman Sally Black tells Lewis that the people of Tiverton “believe in public infrastructure.” In fact, she says, we recently built three new elementary schools and just voted to build a new library.

So much for the argument that Rhode Islanders in this area can’t afford the toll any better than communities elsewhere in the state.

10:05 p.m.
And here comes the old Rhode Island… a speaker just noticed that Gov. Chafee’s father left the governorship and joined the federal government and was key to removing military from Aquidneck Island, and now his son is putting up a toll. He’s asserting that there’s something personal that the Chafee family has against the island.

Shouts of “Vendetta!” from the audience.

Crowd thinning quite a bit, as might be expected. I see that Ed Roderick is back in line to speak again…

10:11 p.m.
You’d think Mr. Lewis would every now and then inform the audience that the testimony would be most valuable if it were focused on the environmental impact. That he doesn’t do so indicates that this meeting is meant as a steam-blowing exercise and not a serious information-gathering exercise.

By the way, we’ve now clarified that the value to the rest of the state is that we will now take no money from the other funds for East Bay bridges, explicitly freeing that up for the rest of the state. As we fiscal hawks have been arguing for years, money is fungible.

Lewis says toll rates will go up over time.

10:16 p.m.
The current speaker works for the federal government and notes that he’s gotten no raise in some years, and yet Rhode Island has enacted a “stealth income tax increase” (meaning the “reform”) to create a surplus. Why not use the surplus for these purposes? he asks.

The speaker is suggesting that RI should lower taxes in order to increase revenue.

10:21 p.m.
Resident Jeff Belli is addressing the lone state representative still in the room, Sen. Lou DiPalma, and saying he stood with Paiva-Weed when he voted for the budget that included the tolls. He then said the only ones who didn’t were Felag and Edwards, but people in the audience corrected him that Edwards voted for the budget.

10:39 p.m.
A surprising number of people drive from the Fall River/Little Compton area to work in Quonset.

The current speaker is joining several previous speakers in pointing out that the maintenance cost of the Sakonnet River Bridge will be much, much less than on the bigger, older suspended bridges, making it even more manifestly unfair to charge its users to maintain all of the bridges.

10:44 p.m.
Present speaker just finished saying, “We the people have had enough.” Not to contradict sentiments with which I wholly agree, but I didn’t see any evidence in the last election, at any level of government, that the people have had enough of what they’ve been getting.

10:46 p.m.
Roderick is reading a letter on behalf of his wife.

I think I’m going to have to call it a night.

4:04 p.m.
With my second fortunate parking experience in Providence this week, having found a parking meter that was already almost at 2 hours time, I’ve settled in for a rousing discussion of municipal pensions at Brown University’s Salomen Center, hosted by the Taubman Center for Public Policy.

About two dozen and a half folks in the audience. Professor Marion Orr is introducing the conference.

4:09 p.m.
Describing the pension problem, Orr puts the price tag at $7 trillion. That’s actually a bit higher than I’ve seen.

4:15 p.m.
Professor Theresa Devine, who is moderating, is introducing the panelists: Robert Clark, Joashua Rauh, and Eileen Norcross.

4:19 p.m.
Clark is giving a history of public pensions. They didn’t fully kick in until the end of the 1800s, mainly because public jobs were patronage jobs and only lasted as long as the career of a given elected official.

1911 saw the first state pension, in Massachusetts.

4:20 p.m.
By 1928, police and fire pensions were “practically universal.” Most plans were badly funded and had long vesting periods, but there weren’t a lot of defaults, because they were run kind of like pay-as-you-go systems.

4:22 p.m.
Historically, military pension plans began the trend, followed by other government workers. The 20th century saw expansion.

It’s interesting to note that teacher pensions tend to be state operated.

4:24 p.m.
The tendency is for local plans to aggregate up to the state level.

4:26 p.m.
The tendency has consistently been: during good economic times, governments grant benefit increases (without necessarily adding contributions), while during bad economic times, they shirk on payments. Clark: “You see them promising things they’re not necessarily willing to pay for.”

4:27 p.m.
Most plans, he says, have provisions that allow employees to retire with full pensions at relatively young ages. “Maybe there’s some occupations where we’re worried that people are too old to work,” but the general government worker could perhaps work a bit longer, he says.

4:30 p.m.
Clark phrases the pension questions that we currently face as conscious decisions for the public to make: Do we want to be unfair to young workers, who if they’re mobile and leave don’t get any real benefit? Do we want older workers retiring in their 40s and 50s?

4:33 p.m.
Joshua Rauh is now up to talk about “debt in disguise.”

4:35 p.m.
He says 92% of economic policy experts believe that pensions represent a catastrophe waiting to happen.

4:37 p.m.
Balancing a budget at the state or local level gets a lot more complicated when employees have deferred benefits. Not paying adequately, Rauh says, is unfair for future generations, because they have to pay for services they’re receiving as well as services rendered in the past.

4:39 p.m.
He’s giving a very basic explanation of how pension plans estimate returns and put money aside, with the historical return having been around 8% per year.

He gives a good example of a person telling a bank that he’s debt free because he put some savings into stocks and bonds. GASB rules for public pensions say that’s just fine.

He makes the point that the current outlook is not as rosy; in the past, you could put money in a safe savings account at 5% interest and make money over inflation.

The problem, Rauh says, is that the benefits are guaranteed, but the investments are not. That should lead to investment in risk-free assets. “The only justification for using estimates higher than that” is if we account for the possibility that they’ll default. (Seems to me he leaves out the possibility of present-budget bailouts in an effective pay-as-you-go system; that’s what tax-hawks fear.)

4:44 p.m.
In the Netherlands, where public pensions are taken “very seriously,” they think we’re nuts.

“We either have to reform defined benefit accounting, or we have to go to defined contributions.”

4:48 p.m.
Eileen Norcross is reviewing where some state and local plans currently stand. She believes that General Treasurer Gina Raimondo did a “wonderful job” by emphasizing “truth in numbers.”

4:50 p.m.
She says GASB rules put RI’s unfunded liability at $4.7 billion; FASB (the private-sector version) puts it at $6.8 billion; and MVL (market-value finance rules) put it at $11.4 billion.

Of 36 locally administered plans, 24 are already at risk on a GASB basis, liability $2.1 billion (40% funded). On MVL basis, MERS plus local plans are at a $6 billion unfunded liability.

4:54 p.m.
Since local pensions are negotiated, not by statute/ordinance, there’s no requirement to fund them. Moody’s singled out Coventry as poor.

4:55 p.m.
Property caps and loss of state/federal aid can restrain payments. Then, pensions costs can rise very quickly (especially when adding in other post-employment benefits, such as health care).

(Just a thought: running through these numbers makes it all sound like such a simple problem to resolve. Then come the politics…)

4:57 p.m.
Norcross says, in contrast to RI, Pennsylvania is still in the “talking phase.” (I’d suggest that Rhode Island has finished talking and acted in such a way as to allow the people to go back into denial.)

4:59 p.m.
At the top of Norcross’s “Consequences” slide:

“Scranton is broke.”

5:00 p.m.
PA law requires municipalities to offer a defined benefit plan, not a defined contribution plan. One of the solutions that they’re playing with is to merge local plans into a state plan, but (she says) the state plan really doesn’t have a plan of its own.

5:03 p.m.
“If you’re going to guarantee a benefit for employees, you should plan it and fund it like you mean it.”

The principle of fairness arises heavily in her “principles for reform,” for older employees, younger employees, and future taxpayers.

5:04 p.m.
For the section of the audience that’s studying public policy, Norcross says pension reform has a fascinating blend of issues.

5:05 p.m.
From the audience, Brian Bishop kicks off the Q&A by asking about the extent to which states are grappling with pensions as legal guarantees.

5:06 p.m.
Norcross brings up the RI law that promises not to default on debts. (That’s specific to bonds, as I recall.)

5:07 p.m.
A Projo reporter asks how unusual it is, as in Central Falls, for example, to slash pension benefits. Specifically, he suggests that CA restricts such cuts.

Rauh says he thinks that a CA judge allowed for cuts, but the bargaining negated the move. “There are many states in which Chapter 9 bankruptcy is not allowed.”

He offers Prichard, Alabama, as another city that’s cut pensions.

5:09 p.m.
Another audience member notes that Coventry is showing what can happen when these problems aren’t addressed, by not paying its firefighters.

He further asks about the new GASB rule for accounting.

Rauh: GASB has responded to criticism by implementing a requirement to assume lower rates of returns for portions of liabilities that are unfunded and not projected to be paid. I’ll be writing about this extensively soon, but Rauh appears to agree with me that the new rules aren’t all they’ve been made out to be.

Norcross adds that the new rules might encourage riskier investments. She also mentions that some private financial entities (like Moody’s) are independently changing their own calculations, which some will consider to be requirements.

5:15 p.m.
Warwick resident Bob Cushman says he doesn’t think municipalities are addressing the problem. Mayor Scott Avedisian is in the audience, for the next panel, but his hand is over his face, so I can’t see his expression. (I get the impression that the mayor is actually Cushman’s intended audience.)

Cushman: Shouldn’t we begin looking at reducing benefits?

Norcross says cities and states need to start considering pensions in terms of their current budgets.

Rauh says the current cost of living suspensions at the state level bring the state not that far from full funding. (Not sure I agree with that.)

5:20 p.m.
Orr is introducing the panel that’s here to talk more about local issues: Scott Avedisian, Mayor of Warwick, Donald Grebien, Mayor of Pawtucket, Gayle Corrigan, Chief of Staff, City of Central Falls, Dennis Hoyle, Auditor General of Rhode Island, Susanne Greschner, Chief, Municipal Finance Department, State of Rhode Island.

5:23 p.m.
Greschner is kicking the panel off. She’s having microphone issues, but she’s describing the local plans… about 110 in MERS. The 35 locally administered have over $2 billion in unfunded liabilities.

5:26 p.m.
Greschner: If we don’t address unfunded liabilities, it could affect current retirees. Current employees could face reduced benefits. As West Warwick shows, current budgets are affected. Ratings agencies are taking closer looks and downgrading municipalities, increasing borrowing costs.

5:28 p.m.
Greschner described the board that’s looking into local pensions per the pension reform law as “diverse,” meaning several varieties of government agents, plus RIPEC.

5:30 p.m.
She says “there will be penalties” for municipalities that fail to submit plans to address their liabilities.

5:32 p.m.
Hoyle restates that 24 of the local plans are “at risk.”

“I think the questionable sustainability of many of these plans is illustrated by the fact that their unfunded liabilities are reaching 50% and 60% of their tax levies.”

He recommends moving local plans into the state-run MERS.

5:34 p.m.
He’s concerned that new GASB rules will make everything confusing by creating two numbers floating around: the calculation for finding required contributions and (if they’re not met) the reporting-only number using the new rule.

5:36 p.m.
By the way, apart from the ones participating, I don’t see a single other elected official in the audience.

Avedisian is describing Warwick’s plans, making them sound in good shape. Interesting to note that he’s speaking as if to Orr, not to the audience.

5:38 p.m.
As Avedisian goes over Warwick’s features, I’m reminded how mind-bogglingly complex the cities’ multiple plans are (COLAs, connections with current employee negotiations, multiple plans). There’s really no way the average resident/voter can possibly know how accurate it is for the mayor to present these plans as in good shape and improving.

5:41 p.m.
Grebien says Pawtucket has a $12 million structural deficit, even before getting into pensions.

5:43 p.m.
He’s saying that reducing estimated returns on investment can have a huge effect on required payments, and Pawtucket is already overtaxed. “We need to change the benefit structure; we need to change the COLAs.”

“Over the past 20 years, there’s been about 10 years” that saw almost no payments into the plans.

5:45 p.m.
Corrigan: “As of today, you can no longer say that Central Falls is in bankruptcy.” I kinda expected the audience to applaud, but I guess it’s not that kind of crowd.

“Pensions were a big reason that Central Falls filed for bankruptcy.” (And the General Assembly agreed, last session, to go a long way toward bailing them out.)

5:48 p.m
Corrigan: “People are rational actors, so they chose to go out on disability retirement.” At one point, it was 92%. (She didn’t explain what it was that allowed people to retire regularly on “disability” as a choice.)

5:50 p.m.
My parenthetical was premature: Mayors were corrupt and/or just wanted to cycle new employees in, and the retirement board consisted of inside interests.

(Observational note: Grebien and Avedisian are chatting with each other to Corrigan’s left. I don’t think I’ve ever seen panelists gabbing, before, while somebody else was talking.)

5:55 p.m.
Corrigan’s describing new restrictions placed on disability pensions. She says the active members of the plan had watched the city move toward bankruptcy and are willing to allow a “cultural change.”

5:58 p.m.
Audience member asks how Avedisian can even consider letting people retire at 50 years old. Avedisian says that was an increase from zero, but that answer doesn’t seem to satisfy. The upshot is that it was a political decision.

5:59 p.m.
Mike Stenhouse points out the “stark” difference between the first panel (here’s the reality) versus the second panel (which is dealing in a “mythical” reality of higher discount rates).

Grebien says their board is looking at a 4.5% discount rate. “The problem with that is the balance. You’re right, it’s not real.” “How do you gradually” move into a more realistic system.

Again, it’s a political situation, also involving contract negotiations. (Which seems to me an acknowledgment that they’re willing to force either higher tax increases, bigger benefit cuts, or both by not addressing the problem right now.)

Hoyle’s referring to the debate over the “right time frame” to determine liabilities and such.

6:03 p.m.
Orr: Where does the political obstacle exist?

Avedisian: On every level. You’re looking at 2-year election cycles for most communities, so it’s difficult to introduce long-term planning.

By the way, Rauh called out from the audience, when Hoyle was speaking, to ask what the actuaries believe is the probability of achieving the necessary rate of return: the answer was a tentative 60%.

Corrigan: “Without the specter of a bankruptcy, I’m not sure that” the pressure would have existed to change retirements.

6:06 p.m.
Orr is saying how upset his family was when his father’s private-sector pension fell through. “I wonder if we consider our promises at all.”

6:07 p.m.
Just a note: from this local panel, I’m hearing a lot of talk about how hard this all is… to resolve, I mean. It’s a very typical response from elected officials, I’d say.

Avedisian: “For two years, we paved roads with the money that employees put in for their pensions and didn’t pay our own share.” He refused to say when that was and under what administration.

6:09 p.m.
Brian Bishop: The personal story that was told was a good contribution. But those promises were under a contract. Public pensions are typically short statutes that are passed and repassed, in essence, which makes them not really contracts. “The sitting councils do not have the appropriating authority” to impose costs on future councils. He says it’s more like a moral obligation.

“I dissent from the idea that we refer to pensions as ‘promises’” in a legal sense.

6:12 p.m.
Professor Winters is saying that Central Falls showed a change of culture and didn’t represent going back on promises.

Seems to me that, considering all of these various comments, public officials are morally obligated to switch to the most accurate pension accounting, no matter how scary, and use the resulting pressure to change the culture to a sustainable system.

6:16 p.m.
Rauh: “Suppose there’s a 50:50 chance that you’ll achieve those returns, is that responsible public policy to rely on that sort of a chance?

Hoyle: You can’t blame any government for taking advantage of the GASB rules. (What? Of course you can. That’s why we elect people to run our governments.)

Clark gets the last comment to say that going to a lower discount rate isn’t a new imposition, but a recognition of the liabilities that already exist.

With the release of a “secret video” supposedly showing presidential candidate Mitt Romney exposing his inner thoughts to a bunch of rich people about the makers versus the takers in American society, I’ve been having a strange sense that I’ve heard such things before.  And it isn’t just that this is a common argument between left and right in U.S. politics.

Rather, I recalled Romney’s saying something similar when he visited Rhode Island in April and spoke to an exclusive audience of hundreds of people and a full complement of media (liveblog).  Here they are:

And here’s the very secret video that I filmed surreptitiously through the legs of a mainstream television tripod:

Transcript:

Nancy Driggs: I agree with you; I think this is a defining election.  My concern, and I’d be interested in your reaction, sort of gets to what Governor Christie said the other day — that America’s become a bunch of people sitting on their couch waiting for a check from the government.  I think government’s grown, I think, the number of dependents on government, and that’s what worries me about this election, that it is a different view of America.  And I’d be interested in your take on who’s going to bring that back.

Mitt Romney: There will be people, without question, who will vote for the candidate that promises the most free stuff, and I know, and I’m not going to get those votes.  They’ve already got their person, and he’s in the White House right now.  And he will campaign on saying, “I’m going to give you this, and I’m going to give you that; you’re going to have this and have that.”

And basically, he’s not giving any of that.  He’s just taking it from some and giving it to others. And yet, to those that are getting the receiving, that’s something that is very attractive and very popular. You get to a point in a society like ours where that could overwhelm the political system.

Fortunately, as I go across the country, the great majority, in my view, of people, for instance, who are on unemployment today, they want a job. They want America to produce good jobs again.

I was with a teacher in St. Louis.  She’d been laid off, and she wants another job.  And she’s looking for a substitute teacher position.  She said, the problem is that with the cost of gasoline what it is today, getting from where she lives to where the substitute positions are is so expensive, she can’t afford to go back and forth.

We’re just really crushing the middle class in this country, and people in this country — I know there many who just want to sit back and get the checks.  I’m sure that that’s true.  But there are many, many more who want good jobs for themselves and their families.

We’re still a hard-working, patriotic people, and yet, we will… I’m convinced of that… you know that famous line by John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what the country can do for you, but what you can do for the country.”  We thrill to that, as a nation.

We want a leader who asks us to help America and do what’s right for the country.  And while there will be some that violate JFK’s request and ask what’s good for them, I think the American people will rally around someone who will get America working again — who will return to our basic values.

Reviewing my liveblog from the event and skimming some of the rest of the video, I’m struck by how unsurprising the election season has been.  There are even overtones of “you didn’t build that,” although it’s Romney saying that government is not allowing anybody to build anything.

1:36 p.m.
With nearly a half hour left to go before Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito takes a comfortable seat at the front of Roger Williams Law School’s Appellate Courtroom, the room is already more than half filled with suited men and professional-dressed women awaiting his arrival. Given the preponderance of lawyers in the room, the occasional bow-tie and sleeveless cardigan sweater is visible, as well.

The event is billed as a “fireside chat,” but I don’t see any area in which it would be safe to stoke a flame.

2:02 p.m.
Room is pretty well full. Attorney General Peter Kilmartin is here.

2:04 p.m.
Introductory comments from Law School Dean David Logan. Dean Ronald Cass is the other side of the “chat.”

2:07 p.m.
Cass: Alito is a very important person in U.S jurisprudence and an honorable and good man. Some statistics:
110th Justice to the Supreme Court
11th Catholic on the court.
6th born in NJ
4th “to claim NJ as a home state”
2nd Italian American
2nd Italian American born in Trenton

2:09 p.m.
Alito: “All of my colleagues have been going on Charlie Rose or the Daily Show, but this is about as close as I’ll get.”

Cass: “This is a far cry from the Daily Show… well, we’ll see.”

2:10 p.m.
Alito: Supreme Court is like winning the lottery in a career, but once you’re in office, you realize the responsibility.

2:11 p.m.
Chose his specification in the law field because he thought he’d be better with judges than juries. Liked being U.S. attorney. Thrilled to become a judge.

2:12 p.m.
On to questions: Two main criteria for choosing a case for the Supreme Court:
1. Conflicts in decisions of lower courts. The federal law should mean the same thing in all states, so this is the “main criterion.” “We don’t always snap up a case as soon as a conflict emerges.” It’s more like “percolation,” for multiple lower court opinions. Also looking for cases that are “good vehicles,” where the legal issue in the law is relatively clear and not bogged in complications.
2. A case that is too important to defer review, whether because it’s a Constitutional challenge or just too big an issue. (Doesn’t give any examples, but PPACA comes to mind.)

2:17 p.m.
Alito is discussing the circ pool, which is sort of like a newspaper’s slush pile (my analogy, not his)… all of the memos about cases that people want the court to review. His office is no longer in the pool, but he has his clerks review them all as a follow up safety.

2:20 p.m.
Back before linotype machines, there weren’t really any briefs, so there was a great deal of oral argument, without limit, early on. “Justice Marshal said the highest ability of a judge was to sit through hours of argument and look at every lawyer, but without hearing a single word said.”

Nowadays, the justices have spent hours reviewing briefs and the law before the case officially opens. Amicas briefs have ballooned, up to five to 10 per side.

“In the Affordable Care case, I needed several briefcases to carry all of the briefs that were submitted.”

2:23 p.m.
“It takes real skill for a lawyer” to add value at oral argument, because the judges have typically got a thorough understanding, although minds may still be open and questions on the table.

“I think most of the public thinks we’re not working… most of our work is not done sitting on the bench.”

2:25 p.m.
Occasionally, Alito says, the process of writing an argument on paper will cause one to see “little gaps or little weaknesses,” sometimes big gaps and weaknesses, and minds can even change. He’s never had that experience on the SCOTUS, but when he was an appellate judge. [Personal note: I've often said that clear writing is clear thinking, and vice versa.]

2:27 p.m.
Cass: Sometimes media divides up judges by the party that appointed them. Notes the attention being given to Citizen’s United. As a Constitutional professor, that was one of the easier cases to decide on First Amendment grounds. How can a justice correct misperceptions in the media without seeming to be influenced by the partisan narrative?

Alito: “We speak through our opinions.”

2:29 p.m.
Alito: Citizen’s United involved a very technically complicated area of law, and it’s very easy for people outside of the legal sphere to get it wrong.

2:30 p.m.
He says Canada has a process of “lock up or lock down” in which the court locks media folks in a room with no recording devices until somebody manages to explain the forthcoming decision to them.

“At first, I thought that was a wonderful idea, until I found out that they then unlock the door and let them out.”

2:32 p.m.
Alito tells an anecdote of a day he was on his treadmill watching TV when a commentator said that he always ruled in favor of business because he once worked for the Chamber of Commerce. “I nearly fell off the treadmill, because I had totally forgotten this aspect of my career.” He ran to the computer to look it up on Wikipedia and only became more confused.

2:25 p.m.
Cass: What’s the most entertaining moment/aspect of your Supreme Court career?

Alito: “I’ve enjoyed the cases more when they come out my way than when they don’t.” But he enjoys it all. “The most enjoyable moment occurred during my welcoming dinner, and the next-most-junior justice is responsible for organizing it.” Steve Breyer handled Alitos and surprised him with a visit from the Philly Phanatic mascot.

2:38 p.m.
Time for Q&A
Question: What do you think of the role of international law and even the decisions made around the world? Especially cases that deal with new technology.

Alito: “It depends on the issue.” There are many areas in which it’s clear that other countries’ laws apply, as when a contract adheres to other law. Or treaties. “So how other courts have interpreted it is relevant.”

Some provisions of Constitution clearly rely upon notions of customary international law. Treaties. War making power; cites Union’s blockade of the South.

“There are areas in which it is not helpful” to take a roll-call count of rulings in other nations. Notes death penalty.

First problem: “Which countries do you count?” He cites the Olympics’ opening ceremonies; there are a lot of countries. Does China count the same as Lichtenstein.

Another problem: Our law is different in certain areas from other countries, especially for example, freedom of speech.

“I find it very interesting to read what foreign courts do,” but it isn’t very useful.

2:44 p.m.
Cass: What courses would you take if you went back to lawschool?

Alito: “I never took a federal courts case,” surprising as that may be. He also would have taken a bankruptcy course; he’s not sure his law school even offered one.

2:46 p.m.
Cass: What advise would you give to students graduating now, into this bad environment for law professionals?

Alito: Take advantage of your time in school to develop unique skills and contacts with potential employers.

“Really try to sell a whole range of law offices on what you can do, and persuade them to take a chance on you.” Then work hard once you’re in. [Not very career-specific, there.]

2:48 p.m.
Q from the dean: What were the qualities of law professors that had the most sticking power for you?

Alito:Still remembers Guido Calabresi. He would take old English cases and have his classes students “plow through” them. Also Jeff Hazard’s civ pro course. He was almost in the “old, crusty” law professor “mold.”

2:50 p.m.
Q: “It’s been a difficult couple of days for the United States.” Question is about technology and First Amendment… if this is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Alito: “It would not be wise for me to comment directly” on this video and the “violent reaction.” But he comes back to the difference between our law and other countries’ laws on freedom of speech.

Justice Ginsberg has said that she wouldn’t recommend the Old U.S. Constitution, but one of the newer constitutions, like South Africa. Doesn’t want to comment on that directly, either.

But, he says, our Constitution is much more categorical than others. Other Constitutions often offer a qualifier… a second paragraph that recognizes that “it’s a qualified right,” with limits acknowledging, for example, “the good of the democracy.” We don’t have that.

Cites the SPEECH Act, saying that foreign defamation courts can’t be carried to the U.S. unless the other country’s courts followed U.S. law in deciding it.

“We have thought that it’s dangerous to go down that road,” of restricting speech. Cites the Stolen Valor Act. He took the position that false speech does not merit Constitutional protection, although he thinks it’s a very careful line to draw, but court went another way.

“There are those who think that our approach is not the best.” At an event with judges from other countries, he was on a First Amendment panel, and he thinks the other judges thought he sort of took their approach. He’s been the lone dissenter on several First Amendment rulings. He didn’t think the Constitution protected videos of people crushing small animals. Didn’t think the Constitution protected Phelps and intentionally hurtful speech at funerals. Didn’t think Stolen Valor Act was unconstitutional.

He disagrees, though, and stresses that U.S. protections of free speech are much stronger.

What Lesson Can We Learn?

It may be the optimism of a constitutional conservative to suggest it, but it appears that an important lesson may be on the cusp of being learned.

Commentators from Rush Limbaugh to the lesser-known mainstays of a libertarian Twitter feed are pointing out that the many scandals currently tightening their grip around the Obama administration are inevitable consequences of Big Government.  While true, that’s a lesson of practical process — of cause and effect within government — and such lessons are not so readily learned.

The technocratic conceit, after all, is that there are no consequences that cannot be repaired out of the equation.  Exhibit A for this point could be calls for “shield laws” for reporters and their sources, in response to the Obama Department of Justice’s sweeping up the phone records of the Associated Press and, apparently, spying on a particular Fox News journalist. The solution, in Exhibit A, is not to question whether a massive, powerful bureaucracy will inevitably misbehave, but to layer on new fixes to one narrow manifestation.

And for the broader public, the tendency is to personalize problems, to see them as the stumbles of the personalities involved rather than as a hole into which they were destined to fall.  For most, government is just some shapeless machine that politicians operate.  The lesson that Big Government naturally rolls in a destructive direction would require people to learn how it works.

For a lesson to be learned, and then to change thinking and behavior, its “why” has to be deeper than “because all politicians lie,” and its consequence has to be something that people see up close and regularly.  That’s the kind of lesson that may actually be gathering around the edges of scandals and economic woes alike.

Make It Happen… for Whose Benefit?

Last week, Jessica David tweeted a quote from Bill McCourt of the RI Manufacturers Association: “Everyone has to be an ambassador for our state.”  David works for the Rhode Island Foundation, which last autumn hosted the high profile “Make It Happen RI” event, intended to spur the state’s private sector to coordinate to improve the local economy.  At the event, the missing question to the answers that attendees supplied was: Why isn’t the private sector doing these things already, and making a profit at it?

The missing question to McCourt and David’s admirable sentiment is: Why should people be “ambassadors” for a know-a-guy state run (and run into the ground) by a deeply entrenched insider culture?  The instances are too numerous to list, but some examples are the governor’s executive orders, a former Senate President under an ethical cloud elevated to judge, the Speaker of the House manipulating legislative rules to quash ethics legislation, special deals in the name of “economic development,” and on and on.

An economy doesn’t grow just because everybody is able to find something to do within it.  An economy grows because its participants are adding to it.  They’re risking their resources on the likelihood that their value will return to them and then some, and they’re offering up their time and effort because doing so can achieve their other goals in life.

A system in which political connections create shortcuts for insiders and in which the rules are constantly subject to revision is not one in which people are going to be enticed to work even harder and risk even more.  Moreover, spreading positive messages about a place of which one is so suspicious can feel a bit like trying to rope friends into a pyramid scheme.

Richard Fernandez makes a similar point at the national level on Belmont Club:

One of the reasons that the United States has remained the last refuge for money fleeing instability abroad is that those investors trust its institutions. They believed — reasonably until now — that in America the rule of law reigned supreme. They thought — until the administration cast the question into serious doubt — that America was not the banana republic that the possessors of those fortunes sought to flee. That’s why the money comes to America and not, let us say, to the Congo. …

…  To a large extent the multiple crises engulfing the Obama administration are economic and informational — it’s a rebellion against the cost of lying. The sheer mendacity of key institutions has jacked up the risk premium on everything, and people instinctively know this.

The leading politicians of Rhode Island are hotly debating what title they should give a one-stop-shop guy you gotta know so more people can feel as if they’ll have a chance to know him.  Creating an Executive Office of the Commerce Secretary is not economic development.  Economic development is figuring out what quantifiable costs the local political and physical environments are adding to business and reducing those costs so business can happen.

Government isn’t inherently the problem, but when it is a significant part, then it has to be the first part solved.  Solutions that address (for example) out-dated real estate can only contribute to the sense of exclusion when they are handled by a government known to be prone to special favors.  Betty the small-businesswoman isn’t going to put her own family even more on the line when large developers and celebrities are able to offload their own risks onto her community.

The Scandals as an Example to Us All

Behind the initial weeks of chatter about the IRS’s targeting Tea Party groups for layers of extra scrutiny over their tax-exemption status has been another unasked question: How much time and financial resources were such organizations — mainly operated by part-time, amateur volunteers — not able to devote to their core missions because they were busy dealing with the taxman?

Once again, it comes down to resources and the cost of doing what one feels should be done.  Jillian Kay Melchior drives the point home with a must-read, but chilling, article about one such part-time, amateur volunteer, Catherine Engelbrecht:

The Engelbrechts were not, until recently, particularly political. They had been busy running a tiny manufacturing plant in Rosenberg, Texas. After years of working for others, Bryan, a trained machinist, wanted to open his own shop, so he saved his earnings, bought a computerized numerical-control machine, which does precision metal-cutting, and began operating out of his garage. “That was about 20 years ago,” he says. “Now, we’re up to about 30 employees.”

For two decades, Bryan and Catherine drove to work in their big truck. Engelbrecht Manufacturing Inc. now operates out of a 20,000-square-foot metal building on the prairie just outside of Houston, where a “semi-pet coyote lives in the field just behind us,” Bryan says. They went back to their country home each night. Stress was rare, and life was good.

When Catherine became involved with a local Tea Party group and True the Vote, however, she, her volunteer organizations, and her family’s business found themselves coincidentally in the spotlights not just of the IRS, but of the FBI, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, as well, most of them more than once.  Each interaction cost time and money, into tens of thousands of dollars.

For anybody without a view from the center of the federal bureaucracy, these incidents are difficult to move from “anecdote” to “data.”  The subject of one such anecdote, Mitt Romney-backer Frank VanderSloot gives an indication why.  After the Obama campaign targeted VanderSloot, he found his personal and business finances under separate audits from the IRS and his business under the scrutiny of the Department of Labor, last week, he told Jamie Weinstein on the Daily Caller:

“I talked to only a handful of [people with similar stories] since,” VanderSloot said. “I’ve reached out to all of them. But only got calls back from a handful and most of the responses were they’re just laying low, you know, they took their own beatings and they don’t want any more of it and they don’t want to even talk about this.”

One of the institutional advantages that the United States has always had is the Constitutional principle that people should be free to engage in their political system.  A corollary principle that grew up alongside that right is that there are (there must be) areas of life outside of politics.  This was true even as the Civil War drew to a close, when Union General Ulysses S. Grant offered terms of surrender to Confederate General Robert E. Lee that allowed officers to keep their firearms and “each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside,” taking their horses and mules along with them as their property.

Last year, it was becoming evident that campaign finance laws would expose individual and corporate donors to targeting by political activists.  The latest scandals indicate that government agencies are willing to open another front in those attacks, and government agencies have access to much more information than can be forced into the public under the banner of “transparency.”

All together, the message is: Stay out of it or pay tribute to the ruling factions.

Rhode Island Loses Another Anecdote

The lessons of the above all come together in the story of Marina Peterson, who is an anecdote in two ways.  First, she is Rhode Island’s local example of a possibly targeted Tea Party/True the Vote volunteer.  Shortly after a dust-up with the Bristol Fourth of July Parade brought national attention to the Rhode Island Tea Party, Peterson was subjected to three IRS audits in sequence, for tax years 2006, 2007, and 2008, in chronological order.

How much time and money did that prevent her, personally, from devoting to the local cause of good government and transparent elections?

The more important part of Randal Edgar’s Providence Journal story, though, is the Petersons’ response to Rhode Island’s last election:

Peterson expects the float to be entered again this year, but she doesn’t think she’ll be there to see it. She and her husband, William, Rhode Island residents for 17 years, are following their tea party instincts and moving to South Carolina. Their moving day is two weeks away.

“My husband’s still working, but when you start to think about living on a fixed income, waiting for the other shoe to drop, who knows what they’ll tax next,” she said.

She said their annual property tax — about $3,000 a year on their two-story home in Bristol — will drop to about $700.

As the article makes clear, the couple is transitioning into their retirement years, so they weren’t likely to be entering into entrepreneurial ventures to kick-start the economy.  Marina’s entrepreneurialism was of a civic nature.

But as was true for many, November’s election — nationally, at the state level, and across the span of local races — was just too strong a proof that positive change is unlikely around here.  The deck is stacked; the rules are malleable.  A state that elects a mayor who lies about his city’s financial condition to the U.S. Congress and then re-elects him even when the lie is pretty universally acknowledged does not instill confidence.

Just before the election, WPRI reporter Ted Nesi pondered some political implications of that outcome:

If [Congressman David] Cicilline wins, will Republicans ever again be able to convince anyone they can win the 1st District, considering the advantages they’d have squandered this year? GOP loyalists will credit Obama’s coattails, but it’s hard to imagine national Republicans deciding it’s worth another shot barring something dramatic.

Nesi follows the lead of too many mainstream journalists, in tracing the horse-race aspect of politics.  The worry should be much larger: If it’s “hard to imagine” Republicans’ investing political capital in a state that its supporters can’t help but “squander” — just as the operators of Big Government can’t help but fall into corrupt holes — shouldn’t it also be hard to imagine people’s investing their lives and livelihoods?

Whatever the case, it’s nigh upon impossible to imagine the Petersons, or the scores of people like them who leave Rhode Island every year, playing the role of “ambassador” for the Ocean State wherever they wind up.  What happens when this syndrome goes national is a question that we should all fear to have answered.

At yesterday’s hearing of the Rhode Island House Finance Committee (which started with four members in attendance and reached a maximum of eight of the fifteen during the three hour meeting), the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity presented its findings with respect to legislation that would eliminate the state sales tax, submitted by Representative Jan Malik (D, Warren, Barrington). Video of the hearing is available here.

Rep. Larry Valencia (D, Exeter, Hopkinton, Richmond) initiated an interesting exchange around the 86:15 mark on the video:

Valencia: Philosophically, what I’m coming across when I take a look at all these documents is that you feel that the income tax is a fairer way to redistribute income, and that the sales tax is immoral and should be eliminated entirely.

Without transcribing all of the responses (mainly with the message of “not at all”), the panel found the question somewhat difficult to answer mainly because none of us really view taxation from that perspective.  Fairness isn’t an economic variable, and even if it were an appropriate way to frame tax policy, the complications would make it impossible to achieve.

In the progressive view, people with more money can afford to pay more for the services that we all use, so it’s only “fair” that they do so.  Often embedded within that view is the further assumption that they are wealthier because they’ve benefited more from the system, not because they’ve put in any more effort or taken any more risk for the public good than other people have.

Once one starts imagining actual people, though, “fairness” muddies.  Firstly, we don’t all use (or want to use) government services equally.  A healthy, childless person making a fortune working from home (with a septic system and well water) in some far corner of the state hardly uses any government services at all.

Secondly, whatever one’s views on what it takes to have a high income, not having a high income is not proof of purity.  Is it fair that somebody who games the system his or her entire life rarely pays into it?

Thirdly, the earning of income creates divisions of “fairness.”  Is it fair that somebody living off a previous generation’s wealth pays less than somebody whose work, benefiting the economy through his or her expenditure of effort and talent, earns a lot of money each year?  Or is it fair that somebody who lives on peanut butter sandwiches for years while working 100-hour weeks to build a business, perfect an invention, or develop a craft (in or out of college) should be whacked with inordinate taxes the moment he or she begins to profit from those sacrifices?

The larger, more-important point, though, is that the entire premise of taxation as a way to “redistribute income” is dead wrong because it is, itself, immoral and because it creates a system of incentives that practically ensures unfair abuse of government power.

The government requires revenue to function.  The difficulty is that every tax creates incentives in all directions, and the principle is that a tax should in some way be traceable to the value that government adds.

An income tax creates incentive for the government to help its constituents increase income. However, it creates disincentive for people to work to get that income, and it isn’t at all clear (to put it mildly) what the government can actively do within its appropriate bounds to accomplish what it has incentive to accomplish.

A sales tax creates incentive for the government to make it easy to spend money on things that are taxable, as well as to find the money for that purpose.  However, it creates a disincentive (particularly at the state and local levels) to spend money where doing so is taxable.  And moreover, in the “what government can do” column, the incentives are for government to redistribute money to people who will spend it in a taxable way, as well as for them to get it on their own, including by increasing their debt.

On these grounds, the property tax appears in the best light. The government’s incentive is to make property more valuable.  Of course, that creates the corresponding disincentive for people to improve their property, although the incentive to live in more attractive surroundings is naturally pretty strong.

Most important, though, is that improving the area in which you own your property is thoroughly within the scope of government, with infrastructure, security, and other things that we consider basic government functions.  As a bonus, property taxes are more obviously the purview of local government, so to the extent that the system is property-tax-driven, government authority will move closer to the local level, where it is more immediately accountable to the people.

I offer this mainly as an example of how tax decisions ought to begin on a philosophical level. A particular state’s circumstances may make the difference, whatever the principle. A small state with wealthy neighbors, for example, should consider how tax structure affects consumer behavior.

To the extent that fairness and morality come into it, perhaps the measure should be how well we resist ideological calls and formulate an intelligent policy.

Today is the 51st day of the Rhode Island House of Representatives 2013 session. Day 51 is of significance, because it is the day on which it becomes possible for a majority of House members to remove a bill from committee, by means of a discharge petition. The relevant House rule is rule 20…

(20)(a) No petition to discharge a bill or resolution from Committee shall be appropriate for presentation until after the fiftieth (50th) legislative day and until the bill or resolution shall have been in the possession of the Committee for no less than sixteen (16) legislative days. On any day after those requirements have been met, the prime sponsor of a bill or resolution may present a petition in writing to discharge the committee from further consideration of a public bill or resolution which has been referred to a committee, and by no other procedure, but only one petition may be presented for a public bill or resolution during the course of a session. The petition shall be placed in the custody of the recording clerk of the House who shall arrange some convenient place for the signatures of the members to be placed thereon in the presence of said clerk. A signature may be withdrawn by a member at any time before the petition receives sufficient signatures to become effective, and such petitions shall become effective, and shall serve to discharge a committee from further consideration of the public bill or resolution and shall cause said public bill or resolution to be placed upon the calendar for action, when any thirty-eight (38) representatives shall have affixed their signatures thereto, provided, however, that if, after the bill or resolution is calendared but before it is taken up, enough signatures are withdrawn so that the number of effective signatures falls below thirty-eight (38), the bill or resolution shall pass off the calendar.

(b) At the time the petition is properly submitted to the clerk of the House, a notation shall be added tothe travel of the bill section for that particular legislation as it appears online.

(c) During House consideration of any discharged public bill or resolution, no motion to recommit or lay on the table shall be entertained by the Speaker until every member desiring to be heard has been recognized.

I haven’t written about discharge petitions in this space previously, because I wasn’t sure they could be applied to bills held for further study. According to the text of House rules, the vote to hold a bill for further study is a vote on “a motion to report the bill or resolution to the House with a recommendation that it be held for further study”. However, during the Judiciary Committee’s nullification of the Ethics bill vote earlier this year, we learned that bills held for further study aren’t considered to have been reported to the floor, and remain in the possession of the committee.

If a bill held for further study remains in committee, it means a discharge petition can be applied.

A discharge petition is not exotic parliamentary trickery. Rather, it is an explicit operationalization of the idea that the final authority on all matters of importance within a legislative body is supposed to be a decision made by the group, not by a single member. A discharge petition process provides an orderly means for a majority to assert itself on a specific issue, when their position differs from that of the leader’s — a circumstance that should be anticipated, since it is unlikely that a legislative leader will agree with the majority view on every issue. (Can you think of any issues this might apply to, in the current RI legislature?)

The nature of a decision-making body is determined by who wins out when the majority of a body wants one thing while the leader, who is just a single member, wants something different. In a democratic process, you get one answer. In a dictatorial process, you get another.

Of course here in Rhode Island, that everyone agrees that a legislative chamber should be run democratically cannot be taken for granted. Putting as positive a spin on the viewpoint as is possible, there are proponents of giving a single leader absolute control of the legislative agenda, under the belief that day-to-day activities become unmanageable if carried out according to actual democratic principles, and that it is close enough to democracy to have a legislative agenda set by one member, so long as final decisions on substantive matters are made by majority vote. But it is difficult to believe that unmanageable chaos will result, if rank and file members from time to time develop a little spine, trust that they understand some of the issues before them as well as whomever the Speaker (or Senate President) consults with to decide which bills to release from committee, and on their own send a bill or two to the floor.

The rub in the RI House rules is that only the primary sponsor of a bill can initiate a discharge petition. This means that an identifiable member of the RI House has to be brave and risk punishment from the Speaker, by taking substantive action on a bill that the Speaker does not want passed. We saw what happened earlier this year when a Representative called for a committee vote without the unofficial – i.e. the formally unnecessary — permission of the Speaker; the Representative (Patrick O’Neill) was stripped of his committee position by the Speaker.  Would a representative who attempted to move a bill out of committee via a discharge petition be treated the same way? Were that to occur, the Speaker who recently spoke in public about the importance of “standing up” for democracy would be guilty of an act of the utmost hypocrisy.

Writing in the Atlantic, Bruce Schneier suggests that we’re rapidly approaching a time when the fear of “a government-issued ID will seem quaint.”  With all of the digital technologies that we’re weaving into our lives — from radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in our clothes to credit card purchases — we’re putting our lives on digital display.  In the not-too-distant future:

When you walk into a store, they’ll already know who you are. When you interact with a policeman, she’ll already have your personal information displayed on her Internet-enabled glasses.

For the moment, those databases of our activities are in the silos of separate organizations.  But since the records have value, they’re being sold, and Schneier points to various mechanisms by which the government is allowing itself to be the buyer (or taker). Schneier doesn’t even address the results when ObamaCare fully enters the scene (bringing the IRS along with it).

More important, perhaps, is the lack of concern that this roundabout way to “a surveillance state beyond the dreams of Orwell” engenders.  A national ID doesn’t seem to have much practical use other than those of the government; the government’s putting a two-way TV set in your home would be frightening.  But if it’s put there for convenience (to save power by turning off when you’re not in the room, to adjust a list of favorite channels depending on who’s watching, whatever), it’s not so obviously malicious.

It’s for your benefit, after all.

That increasingly seems to be the attitude of younger generations, as they become acclimated to interacting on the traceable Internet, and as companies claim more and more liberties.  Why does a simple smart phone video game need access to your phone’s call log?  Who cares?  It’s fun.  Writes Schneier:

Data on this scale has all sorts of applications. From finding tax cheaters by comparing data brokers’ estimates of income and net worth with what’s reported on tax returns, to compiling a list of gun owners from Web browsing habits, instant messaging conversations, and locations — did you have your iPhone turned on when you visited a gun store? — the possibilities are endless.

The drive for fleeting online fame notwithstanding, people seem to find it inconceivable that anybody would really care to manipulate their lives or spy on them.  So what if the store clerk knows your purchase history to a penny; she’ll only be more helpful.  If the police officer knows instantly that you’ve never broken any laws, then he’ll let you walk on buy.  You’re not going to cheat on your taxes.  You don’t have any interest in guns.

But think of the box that this starts to create.  Beyond creepy, careful strategies to manipulate and push you to particular decisions (voting for a particular candidate for public office for example), there’s the possibility that something an individual does will make a convenient excuse as a target for somebody with power.  How confident are you that nothing in any of the digital files on your behavior is either illegal or potentially scandalous?

So, you’ll never make an offensive video about Islam.  So, you’ll never do anything that would do much more than make you blush if your mother found out.  So, you’ll never do anything that would draw the eye of people powerful enough to put you in that situation, anyway.  You’ll never join a Tea Party group (or be Jewish).

Of course, the limbs on which one best not go too far out can be difficult to distinguish.  Doing anything beyond cog-hammering requires some risk.  Whether your particular innovation is artistic, mechanical, or has something to do with a business model, doing new things tends to be disruptive to people whose power derives from doing old things.

The list of activities and behaviors that this sort of society removes from Western culture grows and grows.  Privacy.  Liberty.  Freedom.  Innovation.  Creativity.

1. Last night, the Rhode Island House of Representatives’ Finance Committee heard several bills on the subject of reorganizing Rhode Island government, with the goal of boosting the state’s economic performance. The House leadership (as part of their “economic development package”) and the House Republican caucus have submitted different versions of what they each believe an economically-beneficial reorg would look like.

1A. Through a pair of bills, House leadership would create an “executive office of commerce” headed by a Secretary of Commerce, who would be appointed by the Governor and not subject to Senate advice and consent. The Secretary of Commerce would “operate” all functions of the Department of Business Regulation, much of the function of the Department of Labor and Training, the permitting process of the Department of Environmental Management, multiple Department of Administration functions in areas including the fire code, regulatory reform, energy resources, planning, housing, minority business enterprises and the health benefits exchange; and all functions of the Coastal Resources Management Council.  This new Secretary of Commerce would also automatically become the head of what is now the Economic Development Corporation, which would be renamed the Commerce Corporation while keeping most of its extant powers and duties.

(Under this proposal, the law would state both that the Commerce Corporation is “a public corporation of the state having a distinct legal existence from the state and not constituting a department of state government” and that it is “the operating agency of the state to carry our the policies and procedure as established by the secretary, governor and the board of directors”.  I’m not sure both propositions are simultaneously possible).

1B. The GOP plan creates a new cabinet level executive office of economic development “responsible for the management and administration” of DBR, DLT and “all state departments, divisions and agencies having oversight and regulatory authority over tourism, economic development, corporate services and marketing of the state’s resources to existing or prospective businesses”, to be headed by a Secretary of Commerce subject to Senate advice and consent.  The GOP bill would abolish the EDC in its entirety (seventy-two pages of strikethroughs in the GOP bill eliminate the sections of the law enabling the EDC).

2. The House Leadership plan differs from the plan originally proposed by RIPEC in at least one significant aspect; RIPEC had proposed that the current EDC be replaced by a stripped-down version, given that the Executive Office of Commerce would be assuming a broad range of responsibilities.  However, based upon the legislation submitted, House leadership appears to have decided major changes to the EDC are off-limits, raising the question of who it is that wants to keep EDC largely as is.

3. Personally, I begin from a strong presumption against the idea that changing the structure of the the executive branch of RI government will have a major impact on Rhode Island’s economy, though a case can be made that some form of reorg might be beneficial, the argument being that government tends to do more of what it’s officially charged with doing.  Hence, if there is a government department formally dedicated to “regulating” business, but no department charged with “promoting” it, the predictable result is a government that regulates heavily with little concern for the impact of its policies on promotion. Putting both goals on roughly even footing into the executive branch office that deals most directly with commerce could correct an existing imbalance.

4. That said, by creating an executive branch position that bypasses Senate confirmation and automatically assumes leadership of a quasi-public body, the House Leadership proposal (and also the RIPEC proposal on which it is based) does more than give a standard-issue government department a responsibility for improving commerce.  What assumptions went into this design?  That no one who might be good at helping business can get through a Rhode Island Senate confirmation process?  That the governor himself is unable to use his position as the head of the executive branch to make Rhode Island government more business friendly? (And if a governor can’t get regular department heads to work together through normal processes towards a basic goal like improving the economy, then what is his job exactly?)

5. One conclusion to be drawn is that the technocrats and the political insiders think that Rhode Island is in need of someone who can work behind the scenes on one set of priorities through a shadow hierarchy, regardless of what the more visible branches of government focusing their energies on.  Perhaps there is a belief that too much tension exists between what needs to be done to fix Rhode Island’s lagging economic performance, and what has to be expressed in public to become a member-in-good-standing of the state’s governing class.

6. But ultimately, if RI’s technocratic elites and “pragmatic” policy advocates don’t think that a governor’s economic development plans are sound — e.g. if they don’t believe that same-sex marriage and commuter rail to Wickford are sufficient cornerstones of a sound economic policy — then they either need to change the mind of the leader promoting that strategy, or else find a leader with a better economic development strategy to support.  Creating an undergovernor to implement a set of priorities different from those held by the real governor isn’t going to work in the long term.

It’s all very natural, of course, but we have a tendency to let understanding of techniques change our moral equation about a thing.  When we see how the magic works — whether light or dark — we lose our sense of good and evil.

Label a serial killer “mentally ill,” and it’s harder to see him as a monster, even though his acts and motives are exactly the same.  It’s a peculiar magic trick in its own right, as if understanding the process by which the Devil corrupts a person changes the existential import of the corruption.  In either case, what’s wanted is to save the victim, and in either case, the moral judgment of an act should derive from other principles than the stages of corruption

That a bad action has been analyzed and described does not make it otherwise than wrong; that the forces of good could replicate the tactics of evil does not make them right.  Ends do not justify means.

Such is my reaction to an article in which Rich Thau and Celeste Gregory advise conservatives to “harness behavioral science”:

In Nudge, Sunstein and Thaler advocate for what they call “libertarian paternalism.” They argue that policymakers, whether or not they realize it, are “choice architects” responsible for “organizing the context in which people make decisions.” By recognizing human tendencies to errors and biases, these architects can present choices in a way that will “nudge” people to choose what the architect has decided is the best choice.

Call it what you want — throw in jargon like “choice architecture” and euphemisms like “nudge” — but the action in question is still manipulation, and it isn’t right.

There’s a gray area in all interpersonal interactions, but there’s a difference between persuasion and deliberately manipulating circumstances to make it more difficult to choose any option other than the one that the “architect” desires.  The latter is a sort of benign torture; the torturer just wants the victim to do the right thing (divulge some information that will save lives, for example), and the pain that he inflicts is nothing other than “organizing the context in which people make decisions.”  You can make the pain stop at any time; you’re doing it to yourself.

The difference becomes even less gray when the government is involved:

Other behaviors that Sunstein and Thaler would like the government to nudge citizens toward include making organ donations (by recommending an “opt out” option rather than the explicit consent system currently in effect), wearing motorcycle helmets (by requiring a special license for those who choose to not wear one), and using credit cards more responsibly (by forcing credit card companies to send customers an annual statement that lists and totals all fees incurred in the course of the past year).

The argument is that people don’t lose any options, but in these examples, the government is using its power as a tool to manipulate. The “architects” have claimed political power as a means of defining for everybody else what the “better decisions” are.  As new strategies emerge for manipulation (under the label, “advances in behavioral science”), the rules will expand, and the pain of not making the preferred choice will increase.

This points to the difference between government “nudging” and private persuasion and marketing:

Sunstein and Thaler’s repeated invoking of “libertarian paternalism” is an attempt to win over people from across the political spectrum. While the authors clearly lean liberal (despite their self-described “libertarian” orientation), they emphasize over and over that no individual is ever forced to do anything he doesn’t want to do, which is designed to placate conservatives suspicious of the authors’ liberal motives. Similarly, the pair convey throughout Nudge their simple desire to help people make better decisions. The result, however, is that these decisions advance the authors’ robust view of government’s role in Americans’ lives.

Whether or not these particular authors have “liberal motives” is immaterial, because their project is progressive use of government to take a side in value judgements over which it ought to have no influence. Thau and Gregory offer an excellent illustration when they subsequently suggest a government regimen of “pro-marriage messaging,” including in schools.  Some such messaging might be advisable, particularly when implemented at the local level and as a general default when the question comes up for other reasons.

But the more important part of their discussion of marriage is the sampling of disincentives to marriage that government has created.  Clearly, the idea of “nudging” is not new, even if the scientific verbiage may be; it is enough to end those disincentives, those nudges.  In the case of same-sex marriage, it would be enough not to contradict the cultural view of marriage… and then to let the culture accomplish the pressures and arguments in more appropriate ways.

Conceding that encouraging “better decisions” is an appropriate use of government would close the argument on whether government should be an agent of morality.  Closing that door leaves society in a political cage match to the death, in a winner-take-all fight for government offices and judicial seats.  Saying that the government is the voice of “the people” is just a way of saying that one’s own side is able to win political battles more than economic competitions or philosophical debates.

And when political battles reach that fevered, desperate pitch, our civilization will fall entirely into a web of manipulation, to the inevitable benefit of those able to spin it, and that is an evil end.

I’d be among the last to deny that what one believes about the world affects how one lives and what sort of politics one tends to espouse.  But it’s a tricky matter to begin making regional claims about political outcomes based on religious affiliation.

The subject comes up because Ted Nesi tweeted a link to a brief essay by Mark Silk.  Silk’s religious affiliation isn’t immediately obvious, but his bio says he’s Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, which might lead religious intellectuals (as opposed to academics of religion) to read his work with a skeptical eye.  And indeed, a quick skim of the most recent posts on his blog suggests an affinity for needling the Catholic hierarchy, particularly on the topic of same-sex marriage.

With that context in mind, we turn to Silk’s attempt to answer the question, “Why is the nation’s most Catholic region first to embrace SSM?”

… New England Catholics retain a vibrant communal memory of once having been a disfavored minority subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous Yankee behavior. Rather than return the favor, they have chosen to do better unto others than was done unto them. Why should the Catholic proscription of SSM prevail against the wishes of those who have no part of it?

Such privatization — or, one might say, communalization — of Catholic marriage doctrine sits poorly, of course, with bishops who believe the doctrine to be inscribed in natural law and thus incumbent on all people at all times. But for New Englanders all politics tends to be local, which is to say less about big ideas than about reconciling your preferences with mine.

Naturally, Silk proceeds to needle the Providence Diocese’s own hierarchical pinnacle, Bishop Thomas Tobin. That is in keeping with his apparent intellectual purpose — namely, to drive a wedge between Catholics and the church structure that makes them, well, Catholic.  But there are three items of interest in the above quotation.

The first has to do with the bizarre notion that somebody would look at the push for same-sex marriage in New England, with its grand proclamations about “marriage equality” and love, and disclaim the role of “big ideas.”  Among the less-proclaimed ideas bound up with the movement was the insidious one that government is or should be about a reconciliation of preferences — rather than more mundane things like accomplishing the limited activities appropriate to government. The contrast is with the more conservative, libertarian view that the reconciliation of preferences should be the role of society writ large, with government (owner of tanks and central banks) taking the most minimized role possible.

In that regard, perhaps regional Catholicism did have some effect.  Even the hierarchy has allowed itself to see government as a moral agent and a legitimate mechanism for charitable works and social change.  Perhaps that misplaced trust has come around to undermine the Church in the region, leaving it little rhetorical defense when secular powers chose a contrary objective: namely, redefining marriage as a way of changing the culture.

Among the fears of devout Catholics and other religious Americans is that activists will now leverage the government’s new definition of marriage to wipe out alternate understandings. This will be accomplished through proselytizing government school curricula, and it will be accomplished through laws and litigation that take advantage of the fact that equal treatment within the word “marriage” now includes relationships that they cannot endorse or encourage.

Until recently, marriage was marriage was marriage, whether the employees, beneficiaries, or members within the marriage were black, white, Protestant, atheist, or whatever.  More importantly, non-marriage was non-marriage.  Religious organizations that did not offer benefits or services to non-married heterosexual couples were not invidiously discriminating by not offering benefits or services to non-married homosexual couples.  That’s no longer possible.

There’s a reap what you sow element to this, and it points to the second interesting aspect of Silk’s argument. The people with whom Catholics have been cooperating, locally, to give government its invasive role in society have, in most respects, an incompatible worldview.

New England may be the nation’s most Catholic region, but it’s also the nation’s least religious.  Play with these nifty Pew Forum maps, and you’ll see what I mean. In the combined Connecticut/Rhode Island category, 57% of survey respondents believe in God with absolute certainty, versus 71% nationally.  Nine percentage points fewer Connecticut/Rhode Islanders attend services of any tradition weekly, while seven percentage points more attend services “seldom or never.”

So, yeah, 43% of the two states’ populations are Catholic, while only 10% are Evangelical Protestant, for example.  But in Texas 24% of the population is Catholic in addition to the 34% who are Evangelical Protestants.  That’s 53% total versus 58% total.

It isn’t my intention to dive into delineations of each religious denomination’s views on same-sex marriage and politics generally. The point is that Catholics in New England are, to some degree, paired with the irreligious, not with Evangelicals or other religiously conservative communities.  Flip-flop Catholics and Evangelicals in Texas, and I’d wager you wouldn’t get New England’s social liberalism.

The third point that I would make is one of disagreement with Silk’s phrasing acceptance of same-sex marriage as the clear conclusion of people who are communally minded and tolerant.  The traditionalist’s big idea of marriage is to bind parents with the children whom they create for the benefit of children (and parents) in challenging circumstances.

Marriage is how our civilization has encouraged couples that are capable of creating children to behave responsibly when it comes to those children.  If, at its core, marriage is about the mutual affections of two adults, and if in a final analysis, the only difference between procreation and adoption is the method of procurement, it is more difficult to make the case that people who unintentionally create children within relationships that fall short of deep romantic love with a lifetime commitment have a special responsibility to care for them.

Absent the further involvement of government, naturally.

In that context, fortifying the institution of marriage is a labor intended to help those who are less fortunate than us and to protect those who fall victim to the policies of the ideological faith that claims not to be a faith.  Unless one assumes that anybody who articulates such things must be arguing in bad faith to cover up their sinful bigotry, that’s a charitable and communal and deeply Christian approach to public policy.

Readers can agree or disagree with the conclusion, but in a better, more reasonable society, people who claim to be professors of “religion in public life” would be more able (or inclined) to draw such distinctions.

Something in the final paragraph of a recent Mark Steyn column brings to mind a short story (really a kind of poem) by Franz Kafka. Here’s Steyn:

We’re collapsing our own skulls here — the parameters in which we allow ourselves to think about abortion, welfare, immigration, terrorism, Islam shrink remorselessly, not least at the congressional level. Maybe if we didn’t collapse the skulls of so many black babies in Philadelphia, we wouldn’t need to import so many excitable young Chechens. But that’s thinking outside the box, and the box is getting ever smaller, like a nice, cozy cocoon in which we’re always warm and safe. Like — what’s the word? — a womb.

What Steyn did throughout the preceding paragraphs was to link the murder trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell with a culture that is tempted to blame itself for not doing enough to convince the Boston terrorists not to kill its people.  As he puts it, “Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were raised in Cambridge, Mass., a notorious swamp of redneck bigotry where the two young Chechens no doubt felt ‘alienated’ and ‘excluded’ at being surrounded by NPR-listening liberals cooing.”

The link between the two is the terms in which we’re allowed to think about the thorny issues of our time.  In Boston, we can’t challenge the shibboleths of multiculturalism, and so the answer right before our faces becomes an impenetrable mystery.  In Philadelphia, we can’t challenge the dogma of abortion, so (to the extent it’s discussed at all) talk about “collapsing the skull” and “right to choose” makes it difficult to offer moral argument as to why it’s wrong for a “doctor” to fully deliver the baby before severing his or her spine with scissors and then chopping off hands and feet as keepsakes.

This is where Kafka comes in, with the story in its entirety:

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”

“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

There are many hungry felines awaiting a wealthy, decadent society busily tying its own hands, but among the most proximate to the above discussion is radical Islam.  Americans should familiarize themselves with the concept of jizya, which Andrew McCarthy illustrates as follows:

[Raymond Ibrahim] recounts how a Salafi sheikh has explained that U.S. aid to Egypt is considered jizya. That is the tax the Koran requires non-Muslims to pay for the privilege of living in a sharia state. As Allah directs in sura 9:29, it is not enough for conquered infidels (usually referred to by the dehumanizing term, kuffar) merely to pay this tribute; they must do so “with willing submission” in a manner that makes them “feel themselves subdued” — the humiliating condition of dhimmitude. The same reasoning applies to social welfare payments — they, too, are jizya.

One might object to this suggestion by noting the relative positions of power, here.  U.S. friendliness and wealth is surely threatening to insecure Egyptians of an Islamicist bent who seek world domination, and so they’ll rationalize it away, telling their followers that they, in fact, are the strong horses in the battle.  “Look how we’re winning!” they proclaim.  In this view, Americans needn’t care what the powerless say of them.

Except that Boston shows that we do, or at least that they aren’t quite powerless.

The killers, there, were accepting those jizya social welfare payments, and they were quite destructive.  Reviewing the “Lessons of Boston,” Ralph Peters points out that the United States welcomed the brothers, allowed them to be radicalized within our own society (apparently failing to make a compelling counter-argument to radical Islam), and then hobbled an entire city for days in response to “two amateur terrorists.”  For an international movement with a culture of suicide bombing, that’s got to look like a pretty substantial victory.

There’s a corollary on the American side, too, and it harkens back to the narrow corner into which we’re running. Boston native Michael Walsh challenges the “Boston Strong” brand:

What we saw instead was a city cowering in fear, led by two particularly pusillanimous toads in Gov. Deval Patrick and Mayor Mumbles Menino, who had the services of some 10,000 armed personnel — literally, a small army — to take down… wait for it… a wounded teenager with a gun, and maybe some self-detonating explosives.

In a country that sets for its philosophical model a grade school playground — where the children are free to romp however they like, provided they stay within the spatial and interpersonal boundaries that the kindly domineering teachers prescribe — bravery is “sheltering in place” while your neighborhood is invaded by a legion of door-to-door-knocking men clinging to tanks.  Walsh may miss the mark in his closing, however:

I’ve long said that the relationship between the American Left and Islam is that of masochist and sadist; the perfect Suicide Cult meets the Death Cult of its dreams. No wonder they got along so well together, right up to the moment when they didn’t.

It seems likely to be more the truth that the Left isn’t a death-wish mouse charging the corridor toward the awaiting teeth, but rather fancies itself another cat.  The statists, after all, who desire a controlled, planned society seek a dominating power.  At first blush, their ambitions seem strictly national, not international, like the Islamists, but a broader view shows them eager to work with other statists in other nations, ultimately setting up another kindly planning commission (backed with military force and monetary authority) to govern the entire planet.

And so, when the Left meets radical Islam, it isn’t the masochistic yin seeing its sadist yang, but rather the predator seeing its own reflection. The difference is that the carnivores of the West have learned from experience that aggressive totalitarianism tends to meet opposition or flame out, so they’re developing a passive version that “leads from behind,” so to speak.

Just as the Left strives to direct eyes away from a morally intolerable illustration of what pro-choice euphemisms cover up, it must direct eyes away from the imperialism and power-lust evident in the global jihad.  Strength is weakness, and if the American people would just cower in their homes a little bit better and play a little bit nicer and speak a little bit softer, all will be well.  Our tanks on your street make you strong.

The comfortable, secure dead end is close at hand. Just a little bit farther.

In the course of my morning reading, today, I came across a post in the Corner by Iain Murray, pointing to a Competitive Enterprise Institute video titled “The Life of Julius,” part of their WorkplaceChoice.org project.

The video, embedded below, tells the story of the man named in its title — modeled after the creepy pro-government-dependency promotion, “The Life of Julia,” from the Obama campaign.  Again and again, throughout his life, Julius and his family find themselves stymied by the activities of labor unions, in and out of government.

The video would have been worth mention, anyway, but around 1:25 in the video, I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of the informational bubbles included a reference to a November 2012 study by the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity on the premium that government workers receive in total compensation in Rhode Island and nationwide.

It’s also instructional to observe how the issues described in the video play out at the state level across the country.  Others of the minimum-wage studies by the Center would apply, as well.  And it’s interesting to note, in light of the video, the labor union domination of the list of organizations backing the push to increase Rhode Island’s income tax.

Also interesting (although none of the news reports that a quick Internet search produces mention it) is that those men standing behind Rhode Island’s U.S. congressmen as they promote a huge bump in the federal minimum wage are union representatives.  In keeping with “The Life of Julius,” the Center found that such a change would cost 3,466 jobs in Rhode Island.

A pair of Zachary Malinowski articles recently published in the Providence Journal describe what sounds like the pitch for a light after-primetime drama: a group of twenty somethings bring the City of Central Falls back to life… and finds love along the way.

It’s got an interesting plot, but taxpayers should approach it with some  broader (and more financial) questions than just the compelling narrative that it creates.

[Stephen] Larrick, the city’s planning and economic development officer, enthusiastically embraces the challenges facing the state’s smallest city.

He has big plans for a major transit stop, riverfront development, an urban campground and creating a portion of the bike path that connects Providence to Worcester, Mass.

Larrick is 23 years old and recently graduated from Brown with an undergraduate degree in urban studies and political philosophy.  He joins the 27-year-old mayor James Diossa, 24-year-old City Council member Steven Corrales, and 37-year-old mayoral chief of staff Sonia Grace in what is in some regards a sort of sociology project. “I just started working on the projects that interested me,” Larrick told Malinowski.

Presumably, the hopes and dreams of the people who live in the city (or who heavily subsidize it through state aid) will naturally align with his interests.

Drawing in outside grants, ultimately funded through state and federal tax dollars, the plan consists of a train stop, some “gentrified” apartments in old mill buildings, a walkable main street area, “historic” bridge lighting, a bike-path connector, and a canoe-and-kayaking launch, potentially with “a craft brew pub” and a bike shop.  (By “potentially,” I mean in the vision of the planner, without implying that any investors have expressed interest.)

That last component is telling.  The building that would anchor the kayak launch and shops was sold to a developer by the corrupt, now-imprisoned former mayor Charles Moreau for $200,000.  Four years later, Rhode Island taxpayers, through the state Department of Environmental Management, bought it back for $293,000 and essentially donated it back to the city.

The second article describes an island in the city that would be promoted as an “urban campground” for scouting troops and potentially providing programs for “at-risk youth.”

This all sounds great, and anybody tasked with sitting down and sketching out a plan for an ideal city might be inclined to come up with something similar, but that’s just the problem: it’s a sketch.

The demographics of Central Falls gain its leaders access to government funding that wouldn’t be available to other communities.  And public dollars might transform some areas of Central Falls into a beautiful space, like the water-fire area of Providence, but at least per this article, there’s no indication that masses of camping kayakers are just chomping at the bit to take the commuter rail to Central Falls for a weekend of drifting along the river and getting a mild buzz on craft brews before buying a new bike to head home.

And even if there were, are there enough of them (and are their activities profitable enough) to make the public’s investment worthwhile? If not, who’ll pay to keep the area up and beautiful?

In the meantime, how many small businesses and other investments premised on the interests of the people who’ll actually operate them and evidence of existing demand won’t get off the ground because the government withdrew money from the economy, distorted land values with its purchases, and implemented zoning rules to advance a young man’s specific development vision?

The folks on WPRI’s Newsmakers invited me on to take the conservative, traditionalist side in the debate over same-sex marriage, the weekend between the RI Senate’s vote to change the definition of “marriage” and the RI House’s anticipated vote to send the redefinition along to Governor Lincoln Chafee for anticipated approval.

In summary, I think that Senators who invited gay friends out to dinner and sifted through old magazines to help them make up their minds on the issue would have done better to take walks through urban neighborhoods in Rhode Island and ask the children, there, about their relationships with their parents.  Those are the people whom the redefinition of marriage will harm most and soonest.

Newsmakers 4/26: Same-sex marriage in Rhode Island

In a statement provided to the Ocean State Current, Dr. Dan Harrop of Providence announces that he has decided to bring his campaign for chairman of the Rhode Island Republican Party to a close:

I am today withdrawing from the election contest for Chairman of the RI Republican Party.

While I understand some delegates intend to challenge the results of the vote from last week, based on various irregularities in the process, it is no longer my intention to pursue the Chairmanship.

I now intend to concentrate my public policy efforts through renewed emphasis on the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, where I have served as the Founding Chairman since its inception, and in the Providence Republican City Committee, where I am Vice Chairman, as well as with the Rhode Island Republican Liberty Caucus, where I am the Treasurer and Past Chairman.

My term of office as Chairman of the RI Center for Freedom and Prosperity is due to end shortly, and a transition process has been in place for some six months, having begun well prior to the campaign for RI GOP Chairman.  My successor will be announced shortly, but I intend to remain on the Center’s Board of Directors. I look forward to continuing my work there.

I especially want to thank all those who have supported me during the last three months.

Daniel S. Harrop, MD

Harrop met in East Providence tonight with his opponent, Mark Smiley, of Warren, and Cranston Republican Sean Gately, acting as moderator.

Harrop’s announcement comes the day after the party’s Credentials Committee rejected a complaint that he filed concerning possible irregularities in the voting when the State Central Committee met last Thursday, March 21. Smiley won that tally by a single vote, 94 to 93.

According to the Credentials Committee’s statement, “Absent any additional process between now and then,” outgoing chairman Mark Zaccaria “will declare the results of the original vote to be valid based on these findings” at a meeting of the State Central Committee, scheduled for next Tuesday, April 2.

In his complaint Harrop stressed that “the authority of the Credentials Committee under the Bylaws is limited to deciding contested delegations and does not include the authority to overturn or uphold the results of a contested election.”

The night of the close vote, Thursday, March 21, parliamentary authorities within the party declared the result invalid on the grounds that the number of votes cast outnumbered the people checked in by one.  Nonetheless, Zaccaria subsequently issued a statement on Sunday saying that the phantom voter had been confirmed as eligible. Consequently, his press release said, “Chairman Smiley will take the gavel to conclude that meeting and to begin his official tenure” at the Tuesday, April 2, meeting.

The days that followed brought a stream of public and private attacks between the two sides, with elected Republican officials calling for the vote to be redone and anonymous attacks proliferating. In both his complaint to the Credentials Committee and in the comments to a post in which Patrick Laverty, of Anchor Rising, called on the factions to behave responsibly, Harrop condemned the attacks.

The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity is a state-based free-market think tank and the parent organization of the Ocean State Current.  (Editorial management of the Current falls under the responsibilities of the Center’s research director, the author of this article.)

See here for details about the possible actions that Harrop’s action probably negates.

Featured image: Dan Harrop (left) and Mark Smiley (right).

When Rhode Island patriots burned the cutter Gaspee in 1722, the British government sought to entice potential informants with rewards, but no one came forward. The same approach was tried with the original Tea Party in Boston but none of the “Mohawks” was ever exposed. The idea of “ratting out” fellow Americans was simply unthinkable during the time of the Revolution, but some contemporary government figures appear to view it as an accepted practice. This is one of many reasons why George W. Shuster, a Yale Law School graduate living in Rhode Island, sought to trace President Obama’s “systematic assault” on First Amendment freedoms as part of a book project that is already screaming out for a sequel.

“As the other key constitutional safeguards against the power and influence of the federal government have eroded over time, the First Amendment has become more important, and is perhaps more important now than it was at the time of the founding,” he said in an interview. “When you look at the separation of powers, President Obama is constantly lecturing the judiciary, which is supposedly independent, and is supposed to be a check on unconstitutional actions. When you look at federalism, the states are supposed to operate like 50 separate laboratories, but they are becoming more dependent on the federal government. That’s why I say the First Amendment is more important now: it is doing the combined work of other protections that have been abandoned.”

Just before the first Tea Party demonstrations were organized in April 2009, President Obama sent a decree out to FBI field offices directing them to conduct covert surveillance and identify the participants. Later that same year, a White House Web site was set up asking Americans to report on “fishy” comments about ObamaCare. The site was eventually shut down after in the wake of intense criticism. These episodes are highly instructive and revealing, Shuster said.

“The new standard seems to be that anything offensive to President Obama is not permissible,” he observed. “But the core of the First Amendment is political speech and the ability to criticize government, criticize government officials and government policies. And you should be able to do with this without looking over shoulder and wondering who is listening.”

When President Obama campaigned in 2008, he pledged an “open and transparent” presidency and also said he would make any proposed legislation widely available for public consumption before there was a vote, Shuster reminds readers in his book. But when it came time to move the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), widely known as ObamaCare, through Congress, the Democratic leadership “violated due process” and resisted open debate, Shuster said.

“The lawsuits by the majority of states chose to focus judicial review of the Act based on the constitutional and other defects in its substantive provisions,” he wrote. “Yet the procedural defects in its passage are highly offensive to the Constitution, as well. Why not base the case for legislative repeal on the claim that the underlying cause of these substantive defects are the procedural defects that allowed it to become law? … It is abundantly clear that the process by which ObamaCare was enacted, in repeated violation of both the spirit and letter of the First Amendment, among other procedural shortcomings, rankled the People.”

The book, titled Obama’s War on Free Speech, carefully documents the Obama Administration’s multiple assaults on the First Amendment. An entire chapter is devoted to the attacks on Fox News, talk radio, and other dissenting voices. Shuster also discusses how Obama has yielded to radical Islam in areas where it is his responsibility to defend free speech.

At a time when the government becomes less tolerant, and more restrictive, many Americans understandably find it necessary to fall back on anonymity, he explained.

“Go back to the Federalist Papers, and we don’t entirely know who wrote what,” he said. “We know today that Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison were the authors, but we’re still entirely sure who was ‘Publicus” in certain cases. The point is that they found it necessary back then to keep their identities anonymous. That’s important today too, but even this is in danger.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D, NY), for example, continues to push the DISCLOSE Act, which would force companies and individuals to reveal their names before entering the political fray.

“My hope with this book is that more people come to see what’s happening and they view the period beginning in 2008 as a teachable moment,” Shuster said. “Even if Obama is voted out of office, there are some lessons that should never be forgotten. The First Amendment is our last line of the defense, and the Left knows it.”

Now that they are up for re-election, RI House Democratic Majority Leader Nicholas Mattiello and his close ally Sen. Hanna Gallo, also a Democrat, are posturing as forceful advocates for neighborhood safety in Cranston. But according to local advocates, they are spreading misinformation about sex offenders at the expense of sound public policy.

This was the central message of a press conference Carolyn Medeiros, executive director of the Alliance for Safe Communities, held yesterday in front of the Cranston City Hall building. She was joined by Jean Johnson, executive director of House of Hope, and the Republican candidates running to unseat Mattiello and Gallo in the General Assembly.

At issue, are some of the remarks Rep. Mattiello made during a Sept. 19 meeting of the Glen Woods Crime Prevention and Improvement organization. Instead of advancing meaningful reforms that would provide necessary services to the homeless and safeguard community interests, Rep. Mattiello fell back on incendiary and irresponsible rhetoric, Medeiros told listeners.

“This was a disgusting and obvious attempt to appeal to voters by preying upon the fears in our neighborhoods,” she said. “We are now faced with a lose-lose situation. Any discussion of moving sex offenders to a non-residential area has now ceased. Re-entry is coming, re-entry is happening, but it needs to be done in the right way.”

The Sept. 19 meeting included a “dual presentation” about crime in Cranston and the conditions within Harrington Hall, a homeless shelter for men located at the ACI prison facility, according to a press release from the Alliance.

“It is in the opinion of the Alliance that addressing crime rates in conjunction with sex offender issues and Harrington Hall were not synonymous but separate issues and should have been addressed accordingly,” the release said. “The obvious impact to the audience was heightened anxiety, worry, and stress. The separate issues blended together, causing only more animosity toward Harrington Hall’s current status.”

The Coalition for the Homeless attempted to make their case over “an angry and outspoken audience,” Medieros explained, but Rep. Mattiello “ran the meeting” and told residents that he was working with Sen. Gallo to prevent sex offenders, and other homeless individuals in Harrington, from being moved to the Gloria McDonald building, a nearby empty women’s prison.

House of Hope, which is based in Massachusetts, provides case management for hundreds of men each year at Harrington Hall. With 88 beds, it is the largest overflow shelter in Rhode Island, but the number beds are often not sufficient for the number of individuals who stay each night. The population within Harrington includes former inmates charged with sex offenses.

Jean Johnson, executive director of House of Hope, was sharply critical of Rep. Mattiello’s comments and ardently supports the idea of moving current residents of Harrington into the Gloria McDonald building. Harrington recently failed a state inspection and can no longer accommodate homeless individuals in need of service, she said.

“Harrington is an old gymnasium,” she explained. “We have no private space for the people who are part of our caseload, the Gloria McDonald building is much more suitable. But because of what Rep. Mattiello said at the meeting, we cannot expect to have any movement on this right now.”

Robert Lancia, a former Navy chaplain, is running as a Republican for the state Senate seat now occupied by Sen. Gallo in District 27. He recently did a tour of Harrington and agrees that it is in a “terrible condition” and views the Gloria McDonald House as a viable alternative.

Harrington failed inspection in part because of a leaky roof. The state has offered up $150,000 for repairs to the facility, but Lancia doubts that those funds will be sufficient to cover the necessary expenses.

Unfortunately, Harrington will continue to exist “inclusive of the vilified sex offender population placed there” Medeiros wrote in her press release. What is often overlooked, is that sex offenders are placed in the facility not by House of Hope, but by the State of Rhode Island, she added.

“If Mattiello is so concerned about sex offenders, why did he never introduce any legislation during the entire time he has been in office?” Medeiros asked during the press conference. “Where has he been all this time? And where is the news media on this? Why are they not here? Is Mattiello really that powerful?”

Medeiros also accused Rep. Mattiello and Sen. Gallo of “spreading misinformation” about sex offenders and the living conditions in Harrington Hall.

“Our political leaders are suppose to look out for our safety, but instead they are misinforming the community,” she said. “There should be accountability for this kind of miscommunication about Harrington Hall’s future.  The accountability lies within those who were entrusted to represent their constituents with honesty and integrity. Rep. Mattiello and Sen. Gallo fell short of meeting this obligation and instead have used these issues as a platform for re-election.”

Other Republican candidates in attendance included Donald Gendron who is running for House seat in District 18. If elected, Gendron said he would be willing to favor legislation modeled after the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act.

Rhode Island is consistently ranked as one of the poorest, and least economically viable of all 50 states, because lawmakers place too much faith in the public sector, according to free market activists who took part in a press conference last Thursday in Cranston.

But even modest steps in the right direction could attract business and investment back into the state, which is strategically positioned in the northeast corridor to serve as a vital gateway for national and international trade and commerce, they said.

“The big problem with Rhode Island is that it has become overly reliant on the public sector and its elected officials continue to shape policy with eye toward taxpayer funded benefits for government employees,” Jonathan Williams, the director of the Center for State Fiscal Reform and Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). “Rhode Island has been ranked near the bottom for every year we have down our state survey.”

Williams is the co-author of “Rich States, Poor States,” which ranks states in terms of economic competitiveness. The just released 5^th edition calls attention to policies that hinder investment, discourage business, and drive up consumer costs. The report then juxtaposes this failed approach with free market solutions that are working.

During the press conference, Mike Stenhouse, the president and CEO Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity (the Current’s parent organization), pinned the blame on “restrictive legislation” that must be uprooted before the Ocean State can begin to attract new business.

“We have a failed economy because we have the worst business climate in the country,” Stenhouse said. “We have a bad business climate because we have bad public policy. If we want a good economy, we must get rid of bad legislation.”

The Center advocates a “Get Government Out of the Way” approach to public policy that would remove “legislative barriers to success” that undermine economic and individual freedom. The strategy is built around “three proven steps” identified by the Center:

1. Embrace the free-enterprise system as the means to restore prosperity
2. Follow and learn from successful economic policies implemented in other states
3. Design and implement public policy reforms reflective of the above, applied evenly and universally

But before any of these changes can be set into motion, Rhode Island must first reexamine the mindset that first gave rise to irresponsible budgeting practices and higher rates of taxation, said Ellen Kenner, an activist with the Northwest Tea Party.

“We have to ask ourselves what underlies big government and the bloated budgets and higher taxes that go with it,” Kenner observed. “There’s a moral code that says the state should take care of us and control our lives, that’s what needs to change. If we value the human mind, it should not be chained in the first place.”

Mark Zaccaria, the state’s Republican Party chair, said the next few election cycles will be critical to Rhode Island’s future.

“With just a few more seats in the General Assembly, we could begin to move in more of a free market direction and do this on a bipartisan basis,” he said. “Right now, there is just too big of a majority. This means there is no serious deliberation, and no transparency. The goal here is to dimish the majority just enough so that we could be in position to sustain a veto, and that would change the dynamic.”

The Center’s “Freedom Index,” which ranks lawmakers based on how their voting record impacts state finances and constitutionally limited government is very telling, Zaccaria added.

“It shows the Republican Party is serious about reform, and that we do have some partners on the other side,” he said. “In the end, it comes down to the voters will do.”

Jack Peters, who is active with the Rhode Island Federated Sportsman’s Club, said the techniques his organization, and others, have applied to protect and expand Second Amendment rights, can also be used to secure gains in other areas that are important to the free market.

“Right now Rhode Island is a little island in between Massachusetts and Connecticut where there is freedom to purchase firearms,” he explained. “That didnt’ happen overnight. We made sure the General Assembly knew there was a large voting bloc that was engaged on this issue, and that was watching. ”

In recent years, the General Assembly has catered to special group demands at the expense of taxpayer interests, the Center has argued. As result, legislative barriers have been erected that restrict economic freedom and create disincentives.

“Rhode Island has the worst business climate in the nation because we have one of the most burdensome tax and regulatory environments, leaving families with fewer opportunities and options to pursue a productive life of their own choosing,” Stenhouse, the Center CEO, said.

“More and more it seems that restrictive laws and government programs are running our lives and creating obstacles to prosperity.”

While the relationship between Ron Paul supporters and the Republican National Committee (RNC) remains contentious in some quarters, Rhode Island’s GOP delegates anticipate that the disparate factions will come together in November.

The differences boiled over during the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, this past August when the committee on credentials moved to unseat half of the Ron Paul delegates from Maine. Republican leaders claim that Paul supporters violated party rules during Maine’s party convention when they secured 20 of 24 delegate seats. Audible booing could be heard from the convention floor in Tampa when the announcement was made that 10 of the delegates would lose their seats.  Many of those same delegates reportedly walked out of the national convention in protest.

Paul, a Texas congressman, has said he will retire when his current term expires in December, ending a 24-year career. While it has been clear for some time that he would not emerge as the nominee, Paul’s libertarian sentiments continue to gain currency within the Republican Party, said Andrew McNulty, a Rhode Island Paul delegate, in an interview.  In addition to Maine, Paul won a plurality of delegates in Nevada, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Oklahoma. Even so, it has been clear for some time that Paul would not emerge as the nominee, McNulty points out.

“All the Republican National Committee needed to do was to let the process go forward and let the chips fall where they may,” he said. “The results would have been the same. But when you manipulate the process, people know it, and the Republican leaders hurt themselves in way that was completely unnecessary.”

Since Rhode Island directly elects its delegates, instead of relying on a caucus system that is common in other states, there was less cause for controversy, noted Mark Zaccaria, the state Republican chairman. While the Paul delegates in other states may have legitimate grievances, the candidate’s campaign appeared to deliberately ignore some of the rules that applied to the national convention, Zaccaria said.

Some Paul delegates, for instance, complained that their votes were not called out and counted during the roll call on the convention floor in Tampa.

“You have to file paperwork to have your vote counted during roll call, and this was explained,” Zaccaria said. “The average delegate in the trenches may not have understood this, but I didn’t see any conspiracy at work. The Paul people didn’t always play the game the way it was supposed to be played.”

State Representative Doreen Costa, a delegate for Gov. Mitt Romney, concurs. While she admires Rep. Paul and his supporters, she views Romney as a more electable candidate. Costa is also dismissive of the idea that there was an orchestrated effort to silence Paul delegates.

“I don’t think they were treated unfairly,” Rep. Costa said. “They were there, and they were heard. They were all treated with respect, and they were able to cast their votes.”

Paul’s views on foreign policy ultimately sank his campaign, Costa suggested. “If his foreign policies were not so out there, he might have had a shot,” she said.

While there are some libertarian views on foreign policy that may be out of the mainstream, there is a growing consensus in the country for a return to constitutional limited government, Daniel Harrop, the Rhode Island state treasurer for the Republican Party, observed.

“This is why so many people decided to stick with Ron Paul,” Harrop said. “There is a feeling that we need to reduce the size of the federal government and to have less bureaucracy. This message is resonating because we live in a center-right country. “

He added: “Romney is offering a sort of Ron Paul light. He’s telling us we need to get the government back within constitutional limits , but he’s not going as far as Ron Paul. That’s still a far more compelling message than what Obama is offering.”

Although the Republican Party will likely remain a minority party in Rhode Island, and the Northeast in general, Harrop  is confident the GOP can work to advance reforms in cooperation with Democrats and Independents.

“There are progressive Democrats who want socialized government, but there are also conservative Democrats who would probably be Republicans in other states,” Harrop said.  “We don’t need a Republican majority to effect change,  but we do need some more seats. I think the Republican message that we need to get our finances under control is coming through, and the convention certainly helped to get that message out.”

By resisting the health care exchange system included as part of the new federal health care law, Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has put himself in a stronger position to safeguard taxpayer interests, according to key figures in the state’s delegation to the Republicans’ National Convention in Tampa, Florida.

Since the future of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), commonly known as ObamaCare, remains uncertain, it was prudent for Gov. Christie to insulate his state from federal schemes that could become burdensome and costly over time, delegates said. The exchange system can be described as an online platform where small businesses and uninsured individual can select federally subsidized health care plans.

Christie vetoed a bill that would create an exchange prior to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding ObamaCare’s individual mandate. But the law could still be repealed legislatively if Gov. Mitt Romney is elected president with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, Maria Bua, the former GOP chair of Mercer County, noted.

“It’s certainly a point of pride to see New Jersey taking a stand against bigger and more intrusive government,” she said. “We don’t need to put unelected bureaucrats in charge of our health care, and we don’t need more government dependency.”

State Sen. Tom Kean Jr. described the exchange legislation  Christie vetoed earlier this year as a “badly flawed bill” that could have a severe impact on the quality of health care services for New Jersey residents.

“The bill did nothing other than to expand bureaucracy and create many thousands of dollars in new unneeded positions,” said Kean, who is the son of the former governor. “The bill created a separate branch from the executive branch that raised questions of accountability. The commissioner for the Department of Banking and Insurance wasn’t even included in the decision-making that would impact health care for New Jersey citizens. The bill had a lot of flaws and the governor had the best interests of New Jersey at heart.”

The story is much different in Rhode Island where Gov. Lincoln Chafee used an executive order to implement an exchange system that interlinks health care with a range of social services.  Christie’s approach is much more in line with the policy recommendations of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, which favors “patient-centered, market-based reforms.”

Over time, the Center anticipates that the Rhode Island exchange will be converted into a “dependency portal” that expands access to social welfare services like food stamps and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

“Rhode Island is leading the nation in the advancement of a larger entitlement culture via its planned expansion of social services through a health benefits exchange, a component of the controversial federal healthcare law,” The Center has argued. “When collecting detailed personal financial and household information from individuals seeking health insurance support, the state intends to be the first to proactively enroll participants in other state programs for which they are eligible.”

Bua, the Mercer County delegate, said the specter of a “dependency portal” should give pause to policymakers in all states.”

“That’s not the direction we should go in,” she said. “There’s more compelling path to reform, and I’m pleased Gov. Christie put the brakes on.”

During his convention speech, Gov. Christie’s combative tone was in marked contrast to Rhode Island politicians’  quiet assumptions that government programs should expand. “They said it was impossible to touch the third rail of politics. To take on the public sector unions and to reform a pension and health benefit system that was headed to bankruptcy.” Turning to the federal government, Christie said it “has overtaxed, overspent, and over-borrowed a great people into second-class citizenship.”

Diane Spino, a Republican committee woman in East Brunswick, NJ, said ObamaCare was the byproduct of “irresponsible representation.” She favors a “less-bureaucratic” approach to reform that will hopefully become a reality if Gov. Romney prevails in November.

“We’ve reached a point where our elected officials do not even know what is in the bills they pass,” she lamented. “That is certainly true in the case of ObamaCare.”

Spino also said that Rhode Island’s “dependency portal” vindicates Christie’s policy stance.

“We can see now what the exchange can turn into,” she said. “So Christie was clearly right to veto that bill.”

In addition to Christie, Govs. Rick Scott (R-FL), Scott Parnell (R-AK), Susana Martinez (R-NM), Rick Perry (R-TX), Bob McDonnell (R-VA), Nikki Haley (R-SC), and Bobby Jindal (R-LA) have also said that they will not move forward with the exchange system.

In response to the voter fraud scandals that have beset Rhode Island over the past few days, top figures in the N.J. Republican delegation told the Ocean State Current that electoral irregularities are “rampant” and “widespread” in their own state.

Democratic congressional candidate Anthony Gemma has released sworn statements from witnesses who claim that Rep. David Cicilline’s mayoral and congressional campaigns have benefitted from voter fraud since 2002. Gemma is challenging Cicilline in the Sept. 11 Democratic primary. John Arcaro, a Democratic candidate for House District 59, claims he has come across seven names illegally registered to vote in the primary. Four are green card holders who are not permitted to vote and three are illegally registered at places of business.

“Voter fraud is real and rampant in certain parts of New Jersey such as Southern Hudson County,” State Sen. Gerald Cardinale said in an interview at the Sirata Beach Resort in Tampa, Florida, where the delegation is gathered. “A voter identification law would make sense, but the Democrats here would never let it happen. That’s unfortunate because people in both parties are the victims of voter fraud, and we should hold high standards to ensure ballot integrity.”

The situation in Rhode Island demonstrates that both parties have good cause to be concerned that fraudulent activities effectively cancel votes from people who are legally registered, Cardinale said.

“I’m not familiar with the specific allegations in Rhode Island, but it does say to me that this should not be a partisan issue,” Cardinale continued. “You have one Democrat making allegations about another Democrat. We know voter fraud is commonplace in parts of Jersey, and we should come together to find a solution.”

Rep. Chris Smith (R, NJ) said that there is “no question” that voter fraud occurs in New Jersey.

“We need a clean democracy, and that means clean elections and more vigilance to protect the ballots,” he said. “The people who commit fraud should be held accountable.”

When he first ran for Congress in 1978, Smith lost to incumbent Democrat Frank Thompson, but prevailed in a 1980 rematch, the same year Ronald Reagan was elected president. Smith identified Mercer County as an area where there was, and probably still is,  a strong potential for voter fraud.

“We had 2,000 ineligible voters on the rolls in 1980,” he said. “Thompson also worked to keep the machines open in Trenton, where he said people had trouble making it to polls because of bad weather. But I think there was something else going on. Thompson was trying to see how many votes he needed to win.”

Maria Bua, the former GOP chair in Mercer County, said a concerted effort needs to be made to root out fraud.

“There is a problem with college students who get registered here while they have an address, and with people who use businesses as their registration address,” she said. “This means we have people voting in our elections who probably are not eligble.”

Rhode Island is the only state with a Democratic legislature to pass a new photo voter ID requirement in response to voter fraud allegations since 2011. The move puts the Ocean State in company with Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The constitutionality of photo ID requirements was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2008 case. Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, South Dakota, and Indiana have had photo ID statues in effect for several years.

Most recently, a state judge upheld Pennsylvania’s photo ID law. The state Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has moved to block implementation of the new photo ID laws in South Carolina and Texas under Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA).

Section 5, which was set up to guard against racial discrimination, requires Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and parts of California, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and South Dakota to obtain approval from the DOJ for election changes. Texas and South Carolina are both countersuing the DOJ, but Texas is also challenging the constitutionality of  VRA’s Section 5.

Rhode Island State Sen. Harold Metts, the lead sponsor of the voter ID law that is now operative in Rhode Island, sees room for common ground.

“The key word is balance,” Metts, a Democrat in Providence, has said. “Voter fraud is real; it has a history here in Rhode Island; and it is a problem in other states. What we did here was very reasonable and very necessary, and I think we can be a model for other states. I certainly think it’s possible to have too many requirements and to create too many hurdles and burdens. That might be true in the more conservative states; it’s not true here.”

Rhode Island’s new law was tested for the first time during April’s presidential primary, when voters were asked to show drivers’ licenses, passports, birth certificates, or health club IDs. Voters who did not have the necessary identification were permitted to cast provisional ballots. Beginning in 2014, only a photo ID will be accepted, but the state will provide free IDs to anyone who needs them, and provisional ballots will remain in effect for anyone who lacks an ID on Election Day

Left-leaning special interest groups such as the ACLU, the Advancement Project, Project Vote, and the Brennan Center for Justice claim that voter ID laws tend to disenfranchise minorities. But Metts, who is African American, views the ID laws as a necessary protection against fraud.

“There’s always a concern about disenfranchisement, and we should make every effort to ensure that everyone who is eligible to vote can vote,” Metts said. “But it got to the point where there was a such fear over disenfranchisement that people just buried their heads when it came time to deal with voter fraud, and that was not healthy for our democracy.”

Metts initially took action because several of his own constituents were the victims of voter fraud, he explained. While it is possible to put too many restrictions and requirements in place, this has not happened in Rhode Island, and it does not need to be an issue in other states.

“Again, the key word is ‘balance,’ and we need to be responsive to constituents who know voter fraud takes place here, and I’m sure there are legitimate concerns in other states.”

Complex economic questions were boiled down into a simple message Tuesday night in East Greenwich.

“Mike Riley=Economic Growth”

Instead of pursuing weak dollar policies and European tax rates that scuttle opportunity and diminish investment, Riley, Republican candidate for Congrees, told audience members gathered at the Meritage restaurant he would push for a “fair tax” that would replace all income taxes with a consumption tax on retail sales and advance regulatory reforms to create incentive for business and spur job creation.

Louis Woodhill, a columnist with Forbes Magazine, noted for his unconventional views, was the featured speaker. He praised Riley for promoting a pro-growth agenda that is very much at odds with the current political establishment. An abrupt shift in policymaking is needed, if the United States is to achieve its full economic potential, Woodhill said during his talk.

The U.S. economy grew at an ever slower pace during the period of 2000 to 2011 than it did during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Woodhill observed.

If the United States had grown at such a lackluster pace since time of the American founding, “we would have the per capita income of Zimbabwe,” Woodhill said. “I’m old enough to remember what prosperity is supposed to look like.”

Unfortunately, top government officials are resigned to the idea that a two percent growth rate is normal, but it is not, Woodhill argued. “America’s character is shaped by a four percent growth rate,” he said.

If the economy were growing at a fast enough clip, it would go a long way toward resolving the fiscal challenges of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, Woodhill suggested. Like Riley, he also favors a “fair tax” because he opposes taxes on saving and investment.

“It’s [President] Obama’s fantasy to have European tax rates and American growth rates. You can’t,” Woodhill said.

But the Forbes columnist did not limit his criticisms to Democrats. President Obama and President Bush (43) both favor “weak dollar policies” to the detriment of the economy, he said.

Woodhill also described Richard Nixon as “the worst president of my lifetime.” Nixon’s decision to devalue the dollar had severe long-term ramifications, he explained.

U.S. presidents are viewed as being successful or unsuccessful based in large part on what the “real Dow” does, Woodhill said, during their time in office.

President Eisenhower, for example, who presided over an era of peace and prosperity in the 1950s, while the Dow was strong, is widely recognized as a successful president, Woodhill pointed out.

The strong performance of the Dow during the 1990s also explains why “Clinton got away with murder,” he said.

However, the sharpest turnaround and highest percentage increase in the Dow occurred under President Reagan, the Forbes columnist, noted during his talk.

“People forget that during this time of the presidential campaign in 1980 Reagan was actually behind [President] Jimmy Carter,” Woodhill said. “At that time, nobody realized what American hero he would turn out to be.”

Given where the economy is right now, “Obama is in no great shape” and could lose the election if history is any guide, Woodhill said.

Riley, who is a Narragansett resident and business owner, with expertise in money management, has made economic renewal a major focus of his campaign.

“We can foster economic growth by removing regulation that derails it,” he said. “Removing uncertainty over taxes and reducing government spending levels are fundamental to a sound economy. We should also increase the use of enterprise zones to target areas for growth. We also need to protect and defend the fishing industry and then rebuild it to its former influence in Rhode Island. This is an area where government intervention has gone too far and demonstrably affected the lives of thousands. But first we must stabilize our nation’s economy.”

Riley has been sharply critical of the Obama administration.

“We have created structural impediments to growth that must be corrected in order to place us on a path to stability,” he said. “This administration instead seems intent on leading our nation down a path toward insolvency; it has grown our national debt from $10 trillion to $15 trillion in just the past three years, resulting in a $48,000 debt for every person in America. This nation cannot expect to regain its financial footing until we get our debt under control.”

Jim Taricani invited me and RIFuture.org owner/editor Bob Plain to sit in for 10 News Conference, this morning.  The topics leaned more toward politics than policy, but we bloggers did manage to pull the conversation toward political philosophy a bit.  Specifically, we discussed economic development, the RI economy, the Congressional district 1 race, and the presidential race.

As a side note, hanging out in the waiting area, Plain corrected my erroneous impression of his “mash-up” of my two roles — with the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity and with Anchor Rising — as “Prosperous Rising.”  Apparently, it wasn’t meant as a compliment, but rather to imply that we’re focused on making those who are already prosperous more so (the 1% and all that).

I’d like to suggest that any prosperous person who agrees with Bob’s interpretation should consider financial support for either organization for which I write.  However, from my perspective, the unifying theme of the Center, the Ocean State Current, and Anchor Rising is that of changing Rhode Island such that people can realize their prosperous potential.  Everybody’s got a successful, comfortable professional inside of him- or herself, and it is that which we seek to help rise.  Such folks should read our work and behave accordingly in the civic sphere.