Stronger Leverage for Failure to Pay Tolls Would Only Applies to Newport Bridge … Yeah, That’s the Ticket

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Huh, this must be a huge coincidence, following as it does closely on the heels of the passage of the governor’s horrendous toll plan: bills have popped up that would give the RI Turnpike and Bridge Authority greater leverage to punish people and collect from those who fail to pay tolls when crossing the Newport Pell Bridge.

A series of bills filed in the General Assembly on behalf of the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority would allow the agency to report toll violators to the Division of Motor Vehicles, which would place a hold on license and registration renewals.

Technically, the new statewide tolls – collections and presumably punishments – will be administered by RIDOT. [Correction.] In fact, statewide tolls will be administered by the R.I. Turnpike and Bridge Authority. But So is there any doubt that, if these bills pass, this punishment and leverage would quickly be extended to toll violators around the state, not just those crossing the Newport Bridge?

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RI Innovates as the State Economic Development Sham

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Today brings the General Assembly’s role in the faux process of implementing a Washington think tank’s questionable economic development plans to make Rhode Island great again.

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It Begins: National Trucking Association Moves Upcoming Meeting out of RI Due to Tolls

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So this is not good. Toll gantries are three years away (by the way, what was the peddle-to-the-metal urgency to get tolls passed seeing it’s going to take so long to implement them?) and they’re already chasing business away.

A trucking group has changed its plan to hold a national meeting in Newport in the summer of 2018, in protest of the recently approved RhodeWorks program.

RhodeWorks imposes tolls on some trucks to pay for repairs to the state’s aging bridges. “It’s not that we don’t want to be in Newport, it’s that we can’t support a state where the administration seems to be anti-truck,” said Brian Parke, Northeast chairman of the Trucking Association Executives Council.

Worse, the governor responds with an I-got-mine shrug.

In a statement, Governor Raimondo spokeswoman Marie Aberger wrote, “We’re pleased Rhode Island will now have the money we need to rebuild our roads, as well as putting people to work.

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In Rhode Island, Momentum Means Not Completely Falling Apart

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Reading Kate Bramson’s article, today, on the predictable and usual downward revision of Rhode Island job statistics, I thought this quotation from the governor must certainly be an abbreviated version of the full statement:

“We still have a tall hill to climb to turn this economy around. However, we have momentum. Just yesterday, Citizens Bank announced that it will renew its investment in our state with a new corporate campus in Johnston,” Raimondo said. “I will continue to hustle every day – listening to employers’ needs and working closely with the General Assembly – to invest in growth, attract new businesses, and rebuild the Rhode Island economy.”

I mean, things must be bad, indeed, if the best spin Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo can come up with is to point out that Citizens Bank didn’t run screaming out of the Ocean State.  But no, that’s the full statement, and the picture really is that bleak.

The revised data for RI-based jobs (which is limited to just the one month of January 2015, so far) brings that statistic in line with the employment data reviewed in this earlier post.  Both suggest that Rhode Island’s pitiful recovery hit a complete stop during the first year of Raimondo’s governorship.

One is tempted to see the dramatic halt of employment growth last summer as an immediate reaction to the first legislative session of Raimondo’s term and the first full one with Democrat Nicholas Mattiello (Cranston) as Speaker of the House.  That would be a faster-than-expected validation of my suggestion that the night the House passed the budget marked the state’s entry into the next stage of its collapse.

It’s also tempting to recall the disappointing yield from the governor’s new tax on summer rentals and that the state has been on a minimum wage binge.  In general, one would expect such policies to bend the employment curve downward.

It’s a little early to make such declarations, however, and the odds are good that a much bigger problem will soon arise, swamping the stagnating effects of the General Assembly and governor’s annual shortening of the Rhode Island economy’s leash and giving them a big ol’ excuse why their top-down centralized economic plans didn’t work.

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SEC Charges Both RI & Wells Fargo with Fraud in Issuing 38 Studios Bonds – Should We Stop Repaying the Bonds?

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An interesting development on Monday when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged the R.I. Economic Development Corporation (now apparently trying to pretend, via a name change to the “Commerce Corporation”, that it is no longer in existence) and Wells Fargo with fraud by

making materially misleading statements when they sold the bonds used to fund the deal.

Doesn’t that further erode the case to repay these bonds, as though the fact that they were much higher paying moral obligation bonds isn’t enough? (The Chair of the House Oversight Committee, Karen MacBeth, sure thinks so.)

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Was Final RhodeWorks Vote Scheduled Before the Bill Was Submitted?

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Correspondence related to the removal of the toll gantries on the Sakonnet River Bridge on Super Bowl Sunday suggests that the date was no surprise, that the state paid a premium for the timing, and that government officials had the schedule for RhodeWorks legislation planned out well in advance.

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UPDATED: Former RIICA Director: State House Pressure on Lobbyists, Members Led to Lost Job

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As the latest incident showing a toxic culture in the State House, the former executive director of Rhode Island Independent Contractors and Associates (RIICA) says he was forced out after officials put pressure on the group’s lobbyists and members began to fear retaliation.

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The Success of Medicaid Reform Depends on the Governor’s Party

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Without going back and doing a thorough search of archives, it sure seems like Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s Medicaid reforms are receiving more credulous coverage.  The Providence Journal’s headline today, for example, is “$70M savings goal to be met, and surpassed, says governor“:

With the leaders of the working group seated around her and while pointing to charts trackings spending, Raimondo said that the state is on track to realize $70 million in Medicaid savings for the current fiscal year, and is projected to possibly save another $7 million on top of that before the end of the fiscal year in June. An additional $40 million is expected to be saved in fiscal 2017.

That $110 million is conspicuously identical to the $110 million projected to be saved by Republican Governor Donald Carcieri’s Medicaid reform.  Of course, back then, local journalists were inclined to be skeptical and to shave the estimates down as much as possible.  As I’ve written before, the two programs are similar on multiple points, with the main differences being whether the emphasis is on increased accountability for users or new ways to raise money and shift costs to private insurance members.

It isn’t surprising, therefore, that reporters who tend to share the governor’s progressive beliefs would prefer one program over the other.

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Two Points on the Latest Brookings Op-Ed

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Apart from producing campaign materials for Governor Raimondo, Brookings is suggesting a government-centric plan that might delay Rhode Island’s collapse, but only long enough to increase the pain.

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Distrust in Government Leads to Desire for… Big Government?

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Poll findings about trust in government at different levels and in different states might reveal a contradiction for progressives and a dark future for Rhode Islanders.

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SATs and Any Excuse to Spend Taxpayer Money

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A quick question: Is there any expansion of the government budget that the Providence Journal editorial board wouldn’t support?

Given its importance, it makes sense that parents and teachers and schools should be encouraging students to prepare for and take the SAT. Thus, Gov. Gina Raimondo is on the right track with her plan to make the PSAT and the SAT “free” for Rhode Island public high school students — funded by the taxpayers, that is — and let them take the test during a school day rather than on a Saturday.

It stands to reason that both of these moves will encourage more students to take the test — particularly those who might find it difficult to pay a registration fee that can be more than $50. It also stands to reason that more students taking the test could result in more students choosing to attend college or further their education. According to a 2015 College Board study of Maine’s decision to make the SAT mandatory, the policy resulted in a more than 40 percent increase in the number of students taking the test and a 2 to 3 percent increase in the state’s college enrollment rate.

The one data point — that is, the one statement that doesn’t take the form of “it stands to reason” — is a study of Maine’s mandating the SAT, which study was performed by the College Board. The editorial doesn’t happen to mention it, but the College Board sells the SAT. It stands to reason that readers should be skeptical when a private company finds it beneficial for the government to force people to use its product.

But what about the conclusions that the Providence Journal reaches simply through reasoning? Is the cost of a $50 test really what’s keeping students from committing to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on college? Perhaps the editors would note the proliferation of scholarships and loans that make college “affordable” for lower-income students, but shouldn’t there be any cost to the prospective student, causing him or her to give some thought to his or her reasons for attending college?

Apparently not. So, you and I will pick up this $50 tab. Then, we’ll subsidize the individual students’ tuition, which very likely is a big part of the tuition inflation that affects everybody. Then, if they live in or move to Rhode Island, we’ll pay their loans fully for a few years. Then, if they still find themselves struggling with debt in a failing economy, we’ll cover them with food stamps, Medicaid, housing subsidies, and a number of other welfare programs.

And all of this, by the way, is before we challenge the editors’ dubious assumption that students emerge from subsidized college, which they attend without immediate reason to weigh the cost, “well educated.”

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More Clarity About How Rhode Island Works

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Some folks on social media have noted an op-ed by Mark Ryan in today’s Providence Journal encouraging Rhode Islanders to stop “drowning in negativity” and instead “applaud Gov. Gina Raimondo, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed” and “encourage them to further achievement.” Ryan proceeds to offer a boosterish list of the trio’s achievements, which looks a lot like what one might expect if he’d asked the politicians’ spokespeople for a short list of what good things they think they’ve done over the past year.

Readers should note that Mr. Ryan has handed out over $10,000 to Rhode Island politicians since spring 2014. $2,000 of that went to Governor Gina Raimondo, half just a month before her election and half the following January. Another $2,000 went to General Treasurer Seth Magaziner, half a week before the election and half this past November. These donations are notable, in part, because as Ted Nesi summarized last September in a post on some of the depositions in the 38 Studios trial, Ryan’s law firm, Moses Afonso Ryan, is “a prominent local law firm that often works on government bond offerings.”

For example, however much the firm received for its work on the bonds related to 38 Studios, it agreed to pay the government $4.4 million. The public could be forgiven for thinking that, for such people, campaign donations aren’t so much expressions of support as investments. The other partners in the firm give generously to select politicians, and they also give to the firm’s associated political action committee (PAC), which then gives more to politicians.

And it’s an intricate scheme, too. Ryan gave former Providence Mayor Angel Taveras over $4,000, and as his official bio states:

He was recommended by Mayor Taveras and appointed by Governor Chafee as a commissioner on the I-195 Commission, Chair of the Search Committee for an Economic Development Director for the City of Providence and Co-Chair of the City of Providence Mayor Angel Taveras’ Transition Team.

In short, it’s about as surprising that Mr. Ryan would be a supporter of the politics and brand of economic development of Raimondo & Co. as it is that the Laborer’s union likes the idea of pouring hundreds of millions of dollars immediately into construction projects. The fact that Ryan is former executive vice president and general manager of The Providence Journal only completes the picture of how Rhode Island operates and why it’s in the condition that it’s in.

Insiders profit. You pay. In the absence of a functioning, truly representative democracy, the process is little more than legalized theft.

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Theodore Vecchio: Finding a Definition for Rhode Island Governance

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Whether RhodeWorks or anything else, this resident of Rhode Island finds that the government process in his state doesn’t operate quite as he thought it was supposed to operate.

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RIC Foundation Chairman Avoids the Real Issue

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I’ve been saying that Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s abuse of power, like Democrat President Barack Obama’s, relies on a level of audacity. To the extent this newer generation of politicians acknowledges that concerns about their behavior exist, the response is essentially, “Of course we can do this.” As illustration, consider an op-ed by William Hurt, the Chairman of the Board of the Rhode Island College Foundation, which hired Raimondo’s Chief Information Officer to a high-paying job that isn’t technically part of government at all.

From the text, published a couple of weeks ago in the Providence Journal:

It is important for Rhode Islanders to know that the board’s decision was based, fundamentally, on the following points:

-The proposal to create the Office of Innovation at RIC was brought to the foundation’s Board of Directors with the support and endorsement of senior officers of Rhode Island College, including the president and the college advancement staff.

-This new office will enrich the academic and career development experiences for students and provide new research opportunities for both students and faculty through hands-on experiences and other resources that no other college in Rhode Island currently has.

-While the foundation has identified sufficient unrestricted, undesignated and discretionary funds to provide the seed money to get the office started, the foundation expects and the new chief innovation officer is charged with securing funding sufficient to restore the foundation’s initial investment fully, as well as to create a self-sustaining office going forward.

-A considerable amount of due diligence was done to ensure that the new Office of Innovation fell within the parameters of the foundation’s mission and 501(c)3 nonprofit status.

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t address the basic question of this employee’s role within state government. That’s where the problem arises, and Hurt doesn’t bother to address it. The problem isn’t that the RIC Foundation has hired somebody to develop programs within the college, but that the job is actually to “partner with a multitude of stakeholders,” as Hurt puts it, on behalf of the state, all while trying to raise money for his own office at RIC. The conflicts of interest are so clear, here, the avoidance of ethics rules so obvious, that the only way it can possibly slip through is by the pure force of will and political power of the government insiders who are going along with it.

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The Housing Network We’re Paying to Ask for More Money from Us

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I’ve been meaning to point to this short Christine Dunn article in the Providence Journal because it’s like the tip of an iceberg of disservice from all of us who strive to keep the public informed about the activities of their government so voters can make informed decisions and hold their elected officials accountable. Dunn mentions that (surprise, surprise) the Housing Network of Rhode Island and Rhode Island Housing are happy that Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo has included $40 million of debt for their “affordable housing” cause, but they wanted more: $100 million.

Most people are simply too busy and disinterested to take the time to investigate all of these organizations, so even if they come across their names, and even if they wonder for a moment how they are set up and who funds them, they’ll generally move on from the article only with the sense that these are some sort of well-meaning interest groups, maybe little more than volunteers trying to secure funds for a cause in which they believe.

Rhode Island Housing, for one, isn’t a private organization, but one of those “quasi-public” organizations that the state government sets up to do things that the state government isn’t supposed to be doing. It has revenue of nearly $40 million, of which $21 million goes to operating costs, including about $14 million for employees. The salary of its director, Barbara Fields, isn’t easy to find quickly, but her predecessor contracted for $181,000 in his final year. In fiscal year 2015, RI Housing received $7.3 million from the federal Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, for which Fields used to work.

The Housing Network is a private organization, with 2013 revenue of $421,877, $72,598 from government grants, and paying its director, Christine Hannifan, around $87,000. The network is at the center, as the “state association,” of a number of Community Development Corporations.

One of those CDCs is House of Hope, whose executive director is president of the Housing Network’s board. House of Hope’s 2013 revenue was around $2 million, $1.2 million of it from government grants, and it pays its director, Jean Johnson, around $84,000.

Of course the net can be widened. Both House of Hope and the Housing Network are linked to the RI Coalition for the Homeless, with Johnson on its board and the Housing Network paying it $7,001 in 2015 for lobbying services. The Coalition had 2013 revenue of $822,205, $589,202 of it in government grants, and pays its director, James Ryczek, around $76,000 per year.

Thorough research would wind its way through multiple organizations and a crowd of paid lobbyists, donated-to politicians, and government agencies, all floating on a bed of taxpayer cash. Not every article should repeat the details, but it would be beneficial for some context always to accompany mention of these groups and their advocacy.

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How ‘Bout Some More (Green) Chains on Our Economy?

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See, here’s the thing: If my understanding of economics were wrong, Rhode Island’s economy would be humming along right now. Three green-energy provisions in Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s proposed budget just redistribute money to companies in a politically preferred industry, forcing us all to pay for profits that the market would never provide if people were free to direct their money where they wanted it to go:

“The governor wants to be as aggressive as she can be to expand clean energy sources,” Marion Gold, commissioner of the state Office of Energy Resources, said in an interview. “The three provisions send a signal to clean energy companies that Rhode Island is a good place to invest their dollars.”

The energy proposals would:

— Extend the Renewable Energy Fund another five years beyond its current scheduled expiration in 2017. The fund, which is replenished through a surcharge on all electric ratepayers in Rhode Island that totals about $2.5 million a year, is used to support grants and loans to developers of in-state renewable energy projects.

— Expand the state’s net metering program, which allows owners of renewable energy systems to sell power to offset their total electric bill. The program would allow “virtual” net metering for off-site systems and third-party ownership of systems.

— Impose a blanket exemption for renewable energy systems from municipal property taxes, unless a community actively chooses to tax the systems.

For people in the industry, it’s profits and investment returns. For those out of it, it’s surcharges, taxes, and socialized costs.

At the House Finance hearing regarding tolls, the Republicans’ plan to redirect some money from renewable energy handouts led to the declaration that it’s one of the few growing industries in the state. That’s because it’s heavily subsidized, and only subsidized industries are able to achieve health in this state.

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Are We Americans, or Are We Serfs?

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Given much of the conversation in Rhode Island, particularly that range of the conversation that I bring up repeatedly in this space, a response of Kevin Williamson to a statement of belief from Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton seems a propos:

Terry Shumaker, former U.S. ambassador to Trinidad (I wonder what that gig cost him) and current abject minion in the service of Mrs. Clinton, quotes Herself telling an audience in New Hampshire: “Service is the rent we pay for living in this great country.”

There is a very old English word for people who are required to perform service as a rent for their existence, and that word is serf. Serfdom is a form of bondage.

Americans are not serfs. We are not sharecroppers on Herself’s farm or in vassalage to that smear of thieving nincompoopery in Washington that purports to rule us.

We don’t owe you any damned rent.

The point is especially clear, as I spotlighted yesterday, when it comes to property rights and housing, but it applies throughout public policy. What’s more, this very distinction is the either-or behind every difference that some of us have with Rhode Island’s current governor, Gina Raimondo: Is government here to serve the people who live in the state, or are we servants and supplicant subjects of government? Is it government’s role to make our local society work for us, or is it government’s role to bring in new residents who and to modify us to better fit the government’s plan? Should our economy and its future be determined by our independent interests and actions, or should the government collect all resources and authority to itself and then distribute “incentives” and make “investments” according to the plans of a small group of insiders? Should we be free to act according to our own interests and dreams, or must we either clear our plans with government or find somewhere else to pursue them?

We’ve reached the point of absolutely no ambiguity on these questions from the people who run state government. They know what’s best; government truly has no limits; and representative democracy mainly means we have the opportunity to pick the people who will make decisions for two or four years (including the likelihood that those people will directly give us special payments or privileges).

If the Rhode Island electorate disagrees with this view, we have to let the state government know by the only means that it believes is legitimate.

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Play Money for Government & RI’s Last Chance

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Things are getting surreal in Rhode Island. I have in mind, at this moment, a Providence Journal article about some kind of well-funded experiment in public transportation that Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo plucked from the recent Brookings Institution report and lavished with $1.5 million:

“It is not extremely convenient to get from Boston to Providence by train,” [Rhode Island Commerce Corporation spokeswoman Melissa] Czerwein said by phone. “Something like this would help create more interchangeable connectivity between the [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority] and Amtrak. The hope is you would be able to get back and forth more quickly and conveniently.”

Beyond that, travelers will have to wait and see.

Czerwein could not say whether the $1.5 million in the budget is seen as going toward discounts themselves or development of the app, or whether the discounts would be open to anyone traveling between the two cities or select businesses for which Commerce wants to provide an incentive.

They don’t know what the money will be used for. They don’t know who, exactly, it will target. They just know that when they take your money and use it as they want, good things happen.

Add this to the outrages under the Raimondo-Mattiello administration. This little piece of her plan take the equivalent of almost 50 times the annual per capita income of the state and might give it to some folks who work for a quasi-public agency to play around with developing an app that nobody investing their own time and money has thought it worthwhile to develop. Or they might use the money as a slush fund to give to preferred companies. (Cough, 38 Studios, cough.)

They want money with no real plan and, therefore, no means of accountability. They want to take money from all of us to give to high-paid semi-government employees, perhaps to hand out to the high-income residents of a different state. How could anybody, Left or Right, support this kind of behavior?

Honestly, we’re still the better part of a year away, but the upcoming election is beginning to have the feel of a last chance… a really, truly, I-mean-it-this-time last chance. If Rhode Islanders don’t wake up enough at least to send a message and rattle the State House’s cage a little bit in November, we’re done.

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Legislator Fears RIDOT Retaliation for Not Voting in Favor of RhodeWorks

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Almost from the appearance of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s RhodeWorks proposal on Rhode Island’s political scene, indications of the hard push have filtered out to the public. As the state Senate rushed to pass the enabling legislation last spring and the House resisted, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello (D, Cranston) and Cranston Mayor Allan Fung (R) questioned the motivation behind the state Dept. of Transportation’s sudden closure of a key bridge a few blocks from Mattiello’s law office.

More recently, with Mattiello now on the other side of the issue, controversy has swelled around a meeting that the speaker canceled with South County officials and the treatment of House Finance Committee Member Patricia Morgan (R, Coventry, Warwick and West-Warwick) by both the DOT director, Peter Alviti, and the committee’s chairman, Raymond Gallison (D, Bristol, Portsmouth).

Now a constituent has forwarded to The Current a lengthy correspondence apparently from Mia Ackerman (D, Cumberland, Lincoln) in which the state representative explains why she intends to vote for the revised toll-and-borrow infrastructure plan. In addition to concerns about the state’s infrastructure and doubts about alternative proposals, the letter states:

I also do not want to be the legislator who voted against this bill. If I do vote against this bill, I have an uncomfortable feeling that if I call DOT with a request for a repair or replacement in District 27, my request will not exactly be a priority. I will have failed my constituents and placed them in further peril by shuffling them to the bottom of the pile, so to speak.

Ackerman did not respond to a request for additional information, and House spokesman Larry Berman says he has not heard of any similar fears. However, the substitute bill that sparked the exchange between Morgan and Gallison may not alleviate such concerns. Amid new language ostensibly intended to provide oversight of and accountability for the RIDOT, section 42-13.1-15(c)(5) appears to give the director broad authority to waive “bridge maintenance requirements” if he can cite “circumstances” that “eliminate the need for maintenance activities in any given calendar year.”

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Raimondo’s Putting It Right in Your Faces, Rhode Islanders; React to It

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Every day, it seems, we get more evidence that Rhode Island’s ruling elite are done with pretenses about how they believe our system of government should work. It could just be, of course, that they aren’t sufficiently self aware — or sufficiently inclined to think about the consequences of their own demonstrated political philosophy. In that case, though, I wonder why the news media and activists aren’t calling them on something to which we all obviously need to be attuned.

Here it is, with everything short of a highlighting, slipping right by in Ted Nesi’s summary of Governor Gina Raimondo’s appearance on Newsmakers, this week:

As for all those companies howling [about truck tolls], Raimondo said state leaders “are very open to the possibility of coming up with an economic package that would take these concerns into account.” Keep an eye out for that.

This is nothing more nor less than admission that state government is more than happy to create loopholes and buyoffs for companies that are able to bring enough political heat. This is exactly Rhode Island’s core problem, politically and economically. If you can’t get a special deal from the state, you’re out of luck. (And, by the way, special deals can come in the form of hindering competition.)

Since this apparently isn’t obvious to everybody, let’s think it through: The state imposes tolls on large trucks. Either collectively or individually, businesses that are particularly hard hit appeal to the politicians, who craft specific carve-outs elsewhere in the budget — money taken from one pocket is simply placed in another. In order to place money in the second pocket, the government either has to redirect funds from other purposes (mainly by draining down the general fund) or come up with yet another source of revenue.

Why would politicians want to operate this way? Because they get to be the check point. The businesses are now reliant on the politicians to keep the special deal in place, and everybody else sees quite clearly that bowing to the politicians is a necessary part of operating in the Ocean State.

Postscript: For some reason I don’t understand, WPRI reporters Ted Nesi and Tim White let Raimondo repeatedly get away with the untruth that the tolls are capped at $20. Unless I’m missing something, the legislation is quite clear on this point: The $20 cap is on one truck going one way across the state, all on Route 95. These are truly the out-of-state trucks that everybody claims they want to target. The actual cap is double that — $40 during a full day.

It’s especially rich that Raimondo repeats this untruth so frequently, considering that she accuses truckers of lying about their likelihood of rerouting.

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Civility Deteriorates Further Under Mattiello and Raimondo

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I’ve attended a lot of legislative hearings at the Rhode Island State House, and they’re often an exercise in endurance and almost always give one a sense that the plan is to dissuade the public from paying attention, as I described for WatchDog.org last May. Usually, though, the only real insult is the contempt and lack of serious that one would expect when the people conducting a long hearing know it’s just a dog and pony show.

House Finance under Raymond Gallison (D, Bristol, Portsmouth) has been particularly bad, though, and yesterday’s 9+ hour hearing on Governor Raimondo’s toll-and-borrow RhodeWorks plan was exacerbated by the attitude of Dept. of Transportation Director Peter Alviti, which drew multiple remarks on Twitter about his rudeness and arrogance from people present and watching on television. Goading his behavior, no doubt, was Gallison’s repeated practice of intervening on his behalf in exchanges with Republican committee members, even chastising Patricia Morgan (R, Coventry, Warwick, West Warwick) when Alviti had interrupted her. Also prodding Alviti on was the vocal backing of Michael Sabotini of the Laborers union (which recently employed Alviti) and a gaggle of other labor lobbyists in the audience.

Here’s a clip of the most egregious moment. The performance-art cackling you hear in the background is Sabotini and cronies:

Anybody who’s gone to a school committee or town council meeting during a labor dispute will recognize the bullying strategy of both Alviti and his backers. It’s rare at legislative hearings with executive-branch department heads, though, and it’s unfortunate to see us descending to this level. The governor and her transportation director should publicly apologize to Morgan and to the people of Rhode Island.

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AAA Southern New England Becomes a Political Action Committee

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As a AAA member since 1992, when my late mother insisted that I join, I was disappointed (to say the least) to see WPRI’s Ted Nesi tweet, during a long RI Senate hearing on Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s toll-and-borrow infrastructure plan, that AAA Southern New England is officially in favor of bringing widespread tolling to Rhode Island.

When the roadside-assistance organization released a poll, recently, showing that a relatively narrow majority of its members support Raimondo’s RhodeWorks plan, I was willing to let it slide as purely an information activity, even though people with whom I agree on the issue suggested that it had essentially been a push poll that obscured the difference between supporting road repairs and supporting tolls. (N.B., I was not polled.) Sending a lobbyist to actually put the organization on a particular side of the issue is an entirely different matter.

According to the Secretary of State’s Lobby Tracker, Lloyd Albert, the Senior Vice President of Public & Government Affairs for AAA Northeast whom Nesi had named as offering testimony, collects $100 per hour to lobby in Rhode Island. Another lobbyist for the company, Mark Shaw, collects $150 per hour. Some portion of my most recent membership check, in other words, went toward paying Mr. Albert to argue for a major government revenue grab that I believe will be terrible for the state.

Of course, even if my money all went to Albert, it wouldn’t have covered a full hour of hanging out at the State House. The state government, by contrast, gives AAA enough money to have covered its entire $21,000 lobbying bill last year. According to RIOpenGov, the state Dept. of Administration paid AAA an average of $21,222 per year from 2010 through 2014. According to the state’s transparency site, the Governor’s Workforce Board began giving AAA Southern New England thousands of dollars a year, as well, in 2014 — $18,100 in fiscal year 2014, $500 in fiscal 2015, and $8,523 so far in fiscal 2016.

Yesterday, I noted that the private-sector groups that should offer some counter-force to the agents of big government are next to useless in Rhode Island, perhaps because they’ve simply been bought off. It’s more important to the people at the top of these organizations to preserve their network with government insiders than to assert the interests of their members when they conflict with the government’s interests. Members and potential members should take this reality under advisement.

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UPDATED: Frias Shows Raimondo Doubletalk on Taxes

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One really has to go out of one’s way not to see evidence that Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo and the rest of Rhode Island’s political establishment is not interested in coming to correct answers so much as saying anything to get their insider deals over the (ostensibly) legal finish line. In today’s Providence Journal, Steven Frias notes that Raimondo’s friends at the Brookings Institution proclaim that “Massachusetts and New Hampshire show the way forward,” but gloss over the degree to which cutting taxes made a difference:

In 1979, the Massachusetts High Technology Council (MHTC), a trade association of high-tech companies, declared that the “single most important step to stimulate the growth of the high technology industry in Massachusetts is real tax relief.” MHTC explained that the “higher cost of living and doing business in Massachusetts can no longer be offset by the proximity of MIT or Boston’s active venture capital market, or the cultural and environmental amenities.” Instead, MHTC insisted “Massachusetts must reduce the tax burden,” particularly for property taxes and income taxes.

MHTC and Citizens for Limited Taxation, an anti-tax grass roots organization led by Barbara Anderson, joined forces to support a voter initiative known as Proposition 2½. Proposition 2½ was designed to reduce property taxes and limit future property tax increases to 2.5 percent per year. To control spending, Proposition 2½ also repealed state laws that gave school committees fiscal autonomy and mandated binding arbitration for police and firefighter unions.

In passing, we should observe that Frias has hit on another of Rhode Island’s problems. Whether because of the state’s size or its long history of corruption, the “business backed” groups that should offer a counterweight to state government as the MHTC did in Massachusetts — think chambers of commerce, business associations, and RIPEC — have simply been bought into the insider system. In RI, they are now almost completely controlled by people with high (often six-figure) salaries who are more worried about losing access to the political font than losing ground for their members.

More relevant to the governor’s budget, though, is the tax-limiting reform: “Proposition 2½ was designed to reduce property taxes and limit future property tax increases to 2.5 percent per year.” Raimondo is headed in the opposite direction.

As I noted last week, her Funding Formula Working Group suggested getting rid of the legal requirement that local taxpayers must pay at least as much toward education each year as they did the prior year, instead requiring them to increase taxes every year for inflation and/or for enrollment increases. (The report did not suggest that this ratchet should go in reverse in times of deflation or dropping enrollment.)

I didn’t see confirmation in the governor’s budget documents that this provision made it in, and the budget legislation isn’t available, yet, but Lynn Arditi has reported that it is, presumably as part of the governor’s effort to make the districts’ complaints about charter funding go away by throwing more money at them.

Bottom line: The Raimondo-Brookings plan is an attempt to work around the problems we all know are destroying the state.

UPDATE (2/3/16 7:58 p.m.):

Well, there it is on page 167. Local taxpayer funding of schools must go up by the greater of inflation or the increase in student enrollment. Municipalities can still calculate the increase per student (to account for decreased enrollment), but inflation must still be included. (Of course, this per-student approach is tricky, because it’s not clear what number counts. If the district projects an increase, for example, even after years of decreases, does that mean the budget must go with the district’s estimate? In RI, the safe bet is that the answer is “yes,” if the district challenges the number.)

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With Raimondo Budget 2.0, Welcome to Second Class Status, Rhode Islanders

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Anyone who thought Rhode Island had reached its peak for governing in favor of special interests learned from Governor Gina Raimondo’s budget, released last night, that a whole new level exists. The overarching assumption is now that a few connected insiders in the state government, in nonprofit groups, from private companies and investment firms, and from Washington, D.C., think tanks and agencies can and should map a course for our shared future and spend our money to make us get in line.

“Nearly every item is directly targeted toward a particular narrow group of recipients,” said Justin Katz, research director for the Center. “It’s the kind of budget a chief executive puts forward when she doesn’t trust the people of her state to make their own decisions.”

In ways small and large, the vision of the budget is what one might expect to be crafted in the halls of the progressive Brookings Institution, with its recent report funded by private interests (mainly Raimondo donors), and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which got its hooks into the Ocean State through the RhodeMap RI plan.

Continue reading on RIFreedom.org.

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Picking a Strategy That Suits the Governor, Not Her State

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Governor Raimondo’s approach to economic development is to force a lower-skilled, lower-income population to subsidize jobs for higher-skilled, higher-income people from other states.

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If Non-Freedom Economic Development Doesn’t Work… Try, Try Again

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Those who find Rhode Island’s governance maddeningly self serving, obtuse, and inept might have difficulty getting past the opening portion of this Sunday column by Providence Journal Assistant Managing Editor John Kostrzewa:

The difficulty of matching unemployed workers with available jobs, a problem called “closing the skills gap,” has bedeviled Rhode Island governors for decades.

Despite spending millions of dollars, the state still has tens of thousands of out-of-work or underemployed people and thousands of employers who complain they can’t find the help they need.

Now, Governor Raimondo is trying again.

She and Scott Jensen, her hand-picked Department of Labor and Training director, have started a new effort, called Real Jobs Rhode Island, that puts the design of skills-training programs in the hands of business managers who know what they need, not state bureaucrats. They already have handed out $5 million in grants to 26 teams of private companies, nonprofits, educational institutions and industrial associations.

In other words, to the list of now-discarded pretenses that used to allow us to pretend that we lived under a representative democracy, we can add the idea that government can take economic development on as one of its core responsibilities without undermining our free marketplace of rights and opportunities. No longer is the State of Rhode Island pretending that it’s confiscating our money in order to improve our neighbors’ capabilities. No, having failed to educate the public and having restricted our ability to make the economy work, the state is now simply confiscating our money to let businesses shape the population to their own needs.

Of course, the businesses aren’t alone in this. Kostrzewa also cites some progressives studies in support of the idea that the state should shift even more of its emphasis toward catering to the immigrant population that it has been luring here in order to justify its many social service programs:

“We need more resources focused on helping adults learn English so they can gain skills they need to support their children’s education and so they can get better jobs,” said Mario Bueno, executive director of Progreso Latino, in the report.

The referenced report is by the Economic Progress Institute, which Kostrzewa strangely characterizes as simply a “nonpartisan research and policy organization based in Providence.” He could have added that the institute is housed with a sweetheart rental agreement at the public Rhode Island College, after having been birthed (if I’m not mistaken) with funding from the private nonprofit Rhode Island College Foundation, which is currently under scrutiny for helping Governor Gina Raimondo hire a cabinet member outside the reach of the state’s transparency and ethics laws. The institute has also received funding from the state government and, as Kevin Mooney reports, is among the left-wing organizations supported by the Rhode Island Foundation.

Incidentally, Progreso Latino is also on the Rhode Island Foundation’s list of grant recipients, but its funding comes mainly from state and local government, having received over $600,000 from the state last year and almost $900,000 from the federal government.

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Underlying the Brookings Economic Development Philosophy

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One paragraph, in particular, is worth examination in an op-ed that Brookings Institution scholars Mark Muro and Bruce Katz published in the Sunday Providence Journal, yesterday:

[Rhode Island] needs to improve its ability to act. Currently, Rhode Island frequently undercuts itself with self-destructive turf squabbles and fragmentation. One response: Rhode Island leaders should create a formal Partnership for Rhode Island. Composed of top business and civic leaders, it would rebuild a collaborative ethos and channel private and civic capital and expertise into critical initiatives. State governments do not rebuild economies — people, as part of networks of public, private, civic and university institutions, do.

As my own recent Providence Journal op-ed suggested, the language the Brookings crew uses seems like it could dovetail nicely with the free-market view, but that’s a trickery of the language; the differences are massive and fundamental. Note, in particular, that they don’t write that people “rebuild economies” without limiting the term to those people who are “part of networks of public, private, civic and university institutions.” Sure, people in such networks grow the economy, but so do people out of them. Whereas a free marketer would suggest that people should be free to experiment and find the most efficient ways to accomplish what they want to accomplish, Brookings and the state government of Rhode Island are only comfortable allowing that to happen with the oversight of an established “network,” which they (or at least Bruce Katz) believe ought to put government at the forefront, leading on “what matters.”

The Brookings talk about “self-destructive turf squabbles and fragmentation” might also sound similar to principles espoused by some conservatives, but when conservatives use such phrases, they typically mean to indict the inefficiencies of government. Outside of government, in the private marketplace, “turf squabbles and fragmentation” are better known as freedom and competition. That’s what drives the economy forward, inspiring dedication and innovation.

All that stuff about “a collaborative ethos” that “channel[s] private and civic capital and expertise into critical initiatives” sounds good, but it glosses over the implicit necessity that somebody has to decide which initiatives are critical before directing “decisive” resources to it. (“Decisive” is the term used in the Brookings report.) One might call that a cartel.

In this context, Rhode Island isn’t an “it.” It’s an “us.” Our governor and her Washington, D.C., and Wall Street pals want Rhode Island to be an it, rather than an us, because they know they’ll be at the top of an it, making decisions for all of us.

Rhode Islanders and their representatives should decline to go along.

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James Cournoyer: Tolls – Resist the Urge to Create a Big Bang Wrapped in the Worn Flag of “Economic Growth” and “Creating Jobs”

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Dear Members of the General Assembly,

Please vote against Governor Raimondo’s and Speaker Mattiello’s Rhodeworks plan that calls for Tolls and more Debt.

RI may have the worse roads and bridges, but we are also saddled with one of the highest Debt burdens in the nation – both on a per capita basis and as a percentage of Gross State Product. We simply do not need more debt.

The Governor explained to us in October that the RIDOT, which has a stunning $450+ million budget this year, was “dysfunctional” and that they “never produced start-to-finish budgets and schedules”. That is precisely the reason our roads are in such disrepair. It is NOT due to a lack of funding; rather, it is due to a lack of planning and oversight, and gross mismanagement.

Tolls will simply add to RI’s already notorious national reputation of being “anti-business”.

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Minimum Wage and the New Progressives

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My first thought upon reading in today’s Providence Journal of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s intention to continue Rhode Island government’s relentless push to redistribute money and make business more difficult by increasing the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit was that she has decisively proven that one can know how to make money appear from thin air and still not understand business or the economy. But then I followed a link in Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “newsletter” to a book review by Malcom Harris in the progressive New Republic. The book Harris reviews is by Princeton historian Thomas Leonard, mainly concerning the explicit racism and belief in eugenics of progressives a century ago.

Note these lines from Harris, with the interior quote from Leonard’s book (emphases in original):

Among his revelations: The minimum wage was created to destroy jobs; progressives (including the founders of this magazine) really did hate small businesses and they were all way too enthusiastic about Germany’s social structure. …

The minimum wage, in addition to providing some workers with a better standard of living, would guard white men from competition. Leonard is worth reading at length:

A legal minimum wage, applied to immigrants and those already working in America, ensured that only the productive workers were employed. The economically unproductive, those whose labor was worth less than the legal minimum, would be denied entry, or, if already employed, would be idled. For economic reformers who regarded inferior workers as a threat, the minimum wage provided an invaluable service. It identified inferior workers by idling them. So identified, they could be dealt with. The unemployable would be removed to institutions, or to celibate labor colonies. The inferior immigrant would be removed back to the old country or to retirement. The woman would be removed to the home, where she could meet her obligations to family and race.

As Goldberg points out, one could take modern progressives at their word that an impenetrable wall now exists between them and their ideological forebears when it comes to the racist motivation and still wonder whether they should consider that their erstwhile heroes might have been correct about the effects of a minimum wage.

I’d argue that the answer, as regular readers will no doubt recognize, is that progressives have not changed as much as they, themselves, would like to think. They still believe that, as Harris puts it, they are the ones who should lead all of society. They still want to identify and sort people into that inferior class. But they’ve realized that they can make use of the underclass as a weapon against the more-traditionalist, -motivated, and -individualistic middle, which is ultimately the threat against their elitist designs.

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