RI Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor puts President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” philosophy into practice when asked whether Ocean State Job Lot is justified in complaining about the state’s unilateral change of the terms of its Rhode Island operation.
The following letter to Speaker Nicholas Mattiello was released this morning by House Minority Leader Brian Newberry. The background to this request by Leader Newberry can be found, certainly in part, in this report by Justin Katz about correspondence received by the Ocean State Current-Anchor Rising sent from Rep Mia Ackerman (D, Cumberland, Lincoln) to a constituent.
Dear Speaker Mattiello,
I write to request you open a House Oversight investigation into RIDOT and its tactics with respect to passage of the recent tolling legislation. It has come to my attention that several Democratic members of the House have written letters to constituents explaining their support for the recent tolling legislation by, in part, expressing fear that if they did not support the bill RIDOT might retaliate against their districts by, among other things, slowing down or stalling needed repair work and similar projects. If these members have indeed been pressured it is an outrageous abuse of power by the Executive branch. When I first heard of this last evening I dismissed it as unlikely but then I recalled that the bridge over which you drive to your office was mysteriously closed by RIDOT immediately after you announced your opposition to the original toll plan last spring. I want to stress that all my dealings with RIDOT and in particular their legislative staff over the years have been nothing but professional and in fact their legislative lobbyist has been one of the best and most helpful I have dealt with. I myself have seen no whiff of this pressure. That said, it is quite possible that RIDOT officials are being pressured by higher ranking members of the Executive branch and/or that other Executive branch officials are indeed making quiet threats of this nature. Either way the public deserves a full explanation from the Executive branch and it in the interest of all House members to have this issue publicly aired out.
Thank you for your consideration.
Respectfully,
Brian C. Newberry
The full communication concerning her pro-toll vote that one of Representative Mia Ackerman’s constituents forwarded to The Current.
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.
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.”
Just for fun, I took the proposed toll amounts that Ted Nesi tweeted out earlier and put them on a Google Map. If I did this right, you should be able to click the toll locations and see the amount highlighted.
The RI Dept. of Transportation and toll supporters (most of whom represent interests that will benefit directly from the money or are otherwise entangled with state government spending) want it all ways on this matter. On the one hand, they argue that the state must have this new revenue or there is no way to repair roads and bridges. On the other hand, they point out (as at the House Finance hearing) that even if the tolls produced no revenue, it would “only” reduce the amount of money available for repairs (as in, no big deal). This applies on the individual level, implying that nobody will have to shoulder too much burden, but then emphasizing all the money they’ll collect for infrastructure.
Review the map and think like a trucker on routes with which you’re familiar. For example, traveling from my house to Woonsocket would cost a trucker $40 round trip. Taking an alternate route of routes 24, 495, and 126 — which I’ve done anyway, particularly during certain times of day — would cost $0. Zoom out on the map, and one can see just how easy it would be to avoid Rhode Island, or to only enter it where necessary.
In contrast, depending where trucks start out within Rhode Island, a round trip, say up 295 and down 95 would amount to less than an hour of driving yet cost around $30 in tolls. And that’s before RIDOT decides to start ratcheting up the tolls for more and more money.
Subtitle: A rebuttal to Governor Gina Raimondo’s appearance on Newsmakers.
And which concludes with…If Gina Raimondo and Rhode Island lawmakers truly believe that tolling passenger vehicles should be placed beyond the reach of the legislature and are not merely slipping a few words into the law as meaningless political theater, then according to the most basic tenets of constitutional democracy, the referendum requirement needs to be placed into the constitution. And in the absence of a constitutionally-required referendum, it is entirely fair to describe legislators who support the current truck-toll legislation as supporting tolls on trucks now, with a legislative option for tolls on cars later.
State officials supporting a toll on large trucks may have their numbers and their predictions, but Theodore Vecchio says what they don’t have is common sense.
Transcript:
Good evening. My name is Justin Katz. I’m the research director for the Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity.
The amazing thing about infrastructure, and this whole issue, is that we’ve got roads that need repair, we’ve got workers who want to repair them, we’ve got a public that wants to pay to fix the roads — the problem is we’ve got special interests who already have the money we’re already paying to fix the roads that won’t let us do it. They’re holding that money hostage; they’re holding our roads hostage and holding the jobs hostage, saying, “You can’t do this unless you come up with new money somehow in your economy to fix this problem.
It brings to mind, actually, something a former chairman of this committee said recently, Steven Costantino, when somebody had suggested that he was in on the scandal of 38 Studios, and he said, “Well, look, I was just doing what I was tasked to do by my superiors,” meaning legislative leadership. That’s not how representative democracy works. The people upstairs are not your superiors; the people in Rhode Island are.
So, I’m basically here to give you the message that you have options. Don’t expect that you’ll be able to go out and say, “We had to fix the roads.” A lot of the benefits everybody agrees on: We need new infrastructure; we need repairs; we need maintenance. Don’t expect you’re going to be able to go out and say, “Well, we had to do it, and this was the only option,” because there are other options.
An assertion made repeatedly by pro-toll people at the House Finance hearing on Thursday was that out-of-state truckers will pay 60% of the bill. A commenter on this site just made the same point:
At the hearing it was said that 60% of the toll revenue would come from out of state large trucks. I don’t understand why toll opponents want only RIers to pay for road repairs, especially as those large trucks do significant damage.
The first point to make in response is that the objection isn’t to people out of state helping to pay for our infrastructure. The problem is: To get out-of-staters to pay 60% of tolls, Rhode Islanders have to pay the other 40% on top of all of the already-high taxes and fees they pay to government. The argument is akin to expressing disbelief that somebody objects to paying $4,000 more for cable TV on the grounds that the bill is actually going up $10,000, but is discounted by $6,000. In other words, it’s the kind of argument that only sounds good in government debates in which facts and the truth don’t matter.
Speaking of the truth, though, unless there’s a new source for this 60% claim, it comes from a study by CDM Smith. Unfortunately, as I’ve written before, that study doesn’t account for diversion. In October, I found:
Just for illustration of the effects that change could have, if we apply the diversion evenly across all routes and assume the extreme that all diversion would come from out-of-state truckers, then the percentage of traffic more than flips. In-state trucks would account for 60% of all truck traffic in the state.
Applying rough ratios for a multi-trip discount and assuming the discounts would all go to in-state truckers, they would still be responsible for nearly 57% of all tolls, or $34 million per year, if the goal is $60 million in revenue. That’s more than $10 million larger than implied by CDM.
On the broader argument about user fees, as I’ve written often before, it would generally be a good thing to transition from broad-based taxes to user fees, but that’s not what we’re getting, here. State and local governments have maxed out the taxes they can collect from Rhode Islanders, so they’re using this stuff about a “user fee” as an excuse to raise even more money. By all means, get people who use a service to pay for it, but when we’re already paying for it and won’t be getting that money back, increasing revenue is simply a money grab for special interests.
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.
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.
Today, the Rhode Works plan, which creates a system for tolling trucks across the network of Rhode Island highways, will have its first hearing in the RI Senate Finance Committee….the Senate Finance Committee will also hear a bill today to send to the voters a constitutional amendment which would require that any future car tolls be directly approved by voter referendum….and there is no reason why both bills shouldn’t move through the legislative process together — unless, of course, the plan all along has been to use truck tolls as a stepping stone towards car tolls.
Any legislator who votes for the Rhode Works bill without also voting for the constitutional amendment will be voting for truck tolls now with an option for car tolls later.
Assuming Cynthia Drummond’s sources told the truth for her Westerly Sun story, this is another example of political behavior we all know goes on in Rhode Island, but that our latest, blunter generation of political leaders see less reason to slather with rules of propriety:
A Jan. 28 meeting between Hopkinton Town Council President Frank Landolfi, Chariho Superintendent of Schools Barry Ricci and Rhode Island House Speaker Nicholas A. Mattiello was abruptly canceled because the town has voiced its opposition to truck tolls. …
“[House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello’s Chief of Staff, Leo Skenyon] called me up and canceled, and he said ‘we’re not meeting tonight.’ I asked him why, and he said ‘because I read in the paper that you folks were against the tolls, so we’re not meeting today.’”
Down there in New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie was badly damaged, politically, but a scandal involving his staff’s making road closure decisions to punish a politician. This is the same sort of behavior.
On one hand, it’s not healthy that we have this sort of political culture, in Rhode Island. On the other hand, having that political culture laid out for all to see is the first necessary step for the people to start coming to their senses.
A literature professor of mine used to suggest that everybody (a group including at least the sorts of people taking college literature courses) should make one book their own — that is, study it in every particular, to the point that one can be confident about what the author brought into the work and hoped readers would take out of it and how he or she went about constructing it for that purpose. Back then, I gave Moby Dick that level of attention, and as I’m sure my professor expected, I’ve found that the effort has made it easier to repeat the process with other novels.
I recalled that literary advice while reading Josh Gelernter’s rumination on “How the Left Ruined Air Travel,” in which he concludes:
Air travel is bad because there’s no competition, because there are too few airlines, because there are too few airports, because the feds and city governments make big construction projects nigh-on impossible. So how do we fix air travel? We have either got to start building airports far enough outside of metro areas that labor-environmentalism is a non-issue, or conservatives have to start winning mayorships.
Until then, every commercial flight is going to be a little worse than the last. Buckle up.
As I wade through every bill submitted to the General Assembly so far this session, it occurs to me that every person who intends to engage in public policy in some way, even if only by voting, should make a point of picking some issue and making it their own. As with novels, it doesn’t count to come to a superficial conclusion and then stop digging when it appears to be affirmed. I suspect honest sleuths will tend to find that big government has played a substantial role in just about every modern problem… before that problem falls into the universal category of imperfect nature (and human nature).
Ultimately a pretty simple two-step error wreaks a great deal of havoc:
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”.
Public sector pay, tolls, and regulation of political activity all point to a dangerous, unstable future for Rhode Island.
Dear Potentially-Toll Affected Company:
Look, it’s completely understandable what you’re trying to do. There’s a real possibility that the government – the State of Rhode Island, in this case – would lay a heavy financial burden on your operation. It’s natural, when a heavy blow seems inevitable, to try to lessen it. And the state officials who are talking to you are not dumb. While some of them very much want this new revenue stream, they also know that if you leave the state (or decide to work against their reelection), the political repercussions for them could be bad. Depending upon the number of Rhode Islanders you employ, maybe real bad.
So to shield themselves and try to make you happy – or at least, less unhappy – these state officials are offering to partially offset your losses to tolls through an abatement – perhaps of registration or other fees.
Reading Steven Frias’s commentary in today’s Providence Journal points toward a possibility that should really be emphasized as the General Assembly embarks on a session during which some are saying truck tolls are a done deal. Frias notes decades of resistance to tolls, in Rhode Island, and emphasizes that:
In the past, new taxes have been expanded after efforts to avoid the tax led to revenue shortfalls. For example, in 1969, Gov. Frank Licht’s investment tax was adopted. It was an income tax limited to only interest paid on savings accounts, dividends, and capital gains, which significantly impacted a small minority of taxpayers. But after millions were withdrawn from savings accounts in Rhode Island banks and reinvested into tax-exempt bonds to avoid the tax, the investment tax ended up generating far less in revenue than originally estimated. As a result, in 1971, a state income tax was imposed on all.
In particular Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s toll-and-borrow scheme is practically designed to ensure that tolls expand to cars if the actual collections fall short of the estimates (and they will).
Some have wondered why the governor is so insistent on rushing forward with a revenue bond when a general obligation bond would be sure to pass at the ballot box and would save the state tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in interest. I’d argue that this financing mechanism would be contrary to the state constitution if we had a real judiciary, but even if that isn’t the case, why waste taxpayer dollars? One obvious explanation is that unnecessarily high interest on the debt makes RhodeWorks a twofer for Raimondo’s friends and backers, funding work for the Laborer’s union and a windfall for Wall Street investment types.
Another explanation could be that people in state government have their eyes on much more revenue — revenue that’s relatively easy to ratchet up and that doesn’t count in some measurements of the state’s tax burden — by taxing cars. From this cynical perspective, we can observe that placing a debt of the state on the rickety planks of such a narrow bridge makes it likely that the revenue source will prove inadequate, practically obligating the state to expand the base, specifically to catch the driving piggy banks that can’t simply route around the state: those of us who live here.
Such a cynic might also expect that the governor has the calendar worked out with the expectation that she’ll have moved up to bigger and better things by the time this becomes clear. (She certainly has the investment experience to know how to structure the bonds to ensure the delay.) But even without that level of cynicism, it’s reasonable to conclude that one truly “done deal” should be the end of the political career of any legislator or executive who brings any tolls to the state as part of this particular project.
The Commerce Corp.’s P-Tech program is an example of education reform and public-private partnerships that ought to set off alarm bells for those concerned with individual rights.
Rhode Island doesn’t need tolls. What it needs is a greater number of people taking William F. Buckley, Jr.’s advice to yell Stop.
Transportation advocates suggest that expanding infrastructure expands use and, therefore, does not relieve traffic, but road use means activity, which means an expanding economy.
Ted Nesi has posted one of those articles that falls in the marshy area of topics in which all of the variables (and the desire of government officials to spin) make it very, very difficult to get a specific question answered — even to decide which question is the important one:
The Raimondo administration claims its debt-financed RhodeWorks plan would save taxpayers $595 million, but that number requires tackling fewer bridge projects than a pay-as-you-go alternative, a WPRI.com analysis shows.
… RIDOT now says taxpayers will spend $108 million more on bridge repairs through 2034 if the bond is floated than they would if toll revenue is used on a pay-as-you-go basis. Put another way, RhodeWorks costs $595 million less than pay-as-you-go through 2025, but it costs $108 million more than pay-as-you-go if you extend the window out to 2034.
Keep in mind that we’re ignoring the important question of whether the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) could even handle a “surge” of new projects, and we’re taking the estimated costs and schedules of all projects at face value. In the hands of government, a big pot of money isn’t exactly known to encourage efficiency. Those factors could blow the projected savings out of the water, and it could prove that the slower pace of pay-as-you-go would is just right for the RIDOT, even if it would be more expensive compared with a hypothetical perfect execution.
But let’s put those considerations aside in order to understand what Nesi’s getting at. A key starting point is that both of RIDOT’s estimates assume the state imposes tolls. The only difference is that one grabs the money upfront by taking out loans and the other just uses the toll revenue as it comes in (which points to another questionable assumption). 2025 is the year the toll-and-borrow plan would make 90% of bridges “structurally sufficient,” while 2034 is the year the toll-only plan would reach the 90% milestone. In the first case, when the state hits 90% in 2025, it will keep going on a pay-as-you-go basis, until by 2034, it will have spent another $703 million ($595 plus $108), but will have brought the “structurally sufficient” bridges up to 97%.
The confusing piece that hasn’t been put into the puzzle, yet, is specifically what happens during those nine years. Presumably some bridges will become structurally insufficient between 2025 and 2034, meaning that the pay-as-you-go plan has to repair more bridges just to hit the milestone. We don’t know when and at what cost pay-as-you-go would finish fixing the exact same bridges that toll-and-borrow would fix by 2025.
At this point, though, we should take a step back and recall that the pay-as-you-go amount is just what the state expects to take in from tolls. With or without tolls, if Rhode Island’s government decided to find the money to reach 90% by 2025 without debt, we would save over one billion dollars: $600 million or so in interest and the $595 million in construction costs. That means coming up with around $60 million per year, which wouldn’t be so difficult if the state had its priorities in order.
The grades are out, and once again the status quo fails on the 2015 RI Report Card on Competitiveness. When will the political class learn that their way is simply not working to reach their stated goals? If Rhode Island is to reform its way of conducting business, our elected officials must learn to place less trust in government-centric programs for every problem. We will never improve our state’s employment situation unless we adopted the need reforms that will allow Rhode Islanders to empower themselves to achieve their hopes and dreams. The 2015 report card decisively demonstrates the wreckage that decades of liberal policies have wrought upon our state.
The 2015 RI Report Card shows how Rhode Island’s political class continues to cater to special insiders, while depriving other Rhode Islanders of the opportunity for upward mobility, educational opportunity, and personal prosperity. In the major categories, Rhode Island was graded with two F’s, seven D’s, and one C. The two categories with F grades are Infrastructure and Health Care; the seven D’s are Business Climate, Tax Burden, Spending & Debt, Employment & Income, Energy, Public Sector labor, and Living & Retirement in Rhode Island; while Education received a C-. Among the 52 sub-categories evaluated, Rhode Island received 19 F’s, 24 D’s, 5 Cs, 3 Bs, and just one lone A.
These unacceptable grades should be a wake-up call to lawmakers that a government-centric approach is not producing the social justice and self-sufficiency that Rhode Islanders crave. By burdening the public with policies that discourage work and a productive lifestyle, the status quo is failing the people of our state. On the 2015 RI Report Card on Competitiveness, the Ocean State received “Ds” in the major categories of Jobs and Employment, and in Tax Burden. We must learn to trust in our people and remove the tax and regulatory boot of government off of their backs by advancing policies that empower the average family with choices, that reward work, and that grow the economy.
Only free market policy will transform the Ocean State by advancing policies that empower the average family with choices, that reward work, and that grow the economy. We can no longer tolerate Rhode Island falling further behind. The Center will continue to work tirelessly to promote policies like sales tax reform and school choice in order to help our fellow Rhode Islanders by unleashing their potential. We encourage you to help spread the word about the failing grades the status quo in Rhode Island received this year. You have power to change the Ocean State into a place where everyone can prosper. Thank you.
James Kennedy suggests that the first question Rhode Islanders should answer is why they need the 6/10 Connector in the first place.
Following up on my article, last week, concerning the expectations of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) that the agency can save 31% by using unionized state employees to paint marks on the state’s roadways, I turned my attention to the $6.25 million RIDOT cites as “the historical values for Statewide pavement marking only contracts.” Upon request, RIDOT provided the following contract amounts currently in effect, all of them for two-year terms:
That $12.2 million every two years, or around $6.1 million per year, is further augmented, according to RIDOT, with $250,000 per year for police details. RIDOT spokesman Charles St. Martin states that, when it comes to state workers, “all maintenance staff are flagger certified, so police details would only be used sporadically, as needed.” Those costs are presumably included in the original estimate for in-state work.
Here’s the wrinkle: Used together, the state’s transparency Web site and the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s RIOpenGov provide six full years of actual payments to these three companies, and the average annual payment is $4,436,625, with no gigantic increase over time. Fiscal year 2010 had only $2.9 million while 2011 had $5.4 million, but that may have been the timing of payments, and the two years average to $4.2 million.
In other words, while there may have been a increase of less than $200,000 per year, a jump to $6.1 million starting this year would be very suspicious, indeed. (I’ve requested information on the previous round of contracts to see how well the contract amounts correspond with payments.)
These actual payments of $4.44 million on average and $4.89 million for 2015 compare with the state’s estimated annual “in-sourced cost” of $4.84 million. Under this comparison, if there are any actual savings to in-sourcing, they would mostly come from $550,000 less oversight (including the planning implicit in contract preparation) and the assumption that the new state workers would spend the winter performing other tasks that are currently outsourced, while taxpayers would bear all of the risk that comes with operating $3.65 million in trucks, using around $2 million in gas and materials every year, and employing two crews of unionized employees, with their health benefits and pension promises.
RIDOT is claiming that bringing road-painting services in-house will save a whopping 37% from private contracts, which suggests the agency is either missing something or that a criminal investigation might be justified.
The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s Competitiveness Report Card for Rhode Island is less of an indication of how Rhode Islanders are doing than what insiders are doing to us.
Ask a progressive whether government by, for, and of the people ought to allow them to implement local policies reflecting a conservative understanding of a well-lived life and be sure to duck from the impact of the glare that you’ll receive. Change the impetus from religious faith and the long-standing traditions on which our civilization was built, however, and they’ll be much more amenable to the notion that government should set policies in order to tell people how to live.
Two items down from a note about the lack of diversity among the race scolds at the Providence Journal and the Boston Globe, Ian Donnis’s Friday column includes this:
ProJo op-ed columnist Steven Frias recently outlined the deficits that chronically plague RIPTA. Yet mass transit advocates point to far more extravagant public subsidies for cars and the highways upon which they travel, resulting in runaway development, environmental degradation, and other adverse effects. “We know that every year we ‘invest’ $25 billion of federal taxes in auto-dominated transportation,” the late Jane Holtz Kay wrote in her 1997 book, Asphalt Nation. “Add to this the amount from state and local agencies. We have seen the direct costs and indirect ones, the incalculable sums spent in the wrong way, in the wrong place, for the wrong way of life. It is time to price them correctly — to right the imbalance toward sustainable transportation.”
We can have a conversation about what government ought to fund, but note how casually Kay passes judgment on “the wrong way of life.” It’s not just a “less fulfilling way of life,” or “a way of life that people would eschew if they were well informed,” it’s “the wrong way of life.” And government, Kay seems to be saying, should push people toward the right way of life, even if they don’t want it.
As for the subsidies, a recent post from Ed Driscoll comes to mind, in which he recalls a 2009 anecdote from the early years of Obama’s spending orgy:
“He came in to do his talk and opened his talk with, ‘I’m Matt Rogers I am the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Energy and I have $134 billion that I have to disperse between now and the end of December,’” Holland told the audience. “So upon hearing that I sent an email to my partners that said Matt Rogers is about to get treated like a hooker dropped into a prison exercise yard.”
One suspects that, at the end of the day, the germane consideration isn’t whether government spending supports the right or wrong way of life, but whether it benefits progressive politicians, groups, and supporters and pushes the population into a box that helps progressives maintain their power.