The “Taylor Swift tax” is in keeping with the RhodeMap RI scheme of moving power and money away from local authority.
According to Rhode Island law, cities and towns are never allowed to decrease the amount of money that they supply to their public school systems. If enrollment goes down, they can calculate their “maintenance of effort” on a per-student basis, but that requires a projected decrease.
By way of example, budgeting for the 2013-2014 school year, the Tiverton school department projected enrollment of 1,899. It turned out to be 1,873 in October. For the 2014-2015 school year, enrollment was 1,871, yet the department is now projecting that it will rebound to 1,890.
This is a side note, though, to my latest post on Tiverton Fact Check.
I recently discovered another area of student projections that has significance for school funding. For this year’s budget, the schools asked for an increase in their budget for out-of-district expenses for special needs students. Last year, there were 93 such students, and it appears that the district projected at least as many. It turned out, though, that there were only 77 such students, so the district transferred exactly $600,000 out of that account.
The projection for next year goes down by another 10 students, so the schools may be returning to their prior ability to project this part of their budget accurately. Still, the schools’ local funding increased by $546,014, this year, presumably on the strength of the incorrect projection, so that money is baked into the budget.
I’ve confirmed with the Department of Education that the state’s view is that the district cannot return the unneeded money, even if the aggressive school committee that recently sued the town for much less were to vote to do so.
From the 2001-2002 school year to the one we’re currently in, the Tiverton school department’s budget, from state and local funding, has gone up 65%, from $17.7 million to $29.3 million. Meanwhile, enrollment fell 16%, from 2,219 to 1,871. It’s as if two full grade levels disappeared from the school, but we’re paying for another five.* And word has it that the district is about to come forward and ask local taxpayers for millions of dollars for necessary spending on the school buildings, which will certainly require more debt.
The people who support such trends (probably because they profit from them) are quick to accuse anybody who finds them disconcerting of “hating the schools.” To the contrary, it doesn’t take but a dose of common sense to see that something is seriously out of whack, here.
* Preventive PolitiFact note: Using inflation-adjusted dollars, the schools’ budget increase would only be 24%, so it’d be more like losing two grades while paying for an extra two. But (1) this is a quick illustration to compare numbers, (2) a healthy town’s school system should grow, so the loss in students is arguably understated, and (3) I don’t know why a school system can’t be expected to become more efficient over time, which would require another adjustment.
During the days following its release, reporters, analysts and observers worked to unpack the budget that Governor Raimondo sent to the General Assembly — and found some unpleasant items therein. Here is a bullet list of some of the bigger ones.
Proposed Statewide Property Tax
… aka, the Taylor Swift tax.
Justin got clarification from Governor Raimondo’s office that the INTENT is not to include apartment buildings as properties to be taxed. This conforms to Governor Raimondo’s attempt to sell this tax as having only a narrow list of targeted properties. (So, gosh, don’t worry about it. And, anyways, we only want to tax those icky rich people.)
Intent, however, is completely secondary. If this tax passes into law, the door will be opened wide for future – and current! – governors and General Assemblies to tax apartment buildings (of all classes and sizes); commercial buildings; second homes of less than one million dollars; PRIMARY homes of more than one million dollars; primary homes of $750,000 – $1,000,000; et empty state cetera. The critical issue is not that the initial list of targeted properties is short. It’s that the list comes to exist at all. To subject just one property classification to a new, statewide tax would set the precedent to subject virtually all real estate in Rhode Island to a statewide property tax via an easy tweak of the targeted property list.
In a perfect bit of timing, RIPEC released an analysis right before the governor released her budget of just how much Rhode Islanders are already taxed. By one measure, Rhode Island already has the fourth highest property taxes in the country. The governor is seriously proposing to raise that ranking? In fact, the one thing above all that our elected officials should not do is exacerbate this burden.
Further, there’s the matter of Rhode Island’s already undesirable reputation as a high tax state. On Twitter, Gary Sasse correctly asks,
When Tax Foundation.et. al.rank tax climate will new statewide property tax impact rankings w resulting reputation risks?
Further to “reputation risks”, WPRO’s Gene Valicenti pointed out Friday morning that the governor’s mere proposal has made the national news via the AP’s feed. This is exactly the kind of publicity that Rhode Island needs to avoid, not curry.
Governor Raimondo’s Proposed Statewide Property Tax Redefines Ownership of Real Estate as a Privilege
This one was a great catch by Justin.
Because progressives have a coordinated belief system and playbook, politically active readers may have come across this at the local level: The city or town has a very close election (in which, perhaps, the Democrat Left outspends its opposition by wide margins), with the progressives winning a majority of seats. After the election, they pick up the habit of declaring that their opposition “failed,” and that election results prove that the voters “rejected” them.
(Naturally, when votes go the other way, and the Left loses, the election was unfair, somehow, or the victors fooled the public, which is the current rhetoric of Tiverton’s progressives about the 0% budget that I submitted for the town last spring and that voters supported by nearly a two to one margin. Elected officials are literally screaming at public meetings that it was all my doing. But I digress.)
I’ve got a post up on Tiverton Fact Check addressing this tactic of the local Democrats and progressives. They’re declaring that my friends’ message didn’t “resonate” with voters even though the Democrat Left spent five times as much money and even though the results would have been reversed if we’d received less than 1% more of the total vote.
Overall, of course, elections are elections, and they won. But the prize is the privilege of representing one’s neighbors, not the ability to believe that very nearly half of voters just don’t count.
Over on Tiverton Fact Check, I’ve put up a post announcing that the Tiverton Taxpayers Association Web site now has a PDF of the group’s first newsletter. It’s got a couple of articles, some activity introductions and updates, and a local crossword puzzle.
The puzzle is on local matters, but the answers are printed upside down underneath, if folks get stuck.
Stephen Beale quoted me in a GoLocalProv article, last week, about the winners of Rhode Island’s municipal government salary race:
One taxpayer advocate worries that high compensation may lead to an entitlement mentality among local officials. Rather than welcome citizen involvement, they are incentivized to preserve their power, according to Justin Katz, the research director for the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity.
“At a recent meeting of the Tiverton Budget Committee, newly elected member Donna Cook commented that people are beginning to feel like they work for the town’s employees, rather than the other way around,” said Justin Katz, who is also a Tiverton resident.
“Simply put, government creates far too many opportunities for people to reach the upper tax brackets,” Katz added. “When residents of a city of town decide to get active at the local level, they’re inherently disadvantaged against a group with so much incentive to keep things out of their hands, and for whom political advocacy is ultimately part of their job.”
The most significant thing to note about Stephen’s article, though, may be the limits that he put on his top 30 list. It’s only for employees in some kind of management position, and it excludes school superintendents, because they would take pretty much the whole list. As the payroll application hosted on the site of Tiverton Fact Check shows, even our small town has a superintendent and a police lieutenant who make more money than some of the municipal administrators on the list.
Looking around at Rhode Island’s roads and its education system, it’s difficult not to agree with Donna Cook. Who’s working and sacrificing for whom?
I’ve got a post up on Tiverton Fact Check giving some of the details and background for a press release just put out by the town administrator making (dare I say) unilateral changes to the overtime practices of the fire department. The bottom line is that the town cannot function with a department that runs through its overtime budget in roughly half of a fiscal year.
The change of minimum manning is one thing that folks in other cities and towns might recognize as a regular fight, but some of the administrator’s changes are of the sort that would make the average Rhode Islander say, “Huh? That’s how they did things before?”
I’ve gotten so used to being outraged by the practices of government at all levels, but especially the state and local levels in Rhode Island, that it’s difficult to know what even deserves to be reported, anymore. It doesn’t help that so few people seem to pay attention or do anything beyond shake their heads and say, “This place is crazy.”
Of course, one reason this press release is worth highlighting is that some of the local politicians who originally voted for some of the offending provisions (like the minimum manning number) aren’t exactly taking credit for doing so, these days. Rather, they’re throwing around distracting lies about bond rates and non-existent deficits.
This whole consolidation/regionalization thing is just another example, in Rhode Island, of the common wisdom having reality backwards, in my opinion:
In their presence, Raimondo put her signature on an executive order that gives a host of responsibilities to a former Cumberland mayor, Lt. Gov. Daniel J. McKee.
The order calls for McKee to consult with cities and towns and develop “best practices” for addressing municipal costs and for consolidating, or “regionalizing,” municipal services.
The order also charges McKee with drafting legislation that would establish incentives for cities and towns that make efforts at regionalization. McKee, it says, will also try to help communities find other sources of revenue, beyond property taxes and the motor-vehicle excise tax.
Lest we forget, the Central Coventry Fire District (now on RI’s public bankruptcy list) started out as a consolidation project. Here’s my quick summary, at the beginning of a liveblog of a meeting in April 2012:
… back in 2007, the town consolidated four fire districts into one Central Coventry Fire District, with (some folks tell me) the promise of lowered costs. Instead, during the process of consolidating, various deficiencies were found in the buildings and equipment, around 10 full-time firefighters were hired, and the fire tax went up four times. That’s what I was told; an Internet search hasn’t led me to a decent summary of events.
Interestingly, an Internet search for variations of “Coventry fire district consolidation” turns up more stories about other RI municipalities citing Coventry as an example than explanations of what went on in the town when the change was actually made.
It’s one thing to combine activities like salt depots and police shooting ranges. On a larger scale, though, consolidation can build a new pyramid — a higher one, with a superadministrator overseeing just as many lower administrators as there used to be — that isn’t directly under municipalities’ control and that is often a step or two farther from voters.
In cases where direct or representative democracy remains, consolidation still moves the fight to larger venues, where the consolidated interests of the unions can even more easily overwhelm the disbursed interests of the voters. (How many local taxpayer groups have experienced hitting a wall built by the unions’ friends in the State House?)
This is one area in which government manifestly does not operate like businesses do.
I’ve got a short post, with an accompanying map, on Tiverton Fact Check to give a quick explanation of the backwards way in which Rhode Island cities and towns develop their tax rates and how Tiverton’s compare with the cities and towns around it.
On the first count, the thing that many folks don’t realize is that the tax rate tends to be the last thing calculated. It’s just the rate that the government has to apply to the properties in town in order to collect the amount of money officials say they need. In other words, it starts with them, the government, not you, the people.
If towns focused more on the rates, then the government would have more incentive to make residents’ properties worth more, one way or another.
On the second count, the picture isn’t pretty. At $19.30 per $1,000, Tiverton’s tax rate is significantly higher than that of any city or town around it, in Rhode Island or in Massachusetts. The one exception is Warren, where the property values are lower.
Compared with Westport, right next door across the state line, the tax rate is less than half of Tiverton’s. A Tiverton family with a $250,000 house will pay $4,825 in property taxes, this year, while a family with a house of the same value (which would likely be comparable in size) in Westport would pay only $1,983.
That’s almost an extra $3,000 that the Massachusetts family can invest, save, or spend… perhaps doing something that increases the value of the property.
The latest example of Rhode Island legislators’ not understanding the problems of the state comes via Senator Ryan Pearson (D, Cumberland, Lincoln) and his legislation to allocate a percentage point of the sales tax to school construction:
“No state has figured out how to do this,” Pearson said, referring to the financing of school construction. The Rhode Island plan is similar to one developed by Massachusetts, which dedicates 1 percent of the state’s sales tax to help pay for school facility improvements. In fiscal 2016, this proposal would generate $81.4 million, according to Pearson. The annual increases would add an additional $5.7 million.
Another variable that Pearson doesn’t take into account, which I’ve noted recently, is enrollment. By the Dept. of Education’s own report, Rhode Island schools already have 19% too much space, with projections for a continuing drop in enrollment. How many millions of dollars are we going to spend maintaining schools that face inevitable consolidation? How many more millions of dollars in economic activity are we going to forego in order to keep our sales tax rate so high?
If our state legislators really want to help cities, towns, and school districts, they should do two things. The first is to start easing the burden that they place on the people of Rhode Island in taxes and regulations and let the economy grow, improving local tax revenue. For example, Pearson’s plan would add $81.4 million at first, increasing to somewhere around $143 million over a decade, but the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s dynamic projections for eliminating the sales tax showed around a $149 million increase in local tax revenue with an elimination of the sales tax ($109 million if it were reduced to 3%).
The second is to alleviate the burdens that state law places on schools and on the municipalities that house them. A huge majority of local budgets goes to labor costs that are exacerbated by laws designed to push everything in the favor of the unions. A more fair regime of labor laws would allow cities, towns, and school districts flexibility to finance infrastructure.
Anybody who pays attention knows the score, here. Elected officials (often elected with union support) set up regular budget processes as a battle between labor and taxpayer, with the labor side parading children and the elderly as the victims of fiscal restraint, and let capital needs fester until they reach a point of such expense that there’s no choice but to borrow the money, which simply notches the labor-taxpayer battle up to a higher and higher level of expense, each year. That can’t go on, no matter how many gimmicks elected officials pass into law.
A pair of articles in yesterday’s Providence Journal give an excellent indication of why Rhode Island is the way it is. The first is about the receiver’s plan for firefighters’ new employment deal with the Central Coventry Fire District. The details of the plan are definitely interesting, but the key part, in my view, comes at the end:
The union will contest the new terms in bankruptcy court.
“We’ll out-lawyer them and outspend them and out-fight them,” Gorman said.
Think of the structural conditions — political and legal — that underlie that threat. A financially struggling fire district must balance legal fees against the employment packages that the union is protecting. Meanwhile, the union is fighting with money absorbed, at the point of the taxman’s gun, from local residents. Can we agree that the union’s ability to “outspend” the employer (if true) is a pretty good indication that maybe the union has gone a bit beyond fixing a supposed imbalance between employer and employee?
The second article is about some hires by the new general treasurer of Rhode Island, Seth Magaziner:
Treasurer-elect Seth Magaziner has announced another round of staff picks, including Tom Sgouros as his senior policy adviser.
Sgouros, who waged a short-lived 2010 campaign for treasurer, describes himself as an engineer at Brown University and a freelance writer and public policy consultant who has consulted in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, California and Vermont “on public finance, banking, tax policy, and sustainable economic development.”
Reporter Kathy Gregg leaves out the important background that Sgouros is one of the central spokesmen for Rhode Island’s far-left progressives. (For fun, rewrite Gregg’s second sentence as it would appear if some conservative treasurer had appointed me as senior policy adviser.”)
In fact, we’re watching a whole generation of far-left progressives work their way into state government positions. In 2013, then-Governor Chafee hired progressive activist Kate Brock, for example, and even the supposedly conservative Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello (D, Cranston) hired RIFuture founder Matt Jerzyk to his legal staff. That hiring produced this statement, which can’t help but resonate oddly for long-time followers of Rhode Island’s Left and Right:
“Matt’s experience in city and state government will be a valuable addition as we continue to focus on growing the economy and creating jobs,” Mattiello said in a statement.
How exactly are our leading elected officials planning to “grow the economy and create jobs” with staffs full of progressives? Whatever the answer to that question might be, the two articles from yesterday’s paper illustrate the left-right punches by which progressives implement policies and insiders, like public-sector labor unions, benefit from the unfair rules of the game.
The next round of RI’s political history has only just dawned, but it’s a safe bet that we’re entering four more years of what the last four brought, more or less.
The great government machine has all sorts of ways that officials can shift blame off themselves and ensure that everything is always the responsibility of voters and taxpayers. If there are budgetary problems, it’s because you haven’t contributed enough. If more money is needed, it’s more often than not up to you to give more money (even if it’s confiscated in an indirect way), rather than for government to pare down its activities or run with much less waste.
That observation has had a very clear illustration, recently, in Tiverton.
In short, last May, taxpayers voted themselves a 0% tax increase by using about $600,000 of the slush fund above the reserves that are required (and protected from abuse) by the town’s Home Rule Charter. In setting a bond rating for the town, this November, Standard & Poor’s mentioned that action as a factor in their analysis.
Now, local politicians are priming the rhetoric to use that fact as a political weapon and to justify a bigger tax increase in the next budget. Taxpayers shouldn’t listen. Most of what the politicians are saying just isn’t true and is ultimately a decoy away from their bad management… things like letting the firefighters’ union set up a scenario in which a couple of employees out on disability leave can cost the town around a half-million dollars in additional overtime.
For a deep-dive analysis on Tiverton Fact Check, I took the seemingly unprecedented steps of actually communicating with the S&P analysts, figuring out their rating method enough to calculate multiple scenarios, and researching the impact of bond ratings on the actual rates that municipalities pay. The upshot?
Most of the [officals’] comments are misleading or downright incorrect. Tiverton was not “downgraded” because voters used some of the town’s unassigned funds at last year’s financial town referendum for a 0% tax increase; money in the town’s reserve fund was not the most significant factor in Tiverton’s bond rating; and failing to achieve a higher bond rating will not cost the town a significant money, if it cost the town anything at all.
Ben Domenech takes up the conservative’s difficulty in choosing sides in the battle of Mayor Bill de Blasio versus the New York Police Department in “The NYPD’s Revolt Is a Direct Threat to Democracy.” The problem , and the conundrum, is that neither side of the fight is not a direct threat to democracy.
Ultimately, the officers’ activities as the rank and file law enforcement — turning their backs on the mayor, flying subversive messages around the city, and, now, appearing not to enforce the law to the best of their ability — are the fault of progressive governance. Like other progressives, the mayor does not know what to do when his assumptions are revealed as fantasies and members of his pro-government coalition prove that they believe more in their own interests than in the idea of government, which he (as a progressive) likely believes himself to embody.
But the problem is bigger than that. We currently have a progressive president stretching his ability to use discretion in enforcement of the law beyond all pretense of coherence in order to implement new policy that has explicitly not been enacted by the people’s representatives. (Immigration is the highest-profile example, but there are others.) The police and their union can’t help but see that as another variation of what they’re doing, endorsed by the top government executive (and Democrat and progressive) in the country.
We aren’t a military junta, but we aren’t an aristocracy either. Why should the president not have to follow the rules, but rank and file officers (with their lives on the line) have to? Why should the mayor be able to undermine his police force, but they must put on a show of respect? Because the president and the mayor are the political bosses? Sorry, the United States isn’t supposed to work that way.
So, yeah, there is no righteous side in this battle, but we can still conclude that the villain is progressive governance and its tendency toward merely contingent acceptance of the rules. After all, the police shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, but then, the mayor shouldn’t be allowing them to do what they’re doing. His failure in this is not just a consequence of the demonstrated fact that he’s a weak leader, but also because the political philosophy by which he governs can’t address this situation effectively.
That means that the fix is to illustrate the point and pull back from the progressive course.
Whether meeting that end means siding with the hapless progressive who’s failing to govern the Big Apple or the officers who are setting a dangerous precedent in failing to follow the rules, I guess that’s for the individual to decide. For my part, if we’re to live in a society without the rule of law, I’m inclined to side with the police, mostly because I think they’ll be more likely to accept the re-imposition of the rule of law than the progressives when we finally get to rebuilding.
Filling in for Matt Allen on WPRO, last night, Jay Martins asked me to call in with predictions (and warnings, really) about HealthSource RI and RhodeMap RI. Here are my notes for the call:
HealthSource
When commentator Avik Roy was looking for the perfect quotation to summarize Vermont’s aborted flirtation with single-payer healthcare in Forbes magazine, he picked Raimondo’s choice to lead HealthSource RI, Anya Rader Wallack. What she said was: “We can move full speed ahead…without knowing where the money’s coming from.”
That pretty much sums up the strategy with HealthSource RI, too. They leapt into this thing expecting the money just to materialize, and it didn’t.
The ironic problem is that Wallack’s primary job this year will be figuring out where the money’s coming from.
Prediction: There will be some dramatic hearings and political battling with House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello (D, Cranston), but ultimately, the government insiders like HealthSource enough — mostly as a stepping stone to our own attempt at giving government all control over healthcare — that they’ll give him something substantial that he wants as a trade. What that’ll be may be the most important answer we’ll get in the next six months.
RhodeMap
We can only hope that this will be a big story. RhodeMap’s going to be more interesting than HealthSource in its way. What we’re going to see are:
The big questions are:
Eminent domain is definitely a flash point that will grab the public’s attention, and despite assurances, RhodeMap does open the door for it, but there are many lower-grade tools in the central planners’ toolbox. First, they’ll work on pressuring property owners through taxes, zoning, regulation, and general government harassment, all of which will offer property owners the escape hatch of devices like transfer of development rights. (That’s when a property owner sells somebody, possibly the government, the rights to develop his or her land, which he or she technically continues to own and the buyer transfers that right in order to develop land somewhere else.)
Only if none of that works will they move forward with property takings, which isn’t likely to happen in 2015. The targeted property owners will be outraged, but mainstream journalists don’t tend to care about individual property owners when it’s the government that’s harassing them, so the question is whether those with eyes to see will manage to weave together the bigger story and get the public to pay attention to it.
… the subject of a column that I just posted to R.I. Taxpayer’s website. Here are the first couple of paragraphs.
A browse through HUD-in-the-news items turns up some interesting and instructive items. First of all, there are several instances of HUD cracking down on municipalities or other public authorities who have taken HUD money but failed to comply with the requirements that accompanied it. Certainly, on the one hand, this is as it should be. Government dollars must be spent as stipulated. On the other, it belies the assurances of advocates of RhodeMap RI that there is nothing to fear about the plan. Significant portions of it would almost certainly have to be implemented with HUD money, at which point, HUD would suddenly have a great deal of power and authority over local land use laws and property rights. Let these HUD crack downs elsewhere be an object lesson, accordingly, to both cities and towns in Rhode Island and to state and local officials who would consider accepting HUD monies, whether under the rubric of RhodeMap RI or not. Be prepared to comply with HUD’s requirements or don’t take the money.
And the latter is exactly what officials in the coincidentally named city of Hudson, OH, did less than two weeks ago, in our next interesting HUD-in-the-news item.
By the way, did anyone else notice that HUD’s letter to Westchester County contains the word “roadmap”??? Towards the bottom of the first page.
… HUD provided the county with a roadmap to coming into compliance …
A HUD “Roadmap”. “RhodeMap RI”. Isn’t that a little too similar to be a coincidence? Or do I need to be talked off the conspiracy ledge?
An op-ed by Brown English graduate student Aaron Apps in today’s Providence Journal drew my attention to an FY13 report put out by the Rhode Island Dept. of Education (RIDE). Here’s Apps:
Last summer, I wrote a Commentary piece (“City’s schools require immediate repairs,” Aug. 29) describing the conditions I witnessed inside Gilbert Stuart Middle School in Providence’s West End. To reiterate: The paint is peeling off of the walls, the roof is leaking, ceiling tiles are falling down, the water is non-potable, and there is a giant curtain in the main auditorium made of asbestos. Not to mention probable mold, exposed rusty pipes, and piles of unattended-to bird droppings. …
The Rhode Island Department of Education’s 2013 “Public Schoolhouse Assessment” gave Gilbert Stuart a rating of 2 in its scale that ranges from 1 to 4, where 1 is “good” condition and 4 is “poor” condition. The report rates 304 public schools. Of these, the average rating was 2.05, meaning that Gilbert Stuart, in its appalling, unacceptable condition, is slightly better than average, according to the state’s own rating scale.
One important caveat on the study is that conditions are self reported. That means the ratings are subject to the perspectives and biases of the people in each district, as well as their political calculations. A district that’s pushing for more state and local tax dollars might exaggerate its buildings deficiencies, while a district that’s truly concerned about backlash based on deteriorating schools might downplay the problems.
Be that as it may, RIDE estimates almost $2 billion in expenses to bring all schools up to “good condition.” In contrast, it foresees a continuing drop in enrollment — by more than 13% in the suburbs, for the 2021-2022 school year (compared with 2011-2012). That’s on top of an excess capacity already calculated at 19% (meaning that much space is available for more students). So, that huge expense would be to maintain increasingly empty buildings across the state.
The report makes the obvious recommendation of closing schools and consolidating, which leads to the strategy of regionalization. Whenever either of the steps of that suggestion come up in reality, however, they become the subject of push-back, both from parents and from labor unions, making them very difficult to execute. As long as there’s a chance that other people can be made to pay the bulk of the cost, nobody wants to give up their neighborhood school or their job.
The solution (as the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity will be laying out over the coming months and years) is a broad program of school choice. For one thing, empowering families with options changes the politics from a necessity of taking away money and local convenience to a policy of granting opportunity. For another thing, initial estimates by the Center suggest that school choice would create billions of dollars of flexibility, both in public dollars freed up and in new private dollars invested in tuition.
The question of the near future is going to be whether entrenched interests, including unions, can explode common sense and rational policy for their own benefit.
Analysis of the state law purporting to protect Rhode Islanders from eminent domain suggests that RhodeMap RI makes government takings significantly easier.
The casual attitude of public intellectual Gary Sasse overlooks dangers of RhodeMap RI, perhaps in the interest of Bryant University.
I’ve been running into barriers against transparency, lately.
When I requested its correspondence with ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber, HealthSource RI redacted significant paragraphs. The Town of Tiverton recently spent something like $30,000 on a report about problems in the fire department, and when I asked for a copy, I received one that redacted every word of the interviews the investigator conducted with past and present firefighters about “unfairness, favoritism, bias, hazing, and harassment.” (I’ve heard the rumors, and it sounds like the problems are at least a contributing factor in an overtime bill that might approach a half-million dollars, this year, possibly involving injuries due to hazing.)
And when I asked the Division of Planning for a breakdown of its payments to outside vendors, I heard back from Peter Dennehy, the Deputy Chief Legal Counsel in the Department of Administration, who runs defense for the administration on public-records requests, and he sent me just the totals:
In response to your request, Kevin Flynn informs me that the total amount of Partnership for Sustainable Communities grant fund expenditures by the recipient/vendor, as set forth in September 30, 2014 federal reporting period, amounted to $1,259,886.88.
For other RhodeMap RI related costs and for the period from July 1, 2012 through June 30, 2014, Kevin Flynn informs me that approximately $359,566 of non-Partnership for Sustainable Communities grant funds have been expended by the Statewide Planning Program.
When I pointed out that my request was for the individual vendor payments, he replied:
I don’t believe that we have such a record, particularly since there are multiple vendors and subcontractors.
To which, I asked, “Planning doesn’t know to whom they paid money from a federal grant?” After all, as you can see on RIOpenGov, the state keeps extensive records on vendor payments. Either the Planning vendors are in there, or the state is hiding something. I’m told that Flynn may or may not get back to me with further details.
All these barriers that I’ve encountered as I dig more deeply into progressive schemes and public-sector malfeasance may just be a coincidence, but it feels like a cloud is descending. Some people are hopeful that the incoming Raimondo administration will clear them away.
We’ll see.
The focus on race issues distracts from the lessons that Americans should be learning from high-profile incidents involving the police.
At the beginning of this year, the Projo‘s Amanda Milkovits compiled a list of “police shootings causing injury or death”, including the formal legal resolutions for the officers involved, going back to 2001. Several of the fatal shootings listed appear to be slam-dunk justified, e.g…
May 2012: Pawtucket officers Emmanuel Mejia and Jess Venturini fatally shoot Jamie Coyle, whose gun jammed as he tried to shoot them. A grand jury says the officers were justified.
July 2008: Providence Officer John Abatiello fatally shoots Eddy Tiburcio, who was stabbing a woman with a bayonet. A grand jury clears Abatiello.
…but nevertheless went into the grand-jury process.
In these cases, it seems at least possible and maybe probable that, had the shooters not been police officers, cases might not have been brought to a grand jury at all, e.g. if a non-police officer saw a friend or family member being attacked with a bayonet, and he shot and killed the bayonet-wielding attacker, would a prosecutor be expected to seek an indictment of the non-police officer who had used deadly force?
An important question I believe this raises is, in Rhode Island and elsewhere, by either law or custom (and I realize the answer will vary by jurisdiction), do all police uses of force resulting in the death or serious injury go to a grand-jury for a review? It is important to sort this detail out, because there may be some counter-intuitive consequences to prosecutors applying different standards to police versus non-police cases — even if, on the surface, it appears that the police officers are held to tougher standards — that cause the grand-jury system to not work so well in the police cases.
Well, look, I know my writing is often abstract and that I tend to include words that aren’t exactly of quotidian usage. When I first developed a literary voice, I was up to my vocal chords in Melville and Hawthorne and Shakespeare. Then there are all the ordinary hurdles of writing — ensuring that context is clear, crafting sentences that contain enough information but don’t barrage the reader, and so on.
Nonetheless, I continue to be amazed at the degree to which readers can find a text to say what they want or need it to say, especially when they hate the writer for political reasons. That’s the subject of my latest Tiverton Fact Check post.
Back in college, it occurred to me that, in some situations, the better somebody articulates an opposing view, the more dishonest or insane he or she appears to be to the opposition. I’ve certainly had that feeling while reading those with whom I disagree, with the frustration that every sentence seemed to be just a little bit off, just a little nudge of the wheel to keep the argument from going off the sheer cliff of actual truth.
My particular literary tics and foibles seem to allow those who disagree with me to believe that I’m weaving an elaborate illusion to hide my vicious insanity behind a reasonable facade. Some years ago, progressive commentator Tom Sgouros repeatedly insisted that I was arguing that “the rich” were leaving Rhode Island. Finally, in some comment section, somewhere, I got him to see that I was actually arguing nothing of the sort. His response, if I remember correctly, was that I’d used “stylized prose” to give the impression that that had been my point.
The confusion can snowball, too. When the person who stubbornly misreads turns around and tells other people what the writer was really saying, even when those people read for themselves, they implicitly begin with the challenge of reconciling what they expect the message to be with what it really is.
Communication on charged topics is tough. I’m certainly a long way from having it down and often reread things I’ve written and see that they could have been clearer. That said, writers should remember that it isn’t always their fault when people don’t understand.
On one hand, people engaged in political and policy arguments at higher levels of government seem likely to have more experience engaging with people who disagree with them. On the other hand, one would think folks would be more hesitant to play political cards like black-and-white “my opponent is just evil” games when they’re dealing with neighbors they see around town on a regular basis.
So much for expectations about how people would act.
Earlier this week, I published a commentary that went through the history of Tiverton Budget Committee elections and argued that, if the new Town Council does not appoint the next-highest vote getter from the Budget Committee election to fill a vacancy, it would be a divisive, precedent-setting move.
Until 2002, Budget Committees were elected biannually at the financial town meeting, and any vacancies were automatically filled in order of their totals from the previous votes. Since then, it has only happened once before that a Budget Committee member won an election to Town Council and had to be replaced immediately after the election. In that case, the Council unanimously appointed the next-highest vote getter, even though she was from another faction in town than arguably a majority of the Council.
I acknowledged that the same Town Council had not appointed the next next-highest vote getter to fill vacancies the following year. However, time had passed, and she doesn’t appear to have expressed interest in the job.
In the current situation, if the next-highest vote getter (from the slate of candidates whom I supported) is passed over for somebody more in step with the Town Council majority (from the slate of candidates whom I opposed), it would be a sign that endorsees from Tiverton 1st and the Tiverton Democratic Town Committee don’t really believe that stuff they say about “uniting the town” and “working together.”
The chairman of the Democratic Town Committee, Michael Burk, responded to my argument in the local Sakonnet Times. Actually, he didn’t really respond. It’s more like he took the opportunity to attack me as a villain. It’s Saul Alinsky for locals.
I responded on the merits, here, but didn’t really convey how disappointing Burk’s response is. It’s clear that there will be no arguing in good faith. Whoever started town politics on this nasty path (I’d say it’s obviously them; they’d say the opposite), there’s no hope for bringing down the temperature when one side makes an argument supported by facts and the other side replies as Burk did.
A key question in the RhodeMap RI debate is whether The Plan is merely advisory or carries the force of law. The answer is both: It is implemented with only the civic protections necessary for “advice,” but the burden is shifted to citizens to prove that they don’t have to follow it.
RhodeMap RI gives social equity advocates easy access to federal mandates in order to thwart local control without regard to property values or residents’ concerns.
A friend forwarded me an interesting and alarming e-mail thread with regard to RhodeMap RI. Below is the text of two of the e-mails, which went out this afternoon, followed by the author and his title. On Thursday morning, the State Planning Council will vote on a proposed Economic Development Plan which largely incorporates the […]
The following statement was received via e-mail this afternoon. Attached was a letter addressed to Kevin Flynn, Associate Director of the R.I. Division of Planning.
State Planning Division Faulted For Pursuing “Predetermined Result” With Little Economic Development Focus
Senators, Representatives To File Legislation To Correct Imbalance
State House, Nov 18 – A group of five Republican, Democrat and Independent legislators today called for a delay in approval of the hotly-criticized RhodeMap RI.
The legislators want to correct an imbalance that seems to exclude meaningful action to improve Rhode Island’s poor economic performance, something the State Planning Division has continually tried to characterize as the goal of the effort.
Providence City Councilman Luis Aponte continues with campaign finance reporting issues in not following through with a pledge he made last week.
Frankly, I’m not a fan of campaign finance regulations, especially at the local level. If the information’s out there, grassroots groups should use it, but that’s a separate question of whether the government should be able to impose these sorts of rules on the population.
Whom does it serve when people who are politically savvy and well organized (often within the political establishment) can comb through the donations and expenditures records of newcomers who want to serve their communities in public office? And then there are the fines.
I go into more detail on this topic in a new post on Tiverton Fact Check, in which I answer a resident’s question about why the current Town Council vice president, Denise deMedeiros, has an inactive account on the state’s campaign finance site. (Basic answer: because the Board of Elections spelled her name differently when she reactivated her account to run for Town Council a few years ago.)
There are essentially two reasons I encourage people to become involved in government and politics at the local level.
First, it’s the closest to the voters and their community, so it should be easier (although still very difficult) to overcome the institutional advantage of insiders. Most people in a city or town don’t pay much attention to local civics, and a large portion of those who do are part of the vested-interests crowd. But when a topic has to do with their neighbors, it’s a little bit more possible to change people’s minds, and if not, it ought to be more likely at the local level to get other people to be better informed — perhaps well enough informed to get involved.
Second, local government and politics is very educational. Many of the battles are fought over the same sorts of things, and on the same types of battlegrounds, as state and national issues. What’s more, the local players tend not to be as slick, so their maneuvers are easier to see and make for better lessons to the general public.
More for the second reason than the first, I took a little time, on Tiverton Fact Check, to analyze one aspect of the latest incident in the ongoing saga of town government’s making up the rules as it goes. Of particular interest is the degree to which the Town Solicitor, Andrew Teitz, has pushed the envelope when it comes to the Ethics Commission’s tolerance for corruption provided that nobody involved is not in government.
I’ll have more on this in the future, but he’s going so far as to tell the council what he’s going to argue when he defends a client before it a couple weeks later and to advise the council from the witness table while it’s trying to make a motion in favor of his client.
This is one of those fine cracks in the foundation of our society that nobody seems to be too concerned about but that really deserves more attention than a largely apathetic electorate is likely to pay it.