Rhode Island Cities’ Immigration Lawsuit

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Maybe I’m just getting tired of political drama, but I can’t get wrapped up in the political argument implicit in the lawsuit that the cities of Providence and Central Falls have brought against the Trump administration.  It’s really just… I guess cloying is the word.

First of all, nobody should actually believe that the progressive mayors of these two cities have a principled objection to the federal government’s use of grants to apply pressure on policy goals — even barely related policy goals.  We’ve just recently come off an eight-year lesson that, when the federal government is in progressive hands, the Left is happy to leverage whatever method of pen, phone, and policy will advance their ideological imperatives.  Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza is therefore not credible when he says the following:

“We unequivocally reject this false choice,” he said. “We will not allow the federal government to weaponize federal grant funding in an effort to advance this administration’s agenda.”

Actually, the mayor included a sly wiggle:  “this administration’s agenda.”  Weaponizing federal grant funding would presumably be fine in order to advance another administration’s agenda.

Second of all, the amounts in question are arguably not in keeping with claims about “critical” funding:

Friday is the deadline to accept the funds that were awarded with the new conditions, they said. Providence was awarded more than $200,000 for fiscal year 2017. Central Falls was awarded nearly $30,000.

Providence has used the funding awarded in past years to pay for a bilingual liaison to work with families and pay for overtime for enforcement patrols. Central Falls has paid for technology upgrades. Police chiefs from both cities said these conditions shouldn’t be attached to grants that are crucial to police operations.

For Providence, that grant amount is just 0.03% of its total budget.  It’s 0.12% of its public safety budget.  If these programs are so important, the mayors can find (or raise) the money for them.

In short, this is just a couple of mayors using taxpayers’ legal resources to posture.  Worse, they are doing so in order to grandstand against a requirement that American municipalities make modest concessions to the federal government’s effort to enforce federal law.

We could have a variety of debates about the wisdom of every policy involved — from federal immigration law to local reliance on federal grants — but debate would require getting past these mayors’ tiresome political rhetoric.

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The Obvious Conclusion of a Charter Charade

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Checking in on the progress of Tiverton’s charter review on Tiverton Fact Check, I find the Town Council coming to the conclusion it intended all along:

… it is clear that the Charter does not intend for the Town Council simply to brush aside the work of the Charter Review Commission.  Why would we hold an election for the positions if that were the intent?  It would save the town money and be more efficient simply to have the council appoint the commission members.  That is why no council has ever blocked a CRC proposal before, to the knowledge of people who’ve watched these matters closely.

The strong impression of the last year of charter review politics is that the Town Council called for a review because its members were hoping to claim authority over casino revenue for themselves and to drain the financial town referendum (FTR) of its ability to protect taxpayers. Voters did not elect a single commissioner who wanted to do those things, so the council spent the next year doing its best to ignore the commission. Now, the council members are simply going to pretend the CRC never happened and put forward their own recommendations to voters.

It’s discouraging whenever personal interests (and personalities) corrupt a representative democracy, especially when it happens at the local level.  One can only hope that voters are keeping close enough track and will impose a reckoning.

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Taxpayers “Share” Their Bicycles in Providence

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The mayor’s office tells The Current that a $400,000 TIGER grant of federal taxpayer money from the Rhode Island Department of Transportation enabled Providence’s new bike sharing program:

JUMP, which is owned by the ride sharing company Uber, has bike-share programs in six other U.S. cities. The City of Providence, along with Lifespan, Tufts Health Plan and the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, sponsored JUMP’s Providence launch. …

Four hundred JUMP bikes will be available throughout the city in August, said Victor Morente, spokesman for Mayor Elorza’s office. Riders will be able to park and pick up bikes at 46 stations as well as at public bike racks. …

Bikes will be available for rent at $2 for every 30 minutes of riding. Memberships will also be available for $20 per month for 60 minutes of ride time a day. JUMP will offer reduced-cost memberships to people with low incomes.

As always, with such programs, the first question is why some entrepreneur didn’t find it worth the $1,000-per-bike investment to get this project off the ground.  The answer may be that, even at the highest price point ($4 per hour), every single bike will have to be ridden for more than 31 hours to pay for itself, and that’s if we assume no maintenance or replacement costs.  Moreover, the business model must require that some percentage of the bikes not be used at any given time, or else nobody would be willing to rely on their availability.

In short, the use of other people’s money (taxpayers) was probably the only way to overcome doubts about the demonstrated demand.  When the local Walmart will sell an adult bike for $100, most people who want them can find them.  With the subsidy, most of each sale can be profit for as long as the bikes last.

Those profits come at somebody else’s expense.  In San Francisco (with its better, more-predictable weather), JUMP bikes are cannibalizing Uber business.  The company claims to be happy about the exchange, but each lost Uber ride is a driver with no customer.  The subsidy could also block other innovations; an entrepreneur who was working on an app to allow people to share their own bikes (i.e., without the huge up-front investment for any one company) now has to compete with more-expensive, pedal-assisted bikes.

In the effort to make us behave as government wants us to be have, however, sacrificing the livelihoods and opportunities of a few unseen people is a small price to pay.

ADDENDUM (10:13 a.m., 7/21/18):

By the way, anybody who’s still having difficulty understanding how government involvement in the market produces income inequality should consider this to be an example.  The bicycles used for this offering are constructed in a largely automated process (presumably) and “shared” through an app that requires minimal human involvement, so customers’ money is flowing to the top of the income ladder, probably in distant states or countries.  Meanwhile, local Uber and taxi drivers lose customers, as do any small bike-rental shops or other actual Rhode Islanders who might offer some service that this tramples.

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Grumbling About East Side Progressives

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One hopes (but doubts) that John Walsh’s opinion is on the increase in Rhode Island:

Our elected representatives on the East Side are progressives, a misnomer if ever there was one. Their priorities are ranting at President Donald Trump, advocating for more illegal immigrants, concern over Roe v. Wade, and other “progressive” issues.

As the quality of life deteriorates here, no one seems to be concerned over the many local issues. The criminals who prey on the East Side are not worried about being caught. They immediately go shopping with the stolen credit cards.

As the elections are almost upon us, it seems all the candidates claim to be progressive. What a shame. We’re getting very little value for the taxes we pay here.

The thing is:  Progressivism doesn’t work to produce the lives that people want to live, so progressives must always be directing your eyes elsewhere.

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Abraham Glazer: Various Ideas to Improve Rhode Island Government and Life

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Abraham Glazer shares some collected notes on policies that might do Rhode Island some good.

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Casino Money May Go to Pay for Town Council’s Lawsuit Gambles

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So, Tiverton has this big influx of revenue coming with the Twin River casino, and it sure does appear that the Town Council could lose a lot of it in court, as residents and local businesses win lawsuits related to reckless or poorly executed enforcement actions.  Here’s one instance, from Tiverton Fact Check:

The town approved an incorrect site plan for McLaughlin’s garage, allowing him to build it too close to his property lines, and later told him to take it down.  In February 2016, the town voted to hire a demolition crew one week after a court order allowed it to do so and knocked the garage down, even though litigation was ongoing.  Rather than wait for McLaughlin to exhaust all of his court appeals, the Town Council decided it was an urgent matter to remove the garage, which was, after all, still 16 feet from one property line and 22 from another.  It had to send a message to the people of Tiverton.

The problem was that the wrong town body brought the suit, and now McLaughlin is moving forward in search of millions of dollars in damages.  One wonders how much less likely an incompetent town government would be to insist on arrogant shows of power if it wouldn’t always be able to simply pass on the cost to taxpayers.

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The Conditions Under Which Progressives Will Lease Us to Businesses

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One last minute bill in the Rhode Island General Assembly, H8324, may or may not be going anywhere, but it’s worth a look as an educational exercise.

Very simply, it would require any “hosting platform” (e.g., AirBnB) that allows people to “offer any property for tourist or transient use” to be responsible for making sure that the rentals are in compliance with state and local laws and regulations.  It would also require the platform operators to take a more active role in the collection and transfer of all relevant taxes.

This little change in law, affecting a narrow portion of a single industry in the state, carries some important questions of the sort that we don’t consider thoroughly enough.  What is the nature of commerce?  Who works for whom?  Who has responsibility for whom?

From a free-market perspective that starts with the individual as the origin of all economic activity, the property owners are responsible for the product that they are offering, and the hosting platforms work for them.  Because they are the constituents of state and local government, they have a say in that government and can arguably be said to have consented to granting it some authority to regulate their activities.

The progressive perspective that has long been insinuating itself into Rhode Island government and encroaching on Rhode Islanders’ rights is very different.  That view doesn’t begin with individuals as autonomous sources of responsibility and power.  The Rhode Islanders seeking to rent their property don’t truly have ownership of themselves.  Rather state and local government has claims on their activities, and the hosting platforms own their rental businesses.  It is therefore reasonable for the government to require platforms to make sure that their workers comply with its requirements.

From a free-market perspective, a government that imposes requirements on people might create incentive for them to hire a contractor to do tasks for them — for AirBnB to provide inspections for regulatory compliance, for example, with an extra fee.  But from a progressive perspective, the government has a right to tell companies that intend to draw profits from its people what conditions they must impose, or else they cannot do business here.

In other words, progressives implicitly believe that the government is renting us out to the companies.

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A Relatively Small Sports Gambling Payoff for Host Communities

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As I highlighted on Tiverton Fact Check, the budget proposal from the Rhode Island House would change the legislation initiating sports gambling at the two Twin River establishments: 

Now another chunk of cash looks likely. When we mentioned that a Supreme Court ruling had put sports gambling on the table for Twin River, supporters of Budget #1 took to social media to say it was misleading even to hint that the town might receive revenue from this new source. Well, with the introduction of the Rhode Island House’s version of the budget, Friday, a number has been put on that windfall:

The state shall pay the Town of Lincoln an annual flat fee of one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000) and the Town of Tiverton an annual flat fee of one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000) in compensation for serving as the host communities for sports wagering.

Of course, while that’s something, it doesn’t seem like much in comparison with the $23 million the state’s expecting for itself.  Why the state wouldn’t simply define sports gambling as either a table game or a video slot for the purposes of calculating host community shares (which would be 1% or 1.45% of revenue, respectively), is not clear.  Local residents of Tiverton and Lincoln should hope their representatives and senators are still pushing for more.

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Hosting State of the State on Providence Pensions

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A Side Lesson of One in Five Boys Not Graduating on Time in Tiverton

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That’s the central finding of a post of mine on Tiverton Fact Check:

Tiverton’s four-year graduation rate (that is, the percentage of students who graduate in the typical four years) was 85.5% in 2017, whereas the average suburban high school managed 90.8%. Tiverton was down from 89.1% the prior year.  Nearby Portsmouth and Middletown beat the 2017 suburban average by healthy margins, with 96.7% and 93.8%, respectively.

The picture becomes more bleak if we look just at a population that’s been struggling in recent years: boys.  In Tiverton, one in five high school boys (81.7%) did not graduate within four years.  For the average suburban school, it was closer to one in 10.  Portsmouth was second best in the state, with only about one in 35 boys failing to graduate on time.

And yet, I haven’t seen a single letter to the editor taking the school committee or administration to task for this.

We have a curious political dynamic in town — one that’s probably the same pretty much throughout Rhode Island:  Work to give voters lower-tax options, and anything and everything can and will be said about you, often by parents who think they’re defending their children.  Preside over the lowest non-city four-year graduation rate in the state, and the silence probably means you’ll coast to reelection.

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Avoiding Direct Accountability for the Stadium

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As public opinion rejects one attempt to back a new baseball stadium after another, insiders are becoming more creative (and dangerous) in their tricks to hide the risk and the subsidy.

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Scalable Government Requires Limited Tasks and Local Control

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Just as central servers can lose their ability to “govern” the many computers they connect, a centralized government can’t handle all of the relationships between human beings.

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When Government Can Get a Project Done Early

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The week before Tiverton’s financial town referendum (FTR), I reported that state estimates of revenue from the Twin River casino in Tiverton were based on a September 1 opening — a full month before earlier estimates and two months before the date that some preferred for local purposes.  The budget that I submitted, Budget #2, which would have reduced the tax levy by 2.9% and finally brought our tax rate back into line with neighboring Portsmouth’s, used the September 1 estimate (although with revenue estimates still lower than the latest from the state).

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the week after the town government’s higher-tax budget won the referendum, with questions about casino revenue front and center, Twin River could no longer contain its enthusiasm and proclaimed:

Twin River beat the odds and will get gamblers to the tables a month earlier than expected.

John Taylor Jr., chairman of Twin River Management Group, said the casino will open on Sept. 1 instead of the previous forecast of an Oct. 1 opening.

In the past, the elector petitions have tended to win by 60% versus 40%, but this year Budget #2 lost roughly 45% to 55%.  The Budget #1 advocates managed to erode or eliminate the typical margin relying heavily on exaggerated warnings about what would happen if the assumed casino revenue didn’t materialized.  The victory, however, arguably came from the defection of people who typically vote for the lower-tax budgets but found use of the casino revenue to conflict with their conservative inclinations.

In fairness, on our side of the aisle, when we talk about government projects, we tend to assume that they can never come in on time.  In this case, that assumption misses the key fact that the state government is relying on this revenue.  Roads, bridges, and public works projects can take forever because the money is endless and the economic downsides primarily hit the private sector.  The casino is part of a race to get ahead of the competition with other states.

Twin River’s optimism may still prove to be misplaced, but it looks unlikely, and frankly, my expectation is that the initial revenue estimate for the town is likely to prove to be about half what comes in.  We’ll see.

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A Question of Ballot Design

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With the still-recent change in voting technology in Rhode Island, it behooves advocates to keep a close eye on how ballots are designed, as we’re learning in Tiverton:

I took it as evidence that double-checking work is very important when, while creating a sample ballot to hand out at the polls, I marked the circle for the wrong budget at this year’s financial town referendum (FTR).  I was tired and rushed, and it was natural to fill in the oval directly under Budget #2.  Of course, it took only a moment to realize the mistake and correct the error.

However, standing outside the high school on Saturday, members of Tiverton Taxpayers Association (TTA) were actually surprised at the number of comments supporters made about how confusing the ballot was.  Those comments continued after the results were announced, with people writing by email and Facebook message, even stopping us on the street.

It’s very unlikely that this confusion changed the outcome, but for the sake of completeness, we’ll be asking to take a look at the completed ballots, as well as asking the local Board of Canvassers to take steps to make the voting clearer next time.

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A Canary in Seattle

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The city of Seattle is blazing trails in the assault on business and disincentive for job creation, and Seattle Times columnist Jon Talton is correct to warn of a reckoning:

One thing is clear. The tax will not be paid by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, or any other real or imagined toffs running the targeted companies. It will be “paid” by hiring fewer people here, making fewer investments, thus perhaps reducing overall taxes to the city. This is not sticking it to The Man.

One of the fascinating aspects of the jobs tax is how it reveals a tectonic shift in Seattle politics.

The slow-moving but generally pragmatic center-left that governed for years has collapsed.

Some of Talton’s lessons are either (it seems to me) either off base or specific to Seattle.  I’m suspicious, notably, of the blame that he puts on the GOP for becoming a “hard-right party” that exploded its leverage by booting its centrists.  One needn’t change the tilt of one’s head too much to see that as something more like a center-right party that didn’t move far enough to the left to keep progressive activists from attacking its donors and volunteers.

Consider Talton’s complaint that voters don’t have options; that can be a sign that people won’t run, given the charged atmosphere.  In short, this probably isn’t quite the distinct trend that he presents it as:

Meanwhile, a hard-left movement arose with the activist foot soldiers, infrastructure and energy to win municipal elections. It might represent a minority of voters, but given the withering away of the old order, it can win. Voters don’t have alternatives.

This lesson is probably increasingly universal across the country.  An activist infrastructure has been built up with funding from embedded interests (like labor unions), a supremely wealthy progressive elite, and siphoned taxpayer money from the Obama Administration.  At the local level, it targets any politician or grassroots organization that attempts to offer an alternative, and so the alternative doesn’t get a voice.

So… the city gets insane tax-and-spend policies that create obvious incentives against economic activity and for reliance on public subsidies.  A reckoning will come, indeed.

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A Glimpse at Changing Property Tax Tides

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Here’s an interesting milestone over here in the East Bay, as I wrote on Tiverton Fact Check

Looking at the actual comparison for the 2018-2019 fiscal year, if Budget #2wins at this week’s FTR, Tiverton’s tax rate is projected to be $15.96.  Meanwhile, the proposed budget in Portsmouth is projected to bring that town’s tax rate to $15.97, and taxpayer advocates tell Tiverton Fact Check that the proposal is likely to be accepted.

Matching Portsmouth’s rate shouldn’t be the finish line for Tiverton, but it is a major milestone.  Notably, the comparison should take some of the shackles off of the high-end real estate market in Tiverton and help to balance out the tax burden around town.

Obviously, I’m observing these tax trends in the thick of a budget battle (with voting in Tiverton’s financial town referendum going on today, tomorrow, and Saturday), but in general, it’s disappointing that we don’t have these discussions more often at the local level.  Many factors can move what might be seen as a theoretically appropriate tax rate up or down, but comparisons from town to town do make a difference.

More importantly, we’d all be much better off (and maybe even more civil) if we were more thoroughly conversant about why various government numbers matter.

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A Dynamic of Property Tax Rates and Levies

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Tax rates matter, and people playing class warfare over the property tax bills of people in their town may be missing the way in which that drives up taxes on the working class.

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Trading Water for a Fix

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With his criticism of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo for appointing Democrat Senate President Dominick Ruggerio’s son, Charles, to the Narragansett Bay Commission, Republican Mayor of Cranston Allan Fung has drawn attention back to the City of Providence’s perennial effort to turn its big water asset into a one-time payment, largely to infuse the city’s pension system with cash.

The immediate controversy is that Ruggerio, the younger, works in multiple roles as a lawyer for the city, but his appointment is most significant as a flash point to illustrate how government works, in Rhode Island.  The city has been after this for years.  In 2013, it took the form of an objectionable regional water authority.  Now, the strategy is to bring in the quasi-public Narragansett Bay Commission.

In every case, the goal appears to have been to come up with some excuse to saddle taxpayers and/or ratepayers with the additional burden of that one-time payment to the city.

Making matters worse is the general evidence that thinking about pension funds in this way is a mistake.  Just after the turn of the century, for example, the City of Woonsocket took on debt with the calculation that its investment returns would exceed the interest, and it could get its pension system on track.  That didn’t work out so well.

The Providence deal is different, of course, and would require a more thorough review prior to decisive pronouncements, but the impression one gets is that the primary difference is that the Woonsocket deal saddled the same people who owed the pension debt with the bond debt, while Providence is looking for somebody else to take on the new debt. Of course, Providence will also have offloaded an asset as a one-time part of the deal.

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An Onion of Corruption (All We Have Is Our Vote)

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It’s always shocking to see relativism win in court, and it raises fears about what it means when people can’t expect justice founded in mutual respect for facts and logic.

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Picking and Choosing What Voters Get to Consider

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Last night, Tiverton’s Board of Canvassers decided that it had the authority to pick and choose what voters could vote on based on their feelings about it.  The Town Council is hostile to the resolutions, and the town solicitor, who serves in his $98,000-a-year position at the pleasure of the Town Council, told the canvassers that they might face a complaint if voters passed the resolutions.

Never mind that the board was nearly certain to face complaints for blocking the resolutions and the solicitor couldn’t say which lawsuits would be more likely to win.  The canvassers chose to disenfranchise electors rather than do something that the Town Council didn’t want.

As I write on Tiverton Fact Check:

This is the Board of Canvassers.  They’re supposed to be completely neutral referees making sure that all sides in a political dispute have equal access to the ballot.  In this case, the Town Solicitor — who has $98,000-plus reasons to do whatever the Town Council wants him to do — said people might file complaints against the town if voters agreed with the resolutions, and the Board of Canvassers decided to take the vote away from them.

It would be hard to overstate how shocking that is.  Tiverton’s Home Rule Charter states that “All… Elector Resolutions shall be included on the ballot for the Financial Town Referendum and presented at the Financial Town Hearing provided that they are accompanied by 50 qualified elector signatures.”  There is absolutely no dispute that the resolutions the Board of Canvassers blocked had 50 signatures and followed the process in every way, because they followed the same process and had almost identical signatures as other resolutions that were not blocked.

Once again, government officials in Rhode Island show their belief that the law is whatever they say it is at any given moment.  Hopefully, a judge will conclude differently.

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Yes, Divorce Is Catchy, but So Should Be Good Marriages

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A headline proclaiming that “Divorce is contagious” probably ought to spark the immediate reaction, “of course it is.”  As the essay suggests, all of these big life events are contagious.  I observed among my wife’s friends as well as other circles of friend clusters that marriages, child births, divorces, and other relationship events that seem mainly between a husband and wife seem conspicuously to spread around a group of female friends.

Writes Bek Day:

There is a big social component to the times at which we each decide to make major life decisions like marriage – including, research suggests, when and if those marriages end.

According to a study conducted across three US universities, you’re 75% more likely to get divorced if at least one member of your close friendship circle ends their marriage.

Yep, 75%.

Researchers arrived at this extraordinary figure using a longitudinal study which examined participants over a 32-year period. Their findings, published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information showed that divorce was something that could be passed on through ‘social contagion’.

That’s why we have to make marriage contagious.  As I wrote again and again during the same-sex marriage debate, the designation matters because it allows those of us who maintain long-term relationships with the other who is significant because we two have created children to invest the institution with meaning.  (That applies even among couples that have no children, provided their relationship does not contradict the ability to create children as a central premise… that is, provided one is a man and one is a woman.)

So, to counter the contagion of divorce, we have to have marriages that neither person wants to leave and that other people would take as a model.  That means we must take seriously our responsibility to seriously work out our differences, and in the end, that is most likely when we enter the relationship with the understanding that divorce is simply not an option. It also means those considering divorce should consider how their decisions will affect those around them.

Yes, marriage is a two-person relationship, but its effects are much broader than that.

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Public Policy Inefficiencies Can Be a Feature, Not a Bug

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Whether it’s removing market signals with a value-added tax or creating incentive to block new children through zoning, public policy shouldn’t remove its red flags and should seek to address original problems, not symptoms.

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The Incentives of School Bonds

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Regular readers know I put a lot of emphasis on incentives as a way to understand events and a key consideration when crafting policies.  The $250 million school bond proposed for the November ballot is a good example.

On the front end, the incentive is very strong for school districts and municipalities to let facilities deteriorate.  First, the law is structured to give advantages to labor unions organized at the state and even federal level, creating incentive for them to manipulate the political structure.  Then, elected officials have incentive to tilt budgets toward organized labor, drawing money to compensation.  Next, having learned from that experience over time, taxpayers have incentive to squeeze money out of budgets so that even higher taxes aren’t paying again for things like maintenance that they thought were already included and that might be diverted again if available.

On top of it all, the near certitude of passing bonds for dire repairs creates disincentive for regular maintenance from the start.  This mechanism creates incentives for financial interests and investors, and the bias toward big projects brings in the incentive that got me thinking of these things.  As Dan McGowan reports for WPRI:

Fix Our Schools R.I., a 501(c)4 nonprofit formed last week, will spend the coming months “educating communities across the state about what this plan is and how it would affect them,” Haslehurst told Eyewitness News. …

The organization lists its address as 410 South Main St., the same building as the Laborer’s International Union of North America. Haslehurst said it will share space with the Occupational and Environmental Health Center of Rhode Island, a nonprofit that has an office inside the building.

A quick look at the health center’s IRS filing shows that it’s a labor union organization, with AFL-CIO poobah George Nee as the treasurer.

‘Round and ’round the incentives go, to the point that running things efficiently — in the way people run their households, planning ahead and all that — seems almost to be an impossible task.  Be skeptical of anybody who tells you that this is a “once in a generation” investment that fixes a problem.  After all, when the debt payments subside, the incentive will be to find more projects in need of debt or to build the payment amount into regular budgets.

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When “Our” Land Becomes the Government’s Land

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The governments of Fall River and Tiverton are utilizing their property for reasons that show shifting property to government doesn’t ensure that it will always remain sacrosanct.

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International Gangsters in the Land of the Government Plantation

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In 2015, I presented Lawrence, Massachusetts, as a cautionary tale of the government-plantation economic model.  Just as industrialists once attempted to draw in foreign labor to the “company town” because it was less expensive, the local government is turning the city into a “government town,” whose main source of income is transfer payments from outside to pay for government services.

Consequently, this recent Boston Globe article caught my eye:

The federal government’s relentless assault on the feared MS-13 street gang in Greater Boston continued this week, with two members of the violent outfit admitting to their roles in the 2015 slaying of a 16-year-old boy in Lawrence, authorities said.

True, immigrant gangs are nothing new to the United States, and homegrown gangs certainly exist.  Still, tracing the arrival of an international criminal enterprise is a necessary task, and one needn’t indulge too much in speculation to propose that using immigration to bolster the population in need of government services leaves a region vulnerable to this sort of invasion.

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The Great Flurry’ster of 2018 and Changed Rhode Islanders

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So what happened with the disruptive snow and wind we were supposed to get yesterday?  That’s the question of the morning.  Something seems to have changed in the Rhode Island psyche after the “December Debacle” in 2007.  That year, the timing and handling of a snow storm, particularly in Providence, under Democrat then-mayor-now-congressman David Cicilline caused a nightmare for commuters and children.  Suddenly, hesitation to disrupt our entire community gave way to being “better safe than sorry.”

Once that old New England toughness lost its dominion, the ordinary incentives of government and politics took over.  If the governor or mayor closes down government and implements parking bans, not only do they give some key constituencies a day off, but they mitigate the risk of something going wrong.  Relatively few Rhode Islanders will even think to wonder about considerations like this, as expressed in a GoLocalProv article appearing this morning:

“Let’s go macro,” said [Providence restaurant owner Bob] Burke. “On any given day the state has $150 million in economic activity. What did we produce [on Wednesday] — $10 million?  Are we a state that can afford to give up $100 to $125 million in economic activity without a really tough fight? On Wednesday, they went down in the first round!”

Similar views were expressed by Mike Stenhouse, CEO of the RI Center for Freedom and Prosperity. “The lack of concern for small businesses by bureaucrats and elected officials looking to make themselves look good – when they prematurely issue parking bans, large truck bans, or shutting down government operations – directly leads to a loss of business and productivity in the private sector,” said Stenhouse.

Whatever it is that’s changed in the Rhode Island psyche has freed government officials from the need to actually make decisions.  Either business people have given up trying to assert their influence in an often-hostile government or those who take the needs of businesses lightly have increased.

Perhaps the change has to do with the “government plantation” that effectively replaces Rhode Islanders who are driven to turn their time into money with others who are more likely to seek government services. Those who work for government get paid no matter what, and those who are the recipients of its beneficence are a step removed from caring about where the money comes from.

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Ensuring More Such Union Behavior in the Future

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Well, according to a Newport Daily News article appearing last week, the Newport school committee caved to the inappropriate behavior of its teachers’ union:

When teachers retire early, they can continue to receive health insurance under the School Department’s plan until they reach the age of 65. Then they go onto Medicare’s Plan 65. That is provided for under the labor contract.

These early retirees had been receiving dental insurance and life insurance until age 65 as well. However, the School Committee determined those benefits were a “past practice” not included in the labor contract, and ended them as of Nov. 16 last year. Now, however, the five teachers who announced their upcoming retirement well before November will receive the dental insurance and life insurance until they reach age 65 as well.

One could argue that the “compromise” was that the school committee is not barred from changing this absurdly generous benefit going forward, but then, the unions aren’t barred from renewing their inappropriate tactics.  They haven’t even been chastised for using them already.
The union has simply said that it won’t do something it never should have threatened to do in the first place.

This episode again emphasizes the imbalance in our government, especially in our schools.  The labor unions are essentially in place for eternity, once certified, so when they aren’t able to win the political contest over the school committee, securing friendly “opposition” in negotiations, they are free to simply make the job difficult until new people are in place.  The incentives are for the union constantly to push the envelope and for the school committee to be maximally accommodating.

So, over time, school committees across the state have allowed a system to develop that fails students and robs taxpayers.

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Perpetual Contracts and Managing the State’s Decline

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I’ve been slow to share it, here, but the recent Providence Journal editorial on the return of perpetual-contract legislation to the General Assembly is important to read and take to heart:

Like a painful rash that keeps returning, the idea of “evergreen contracts” is back before the Rhode Island General Assembly. Year after year, union leaders who want even more taxpayer money revive this campaign.

Under this special-interest measure, police, fire and teacher contracts would remain in effect indefinitely after they have expired. The idea is to weaken the bargaining position of local cities and towns and pry more money out of the taxpayers, already burdened with some of America’s most crushing property taxes.

A fair accounting of this policy suggests that Rhode Island’s insiders understand that they’re really just managing the decline of the state.  Theoretically, perpetual contracts could benefit either side, given the circumstances.  We all understand that when the economic pressure would be on lower compensation for unionized employees, they’ll just sit on their contracts until things improve.  When the economic pressure goes the other way, promoting higher pay, local governments could be the ones to sit on the contracts.

However, everybody from the unions to municipal and school district leaders to the Providence Journal understands two things:

  • Economic flourishing isn’t in Rhode Island’s future unless the state can break insiders’ strangle hold on the state, and that doesn’t look likely, absent a terrible crash.
  • Interacting with that point, the deals that unionized government employees get in Rhode Island are so generous that it’s even less plausible to imagine circumstances in which Rhode Island’s economic growth would be so strong that the government would struggle to find people willing to work for that amount of remuneration.

Add in the fact that union employees can disrupt government services much more readily than government agencies and school districts can get out from under their unions, and it’s clear why this is such a one-sided issue.  At least the insecurity of a lapsing contract instills some discomfort among Rhode Island’s privileged class, which gives elected representatives a little leverage.  Whether or not they take advantage of that leverage — which hinges, in large part, on whether they were elected with the unions’ help — is another question.

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Newport Sees Latest Teachers Union Outrage

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In the Newport Daily News, Sean Flynn highlights another example of the outrageous behavior among teachers union organizers, which ought to embarrass well-intentioned, professional teachers:

Superintendent of Schools Colleen Burns Jermain sent a notification to all parents on March 1 informing them that the conferences would take place between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. on three days this week, one day at each school, the same as has been done in past years. …

The conflict reached a new flashpoint over the weekend with an advertisement in this newspaper paid for by attorney Jennifer Azevedo, who is an assistant executive director of the National Education Association RI, on behalf of the Teachers Association of Newport. The ad claimed the parent-teacher conferences would be held during the regular school times at each school on the designated days. Regular school hours are staggered between 7:45 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. among the three schools.

On first review, this has the feel of parents who are tearing their children apart as they head toward divorce, but that analogy isn’t applicable.  The union advertised publicly in a way that presumed to set school policy.  Here’s the ad; it’s extremely misleading, with no indication that it’s actually part of a disputed policy.  This is the union saying, “Whatever your elected and appointed school administration might think, we run the schools.”

Hopefully, the Supreme Court will give teachers the ability to get out from under this thuggish organization when it decides its Janus case this year.  Be that as it may, parents and voters should respond to this abuse of contracts to figuratively rip the contracts up.

And any legislator who votes for the legislation to make teacher contracts last forever unless renegotiated ought to find him or her self unelectable.

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Speed Cameras, Another Lesson

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