OCG BLOG

Readers of my blogs will jump to the conclusion that i blame government union workers for all RI’s financial problems.  Not true.  I blame the union bosses and thier allies in government–legislators at the state level and city managers, mayors, and town council members  at the local level.  Union workers, properly managed, will work just as hard as any worker in private industry.  I know this for a fact.

My wife is an elementary school teacher in Central Falls.  She leaves for work Monday through Friday at 7:00 am and returns each night at 7:00 pm.  Most weekends she spends half her time correcting papers, doing lesson plans, making materials for classroom projects, or filling out report cards.  My brother is a facility engineer (maintenance technician) for the RI court system.  He is a hard worker and earns every cent of his pay.

My problem is with highly paid union bosses who demand ever more money from state and local governments regardless of whether or not these governments can afford to finance these increasing demands for higher wages, benefits, and pensions.  Where does this money for the unionized government workers come from?  It comes from every taxpayer in the state and every taxpayer in the state’s cities and towns.  But even worse than these greedy union bosses are the state legislators, city managers, mayors and town council members who refuse to say–enough!  These politicians are willing to give away hard earned taxpayer dollars to these government workers in exchange for the worker’s vote come Election Day.  This cycle of ever increasing unionized government worker compensation in exchange for another incumbent victory on Election Day has reached the breaking point in RI.  No you say.

Consider this.  Average pay for public sector government workers in RI is 4th highest in the country.  See p. 43 in the book Rich States, Poor States at http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Rich_States_Poor_States.  It is no coincidence that RI has one of the highest rates of unionized government workers in the country–62 percent as compared to the national average of 37 percent.

Again this is not the fault of the rank and file union worker in RI.  It is the fault of politicians in the RI general assembly who insist on unionizing every single service provided by the government.  This would not be so bad if one union compete against another to provide the best service for the lowest price.  It would not be so bad if unions competed with private companies to provide these government services for the lowest price.  Yet, instead of implementing competition amongst various suppliers for these government services, the legislators enact laws that make it almost impossible for RI to privatize any government functions.

At the same time, these state legislators are enacting laws that shift union expenses from the unions to the state which means the state taxpayers.  For instance, instead of a union and a school committee splitting the cost of mediation or arbitration when the two sides can not agree on an issue, the legislators want the state (taxpayers) to pay the first $15,000 of the mediation or arbitration cost.  Why should the state’s taxpayers pay for union mediation in a city or town?  Why shouldn’t the union and the city or town pay these costs!

Another prime example of union boss and politician collaboration at the expense of the tax payer is how the union worker’s health insurance is paid.  Only recently have union members started to pay part of the cost for their health insurance.  For years the city or the state taxpayers paid the whole premium for these health insurance plans and the union member paid nothing.  Yet, civil servants in the Federal Government pay about 30% of the cost of their health insurance.  If a Federal employee elects not to take the federal health insurance, he/she gets no “buyback.”  My wife does not take her Central Falls health insurance because she is covered by my health insurance, but the school department “gives” her the money the school would have paid for her health insurance if she had taken it.  This is called a buyback.  It is things like buybacks that are causing cities and towns all over RI to go bankrupt.

Union leaders must realize there is a limit as to how much government and its taxpayers can afford for the government worker’s compensation.  Legislators, city managers/mayors, and town council members must carefully analyze the cost of every pay raise and other benefit that they bestow on their government workers to make sure that the taxpayers can afford to shoulder these costs.

Finally, if the taxpayers realize the politicians are not doing their job to protect the public’s interest, then their only recourse is to vote these politicians out of office.  You can ‘t get blood out of a stone and you can only get so much out of each taxpayer!   Robert A. Benson, Jr.

Of all the events scheduled for April 25th,2009 the Operation Clean Government R.I. Fiscal Forum is probably one of the most timely and significant.  R.I. is in the midst of a crushing financial crisis as evidenced by its very high unemployment and huge budget deficits.  For years the economic experts and business leaders have been advocating structural budget reform.  Yet the General Assembly House has been ignoring these warnings, continuing to enact budgets with annual increases higher than the rate of inflation in order to fund special interests.  After thirty years of overspending and overtaxing Rhode Islanders, what do we have to show for it?  Not much.

Oh, we have too many people on welfare who are not even working part time.  We have highly unionized government workers at both the state and local levels (71% of these government workforces–twice the nation-wide average unionization rate) with no competition from other union workers or private employees.  We have a General Assembly full of union business agents, teachers, policemen, firefighters and lawyers who owe their victories each election cycle to union political contributions.  In short we have over-compensated government workers with no competition for their jobs thanks to a General Assembly that refuses to enact Right-To-Work laws or even consider privatizing any government services.  Well, now they have to face the fact that the state and many of its cities and towns are broke.  Yet, still the Assembly refuses to reform the defined benefit pension plans for teachers and state workers.  The taxpayer bill for these pension plans will rise to $800 MILLION dollars by 2017 if no reforms are enacted.

Yes, R.I. is a basket case.  WE have no one to blame but ourselves. We insist on the straight-ticket master lever voting option; we won’t even spend 15 minutes a week to check to see the bills introduced by our state representatives; we let the General Assembly enact laws that gut the conflict of interest law; we seat judges that exempt our state senators and representatives from the state’s ethics laws.  We could change the direction R.I. is going so easily with our vote on election day, but we refuse to unseat the corrupt, self-serving incumbents.  So if you are not satisfied with R.I.’s financial situation, look in the mirror or come to the OCG Forum and ask the experts if the above narrative is fact or fiction!   For more information on the OCG Fiscal Forum, see http://ocgri.org  .

A Providence Journal editorial, “Courage, please, on COLAs,” ask the General Assembly to reform the pension plans for public sector workers–teachers and state workers.  The editorial ask state legislators to summon the courage to end the automatic 3 % compounded cost-of-living raises on state pensions and to at least raise the minimum retirement age to 59.  The editorial points out that very few retirees in the private sector get COLAs.  Also, many non-government workers must work until age 62 or more to even be eligible for a pension.  There is a problem however, in getting the General Assembly to take any action that might be perceived as aiding the taxpayers if it hurts state workers.  The influence of public-employee unions is so strong in R.I., I doubt the legislators in the General Assembly will enact laws to reform the public-sector pensions. The legislators know these unions will put up candidates against them in the next primary and general election and spend untold thousands to defeat any politician who votes against the unions. 

This is just another good reason for term limits in R.I., but the General Assembly will never even consider that option. The only way we could get term limits for legislators, is if R.I. had a Voter Initiative law whereby the states citizens can make laws as in MA and CA. But first, the General Assembly would need to enact Voter Initiative legislation so the voters could collect signatures and get a new law put on the ballot. Voter Initiative bills have routinely been intorduced in the General Assembly year after year, but died in committee. In R.I., meanwhile, we have government of the people for the people by the General Assembly. Voter Initiative would give us government of the people for the people BY the people.  Think about that the next time you wish there was a way for the taxpaying citizens to make laws instead of having only the General Assemby make our laws.

Ed Achorn’s column yesterday reveals a group of R.I. state Senators–Harold Metts, Jua Pichardo, Maryellen Goodwin, Elizabeth Crowley, and Charles Levesque–want to enact legislation (S-0156) that “would ban employers from denying a job to anyone because of his or her criminal history.”  If a business did not hire a criminal it would have to documnet in writing why it hadn’t.  Just for the heck of it, i checked the list of bills that Senator Charles Levesque has introduced in the last could of years.  You can do this by simply entering a legislators name on the OSPRI Transparency Train web site ( http://www.lrbwatch.org/test/ ).  It turns out Senator Levesque is the same Senator who introduced a bill (2009-S-188) to add a 1% tax to standard health insurance premiums and a 2% tax to HMO premiums, a bill (2009-s-196) to allow state employees to hold state office (then these state employees could vote on their own benefits and pension plans, wow!), a bill (2009-s-206) giving illegal immigrants all the rights and protections of state laws, and a bill (2008-s-2718) to allow health care professionals who have been disciplined by the Dept. of Health to have their records expunged.  Anyone want to start recall proceedings?  When you see some of the bills that these legislators introduced, you have to wonder if their constitutents are just totally uninformed or pulling the master lever when they get in the voting booth.  In the case of Senator Lesvesque, i think both apply!!

On March 26th on Operation Clean Government’s (OCG) State of the State public access TV show, President Chuck Barton, 1st Vice President Robert Benson and Attorney Tom Dickinson discussed the R.I. Superior Court decision that allows state legislators to violate the state’s ethics  laws .  In October 2008, the R.I. Superior Court decided that the Rhode Island Ethics Commission could not prosecute ex-Senate President William V. Irons for a conflict of interest (a violation of the state’s ethic law 36-14-5) because he is protected by the “speech in debate” clause in the state’s constitution.  The speech in debate clause says “for any speech in debate in either House, no member shall be questioned in any other place.”   However, in 1986 Rhode Island voters approved an amendment to the state’s constitution that created the state’s ethics commission for the express purpose of prosecuting “all elected and appoint officials of the state” when they violate the ethics laws.  The R.I. Ethics Commission (RIEC) has appealed this Superior Court decision to the state’s Supreme Court.  Larry Valencia, an OCG member, was the host for this State of the State TV show.

Barton pointed out that OCG filed the original complaint against ex-Senator Irons in 2004 because in 1999 and 2000 Irons received hundreds of thousands of dollars from CVS for “killing” pharmacy choice legislation in the Senate.  Pharmacy choice legislation would allow insured workers to buy their prescriptions from any drug store.  Irons was the owner of an insurance agency, and the payments from CVS were allegedly for “arranging” a Blue Cross/Blue shield health insurance policy for CVS workers.   Middle managers at both Blue Cross and CVS said these payments were unusual.  Barton pointed out that the 1986 amendment was enacted by a majority of the state’s voters for the express purpose of combating this type of abuse of legislative power.  The amendment says public officials shall “not use their position for private gain or advantage.”

Benson was asked how he reacted to the Superior Court decision that dismissed the ethics complaints against Irons.  He said he was outraged so much so that he wrote a Providence Journal Op-Ed article calling this decision an injustice.  The article said, “How can we have a code of ethics that applies to two branches of our government and not to the legislative branch?  What message is the court sending to our citizens about the standards of conduct they can expect from our legislators?”  He said, “If the speech in debate clause allows lawmakers to violate the ethics code, then it allows lawmakers to break the law.”  The code of ethics is contained in R.I. General Laws 36-14-1 through 36-14-21.

Attorney Dickinson, an appellate lawyer retained by OCG to file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the Ethics Commission’s appeal in this Irons case, said the language of the 1986 amendment is explicit and unambiguous.  It says clearly that legislators are included in the clause, “All elected and appointed officials of state and local government, of boards, commissions  and agencies shall be subject to the code of ethics.”  He said the fact that the amendment also states, “the commission shall have the power to remove from office officials who are not subject to impeachment” indicates the ethics laws and this removal power of the commission specifically apply to legislators because they can not be impeached.  Only elected and appointed members of the Executive and Judicial branches of R.I. Government can be impeached.  He also indicated that the R.I. Supreme Court has never heard a case where an elected state official has tried to use the speech in debate clause to avoid prosecution by the ethic commission.  He also stated that he did not believe Irons would be able to appeal this case to the U.S. Supreme Court if the R.I. Supreme Court overturns the Superior Court decision in his case.

This OCG State of the State TV Show, “The RI Ethics Commission fights to survive,” can be viewed on Mondays, March 30th and April 6th 2009 at 9:00 pm, and also on Thursdays, April 2nd and 9th at 9:00 pm, on Cox Channel 18, Verizon Channel 32 and Full Channel 9 or on these same channels on Saturday April 4th at 11:00 pm and Sunday April 5th at 8:00 am.  In a few days this public access show will be available for viewing on the OCG web site under the State of the State heading.  See http://ocgri.org .

There is no doubt that R.I.’s three largest state pension plans for state workers, municipal workers and teachers are unfunded unless you think an unfunded liability of SEVEN BILLION dollars is nothing to worry about. However it is unfair to the current vested workers and teachers to now make drastic changes to their pension plans and tell them they have to work until age 65 as Rep. Tim Williamson’s Pension Commission recently recommended.

Under the existing plan for teachers, they can retire after 28 years of service or at age 50 if they started teaching when they were 22 years old. Governor Carcieri wants to establish a minimum retirement age of 59 for all state/municipal workers and teachers. I see nothing wrong with that even for vested workers considering the dire straits the system is in now.

Keep in mind the Federal Government switched from defined benefit to a hybrid defined contribution pensions for civil servants in 1984, but it did not change the rules for those in the older defined benefit system.  A.B.

T.R. Catanzarite, author of a Projo commentary titled “Unionized states are the best,” says “There are more people in Rhode Island and in the United States who want to join unions than who want to abolish them.”  He says this claim is supported by surveys and has been reported in the Providence Journal.  Yet he cites not one survey nor one ProJo article to substantiate this claim.

to the contray, “the Center for Union Facts (CUF) released a unique new poll which found that 82% of non-unionized American workers would not like their jobs to be unionized. The poll, which was conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey, clearly demonstrates that an overwhelming number of Americans have no interest in joining a union.”

See http://laborpains.org/index.php/2009/02/04/new-poll-82-of-americans-dont-want-to-join-a-union/ .

Mr. Catanzarite ignores that fact that a state like Rhode Island with 71% of the state workers and municipal workers in unions can not balance its budgets at either the state or local level.  Rhode Island is one of forty-six states that are wrestling with budget deficits, and many of these deficits are the result of overspending on unionized government workers with generous benefits and pensions.  For instance in R.I., the state’s three largest pension plans for state workers, teachers and municiapal workers are seven BILLION dollars underfunded.  Governor Carcieri has recommended raising the minimum retirement age for these workers to 59 years of age.  A House Commission has gone a step further and recommends a minimum retirement age of 65.  Both of these efforts are aimed at closing the unfunded liability in these pensions plans.

It should be pointed out that Mr. Catanzarite is a former employee of the R.I. Department of Human Services with a master’s degree in social work.  He has moved out of R.I. to avoid paying state income and sales taxes.  A.B.

I see where Senator John Tassoni wants to introduce legislation to create a 7-member state panel to mediate disputes between parents.  These disputes arise occasionally at youth sporting events in RI.   The ProJo editorial today really lambasted Tassoni for this idea, saying it most likely would be costly, time-consuming and unconstitutional.  I can’t quote the ProJo exactly, as someone swiped my newspaper today.  The newspaper box is out on the main street.  When the news paperboy leaves the plastic wrapper sticking out of the front of the box, a driveby thief just cruises by and grabs it.

Anyway, the ProJo suggested Tassoni pay more attention to things like RI’s financial crisis.  Good idea.  I left a comment on the Projo editoral suggesting Tassoni retract his bill # 2009-S-0006.  This bill would tax every Rhode Islander who has auto insurance, another $5.00/year.   As if we aren’t already taxed enough, our representatives are always asking for more.  I might not mind if our state and local tax burden wasn’t the 1oth highest in the country.   When will they learn?  Al B.

I sent this Letter-to-the-Editor (LTE) below to the Providence Journal.  You never know if they will publish an LTE or not.  I sent in three different LTE’s to the ProJo debunking Patrick Crowley’s claim that unions are still weak in R.I.  I haven’t seen any of those LTE’s published yet.  I hope they publish this one as it is much more important than the others.  The Journal has a rule that each LTE author is usually only allowed one LTE a month.   A.B.

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Former House majority leader Gerard Martineau wants his prison sentence shortened (“Martineau seeks early release,” Projo, Mar. 6, 2009). He is serving time for pleading guilty to selling the public’s trust. He was pushing legislation in the General Assembly, legislation favorable to drug-store chain CVS and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Rhode Island. At the same time the companies were paying him $911,400 for plastic bags, including bags that didn’t even exist!

Martineau claims he can not be prosecuted for his votes in the General Assembly because he is protected by the speech in debate clause in the state’s constitution. He cites an October 2008 Superior Court decision by Judge Francis Darigan that said former state Senator William Irons could not be prosecuted by the state’s Ethics Commission for receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in Blue Cross health insurance commissions from CVS at the same time he was killing legislation that these two companies did not support. Darigan used the speech in debate clause in the state’s constitution to support his decision in the Irons’s case. Yet a 1986 amendment to the state’s constitution created the state Ethics Commission, giving it the power to prosecute and penalize all state elected and appointed officials when they violate the code of ethics. The state’s code of ethics is state law. The code of ethics laws were enacted by state legislators. Some of these very same legislators are now trying to say these laws don’t apply to them.

Judge Darigan’s decision in the Irons case is being appealed to the state’s Supreme Court by the state’s Ethics Commission. Martineau’s request for shortening his sentence is a perfect example of why Darigan’s decision should be overturned.

On March 5, 2009 the Providence Journal published Bev Clay’s Letter-to-the-Editor (see below) on the problems that occur when using the Straight-Party option on optical-scanning voting machines.  Bev is a n Operation Clean Government Board Member.  A.B.

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The straight-ticket “lever” on Rhode Island’s optical-scan-machine ballots is confusing and misleading. Edward Achorn’s Feb. 17 Commentary column “Removing the taint from R.I.’s elections” enumerated many other reasons to do away with this outdated option.

With the old mechanical voting machines, when you pulled an actual lever for a straight-ticket vote, you would see an X next to every candidate you just voted for. You could change a vote by lifting the lever next to a candidate (removing the X) and then select an opposing candidate by lowering the lever next to his/her name (adding the X).

And voters in the towns that have nonpartisan races (eleven school committees and five town councils) could see that they had not yet voted for local offices and could then proceed to vote in those races. By pulling the levers for the individual candidates, the voter would get a visual confirmation that the votes would count.

In contrast, with optical-scan voting, to vote a straight party ticket, you mark your paper ballot by connecting the arrow next to the party of your choice.

There are four problems with this process:

Confusion created with the introduction of the optical-scan machines is only one of the many good arguments for eliminating the straight-ticket lever. It should have disappeared with the old mechanical lever machines.

BEVERLY CLAY
West Greenwich
The writer is a member of the board of Operation Clean Government.

Click below for this Providence Journal letter and comments

http://www.projo.com/opinion/letters/content/LT_clay_RDY_03-05-09_E4DC7CS_v6.3e6936f.html