February 27, 2012 – RI Future

February 27, 2012March 11, 2012

Darth Flanders at Follies: ‘Lord of the Pink Slip’

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The Follies are designed to be funny and irreverent, and this year’s mystery guest was both. Bob Flanders, dressed as an executioner, poked fun at his role as receiver for Central Falls by comparing himself to Darth Vader and calling himself the “lord of the pink slip.”

He sang a parody of “Imagine” (as John Lennon undoubtedly rolled over in his grave) with lyrics such as: “Imagine there’s no mayors/ It’s easy for true believers/ No councils below them/ Above us only receivers/ Imagine all the pensioners living with haircuts and co-pays/ You may say I’m a dictator…”

Flanders was funny, and he evidently can carry a tune. But when tasked with a job that involves publicly bringing hardships on so many people’s lives, it’s better to leave it to others to tell the jokes.

He said “there’s talk of sending me to East Providence or West Warwick or Providence. Why can’t they send me to Newport, or Block Island. I’d even take Charlestown.” But wisecracking about how ruthless you are won’t make negotiating any easier next time, regardless of the community.

February 27, 2012February 27, 2012

Conley’s Pier Sold

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PBN reported last week on the sale of Conley’s Pier along Allens Avenue. Under Cicilline, the city had sought to rezone the hospital adjacent section of Allens Avenue to mixed-use, to allow developments like the one pictured with plans for a hotel, office building, private marina, cruise ship terminal, retail, a floating restaurant, and public walkways for visitors.

The development would create 2,000 permanent jobs and help redefine an industrial area into a waterfront attraction, according to Rhode Island Medical Arts. Its managing director, Stanton Shifman, said the project would cost between $350 million and $400 million to develop and that the site’s existing building would remain.

“We like the location, which is in easy proximity to the hospitals,” Shifman told PBN. “We like the idea that we can [utilize] the water, which is certainly an attractive area.”

Problem was, industry lobbyists had other ideas, and with the election of Mayor Taveras the proposed zoning changes never happened. At the time we were told that with Providence’s deepwater slips, maritime uses needed to be the only uses for those waterfront lots. So who bought the property? Offshore windmill turbine construction? Short-sea shipping? Nope… National Grid?!

Power utility National Grid has purchased Conley’s Pier on Allens Avenue for $4 million, former owner Patrick T. Conley said Tuesday.

National Grid plans to clean up the 4.25 acre waterfront property, which was once a manufactured gas plant, and then return it to “productive use,” company spokesman David Graves said Tuesday.

Asked what that productive use would be, Graves said the utility has not identified one yet.

It’s certainly not clear what connection National Grid has to the “working waterfront” (read polluting industry legacy uses). Don’t get me wrong, the clean up is good news and at least it’s not another scrapyard. But it’s likely we can look forward to the tax revenue generated by low density use like another parking lot. Taxpayers can only wonder what kind of revenue a mixed-use would have generated.

“I am profoundly disheartened,” Conley said in a statement about the sale. “If you spent over $8 million attempting to implement the city’s expensively-produced Providence 2020 plan for the Allens Avenue waterfront, a $4 million forced sale brings no joy, especially when much of that sum was paid to a bank in the form of interest and penalties.”

Yes, in Providence everyone’s making sacrifices… public employees, nonprofits, businesses, homeowners. But a deal to expand the tax base at the expense of the polluting lobby? Fuhgeddaboudit.

February 27, 2012February 27, 2012

Proposal to tax the richest Rhode Islanders

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cimini_maria — Rep. Maria Cimini, D-Providence. (photo courtesy of Rhode Island College)

As Rhode Island struggles to pull itself out of the recession many have been asked to sacrifice. Cities and towns have seen drastic cuts in state aid, schools have had their budgets cut, the poor have endured program cuts and public sector employees have had their benefits slashed.

Now it’s time to ask Rhode Island’s wealthiest residents to help out, too.

There are a number of bills before the General Assembly this year that would do this by creating new tax brackets for the state’s wealthiest residents with the most interesting one being a bill sponsored by Maria Cimini, D- Providence.

“We’ve really called on low and middle income Rhode Islanders to feel the pain of this recession,” Cimini said. “I don’t feel that we’ve called on upper income Rhode Islanders to feel that pain or share that sacrifice.”

Her bill, H7729, would increase the amount of income taxes people pay who make more than $250,000 a year from 5.99 percent to 9.99%.

“What this bill does is calls upon people who are better off to chip in during this time of economic crisis,” she said.

A similar bill proposed by Rep. Larry Valencia in the previous legislation was estimated to bring in about $130 million to the state coffers. That’s about a third as much as the landmark pension reform bill passed in the fall saved the state.

The bill would actual restore the tax rate to the exact level that former Governor Donald Carcieri cut it from (at the time, Carcieri said doing so would spur economic development in the state), except instead of being applied to everyone making more than $125,000 – or the richest 20 percent of Rhode Island – it would only apply to those who make more than $250,000 – or the richest 4 percent of the state.

Cimini’s bill also offers an economic incentive for the so-called job creators to actually creating jobs in the state. According to Cimini, the tax rate increase proposed in her bill would drop by one percentage point with every percentage point that the state unemployment rate drops. So if the unemployment rate drops from 10 percent to 9 percent, the tax rate increase would drop from 4 percent to 3 percent. The potential decrease would be capped at the same amount as the proposed increase.

“What this bill does if you do hire people and you do help to lower unemployment in Rhode Island,” she said, “we will recognize those efforts.”

Cimini said there are 37 co-sponsors of the bill – that’s almost half of the 75-member House of Representatives. On the Senate side, Josh Miller, D- Cranston, is expected to introduce similar legislation.

Similarly, Sen. Harold Metts, D-Prov, has introduced a bill that would increase income taxes on people making more than $500,000 by 3 percent. Even Gary Sasse, who helped orchestrate the Carcieri tax cuts, has said that he thinks taxes should be raised on Rhode Island’s wealthiest. But he suggested only raising taxes by less than 1 percent on those who earn more than $400,000 annually, which would only mean an additional $10 million in state revenue.

February 27, 2012February 27, 2012

Looking beyond the primary system

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Do you understand why we nominate presidents the way we do? As we get into the nominating contest, and the Democratic and Republican Parties decrease in popularity (helped along by a bad economy and their own hostile natures), more and more people across the political spectrum advocate for the end of the party system. Most recently, Patrick Laverty of Anchor Rising has advocated for it. It seems a simple enough reform; but I think it’s a short-sighted one. For one thing, it ignores the historical realities that led to state regulation of parties.

For those without the time to read, I’ll give a quick summation; essentially when the nominating process began utilizing a convention system (it took to around 1832 for parties to start utilizing it, prior to that, a party’s legislative caucus in a state nominated candidates) lawlessness in the process was pretty common. This is how you got political bosses who controlled machines. Since parties were more or less voluntary associations in the eyes of government, there was no need to regulate how they selected candidates. Most changes in the nominating process for president tended to be reforms of previous systems, and vary from state to state, creating a piecemeal system which still exists in the Republican Party today (Democrats overhauled their system in the 1970s and asserted national party control).

Now, Mr. Laverty strikes towards the abolition of political parties ignoring that politicians will tend to associate in factions. The same error was made by the Framers of the Constitution, which is why we got the Twelfth Amendment (reorganizing the Electoral College process) in the first place. Politics requires parties, if only to keep political alliances out in the open. Even officially non-partisan states like Nebraska have politicians who are of parties. Party-line votes still exist, and the parties endorse candidates. A non-partisan primary system is really just a first-round election in a run-off system. Simply put, there is no feasible way to organize a political system without parties; world views will always align with similar world views.

Though I’ve just laid out the issues of not having state control of the primary system, I do think there are some inherent issues in it. For one thing, the state can be a slow mover (witness our 1950s social programs grafted onto our Gilded Age economy). The second thing is that the state is much like corporations; both resist experimentation and new ideas (despite our “lively experiment” rhetoric). Having hit upon a successful formula, we cling to it. Government is thus almost always reactionary. You need only see how we respond to crises once they happen, instead of investing in prevention. Y2K, largely a punch line now, was prevented due to our prevention measures; systems did go down. But when the end of the world didn’t happen, we laughed it off. This inability to respond to future crises limits the scope of the debate when it comes to things like climate change. And it limits our ability to experiment in government. If things are working, why change?

An inherently conservative mindset, and one that I actually think must be asked. But if we take the view that there’s too much money politics, or that the elite few are foisting their views on the popular many, or whether special interests have too much power; then we can certainly says that things are due for a change. Both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street hit upon this view (“things need to change”) though their prescriptions are very far apart.

But no matter how you frame it, the call for greater democratic control is a very noble one. We do exist in a representative democracy, but this has always been fraught with trouble. For much of our early history, this meant only the well-off could vote or hold office (leading to the outbreak of the Dorr Rebellion). For the majority of our history, this meant black people couldn’t vote. Our representatives have always represented people they were never beholden to. This continues to this day.

That said, representative democracy does have its upsides. It is genuinely fine for people to have other concerns than politics. We don’t all need to be involved in government. Under the current system, you look to your politicians and essentially say, “I’m ceding my autonomy to you, so you can do the deciding for me, so I can get on with my life. But I reserve the right to yell at you if you do something I don’t like, and I reserve the right to throw you out next election.” The issue is that this then creates a system where the preferences of the politician are largely dominant to those of the voters.

So how do we found a new process that forces greater democratic control without hindering the ability of representatives to get their jobs done? That’s a question I can’t quite answer, but I will say one system is to actually control the platform. I pay attention to world politics a bit, and one of the things that interested me was the development of the idea of liquid democracy by the German Pirate Party utilizing LiquidFeedback.

Essentially, party platform can be suggested by anyone, with a proposal submitted to a central website. Members are free to discuss this system for a set period of time, and then a final draft is submitted and proposal is voted upon. But say a proposal comes up which you don’t really care or just can’t comprehend? In this case you can cast your vote yourself, or you can delegate your vote to another person; you can do this on an issue-by-issue basis or on a topic-by-topic basis. So if I know nothing about environmental policy, but my friend Jay does, I simply allow Jay to cast my vote for me. Jay might not fully grasp all aspects of environmental policy, and on certain issues might delegate to someone else. In this case, my vote would travel with Jay’s to this third person, who could then cast three votes.

There are serious drawbacks to this system. Issues like fraud, buying votes, and hacking are top concerns, along with the fact that not everyone has access to electronics or the Internet. But it’s intriguing as a system that essentially lowers the bar to participation, keeps politics relatively local, and allows a great amount of representation. Candidates could easily be nominated and selected using this system, instead of the complicated delegate rules that currently dominate the political parties.

But this is just one idea. Since I’ve gone on for a long time, how would you change things? What’s your ideal change in terms of politics or government or elections? How would you implement it?

February 27, 2012February 27, 2012

The new owner/editor of Rhode Island’s Future

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bob — Bob Plain, the new owner-editor of Rhode Island's Future.

Fresh off a redesign of our site, Rhode Island’s Future has a new owner/editor now, too. It’s me!

Some of you may know me from my stint as the digital reporter/blogger for WPRO. I know it isn’t the most common career path to go from a right-leaning radio station to leftist-trumpeting website, so allow me to explain how I’ve come to this crossroads.

First off, I should say that I’ve always been a political progressive in my personal life and I’m thrilled to have an opportunity to preach what I practice.

That’s not to say it’s an easy transition. I place a very high value on objective journalism, and think it’s the most important ingredient in a balanced diet of news and information.

But in supposedly liberal Rhode Island, the marketplace of ideas has a noticeable conservative bent. From talk radio, to TV, to the internet, to the editorial pages of the Providence Journal, the local media offers almost no progressive analysis or commentary.

While conservative thought dominates the discussion, on the other side of the spectrum there is pretty much just RIFuture.

Since 2005, this site has been covering Rhode Island from the left’s perspective. Brian Hull, from whom I inherit this institution, has done yeoman’s work for the site since taking the helm in 2009. But as a grad student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, it’s easy to understand why he would want to focus primarily on his studies.

I approached Brian shortly after being laid off from WPRO and offered to help him reinvigorate RIFuture. Instead, he offered to hand me the ball and let me run with it. Brian took over from Pat Crowley in 2009 and Crowley succeeded founder Matt Jerzyk in 2008.

The site will maintain the same core mission it’s had since its inception: serving up news, commentary and community for and about the progressive community. I’ll add some additional deadline posts, long-form journalism and beat reporting, as well as some thoughtful opinion pieces. The plan is to publish a product that is useful for all of Rhode Island.

Monetizing the site is important, too, so that the hard-working contributors can be compensated for their efforts. We’ll need the progressive community, and hopefully others, to step up and support us by advertising or donating (or both!) if we want to guarantee Rhode Island continues to have a voice for the left.

While I don’t have an exact business plan yet, I already know this much: There’s a niche for us here in our still-somewhat-liberal and still-somewhat-working class state. And, we’ve got a great group of committed people willing to help keep Rhode Island’s Future going strong. I’m proud to be one of them.

__________________________________________________

(The following has been written by Brian Hull): Yes everyone, all of the above is true. Bob Plain is the new owner and editor of the Rhode Island’s Future blog as of last week. For all of 2011, the site was largely on auto-pilot since I was unable to commit any time for management or writing due to my studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School (ask me about the amazing economic development proposals I’ve worked on to grow jobs in Haiti, New Orleans, Worcester, and Miami – and let me know if you need a policy person).

Each time I tried to create a group to help with the blog, that effort ended in failure. My frustration with the blog and the lack of support from the progressive community was evident when it devolved to nothing more than a screaming match between hardcore partisans each ridiculing each other. I decided to pull the plug and killed the blog at the end of last year, and for several weeks it just didn’t exist. Then something strange occurred. With the absence of the blog, supporters came out of the woodwork asking what they can do to help get it back up. After many lengthy conversations with a great many people and commitments for assistance, I decided to resurrect the blog with a fresh new look, and with all new content.

But I still knew that I couldn’t be at the helm. While I had a blast writing when it was my full-time gig in 2009 and most of 2010, I felt the blog needed to be entrusted to someone who has the time and dedication to pump it back to life. That someone is Bob Plain. And after several conversations with him, I handed over the reins.

I look forward to the newest iteration of the blog, and to see where Bob takes it. I will largely be a lurker, only occasionally posting comments or articles. And in parting I offer these words of advice for Bob and the larger progressive community. The Rhode Island’s Future blog needs to once again be the strong liberal / progressive voice for the state of Rhode Island. In its absence, the political narrative that has permeated the state has fluctuated between centrism and varying degrees of conservative talking points. The mythology of Rhode Island as a liberal bastion needs to be disproven by truly progressive and forward-thinking advocacy embodied in the posts of RI Future. Without a strong progressive counterbalance to this pull to the right, the policy choices on display at the General Assembly and in City Halls throughout the state will be narrowed to a small pool of false and foolish tradeoffs that merely prolong Rhode Island’s economic malaise.

February 27, 2012March 1, 2012

Budgeting for Disaster – Part I

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One of the problems of political journalism is trying to parse the difference between what’s really going on and what is said about it. Press releases are misleading as often as they are informative, and interviews seldom get at any matters beyond the superficial.

That’s the secret pleasure behind budget analysis. A budget document is the policy choices of the government made manifest. You don’t have to ask someone what the policy is, it’s there in the sums. There are, of course, ways to obscure policy within a budget, and not all budgets are presented well, but these problems pale before trying to decipher what some people mean when they talk about policy issues. What does it mean to “cut” a program? What does “level funding” mean? Is some program really “new?”

The problem with open government is that sometimes there is altogether too much information available. You can go to the RI Open Government site now and learn how much any department spent on postage last month. That’s fine, but once you know that, what do you really know? The state budget is something similar. The budget documents for the state of Rhode Island are a large and ungainly set of documents. They are seven volumes, and even the Executive Summary has a hundred pages, plus five appendices. It’s hard to know where to begin.

Here, then, is the beginning of an entirely desultory tour through the state budget—and the state budget documents. For the next several weeks, I’ll post an article every few days (and every Monday) about different parts of the budget, and eventually we should be able to get within shouting distance of most of it. Obviously some subjects will get short shrift, but there will be room to cover plenty of the controversies. I’ll monitor the comments for suggestions, directions, and corrections, and will happily accept them via email as well.

Through the same period, the House Finance Committee will be conducting hearings about the various pieces of the budget proposal, but they are unlikely to do anything about any of it until after the beginning of May, when the estimates come in for tax receipts and social service expenses.

Volumes

The budget documents have been rearranged slightly this year, and they consist of the following volumes (and my abbreviations). All these are available at the link above:

Executive Summary (ES) contains text descriptions of the budget and its changes. It also has a description of the economic outlook, summary schedules, tables of municipal aid and education aid, and the planning values used.
Budget, volume I (B1) contains the budget for the General Goverment departments, like Administration and the Legislature, and the quasi-public agencies like RIPTA and the Airport.
Budget, volume II (B2) has all the Human Services agencies (Health, DCYF, and Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals, and so on)
Budget, volume III (B3) covers all the Education departments, both Elementary and Secondary, and the state higher education institutions.
Budget, volume IV (B4) is for Public Safety, Transportation, and Natural Resources.
Capital Budget (C) has all kinds of exciting tables about how much is borrowed and what for.
The Technical Appendix (TA) is where dollar figures for detailed accounts are published, and includes the accounting codes, which helps when you want to get specific answers later.
There’s usually a small Budget as Enacted document that toddles along a month or so after the budget is passed. It’s not much more than a restatement of the schedules in the various department budgets; its numbers become part of the next year’s presentation.

In addition to these, the word “Budget” can also refer to the Appropriations Act itself. This is the law that actually gets passed by the legislature and signed by the Governor, and this year it’s been introduced to the House as bill 2012-H7323. All the numbers presented in the seven volumes are in Article 1, and the other articles contain the necessary legal changes to make the numbers work. Of course, the budget is a must-pass piece of legislation, so by the time the budget hits the floor of the House for debate, the articles will often include some hidden delights, too.

So let’s begin.

Austerity

To begin with, let it be clear from the outset that this is an austerity budget. Governor Chafee is getting lots of flack from the usual sources about his high spending and his tax increases, blah blah blah. What these people don’t want you to know is that this is a budget with many savage cuts in it. Chafee claims $45 million in program cuts in his transmission letter (beginning of ES), and the overall budget is down by 2.8%, to $7.943 billion from $8.173 billion in FY12. Federal funds are to be cut $271 million, largely due to the expiration of the stimulus funds.

For a little perspective, the state’s economy is expected to be a hair less than $50 billion in 2012, so the state budget is about 16% of everything. Municipal expenses add another $2 billion or so, so together we’re talking about a fifth of the state economy under very tight constraint. Recovery from our downturn can happen under these circumstances, but the austerity we’re seeing in government is roughly the opposite of stimulus, so it’s not as if the state is helping dig the economy out of its hole.

Why is the Governor’s budget so stingy? Because the Legislature told him that’s what they wanted. Last year, Governor Chafee proposed some changes in the sales tax to give his budget a modestly expansionary flavor. The state has to balance its budget, so we can’t do wholesale stimulus; the idea was only to keep from slashing everything, and to prevent a situation where government was laying people off during a recession. Any tax at all, of course, was anathema to the business “community” and the legislature duly shot it down, in peremptory fashion. House Speaker Gordon Fox essentially foreclosed the tax change before the budget even got to the behind-closed-door phase. So most towns enacted a property tax increase, and this year we have more austerity and cities going bankrupt. It’s really a pretty simple connection, even though lots of people want you to think it’s complex.

You have likely already heard lots of righteous-sounding arguments about how we ought to balance the government’s checkbook just like we balance a household’s. The analogy hides that fact that the austerity we feel is self-imposed, with much of it due to ill-advised tax cuts in the recent past. Second, and more important, it would have us imagine that paving roads, jailing criminals, and providing universal public education is somehow comparable to buying groceries and paying rent. Yes, the accounting can be made to look similar, but does the analogy stretch any further than that? The benefit of my groceries goes to me. The benefit of public education and roads doesn’t accrue to the state government in any but the most indirect sense. There is a difference between public goods and private ones that the accounting cannot reach and that many fiscal “conservatives” apparently cannot see. But more about all of this further down the road.

Next: “Assistance, Grants, and Benefits” — 44.6% of the budget?

February 27, 2012February 27, 2012

MERI testifies at Board of Elections Hearings about Voter ID

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Rhode Island’s controversial new voter identification law goes into effect with this year’s election, and MERI has been actively working to make the process less challenging to our community, particularly transgendered individuals who could face unnecessary hinderances and potential disenfranchisement.

This afternoon, MERI appeared in front of the Rhode Island Board of Elections and presented testimony voicing concern that the new voter ID law has the potential to put at risk the voting rights for the 2,000 to 10,000 transgender Rhode Islanders. We raised similar concerns at a hearing with the Secretary of State’s office last December.

Our testimony today focused on the proposed rules and regulations in the voter ID law as they stand and discussed their potential to place these individuals in an unwelcoming or hostile environment—an environment that is incongruous with the ideals of fairness and democracy that are supposed to define the voting process.

For example, while an individual’s identification could list one gender, that individual may be in the process of transitioning or may not wholly identify with their documented gender. Furthermore, the individual’s identification could list a name not traditionally associated with their gender at the time of voting. Such identification discrepancy could prompt a poll worker to initiate an awkward or embarrassing conversation that could bring the individual unnecessary and uncomfortable attention. Transgender individuals may be discouraged from even going to the polls for fear of being outed publicly.

But the dangers of the voter ID law on transgender people reach even beyond the possibility of discomfort or disenfranchisement to include the threat or act of physical violence. As many of us know, transgender people face extraordinarily levels of both verbal and physical violence in their everyday lives. The chance of public outing at polling places makes these sites especially susceptible to anti-transgender violence, and the mere possibility of such violence could demotivate transgender citizens from voting at all.

Although everyone should be able to vote at their local polling place free from fear and intimidation, the General Counsel for the Board of Elections wanted to make sure we knew we could vote by mail. Members of the Board of Election appreciated our testimony and want to work with us moving forward to ensure the poll workers are properly trained. We’ll keep you updated on our progress.

Also, thanks to one of our Spring Fellowship students, Simon, for all of his hard work on this issue!