Legislature Wanted to Force Cities to Cut Taxes
June in Rhode Island means two things: ripe strawberries and gubernatorial vetos. The silly way our legislature schedules things — with all important bills held until after the budget passes to ensure every legislator falls into line on that vote — means that hundreds of bills are passed in the last few days of the [...]
Sewage Treatment Gets Legislative Treatment
In the waning days of the legislative session, can one be forgiven for suspecting that Assembly members don’t give a, well how about a quart of sewage solids about the municipal governments they represent? Sewage stories from Woonsocket and Warwick lead one to suspect otherwise. Woonsocket first. Woonsocket is currently under a DEM order to [...]
Legislature Ignores Public Transit in Budget
Who cares about buses? Apparently no one on Smith Hill. The House Budget, to be voted on Thursday, contains not a penny in new revenue for RIPTA. It also contains no ideas, proposals, or signs that anyone in the House Fiscal staff spent more than a dozen minutes thinking about the agency. This is hardly [...]
As Legislature Spends Money, Cities Feel Pinch
I see from the Providence Journal that the new state-appointed budget commission has decided that the city council and Mayor Fontaine were exactly right to request permission from the state to impose a supplemental tax increase on their citizens. Last week, after an impassioned speech by Rep. Lisa Baldelli-Hunt, the House rejected Woonsocket’s request. This [...]
Budgeting for Disaster: Like What We’ve Got? Good
As has been amply reported by other writers here and in other places, the state budget has emerged from the mists of the Finance Committee, and will likely be voted on and passed this week. It contains no broad-based tax changes, though there are small increases in cigarette taxes, and small expansions of the sales [...]
Who Pays for Tax Cuts to the Rich? The Poor
A correspondent tells me that last week there was a meeting over at University Heights where some residents got bad news about their rent. University Heights was built in the 1960s as a mixed development, split about half and half between market rate apartments and subsidized apartments, available to poor people and families. It’s had [...]
Budgeting for Disaster: Taxing History
Is it really too soon to modify our tax code? In the discussions of taxes at the State House, one line you hear a lot this year is that our state’s new income tax code is new and we should give it time to see how it works out. That’s what House Speaker Gordon Fox [...]
Budgeting for Disaster: How RI Pays for URI
Should URI Faculty get a 3 percent raise? Let me tell you a story and you decide. URI is the big kahuna among the three institutions run by the Board of Governors. It educates about 16,000 students, around 10,000 of whom are from Rhode Island. Researchers there pull in about $80 million each year in [...]
Budgeting for Disaster: Cutting the Buddha
Our budget tour continues with a visit to the Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals. The acronym is BHDDH and I’m told by insiders it’s pronounced “buddha.” BHDDH is spending more time than usual in the news. This is largely because last year they cut $26 million from the budget that would have gone to [...]
Budgeting for Disaster: Medicaid in the Budget
In volume II of the budget, you’ll find there the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS), which contains the Departments of Children Youth and Families (DCYF), Health (DoH), Human Services (DHS), and Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities, and Hospitals (BHDDH). Collectively these departments spend over $3 billion, about 40% of the overall budget. In [...]
Budgeting for Disaster Part VII: Quasi-appropriate?
Trick question: Why is Rhode Island’s housing policy not made by the state government? How about economic policy? Why do we have two environmental agencies? Two elections agencies? The questions sound unrelated, but they have very similar answers, and they’re all related to the state’s bevy of “quasi-public” agencies—whose budgets are in Volume I of [...]
Budgeting for Disaster VI: DMV Manages for Success
One part of the Department of Administration that gets a lot of press is the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is actually a unit of the Department of Revenue. DMV, of course, gets press because people don’t like it, and the lines are long, and it’s in an inconvenient place, and so on and on. [...]
Budgeting for Disaster Part V: Granting a Problem
Our tour of the state budget documents continues. We leave the Executive Summary for the time being (we’ll be back for the all-important schedules and for the invaluable predictions of the future), and move into Volume I. Volume I covers “General Government”, which includes the offices of all the elected officials, and the departments of [...]
Budgeting for Disaster Part IV: Lack of Education
After spending time with Appendix C of the Executive Summmary, it only makes sense to dip into Appendix D, doesn’t it? C was about state aid to the parts of municipal budgets that aren’t education. D is about the much bigger contribution the state makes to education. Once again, the really interesting things about the [...]
Budgeting for Disaster – Part III
We continue our tour of state budget documents. The Executive Summary has a lot of useful information, but the parts that I find myself referring to most often are not the text descriptions of the Governor’s program for the various departments, but the numbers in the back: the summary tables, the planning values the Budget [...]
Budgeting for Disaster – Part II
Look at it grow So what’s in the state budget? Funny you should ask. In the accompanying chart, you can see the breakout in a graph prepared by the House Fiscal staff. They publish a digest of the budget every year that is pretty helpful in figuring out what’s going on. What you can also [...]
Budgeting for Disaster – Part I
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 [...]
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