bob flanders – RI Future

April 17, 2012April 17, 2012

RI Progress Report: Tax Day, Central Falls, Callista Gingrich

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Happy Tax Day, says Ted Nesi. Meanwhile, our own Tom Sgouros uses the occasion to report that the Tax Foundation says Rhode Islanders have the second lowest tax burden in the region.

Speaking of Tax Day, this from Ocean State Action: “Years of misguided tax policy that benefit Rhode Island’s highest income earners have starved our state of revenue, leading to budget deficits, cuts to cities and towns and critical programs like services for the developmentally disabled, higher college tuition rates, and massive hikes to property and car taxes. This six year experiment in trickle-down economics has failed, and it is time to restore fairness to our tax structure by asking everyone to pay their fair share. The Miller Cimini Tax Equity bill will generate $131 million in revenue to invest in education, repairing our roads and bridges and ensuring to services for the most vulnerable Rhode Islanders are restored.”

They are hosting a rally today to “call on the General Assembly to end the Carcieri tax breaks for our top earners and rebuild Rhode Island through investment not cuts” today at Network RI in Pawtucket, 175 Main St., at 4 p.m.

Offshore tax havens used by the uber-affluent and corporations are costing Rhode Island more than $450 million in lost revenue annually. That’s more than we saved on pension reform last year!

Callista Gingrich, Newt’s wife, will be at Caprice in East Greenwich tonight. Her husband, people keep saying, is still running for president.

The Central Falls School District must be breathing a sigh of relief given that it will be the state Dept. of Education rather than receiver Bob Flanders who will be charged with taking over the district. It doesn’t mean there won’t be haircuts, it just means they won’t be as obnoxious.

Five banks control 56 percent of the U.S. economy, reports Bloomberg via PBN. Conversely, two economists are largely responsible for the tax equity craze sweeping the nation.

It’s true! There is one part of the local economy that is doing quite well: exports.

The United States may be a great place to have a job, but it’s a terrible place to be out of work … 30 countries have better unemployment benefits than we do.

This page may be updated throughout the day. Click HERE for an archive of the RI Progress Report.

April 3, 2012April 3, 2012

Taveras Beheads Flanders; Chafee Should Give Him Haircut

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Bob Flanders seemed to take a perverse pleasure in threatening other people’s livelihoods. But yesterday he was the one who got beheaded rather than getting a haircut when Providence Mayor Angel Taveras severed the city’s relationship with the Central Falls receiver-turned-municipal bankruptcy zealot.

Taveras fired Flanders yesterday because the retired Supreme Court justice, who was acting as an legal adviser to the Capital City in its quest to avoid going belly up, said he thought bankruptcy was inevitable.

“Judge Flanders’s recent comments concerning Providence’s fiscal crisis are unacceptable,” said Taveras in a statement. “Because of the harm his comments have done, effective today the City of Providence has severed its relationship with Judge Flanders.”

Somewhere between being named the receiver for Central Falls and being fired as a bankruptcy adviser to Providence, Flanders had become both obsessed and enamored with the idea of municipal restructuring. He penned pieces extolling bankruptcy’s benefits, and seemed to tell anyone who would listen what a boon Chapter 11 could be.

He even traveled to a bondholders conference in Philadelphia and, in trumpeting the virtues of coerced contract negotiations, according to the Huffington Post, said, “We could blow up any contract we liked.”

Turns out, however, that Providence didn’t mind blowing up his contract either.

Flanders had become an outspoken and often obnoxious force in the realm of municipal restructuring. He turned even ardent supports against him when he gave a poorly-received performance at the annual Follies, cracking wise about his job of stripping working class people of their agreed upon retirement plans. Dressed as an executioner, Flanders likened himself to Darth Vader and called himself the “lord of the pink slip.”

Prior to that, Gov. Chafee had to revoke Flanders decision to outlaw street parking in Central Falls after it became painfully evident that the decision was little more than a way to charge Central Falls residents for having cars (most homes in CF don’t have driveways, so parking on the road is the only option). He’s being sued by the ACLU for not properly adhering to the state’s rules for democracy in his role as Central Falls receiver.

While Flanders has done good work in getting Central Falls’ budget back in line, he proved disastrous at the public relations aspect of his role. He came across as arrogant and uncaring. He belittled the people he was supposed to be helping. He made Rhode Island seem like a state that didn’t care about its struggling communities, only their bottom lines.

Gov. Chafee would be wise to show the same kind of leadership that Taveras did and rebuke Flanders for giving municipal bankruptcy a bad name. But he shouldn’t be removed as Central Falls receiver; Chafee should simply slash Flanders exorbitant contract that pays him more than $360,000 a year.

Surely, Flanders would be amenable to taking less money to be the “lord of the pink slip” in Central Falls because, as we all know, a haircut is better than a beheading.

March 26, 2012March 26, 2012

Sen. Crowley vs. Bob Flanders on Bankruptcy’s Benefits

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Bob Flanders, the receiver for Central Falls, and Elizabeth Crowley, a state senator from Central Falls, are both offering Woonsocket advice on whether or not to pursue bankruptcy. Whose advice should Woonsocket put more stock in? Let’s compare…

Crowley has to live with the effects of bankruptcy. Flanders doesn’t even show up for public meetings in Central Falls, and will get paid more than a third of a million dollars because of bankruptcy.

Crowley went to Central Falls High School, and worked for 40 years there as a city clerk. Flanders went to Harvard Law School, lives in East Greenwich and I’ll bet had never been to Central Falls before becoming its receiver.

Crowley has said bankruptcy has been bad for Central Falls’ morale. Flanders told the Projo “it’s not a mark of shame.” But he also made some pretty pointed jokes about it at the Follies, for which he was roundly criticized.

Crowley said Central Falls lost its public libraries and community center because of bankruptcy. In East Greenwich, where Flanders raised his family, the school committee recently decided to spend $1 million renovating its school library. Oh yeah, about a third of that project will be paid for by the state. In 2010, East Greenwich renovated a historic gym into a community center for $3 million.

Woonsocket may indeed decide that bankruptcy is the best option for it to right its fiscal issues. But it would be wise to consider Crowley’s perspective on it more than Flanders. Doing otherwise would be like asking the fox, rather than the farmer, for advice on protecting the hen house.

March 19, 2012March 19, 2012

ACLU: Flanders Flouts Law By Delegating His Duties

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The Rhode Island ACLU filed a lawsuit today against Central Falls receiver Bob Flanders saying he is improperly delegating authority to his chief of staff Gayle Corrigan.

Flanders, ACLU attorney Jennifer Azevedo said, “is stepping in for the mayor and city council. If he is going to do that he should have to do what mayor and council do. He has no authority to pass off his duties to a third party.”

Corrigan presides over Central Falls public meetings and makes recommendations that Flanders later signs off on. Azevodo said Flanders has no more a right to pass off this responsibility to a third party than would a mayor and council. Her suit contends that by doing so, Flanders is violating the Financial Stability Act, the law that put a receiver in place in Central Falls.

“The citizens of Central Falls have had their mayor and council taken away from them they have no self government,” Azevedo said. “If receiver can’t turn up for meeting himself then the people essentially have no one listening to them at all.”

She said the Rhode Island Supreme Court case Moreau v. Flanders spoke to her case when a justice wrote, according to her press release, “the receiver may exercise the powers of an authority or office to the limits of that authority or office, and no further.” Flanders is a former member of the state Supreme Court.

Flanders told me “there is nothing that requires there to be meetings,” let alone that he attend them. He said the Financial Stability Act empowers the receiver to make decisions through orders and because it expressly says that it is to, as he said, “take precedence over any contrary laws” he can make orders without holding public meetings as a mayor and council would have to do.

In a letter to the ACLU dated January 30, he wrote:

“There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding on your part that “third parties” are exercising the “extraordinary powers” ofthe receiver. Nothing could be further from the truth. With regarding to the parking ordinance, neither myself nor any member of my staff enacted any such ordinance at any public meeting. Whenever I exercise the powers ofthe Central Falls City Council, I do so by order, as R.I. Gen. Laws 45-9-20 requires me to do. I personally execute all orders of the receiver, and I assure you that I have never delegated that authority to anyone. In the case ofthe parking ordinance specifically, a copy of the order that I executed on January 6, 2012, is enclosed.”

The suit is expected to heard on March 30 in Superior Court. It could go before Judge Taft-Carter, who has seen many high-profile cases as of late, though it could also be moved to the business calendar and be heard by Judge Silverstein who has heard other cases relating to Central Falls.

March 19, 2012March 19, 2012

RI Progress Report: Reinvent RI, Receivers and OccupyURI

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The Providence Journal kicked off a great new series on Sunday called Reinvent RI in which the paper does a great job analyzing and identifying the problems with our economy. The Projo says the state’s downturn is a result of a slumping housing economy coupled with a transition away from manufacturing – not high taxes or union dominance as some would have you believe.

Kate Bramson details five priorities for Rhode Island, including taking better advantage of our ports, keeping our college graduates here in state, retraining our workforce and taking advantage of what Allen Tear of Betaspring called our “unfair lifestyle advantage, an unfair cool advantage.”

Of course, Rhode Island’s business climate was also cited as a priority, but Bramson keeps great perspective writing that RI must, “reach out to help traditional small companies and the innovative start-ups that are developing new technologies and will be future job creators.”

— Meanwhile, over on the editorial page, Darth Flanders penned an op/ed with Gary Sasse extolling the benefits of municipal bankruptcy. It read as if Flanders and Sasse were selling the idea of municipal receivers to mayors and managers across the state, even though they led off by saying, “If the reader takes one thing from this article, it is that only after exhausting all other options should financially troubled Rhode Island municipalities” consider bankruptcy. Of course the next sentence started with a big giant, “But…”

— In other financial news from this weekend, Ted Nesi made a great observation about Rhode Island’s economy. Namely that public sector unions aren’t nearly as powerful as people think, and Wall Street is much more so.

“For all the talk about labor unions’ power in Rhode Island, their influence over political leaders is still trumped by the might of another formidable institution: Wall Street. When Rhode Island’s leaders are faced with a choice between investors and public-sector union members, they consistently side with the former. The bondholders law, which explicitly protects creditors over pensioners, is one example of that; the suspension of democracy in Central Falls is another.”

— Economic inequality has become such the debate dejour that they are even talking about it in East Greenwich, home of Rhode Island’s largest concentration of the 1%. Lisa Sussman wrote a great piece for EG Patch about why this upscale suburban enclave really shouldn’t complain about Chafee’s municipal plan. Read the comments to see me get beat up for sticking my nose into the fray!

— Given all this gloomy news about the state of the state, what are we to do about it? Well, Occupy URI will be protesting at the Board of Governors for Higher Education meeting today at 5:30 at the URI Bay Campus “to object to the unrelenting diversion of funds from public education in Rhode Island, and to bring to the Board’s attention grave concerns regarding the constitutionality of those diversions,” according to a press release, which also says:

“In addition to being patently unconstitutional, the diversion of funds from education is morally reprehensible. Nevertheless, The RI Board of Governors, continuing a trend spanning decades, approved an explosive 9.5% tuition increase for the University of Rhode Island for the 2012-13 academic term. This has led to an unconscionable burden on those seeking the opportunities guaranteed to them in the RI Constitution.”

March 14, 2012March 14, 2012

RI Progress Report: Central Falls disagrees, lottery logic, Chamber of Charity in SK, Mitt Romney and Goldman Sachs

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Seems the state and Central Falls are in disagreement once again. While Rosemary Booth Gallogly issued a three-pager exonerating CF receiver chief of staff Gail Corrigan of any wrongdoing when she let her mom volunteer in the city’s finance department and hired her lawyer’s daughter, the Central Falls City Council plans on doing its own investigation, TurnTo10 reports.

Meanwhile, CF residents are growing increasingly angry at receiver Bob Flanders. At a meeting last night, according to the Projo, after he and Corrigan got up to leave early, people shouted at them “coward” and “people are leaving without their questions being answered.” Really? You’re being paid $360,000 a year to forever alter a community and people’s lives and you can’t stay for the whole meeting?

— Boy, we sure are lucky Rhode Islanders keep winning the lottery. Or maybe it’s just the law of averages. After all, according to Ian Donnis, Rhode Islanders play the lottery more than others. And while this is good for state coffers, and every once in a while we get a good string of wins, per capita lottery players is another list Rhode Island doesn’t want to finish first in. “As I noted last week,” Donnis wrote, “the Tax Foundation calls lotteries a hidden tax that take a disproportionately heavy bite from poor people. The foundation also finds that lotteries divert money from retirement savings.”

— Mitt Romney on Planned Parenthood: “we’re going to get rid of that.” For more on the ridiculousness that has become the GOP nomination process, check out Samuel G. Howard’s post this morning.

— Call it a Chamber of Charity. Down in South Kingstown, the Town Council will debate tomorrow night whether or not to continue giving the local chamber of commerce a $7,000 tax abatement. The chamber has received the abatement for the past three years under an exemption for organizations engaged in “charitable purposes,” according to Narragansett/SK Patch. Chambers of commerce may do good work for their communities but there is a world of difference between what they do and charity.

— A great op/ed in the NY Times today by a Goldman Sachs executive who says he can no longer in good conscious work there. He writes: “The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

March 12, 2012March 12, 2012

Darth Flanders Sets Sights on CF Mayoral Office

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It turns out there’s at least one more job Central Falls receiver Bob “Lord of the Pink Slip” Flanders would like to eliminate from the financially struggling city: mayor. As if temporarily eliminating democracy from Central Falls wasn’t enough, now he wants to permanently eliminate democratically elected mayors and replace the position with an appointed city manager.

Flanders told the ProJo he would like to create a local charter review commission to look into the merits of switching from a mayoral form of government, in which the highest position in government is elected, to a city manager form, in which the highest position is appointed.

The article says “state and local officials are exploring the possibility,” but the only local official cited is Albert Romanowicz, who was appointed by Flanders to run the local jail. All the other local officials in the article – such as the mayor, not surprisingly – are against it.

Forget, for a moment, that mayors are less expensive than managers – in Rhode Island, the average municipal manager makes $101,480 a year and the average mayor makes $84,800 (meanwhile, average receiver makes in excess of $360,000 a year).

The really troubling issue here is that Darth Flanders is again going too far in his role as receiver.

Flanders has already over-stepped his bounds when he tried to institute an overnight parking ban in Central Falls. Sure, this would have made money, but that’s because he would have made it a violation to park where residents park in Central Falls, on the road. Few, if any, in Central Falls have three car garages, like Flanders does at his house in East Greenwich. While he pushed the idea through over the objection of the residents, Gov. Chafee had him rescind the idea the next day.

Similarly, the governor should tell Flanders to back off on his vision of permanently restructuring of the government by eliminating elected officials.

Central Falls does not suffer from too many elected officials, it suffers from poverty. There isn’t a high enough tax base to pay for the services that are needed. To that end, the receiver is well within the parameters of his responsibilities to shrink the size of government – though a better solution would be to work on expanding the tax base.

Either way, someone charged with financial oversight shouldn’t take action toward eliminating elected positions. It’s just unseemly, and it smacks of punishing the people of Central Falls for being too poor to pay for their services.

According to the Projo, “Flanders and his staff insist that the mayoral form of government invites patronage and cronyism.” But I’m not sure the same can’t be said of an appointed manager. At least mayors can be voted out of office. In fact, the very underlying principle of a democracy is that elected officials are held accountable by the people.

Evidently, Flanders doesn’t think this is working so well in Central Falls. “Let’s put it this way,” he told the Projo. The mayoral form of government “hasn’t served the populace very well to date.’’

If this is the case, Flanders could use the power of his position to create a community dialogue about these issues, or start a training academy for young local leaders. Both of these ideas would better eliminate cronyism from government than simply trading a mayor for a manager, as well as have many other positive effects on the city.

But it seems as if Flanders is so hyper-focused on being the Lord of the Pink Slip that he forgot he actually has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something much bigger and more meaningful than just eliminate positions and divvy out haircuts.

March 5, 2012March 5, 2012

Promise Breakers: Taveras, Raimondo and Flanders

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taveras_sotc_close — Providence Mayor Angel Taveras from the State of the City speech.

Providence Mayor Angel Taveras now joins General Treasurer Gina Raimondo and Central Falls receiver Bob Flanders in a very exclusive group of Rhode Islanders. You’ve heard of the Promise Keepers, right? Well, these three are the promise breakers.

All three have asked retirees, in no uncertain terms, to give up a portion of the post-employment benefits that they previously negotiated for and agreed upon. They asked for a contractual mulligan, if you will.

Not that Taveras, Raimondo and Flanders don’t each have difficult situations to deal with – they do. But while fiscal health is important, so is being known as a community that keeps its word. And at this rate, Rhode Island is in grave danger of being known as the state where contracts are made to be broken.

This won’t serve the state well in any future negotiation, even if it’s with a big company looking for a tax incentive to relocate here. If we did it to the people who served and protected us, they might reason, why would they not also do it to us?

But on a more elemental level, faith in government is really all that holds us together as a civic community. Once we can’t trust our government to keep its word, all bets (and social contracts) are off. I’m not saying we’re there, or even close, but we should certainly do whatever we can do to avoid that path altogether.

Give Taveras credit here. Of the three promise breakers, he has leaned the least on the contractual mulligan strategy. Before going to the retirees, he raised taxes significantly and fought hard to raise revenue through other means, most notably by begging the colleges and hospitals to ante up as well.

And he has been pretty honest about his ask. When I asked him prior to Saturday how he felt about asking for such concessions, he was pretty blunt about it: “A lot of people have gone forward based on promises that have been made and most of them have kept their side of the bargain. Obviously the city is at this point saying we need to change our side of the bargain and that is always a difficult thing.”

At his plea to retirees on Saturday, he repeated several times, I’m told, that his ask was by no means fair. He repeated it to Ted Nesi later in the day.

Raimondo, on the other hand, sold her pension-cutting plan under the banner of being fair, that is when she wasn’t fist-pumping to the pro-business crowd. And Flanders … well, I’d be surprised if the concept of fair ever even occurred to him. He simply threatened to behead retirees if they didn’t agree to his pension-slashing terms. Seriously, he told them “a hair cut is better than a beheading.”

In the short term, Taveras’ more humanistic approach may save fewer dollars. But it’s little wonder he’s the most popular pol in the state. And in the long run, that kind of political capital can get you a lot more concessions than deception or decapitation.

February 29, 2012March 1, 2012

Senator: ‘Darth Flanders bit’ insults Central Falls

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In a post yesterday about Bob Flanders poking fun of his role as the “lord of the pink slip” in Central Falls (check out the video of Flanders singing if you haven’t yet), I mentioned that it wasn’t in good taste for Flanders to make jokes about a situation that has dire consequences to already-struggling Rhode Islanders. Evidently, Sen. Elizabeth Crowley, a Democrat who represents the people of CF that Flanders gave a haircut to, agreed and wrote an op/ed about it. She even used the nickname I coined for the receiver: “Darth Flanders.”

Here’s Senator Crowley’s piece:

Residents at the Central Falls City Council meeting I attended Friday evening raised a pretty good question: where was Robert Flanders, the state-appointed receiver. While about 40 members of the public sought to have their questions addressed, the receiver and his chief of staff, Gayle Corrigan, were nowhere to be found.

So what did receiver Flanders deem so important that it kept him from meeting with the public on Friday evening? He was busy at another function, dressing up as an executioner, comparing himself to Darth Vader, and poking fun at both the city and its residents, who have been seriously harmed through the actions he has overseen.

Former Judge Flanders was the “Mystery Guest” at the Providence Newspaper Guild’ annual “Follies,” an irreverent take on all things Rhode Island, especially politics. The Mystery Guest is a well-known figure who typically engages in harmless self-deprecating humor to close out the evening. The problem this year is that the situation that makes receiver Flanders so well known is no laughing matter, and his jokes were anything but harmless.

First and foremost, Judge Flanders should have been at the City Council meeting, not at a social gathering poking fun of the very people he was snubbing. The people of Central Falls appeared before a powerless Council because they were seeking answers on Friday evening, and their mood was summed up nicely with the resounding applause they gave to a Council member who questioned where the receiver was.

Judge Flanders, meanwhile, was singing to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine”:

“Imagine there’s no mayors. It’s easy for true believers. No City Council below them. Above us only receivers. Imagine all the pensioners living with haircuts and co-pays.”

It certainly isn’t hard for us in Central Falls to imagine a world in such a dictatorship. We were robbed of our democratic representation when the city entered receivership. The state-appointed receiver collects his salary, a bill we in Central Falls will ultimately pay, but he is accountable to no one here in the city. Indeed there is no local elected official who wields any power, all of which is vested in a receiver who thinks so little of us that he goes off and makes fun of the pensioners whose livelihoods were devastated.

Judge Flanders, of all people, should be cognizant of the pain being borne by the people of Central Falls as we undergo receivership. It was he who presided over the slashing of what were already, for the most part, very meager pensions. Did he not notice the devastation written in the strained faces of elderly women and in the tears of retired men as they witnessed the security they had worked a lifetime to achieve taken from them? It is positively disgusting that Judge Flanders, who should know better than anyone how painful this situation is, would dub himself “Lord of the Pink Slip” and make light of people losing their representative democracy, losing their jobs, and losing their retirement benefits.

We the people of Central Falls will not tolerate being the butt of anyone’s jokes. Our city is a vibrant, tight-knit community, not a laughing stock. We deserve better than to be ignored and made fun of by the person appointed by the state to provide sound fiscal management.

Rep. James McLaughlin and Rep. Agostinho Silva – my colleagues in the Central Falls delegation to the State House – and I will be meeting with the Governor to discuss our concerns with the way in which the city is being run, and the lack of accountability to the people of Central Falls. We will stand strong to see that the people of Central Falls get their city back. In the meantime, it would be nice to see Judge Flanders acknowledge that he exercised some pretty lousy judgment on Friday night.

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.