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.