Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 19

Monday, July 13, 2015

H. Philip West Jr.

Between 1986 and 2006, Rhode Island ran a gauntlet of scandals that exposed corruption and aroused public rage. Protesters marched on the State House. Coalitions formed to fight for systemic changes. Under intense public pressure, lawmakers enacted historic laws and allowed voters to amend defects in the state’s constitution.

Since colonial times, the legislature had controlled state government. Governors were barred from making many executive appointments, and judges could never forget that on a single day in 1935 the General Assembly sacked the entire Supreme Court.

Without constitutional checks and balances, citizens suffered under single party control. Republicans ruled during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Democrats held sway from the 1930s into the twenty-first century. In their eras of unchecked control, both parties became corrupt.

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H Philip West's SECRETS & SCANDALS tells the inside story of events that shook Rhode Island’s culture of corruption, gave birth to the nation’s strongest ethics commission, and finally brought separation of powers in 2004. No single leader, no political party, no organization could have converted betrayals of public trust into historic reforms. But when citizen coalitions worked with dedicated public officials to address systemic failures, government changed.

Three times—in 2002, 2008, and 2013—Chicago’s Better Government Association has scored state laws that promote integrity, accountability, and government transparency. In 50-state rankings, Rhode Island ranked second twice and first in 2013—largely because of reforms reported in SECRETS & SCANDALS.

Each week, GoLocalProv will be running a chapter from SECRETS & SCANDALS: Reforming Rhode Island, 1986-2006, which chronicles major government reforms that took place during H. Philip West's years as executive director of Common Cause of Rhode Island. The book is available from the local bookstores found HERE.

Part 2
JUDGES AND LAWMAKERS
Chapter 19
Paying the Piper (1992-93)

“We’ve got our shot,” Gary Sasse told me with a wry smile. “How often do legislative leaders invite you to redesign their bailiwick?” He had nurtured the vision for an independent blue ribbon commission to create “a blueprint for the General Assembly in the 21st Century.” With the support of legislative leaders the proposal had passed easily at the end of the 1992 legislative session, a final concession to the RIght Now! Coalition. After the General Assembly adjourned, Speaker Joe DeAngelis and Senate Majority Leader John Bevilacqua appointed a sixteen-member panel, with Sasse as chair.1

Before coming to Rhode Island, Sasse had served on the senior staff of Tennessee Gov. Winfield Dunn. Lean, lanky, modest, and around fifty, he had played college football for Florida State and flew to Tallahassee several times each fall to cheer the Seminoles. Years of reading gridiron defenses had prepared him to see pathways through political minefields.

He brought the commission together for an overnight retreat within walking distance of Quonochontaug Pond, a stretch of salt water behind the dunes on Rhode Island’s southern coast.2 Without lobbyist badges or legislative lapel pins, we settled into lawn chairs and met as peers. “This is casual, “ Sasse told the opening session, “but we have real work to do. We need to reach consensus on reforms that will improve future operations of the General Assembly.”

A national expert, William T. Pound from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), had come to guide us. “You couldn’t undertake this study at a more opportune time,” he began. “Over the last decade or so, we’ve watched decision-making shift from Washington to state capitals, which raises questions of legislative expertise and capacity.” Pound had an easy smile, white mustache, and round face. He did not mention the RISDIC disaster that had revealed ignorance, gullibility, and many conflicts of interest in the General Assembly.

Long before the colors red and blue automatically identified Republicans and Democrats, Pound’s organization had begun using those colors to describe characteristics of state legislative bodies. “Blue legislatures” were part-time operations, typically with small staffs and low pay, where legislators needed outside work. By contrast, “red legislatures” functioned like Congress, with full-time lawmakers and professional staff to do research, draft legislation, and manage constituent services. Between these extremes Pound identified hybrids, which he called “white legislatures.” In those bodies, he explained, lawmakers spent most of their time representing their constituents but received modest pay. Further gradations included “light red” and “light blue.” A chart listed states in each category. Rhode Island’s General Assembly fell between “blue” and “light blue,” since most lawmakers had no staff and ranked near the bottom in legislative compensation.3

Rep. David Dumas, who was retiring from his post as House minority leader, said the abysmal pay forced him to step down. Since 1900 Rhode Island’s Constitution had specified legislative pay as five dollars a day up to a maximum of sixty days: a total of $300 per year. Three times in the last twenty years pay raise amendments had gone before the voters, who spurned them every time. In 1986, more than 64 per cent of state voters rejected higher salaries.4 After that rebuff, lawmakers thumbed their noses and doubled their pensions. Then scores of General Assembly members secretly secured special pension bills that allowed them to buy pension credits for military service or years served on local boards.

“Pension shenanigans have poisoned the body politic,” Dumas said as we lounged on Adirondack chairs. “But lots of luck in convincing voters to pay more. People in my district know I run a solo law practice. They know I’m at the State House three or four afternoons a week for six months every spring. They know I can’t afford to continue. But if you think they’ll approve a legislative pay raise, I’ll give you a deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.” Dumas shook his head. “Legislative pay is an utterly intractable conundrum.”

I knew he was right. When I first went to the State House, the sheer size of the General Assembly shocked me. How could a state just over a million people afford 150 state legislators? Rhode Island and nine other states averaged fewer than 10,000 people for each lawmaker, but all the others were rural and sparsely populated.5 By contrast, Rhode Island ranked second only to New Jersey in population density, and New Jersey had nearly ten times as many constituents per legislator.6 Since 1987 Common Cause had favored downsizing Rhode Island’s senate from 50 to 25 seats and shrinking the House from 100 to 50 representatives. Even after those reductions, Rhode Island legislators would still represent fewer people than their counterparts in any other urbanized state.7

James Madison, the political theorist widely regarded as the architect of the U.S. Constitution, had warned against the assumption that large legislatures were more representative than small ones. “After securing a sufficient number for the purposes of safety, local information, and of diffusive sympathy with the whole society,” Madison wrote, any further increase in numbers would counteract effective representation.

After our initial retreat, the group met at the State House every two or three weeks through the fall. Sessions were always posted under requirements of Rhode Island’s Open Meetings Law, but reporters rarely came, and only a handful of citizens showed interest. Gary Sasse held back his own expertise and drew others out, remaining patient even when comments came with an edge. He often defused arguments by asking how an idea translated into a better legislative system. “Remember,” he said once, “we’re trying to build a train that stays on the tracks no matter who’s at the throttle.”

John Bevilacqua had appointed Ray Dettore, a lawyer who worked for the City of Providence. Legally blind, Dettore held a complex chart on legislative pay only inches from his thick glasses and extracted its essence: “This confirms that Rhode Island’s legislative pay is among the lowest in the country, only above New Hampshire’s.” With wide, half-seeing eyes, Dettore panned around the table. “How many of us would enter a profession where there hasn’t been a pay raise in ninety years? Should we be surprised when some senators or reps compensate themselves in dubious ways?”

“Five dollars a day was standard pay for railroad managers in 1900,” said Patricia Houlihan of the AFL-CIO. “The problem is that voters have kept refusing to amend the Constitution to raise legislative pay. Even after ninety years of inflation.”

Everyone agreed that the pay scale made no sense, but there was no consensus on what it should be. And no one knew how to market a pay raise to voters whose wounds from RISDIC were still raw.

I had much to learn about the constitutional powers of legislatures and the history of Rhode Island’s General Assembly. Why did Rhode Island legislators introduce more bills than lawmakers in all but four other states? Why did legislative leaders tolerate the stampede of session-ending special pension bills? Before our move to Rhode Island I had testified before legislative committees in New York and Connecticut, but never watched the intricacies of what many called “legislative sausage-making.” I knew virtually nothing about how legislatures functioned farther west and south.

Inflation had driven the Consumer Price Index up 234 percent in the last twenty years, but Rhode Island had not raised legislative wages since the State House was built in 1900. Only a constitutional amendment approved by voters could lift the General Assembly’s pay, and voters had rejected higher compensation in 1962, 1973, 1980, and 1986.9 Sixty-four percent of the electorate had crushed a pay raise proposed by the 1986 Constitutional Convention.10

Lawmakers found ways around voters’ resistance. In 1947 the General Assembly created a legislative pension system; after the proposed 1986 pay raise was defeated, bills appeared to double the size of legislative pensions. One sponsor, Federal Hill Sen. John Orabona, spoke candidly to reporter M. Charles Bakst: “If the voters feel legislators do not merit a pay increase, then you have to have some other type of compensation. It’s fair, and it’s just.” Bakst reported that despite the likely public backlash, the pension-doubling legislation “leaped off the starting block” on the next-to-last day of the 1987 General Assembly session. It passed among hundreds of bills on the final night.11

Beyond infuriating the voters, the doubling of legislative pensions created a sense of entitlement as lawmakers channeled a flood of special pensions to themselves and their cronies. Pension abuses in 1987 left an indelible high-water mark. One of the most egregious bills allowed a bevy of union officials to buy into the state pension system at bargain basement prices.12

Steve Kass, a WHJJ-AM radio talk show host, had served as a delegate to the 1986 Constitutional Convention. He supported a General Assembly pay raise but took offense. “This kind of activity is why people won’t give them a pay raise,” he told listeners. “They took the back door.” Kass soon filed suit to block the newly doubled pensions, and angry listeners mailed enough checks to fund the lawsuit, but he remained skeptical about the judicial process. “Let’s face it,” Kass asked listeners, “where does the judiciary come from? The legislature, and that’s a concern. Can we get a fair hearing?” More than he knew, Kass had reason to be suspicious. His case, Kass v. Retirement Board, landed on the calendar of Superior Court Judge Antonio S. Almeida.

Kass’s attorney, George Vetter, argued that although legislative pay was low, lawmakers had violated the Constitution’s compensation clause when they boosted their pensions.15 Vetter zeroed in on the actuarial discrepancy between $90 per year that lawmakers would pay in and the generous pensions — $600 per legislative year, up to a maximum of $12,000 after twenty years — that taxpayers like Steve Kass would have to fund. “If the people wanted to have the General Assembly set their own salary,” Vetter insisted, “they would have said so.”

Plaintiffs who supported doubling the pensions included the General Assembly, the State Retirement Board, and General Treasurer Roger N. Begin, a former state representative from Woonsocket. Attorney John Dolan argued that pensions were mere fringe benefits and that the Constitution did not forbid the legislature to grant or raise them.

Kass’s suspicion of the judiciary proved prescient. Judge Almeida ruled that doubling legislative pensions did not violate the Constitution, and the Supreme Court, comprised entirely of former legislators, agreed. In a unanimous opinion, Joseph R. Weisberger wrote that retired senators and representatives had been receiving legislative pensions since 1947. He added that the 1986 Constitutional Convention could have proposed to end or restrict those pensions but it did not. “Had those delegates desired to prohibit statutory pension benefits to state legislators,” Weisberger wrote for the high court, “they would have done so explicitly.”

Beyond the fact that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of doubling legislative pensions, the judge upheld in Kass v. Retirement Board achieved his own notoriety barely a year and a half later. In July 1991, Judge Almeida was arrested only moments after he pocketed an envelope stuffed with $1,500 in marked bills, and he eventually pled guilty to accepting $45,100 in bribes.18 A colleague on the Superior Court fined him $50,000 and sentenced him to six years in prison. The Retirement Board sued to revoke Almeida’s $97,904-peryear judicial pension and ultimately succeeded.

Could our Blue Ribbon Commission ever resolve this bitter legacy of blame? Even if we could diagnose chronic dysfunction and propose solutions, could we persuade mutually resentful audiences — 150 members of the General Assembly and hundreds of thousands of state voters? In an effort to try, we issued an open invitation for witnesses to testify — in person or in writing — at a series of televised hearings from January to March of 1993, with specific topics scheduled for each Monday evening. The Providence Journal quickly weighed in with an editorial. “The General Assembly,” the editors wrote, “is a part-time, underpaid, overworked, intensely politicized aggregation of amateurs, imprisoned by a process that tends to hinder excellence and independence and reward self-promotion — and, from time to time, out-and-out corruption.”

The editors added that the legislature could not fulfill its duty “when it is mired in inefficiency; when some of its members indulge in glaring conflicts of interest; when some of its committee chairmen brandish autocratic power; and when the institution is so large as to be sluggish and unwieldy.” The editors urged Rhode Islanders to attend the hearings and speak up “for the legislature they want.”

 

Room 35 in the State House basement was equipped for television. Its walls had been stripped to century-old bricks, and a blue drape hung behind ergonomic chairs for members of the House Finance Committee. The RISDIC Investigating Commission had used the room for many public hearings. I had often watched from the audience never sat in one of the high-backed black chairs behind the boxy dais.

From the center seat, Gary Sasse summarized our commission’s work over six months. He introduced members of the panel and invited witnesses to share their ideas about structural steps for improving the General Assembly. Should Rhode Island switch to a unicameral legislature, as Nebraska had done? Should we go to a full-time legislature? Reduce the number of legislators? Set term limits?

Former Lt. Gov. Richard A. Licht declared unequivocally that a General Assembly of 150 was far too large for a state of only a million people. He suggested cutting the House from 100 to 50 representatives and the Senate from 50 to 24. Downsizing the legislature, Licht said, would make lawmakers more visible in their districts, and might persuade voters to consider a pay raise that was long overdue.

Next to testify was Lt. Gov. Robert Weygand, who had helped put Brian Sarault in prison two years earlier. “As we move into the twenty-first century,” Weygand testified, “the question is whether we’ll continue with an amateur legislature or create a body that can deal head-on with the complex issues that face our state.” He urged reducing the number of legislators. “Last year, we had over four thousand bills introduced, and that was fewer than the year before. When I chaired the House Corporations Committee, I had to read thousands of bills. I tried to be responsible, but there was no way I could stay on top of them all.” He urged stronger professional staff to help lawmakers with research and constituent services, as well as improved equipment and computer access for every legislator.

Although the question of legislative pay no longer affected him, Weygand continued, the state must deal with it. Even increasing from $5 to $100 per day might not solve the problem. “There’s huge stress and pressure in having to leave your regular place of business after lunch three days a week all through the spring. For my work as a landscape architect, that was the busiest time of year.” Although he was not sure how to persuade the public of this, “it’s basic in any business to pay your employees fairly. When you don’t, you invite precisely the kind of problems we’ve seen in recent years. Either you are going to make the leap to reasonable salary or strip responsibilities and go back.”

Former Senate Minority Leader Lila M. Sapinsley, a moderate Republican with elegance and gravitas, had narrowly lost a race for lieutenant governor and now volunteered with several nonprofits, including Common Cause. She proposed higher legislative salaries, an end to legislative pensions, and strict ethics rules. “Until people in the General Assembly recognize a conflict of interest and steer clear,” Sapinsley testified, “all the rest will be merely cosmetic.”

Week after week witnesses testified. Some had served as statewide officers or legislators, others worked in government agencies, one taught political science, and a few were citizen activists. One evening in March, both Joe DeAngelis and former Senate Majority Leader Jack Revens spoke.

DeAngelis, with his neatly trimmed mustache, remained one of the most successful lawyers in the state. No longer speaker of the House, he seemed diminished as he sat before the commission. Routine conflicts of interest and lax legislative oversight had come crashing down on his watch. Nothing would change his responsibility for that. Defensively, he recited the reforms approved since RISDIC. “We enacted DEPCO in thirty-six days,” he said. “We reformed pensions and restructured state purchasing.” He ended by saying plaintively that he and other leaders had “done a lousy job of promoting ourselves.”

Jack Revens had risen to the top spot in the Senate after his old-school predecessor, Rocco Quattrocchi, botched the redrawing of Senate districts in 1982. Taxpayers were stuck with the costs of protracted litigation. Judges blocked the election of senators in 1982 and forced the drawing of new Senate districts. As a result, Rhode Island state senators met as lame ducks throughout the spring of 1983 and had to compete that June in a costly special election. Voters expressed their disgust by electing fourteen Republican senators, a record number since Democrats grabbed power in the Bloodless Revolution of 1935. Senate Democrats dumped Quattrocchi and elected Jack Revens majority leader.

At 36, Revens had already spent half his life in politics and had learned painful lessons. A tragic accident had seared his character. While a student at Providence College, he struck and killed a pedestrian one night on Boston Neck Road. Although no charges were filed, Revens never forgot. “You know,” he told a reporter, “you wish you could find some way to change it. You rethink it and rethink it and rethink it. Was there anything you could have done differently?”

Over several years I had come to respect Revens for his intelligence. Now he testified before the Blue Ribbon Commission with cool detachment. “It’s difficult for the legislature ever to look good,” he said. Thin, tall, and balding, he spoke with wry self-confidence, as if he had no need to persuade. “I have legislation pending to reduce the size of the Senate by half. You can imagine how popular that makes me with my colleagues, but it’s necessary and the right thing. We have far more senators than we need, and with so many, it makes questions of a pay raise all the more complicated.”

Revens scanned the dais. “If we were asking in the abstract what size the General Assembly should be, no rational person would say a hundred reps and fifty senators.” He said the legislature’s size distracted from the central issue: legislative pay. “Pay should reflect fairly what work the public expects the legislature to do. A real problem in Rhode Island is that all state officials are significantly underpaid. The attorney general makes only half the salary of the U.S. attorney or a lawyer who’s made partner in a downtown firm. I know it’s not easy to get the public to pay, but our pay should be in the ten-to-fifteen-thousand-dollar range. To quote an old cliche, ‘You get what you pay for.’ ”

He urged us to preserve what he called “a citizen legislature.” With his characteristic detachment, Revens saw no reason for a full-time professional legislature. “You don’t need full-time legislators if you improve the quality of staff to analyze complex issues.” He spoke laconically, moving through the matrix of legislative functions, schedules, and structures like a plumber tracing pipes through the basement of an old house, explaining what each did and how they connected.

 

Beyond taking public testimony, the Blue Ribbon Commission also surveyed current and former legislators, and 175 returned questionnaires. Nearly all said they felt overworked, undervalued, and underpaid. Their feedback showed a surprising amount of agreement, particularly the need for reliable legislative information. They wanted computer access for everyone, including the public, to bills and legislative data, and asked for more staff to help sort through torrents of data. “It’s like trying to drink from a fire hose,” one wrote. Many requested fiscal impact statements and professional analysis of major bills before their transfer from committees to the floor.

Among former lawmakers who took time to respond, nearly four out of five agreed that the General Assembly should continue as a “part-time citizens’ legislature” rather than become a full-time professional body. Almost all of them favored a dramatic increase in pay, and 59 percent wanted to keep legislative pensions based on years of service. Nearly 84 percent thought it would be wise to downsize the House by 25 percent and to cut the Senate by half. Most also favored four-year terms for senators; 89 percent called for shared office space, phones, voice mail, and secretarial support.

By contrast, there was no agreement on term limits for legislators, which had become popular in other parts of the country. In 1990 and 1992, voters in a dozen states had established term limits, typically six or eight years for senators and representatives. Most former Rhode Island lawmakers did not like that idea.

With mounds of testimony, completed surveys, and research data from other states, the Blue Ribbon Commission spent four months drafting a preliminary report. The work reminded me of boiling down maple syrup in the Catskill mountain valley where I grew up: lugging buckets of clear sap to an oblong tub over a stone fire pit, pouring into the steam, stoking the fire, then climbing through snowy woods for more sap. Gradually, the clear liquid turned amber. Our panel’s final product might not be sweet, but it would be genuine.

We would propose current compensation of $10,000 per year with full family health insurance — costs that roughly equaled the pensions that would be eliminated. The official position of the Common Cause state governing board was for a salary equivalent to 125 percent of Rhode Island’s average wage, approximately $8,352, with no health insurance. I urged the board to accept the commission’s slightly higher amounts, and they agreed. And to avoid future battles over raises, we would put a cost-of-living escalator in the proposed constitutional amendment.

Along with a grand bargain over pensions and pay, most of us were ready to recommend downsizing the General Assembly by one third, from 150 to 100 members. All but one member of the panel affirmed Sen. Jack Revens’s legislation to cut the House from 100 to 75 representatives, the Senate from 50 to 25 senators.

“I like Jack Revens, but downsizing makes no sense.” The AFL-CIO’s Patricia Houlihan was adamant. “There would be a terrible blood-letting to see which twenty-five senators survive. It’s wrong to chop away at the General Assembly, especially if we’re not proposing four-year legislative terms.”

I reminded her that Revens had proposed four-year terms in exchange for a smaller state senate.

Houlihan glared. “Labor’s position last year was to create four-year terms both for general officers and the General Assembly, but your reform groups never took it seriously.”

Sasse tried to mollify her. “Downsizing wouldn’t take place until after the next census, and that would be eight years after passage of the amendment. If past experience is any guide, many current members of the General Assembly may move on in that time.”

“That’s fantasy,” she shot back. “Window-dressing. Rhode Island voters have a closer connection to their senators and reps than you see in other states. In all the research we’ve done, in all the conversations we’ve had, I have yet to see a shred of evidence that closeness is bad for democracy.”

I reminded her of the RISDIC scandal and pointed out that Rhode Island legislators would still represent fewer constituents than their colleagues in forty other states.

“You’ve said all that before,” Houlihan said, “and I’m sure you’ll say it all again. But you haven’t convinced me, and I don’t think you’ll convince many in the Senate. It’s obvious that if you double the number of people in their districts from twenty to forty thousand, they won’t have anything like the intimate relationship that people enjoy now. It simply won’t be the same, and it doesn’t matter whether you downsize next year or in 2002.”

She would not budge. “I want AFL-CIO’s opposition to downsizing noted in our final report.”

“You got it,” Sasse agreed.

Item by item, most members of the commission supported a preliminary report we would release for discussion. At its core were two compromises: first, an end to legislative pensions for all lawmakers elected after passage of a constitutional amendment that would raise compensation to $10,000 per year, adjusted to follow the federal Consumer Price Index; second, downsizing the House from 100 to 75 representatives and the Senate from 50 to 25 senators. Senators would get four-year terms, while representatives would continue with two. The downsizing would occur in eight years, when data collected in the 2000 federal census would guide the drawing of larger districts.

These historic changes could occur only if the General Assembly placed a constitutional amendment on the statewide ballot and voters approved. A less controversial constitutional amendment would end the roles of the lieutenant governor and secretary of state as presiding officer and secretary of the Senate. In their place, senators would elect their own officers.

We would also propose improvements that the General Assembly could provide for its rank-and-file members: staff to help with research and constituent services, office space in or near the State House, voice mail, laptop computers, and a computer database of legislative information. We would urge that the legislative database be accessible to the public from computer terminals at the State House and in public libraries. “Above all,” we wrote, “the General Assembly should conduct itself in accord with the highest ethical standards.” No one was certain how to make that happen, but we urged ethics training to ensure that lawmakers would never be ignorant of the law.

Meanwhile the legislature had gone through a sea change since Joe DeAngelis and John Bevilacqua appointed the commission in July of 1992. DeAngelis had stepped down voluntarily, and the November elections had swept Bevilacqua from power. Now new leaders — House Speaker John B. Harwood and Senate Majority Leader Paul S. Kelly — controlled the General Assembly. Neither had been involved in designing our commission or appointing its members, although Gary Sasse had kept them informed and provided advance copies of our draft report. Two years and two days after the RIght Now! roll-out with pealing bells, we released the final seventy-page report at a press conference in December.

Paul Kelly attended. Cheery and positive, he accepted his copy and said he favored the idea of keeping the General Assembly as “a citizen legislature.” Afterward, he told reporter Russell Garland that he liked the idea of four-year terms for senators, but preferred to decrease the size of the Senate and House by equal percentages. John Harwood ignored the event. He later told reporter Russ Garland that while he could affirm four-year terms, additional staff, and office space — the question of downsizing “must be looked at carefully.”

Kelly and Harwood were consolidating their power. Would our recommendations gather dust on a shelf, as commission reports traditionally did? Were we fools to think we could move these proposals through the General Assembly and onto the 1994 ballot? Even if we did, would voters approve?

H. Philip West Jr. served from 1988 to 2006 as executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island. SECRETS & SCANDALS: Reforming Rhode Island, 1986-2006, chronicles major government reforms during those years.

He helped organize coalitions that led in passage of dozens of ethics and open government laws and five major amendments to the Rhode Island Constitution, including the 2004 Separation of Powers Amendment.

West hosted many delegations from the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program that came to learn about ethics and separation of powers. In 2000, he addressed a conference on government ethics laws in Tver, Russia. After retiring from Common Cause, he taught Ethics in Public Administration to graduate students at the University of Rhode Island.

Previously, West served as pastor of United Methodist churches and ran a settlement house on the Bowery in New York City. He helped with the delivery of medicines to victims of the South African-sponsored civil war in Mozambique and later assisted people displaced by Liberia’s civil war. He has been involved in developing affordable housing, day care centers, and other community services in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

West graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, from Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., received his masters degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and published biblical research he completed at Cambridge University in England. In 2007, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Rhode Island College.

Since 1965 he has been married to Anne Grant, an Emmy Award-winning writer, a nonprofit executive, and retired United Methodist pastor. They live in Providence and have two grown sons, including cover illustrator Lars Grant-West. 

This electronic version of SECRETS & SCANDALS: Reforming Rhode Island, 1986-2006 omits notes, which fill 92 pages in the printed text.

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Related Slideshow: Rhode Island’s History of Political Corruption

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• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter One
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Two
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Three
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Four
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Five
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Six
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Seven
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Eight
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Nine
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Ten
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Eleven
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Twelve
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Thirteen
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Fourteen
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 15
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 16
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 17
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 18

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