Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 28

Monday, September 14, 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 3
SEPARATION OF POWERS 1

28

Declaration of War (1994–95)

The Rhode Island Lottery Commission spun off scandals like scratch tickets from a spool. A former Senate majority leader, John P. Hawkins, had designed the gambling operation and driven its creation in 1974. He named himself and two other senators to the board; the speaker of the House added three representatives; the governor got three public members. Hawkins ran “The Lot,” as it was called, in various guises — board chair, legal counsel, and executive director — all while brushing aside every suggestion of impropriety. During his tenure as Senate majority leader, he also served as vice chair of the State Properties Committee, an administrative agency awarded him a $21,000 per year lease on a house that he owned.

In the fall of 1993, shortly after Hawkins became executive director of “The Lot,” he converted video poker consoles at Lincoln Greyhound Park and Newport Jai Alai into video slot machines. Anti-gambling groups blasted the video slots as highly addictive, but Hawkins dismissed their complaints as the product of “warped minds.”

Pawtucket Sen. Harold Miller chaired the Lottery Commission when it hired Hawkins as director. Miller and two other commissioners flew to Florida for a conference, where they rented a Lincoln Town Car with state funds. Miller also took his wife with him to Paris, where they stayed at the Hotel Meurice, whose decor copied Versailles. Providence Journal reporter Christopher Rowland tallied the price of Miller’s 1994 junkets: $9,160.31. Miller’s tab had first claim on proceeds from scratch tickets and video slots, since only net profits made their way to state coffers.

Embarrassed by negative publicity, Miller did not run for re-election in 1994. When Pawtucket Sen. John McBurney succeeded him, the gambling board promptly raised Hawkins’s salary by nearly 23 percent. McBurney told reporters that high salaries were needed to get and keep “qualified people.” With this raise the former Senate majority leader would make $11,000 more than the director of the far larger lottery in neighboring Massachusetts.

This news sparked a firestorm. Governor-elect Lincoln Almond blasted the raise and called for legislation to abolish the Lottery Commission, proposing to absorb it into the Department of Administration. Senate Majority Leader Paul Kelly agreed to consider Almond’s idea. Removing McBurney from the lottery, he appointed his Senate Judiciary Committee chair, Domenic DiSandro, to one of the three Senate seats.

While Kelly only replaced one senator with another, I wondered if he would consider separation of powers. The next day I hand-delivered a letter at his third-floor office. In it I thanked him for removing McBurney from the Lottery Commission and reminded him that the Senate under his leadership had played a crucial role in passing the constitutional proposals for judicial merit selection and modernizing the General Assembly. “Your actions,” I wrote, “refute the argument that the legislature is unwilling or unable to pass reforms that limit its reach.”

I urged Kelly to take the lottery crisis as the occasion for resolving a bedrock constitutional question: “Should the General Assembly be exercising the broad appointive powers that are traditional in Rhode Island but are barred in most other states under the separation of powers doctrine and are forbidden to Congress by the U.S. Supreme Court?”

I asked for a meeting to discuss how the Senate could resolve these issues. I left the letter at Kelly’s third floor office and walked down three flights of stairs. What would Kelly do with the letter? Would he discuss it with his Senate leadership team? Or would he crumple and lob it into the trash?

In their 1992 battle against John Bevilacqua’s faction, Kelly’s stalwarts had demanded the most stringent versions of RIght Now! proposals. In 1993, they blocked the Grand Committee from replacing the disgraced chief justice. In our 1994 scorecard, they scored well on reform. I stepped out of the State House into a warm December breeze that felt like spring.

 

The 1995 legislative session began festively with the inauguration of Lincoln Almond as Rhode Island’s first four-year term governor. After the Senate session, I waited to greet Paul Kelly and asked if I could bring Common Cause leaders to meet with him.

“About?” he asked.

“About separation of powers. I sent you a letter before the holidays.”

“Phil,” Kelly said with abundant cheer that masked his message from those around us, “raising that issue this year is like pulling the pin on a hand grenade and rolling it into a tent.”

I pushed back. “Would next year be any better?”

Kelly fidgeted with his tie, and Peanuts characters writhed beneath his fingers. “Truthfully, probably not.”

“May we sit down with you and your leadership team?” I asked. Half a dozen other lobbyists stood at a respectful distance, waiting their turn.

Kelly shook my hand, signaling an end. “Honestly, Phil, I don’t think it would make any difference.”

 

East Providence Sen. James P. McStay, a funeral director, had a self-effacing and modest manner that demonstrated why his profession enjoys more respect than many politicians. He had scored 97.5 per cent on our 1994 Senate report card. I felt certain he would always do what he believed was right. We leaned against a broad marble railing on the third floor. Far above us stretched the dome, with its fresco of Roger Williams greeting the Narragansett chief Canonicus. I showed McStay the list of seven boards we hoped to challenge in 1995.

“I’ve thought about this mess,” he said. “Often. But there are so many of these boards and so many legislative appointments. I never know where to start.” Looking up from my list of boards, he continued, “All of these are good. You know, of course, that none will pass?”

“We’ve assumed this will take several years,” I said. “We need to educate the public and soften things up.”

He laughed. “‘Soften up’ may be the wrong expression. I guarantee you that these bills will only harden Harwood and Caruolo.” He nodded toward the speaker’s office at the far end of a hallway where afternoon sunshine gleamed on a polished stone floor. “Those guys don’t care about policy or principle. All that matters to them is power.”

“Are we making a mistake to try this?”

McStay shrugged. “We may all be dead before it’s done, but heaven knows it’s overdue.”

“So will you sponsor one or two of these bills?”

He scanned the list again. “The Lottery Commission and the Unclassified Pay Plan Board are the two worst. Shall I take those?”

“They’re yours,” I said. “If you can get some Republican co-sponsors, that would be great.”

Just above us, four Roman arches bore the weight of the majestic dome. Gold letters in a dark band circled its base: RARA TEMPORUM FELICITAS UBI SENTIRE QUAE VELIS ET QUAE SENTIAS DICERE LICET. The Latin I had learned decades earlier deserted me, but I scribbled the words and later found the epigram from Tacitus: “It is the rare fortune of these days to think what one likes and speak what one thinks.”

A few days later, snow fell steadily and covered a marble balcony outside the House lounge. I sat at a round oak table near lofty windows with Rep. Charlene Lima, a math teacher who made eye contact and held it. My folder full of lists and bills lay open before us. I showed her the list. “We’d like to start with these seven. We’re not under any illusions that they’ll pass this year.”

“Good thing,” she said mischievously. “You’re really going after the family jewels.”

I waited while she skimmed several drafts. I told her we would welcome her suggestions.

“Won’t this take a constitutional amendment?” she asked. “You’re making an assault on three centuries of tradition.”

“We’ll need an amendment,” I agreed. “But at the start, we want to call attention to specific abuses of these seven boards. I assume they’ll go to different committees. That’ll give us plenty to talk about.”

Lima drew a deep breath. “I would do the Coastal Resources Management Council. And the Narragansett Bay Commission.”

“You’re not afraid of Mesolella?”

“No!” She scowled. “Vinny doesn’t like me, and I don’t particularly like him.”

 

At the end of February we unveiled our separation of powers bills to at a press conference in the Senate Lounge, a magnificent space with green walls and plush velvet curtains. A massive mirror above the fireplace framed the podium. Despite his reservations about the topic, Paul Kelly had granted permission for us to use the space.

I welcomed reporters, sponsors, and leaders of groups that backed the campaign: Save the Bay, Operation Clean Government, and the League of Women Voters. “We’re here today,” I said, “to talk about the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers.”

I explained that two centuries had passed since Rhode Island ratified the U.S. Constitution. While all the other states had established separation of powers as the bedrock of sound governance, Rhode Island had veered off in the opposite direction. We would try to rebuild seven boards, all created in the last fifty years, where legislators actually executed state laws: the Lottery Commission, the Coastal Resources Management Council, the Commission on Judicial Tenure and Discipline, the Narragansett Bay Commission, the Port Authority, the Solid Waste Management Corporation, and the Unclassified Pay Plan Board. Then I introduced the senators and representatives who sponsored these bills.

Sen. Jim McStay described the Lottery Commission’s headlong rush into video slot machines. “With virtually no public discussion,” McStay said, “the Lottery board took giant steps toward full-fledged casinos in Lincoln and Newport. I think they conducted one public hearing before making a huge change in state policy that would never have passed the entire General Assembly.”

He looked out over the microphones. “I’m not saying what they did was illegal. That’s just the problem. It was perfectly legal under Rhode Island law where six legislators on a nine-member panel can vote to install video poker terminals, then turn around and convert them into video slot machines. That was perfectly legal and completely wrong.”

“My other bill,” he continued, “would remove legislative members from the Unclassified Pay Plan Board.” He said decisions about how much to pay department directors and utility regulators had long been made entirely within the Department of Administration. But in the 1970s, the General Assembly changed the law to add the heads of the House and Senate Finance committees, then two more legislators. “Before you could say ‘Whoopee,’ the General Assembly had four members on a seven-person board. The legislature gained control of top salaries in the other two branches of government. Again, all perfectly legal and completely wrong.”

Rep. Charlene Lima outlined her bills to end legislative appointments on the Narragansett Bay Commission and the Coastal Resources Management Council. “The people of my district are fed up with sweet-smelling toxic fumes that mysteriously vent from chemical plants in the dark of the night. The people of my district don’t want to live downwind from a sewage sludge incinerator that spews poisons from its smokestack. Maybe they could be convinced by a good environmental study, but we don’t have one because the House scuttled Myrth York’s legislation last year.”

Lima made eye contact around the room. “I’m not blaming my colleagues who sit on all these boards. I am saying we have a broken system, and it’s up to us to fix it. It’s time we as elected officials put aside our egos.”

Myrth York, the recently defeated Democratic candidate for governor, strode to the podium. Speculation persisted that her call for Vincent Mesolella to step down as head of the Narragansett Bay Commission had cost her the party’s support in her race. Rumors abounded that John Harwood preferred a Republican governor above any Democrat who might push for separation of powers.

“I no longer serve in the Senate,” York declared in a resonant voice, “but I strongly support these bills. More often than we would like to remember, our state has been embarrassed by the blatant conflict of interest that is inevitable when the same individuals write and also execute state laws.” She described her bill that would have required an environmental impact analysis before the Bay Commission could proceed with a sewage sludge incinerator. The Senate had passed her bill, but the House Corporations Committee buried it. “I remain convinced,” York declared, “that Rep. Mesolella — who continues to serve simultaneously as chairperson of the NBC and as deputy majority whip in the House — ordered the hit.

“I called on Rep. Mesolella to step down from his role on the Bay Commission. It was clear that his dual roles created conflicts of interest and prevented the General Assembly from exercising legislative oversight in this crucial area. This must end.”

Each of our sponsors came across as smart, passionate, and on-message.

Afterward M. Charles Bakst, the Providence Journal’s political columnist, retrieved his microcassette recorder from the podium. Over nearly two decades Bakst had produced a wealth of columns that backed strong ethics, campaign reform, open government, and judicial selection. He had not liked four-year terms for general officers or downsizing the General Assembly.

Bakst thrust his tiny recorder toward my face. “So how do you keep people from falling asleep on this?”

I laughed. “By getting you to write about it.”

After our press conference, Bakst prowled the House and Senate chambers with his recorder. In his column, he quoted Paul Kelly as defending the current system for providing checks and balances. He also got John Harwood on the record declaring that the legislators’ service on boards was a way of “overseeing and interacting.” Harwood added that the current system “gives the legislature, which controls the money, a better feel for what’s going on.”

Bakst also tracked down Mesolella, who acknowledged testifying against York’s bill to delay and study the incinerator. “That bill died of its own weight,” Mesolella insisted, dismissing his critics as “hypocrites” or as wielding “special-interest axes.” In his column, Bakst summarized Mesolella’s campaign contributions from Bay Commission employees and from contractors who wanted business. “Mesolella,” Bakst wrote, “waves the question off. Fundraising activities have been part of the political scene for centuries, he says.”

In response to this unveiling of our bills, Vincent Mesolella promptly launched a counterattack. He filed a bill that would require nonprofit organizations “to report any donation in excess of membership fees” as part of their lobbying reports if they sent “any representatives to testify before legislative committees or governmental agencies.” Failure to comply would subject the group to a thousand-dollar fine.

Was his bill a joke or a warning? Would he really try to force nonprofits to name their contributors if they spoke at the State House? Did he believe he could make religious leaders disclose their donor base or else keep silent in our most Catholic state?

Timing mattered. Mesolella filed his bill on the day of our separation of powers press conference. Had word of our legislation reached him? Had he rushed his idea into print? Why was he the bill’s only sponsor? Was the whole thing just a ruse?

 

Our separation of powers bills were scattered widely among House and Senate committees. Covering multiple hearings before the days of affordable cell phones required running from room to room, upstairs and down. Members of the separation of powers task force testified as often as they could, but some afternoons I found myself alone. I signed witness sheets wherever our bills were scheduled. Whenever my name was called, I had to be present and ready to speak. One tradition helped: as a courtesy to sponsors who might be in other hearings when their bills were called, committee chairpersons routinely sent for them. When a sponsor arrived, a Common Cause volunteer or intern came for me, and I raced to that hearing.

Our testimony rose from talking points for each of the seven boards. I carried a dog-eared paperback of the Federalist Papers full of intricate constitutional lessons that I was learning on the fly. I often found myself jousting with lawmakers who had read these broadsides in college but forgotten their message. Some protested that such lessons did not apply because the Rhode Island Constitution was fundamentally different from the United States Constitution.

 

Separation of powers advocates aimed to frame the public debate. Shortly after his appointment as U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island in 1994, Sheldon Whitehouse had begun publishing articles on separation of powers, first in the Providence Journal. With calm and formal language he declared: “Encroachment by the Rhode Island General Assembly outside its legislative sphere, through appointments to positions in state agencies, boards, commissions and corporations, violates the separation of powers doctrine as expounded by the U.S. Supreme Court for more than 100 years.”

For a column in the Rhode Island Bar Journal he drew from Federalist Paper 48 where James Madison warned that the legislative branch “is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.” The General Assembly, Whitehouse argued, routinely demonstrated what Madison feared. He wrote that the Rhode Island Supreme Court — in its first comment on the state’s new Constitution — had declared in 1854: “The union of all the powers of government in the same hands is but the definition of despotism. To guard against such a government was one great object of the Constitution. This was to be done by the distribution of powers. This is the great principle of American liberty.” In one legislative committee after another, I distributed copies of his articles.

Bill Colleran, our NASA engineer, turned his number-crunching skills to laws passed since the 1870s. He produced a chart that showed how the General Assembly added legislators or legislative appointees to existing boards, and to the new boards it established. The pace of such enactments had accelerated in the 1950s and swelled through each succeeding decade into the 1990s. His chart looked like a city where low structures gave way to skyscrapers.

Colleran wrote with droll humor in opinion pieces with titles like “Our Unclassified Pay Plan Follies.” He had discovered that many Rhode Island directors took home higher pay than their counterparts in neighboring Connecticut or Massachusetts. He attributed that anomaly to the Unclassified Pay Plan Board, the powerful seven-member body that set salaries for department directors, regulators, and judges. Until 1973, a director of personnel proposed pay plans for employees in the state’s “classified” or merit system and for “unclassified personnel,” mostly administrators in the three branches of state government. The director of administration, the budget officer, and the general treasurer presented recommendations to the governor.

A 1973 law created the Unclassified Pay Plan Board (UPPB) and added the chairs of the Senate and House Finance committees. Colleran wrote, “The executive branch still had the majority, but the camel’s nose was in the tent.” In 1978, a new law added two more legislators to the board, along with the Superior Court administrator, and it gave them each a vote. As a result, lawmakers gained a majority on the seven-person board that set top salaries across state government. General Assembly leaders claimed this was a model of cooperative consultation, but in practice it became a den of deal-making. In 1988, House Speaker Matthew J. Smith chaired the Unclassified Pay Plan Board while at the same time administering the state court system. Smith’s deals had laid tinder for the fire that burned him and Chief Justice Thomas Fay in 1993.

“It is high time,” Colleran wrote, “for the Assembly to be extricated from their executive role. Perhaps then, they might devote their attention to the task of making laws.”

 

James Madison’s warning about the legislature drawing “all government powers into its impetuous vortex” proved prescient when House leaders tried to hijack the Department of State Library Services (DSLS), an executive agency with a staff of two dozen and a budget of $5.5 million.

The new governor, Lincoln Almond, had unwittingly created a take-over target when he presented his first budget. He sought to save money by cutting library services by $162,000 and downgrading State Library Services from a cabinet department to an office within the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Librarians were stunned, and the Library Board of Rhode Island began searching for a rescuer.

Like scores of other administrative bodies, the library board included members of the House and Senate Finance committees — Rep. David Panciera, a librarian himself, occupied the House seat. Besides his job as the director of the Ashaway Free Library, he sat on the House Finance Committee, which spent its spring in endless televised budget hearings. Most committee members walked onto its blue-draped set in dark suits and conservative ties, but Panciera typically wore a pullover sweater and open-necked shirt. He listened attentively and often brought a voice of reason to the discussions.

In April, Rep. Frank Montanaro introduced a bill with Panciera and two other members of House Finance as co-sponsors. Though apparently innocuous, it would sweep the entire Department of State Library Services into the legislature’s embrace. Common Cause board member Mike Cerullo learned of it and warned me that this was “the greatest piece of empire building that most of us will ever see.”

Soon afterward, I bumped into the department’s deputy director, Beth Perry, at a reception. She whispered that the library board had approved criteria for moving their department “under the legislature’s umbrella.” The board wanted assurances that funding, staffing, and independent decision-making would continue, and it wanted to keep library services free from political pressure.

I stifled a laugh. “Excuse my cynicism.

“There’s more,” said Perry. “On April 3, the board reviewed this legislation and agreed to go along with it.” Clearly, Panciera had taken copies to the library board’s meeting and made the legislation sound harmless.

I approached Montanaro, the lead sponsor, before a House session with his bill in hand and asked why he had done this.

“Why not? It would be like the Library of Congress.”

I argued that it would not. The Department of State Library Services did not own any books, but managed inter-library loans and services for the blind. I reminded him these were executive functions. “Your bill creates one more situation where legislators would be executing state law.”

In his mid-thirties and brawny, Montanaro shrugged. “How many boards are there now where that happens?”

“We’re counting,” I answered. “A lot.”

“So?”

“So it’s time to stop and not make more.”

Montanaro shook my hand with a muscular grip. “Phil, I like you. We’ve always gotten along. But take it from me, you will never get separation of powers — not in your lifetime or in mine.”

Then a secret document leaked. Richard Kearns, a former representative who worked as a top House lawyer, had written a confidential memo to the speaker. Its text was rife with jargon but revealing. “Legislative control of this apparatus,” Kearns wrote of the department takeover, “could prove seminal in its impact, and would undoubtedly provide an increasing largess of both political and operational opportunities, some of which are obvious now, others becoming apparent in the future.”

But even Kearns’s embarrassing memo did not slow the rush toward passage. Members of the House Finance Committee settled themselves under television lights to hear Montanaro argue that it was appropriate to move library services “under the legislative umbrella.” Again, he made the comparison to the Library of Congress.

Joan Ress Reeves, who chaired the Library Board, testified that her organization supported Montanaro’s bill. She said the library community did not believe that moving the Department of State Library Services into the General Assembly would make it more vulnerable to politics. In answer to a question, Reeves said she was not put off by Richard Kearns’s leaked memo.

I made my way to the witness table. “We are here,” I began, “because the Department of State Library Services faces a crisis. Like most crises, this one occurred when a number of competent, well-meaning people did what they thought were their jobs without seeing the whole picture. We also face this crisis because Rhode Island government has traditionally ignored our nation’s revered doctrine of separated powers.”

I outlined misunderstandings that left library services at risk. “Part of the problem,” I said with a glance at Panciera, “may be that Westerly has a good librarian, who is also a member of the General Assembly, who is also a member of the Library Board, who is also a member of this committee, and who is also a co-sponsor of this bill. Last Monday morning he explained to his fellow members of the Library Board why this legislation is appropriate. And then, out of an abundance of caution, he recused himself from the actual vote.”

At this Panciera smiled. Was he a good soldier following orders? Had he conceived and drafted this legislation? By criticizing his role I forfeited any chance of ever hearing his side of the story. In any case, despite the Kearns memo and our public warning that the legislature’s takeover would further weaken separation of powers in our state, the Montanaro-Panciera bill flew through the House. In the Senate, it was referred to Senate Finance whose chairperson was Sen. J. Michael Lenihan.

A sturdy former Brown University football player, Lenihan earned his living as a high school history teacher. He taught students about separation of powers, and he displayed a motto from Thomas Jefferson on his desk at the State House: “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

Lenihan did not have the leverage to impose separation of powers on countless other Rhode Island boards where lawmakers already executed state law, but within his committee he could block this hijacking of the Department of State Library Services.

I asked what he planned to do.

He shrugged. “I hadn’t decided before, but they’ve got my Irish up. So what am I going to do with this bill? Nothing. Precisely nothing.”

The Montanaro-Panciera bill died in his committee. Lenihan protected Rhode Island from the creation of yet another patronage mill. But how would House leaders retaliate against him?

When it became obvious that House leaders would bury all seven separation of powers bills in various committees, Common Cause decided to test the bulwark at other points. The Rhode Island Constitution required the Supreme Court to issue an advisory opinion “upon any question of law whenever requested by the governor or by either house of the general assembly.” We asked Gov. Almond and legislative leaders to seek a separation of powers advisory from the high court.

Our draft resolution summed up the duty of legislative leaders under many sections of Rhode Island law to appoint senators or representatives as members of quasi-public boards and commissions. We noted that the Supreme Court had never ruled whether these legislative appointments were constitutional. I delivered our requests to Gov. Lincoln Almond, Speaker John Harwood, and Senate Majority Leader Paul Kelly.

Joseph Larisa, Almond’s executive counsel, phoned to endorse our position. “We think you’re spot on,” Larisa told me. “The current situation is absurd, and we want to work with Common Cause on this. But we can’t just pop the question.”

“Why not?”

“Because everything else would go down the tubes,” he said. “We’re confident that we’ll get a contested case before long. This situation can’t endure.”

“It’s endured for three centuries, hasn’t it?” I asked.

“But it won’t continue,” Larisa insisted. “This governor is absolutely committed on this issue. With us pushing from inside and you working from outside, we’ll force some movement. I guarantee you.”

Winter’s frozen ground thawed, but our bills to end legislative appointments on the seven troublesome boards were entombed in ice. House and Senate leaders hardened in their shared determination not to seek an advisory opinion.

We decided to try the last resort for stranded bills, a study commission. In an April memo, we proposed a new panel like the Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of the General Assembly. As that previous panel had broken Rhode Island’s log jam over legislative size, pay, and pensions, a successor could ask whether legislative participation on quasi-public boards was “consistent with the separation of powers doctrine” and what it might cost to create “a more professional legislative oversight process for the Rhode Island General Assembly.” I hand-delivered our proposal to the House and Senate leaders. Kelly promised to look at it.

Only days later, Sen. Jim McStay told me on the Senate floor that the issue had come up in a meeting with the governor. “A few of us think a study could be the way to go,” McStay said.

“A few, but not a majority?”

“Probably not a majority,” he agreed. “The real resistance is in the House.” I began staking out the speaker’s office before each day’s legislative session.

Without a private stairwell or elevator, Harwood and his entourage took public stairs from the majority offices on the third floor to the House chamber on the second. Typically, the speaker burst into the hallway amid a coterie of top staff and deputies; they moved in a pack down the switchback stairs while I trailed behind like a palace courtier.

One rainy spring day, Harwood started down with House Majority Leader George Caruolo and Deputy Majority Whip Vinny Mesolella in tow.

“Mr. Speaker,” I asked, “if I could have just a word with you?”

Harwood hesitated. Caruolo and Mesolella continued down the stairs. We paused on a landing beside tall windows.

“I left our proposal at your office for a new blue ribbon commission,” I said, “to address some basic questions about separation of powers.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen it,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve always had a sense that legislative appointees bring back good information. Besides, I thought you were trying to get your answer from the Supreme Court.”

“We are,” I said, “but that could take years. It might be better to address these questions in a non-adversarial way.”

“You haven’t exactly started with that approach,” he said and continued down without shaking hands.

Caruolo was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. “You’ve been way out of line,” he grumbled. “We’ve given you a lot in the last couple of years. Instead of resting on your laurels, you start attacking reps’ roles on boards. Who the fuck do you think you are?” He spun away and strode into the chamber.

The only visible result from months of effort on separation of powers was retaliation against our sponsors. Rep. Charlene Lima had filed legislation to require labels on milk if the cows received bovine somatotropin (BST), a hormone believed to increase milk production from cows and the risk of breast cancer in humans. The House Health, Education and Welfare Committee deleted the mandatory labeling provision, allowing the dairy industry to use labels voluntarily, precisely as its lobbyists asked. Mesolella, a member of the committee, had not attended all year, but arrived to join in a 15–0 vote to gut Lima’s bill.

Lima told me that Mesolella had literally bumped into her — not once, but twice — she thought to intimidate her. She laughed it off. “He doesn’t scare me,” she said. “I’ve never liked bullies.”

I nodded. “It’s almost as if he wants to make himself into a poster-child for separation of powers.”

Several times, I noticed Mesolella watching me from a distance. Our eyes locked briefly, never close enough to speak. I avoided him in the hallways or on the House floor, but one day we came face to face in a doorway. I backed out of his way but felt his fury. “So you’re making me your ‘poster-child,’ you self-righteous. . . .” He stopped himself.

“You’re making yourself the poster-child,” I said. “All we’ve done is publicize your record.”

“Our record at the Bay Commission is one of the best in the country,” he said. “We’ve stopped the dumping of raw sewage. We’ve won national awards. Why don’t you put that in your press releases?”

“That’s not the issue.”

“So no good deed goes unpunished?” he jeered. Lobbyists and lawmakers were watching.

I forced a smile. “Maybe not, Rep.” I excused myself and stepped by him into the hearing.

Both Rep. Charlene Lima’s bill to end legislative appointments on the Narragansett Bay Commission and Rep. Vincent Mesolella’s legislation to force nonprofits to disclose their donors landed in the House Corporations Committee. Mesolella’s bill had seemed a bluff. After he introduced it in February, it lay dormant until the April deadline for committees to vote the bills in their files up or down. Hundreds appeared on lists outside hearing rooms. House Corporations killed Lima’s NBC bill but — to my astonishment — voted unanimously to send Mesolella’s nonprofit disclosure bill to the full House. It became deadly serious.

I faxed warnings to scores of nonprofit organizations across the state. Several had opposed Mesolella’s plan for a sewage sludge incinerator but were not interested in separation of powers. I hoped they would resist his move to silence them or expose their donors. I also faxed the editors of daily and weekly newspapers, asking for editorials on Mesollela’s abuse of his dual positions as head of the Narragansett Bay Commission and deputy House majority whip. I suggested that he was pushing his nonprofit disclosure bill to rebuke Common Cause and Save the Bay for challenging his conflicts of interest.

Editors and reporters phoned for more information, and the nonprofit community reacted swiftly. From the Council of Churches, Jim Miller notified denominational leaders and hundreds of member congregations. Thirty two nonprofit organizations — from the ACLU and Boy Scouts to the NAACP, Save the Bay, and United Way — fired off letters urging representatives to reject Mesolella’s proposal. Most wrote that it would infringe on the privacy of contributors, multiply their administrative burdens, and stifle their advocacy at the State House.

The House took up Mesolella’s nonprofit disclosure bill on April 27. During a 45-minute floor debate, Mesolella claimed he had introduced his bill only in the interest of good government. In a wild reach, he used the recent Oklahoma City bombing to justify his legislation, claiming the public needed to know about groups that support individuals like Timothy McVeigh.

Charlene Lima called this “ludicrous” and blasted Mesolella’s bill as “bad legislation” that would have a chilling effect on nonprofits. Rep. David Cicilline, a Providence attorney and separation of powers sponsor, cited a 1958 decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Alabama law that required the NAACP to identify its members. “This is a very dangerous bill,” he said. “There’s no need for it, and it would be burdensome.”

Next Mesolella offered an amendment to exempt charitable groups, but to no avail. Rather than lose on the House floor, he moved to recommit his bill to the House Corporations Committee. His colleagues approved almost unanimously.

Lisa Prevost, news editor for the Providence Phoenix, breached Mesolella’s defenses and got him to say things on the record that he kept from other reporters. She profiled him under a bold tabloid headline: “V.I.P. Vin,” asking, “Is Representative Mesolella’s role as Bay Commission chairman in the public interest, or in his?” An illustration by David Opie showed Mesolella with two heads rising from a muscular torso. One face looked toward a door marked “Narragansett Bay Commission,” the other toward a sign that read “QUIET. House in session.”

Prevost wrote about the NBC Christmas parties that Mesolella hosted each year, where funds from his campaign account provided a lavish spread for hundreds of lobbyists, engineers, and public officials. She described the flow of campaign funds from NBC employees and vendors to “the Chairman’s” campaign fund. She reprised the $18 million NETCO deal to build a sewage sludge incinerator at the edge of an impoverished neighborhood; protests by civil rights and environmental groups; the way Mesolella thwarted Myrth York’s call for a moratorium and study; and York’s demand that he resign from the NBC because of the conflict between his legislative and executive roles. Prevost described the ways Mesolella bullied other lawmakers and tried to intimidate nonprofits, citing the Common Cause message on separation of powers: “What contributors are interested in is not his legislative power. It is blended legislative and executive power. And that ought to scare people.”

 

During the spring of 1995, news of rabid animals frightened many. A Hopkinton family needed shots after contact with a raccoon carcass that tested positive for the virus. Tests confirmed that nine cats on a Coventry farm were infected and must be euthanized. In Tiverton, calves had to be destroyed. Even in Providence, a rabid raccoon leaped from a fence and attacked a walker.

I never noticed a little bill that altered the Rabies Control Board, a tiny executive entity previously comprised of farmers, veterinarians, and citizens who opposed cruelty to animals. Senate Majority Whip Bill Enos, who represented a rural district, filed legislation that clarified definitions and procedures for rabies control; it also thrust two legislators — a senator and representative — onto the Rabies Control Board. I noticed Enos’s bill on the last night of the session, too late to sound an alarm. I blamed myself as it slipped through the Senate and House without a protest.

A few days after the session ended, I stopped at the first floor office of Gov. Almond’s executive counsel, Joe Larisa. Hundreds of bills had passed in the final hours and were piled on his credenza; unless the governor vetoed them, all would become law without his signature in ten days.

I mentioned the rabies control bill. “Sorry, Joe,” I said. “I missed it entirely.”

“We didn’t.” Triumphantly, Larisa lifted the original bill from his desk. Its face sheet bore cursory stamp-marks and signatures from its travel through committee hearings and floor votes in both chambers. “Their imagination and arrogance have no limits.”

“So why would they put legislators on the Rabies Control Board?” I asked.

“Beats me,” said Larisa. “It’s utterly worthless in terms of patronage. Maybe they just wanted to see if we would notice.”

“And the governor will veto it?”

“Absolutely!” Larisa exclaimed. “This will be our first veto. They have the votes to override, but our veto will send a message.”

I mentioned my frustration that both chambers had buried Almond’s bill to fold the lottery into the Department of Administration, as well as our bills to remove legislative appointments from seven executive boards.

Larisa smiled. “Relax. This was only the first inning. Separation of powers is a battle worth fighting. People will get this.”

On June 14, Almond vetoed the Rabies Control Board legislation. His veto message lauded separation of powers as the cornerstone of American government everywhere but in Rhode Island. I rushed out a letter to lawmakers affirming the veto and sent copies to reporters and editors, reminding them that the General Assembly rejected a range of opportunities to address “commingled powers in state government.”

A week later the Providence Journal published an editorial entitled “Rabid conflicts of interest.” The editors asked why legislators should be in charge of rabies control, given that it is a function of the executive branch and not the legislature. They went on to lament the fact that every bill backed by Common Cause to remove legislators from powerful boards had died in committee, even a compromise plan to study other ways of achieving proper legislative oversight of executive bodies. The editorial endorsed our call for an advisory opinion from the Supreme Court. In what would clearly be a rancorous campaign for separation of powers, the Providence Journal’s editorial support could prove crucial. Nonetheless, on a searing Friday in August, three-quarters of the General Assembly members trooped back from vacation and voted in overwhelming numbers to override Almond’s vetoes of several bills, including rabies control.

Since the Royal Charter of 1663, the General Assembly had governed Rhode Island. For more than three centuries, those in power had swatted away every move toward constitutional checks and balances. Now it came as no surprise that they took our call for separation of powers as a declaration of war. Could anything persuade them to relinquish control? Could we ever breach their ramparts?

 

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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