Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 37

Monday, November 16, 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.

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

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 4

37 Downsizing Revisited (1999–2000)

Five years had passed since voters amended Rhode Island’s Constitution to create a new General Assembly for the twenty-first century. Nirvana had not yet arrived at the State House, but the bitter impasse over legislative pay and pensions was fading from memory. Special pension bills no longer clogged the consent calendars and lawmakers were pleased with their new laptop computers, email, and voicemail.

Under the 1994 constitutional amendment, the legislature would lose one-quarter of its members in redistricting after the 2000 U.S. Census. Mapmakers would use new population data to eliminate twenty-five House districts out of a hundred and twelve Senate districts out of fifty. Incumbents began worrying about having to campaign against friendly colleagues. Tales of downsizing in neighboring states —Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts — began to circulate. As if a hurricane were barreling into Narragansett Bay, anxiety spread.

A warning flag went up in January 1999. Lincoln Rep. John D. Barr II, a deputy majority leader, proposed a ballot question that would ask voters to retain the current number of representatives and senators. Yet Barr’s text did not touch those parts of the 1994 constitutional amendment that raised legislative pay and ended the old legislative pensions. Uncertain whether Barr’s bill was a joke, a trial balloon, or a shot across the bow, I asked him.

“Of course it’s serious, Phil,” Barr exclaimed in a high-pitched laugh. “Would I jerk you around?”

I smiled but did not answer. “Even if you put that on the ballot,” I said, “the voters will never agree.”

“I think they’ll go along,” Barr grinned. “Downsizing would make a terrible mess.”

“What about the pay raise and health insurance you’ve been taking for four years?”

“What about them?”

“The pay raise and downsizing were a package deal. Everybody knew that.”

"Did they?” Barr laughed.

I sounded the alarm with emails to the reform community.

Barr’s bill was never posted for a hearing and died with the 1999 session, but it was revived in September with new frills.

During deliberations in 1993 of the Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of the General Assembly, a teachers’ union leader had vehemently opposed legislative downsizing. The reasons seemed obvious. For decades, public employee unions had dominated the reliably Democratic General Assembly. Legislative stability and continuity were in labor’s interest; the chaos and conflict of downsizing were not.

It became clear in September 1999 that organized labor and many legislators would try to rescind the downsizing. Robert A. Walsh Jr., a leader in one of two powerful state teachers’ unions, told the Providence Journal that voters had not had “a fair opportunity to speak solely and exclusively about what they felt the size of the legislature should be.” Tall and balding, Walsh conveyed labor’s resistance to downsizing in a gentle voice. Leaders of Ocean State Action, a labor-funded coalition, surrounded him in a Providence Journal photo. The new anti-downsizing coalition called itself “Democracy Counts,” and their handout claimed that larger legislative bodies “tend to be better organized so that they are able to get their work done efficiently.”

“Now that we have found the door of the State House,” said Victor Capellán, the executive director of CHisPA, the Center for Hispanic Policy and Action, “they are shutting the doors in our face.”

A week later, I sat with Capellán in his headquarters on Elmwood Avenue, only a few blocks from our home. With Capellán was Tomás A. Ávila, the agency’s director of policy. Both had arrived in Rhode Island since the 1992 round of redistricting. This elegant mansion that embodied Elmwood’s past now belonged to CHisPA; Capellán and Avila represented the neighborhood’s future.

“The issue isn’t the number of House and Senate seats,” I told them. “It’s who draws the district lines and how they draw them.”

“So who does draw the lines?” Avila asked.

I explained that legislative leaders would appoint a redistricting commission to analyze demographic shifts and take testimony. Unrolling maps from the previous redistricting process, I showed them how legislative leaders created safe districts for their political allies. First drafts of 1992 Senate maps had protected white incumbents in our neighborhood by reaching south across the Providence city line and pulling in largely white blocks in Cranston. After Common Cause and the Urban League testified at public hearings against those racial gerrymanders, the incumbent senator, a Bevilacqua ally, had seemed embarrassed and quietly told Senate leaders to bring the district border back to the city line.

“That was Bob Kells,” Capellán recalled. “Juan Pichardo never got a fair shot against him.”

“Senate leaders were trying to protect Kells,” I said. “They used redistricting to split the heaviest concentration of Latinos in half.”

I showed them a district Sen. Charles Walton and I had drawn in 1992, when the number of Latinos barely warranted a single seat in the House. Our creation looked like a loose bow tie, but Anastasia Williams, a young Latina, had won that seat and had served there ever since. “I hope,” I said, “that we can work together this time around for districts that serve communities rather than incumbents.”

“I like that,” Avila said. “Can you leave these maps with us?” “Absolutely,” I agreed.

In February, Rep. Marsha E. Carpenter — an African-American whose district included our home on the South Side — sponsored a House leadership bill to rescind the downsizing. Hers began with John Barr’s proposed constitutional amendment and piled a series of dubious “whereas” clauses on top. One of Carpenter’s “whereas” clauses declared, as if it were a proven fact: “Any reduction in the size of the membership of the house of representatives and senate will inevitably render it more difficult for minority and/or women candidates to successfully run for and gain election to the general assembly.”

Nothing I knew supported such a sweeping claim. In fact, our research suggested the opposite, at least for women.

In 1978, Massachusetts had cut the size of its House from 240 to 160, and four years later, Illinois reduced its lower chamber from 177 seats to 118. Newspaper stories from both states were rife with fears that women and minorities would lose out. Neither Massachusetts nor Illinois kept statistics on race or ethnicity, but we counted the names of women before and after downsizing. In 1975, only 5.0 and 5.1 percent of representatives in the two states were female, while women comprised 8.1 percent of state legislators across the United States. Both began behind the curve, but after downsizing the numbers of women lawmakers in the two states soared. Illinois surpassed the 1985 national average of 14.8 percent first and reached 16.5 percent. Massachusetts caught up and went ahead to 16.9 percent.

The House Judiciary Committee scheduled testimony on Carpenter’s bill before television cameras in Room 313, a handsome setting with banked seats for lawmakers amid dark mahogany panels.

Carpenter made her way down from her place in the committee to the witness chair. Less than four years earlier her son had been gunned down on a street in our neighborhood, but she turned tragedy into anti-gang legislation. As brave as Carpenter was, she faced formidable odds in the September Democratic primary because preliminary census figures showed that the Hispanic population in the district had surged since the last round of redistricting.

Now she began softly. “My bill would put the question of downsizing the General Assembly back on the ballot in November. My reason for wanting this back on the ballot is that the question, as it appeared on the ballot in 1994, was very misleading. There were three questions within one question. Each of those questions should have stood alone on the ballot, but they did not.” She said that the chief problem was that voters had to approve or reject three questions as a total package.

“I believe the voters in my district wanted to increase legislative salaries. I believe they wanted to abolish legislative pensions, but I do not believe they wanted to reduce the size of the General Assembly. Since the question was so misleading and confusing, I think it’s only fair that it go back on the ballot and give the voters another chance to vote on it.”

Carpenter testified that only eight out of seventeen state representatives from Providence were people of color. “Minorities stand to lose two to three. It took so long to get here, and now to get rid of two or three? If the downsizing goes through, we’ll all be taking two steps back when we should be going forward.”

Rep. Scott Rabideau, a Republican from the rural northwest corner of the state, asked if she would prefer to have downsizing, the legislative pay raise, and pension reform back on the ballot as separate questions. “If it’s so confusing, shouldn’t we put all three?”

“If that’s a fair way,” Carpenter replied, “then we should do that. I don’t believe it was fair the first time.”

Rep. Joe Almeida represented the South Providence neighborhood adjacent to Carpenter’s. Retired from the Providence police, he ran a nightclub and headed the Black Caucus of State Legislators. “With this downsizing,” he said, “I feel as though our community will not be represented, and we will be set back again. The black, Hispanic, and Southeast Asian communities will no longer be represented in the General Assembly, and our voice will die.” Almeida normally spoke at length and with fierce intensity, but this testimony against downsizing felt devoid of passion.

Rep. Paul Moura, a senior deputy majority leader, settled at the microphone. “I’m a proud co-sponsor of this bill,” he began. “Most of the proponents of downsizing never served a day in public office in their lives.” Movie star handsome with abundant black hair, supple eyebrows, and expressive eyes, Moura was one of three full-time union employees — along with Sens. Dominick Ruggiero and John Tassoni — serving in the General Assembly.

He praised the small-town familiarity of the current districts, where his constituents “like the fact that they can pull into a gas station and say, ‘Oh, Representative, have you got a minute? Can I talk with you?’”

Behind him in the audience, Larry Purtill, president of NEARI, the largest block of teachers’ unions, nodded. In the bluest of blue states, organized labor rarely lost a vote.

Moura looked up at the Judiciary Committee. “I strongly support putting this question before the people. Let them answer the question clear cut and all alone: ‘Do you feel that the legislature should be downsized, or should we overturn the downsizing?’”

George Nee, tall and bulky in a gray suit, came to the microphone. Although only in his forties, his hair was white. “On behalf of the AFL-CIO,” Nee said, “I wholeheartedly support this bill. In a smaller General Assembly, there would be a danger of moneyed interests influencing legislation.”

I stifled a laugh. In the wake of RISDIC’s collapse, we had tried to persuade the AFL-CIO Executive Council to support campaign finance reform legislation that ultimately outlawed direct contributions from the treasuries of corporations and unions. Nee and the cadre of labor lobbyists had never supported campaign finance reform, nor had they spoken out against districts gerrymandered in 1992 to protect white incumbents against black and Latino challengers.

“We deserve to have this issue get a clean vote,” Nee continued. “The issue was cloudy in 1994. Our organization thought downsizing the General Assembly was a bad idea then, and we think it is today.”

Marty Rosenberg followed Nee, her short hair swept back. She ran Ocean State Action, a nonprofit organization based in a teachers’ union headquarters. “The problems pointed out by the Blue Ribbon Commission were apt,” she began in a resonant voice, “but we think that downsizing is not the answer. Perhaps we should talk about campaign finance, but I’ll leave that for another hearing.”

I had to smile. I liked Rosenberg and had worked with her on a half dozen bills. I had spoken to the Ocean State Action steering committee about campaign finance reforms, but like the larger labor establishment they neither supported campaign finance proposals nor offered alternatives.

“Downsizing passed with 51.8 percent of the vote,” Rosenberg continued, “not an overwhelming majority in any sense. We know people were riled up about the pensions, but since they were upset over the pensions, you’d think the question would have passed with a 75 percent margin.” She paused. “I think people were torn because they couldn’t decide which side to vote for.”

The parade of labor and minority witnesses kept coming. Victor Capellán came to the microphone in a dark, open-necked shirt. “We’re asking you to put this question back on the ballot,” he said passionately. “We have a citizens’ legislature. We’re being included. We believe that the legislature is working, and this is not the time to change it. What downsizing would do is push us out. My agency would not be able to come up here.”

Capellán’s voice rose as he spoke. He said America was about recognizing and fixing mistakes: eradicating slavery, undoing Jim Crow. He insisted it was not wrong to go back and make things right.

Larry Purtill wrapped up the opposition to downsizing. As president of Rhode Island’s National Education Association, he represented more than eleven thousand teachers across the state. “I don’t have to reiterate the concerns others have laid out,” he began. In a double-breasted suit, he communicated power. “We think downsizing of the legislature will do exactly the opposite of what the proponents want it to do. We think it will limit access to legislators and make committees smaller. We think that the grassroots lobbying that makes Rhode Island special will be limited.”

Gary Sasse, executive director of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, a business-backed think tank, and former head of the Blue Ribbon Commission, came forward. He spoke of the disillusionment from the RISDIC scandal that led to the appointment of the commission and described its work: soliciting recommendations from all current and former members of the General Assembly, conducting public meetings and five televised public hearings, releasing a draft report, and seeking public comment. The process stretched over a year and a half.

Then Sasse outlined our recommendations: maintain a part-time citizens’ legislature, but make the General Assembly more effective with modern information technology; enlarge the opportunity and power of individual legislators; persuade voters to provide reasonable legislative pay; increase competition; and modestly enlarge the districts.

“If we had recommended that the size of districts be doubled,” Sasse said, “I would agree with some of the testimony you have heard tonight. What we were trying to achieve was a balance among competing concerns. An increase in population of a House district from ten thousand to thirteen thousand would not have drastic results.” Sasse made the case without sounding argumentative. “While there’s no magic number of state representatives and senators, our House districts would have roughly one third the population of representative districts across the country. Our Senate districts would have roughly a quarter of the national average population.”

He added that the commission did not believe the downsizing would harm minority representation and noted, “This was thoroughly debated before the General Assembly voted to place the question on the ballot.”

Rep. David Cicilline challenged Sasse. “You said this Blue Ribbon Commission made those recommendations. I don’t know who was on it, and surely it didn’t hear from the Center for Hispanic Policy and Progreso Latino and the Urban League and women’s organizations and labor organizations. Don’t you think we have some obligation to hear from them?”

“I’ll give you a list of the commission members,” Sasse replied dispassionately, “and we did hear from different groups. Labor was represented on the commission and had a minority position with regard to downsizing. We had hearings that lasted late into the night. We heard from a broad cross-section of Rhode Islanders.”

As he moved to the question of whether downsizing would hurt minorities, his gestures punctuated each point. “The commission told the legislature in 1994: ‘Don’t put the question before the people if you felt this would hurt minority or gender equity representation.’ That was highlighted in the commission’s report,” he said, “and the General Assembly voted to go forward.”

Sasse concluded softly: “There have been a lot of statements tonight that downsizing passed because voters wanted to get rid of legislative pensions. I think you could argue that the relatively narrow margin was because the people didn’t want to increase legislators’ pay.”

Common Cause president Nancy Rhodes and I moved to the witness table. I handed the clerk documents to distribute. One chart showed how few constituents each Rhode Island legislator represented by contrast with lawmakers in other states. On a fifty-state list of constituents per lawmaker, downsizing would move Rhode Island from sixth fewest to eighth fewest. The packet included newspaper stories that showed how thoroughly the commission’s deliberations were reported and pages from the House Journal that traced the lengthy debate on June 2, 1994.

I reminded the committee that voters were still seething over the roles key lawmakers had played in RISDIC’s collapse. “There was a sense that the legislature uniquely had let down the citizens,” I said. “The question for our commission was: How could we strengthen this legislature to provide effective representation? We quickly saw that legislators were not being adequately paid. State voters — in misplaced cynicism and resentment of the legislature — had refused to raise legislative pay on several occasions.”

I explained how the General Assembly had created its legislative pension system and then doubled it, and why so many opposed raising legislative pay. But we believed it was only fair to provide a $10,000 salary and family health coverage. “We knew that would be a tough sell,” I said, “but we knew it was right.” The voters’ resistance to the pay increase was the main reason for the narrow majority when the amendment passed.

Committee Chairman Bob Flaherty interrupted: “We have other witnesses and other bills to hear tonight.”

In closing, I pointed out that Common Cause believed that the issue was not the size of districts but how the lines were drawn.

Rep. David Cicilline launched an attack on one of the commission’s central premises. “The commission,” he read from the report, “believes that the recommended reduction in size should not cause any reduction in the proportion of minority representation in the General Assembly.”

“That’s nice,” he said, “but there’s no data, no empirical evidence from which the commission can decide that it shouldn’t, in fact, cause a reduction. We know for sure it’s going to cause a reduction.”

I kept silent, and Cicilline kept going. “What particularly concerns me, as I look at the groups that have come forward in opposition to this . . . . ”

Then he switched gears in mid-sentence. “I’m a member of Common Cause. I introduce a lot of legislation for Common Cause. I’m beginning to question whether I should be involved with Common Cause because this is an organization that I’m sensing doesn’t have a great representation in the minority community, and is displaying a real arrogance and insensitivity to the plight of minorities and disenfranchised people in this state. I’m embarrassed right now to say that I’m associated with Common Cause because I’m hearing from a broad cross-section of this community that they will be hurt by their inability to be involved in the political process if we downsize. I think the empirical data shows that this is unequivocally true.”

“What empirical data?” I interrupted.

“That there will be fewer members of the minority community who will be elected. And fewer women. And I’m not hearing from Common Cause or RIPEC that we need to reexamine this issue, because good government isn’t just lean government. It’s inclusive government. It’s representative democracy. I’m hearing: ‘We committed ourselves to this plan. It’s part of a reform package. Therefore we’re going to support it.’ That really disturbs me.”

“May I answer?” I asked.

“Certainly.”

I said there was no way — with or without downsizing — to say that the number of Providence representatives would remain the same. The real issue was how new districts would be drawn to protect minority rights, a concern Common Cause had fought for in the 1992 round of redistricting.

Chairman Robert Flaherty interrupted that he would not allow what he called “private debate about legislation that’s not before this committee.”

Cicilline’s attack felt like grandstanding, and Flaherty would not let me address the question of fair redistricting.

Several other members of the committee asked questions, and I managed to close by warning that voters would react strongly against any effort to put the downsizing question back on the ballot by itself. “There was a deal,” I said, “to end a corrupt legislative pension system and downsize a huge legislature by one quarter. That was the deal. Voters understood.”

The Judiciary Committee adjourned without voting on Carpenter’s bill. The Providence Journal’s State House chief, Kathy Gregg, reported the hearing in a front-page story. Her summary of the debate juxtaposed Carpenter’s assertion that voters in 1994 did not understand the downsizing against my insistence that they knew. Gregg quoted my closing prediction: “Some voters will say General Assembly members were ready to take the pay increase. They were ready to take the health insurance. They don’t seem to be ready to accept the competition. Voters will say that.”

Editorial writers at the Providence Journal pounded the committee, calling its behavior “a pathetic ruse to derail this reform: They are saying the voters did not really mean it.” The editorial accused the committee of “trying to stop reform by whipping up racial animosity and division, charging — without a smidgen of sense — that a smaller legislature is automatically bad for blacks, other minorities, and women. What an insult to the public’s intelligence!”

The editorial also blasted Cicilline for having “the gall to insinuate that Common Cause, which is open to all and champions minority representation, is a racist organization.”

The Judiciary Committee eventually voted, 12–1, to send Carpenter’s bill to the full House.

Dueling opinion columns kept the question boiling until the House finally took up Carpenter’s legislation on May 31. Rep. Mark Heffner argued on the floor, as he had in committee, that it was wrong to ask voters to reconsider the 1994 downsizing question without giving it a chance to be tested.

Rep. Mabel M. Anderson of Pawtucket made a speech so memorable that House leaders took the extraordinary step of publishing its full text in the House Journal. “There is a saying,” the 76-year-old began, “that if you’re going to tell a lie, tell it often, and the bigger the better. I have listened to the proponents of downsizing the legislature, and it appears that they have learned that lesson well.”

Anderson, wearing her trademark baseball cap, recited names of polling places in her Pawtucket district where voters rejected the 1994 ballot question that included downsizing. “Indeed, at every polling place in my district, people voted it down.” Her oratory caught the attention of other representatives around the chamber.

“Now I know,” Anderson continued in high dudgeon, “what the good folks at Common Cause have said about me: ‘The voters of District 77 are not very bright, after all, they keep re-electing Mabel Anderson.’” She named Pawtucket voting places outside her district. “Now I know what my dear friends at Common Cause are now saying: ‘Well, what can you expect from Pawtucket?’ ” On her feet by her desk near the back of the chamber, she had her colleagues’ attention. Many swiveled their chairs to watch.

“So who voted for it?” Anderson mocked. “Rumstick Point in Barrington, Poppasquash Point in Bristol, the Dunes Club in Narragansett, Carriage Heights in Lincoln, the East Side of Providence. Well la-de-da!” She chortled, and other representatives hooted along with her. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, that looks like the membership of Common Cause. And that’s all downsizing is — a power grab by the people behind Common Cause. You know it, and I know it.”

On a roll, she plunged ahead. “Having sat here for almost twenty years, I know exactly what’s going to happen if redistricting and downsizing take place together: the same old communities are going to be protected, and the same old communities are going to be screwed. Is the East Side of Providence going to be downsized? Of course not! They’ll just chop up Pawtucket like they did ten years ago. Downsize Rumstick Point? Never, when they can rip Warren to shreds.”

I watched from the gallery. Who did she believe controlled the mapmaking — Common Cause or the speaker of the House?

The House cheered Anderson and approved Carpenter’s anti-downsizing resolution by a vote of 84–15.

Senate leaders recognized the folly of another ballot question on downsizing. They sent Carpenter’s proposed amendment to the Committee on Special Legislation, where it died without a hearing or vote.

House leaders may have regretted their anti-downsizing campaign, particularly after the Senate buried their amendment. Several Harwood backers claimed that the Senate majority leader had hung them out to dry, but it seemed more likely that the Senate leaders saw the public reactions to the House’s anti-downsizing spectacle and decided not to subject their members to more of the same. The question remained: Would General Assembly leaders protect communities from being chopped up, as Mabel Anderson had warned? Or would they use downsizing and redistricting — as their predecessors had — to purge mavericks from their ranks?

I liked Marsha Carpenter and voted for her in the September primary. But Latinos had flooded into the district where we lived, and Leon F. Tejada defeated her by fewer than one hundred votes in the all-important Democratic contest. Her career in Rhode Island politics was over and within a year, she and her husband moved to Georgia.

Mabel Anderson won re-election that November, but retired in 2002. Only months after she left the General Assembly a man backing up in a parking lot ran over her. She was rushed to Rhode Island Hospital but died. Among the many tributes to the feisty legislator, who wore quirky caps throughout her twenty years in the State House, Rep. Elaine A. Coderre told a reporter that Anderson had talked her into running: “She believed in me before I believed in myself.”

View Larger +

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.

Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 37

Part 4

37

Downsizing Revisited (1999–2000)

Related Slideshow: Rhode Island’s History of Political Corruption

Buddy Cianci

Joseph Bevilacqua

Thomas Fay

Brian J. Sarault

Edward DiPrete

Plunder Dome

N. Providence Councilmen

Charles Moreau

Joe Almeida

Gordon Fox

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

Sign Up for the Daily Eblast

Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 37

Part 4

37

Downsizing Revisited (1999–2000)

Related Slideshow: Rhode Island’s History of Political Corruption

Buddy Cianci

Joseph Bevilacqua

Thomas Fay

Brian J. Sarault

Edward DiPrete

Plunder Dome

N. Providence Councilmen

Charles Moreau

Joe Almeida

Gordon Fox

Related Articles

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

Sign Up for the Daily Eblast