Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 45
Monday, January 11, 2016
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 EBLASTH 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
45
Minimalist Principles (2003–04)
“We’ve won a fabulous victory!” Carl Bogus poured champagne into paper cups and lifted a toast. “Now to a landslide from the voters!”
Cheers filled the Common Cause office on a bittersweet July afternoon. Shortly before the General Assembly’s climactic vote to place separation of powers on the ballot, Bogus had announced that he would leave the task force. He needed to refocus on his academic duties, an article about our long struggle, and a book he had postponed.
“Regardless of their unanimous votes ten days ago,” Bogus cautioned, “if they’d had secret ballots in the House and Senate, we’d have lost in both chambers. Deep resistance remains. Legislative supremacists have not disappeared. From here on, they’ll just pursue their agenda in more subtle ways. The challenge will be to defend what we’ve won and make it work.”
Will Barbeau, a leader of Operation Clean Government, wondered when we could start recruiting qualified people to take seats on those boards.
“We should eliminate a lot of boards entirely,” Bogus replied.
“And do what with them?” asked John Holt, who had followed Jim Miller as executive minister of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches.
“Fold them into executive agencies,” Bogus said. “Move Coastal Resources into the Department of Environmental Management. Merge the Lottery Commission into the Department of Administration. They could operate just as well under a director appointed by the governor.”
“Whoa! Whoa!” Holt interrupted. “I have to go back to my board before we morph this into a new issue. We have to agree on an approach.”
“We’ve won a huge battle,” agreed Bob Kilmarx, who had led the task force for its first five years, “but we haven’t won the war. Our top priority has to be keeping our coalition energized through the 2004 election. That means all of us staying on message for the next sixteen months. We can’t open ourselves to the charge of harboring hidden agendas or risk splitting groups off.”
From a corner of the table former board president Nancy Rhodes spoke: “I hear three crucial things. First, we can’t take anything for granted. As Carl says, we need a vigorous campaign to overcome lingering resistance.”
“Nancy,” growled Burt Hoffman, “they held their noses, but they voted for it. How can they campaign against it now?”
“Sensible, Burt, as always,” she affirmed. “They could create a front group to fund negative ads that sow doubt. Second, we need to work on reconstructing all those boards before the mischief starts. And third — with all due respect to you, Carl — we absolutely can’t say a word about folding boards into executive branch agencies. Lots of those boards, like the Rivers Council and the Resource Recovery Corporation, have constituents who will be furious if we propose absorbing them into any bureaucracy. We could be goring people’s oxen left and right, which could turn key constituencies against separation of powers itself.”
“I’m with Nancy,” said Bob Cox. “Right now, our brand is strong, but we can’t squander our advantage.”
Kevin McAllister agreed that the General Assembly would come back full of tricks. “They’ll hire some high-priced consultant to help them take back in new laws for quasi-publics what they gave up in the amendment. They’ll make it technical and confusing to non-lawyers. We can develop principles to make that harder. Peter Hufstader’s research gives us a head start, but we still have to watch them like hawks.”
Common Cause planned a gala for September 2003 to “Celebrate Separation of Powers 160 years after the Dorr Rebellion.” We would create the Thomas Wilson Dorr Fund for research and advocacy, aimed at making separation of powers fully effective in Rhode Island.
Brian Heller, a board member, handed me a wooden box the size of a paperback book with a brass knob and hinges. Inside I found the etched portrait of Thomas Wilson Dorr and a laminated text of our Separation of Powers Amendment as it would appear on the 2004 statewide ballot.
“What do you think?” Heller asked.
“It’s exquisite,” I said. “What will you do with it?”
He shrugged. “I’ll make several hundred as table favors for the celebration. Finishing Dorr’s work is a really big deal.”
Our celebration filled a huge white tent at Newport’s Castle Hill Inn. Below lay rocky shoals and a lighthouse marking the entrance to Narragansett Bay. After dinner, we presented awards. One certificate praised Nick Gorham, saying that “no one had entered a more hostile arena or engaged fiercer foes” than he had in the House of Representatives. The citation for Mike Lenihan read. “He labored over the text and persuaded many reluctant senators that the time had come to repair Rhode Island’s flawed Constitution.” A third framed certificate went to Gov. Don Carcieri “for his effective leadership in the struggle for constitutional Separation of Powers.”
With the sun setting, lights came up inside the tent, and Brian Heller presented the boxes he had made as table favors. He opened a tiny door that revealed the historic etching of Thomas Wilson Dorr and the Separation of Powers Amendment. “These are your awards,” he said, “for helping to open ‘the Dorr to Rhode Island’s Future.’”
Then Heller lifted a framed poster above his head for the crowd to see. Over the image of Dorr he had superimposed my head as I typed, smiling, on my laptop.
The crowd burst into laughter.
Any of us who made the mistake of thinking that quasi-public boards were boring and off the public radar were wrong. People started phoning Common Cause to ask how they could claim seats on these boards that were now held by legislators.
Almas Kalafian, a legally blind woman, wanted to get people with handicapping conditions onto the Rhode Island Public Transportation Authority (RIPTA). She explained that RIPTA had long ignored their concerns.
Members of the Kay Coalition had fought against casinos and demanded counseling for compulsive gamblers. Now they wanted seats on the Lottery Commission. Property owners in the Jewelry District asked about membership on the I-195 Redevelopment Board. Neighbors of the state landfill, sickened by garbage smells long after the Solid Waste Management Corporation was renamed Resource Recovery, demanded representation.
Though mission, structure, and appointment scheme differed widely from one quasi-public to the next, separation of powers would require the restructuring of every board where legislative appointees exercised executive powers. Peter Hufstader had identified seventy-three that had been created and codified over generations. Most carried the imprint of special interests, lobbyists, and lawmakers. No two were identical, and no single design would repair more than a few. Hufstader and I brought these lists to a Common Cause board meeting and began unpacking the data.
“Wait a minute,” Doree Goodman objected. “Wait just a minute! Smart people may get this, but I’m totally lost. You’re giving us way too much detail. What principles are you proposing?”
I knew she was right. We needed ground rules for reconstructing boards that people could understand and lawmakers could apply.
Over several weeks Hufstader led the separation of powers task force in analyzing the data and extracting what we called “minimalist principles” for reconfiguring boards. Laws establishing those boards listed 153 seats reserved for lawmakers and sixty-six for public members appointed by legislative leaders.
We suggested that the General Assembly launch public hearings at the start of the 2004 legislative session — months before voters would approve the amendment. Rather than introduce separate bills for all seventy-three boards, we recommended omnibus legislation to reconfigure groups of related boards. We hoped legislative committees would consider the mission, composition, and operation of each board in public hearings. We suggested reducing the size of boards wherever practical and creating a standard process for appointing all members and chairpersons.
After the confusion of trying to deal with boards we barely knew, our minimalist principles provided a functional way to approach every board, no matter how obscure. Clauses that required legislative leaders to appoint senators or representatives must be repealed, but most boards could shrink and still function well. Where current law empowered legislative leaders to appoint public members, this appointing authority would shift to the governor with a boilerplate clause for Senate confirmation. We recommended that each revised law require the governor to ensure diverse public participation, particularly with respect to gender, race, and areas of social concern or professional expertise, and we suggested that professional licensing boards include public members.
On December 9, we convened an information meeting on separation of powers and the restructuring of boards at the First Unitarian Church. As public officials and coalition leaders arrived, Peter Hufstader and I passed out the latest draft of our principles. Then former Atty. Gen. Sheldon Whitehouse, now in private law practice, outlined the history of our struggle. He reminded public officials and advocates in a large semi-circle how our new amendment would change scores of state laws.
From the back row Mike Lenihan rose to speak. Large but no longer as sturdy as when he played college football, he had a gift for metaphors. “When we passed separation of powers,” he said gently, “we recognized that it would be complicated. I think of this as digging a canal. Last year we did the blasting. Now we have a lot of shoveling to do.”
He described a meeting the previous week when Senate leaders and senior staff discussed our minimalist principles, and confirmed that the leadership found this approach reasonable. “With some boards,” Lenihan added, “I would prefer to do more than just take legislators off. Some boards might be put out of existence. Some might be put under an executive department.”
He invited public testimony before his Committee on Government Oversight as to what other principles should be considered. “Everyone has a right to speak. We’ll create the opportunity for many people to put their oars in the water.” Since Senate leaders wanted to start with fifteen boards whose operations were crucial, he would package those boards in an omnibus bill and then move on to less urgent ones. Finally, Lenihan said, he favored downsizing some boards, particularly those like the Coastal Resources Management Council. Such boards relied on huge amounts of highly specialized work and not many volunteers were waiting in the wings.
His canal-digging metaphor rang true — last year the blasting, this year the shoveling. Reconstructing boards to comply with separation of powers would take a lot of muddy toil.
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.
Related Slideshow: Rhode Island’s History of Political Corruption
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