Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 48
Monday, February 01, 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
48
Presumption Prize (2004)
In 2002, Alan G. Palazzo marched into the Common Cause office unannounced. With military bearing, shaved head, and a binder full of documents, he came armed for battle but needed help. A retired Navy lieutenant commander, Palazzo now taught public school. He outlined plans for a new elementary school in West Warwick, fuming that state Sen. Stephen D. Alves served on the building committee despite conflicts of interest involving the contractor and the location. Palazzo had criticized Alves at public meetings and in letters to the Kent County Daily Times, charging that costs for the new school would balloon from $10.5 to $12 million and that taxpayers in the cash-strapped city would be stuck for the difference.
Alves had struck back with a lawsuit, alleging that Palazzo had slandered and libeled him. He also accused Palazzo, who had lost to him in a 2000 Senate race, of conducting a political vendetta.
I knew Stephen Alves as vice chair of the Senate Finance Committee and a wily survivor, but I believed Palazzo had the law on his side. Rhode Island’s anti-SLAPP suit law, enacted in 1993 and refined in 1995, had been upheld by the Rhode Island Supreme Court in 1996. SLAPP was an acronym for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation.
I photocopied the law for Palazzo and explained its essentials: any citizen who petitioned a government agency was “conditionally immune” against being sued for slander or libel as long as the request was genuine. Under the law, anyone “SLAPPed” for seeking government action could move to have the SLAPP suit thrown out of court. A SLAPP suit could go forward only if the judge decided the citizen’s speech was both wrong on the facts and motivated by malice. An important provision of the law required a judge who dismissed a SLAPP suit to award attorney’s fees to the prevailing party. Nancy Hsu Fleming, the environmental advocate who protested toxins seeping into neighborhood wells, had won a $400,000 judgment against the former congressional candidate, Charles Gifford, who had SLAPPed her.
Since the ACLU had volunteer lawyers ready to defend citizens against SLAPP suits, I also encouraged Palazzo to contact Steve Brown. He quickly got a lawyer who moved to dismiss the SLAPP suit, and on September 12, 2002, Superior Court Judge Netti C. Vogel threw out most of Alves’s slander and libel charges. She wrote that the high court had affirmed that complaints published in newspapers could constitute legitimate petitioning activity. She ordered Alves to pay Palazzo’s court costs and attorney’s fees, which came to $17,471.99.
Alves appealed to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously for Palazzo on August 4, 2004. “Are litigants in Rhode Island SLAPP-happy?” the justices asked. “This is the second case in as many months that calls upon us to determine whether judgment was granted properly in favor of the defendants . . .” who sought protection under the anti-SLAPP law.
Stephen Alves had his eyes on a prize much bigger and more lucrative than a school building. Throughout the 2004 legislative session, he pushed for a Narragansett Indian casino at the southern end of West Warwick. Harrah’s Entertainment, which would actually own the “destination casino,” produced plans for a thousand-room hotel with its own I-95 entrance and exit ramps. Proponents hoped to lure gamblers driving toward Foxwoods and the Mohegan Sun, two huge tribal casinos that lay in Connecticut more than an hour farther south on the interstate. Senate legislation that Alves sponsored would authorize the project and promise one quarter of the proposed casino’s profits to state coffers — far less than the sixty percent from video slot machines at Lincoln Park and Newport Grand.
The stakes were high. Between New Year’s Day and mid-May, supporters and opponents poured more than $750,000 into advertising alone — on radio, billboards, and bus shelters. Television ads would not begin until the General Assembly approved a statewide ballot question. Former Common Cause board member and state Sen. Robin Porter, who chaired the Kay Coalition Against Gambling, predicted far more spending if the referendum went forward. “They will spend a fortune to persuade us against our will,” he told the Providence Journal.
Alves claimed that West Warwick had done its due diligence and had entered into a preliminary agreement, but when reporters pressed to see documents, Harrah’s attorney and two top West Warwick officials admitted there was none. House Speaker William J. Murphy, whose district included part of West Warwick, met behind closed doors with Harrah’s CEO. “We are attempting to get the best deal possible for the people of Rhode Island,” Murphy told reporters afterward.
As negotiations stretched deep into June, Gov. Carcieri pounced on Harrah’s disclosure that it and not the Narragansett Tribe would own the proposed casino. He accused Harrah’s promoters of “using the Narragansetts as a foil here and calling it a Narragansett Indian casino. It is not.”
On June 22, still without a written agreement from Harrah’s, the Senate Committee on Constitutional and Gaming Issues approved Alves’s resolution. The bill finally appeared two days later, only minutes before the full Senate was scheduled to vote. Sen. Leonidas Raptakis blasted it on the floor: “This legislation reminds me of the state going to a pawn shop and selling its future for whatever the pawnbroker offers us.”
Senators voted 23–11 to put the casino question on the November ballot. The House followed, approving it by 52–18.
From the beginning, Alves’s Senate bill and a companion House version had contained a question for the November statewide ballot: “Shall there be a casino in the Town of West Warwick operated by an Affiliate of Harrah’s Entertainment in association with the Narragansett Indian Tribe?” Alves and the Harrah’s lawyers who drafted this language rightly recognized that they needed voter approval to build the casino. But in an astonishing error they overlooked an equally important requirement: the Rhode Island Constitution appeared to require that all gambling be “operated by the state.”
Lawyers for the governor saw this defect, but kept quiet until the General Assembly passed final versions of the casino bill and went home. On July 1, Carcieri vetoed the legislation. His veto message gave a raft of reasons: casino gambling was wrong for Rhode Island on principle; the Harrah’s deal had been consummated without competitive bidding; the Narragansett Tribe would gain no equity ownership or economic independence; no one knew how West Warwick would be compensated; the proposed financing would undercut state revenue from Lincoln Park and Newport Grand; this new gambling venue would “lead to more addictions, more crime, and more Rhode Islanders whose lives will be turned upside down by the false promises of the casino interests.” Carcieri’s strongest point came at the end: “Absent an amendment to the Rhode Island Constitution, the General Assembly does not have the authority to permit the operation of a casino by a non-state entity.”
Lawmakers had expected a veto and corralled enough votes to override, but they had no easy fix for the fatal flaw: if Harrah’s operated the casino, it could not also be operated by the state, which was an explicit requirement in the Constitution. As the General Assembly prepared to override his veto, Carcieri asked the Supreme Court for an advisory opinion on the constitutional question.
West Warwick Rep. Timothy A. Williamson, who had sponsored the House version, groused to reporters, “If it is unconstitutional now, why wasn’t it unconstitutional in February when the bill was first put in? Why did Governor Carcieri wait until July 2004 to seek an advisory opinion?”
Alves, West Warwick’s senator, incorrectly claimed that Lincoln Park and Newport Grand were not state-operated. He told the Providence Journal: “I think he pretty much knows that we are going to override his veto. So he’s trying what he can, and that’s certainly his prerogative. But according to all the legal counsel we’ve had look at it, we don’t believe he has any standing in his arguments.”
Rumors spread that casino backers were revising the proposed constitutional amendment and would seek its approval when the General Assembly came back to override vetoes.
Nick Gorham, a sponsor of the Separation of Powers Amendment that would be Question 1 on the November ballot, was incredulous. “Why not amend the Constitution to say that Harrah’s can take over the town of West Warwick, with an option on the state of Rhode Island?” he demanded. “I really don’t think we need to start fooling around with the Constitution just to accommodate some huge corporate behemoth from Las Vegas.”
On July 21, 2004, Sen. Alves filed two new casino bills. One was a modified version of his casino legislation that had been amended several times during the session. The second proposed adding an entirely new section to the Constitution:
Article VI Section 23 — Casino Gambling. — A casino is authorized to be owned and operated in the town of West Warwick by an entity consisting of the Narragansett Indian Tribe and any other parties licensed as authorized by statute, subject to taxes and/or revenue sharing and other conditions as enacted in the Rhode Island General Laws and notwithstanding Article 6, Section 15 or any other provision of this constitution.
The proposed “notwithstanding” clause would make an end run around the article that all lotteries within Rhode Island be operated by the state. Alves’s amendment dropped all mention of Harrah’s Entertainment, which would own and operate the casino.
I scanned the “resolved” clauses that described how this constitutional amendment would be presented. A final clause exploded off the page. It ordered the secretary of state to place this casino amendment on the ballot “for the statewide election in November 2004 as question #1.”
Tradition placed constitutional questions on the ballot in order of their passage, and the Separation of Powers Amendment had passed both the House and Senate more than a year earlier. We had already ordered lawn signs, bumper stickers, and a huge banner that called for people to “Vote Yes on #1. Separation of Powers.”
It would do no good to get angry at Alves. Instead, I made a round of press calls and fired off an email to our coalition. “Only a deluge of calls can stop this outrage,” I wrote. “The idea of proposing and passing a constitutional amendment in 48 hours is absurd. There have been no hearings, virtually no legal research, no public debate.”
Editors at the Providence Journal amplified this concern, urging readers to phone their legislators to oppose hasty consideration of a constitutional question “at the eleventh hour of a special session on a Friday night in late July.”
On July 22, the day before the Senate override vote, State House visitors and reporters got an eyeful. In the rotunda, where marble staircases met at a central landing beneath the dome, an actor bronzed from head to toe — wearing a bronzed loincloth and wielding a bronze spear — struck a pose like the Independent Man statue high above. He had no hair on his chest and hardly seemed to breathe. Executives from Lincoln Park and Newport Grand mugged for TV cameras as they presented him an oversized check for $217 million. They warned lawmakers not to put that money at risk by approving a Harrah’s casino that would take more from gamblers and pay far less to the state.
The following day, as its first order of new business, the full Senate referred both Alves’s revised bill and his proposed constitutional amendment to the Committee on Constitutional and Gaming Issues. A dozen witnesses signed in to testify against the last-minute amendment. I thought we had the votes to kill the bill, and Alves apparently knew we did. When Sen. Maryellen Goodwin gaveled her committee to order, she called him to present his legislation. Alves forced a smile and said that after consultation with Senate leaders and members of the committee he thought it better to hold both bills “until a later date.”
In a matter of seconds the committee moved, seconded, and approved a motion to hold for further study. For all practical purposes, Alves’s latest legislation and proposed casino amendment were dead. As the committee recessed, reporters asked my reaction. I told them the proposed amendment was dishonest, and the committee’s vote was “a good sign of sanity in the building.”
Back in the Senate chamber, pages passed out copies of Carcieri’s veto message of the casino bill they had already passed. Minority Leader Dennis L. Algiere, who rarely gave speeches on the floor, stood at his seat. Tall and lean, with a strong chin and graying hair, he argued quietly for the Senate to uphold the governor’s veto. He pressed Carcieri’s point that it would be illegal and unconstitutional for Harrah’s to own a casino in Rhode Island.
In turn, Stephen Alves — shorter than Algiere but handsome with large eyes and black hair — acknowledged that his bill might be “the most controversial piece of legislation in modern history,” but urged the Senate to approve it and let the people decide.
Green and red lights flickered on. Senators overrode Carcieri’s veto by a vote of 21–13, only one vote above the sixty percent needed. From snippets of conversation, I sensed that senators were embarrassed to approve what they must have suspected was an unconstitutional ballot question.
A week later, after perfunctory debate, the House also overrode the governor’s veto: 47–19.
A West Warwick casino to be owned and operated by Harrah’s was on its way to the November ballot.
Harrah’s claimed its legislative victory and promised a $2 million campaign to persuade voters. Lincoln Park, one of the state’s video slot parlors, said it would top that with $3 million against the casino. Groups that feared more gambling addictions, bankruptcies, and broken families had little money to broadcast their message.
On August 6, a three-justice panel of the Rhode Island Supreme Court took up Gov. Carcieri’s request for an advisory opinion on the constitutionality of Alves’s original question: “Shall there be a casino in the town of West Warwick operated by an affiliate of Harrah’s Entertainment in association with the Narragansett Indian tribe?” Chief Justice Frank Williams, retired Chief Justice Joseph Weisberger, and Associate Justice Paul Suttell questioned lawyers on both sides but did not reveal their views.
Their ruling six days later was unanimous and could not have been more emphatic. The justices noted that the governor and attorney general both found the Casino Act “constitutionally infirm.” They wrote: “If, as we believe, the question and legislation are void and unconstitutional, then members of the public will waste much money, time, effort, and energy to familiarize themselves with the controversial issues that the proposed casino has raised.” They added: “If we were to sit idly by while an unconstitutional question was submitted to the voters, only to later issue a binding decision declaring the Casino Act and the referendum question void, chaos might well ensue.”
The justices noted that the ballot question “asks whether there shall be a casino ‘operated by an Affiliate of Harrah’s Entertainment in association with the Narragansett Indian Tribe?’ ” Asserting there could be no “clearer identification of the casino operator,” they held that “on its face, the referendum question is contrary to art. 6, sec. 15 and, thus, is fundamentally flawed.”
Emphasizing the functional differences between operating and regulating a casino, the three justices called the arrangement “an unconstitutional divestiture of operational control” to a private corporation. They noted that although the legislation contained a severability clause, “To parse out the constitutionally repugnant portions of the Casino Act would leave the legislation in tatters.” They declared it “invalid in its entirety.” This was only an advisory opinion, but the principles they set forth would probably stand in any litigated case that might follow. Nothing could have been more direct.
On Friday, August 13, Superior Court Judge Daniel A. Procaccini ordered the casino question off the ballot. “As precious as the right to vote is,” Procaccini wrote, “to permit it to be exercised in a way that violates the Rhode Island Constitution would render this important act of the citizenry meaningless and futile.”
If there had been a prize for political presumption, Stephen Alves might have won it. In his comments to reporters — as in his treatment of Alan Palazzo — the West Warwick senator ignored the fact that three Supreme Court justices had rejected his legislation. Without acknowledging the failures of research that he and Harrah’s highly paid lawyers had made, Alves expressed frustration on behalf of West Warwick and the Narragansett Tribe. “Every time they reach the threshold,” he said of the tribe, “they encounter a new roadblock.”
Defeat of yet another casino proposal was bitter fruit for the Narragansetts. In all the years I had known him, Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas had towered — physically and morally — above lobbyists and legislators at the State House, often rehearsing injustices the Narragansetts had suffered over centuries at the hands of Rhode Island officials. Robbed of their ancestral lands, the Narragansetts were systematically “detribalized” in the 1880s but struggled to retain their identity. After legal incorporation in 1934, the tribe had reclaimed its lands. They won federal recognition in 1983 but lacked an economic base. After being blocked from building a casino on tribal lands in Charlestown, they worked with Boyd’s Gaming and then Harrah’s to build a casino anywhere else in the state. The most recent humiliation occurred in July 2003, when state police, on orders from Gov. Don Carcieri, had attacked and closed the Narragansetts’ smoke shop on tribal land in Charlestown.
Now, Matthew Thomas voiced the tribe’s resentment. “I have to give it to the state,” he told the Providence Journal. “They find new ways to shaft us.”
George and Grace Wilcox, neighbors across our street on the South Side of Providence, were Narragansetts who felt the sting of yet another defeat for their tribe. Though we held contrary views on the casino, they always treated me with respect. Long after the 2004 campaign for a Narragansett casino in West Warwick ended, a lawn sign still stood near their front porch, a reminder that government often proved unfair for those whose ancestors had lived here long before Europeans arrived.
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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