Secrets and Scandals: Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 26
Monday, August 31, 2015
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 2
JUDGES AND LAWMAKERS
26
Historic Votes (1994)
Early in 1993, after the upset over my candidacy, the Ethics Commission hired Sara Quinn as executive director for a second time. She quickly launched a flurry of bold ventures: pushing to investigate pre-1987 conflicts, suing to collect unpaid ethics fines, shaping rules for the commission to file its own complaints, and proposing mandatory ethics education for public officials. She also lodged an ethics complaint against John Harwood and tangled with other powerful legislators.
Quinn made enemies and revealed a hard edge that irritated even her allies. Commissioner John J. O’Brien, who had worked with her over a decade, told reporter Thomas Frank he wished she would “learn to temper justice with mercy.” And Quinn was irked when members questioned her legal dictates. In what proved a final straw, she publicly accused the panel’s chairperson, Richard Morsilli, of “coercing” her to seek legal advice from a judge.
Guy Dufault, the state Democratic Party chair, ended the impasse by offering her a slot on the party’s 1994 statewide ticket. Over breakfast he suggested that she run for attorney general. A few days later, she resigned from the Ethics Commission for the second time and announced her candidacy.
My heart sank. Quinn had no chance against the formidable Republican incumbent Jeff Pine. Once Democrats got her out of the Ethics Commission they would invest little in her campaign, nor would they dream of rewarding her unsuccessful race with a judgeship, as they had compensated others who ran against powerful Republican incumbents.
No matter how people voted, Rhode Island’s 1994 election would be historic. For the first time in the state’s history voters would elect a governor for a four-year term. In another first, they could pick women for four of five statewide executive offices: governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and general treasurer. For the first time in American history, they might elect a quadriplegic secretary of state.
Voters might also decide to end a 247-year tradition under which the General Assembly named justices to the Supreme Court, and they might break the bitter impasse over legislative pay and pensions.
1994 would also provide an acid test of the 1992 Comprehensive Campaign Finance Law. Candidates for the five statewide executive offices could decide whether to draw down public matching funds. Any who opted into the process must swear to comply with limits on contributions and expenditures.
All of the 1994 candidates for governor signed into the program, and among contenders for the five statewide general offices, only Jim Langevin chose not to participate. He had told me beforehand that he would not take matching funds in his campaign for secretary of state. Because he faced a primary in his own party and a Republican incumbent, Barbara Leonard, in the general election, Langevin thought he had to spend more than the half-million dollars the program would allow. “I won’t be in debt to any special interest,” he assured me. “Whatever I can’t raise from individual donors, I’ll take from my trust fund.”
Langevin had been a teenager dreaming of a career in law enforcement when a bullet fired accidentally inside the Warwick police headquarters shattered his neck. The near-death experience and resulting quadriplegia had galvanized his sense of purpose. In our 1992 Common Cause scorecard, he tied at the top of our House rankings, and from his motorized chair, he led the move to impeach Chief Justice Fay. He had eagerly pledged not to participate in the Grand Committee election of a new chief justice, co-sponsored merit selection, and he became lead sponsor of the constitutional amendment to modernize the legislature. He accomplished all this without any air of superiority or provocation. Though I could not endorse him or any candidate for office, I trusted Jim Langevin.
Our RIght Now! campaign for Question 1 — merit selection of all Rhode Island judges — garnered priceless publicity at little cost when Gov. Bruce Sundlun appointed the members of the Judicial Nominating Commission — now established by law for all lower court vacancies. Of the nine, he appointed three women and one Latino; as envisioned in the law, no more than five of the appointees were attorneys. In the summer of 1994 they began meeting in a windowless conference room at the Department of Administration, across Smith Street from the State House, where they faced a backlog of judicial vacancies.
Never before had Rhode Island witnessed an open casting call for would-be judges. In response to newspaper ads inviting applicants for seven judicial vacancies in the Superior, Family, District, and Workers’ Compensation Courts, nearly 190 applicants submitted their reams of required paperwork. The new law required the panel to name between three and five “highly qualified” nominees for each judicial vacancy.
Michael J. Yelnosky, who now chaired the Common Cause judicial reform committee, monitored every meeting. With his abundant brown hair and large eyes, Yelnosky looked too young to be a professor at the Roger Williams University School of Law. As commissioners considered procedural rules, he argued that the names of all judicial applicants should be made public.
“Why?” demanded Peter J. McGinn, a crusty corporate lawyer and lobbyist on the panel. “I don’t see any great public interest in revealing those who didn’t get an initial review.”
Michael A. Kelly, an attorney Sundlun appointed to chair the panel, agreed. “I wouldn’t want someone’s professional reputation tainted or damaged because he or she didn’t make the interview list.”
Yelnosky answered that the entire exercise was intended to bring backroom deals into the sunlight. “To be credible, this process has to be accessible to the public. It can’t look like you’re quietly ditching applicants.”
Commissioners persisted in their plan to release the names only of those they chose to interview. They also voted to conduct interviews behind closed doors unless a candidate opted to answer questions in public.
Yelnosky argued that it would be absurd to exclude citizen observers from interviews with prospective judges. “How can members of the public comment on the nominees if they haven’t been allowed to observe the interviews?” he asked.
The pressure of public opinion quickly prompted open interviews.
During the past year, deaths and retirements had created seven lower court vacancies, which forced the new commission to schedule nearly a hundred individual interviews, typically fifteen to twenty minutes each. As each candidate entered the bland conference room, commissioners around the table asked about their legal practice, specialties, and court cases. Reporters and ordinary citizens surrounded the panel, listening and taking notes. The fact that lawyers and current judges were submitting themselves to public scrutiny became newsworthy. Newspapers, radio, and even television covered the process.
On August 4, the fledgling commission invited public comments on the nominees. Commissioners listened to hours of mostly supportive testimony from judges, lawyers, litigants, activists, and friends, then voted publicly on candidates, winnowing names. In a single evening they prepared four lists for Superior Court vacancies, three lists for Family Court, and a single list for District Court. The Providence Journal published photos of four Superior Court nominees on its front page. Of the thirty-nine candidates presented to the governor, only four had ever served in the General Assembly — former representatives Elaine T. Bucci and Gilbert V. Indeglia, and former senators Marilyn Shannon McConaghy and Gilbert T. Rocha.
Sundlun quickly began interviewing all the candidates, and on August 12 he appointed Netti C. Vogel, Michael A. Silverstein, Stephen J. Fortunato Jr., and Edward C. Clifton as Superior Court judges, announcing that he would send their names to the Senate for confirmation. A day later, he appointed Pawtucket Municipal Court Judge John A. Mutter, District Court Judge Gilbert T. Rocha, and Workers’ Compensation Court Judge John Rotondi Jr. to vacancies on the Family Court. He also named Frank J. Cenerini, a lawyer and former social worker, to District Court.
Even an ensuing glitch with one of the candidates showed that merit selection marked a quantum leap beyond the secrecy of previous centuries. Despite a bitter divorce, Workers’ Compensation Court Judge John Rotondi Jr. had applied for a seat on the Family Court. His ex-wife complained of spousal abuse in a letter to the nominating commission. Commissioners questioned Rotondi in executive session about her charges and kept the dispute confidential. They put Rotondi on the short list for Family Court and passed his entire file to Sundlun. The governor, who had been through three divorces, discounted the letter, kept it to himself, and nominated Rotondi. He sent Rotondi’s file to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where the dispute exploded.
Three women senators announced that they had received copies of a letter that made them question Rotondi’s suitability to decide matters of divorce and custody. M. Teresa Paiva Weed, vice chair of the Judiciary Committee, said she had spoken to thirty lawyers but most were afraid to testify against Rotondi because they might later have to appear before him in court. While Paiva Weed did not question Rotondi’s competence in the Workers’ Compensation Court, she suggested he might be “an inappropriate selection for the Family Court.” Maryellen Goodwin added that attorneys in her district were raising concerns about Rotondi, and that in her eight years as a senator she had never received such calls about a judicial nominee.
In a dramatic public hearing of the Judiciary Committee Rotondi’s former wife, Susan A. Epstein, testified against his nomination. She reiterated charges from her letter that he “emotionally battered” her and their daughter, and declared it “totally inappropriate” for him to judge “the intimate affairs of women and their children who would come before him.” After wrenching deliberations, the committee voted 10–7 to reject Rotondi’s appointment, and Sundlun wisely withdrew the nomination before its likely defeat on the Senate floor.
Whatever the truth of Rotondi’s life, his volatile confirmation showed that merit selection — with three venues for evaluating each nomination — created valuable space for issues to surface.
The Common Cause state governing board decided which votes to count in our 1994 legislative scorecard. At the top of the list were merit selection of judges, modernizing the legislature, and online access to legislative computers. We would also tally votes on ethics, campaign finance, voter registration, state purchasing, and pension reform — nineteen votes each in the Senate and House of Representatives.
One board member asked if we would include those pledges that had successfully blocked the Grand Committee from electing a new chief justice. “They showed a lot of chutzpah,” she said. “Their moratorium turned the tide.” So in the scorecard published ten days later, we included a special column marked “Moratorium” at the top and a letter “M” by the scores of senators and representatives whose courage forced the General Assembly to change a practice that stretched back to 1747. We gave bonus credit to senators and representatives who forced the constitutional showdown.
Rhode Island’s September primaries brought fierce gubernatorial campaigns in both major parties. In the Republican contest, U.S. Attorney Lincoln C. Almond gained support by promising to root out corruption. “It’s been one conflict of interest after another,” Almond declared in one radio debate against 1st District Congressman Ronald K. Machtley. “We’ve never been so weighted down by a state government that is so arrogant, so corrupt, so inefficient and so dominated by political insiders.” Almond garnered 59.7 percent of the vote against the higher spending Machtley.
In the Democratic race, Sen. Myrth York crushed incumbent Gov. Bruce Sundlun with 57.2 percent in a four-way contest.
Three Republican incumbents running statewide — Jeffrey B. Pine, Nancy J. Mayer, and Barbara M. Leonard — had no primary opponents. Four Democrats campaigned for their party’s nomination to run against Leonard for secretary of state, and Jim Langevin outspent three rivals to win 49.1 percent of the vote. Sara Quinn had no challenger in her campaign for attorney general.
Our hardest job in the spring of 1994 had been to convince House leaders to give up the Grand Committee. A tougher sell in the fall would be to convince voters to raise legislative pay for the first time since 1900. Merit selection of judges, which was Question 1, rode a wave of public support, but Question 2 on modernizing the General Assembly felt like a lost cause.
The summer passed without visible statewide opposition. The AFL-CIO Executive Council had opposed plans to downsize the General Assembly, but a labor lobbyist let slip that beyond a few mailings to union members, they were not planning to spend money to defeat Question 2. “It may not be quite dead on arrival,” he scoffed, “but we know Hassenfeld won’t bankroll any TV ads this time. It’ll go down as decisively as the pay raise did in 1986.”
RIght Now! shaped a strategy of promoting judicial reform and legislative modernization as dovetailed responses to problems that had corrupted Rhode Island for generations. Our coalition’s network of organizations — business, religious, civic, environmental, and reform — would distribute campaign flyers to hundreds of thousands of voters across the state. Wherever possible, we would make the case face to face.
On one side of a flyer, we explained Question 1. On the back, we gave reasons to approve Question 2. On both sides, a thumbs-up hand approved the numbers 1 and 2 with exclamations: “Yes! Yes!”
Whether voters received flyers in a place of worship, outside the supermarket, at a community meeting, at a bus stop, or at their front door, its first words would remind them of recent scandals:
If you’re sick of insider games in our state government, vote YES on Questions 1 & 2.
A question and answer format showed readers how this pair of constitutional amendments would address root causes. We presented essential facts with simple but memorable tag lines:
YES on #1 to choose judges for qualifications, not connections.
YES on #2 to create a modern legislature for the 21st Century.
The flyer highlighted the RIght Now! logo and listed the array of organizations that were supporting both amendments: the state AARP Legislative Committee, the Greater Providence and Northern Rhode Island Chambers of Commerce, Common Cause, the Diocese of Providence, the Jewish Federation, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, the NCCJ (National Conference of Christians and Jews), the Rhode Island State Council of Churches, RIPEC, and Save the Bay. These groups would distribute flyers to their members and in communities they served.
As with four-year terms in 1992, we aimed to convince local newspapers to publish editorials in support of both questions. Gary Sasse and I scheduled days of going in person to editorial offices. “I like this,” he said as we drove away from the Newport Daily News building on a hill overlooking the harbor. “With the Providence Journal on your desk, it’s easy to forget that these smaller dailies and weeklies reach significant numbers of people.”
Publishers in tiny backroom offices understood the issues before we arrived. Like the devil’s advocates they had to be, editors asked the important questions that skeptical readers would raise. Their reporters covered the substance of Questions 1 and 2, and most published editorials in support.
The Narragansett Times rehearsed the state’s history of voters rejecting legislative pay raises — followed by legislators creating and fattening their pensions. “At long last,” the editors wrote, “there is a genuine proposal to reduce the size of the House and Senate chambers and to rectify the compensation system that, in the minds of many taxpayers, has been subverted over the years with pension ploys.”
With their gearwheel logos, omnipresent banners, and nonstop “happy bucks,” Rotary Clubs exuded a spirit of civic duty. Over the clinking of coffee cups at one meeting, members listened politely to my stump speech.
“So tell us about why they let union hacks buy their way into the state pension system,” one man asked. “Did they ever stop and think what those special pensions would cost the taxpayers?”
I answered that General Treasurer Nancy Mayer’s bill to evict those union officials from the retirement system had finally become law in 1994.
“When voters rejected legislative pay raises,” another Rotarian said, “the General Assembly turned around and increased their pensions. Why on earth should we reward them with a raise to $10,000 a year?”
I agreed with his premise. Voters had rejected a 1986 legislative pay increase by nearly two to one, only to have legislators double their pensions and the Supreme Court rule that pensions were not “compensation.” Since then, recriminations between the people and their elected representatives had become ever more bitter. I explained that Question 2 would amend the Constitution to state explicitly that no lawmaker elected after passage could ever receive pension credits for time in the legislature. The amendment would also establish a process for periodic pay raises linked to inflation. Under Question 2, Rhode Island lawmakers would still receive less than half what legislators received in Connecticut, Delaware, and Maryland, three states with comparable part-time legislatures. “Legislative pay has been a problem since before most of us were born,” I said. “Let’s solve it once and for all.”
I drove back toward Providence doubting that facts and figures made any difference. Rhode Islanders harbored a deep suspicion of people they elected in a system that seemed rigged against them. Could these constitutional amendments make any lasting difference?
In the 1994 elections, Rhode Island Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy won the 1st Congressional District and Congressman Jack Reed was re-elected in the 2nd. In the state’s first campaign for a four-year gubernatorial term Lincoln C. Almond narrowly defeated Myrth York. Although York had won their primary, leaders of Rhode Island’s dominant Democratic Party had done little to help her campaign.
For the first time, every candidate for governor had accepted matching public funds and campaigned within tight contribution and spending limits. Almond and York spent roughly equal amounts — their combined total spending fell $1.2 million below the $4.26 million Bruce Sundlun spent to beat DiPrete in 1990. Ironically, Almond’s campaign to win the first four-year gubernatorial term cost only slightly more than a third of what Sundlun had spent in 1990 for a two-year term. The governor-elect told reporters he could not have run statewide without public matching funds.
Jim Langevin, newly elected secretary of state, promised voters that he would transform the office from that of a repository of documents to an open government service for the people. His campaign touted the fact that the 1993–94 Common Cause scorecard credited him with 100 percent support for reform, noted his early commitment to merit selection of judges, and headlined his leadership in modernizing the General Assembly for the twenty-first century. But from his trust fund Langevin spent three times what the Republican incumbent, Barbara Leonard, could muster, and he crushed her at the polls.
In the race for attorney general, incumbent Jeffrey Pine won every city and town, trouncing Sara Quinn with 76 percent of the statewide vote. Both candidates had participated in the matching-funds program, but Pine qualified for nearly five times as much in matching public funds. Whatever support Guy Dufault originally promised Quinn from the Democratic Party, he produced virtually nothing.
Seventy percent of state voters approved Question 1 on merit selection of all Rhode Island judges. Their votes ended the election of Supreme Court justices by the legislature, which had begun before the American Revolution. Question 2 on modernizing the General Assembly garnered 51.8 percent of the vote. Voters agreed to downsize the General Assembly, end its outsized pensions, and provide a fair salary with health insurance.
Right Now! had helped to bring historic changes. We could celebrate constitutional reforms that were reshaping all three branches of state government. New laws had lessened the cost of running for statewide office and built a bulwark against corporate cash. The Rhode Island Ethics Commission now operated with its constitutional authority reinforced by two unanimous Supreme Court opinions.
But it all seemed too good to continue. Legislative leaders would soon learn that Common Cause had committed itself — with or without support from the RIght Now! coalition — to fixing the deepest defect in Rhode Island’s Constitution. Would they continue on the path toward constitutional reform? Or would we face backlash and retrenchment?
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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