Battle Brewing Between Chafee & Raimondo
Thursday, May 24, 2012
The verbal spat between Governor Lincoln Chafee and General Treasurer Gina Raimondo continued Wednesday when the two rivals traded barbs over the apparent lack of oversight regarding the finances of Curt Schilling’s cash-strapped video game company.
But the tension between Chafee and Raimondo, who is widely viewed as the favorite to be the Democratic nominee for Governor in 2014, stems more from a disagreement the two had during last fall’s pension reform debate than it does from decisions made regarding Schilling’s failing video game company.
Chafee has continuously charged that Raimondo made a mistake by not granting cities and towns the ability to freeze cost-of-living-adjustments (COLAs) for retirees. In an interview last week with GoLocalProv, Chafee said he doesn’t understand why the Treasurer didn’t go to bat for municipalities last year.
“That’s the question I can’t answer,” he said. “Why a smart Treasurer couldn’t see the magnitude of the local issues. I don’t have a good answer for that.”
Raimondo meanwhile has defended her pension plan by suggesting that cities and towns needed to do their homework and understand just how severe their problems were before taking up reform efforts. The legislation did require municipalities to reevaluate their pension systems and begin taking action toward addressing their unfunded liabilities.
“Maybe the Governor hasn’t reviewed the legislation that was passed by the General Assembly, but there was an entire chapter dedicated to independent municipalities and that work is happening,” Raimondo said during an interview on the Dan Yorke Show.
But Chafee, the veteran politician, believes more could have been done last year when members of the General Assembly weren’t immediately facing reelection. Chafee has proposed a municipal relief package that includes freezing COLAs and offering mandate relief to struggling communities, but his plan has been met with lukewarm support in the legislature. An increasingly tense relationship with Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed is unlikely to help matters for the Governor.
Still, the dispute between the two leaders appears to be little more than an early attempt at jockeying for position in a Governor’s race that is more than two years away. Raimondo has become one of the most popular politicians in the state with her fiscally conservative approach while the Governor has tried to win back support by standing up for cities and towns.
“My concerns go back to the crash of 2008,” Chafee said last week. “I knew then they could not take these kinds of hits. I knew that Providence with the children they have to educate and the mandates, the binding arbitration and the minimum manning, these communities couldn't take that hit.”
Dan McGowan can be reached at dmcgowan@golocalprov.com.
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Comments:
David Beagle
7:22am on Thursday, May 24, 2012
"the mandates, the binding arbitration and the minimum manning", these aren't new problems by any means. These issues have been crippling towns for along time. Question is with so many bright, intelligent people running the show, how come these issues are always talked about but never legitimately acted on?
Jeffrey deckman
7:38am on Thursday, May 24, 2012
David, because unions control the statehouse
RI Taxpayer
11:42am on Thursday, May 24, 2012
Hmmmm. A battle of wits between Gino and Linc. It's a slam dunk. Sorry, gov.
jon paycheck
12:47pm on Thursday, May 24, 2012
“My concerns go back to the crash of 2008,” Chafee said last week. “I knew then they could not take these kinds of hits. I knew that Providence with the children they have to educate and the mandates, the binding arbitration and the minimum manning, these communities couldn't take that hit.”
he is absolutely correct that they couldnt take those hits.
what he fails to mention is that they were all warned the year before that this was going to happen and they did nothing!
they were supposed to revise their own pensions and payroll, etc before the cuts started and they did nothing but hope that the problem would just go away.
Captain Blacksocks
12:59pm on Thursday, May 24, 2012
RI is run by the unions, lobbyists and special interests. Dems in general assembly will again win reelction by a huge margin. RI taxpayers will be punished for decades and...ya know what?....THEY DESERVE IT for being so dumb.
Joseph Bernstein
1:17pm on Thursday, May 24, 2012
Here we have a State Treasurer with years of expertise in venture capital operations offering her skills and being rebuffed by that barely functional idiot of a Governor.
Gina Raimondo already gets a state salary so she is offering this advice at no additional cost to the taxpayer,but Linc's handlers don't want this-enter the state's own Iago-Richard Licht.What are his motives here?Hmmm?
Thomas Lessio
3:55pm on Friday, May 25, 2012
The facts dont look good for Gina Raimondo. The simple truth is that she refused to support local pension reform for cities and towns. The result of her bad decision is that city after city is falling off of a financial cliff.
Captain Blacksocks
4:00pm on Friday, May 25, 2012
I think G Raimondo took a calculated risk and she was probably right. If she tried to go after state and city pension reform all at once, RI unions would have revolted like they are in now in some states where te unions are so powerful they are about to recall the governor for doing the very same thing Gina R is trying to do here. at least she accomplished some good reforms. That's more than I can say for the prior few hundred years of RI politicos. City pension reforms....will be done soon...because now the cities will to choose between that and going broke.