Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 46

Monday, January 18, 2016

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.

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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

46 Triple Scandal (2003–04)

Scandals create fleeting chances for change. In the fall of 2003, Kathy Gregg, the Providence Journal’s State House bureau chief, broke headline stories that engulfed three powerful lawmakers. On October 1, she reported that House Majority Leader Gordon Fox had backed a deal to relocate GTECH’s world headquarters to a new $65 million building in downtown Providence. The gambling company would get $8.3 million in property-tax breaks and an exclusive twenty-year “master contract” to provide scratch ticket and video slot machines for the Rhode Island Lottery Commission. Three weeks after the contract cleared the General Assembly, GTECH hired Ferrucci-Russo P.C., the law firm where Fox worked. The firm later billed GTECH for twenty-seven hours of legal work done before the House vote, including hours attributed to Fox.

These front page stories prompted ethics complaints against Fox from state Republican chair Patricia Morgan and Operation Clean Government. The Ethics Commission quickly reached an “initial determination,” the first step toward a full probe. The evidence suggested a clear conflict of interest: the law firm billed GTECH for Fox’s work on legislation that he later voted for. W. Mark Russo, a partner in the firm, had billed GTECH retroactively in an effort to “recapture” payment for preliminary work.

Rather than face adjudicative hearings before the Ethics Commission, Fox and his lawyers negotiated a settlement — the equivalent of a plea bargain. On January 20, 2004, the commission voted to accept a fifteen-page informal agreement stipulating that the majority leader did not know about the hours billed in his name, but that he “knew or should have known of the existence of this legal and business relationship.” It acknowledged that Fox had a substantial conflict of interest when he voted for the GTECH deal and that it was reasonable to expect that his law firm would profit from his vote. In signing, Fox accepted unequivocal responsibility, paid a fine of $10,000, and left the firm of Ferrucci-Russo.

In December, Gregg revealed secret business deals involving two top state senators. She first named Sen. John A. Celona of North Providence, who chaired the Senate Committee on Commerce, Housing, and Municipal Government. CVS, the Woonsocket-based pharmaceutical giant, was paying Celona as a consultant, while Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Rhode Island, the state’s largest health insurer, funded a cable TV program that gave him priceless free publicity. Celona’s ties to the two health care giants appeared to clash with his committee’s jurisdiction over legislation of interest to them.

Gregg reported that Celona had approached Thomas A. Lynch, a former senator who had become a lobbyist for Blue Cross, about the television program that he would host. Lynch and the other executives conferred with Celona in his corner office at the State House. Michael A. Sisti, a Blue Cross vice president of marketing, told Gregg that he had argued against the TV program because the insurer already had one, and Celona’s proposal — then estimated at $75,000 — was too expensive. Gregg quoted Sisti saying it had become “a political necessity to do this show.” Eventually, a single media company produced both the Blue Cross program and Celona’s public access cable show entitled “The Celona State House Report.”

Celona’s CVS connection proved doubly damaging. A public relations officer for the pharmaceutical company admitted that CVS had hired Celona as a “community outreach specialist” and paid him a monthly retainer for three and a half years. A pair of CVS government-relations employees had supervised him. Their other duties included blocking passage of the pharmacy freedom of choice legislation — assigned to Celona’s committee — that might have weakened the drugstore chain’s dominance in Rhode Island. CVS spokesperson Todd Andrews refused to reveal the amount of Celona’s compensation but admitted that it exceeded $1,000 each year — the threshold at which public officials were required to disclose income under Rhode Island’s ethics law.

Celona had not listed any earnings from CVS on his financial disclosure forms.

Walgreens and Stop & Shop — CVS’s competitors in the lucrative prescription drug market — protested vehemently. Year after year, they had promoted pharmacy freedom of choice bills that would have allowed insured employees to fill prescriptions at pharmacies other than CVS and Brooks, while CVS and Blue Cross lobbied aggressively to kill the legislation.

In 2003, two such bills had passed the House but died in Celona’s Senate committee. Ironically, Celona had co-sponsored similar legislation before he took over the committee and began taking payments from CVS.

Celona tried to stamp out the fires burning around him with an apology. “If there’s an appearance of impropriety,” he told reporter Bill Malinowski, “I apologize. If there is a perception that I voted a certain way on pharmacy issues because of my relationship with the charitable endeavors of CVS, then I should have recused myself from those matters.” He claimed to have phoned the Ethics Commission and been assured that his work for the pharmacy “was proper,” but staff at the commission had no authority to offer advice by phone. By the time Celona sought an advisory opinion and went to plead his case, his efforts at damage control were pointless.

On December 9, with details from Providence Journal stories, Operation Clean Government filed an ethics complaint against him.

On December 11, under pressure from Senate leaders, Celona announced that he would relinquish his committee chairmanship temporarily.

The burgeoning scandal quickly entangled Senate President William Irons as well. Providence Journal reporter Liz Anderson asked Irons about his insurance business. “I will never divulge who my clients are,” he growled. He cited a 1999 advisory from the Ethics Commission.

Anderson reported that between 1995 and 1998 — while Irons chaired the Senate Corporations Committee — a number of pharmacy freedom of choice bills had died there. Early in 1999, then-Majority Leader Paul S. Kelly had queried Irons about his financial ties to CVS and Blue Cross. Irons indignantly denied any conflict of interest, refusing to name his insurance clients, but he told Kelly he would seek advice from the Ethics Commission. In his letter to the commission, Irons described himself as “an independent insurance broker representing many companies in the area of life, health and disability insurance.” He said his committee was considering a bill “that a corporate insurance client of mine has an interest in along with a number of other parties.”

No one on the ethics panel had pushed him for details about his client, and the advisory authorized him to vote on “broad-based legislation involving general health care issues of public interest.” The opinion hinged on his declaration that his “corporate insurance client” would not benefit more than “any other similarly situated members of a significant and definable group.”

That claim had clearly been false.

I imagined Irons in his private meeting with Kelly and Enos, pushing back hard and going resentfully to the commission. He quickly began forging alliances with survivors of Bevilacqua’s faction. Once he toppled Kelly, Irons gerrymandered his former allies — Paul Kelly, Bill Enos, Charles Walton, and Donna Walsh — into districts they could never win. He drove them out of the Senate.

Hindsight revealed the timing. In December 2003, when Irons forced Celona from his post as committee chair, Enos revealed to the Providence Journal what Irons had hidden from the Ethics Commission in 1999. Like Celona, Irons had been earning commissions from CVS and Blue Cross while killing freedom of choice bills that would open the market to their competitors.

When reporter Liz Anderson asked Irons about his insurance business, he snapped that he would not divulge his clients, cited his 1999 advisory opinion, and insisted that he would recuse himself whenever he had a conflict of interest.

With these stories swirling, Irons phoned me. Would I meet him at 3 o’clock that afternoon at his State House office?

Windows on College Hill gleamed gold in late December sunshine as I settled into a leather chair in his corner office. Irons thanked me for coming on short notice. He wore a crisp white shirt and perfectly knotted tie, but looked as if he had not slept in days. He wanted to tell me in person that he would step down as Senate president and asked me to keep his decision confidential until he made an official announcement after Christmas.

I wondered whether he would really resign or was only testing the idea. During the fifteen years we had been allies and antagonists, he had blustered about quitting. Now, in the December twilight, his eyes were hollow as he defended himself. Hounded by reporters, he had boxed himself in by making Celona step down. Now he must do the same.

After spending twenty-one years — more than a third of his life — in the Senate, he wanted me to remind people of the good he had done. When depositors staggered through the rubble of RISDIC, he had risked an epic battle against John Bevilacqua. When Rhode Island’s campaign finance system invited corruption, he fought for Jeff Teitz’s legislation to fix it. When insiders were trading votes for permanent state jobs, he backed our revolving door bill. When governors had too little time to build competent teams, he worked with RIght Now! to place a Four-year Term Amendment on the ballot. When scandal engulfed the Supreme Court, he pushed the Senate toward merit selection. When senators and reps exploited the pension system, he supported ending legislative pensions, setting reasonable pay, and downsizing the General Assembly. When John Harwood tried to crush our campaign for separation of powers, he led the Senate in approving Mike Lenihan’s breakthrough amendment a full year before it finally passed. “You and I haven’t always agreed,” the beleaguered Senate president said, “but you know I’ve taken positions of principle.”

I kept listening as Irons vented about attacks on his integrity and insults to him, his clients, and his business. He insisted that he had always done what he believed was right.

When I left his office, the State House was empty and silent. I jotted down what I could remember of his lament. His defensiveness made me wonder whether he would actually step down.

Through the holidays, pressure mounted. Sen. Leonidas Raptakis, who had sided with Irons in the leadership struggle, published an opinion piece in the Providence Journal. Raptakis wrote that he had sponsored the pharmacy legislation. “The fix was in,” he wrote, and “good people were hoodwinked.” He accused Irons of “submitting a cleverly worded question” to the Ethics Commission, which was “designed to hide the truth and let him operate with the appearance of propriety.”

Two days before Christmas, the attorney general’s office and state police confirmed that a criminal investigation had begun.

On New Year’s Eve, Rhode Island’s first Senate president announced his resignation from the Senate. Irons’s office faxed out a five-page statement that touted his “reform efforts,” his “spirit of service,” and his career in the insurance industry. “I have been blessed to be a person who has achieved success in both the private and public realm,” he wrote. “I have always known that strong leaders create strong enemies. . . . Despite my painstaking efforts to follow the law and the rules as I understand them, some political opponents have begun an attack.” He blamed his resignation on “the time-old process of backroom destabilization to bring down my position as President of the Senate.”

With Irons gone, the thirty-seven remaining senators elected Senate Majority Leader Joseph A. Montalbano, who had led the redistricting panel, as Senate president. Democrats chose Sen. M. Teresa Paiva Weed as majority leader, the first woman to rise so high. “She’s a little waif of a thing,” a friend told one reporter, “but she’s got a metabolism that can run a nuclear power plant. She runs on Diet Coke.”

Former Senate Majority Leader Paul Kelly confirmed that two detectives from the state police had interviewed him about Irons’ CVS and Blue Cross connections. Kelly acknowledged telling the officers he should have pressed harder for answers. State police also asked Raptakis about Irons’s ties to the drugstore chain and health insurer.

Reporter Mike Stanton obtained documents from the federal government that showed CVS paying Irons $70,315 in commissions during a two-year period that ended the previous May. Though the drugstore chain reported twenty-three health-insurance programs for its employees across the country, it listed only a single broker’s commission — the one paid to Irons for its Rhode Island personnel.

CVS declined to tell Stanton when, why, or how Irons had become its only broker of record.

Operation Clean Government packaged newspaper stories about Irons’s secret payments from CVS and Blue Cross in an ethics complaint, which its leaders filed on January 20.

Ominously for Irons, the Ethics Commission immediately reviewed his 1999 request for an advisory opinion. Commissioners wondered aloud whether he had concealed information. They revoked the advisory and the immunity it conferred.

An idea woke me up at 4 a.m. No law could force attorneys or physicians to name their clients, and the General Assembly would never compel other professions to disclose their customers. But what if we could turn the problem inside out?

Income tax forms covered my desk at home. Common Cause reported my salary to the Internal Revenue Service on a W-2 form and mailed identical copies that I filed with our federal and state tax returns. Our bank sent a 1099 listing interest it paid on our savings, and it transmitted our data directly to the IRS. The law made these payers report both to the taxpayer who received a benefit and to the enforcing agency. Such identical copies were simple, efficient, and widespread.

Current Rhode Island law already required companies with lobbyists — including CVS and Blue Cross — to report what they spent on lobbying. Why not require lobbyists and those who hired them to report everything they paid to legislators? Serving in the General Assembly brought business to lawmakers who owned insurance brokerages, law offices, farms, restaurants, and liquor stores. Unions had public officials on their payrolls and paid them well, but who knew how much?

What if we could require any corporation that deployed a lobbyist to report payments it made to public officials? Why not require identical reports each January to the Secretary of State, who regulated lobbyists; to the Ethics Commission, which monitored financial disclosure by public officials; and to any public official who received any payments? I sketched a new reporting requirement: businesses or unions that paid lobbyists would have to divulge “money or anything of value” worth more than $250 which they paid to any “major state decision-maker” in a calendar year.

I shared my draft with leaders at Common Cause, and they relished the idea of forcing CVS and Blue Cross to disclose such payments or lose their license to lobby. Nancy Rhodes suggested calling our proposal “The Celona Law.”

With board approval, I explained the concept to Mike Lenihan and to Gordon Fox, who had been fined $10,000 because of his undisclosed tie to GTECH. Fox pondered the text for several days and agreed to file it in the House. We shook hands, both of us understanding what rode on its passage.

Lenihan quickly introduced a Senate version, but weeks passed without any sign of Fox’s bill in the House. The normal deadline for bill introductions came and went, and I began to worry that House leaders were resisting. I prompted Fox several times, and his bill finally appeared on March 18.

John Celona made headlines again in February for a second set of undisclosed “consultant payments.” He had been receiving monthly fees of $1,200 for two years from the New England Ambulance Company, a total of $14,400 each year, but never disclosed those payments on financial disclosure forms he filed with the Ethics Commission. John Vernancio, the company’s owner, explained to reporter Mike Stanton that he had hired Celona out of pity after his lawnmower shop closed.

In a curious twist, Celona had used his position as chair of the Corporations Committee to lobby lobbyists for Rhode Island Hospital and St. Joseph Health Service — Mark Montella and Frank McMahon — to steer their hospitals’ business to New England Ambulance. Both had bills before the Corporations Committee and needed the chairman’s good will, but neither knew that New England Ambulance was paying Celona.

“We must be doing something right,” the ambulance company’s owner crowed to Stanton, “because we keep growing. As long as we keep growing, I’m not going to change what I’m doing.”

Celona had also promoted New England Ambulance with Sen. Jack Reed and Congressman Patrick Kennedy for runs to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Providence.

As the Celona and Irons scandals kept erupting, television news and radio talk shows amplified public awareness of the senators’ split loyalties. In response to a Brown University poll conducted during the second week of February, eighty-seven percent of those questioned believed that corruption in Rhode Island government was either “very common” or “somewhat common.”

With Irons absent from the State House his name almost vanished from the news, but Celona arrived awkwardly each day. Unlike Congress, the General Assembly had no internal ethics committees or rules for expelling members, but Celona was shunned. Sen. Susan Sosnowski managed to move her seat, leaving Celona — formerly one of the most powerful members of the Senate — with empty desks on both sides of his. Sosnowski and five other senators called for him to resign. “This is nothing personal,” she told reporters. “I just think it is hurting the Senate. People look at government with a jaundiced eye because of this.”

Sen. Maryellen Goodwin told reporters the scandal had “virtually paralyzed the Senate,” and eighteen senators signed a call for Celona’s resignation.

Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty and Secretary of State Matthew A. Brown joined the clamor. “When credibility for an elected official ceases to exist,” Fogarty told reporters, “we have a responsibility to say that it’s time to put the public interest ahead of our personal interest, no matter how difficult.”

On March 8, state police swarmed through Celona’s North Providence home, emerging with computer equipment and cartons of papers. Atty. Gen. Patrick C. Lynch told reporters it might take two months to analyze the haul. “I use the analogy of an iceberg. We’ve all seen the tip and we’re wondering how deep and how wide it runs beneath the water.”

The next day, Celona resigned from the Senate. President Joseph A. Montalbano read Celona’s letter aloud to a packed press conference. “I take no personal pleasure in the difficulties that Senator Celona is going through,” Montalbano said. “A majority of the Senate had really felt that it was time to move beyond the distraction of what was going on in his personal life.”

Answering for Common Cause, I tried to shift the focus to loopholes that had tempted Celona and Irons to seek secret income from lobbying interests. I urged passage of “an airtight lobbying law, better ethics disclosure, and better ethics enforcement.”

Our case became stronger as more discrepancies started to appear between the gifts reported by public officials and the payments disclosed by lobbyists. Four years earlier, when the Ethics Commission passed a controversial rule raising the limit on gifts to $150 per occasion and a maximum $450 per calendar year from any “interested person,” it also required public officials to file annual reports each January. Lawmakers began listing receptions, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, Christmas ornaments, books, baseball caps, sports jerseys, and children’s clothes. Others reported Newport Harbor cruises, rounds of golf, and tickets to the theater, circus, or sporting events. Curiously, many tickets topped out at $150.

“My Palm Pilot is my life,” Sen. Leo R. Blais explained to a reporter. “I had my assistant print out my calendar for the year and I went through everything to think of what could be reportable. I gave it a lot of thought.” Speaker William J. Murphy was less conscientious, listing only “various breakfasts, lunches, and dinners,” on “various dates,” costing “various amounts.”

Secretary of State Matthew Brown directed his staff to crosscheck gift reports filed by legislators against lobbying reports submitted by lobbying groups. When Brown’s subordinates queried lobbyists about discrepancies, some amended their lobbying reports and others said the legislators must have been mistaken about who provided the gifts. Some lobbyists told reporter Scott Mayerowitz that differences occurred because they were required to report only expenses “for the specific purpose of promoting or opposing legislation.” AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer George H. Nee acknowledged that he and union president Frank Montanaro had played golf with William Irons the previous May, but he denied any lobbying.

CVS admitted paying $120 for Irons to play in its Charity Golf Classic and $150 for House Speaker William J. Murphy and his wife to attend a CVS charity dinner. But the company wrote to Brown: “There was no intention on the part of CVS to use the tickets to the events as a means of promoting or opposing any legislation before the General Assembly, and CVS did not do so.”

When the reporter asked for my reaction, I asked where companies “got the gall to write this sort of thing.”

True to his simile about digging a canal — last year blasting, this year shoveling — Sen. Mike Lenihan filed three bills to remove lawmakers and legislative appointments from boards that executed state laws. He followed the Common Cause “minimalist principles” by packaging boards in three large omnibus bills. Each bill ended with a proviso that the new law would take effect sixty days after voters ratified the Separation of Powers Amendment.

Senate leaders referred Lenihan’s monumental bills to his recently created Senate Committee on Government Oversight.

I testified at a first hearing that reconstructing boards would not be the committee’s most exciting mission but might be among its most important. “Few people will understand what you do here, yet your work this spring may well shape state government for the next forty or fifty years.”

Separate from his three omnibus bills and on a faster track, Lenihan introduced legislation to abolish the Unclassified Pay Plan Board. This board had always been vulnerable to political manipulation and was among our first seven separation of powers bills in 1995, but in nine years we had made no headway. Lenihan now proposed the approach Carl Bogus had urged: fold the pay board’s salary-setting duties into the Department of Administration. The director of administration would recommend raises for unclassified staff; the governor would make the decision and be accountable for the decision. If enacted, this would mark a monumental shift from the abuse-prone process in current law.

No matter how positive the dynamics of a legislative session, dangerous bills could cause real harm. Sen. Frank A. Ciccone III filed one in 2004 to prevent gubernatorial nominees from assuming their duties before Senate confirmation, specifically banning “acting” or “interim” appointments. Current law gave the Senate thirty legislative days to confirm or reject gubernatorial appointments, but if it failed to act, the nominee would take office as if confirmed.

The Judiciary Committee produced a substitute that completely reversed that dynamic: removing the Senate’s obligation to act within thirty legislative days and declaring that if the Senate did not approve, the nominee was “rejected.” In that case the governor would have to appoint “a different person as director and so on in like manner until the senate shall vote to approve the governor’s appointment.”

Five days before the scheduled floor debate, I emailed every senator to warn that Ciccone’s bill evoked the infamous Brayton Act of 1901, which had allowed the Senate to reject a governor’s nomination simply by ignoring it for three days. I suggested a plain English translation of Ciccone’s new language: “Governor, we’ll ignore your appointments until you nominate someone we like.” I said Ciccone’s legislation would make a sham of the Separation of Powers Amendment.

I sent a copy of my email to Edward Achorn at the Providence Journal, and that Sunday, the paper ran a blistering editorial that accused Senate leaders of undercutting separation of powers. “Rhode Island must not go back,” the editors declared. “Passage of this bill would signal that the new Senate leaders do not truly care about the public’s will.” It urged readers to phone the Senate president’s office and gave the number.

A few days later, Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed offered a floor amendment that doubled the time for Senate confirmation to sixty days and restored the automatic confirmation if the Senate failed to act. Senators approved Paiva Weed’s amendment unanimously, and the amended confirmation process later passed the House.

Lawsuits over the Senate districts that had been gerrymandered two years earlier made their way fitfully through state and federal courts. Karen Pelczarski argued in Superior Court on behalf of Barrington, Bristol, Little Compton, Tiverton, and Warren that the Senate map failed the constitutional requirement that districts be “as compact in territory as possible.”

Superior Court Judge Susan McGuirl ruled that the towns had “failed to establish, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the redistricting statute is irrational and has abandoned the principle of compactness.”

The five East Bay towns appealed McGuirl’s decision to the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the federal suits on behalf of African-American and Latino plaintiffs from South Providence worked their way toward trial in U.S. District Court.

Suddenly, on May 21, rumors raced through the State House that the federal litigation would end with a settlement. Senate leaders were to speak at a press conference in the Senate lounge, where a tripod held what were obviously maps to be unveiled.

Joseph Montalbano and Teresa Paiva Weed, strode to the lectern, both smiling broadly. Montalbano seemed uncharacteristically theatrical as he reviewed the complications caused by the 2002 redistricting. Downsizing had caused extraordinary problems, he said, but the Senate had been sensitive to minorities and he believed the courts would have upheld the 2002 redistricting plan. He wished to “make it very clear that the Senate was not admitting fault.”

Then, with a shy smile, Montalbano brightened and described himself as “someone who knows how to build a consensus.” He explained that the resignations of Senators Irons and Celona from districts adjacent to the City of Providence had allowed all sides to take a fresh look at the map. Paiva Weed added that ten senators had “put the principle of inclusiveness ahead of themselves.”

Their new map superimposed the 2002 district lines over brightly colored new Senate districts. No fewer than twelve had been squeezed and stretched into new shapes. What I had called “Caprio’s Castle” on Federal Hill gave many blocks back to what had been Charles Walton’s heavily black district on the South Side of Providence, and the redrawn district added a largely black neighborhood around Hope High School.

The district where Sen. Juan Pichardo overwhelmed Walton in the 2002 primary now reabsorbed heavily Latino blocks in Elmwood. Whether Walton would run again or not, the redrawn “majority minority” districts made it possible to elect both an African-American and a Latino to the Senate.

Charles Walton, the only African-American ever to serve in the state Senate, had stood stoically in the face of humiliation, introducing maps that would restore minority representation and forcing floor votes on them. The Senate had followed Irons’s lead in rejecting all of Walton’s amendments, and Walton accepted his 2002 primary loss to Pichardo with characteristic grace, leaving the Senate without rancor.

Irons had won but seeded resentments that sprang up to haunt him. By forcing Celona to step down, Irons virtually invited Kelly stalwarts who knew about his lucrative CVS business to blow the whistle, and they did. Now, with Irons and Celona gone, a dozen districts slid and bent to undo several — but not all — of Irons’s gerrymanders. Vivid colors on the new Senate map restored a measure of justice.

At the microphone, former Rep. Harold Metts, lead plaintiff in the federal suit, looked as happy as I had ever seen him. “We believe the plan the Senate is now proposing, by uniting upper and lower South Providence in one Senate district, is fair to black voters,” Metts said. “The plan is also fair to Latino voters because it allows them to elect the candidate of their choice to the Senate in a separate district.”

Beside me in the crowd, Tomás Ávila represented both the Rhode Island Latino Political Action Committee and the Common Cause board. He had hosted the first meeting of what became the Fair Redistricting Coalition at Progreso Latino five years earlier. “What do you think?” I whispered.

“Absolutely terrific,” Ávila enthused. “But why didn’t they just do right the first time? Think what the lawyers cost!”

Gerrymandering had cost the state millions, but Montalbano’s redistricting settlement quickly became law.

The 2004 legislative session rushed toward its close. Under the pressure of scandal, lawmakers passed and sent to the governor Common Cause’s new lobbying bill, now informally called “the Celona Law.”

Other ethics reforms also moved forward. For five years, Sen. Teresa Paiva Weed had been trying to reduce the number of officials required to file annual ethics disclosure forms. The paperwork annoyed community leaders who volunteered for unpaid posts that carried little power, and it forced Ethics Commission employees to request, receive, file, and monitor disclosure reports from thousands of officials who had no contracting or hiring authority. Meanwhile, a quirk of law allowed some school superintendents, public works administrators, and chiefs of staff to escape the filing requirement.

Paiva Weed’s legislation sought to resolve this by defining “major decision-making positions” and requiring financial disclosure from state officials who held them. It would require financial disclosure by municipal decision-makers authorized to spend over $50,000 and by all building inspectors, fire and police chiefs, and directors of public works. Members of boards with authority over education, zoning, and local taxation would also be required to disclose. Meanwhile, this new framework would excuse more than a thousand local officials from the annual filings.

In four previous years, unions representing unclassified employees had blocked passage, but Paiva Weed’s new clout as Senate majority leader enabled her to push her common-sense reform into law.

Another Paiva Weed bill required lobbyists who sought to influence executive departments or public corporations to register and report their activities. With separation of powers looming, House leaders were glad to pass Paiva Weed’s bill and a companion by Rep. Fausto Anguilla. Equally important in a year of scandal, Gordon Fox helped secure additional funding for the Ethics Commission that had fined him. Its budget increased by twenty-four percent.

But leadership had its limits. The Ethics Commission’s move in 2000 that permitted gifts of up to $150 on any occasion — or $450 per year from any “interested person” to any public official — had opened floodgates. In 2004 Joe Montalbano sponsored legislation to restore a limit on gifts to public officials. He proposed to bar public officials from accepting gifts worth more than $25 from any “person or business that has a direct financial interest” in a decision that official might make. The legislation passed the Senate early in May but died without a vote in the House Judiciary Committee.

To his credit, Mike Lenihan had assumed this would happen, and he filed a bill requiring public officials to report any gift worth more than $100 on an annual financial disclosure form. Late in the spring, House Majority Leader Gordon Fox introduced an identical bill, which passed the House in June.

Lenihan was also busy with separation of powers. In April, his Committee on Government Oversight unanimously approved his bill to abolish the Unclassified Pay Plan Board, and the full Senate did the same. On June 9, his committee recommended the three monumental omnibus bills to restructure or eliminate ninety-one boards. The full Senate took them up a week later. I watched from the gallery as Lenihan, in his civics teacher mode, explained a series of technical amendments. Around him in the semi-circular chamber senators absorbed the details without any sign of astonishment that these bills, once finally enacted, would end more than three centuries of what the state Supreme Court had called “quintessential parliamentary supremacy.”

Two years earlier, the Senate had led the way in passing constitutional amendments by Lenihan and Senate Minority Leader Dennis L. Algiere. One year ago, senators had approved the bipartisan Separation of Powers Amendment co-sponsored by Lenihan and Algiere. Now the Senate unanimously passed all three of Lenihan’s bills aimed at reconstructing boards to comply with separation of powers. Few expected the House to pass these bills, but they set a standard and established a process that House leaders could not ignore.

During supper break on what seemed to be the last night of the 2004 legislative session, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Sen. Joseph M. Polisena, who had co-sponsored Mike Lenihan’s ethics and lobbying bills, stood behind me. “Hey, Phil, how’d you like to climb the dome with us?”

Rhode Island’s State House boasts the fourth largest unsupported dome in the world, after St. Peter’s in Rome, the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, and the Taj Mahal. I had described its features to international visitors and dreamed of going up there someday. “Climb the dome?” I asked. “When?”

“Now.”

On the third floor, just beneath the dome, Polisena drew together seven legislators and me. As the lone lobbyist I wondered why, but did not ask.

At the base of one massive pillar, a uniformed officer worked his key in a cranky lock. I had always assumed the four mammoth uprights that held the dome were solid stone, but when the door finally opened, musty air flowed out around us. A light switch revealed a zigzag iron stairway. Like mischievous schoolboys, we stepped into a hidden shaft and started climbing the steep, narrow metal stairs. Each followed the calves and heels of the one ahead. From a landing, we stepped out onto a roof at the base of tourelles that stood on four sides of the dome.

Beneath an overcast sky, the state flag fluttered on a stubby pole that stood above the Senate’s looming skylight. We paused for photos, reentered the columned drum, and clambered up a steep spiral staircase. As we entered the dome, our stairway bent along its curve.

Out of breath, we reached a circular inner balcony where a heavy gilded chain stretched hundreds of feet down to the central chandelier. Just below us, larger than life on the dome’s inner surface, the mural showed Roger Williams purchasing land from the Narragansett sachems.

Finally, we climbed a few more steep steps up into the cupola and stepped out onto a tiny circular walkway. Only a metal railing protected us from a dizzying drop to the brick and marble plaza hundreds of feet below.

“Notice, Phil,” Polisena joked behind me, “it’s a long way down.”

I had enjoyed moments of triumph in the State House, but none like this. With jackets and legislative lapel pins far below, we were all on a first name basis. I felt giddy with the height and camaraderie. I knew we would make our way back down into familiar spaces and roles, but none of us would forget this adventure.

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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 46

Part 4

46

Triple Scandal (2003–04)

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

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Secrets and Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 46

Part 4

46

Triple Scandal (2003–04)

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

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