Ken Block: RI is Racing to Tread Water
Monday, June 15, 2015
There is not a better example of what is broken with Rhode Island than what happened over the last two weeks with the firefighter overtime bills that were submitted to our General Assembly.
Rhode Island firefighter’s unions, very late in the legislative session, submitted a bill to mandate overtime for all hours that a firefighter works over 42 hours per week. This bill was at odds with federal law, which permits firefighters to work 53 hours per week before overtime kicks in.
Typically, bills cannot be submitted this late in the legislative session, which should end before July. For a bill to be submitted this late, the Speaker must specifically allow the bill to be introduced, overriding the legislature’s rules of operation.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe bills (one in the House, and one in the Senate) did not have financial impact statements attached to them. This is notable, because the General Assembly has a rule that these statements, called fiscal notes, are supposed to accompany bills that have a material economic impact.
Rhode Island’s mayors and town managers did supply some economic data, suggesting that the impact of these bills could cost Rhode Island municipalities many tens of millions of dollars annually statewide.
The bills enjoyed a rocket ship ride through the General Assembly, receiving Labor Committee hearings within days of being submitted. Notice was even given that the House and Senate Labor Committees were prepared to take up or down votes on the bills last Thursday – just over a week from when they were introduced.
Rhode Island’s General Assembly took 51 years before it allowed an up or down vote to be taken on eliminating the master lever, but it was prepared to smash through a costly, special interest bill defining firefighter overtime in a disadvantageous way for RI taxpayers in just one week.
A full court press by mayors, town manager and advocates was required to ultimately beat the bills back.
All of that time and energy, just to keep our desperate economic situation from getting even worse.
How can the General Assembly claim to be all about improving Rhode Island’s economic condition when it allows such a harmful and nonsensical bill to enjoy the special attention the overtime bills received?
There are roughly 2,000 career firefighters in Rhode Island. Why does a special interest bill they desire narrowly miss receiving an up or down vote, while the line-item veto bill, which more than 1,300 voters have sent email to the Speaker asking him to pass, gets sent to the legislative equivalent of Siberia – held for further study, never to be ‘studied’ again this session.
Why would the General Assembly come so close to passing a firefighter overtime bill that would have been unique (in a really bad way) compared to the rest of the country? Rhode Island is one of only six states that do not have a line-item veto. Let’s race to fix that one up, okay Mr. Speaker??
We have serious problems that need fixing. Rhode Island still lags most of the rest of the country economically, businesses can and do pick Massachusetts over Rhode Island because Massachusetts is a business friendlier place, our infrastructure is literally falling down, our schools underperform, we have cities and towns in financial distress and we have fire districts in Coventry, Lincoln and who knows where else circling the fiscal drain.
How Not to Fix RI
And with all of our issues that need fixing, our General Assembly feels compelled to address the burning need of defining firefighter overtime differently than well-established federal law.
You want to know what is wrong with Rhode Island – go read that last sentence again, and again, and again.
Taxpayer advocates and mayors and town managers spend all of their time playing defense, trying to not have the status quo get worse.
How will we ever make things better when the special interests have the obscene ability to manipulate harmful legislation through our General Assembly without a shred of research being done by the Assembly to ensure that the bill will benefit all Rhode Islanders?
We need to do things differently. We need legislative leadership to actually make economic recovery the first priority of the legislature – and not just pay the idea lip service. Rhode Island will not become a place people race to move to when our local taxes are amongst the highest in the country.
Rhode Island’s per capita cost of fire protection was the highest in the country of any place that I compared. Why would our General Assembly take action that would have made the cost of fire protection go even higher?
Now that disgraced former Speaker Fox is headed off to jail, it is time for our General Assembly to pass a meaningful ethics bill that puts back in place the Ethics Commission’s oversight of the legislature as the voters demanded.
Rhode Islanders have always tolerated the wink and nod politics that comes along with being such a small state, but this tolerance is wearing very thin. Will leadership arise within the General Assembly that is dedicated to reform? Are there heroes within the General Assembly ready to take the status quo head on and fundamentally change that institution from the inside?
Until the General Assembly becomes the driver of change, Rhode Island will continue to tread water, growing more and more weary spending all of that energy to just bob on the water, like a piece of flotsam.
Related Slideshow: Rhode Island’s History of Political Corruption
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