March bursts upon the scene with a blast of cold air, as lawmakers return to Smith Hill and the political pot keeps bubbling. Thanks for stopping by for my weekend column. As usual, your tips and comments are welcome, and you can follow me through the week on the twitters. Here we go.
1. With three-plus months left in the legislative session, Governor Gina Raimondo‘s and House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello‘s clashing priorities remain on a collision course. Mattiello has made clear his intention to begin a phaseout of the car tax, and Raimondo keeps campaigning for her college tuition plan. During a stop at Rogers High School in Newport this week, the governor once again framed the issue as a key for the economy. “The three hottest economies in the U.S. are Massachusetts, California and New York,” Raimondo said, according an account in the Newport Daily News. “They all have higher taxes than we do. What they have in common are large numbers of workers with massive amounts of skills.” (Interestingly, House Finance Chairman Marvin Abney, D-Newport, praised Raimondo’s initiative, saying, “It is a great idea, what she is trying to do. We will find a way to make things work for you [students].” Yet other state reps are sketching out different positions. Rep. Robert Phillips (D-Woonsocket), for example, used a news release to call the governor’s plan “intriguing,” while saying the money would be better used for now by improving career and technical K-12 education. Some of this debate will come into view when the House Finance Committee holds a March 15 hearing on Raimondo’s college tuition plan. Meanwhile, a better read on the amount of money available to fund competing needs won’t emerge until the May revenue estimating conference. In theory, Mattiello and Raimondo could come up with a win-win for the state by striking a compromise that cuts the car tax while improving access to higher education. That twinning could please taxpayers, generate positive headlines, and bolster a perception of state leaders crafting tangible accomplishments by working together. Yet with more than a little turbulence in the relationship between the governor and the speaker, it remains unclear if a deal is even possible.
2. The formal start of the 2018 gubernatorial race remains off in the future, yet it’s clear that jobs and economy will be be a dominant topic. Governor Raimondo got some prominent exposure, via The New York Times (and PoliticoPro), while talking up a jobs message during a National Governors Association meeting in Washington, D.C. last weekend: “My own view is, we have to say: The whole game is job growth. People feel left behind because they are left behind. People feel the playing field isn’t level because it’s not level. So let’s level it.” Raimondo’s administration claims credit for getting Rhode Island back to work. The hard-charging Democratic governor has attracted some brand-label corporate franchises, presided over a decline in the state’s post-recession unemployment rate, and launched a variety of initiatives. Yet Rhode Island’s economic recovery remains uneven, so it’s no surprise that the Republican Governors Association is trying to capitalize on the situation with a social media campaign, entitled #DemGovFails. The RGA points to some of the Ocean State’s poor rankings in national business surveys, in challenging Raimondo’s self-description as a jobs governor. Meanwhile, as URI economics professor Leonard Lardaro points out, the percentage of Rhode Islanders who are actually working has yet to return to the recent high set in 2005. To state the obvious, RI’s economic problems have been decades in the making. Yet that won’t preclude a sharp debate in next year’s gubernatorial race about whether the jobs glass is half-full or half-empty — and whether the state is moving in the right direction.
3. Watch for Cranston Mayor Allan Fung to get some coverage in the NYT, too. The mayor’s ace assistant, Mark Schieldrop, said the paper reached out to speak with the mayor.
4. Cranston City Councilor Paul Archetto, a Democrat, tells TGIF he expects to announce a run for lieutenant governor in August. Term limits prevent Archetto, a former state rep and School Committee member, from seeking re-election. He said he received favorable scores from good government groups as a legislator, and believes he has a good base as a resident of Rhode Island’s third-largest city. Archetto is also one of the Cranston councilors whose wards was most heavily affected during Cranston’s “Ticketgate” scandal.
5. Maybe we hard-bitten Rhode Islanders should embrace happiness as part of the process for building a better economy. Sound silly? Well, Brown undergrad Kiera Peltz, a newly minted Cambridge scholar, is concentrating on happiness. As the BDH reported, “When developing her senior thesis, Peltz was interested in why American policy does not make people happier. She wrote a senior thesis on ways to use happiness research to influence the policy making process, focusing on three different policy areas: obesity, loneliness and unemployment. Professor of Philosophy Bernard Reginster, Peltz’s independent concentration and thesis advisor, said he was especially impressed by the work Peltz has done concerning Thomas Jefferson’s belief in citizen’s fundamental right to pursue happiness. Focusing on this notion, she laid out the reason for policy makers to consider happiness as a criterion to evaluate the effectiveness of their policies, he said. ‘It was a very impressive and ambitious thesis,’ Reginster said.” Still not convinced? Consider how online shoe retailer Zappos hit $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in 2008 — an accomplished attributed by CEO Tony Hsieh to the company’s embrace of happy weirdness. “I think it’s pretty hard to give great, amazing service if you’re an unhappy employee,” Hsieh tells the PBS NewsHour.
6. We’re no. 21! US News & World Report grades Rhode Island considerably better than some of the national business surveys, although the rankings are worse for education (31); infrastructure (35); opportunity (32); and government (38 — did they have to use that number?). On the other hand, we have the worst rating among the New England states; even problem-plagued Connecticut comes in at no. 12! Adding insult to injury, ultra-successful Massachusetts claims the top spot (while conservative fave New Hampshire places second). Still, let’s remember that large swaths of Massachusetts have much more in common with Rhode Island, economically and culturally, that the perimeter of wealth encircling Boston and Cambridge. Meanwhile, a new study finds that Boston is kind of meh when it comes to broad-based economic growth.
7. The release of a batch of State Police documents pertaining to 38 Studios mostly reinforce the existing narrative: bad things happen when secrecy shrouds an effort by insiders to funnel millions of public dollars.
8. Media writer Ken Doctor had a long recent take on the significance of Japan’s SoftBank $3.2 billion acquisition of Fortress Investment Company, which manages the parent company of the ProJo and lots of other US newspapers. Here are Doctor’s key takeaways: 1) New Media Investment Group/GateHouse Media plan to keep growing while cutting newsroom resources; 2) Institutional and mutual fund shareholders with companies like Vanguard, Wells Fargo and T. Rowe Price own 70 percent of New Media Investment Group. “There’s rich irony here,” Doctor writes. “The retirement funds of those in the news industry, among many others, helps fund these New Media takeovers, which in turn result in more job cutbacks and the thinning of journalism in communities from coast to coast. Those nice dividend checks mean fewer journalist paychecks”; 3) “Word of an overall 4.6 percent budget cut across the chain is rifling through [GateHouse]”; 4) Fortresses’ management of New Media is “a good business story. More importantly, though, for the story of flagging local American journalism in a time of great societal stress, it’s a triumph of capital over community. The managers and the investors are the victors, the readers and the journalists the losers.” 5) Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the assets of certain traders have been frozen in a possible insider trading scheme related to SoftBank’s takeover of Fortress.
9. Last month, we wrote (#4) about the lonely battle fought by Rep. Jared Nunes (D-Coventry) and a bipartisan sprinkling of other lawmakers to change the House of Representatives’ rules for the 2017-2018 session. Nunes called it a matter of making state government more accessible and distributing legislative power more evenly. So when Rep. Jason Knight (D-Barrington) joined us for this week’s RI Public Radio Bonus Q&A, I asked why a progressive like him didn’t support the move to change the House rules. Here’s Knight’s response: “That has to do with process. By the time a bill gets to the floor, ideally it’ll have been talked about, and talked about a lot, both in committee and in less formal situations. And in this particular case, each and every one of those amendments that were offered on the floor — to my knowledge — were introduced cold on the floor with no advance planning. Nobody approached me beforehand to say, ‘Hey, you know, this is something we would like to do — what do you think about it? However progressives feel about leadership up there, the fact of the matter is that leadership has an extraordinarily difficult job of corralling 75 legislators, each with their own opinions, and they need to have a rule set that works for them because they’re leadership. I’m all for taking a look at those changes to the rules that were introduced in some of those amendments, but the way it got there was not collaborative, and I was not going to vote for it.”
10. Rep. Knight is declining at this point to support Governor Raimondo for re-election. Knight said he recognizes that the governor has a difficult job and doesn’t doubt that she takes it seriously. But he said he’s “very, very disappointed” with aspects of Raimondo’s job performance, particularly having to do with the UHIP mess. As far as 2018, Knight said, “I don’t really want to speculate on what that race is going to look like, because who knows if someone is going to come in or not. But I think that — I hope that the UHIP debacle, frankly, is a wakeup call for the governor and her staff.”
11. Back on February 24, Speaker Mattiello‘s tweet-storm about the governor’s education plan quickly blew up into full-blown media coverage, a reflection of the close attention that reporters pay to Twitter. So it won’t be a surprise if more pols start using the land of 140 characters to break news on occasion. Still, it’s worth remembering that with about 918 followers, Mattiello isn’t exactly a Twitter enthusiast. Some members of his leadership team have ambivalence about the social media. Deputy Majority Whip Chris Blazejewski, for example, has tweeted only twice. And Majority Leader Joe Shekarchi doesn’t follow anyone on Twitter, although his deep information base suggests the use of well-organized Twitter lists. Across the partisan aisle, Brian Newberry continues to show a strong knack for Twitter, using it as a way to express his views and share information. And more incoming lawmakers seem to be on Twitter, if they are not frequent tweeters. All this marks a distance from the time, back around 2009/2010, when then-Reps. Ray Sullivan and Chris Fierro caused a stir by tweeting details from a closed briefing.
12. Former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, now a partner in the DC office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. will be the features speaker for a one-day conference presented by the U.S. District Court for the District of RI, “The eLawyer Era and the Court – Challenges for the Future.” It’s on for March 23 at the Omni Providence Hotel.
13. U.S. Sen. Jack Reed sat down with SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch in the senator’s Washington office on Wednesday. “Senator Reed believes Judge Gorsuch will receive the fair public hearing that Republicans denied Judge Garland,” Reed spokesman Chip Unruh tells TGIF. “He remains concerned about Judge Gorsuch’s judicial philosophy, and expects to learn more from the hearing. Either way Judge Gorsuch should have to meet the 60 vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees.” Meanwhile, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse aired some of his concerns about Gorsuch during a Providence meeting last month.
14. The Coalition of Northeastern Governors has elected Governor Raimondo as chair, and Vermont Governor Phil Scott as vice chair, for 2017.
15. The Providence Board of Canvassers has told the City Council that it has certified 2,383 signatures to recall Councilor Kevin Jackson, according to Tricia Kammerer, a leader of the recall effort. She said the next step in the process is for the City Council to set an election, within between 30 and 60 days. “This is what democracy looks like — a grass roots campaign, with over 50 volunteers — collecting signatures from every street of every neighborhood of the entire ward,” Kammerer said in a statement. “We deserve a City Councilor we can trust, someone who is a role model and a leader, not someone who is an embarrassment.” Jackson, who first won election in 1995, has pleaded not guilty to charges of misappropriating campaign funds and embezzling more than $127,000 meant for a youth sports organization. He’s also fought a spirited legal battle against efforts to knock him out of office.
16. With Providence police getting set to implement the use of body-cams, NPR’s Martin Kaste finds that cams are offering a mix of benefits and drawbacks in New Orleans. Excerpt: “The extra hours of video-watching are an especially heavy burden for public defenders, who already carry huge caseloads. In fact, the Louisiana public defender system is currently being sued by inmates who claim they weren’t given sufficient legal counsel. And it’s not just lawyers who are spending hours with the videos. New Orleans police supervisors also are required to carve out time for them. ‘We mandate that they review any incident that results in a use of force or misconduct complaint or any type of injury,’ says Danny Murphy, the deputy chief of the NOPD’s Compliance Bureau. On top of reviewing those incidents, he says the department also wants lieutenants and sergeants to do random checks of videos of everyday interactions on the streets, to track their officers. ‘It’s facilitating close and effective supervision on a scale that’s never been seen before,’ Murphy says. Lieutenants are required to view at least 30 such videos a month — though they are allowed to fast-forward through portions in which little is happening. Still, that’s a big time commitment in a police department that has been chronically short-staffed and has a history of long response times for 911 calls. It also contributes to a feeling of being ‘nitpicked,’ says Donovan Livaccari, the lawyer for the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. ‘It leads to a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking,’ he says. ‘You’re talking about somebody who’s in the heat of the situation, is taking the actions that they think is the best at the time, versus somebody who has the opportunity to review a video 20 times before making a judgment. So I do think those kind of things do wear on people a little bit.’
17. RIPR’s John Bender explains why building affordable housing is a little like jumping into a pool naked.
18. The California Supreme Court has ruled that email sent by public employees on their personal devices or accounts are public records if they deal with official business. That’s significant, since, for example, the City of Providence blocked the public from seeing email sent and received by David Cicilline during his final two years as mayor.
19. Sen. Whitehouse on why national Democrats have struggled with their messaging: “Well, I think if I knew that I would be a bigger wheel in our operation. I don’t know the answer to that. I think partly it comes from the sort of big-tent, check-the-box politics that can emerge from a party that has very broad but not particularly deep backing. So, you’ve got right with Planned Parenthood, you’ve got right with the LGBT community, you’ve got right with public labor unions, you’ve got right with the private labor unions, you’ve got right with young voters, and you kind of, every time you do that, there’s another added step. And like the guy with 1,000 nails, nothing penetrates because there are so many nails you can actually lie on them comfortably So nothing actually sank through.”
20. Highway tolls are a hot topic in Connecticut.
21. Giovanni Feroce is set to headline North Kingstown Republicans’ 59th annual Lincoln Day Dinner, on March 25.
