Tom Sgouros: Short Takes

Tom Sgouros: Short Takes

The War on Municipalities

One of the most promising political developments of the last decade came this past week when at last a Rhode Island Governor listened to some representatives of our cities and towns. For those who haven't noticed, your state has been waging war on your cities and towns for 20 years. State aid to cities and towns has been cut dramatically even while the state heaps responsibilities onto them: Educating disabled students, transportation to private schools, curriculum mandates, testing mandates, tightened fire codes and inspections, additional homeland security responsibilities for police departments, maintenance of effort rules for libraries, higher standards for water systems. These are all mandates that came with little or no additional money. Some of them are even things the state used to pay for itself, like education of severely disabled children.

At the same time these mandates have appeared and grown, the state is concerned with our very high property taxes. But Assembly leaders and governors past haven't been interested in the why about rising taxes, they made it perfectly clear that they only wanted taxes to be lower, and didn't care what services were casualties. That message was sent by passing a draconian tax limit authored by Senate President Teresa Paiva-Weed in 2006.

The tax limit in that bill applies to the tax collections in a municipality, saying they can't go up more than 4% per year any more. It is not a limit on the rate or the collections from an individual, but on the entire town. Therefore, new construction in your town cannot be used to expand tax collections. Are you expecting some new construction to help with the school budget? Can't happen under this law.

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Bills like this tax cap have been a long-time goal of the right wing of politics in our country. The first of these was Proposition 13 in California in 1978, followed shortly by Proposition 2 1/2 in Massachusetts, but neither one was as severe as the Paiva-Weed law.

A second wave of referenda washed over the land in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the bills were called "TABOR" for "Taxpayer Bill of Rights." Colorado passed one like it by referendum in 1992, and after a decade of experience, another referendum pretty much gutted it in 2005 over concerns about the damage done to Colorado schools, libraries, and other public services. Since then, similar referenda have gone down to defeat in Maine, California, Nebraska, Oregon, and Washington in recent years.

In other words, pretty much the only place in the whole country this right-wing idea has gotten any traction is in the supposedly Democratic-controlled Rhode Island Senate. Oddly enough, the Senate is also the body that led the way to giving us the only Democratic-passed Voter ID law in the country.

RI Republicans

There is all kinds of interesting news about the disarray of the Rhode Island Republican party lately. The disarray is a sad state, not least because our state could really benefit from vigorous competition between two parties.

Politics in Rhode Island is confusing to even the most perceptive observers, but a big part of the problem is a labeling issue. To know that someone is a Democrat in RI tells you approximately nothing about their policy preferences. We have pro-choice Democrats and anti-choice ones, pro-labor Democrats and anti-labor Democrats. Democrats who care deeply about the state of our environment and Democrats who make fun of Save the Bay and RIPTA. It's not easy even to say which of these factions is the majority.

Part of the reason is that the parties are so out of balance in the Assembly that the Republican party has pretty much nothing to offer a prospective candidate for office. Run under our banner, new state chair Mark Zaccaria will say, and we can promise you no party funds, a disorganized state operation, and no hope of any influence on legislation once you're elected. But I have some friends who will be a great team of volunteers, he'll say.

With a package like that, it's no wonder that the collection of Republicans in the Assembly includes mostly true believers and people whose political affiliations were formed out of state -- and candidates like Brendan Doherty and John Loughlin who can attract money from elsewhere.

On the other side, Democrats don't turn anyone away, and the Assembly leadership is filled with people who have nothing in common with the national party, which is how we come to have Voter ID and TABOR (see above), two right-wing ideas generated by a state theoretically under Democratic control.

The unfortunate thing about this situation is how stable it is. Power begets power, and though I am glad to have a self-described progressive be Speaker of the House, you can't say he's the most effective advocate for progressive ideas. Voter ID passed on his watch, and he was Majority Leader of the team that brought us the TABOR law. The flip side, of course, is that lack of power begets a lack of power, and the Republican party will continue to struggle until something changes.

I say the Republicans can learn something from their own history. After all, they did control a majority in the Senate in 1989, when a large faction of the Democrats, led by Sen. John J. Bevilacqua, broke away from Majority Leader David Carlin. An alliance between the Bevilacquans and the Republicans controlled the Senate for the rest of that term, and Carlin was left power only over parking spaces (which he used, and sent the renegades to the far corners of the parking lot). The missing piece was the Republicans didn't manage to get the Bevilacquans to change their party registration, so the moment passed with the 1990 elections. So I say to Mark Zaccaria, don't bother to recruit candidates to run for office; recruit the ones who are already there. Again, actual competition between parties who actually stand for something will benefit us all. Good luck, Mark.

Tom Sgouros is the editor of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter, at whatcheer.net and the author of "Ten Things You Don't Know About Rhode Island." Contact him at [email protected].