Guffey 2006 chapter One When Art Nouveau Became New Again
Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 19
Monday, July 13, 2015
Betwixt 1986 and 2006, Rhode Island ran a gauntlet of scandals that exposed corruption and angry public rage. Protesters marched on the State Business firm. Coalitions formed to fight for systemic changes. Nether intense public pressure, lawmakers enacted celebrated 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 Full general Assembly sacked the entire Supreme Court.
Without constitutional checks and balances, citizens suffered under unmarried party command. Republicans ruled during the nineteenth and early on twentieth centuries; Democrats held sway from the 1930s into the xx-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 Isle's culture of corruption, gave nativity to the nation'south strongest ethics committee, and finally brought separation of powers in 2004. No single leader, no political political party, no arrangement could have converted betrayals of public trust into celebrated reforms. But when citizen coalitions worked with defended public officials to address systemic failures, government changed.
Three times—in 2002, 2008, and 2013—Chicago's Amend Government Association has scored state laws that promote integrity, accountability, and government transparency. In 50-state rankings, Rhode Isle ranked second twice and start in 2013—largely considering of reforms reported in SECRETS & SCANDALS.
Each calendar 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 managing director of Common Crusade of Rhode Isle. The book is available from the local bookstores found Here.
Part 2
JUDGES AND LAWMAKERS
Chapter 19
Paying the Piper (1992-93)
"Nosotros've got our shot," Gary Sasse told me with a wry smile. "How often do legislative leaders invite y'all to redesign their bailiwick?" He had nurtured the vision for an contained blue ribbon committee to create "a blueprint for the General Assembly in the 21st Century." With the back up of legislative leaders the proposal had passed hands at the end of the 1992 legislative session, a final concession to the Right Now! Coalition. After the General Associates adjourned, Speaker Joe DeAngelis and Senate Bulk Leader John Bevilacqua appointed a 16-member panel, with Sasse as chair.one
Before coming to Rhode Isle, Sasse had served on the senior staff of Tennessee Gov. Winfield Dunn. Lean, lanky, minor, and around fifty, he had played college football for Florida State and flew to Tallahassee several times each autumn to cheer the Seminoles. Years of reading gridiron defenses had prepared him to see pathways through political minefields.
He brought the commission together for an overnight retreat within walking distance of Quonochontaug Pond, a stretch of table salt h2o behind the dunes on Rhode Island's southern coast.2 Without lobbyist badges or legislative lapel pins, nosotros settled into lawn chairs and met every bit peers. "This is coincidental, " Sasse told the opening session, "but we have real work to practice. Nosotros need to reach consensus on reforms that will improve future operations of the Full general Associates."
A national skilful, William T. Pound from the National Briefing of State Legislatures (NCSL), had come to guide united states. "You couldn't undertake this written report at a more opportune fourth dimension," he began. "Over the terminal decade or so, we've watched decision-making shift from Washington to state capitals, which raises questions of legislative expertise and chapters." Pound had an easy smile, white mustache, and round face. He did not mention the RISDIC disaster that had revealed ignorance, gullibility, and many conflicts of interest in the General Associates.
Long before the colors ruddy and blue automatically identified Republicans and Democrats, Pound'due south organization had begun using those colors to draw characteristics of state legislative bodies. "Bluish legislatures" were part-fourth dimension operations, typically with small staffs and low pay, where legislators needed exterior piece of work. By contrast, "cerise legislatures" functioned like Congress, with full-time lawmakers and professional staff to do research, draft legislation, and manage constituent services. Between these extremes Pound identified hybrids, which he called "white legislatures." In those bodies, he explained, lawmakers spent most of their time representing their constituents but received modest pay. Farther gradations included "calorie-free red" and "light blue." A chart listed states in each category. Rhode Island's General Assembly cruel between "blue" and "light blue," since near lawmakers had no staff and ranked nearly the lesser in legislative compensation.3
Rep. David Dumas, who was retiring from his mail service equally House minority leader, said the abysmal pay forced him to step down. Since 1900 Rhode Isle'due south Constitution had specified legislative pay as five dollars a day up to a maximum of sixty days: a total of $300 per year. Three times in the last twenty years pay raise amendments had gone before the voters, who spurned them every time. In 1986, more than 64 per cent of state voters rejected college salaries.4 After that rebuff, lawmakers thumbed their noses and doubled their pensions. And then scores of General Assembly members secretly secured special pension bills that immune them to buy pension credits for military service or years served on local boards.
"Pension shenanigans have poisoned the body politic," Dumas said equally we lounged on Adirondack chairs. "Only lots of luck in disarming voters to pay more. People in my district know I run a solo law practice. They know I'm at the Country Business firm three or four afternoons a week for half-dozen months every spring. They know I tin't afford to go on. But if you remember they'll approve a legislative pay heighten, I'll give y'all a deal on the Brooklyn Span." Dumas shook his head. "Legislative pay is an utterly intractable puzzler."
I knew he was right. When I kickoff went to the State House, the sheer size of the General Assembly shocked me. How could a state just over a million people beget 150 state legislators? Rhode Island and nine other states averaged fewer than x,000 people for each lawmaker, but all the others were rural and sparsely populated.5 Past contrast, Rhode Island ranked 2nd just to New Bailiwick of jersey in population density, and New Jersey had almost 10 times as many constituents per legislator.half-dozen Since 1987 Common Crusade had favored downsizing Rhode Island's senate from fifty to 25 seats and shrinking the House from 100 to 50 representatives. Even after those reductions, Rhode Island legislators would still represent fewer people than their counterparts in whatever other urbanized land.seven
James Madison, the political theorist widely regarded as the architect of the U.Due south. Constitution, had warned against the supposition that large legislatures were more representative than minor ones. "Afterward securing a sufficient number for the purposes of safety, local information, and of diffusive sympathy with the whole gild," Madison wrote, any further increment in numbers would counteract effective representation.
Later our initial retreat, the group met at the State House every 2 or three weeks through the fall. Sessions were always posted nether requirements of Rhode Island's Open up Meetings Law, but reporters rarely came, and only a handful of citizens showed interest. Gary Sasse held dorsum his own expertise and drew others out, remaining patient fifty-fifty when comments came with an edge. He often defused arguments by asking how an idea translated into a meliorate legislative system. "Retrieve," he said once, "we're trying to build a train that stays on the tracks no matter who's at the throttle."
John Bevilacqua had appointed Ray Dettore, a lawyer who worked for the City of Providence. Legally bullheaded, Dettore held a complex nautical chart on legislative pay simply inches from his thick glasses and extracted its essence: "This confirms that Rhode Island'southward legislative pay is among the lowest in the land, simply in a higher place New Hampshire's." With wide, half-seeing eyes, Dettore panned around the table. "How many of united states would enter a profession where there hasn't been a pay raise in 90 years? Should we exist surprised when some senators or reps compensate themselves in dubious ways?"
"Five dollars a twenty-four hours was standard pay for railroad managers in 1900," said Patricia Houlihan of the AFL-CIO. "The problem is that voters have kept refusing to meliorate the Constitution to raise legislative pay. Even after ninety years of aggrandizement."
Anybody agreed that the pay scale made no sense, but there was no consensus on what information technology should exist. And no 1 knew how to market a pay raise to voters whose wounds from RISDIC were all the same raw.
I had much to larn about the constitutional powers of legislatures and the history of Rhode Island's General Associates. Why did Rhode Island legislators introduce more bills than lawmakers in all but 4 other states? Why did legislative leaders tolerate the stampede of session-catastrophe special pension bills? Before our movement to Rhode Isle I had testified before legislative committees in New York and Connecticut, but never watched the intricacies of what many called "legislative sausage-making." I knew virtually goose egg nigh how legislatures functioned farther west and south.
Aggrandizement had driven the Consumer Price Index upwardly 234 percent in the last twenty years, but Rhode Isle had non raised legislative wages since the State House was congenital in 1900. Only a constitutional subpoena approved by voters could lift the General Assembly's pay, and voters had rejected higher compensation in 1962, 1973, 1980, and 1986.9 Sixty-four percent of the electorate had crushed a pay raise proposed past the 1986 Constitutional Convention.10
Lawmakers found ways around voters' resistance. In 1947 the General Associates created a legislative pension system; after the proposed 1986 pay heighten was defeated, bills appeared to double the size of legislative pensions. I sponsor, Federal Colina Sen. John Orabona, spoke candidly to reporter Chiliad. Charles Bakst: "If the voters feel legislators do non merit a pay increment, then yous have to have some other type of compensation. It'southward fair, and it'south simply." Bakst reported that despite the likely public backlash, the alimony-doubling legislation "leaped off the starting block" on the next-to-last 24-hour interval of the 1987 General Associates session. It passed among hundreds of bills on the final night.xi
Beyond infuriating the voters, the doubling of legislative pensions created a sense of entitlement as lawmakers channeled a alluvion of special pensions to themselves and their cronies. Pension abuses in 1987 left an enduring loftier-water marking. One of the near egregious bills allowed a bevy of union officials to buy into the state pension organisation at bargain basement prices.12
Steve Kass, a WHJJ-AM radio talk evidence host, had served as a delegate to the 1986 Constitutional Convention. He supported a General Assembly pay heighten but took offense. "This kind of action is why people won't give them a pay heighten," he told listeners. "They took the back door." Kass soon filed suit to block the newly doubled pensions, and angry listeners mailed enough checks to fund the lawsuit, just he remained skeptical about the judicial process. "Let's face up it," Kass asked listeners, "where does the judiciary come from? The legislature, and that's a business organization. Can we get a fair hearing?" More than than he knew, Kass had reason to exist suspicious. His instance, Kass v. Retirement Board, landed on the calendar of Superior Court Guess Antonio S. Almeida.
Kass's chaser, George Vetter, argued that although legislative pay was depression, lawmakers had violated the Constitution's bounty clause when they boosted their pensions.15 Vetter zeroed in on the actuarial discrepancy between $90 per year that lawmakers would pay in and the generous pensions — $600 per legislative year, upward to a maximum of $12,000 subsequently twenty years — that taxpayers like Steve Kass would have to fund. "If the people wanted to have the General Assembly ready their ain salary," Vetter insisted, "they would have said so."
Plaintiffs who supported doubling the pensions included the General Assembly, the State Retirement Lath, and General Treasurer Roger N. Begin, a erstwhile state representative from Woonsocket. Attorney John Dolan argued that pensions were mere fringe benefits and that the Constitution did not forbid the legislature to grant or enhance them.
Kass's suspicion of the judiciary proved prescient. Judge Almeida ruled that doubling legislative pensions did not violate the Constitution, and the Supreme Court, comprised entirely of former legislators, agreed. In a unanimous opinion, Joseph R. Weisberger wrote that retired senators and representatives had been receiving legislative pensions since 1947. He added that the 1986 Ramble Convention could have proposed to end or restrict those pensions but it did non. "Had those delegates desired to prohibit statutory pension benefits to land legislators," Weisberger wrote for the high court, "they would have done and then explicitly."
Across the fact that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of doubling legislative pensions, the approximate upheld in Kass v. Retirement Board achieved his own notoriety barely a year and a one-half after. In July 1991, Judge Almeida was arrested only moments later on he pocketed an envelope blimp with $ane,500 in marked bills, and he eventually pled guilty to accepting $45,100 in bribes.18 A colleague on the Superior Court fined him $50,000 and sentenced him to six years in prison. The Retirement Lath sued to revoke Almeida's $97,904-peryear judicial alimony and ultimately succeeded.
Could our Blue Ribbon Commission ever resolve this biting legacy of arraign? Even if we could diagnose chronic dysfunction and propose solutions, could we persuade mutually resentful audiences — 150 members of the General Associates and hundreds of thousands of state voters? In an try to try, nosotros issued an open invitation for witnesses to testify — in person or in writing — at a series of televised hearings from January to March of 1993, with specific topics scheduled for each Mon evening. The Providence Journal apace weighed in with an editorial. "The General Assembly," the editors wrote, "is a part-time, underpaid, overworked, intensely politicized aggregation of amateurs, imprisoned by a procedure that tends to hinder excellence and independence and advantage self-promotion — and, from time to time, out-and-out corruption."
The editors added that the legislature could not fulfill its duty "when it is mired in inefficiency; when some of its members indulge in glaring conflicts of interest; when some of its committee chairmen display autocratic ability; and when the establishment is and so large as to be sluggish and unwieldy." The editors urged Rhode Islanders to attend the hearings and speak up "for the legislature they want."
Room 35 in the State House basement was equipped for boob tube. Its walls had been stripped to century-old bricks, and a blueish curtain hung backside ergonomic chairs for members of the House Finance Committee. The RISDIC Investigating Commission had used the room for many public hearings. I had often watched from the audience never sat in ane of the high-backed black chairs behind the indigestible dais.
From the middle seat, Gary Sasse summarized our committee's work over six months. He introduced members of the panel and invited witnesses to share their ideas about structural steps for improving the General Assembly. Should Rhode Island switch to a unicameral legislature, as Nebraska had done? Should we go to a full-time legislature? Reduce the number of legislators? Gear up term limits?
Former Lt. Gov. Richard A. Licht alleged unequivocally that a General Assembly of 150 was far as well large for a country of only a million people. He suggested cutting the House from 100 to 50 representatives and the Senate from 50 to 24. Downsizing the legislature, Licht said, would make lawmakers more than visible in their districts, and might persuade voters to consider a pay heighten that was long overdue.
Next to evidence was Lt. Gov. Robert Weygand, who had helped put Brian Sarault in prison two years earlier. "Every bit nosotros move into the twenty-first century," Weygand testified, "the question is whether we'll continue with an amateur legislature or create a torso that tin deal head-on with the complex issues that confront our state." He urged reducing the number of legislators. "Last year, nosotros had over four thousand bills introduced, and that was fewer than the year before. When I chaired the House Corporations Committee, I had to read thousands of bills. I tried to exist responsible, but there was no way I could stay on top of them all." He urged stronger professional staff to assistance lawmakers with research and constituent services, besides every bit improved equipment and computer admission for every legislator.
Although the question of legislative pay no longer affected him, Weygand continued, the state must deal with information technology. Even increasing from $5 to $100 per solar day might not solve the problem. "There's huge stress and pressure in having to leave your regular place of business afterward lunch three days a week all through the jump. For my piece of work every bit a mural builder, that was the busiest fourth dimension of twelvemonth." Although he was non sure how to persuade the public of this, "it's bones in whatsoever business to pay your employees fairly. When you don't, you invite precisely the kind of problems we've seen in contempo years. Either you are going to make the leap to reasonable salary or strip responsibilities and go dorsum."
Old Senate Minority Leader Lila M. Sapinsley, a moderate Republican with elegance and gravitas, had narrowly lost a race for lieutenant governor and now volunteered with several nonprofits, including Common Cause. She proposed higher legislative salaries, an end to legislative pensions, and strict ethics rules. "Until people in the Full general Assembly recognize a conflict of involvement and steer clear," Sapinsley testified, "all the rest will be merely corrective."
Calendar week after week witnesses testified. Some had served as statewide officers or legislators, others worked in government agencies, 1 taught political science, and a few were citizen activists. One evening in March, both Joe DeAngelis and old Senate Majority Leader Jack Revens spoke.
DeAngelis, with his neatly trimmed mustache, remained one of the nearly successful lawyers in the country. No longer speaker of the House, he seemed diminished equally he sat earlier the commission. Routine conflicts of interest and lax legislative oversight had come crashing down on his watch. Cypher would change his responsibility for that. Defensively, he recited the reforms approved since RISDIC. "We enacted DEPCO in thirty-6 days," he said. "Nosotros reformed pensions and restructured state purchasing." He ended by saying plaintively that he and other leaders had "done a lousy task of promoting ourselves."
Jack Revens had risen to the top spot in the Senate after his quondam-school predecessor, Rocco Quattrocchi, botched the redrawing of Senate districts in 1982. Taxpayers were stuck with the costs of protracted litigation. Judges blocked the election of senators in 1982 and forced the drawing of new Senate districts. As a result, Rhode Island country senators met as lame ducks throughout the leap of 1983 and had to compete that June in a costly special ballot. Voters expressed their disgust past electing fourteen Republican senators, a record number since Democrats grabbed power in the Bloodless Revolution of 1935. Senate Democrats dumped Quattrocchi and elected Jack Revens majority leader.
At 36, Revens had already spent one-half his life in politics and had learned painful lessons. A tragic blow had seared his grapheme. While a educatee at Providence College, he struck and killed a pedestrian ane nighttime on Boston Neck Road. Although no charges were filed, Revens never forgot. "You lot know," he told a reporter, "you wish you could notice some way to change it. You lot rethink information technology and rethink information technology and rethink it. Was there anything y'all could have done differently?"
Over several years I had come to respect Revens for his intelligence. At present he testified before the Blue Ribbon Commission with cool detachment. "It'south difficult for the legislature ever to wait good," he said. Thin, tall, and balding, he spoke with wry self-conviction, as if he had no need to persuade. "I have legislation pending to reduce the size of the Senate by half. Yous tin imagine how pop that makes me with my colleagues, but it's necessary and the right thing. Nosotros have far more senators than we demand, and with then many, it makes questions of a pay raise all the more complicated."
Revens scanned the dais. "If we were request in the abstract what size the General Assembly should exist, no rational person would say a hundred reps and l senators." He said the legislature'south size distracted from the central issue: legislative pay. "Pay should reverberate fairly what work the public expects the legislature to do. A existent problem in Rhode Island is that all state officials are significantly underpaid. The attorney general makes only one-half the salary of the U.S. attorney or a lawyer who's made partner in a downtown firm. I know it'southward not easy to get the public to pay, but our pay should exist in the ten-to-xv-thousand-dollar range. To quote an erstwhile platitude, 'You get what yous pay for.' "
He urged the states to preserve what he called "a citizen legislature." With his characteristic detachment, Revens saw no reason for a full-time professional legislature. "You lot don't need full-time legislators if you improve the quality of staff to analyze circuitous issues." He spoke laconically, moving through the matrix of legislative functions, schedules, and structures like a plumber tracing pipes through the basement of an old firm, explaining what each did and how they connected.
Beyond taking public testimony, the Blue Ribbon Commission too surveyed electric current and quondam legislators, and 175 returned questionnaires. Nearly all said they felt overworked, undervalued, and underpaid. Their feedback showed a surprising corporeality of agreement, particularly the need for reliable legislative information. They wanted figurer access for anybody, including the public, to bills and legislative data, and asked for more than staff to help sort through torrents of data. "Information technology's similar trying to beverage from a fire hose," one wrote. Many requested fiscal bear on statements and professional analysis of major bills before their transfer from committees to the floor.
Amid former lawmakers who took fourth dimension to respond, nearly four out of five agreed that the General Assembly should go along as a "office-fourth dimension citizens' legislature" rather than get a full-time professional torso. Almost all of them favored a dramatic increase in pay, and 59 percentage wanted to keep legislative pensions based on years of service. Most 84 pct idea it would exist wise to downsize the House by 25 percent and to cutting the Senate by half. Most as well favored four-year terms for senators; 89 percentage called for shared function space, phones, vocalism mail, and secretarial support.
By contrast, there was no agreement on term limits for legislators, which had become popular in other parts of the state. In 1990 and 1992, voters in a dozen states had established term limits, typically half-dozen or viii years for senators and representatives. Most onetime Rhode Isle lawmakers did non like that idea.
With mounds of testimony, completed surveys, and enquiry data from other states, the Blue Ribbon Commission spent four months drafting a preliminary report. The work reminded me of boiling down maple syrup in the Catskill mountain valley where I grew up: lugging buckets of clear sap to an oblong tub over a stone fire pit, pouring into the steam, stoking the fire, then climbing through snowy forest for more sap. Gradually, the articulate liquid turned bister. Our panel's final product might not exist sweetness, only it would exist 18-carat.
We would propose electric current compensation of $10,000 per year with full family health insurance — costs that roughly equaled the pensions that would be eliminated. The official position of the Common Crusade state governing lath was for a bacon equivalent to 125 percent of Rhode Isle'southward average wage, approximately $8,352, with no wellness insurance. I urged the board to accept the commission's slightly higher amounts, and they agreed. And to avoid future battles over raises, nosotros would put a price-of-living escalator in the proposed constitutional amendment.
Along with a grand bargain over pensions and pay, almost of the states were ready to recommend downsizing the Full general Assembly by one third, from 150 to 100 members. All but one member of the panel affirmed Sen. Jack Revens's legislation to cutting the House from 100 to 75 representatives, the Senate from 50 to 25 senators.
"I like Jack Revens, but downsizing makes no sense." The AFL-CIO's Patricia Houlihan was determined. "There would be a terrible blood-letting to see which xx-five senators survive. It's wrong to chop away at the General Assembly, peculiarly if we're non proposing 4-year legislative terms."
I reminded her that Revens had proposed four-year terms in exchange for a smaller state senate.
Houlihan glared. "Labor's position last year was to create four-year terms both for general officers and the General Assembly, just your reform groups never took it seriously."
Sasse tried to mollify her. "Downsizing wouldn't take place until afterward the next census, and that would be eight years after passage of the subpoena. If past feel is any guide, many electric current members of the General Assembly may motility on in that fourth dimension."
"That's fantasy," she shot back. "Window-dressing. Rhode Island voters take a closer connection to their senators and reps than you lot come across in other states. In all the inquiry nosotros've done, in all the conversations we've had, I accept all the same to see a shred of evidence that closeness is bad for commonwealth."
I reminded her of the RISDIC scandal and pointed out that Rhode Isle legislators would still represent fewer constituents than their colleagues in forty other states.
"You've said all that before," Houlihan said, "and I'thousand certain you'll say it all again. Only you haven't convinced me, and I don't think you'll convince many in the Senate. It's obvious that if you double the number of people in their districts from twenty to twoscore g, they won't accept anything like the intimate relationship that people enjoy now. It only won't be the aforementioned, and it doesn't matter whether yous downsize adjacent year or in 2002."
She would not budge. "I want AFL-CIO's opposition to downsizing noted in our concluding report."
"You got it," Sasse agreed.
Item by item, nigh members of the commission supported a preliminary report we would release for discussion. At its core were 2 compromises: offset, an stop to legislative pensions for all lawmakers elected afterwards passage of a constitutional amendment that would raise compensation to $10,000 per year, adjusted to follow the federal Consumer Price Index; second, downsizing the House from 100 to 75 representatives and the Senate from 50 to 25 senators. Senators would go four-year terms, while representatives would keep with two. The downsizing would occur in viii years, when data collected in the 2000 federal census would guide the drawing of larger districts.
These historic changes could occur only if the General Assembly placed a constitutional amendment on the statewide ballot and voters approved. A less controversial constitutional amendment would end the roles of the lieutenant governor and secretary of state as presiding officeholder and secretary of the Senate. In their place, senators would elect their own officers.
Nosotros would as well advise improvements that the General Assembly could provide for its rank-and-file members: staff to aid with enquiry and constituent services, part infinite in or almost the Land House, voice mail, laptop computers, and a reckoner database of legislative data. We would urge that the legislative database be attainable to the public from computer terminals at the Country House and in public libraries. "Higher up all," we wrote, "the General Associates should conduct itself in accordance with the highest upstanding standards." No one was sure how to make that happen, but we urged ethics training to ensure that lawmakers would never exist ignorant of the constabulary.
Meanwhile the legislature had gone through a sea modify since Joe DeAngelis and John Bevilacqua appointed the commission in July of 1992. DeAngelis had stepped downwards voluntarily, and the November elections had swept Bevilacqua from power. Now new leaders — Business firm Speaker John B. Harwood and Senate Majority Leader Paul South. Kelly — controlled the General Assembly. Neither had been involved in designing our commission or appointing its members, although Gary Sasse had kept them informed and provided advance copies of our draft report. 2 years and ii days after the RIght Now! roll-out with pealing bells, we released the terminal seventy-folio study at a press conference in December.
Paul Kelly attended. Cheery and positive, he accepted his re-create and said he favored the thought of keeping the General Assembly as "a denizen legislature." Afterwards, he told reporter Russell Garland that he liked the idea of four-year terms for senators, but preferred to decrease the size of the Senate and Business firm by equal percentages. John Harwood ignored the event. He later told reporter Russ Garland that while he could affirm four-twelvemonth terms, boosted staff, and office space — the question of downsizing "must be looked at carefully."
Kelly and Harwood were consolidating their power. Would our recommendations gather dust on a shelf, every bit commission reports traditionally did? Were nosotros fools to call back we could move these proposals through the Full general Assembly and onto the 1994 ballot? Even if we did, would voters approve?
H. Philip West Jr. served from 1988 to 2006 as executive director of Mutual Cause Rhode Island. SECRETS & SCANDALS: Reforming Rhode Isle, 1986-2006, chronicles major authorities reforms during those years.
He helped organize coalitions that led in passage of dozens of ethics and open government laws and 5 major amendments to the Rhode Island Constitution, including the 2004 Separation of Powers Amendment.
Due west hosted many delegations from the U.Southward. Country Department's International Visitor Leadership Programme that came to learn well-nigh ideals and separation of powers. In 2000, he addressed a conference on government ideals laws in Tver, Russia. After retiring from Common Crusade, he taught Ethics in Public Administration to graduate students at the Academy of Rhode Island.
Previously, W 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 S African-sponsored civil war in Mozambique and afterward assisted people displaced by Liberia'due south civil war. He has been involved in developing affordable housing, 24-hour interval intendance centers, and other customs services in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
Due west graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, from Hamilton College in Clinton, Northward.Y., received his masters degree from Wedlock 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 Laurels-winning writer, a nonprofit executive, and retired United Methodist pastor. They live in Providence and take 2 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.
Related Slideshow: Rhode Island's History of Political Corruption
Related Manufactures
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Affiliate Ane
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Affiliate Two
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Three
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Affiliate Four
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Isle 1986-2006, Chapter Five
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Half-dozen
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Affiliate Vii
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Isle 1986-2006, Chapter Eight
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Nine
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Ten
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Affiliate 11
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Twelve
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Isle 1986-2006, Chapter Thirteen
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Xiv
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Affiliate xv
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Affiliate 16
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 17
- Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 18
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