BY JIM BARON

WARWICK — After joining nearly all of his fellow governors in Philadelphia to meet President-elect Barack Obama, Gov. Donald Carcieri returned home Tuesday “impressed” with and “encouraged” by the next president’s willingness to work and partner with the chief executives of the 50 states to help stop the country’s economic slide.

“I was impressed by his command of the issues and the sweep of understanding of what we are facing, an awareness of the precariousness of where we are right now,” Carcieri said of Obama, who was joined at the governors’ conference by Vice President-elect Joseph Biden. “He made it clear from the beginning that he was there to listen, that he wanted feedback from the governors.”
With about 41 states staring at looking at deficits in their budgets, Carcieri said during a press conference at the T.F. Green Airport terminal shortly after his arrival, “there needs to be a big federal response, and it looks like there will be, helping states with their budgets. States are where services are provided for citizens — Medicaid, education.
“At the state level, there are limited things we can do,” the governor noted. “There are no easy or fast solutions to this problem. This is a time when we need the federal government’s resources to come to bear.”
Unlike the federal government, Carcieri said, the states must balance their budgets “and the effects are going to make matters worse, not better.” He noted that here in Rhode Island, “by reducing the state payroll, we exacerbated our own unemployment situation.”
Saying that Obama recognized that “the national economy is the sum of all the states’ economies,” Carcieri said the president-elect has asked that a “major stimulus package” be prepared for him shortly after he is sworn in next month so he can sign it right away and put it in motion.
The Associated Press quoted Obama as telling the governors: "This administration does not intend to delay in getting you the help that we need."
The stimulus package, Carcieri reported, will have two prongs – funding for infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges and rail transportation that will put people to work and get the economy moving again, and assistance with Medicaid, which is costing states more and more each year and creating their deficits.
“There was a fairly unanimous consensus (among the governors), that that’s the direction we need to go in,” he said, “and I got the sense from the president-elect that he agreed with that.”
One of the problems with Medicaid, Carcieri noted, is that “as unemployment rises, the need for services increases.”
The idea, Carcieri said, is to “provide some relief for the states. We have to balance our budgets, so without that (relief) the states will have to cut back services. Cutting back services, letting people go, raising taxes – that is counter to what the federal policy is, to stimulate the economy and get people to work.”
The usually upbeat governor sees the nation’s economic situation as bleak, saying, “we haven’t seen these kinds of times in most of our lifetimes. I thought I had seen a lot of business cycles in my career, but this is one of the most complex downturns, one of the worst I have ever seen.”
Asked if heavily Democratic Rhode Island might benefit from having a Democrat in the White House after eight years of a Republican president, Carcieri said, “this is not a partisan issue. This is beyond that. Our citizens are going through a trying time. A lot of people are out of work, most people are worried about their job, about being able to keep their house. The mechanism of what will flow to the states is not political. It is based on policy and facts and what the needs are.”
Carcieri said that Rhode Island is unlikely to run out of cash to operate, a possibility that is bearing down on some states. He said the $350 million in tax anticipation notes the state has sold would see it through the end of the fiscal year that ends in June.
He said the possibility of the Obama administration acting on Rhode Island’s application for a global Medicaid waiver, which the administration estimates would save $67 million in the current year alone, “wasn’t discussed at all.”
Carcieri said the state is close to reaching an agreement with the Bush administration on the waiver, and officials are headed down to Washington later this week, hoping to finalize the waiver, which would give the state a five-year block of Medicaid money and more flexibility on how it can be spent, but the state can get no more money if it overspends the Medicaid account during that period.