By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — Whopping cuts in municipal and school aid, radical changes in retirement benefits for state and municipal employees and school teachers and a dollar-per-pack hike in cigarette taxes are among the measures Governor Carcieri is proposing to fill a $357 million deficit between now and the end of June.

Going over the heads of the General Assembly and the news media to speak “directly to the people,” Carcieri gave a televised address from his office outlining the state’s economic woes and giving broad outlines of his plan to address them.
“By reforming our public employee pension plans, modifying how we provide aid to our cities and towns, and improving how we deliver our social service programs, we will resolve our short-term budget problem and set the stage for a better Rhode Island,” Carcieri promised. “The decisions I have outlined here tonight balance our budget without raising broad-based taxes — without removing the safety net from anyone in need and without putting anyone out of a job.” 
Under the governor’s plan, Pawtucket would lose $5.4 million in combined municipal and school funding, Woonsocket would lose $3.8 million; Central Falls, $1.7 million; Cumberland, $1.6 million; Lincoln, $993,000; North Smithfield, $860,000; Burrillville, $782,000; Glocester, $560,000.
All $55 million in state revenue sharing to cities and towns would be eliminated. The permanent school fund set up to distribute revenue from 24-hour weekend gambling at Twin River would be reduced by $4.3 million and $5.8 million set aside for professional development for school teachers would be axed.
In what it called an effort to take some of the sting out of the cuts, the Carcieri is proposing a raft of legislation aimed at helping municipalities absorb the increases.
Among these are statewide programs for school busing and school lunches that will eventually be mandatory for all districts once their current transportation and food service contracts expire, an end to minimum manning provisions for municipal police and fire departments in contracts and arbitrations, repealing the requirement that school nurses be certified as teachers, establish “management rights” for school committees that remove issues deemed not appropriate for collective bargaining from contract negotiations, eliminate “work to rule” actions by teacher unions during labor disputes.
The supplemental budget also proposes eliminating cost of living increases in pension benefits at the state and local level and increases the minimum retirement age to 59 for any teacher or other public employee who does not retire by April 1.
Those and other proposed retirement changes would allow the state and the cities and towns to reduce the amount they have to pay into teacher retirement plans this year, however, any savings to cities and towns will be offset by a reduction in state aid to that district.
That concerned Dan Beardsley, executive director of the RI League of Cities and Towns.
“There is no guarantee that the legislature is going to pass any of this,” Beardsley said, but if it doesn't the districts will still have to make the payments and face the state cut anyway.
“This is going to put a couple of cities and towns over the edge,” Beardsley predicted. “You are going to see programs reduced or eliminated” citing as an an example “less frequent garbage collection.”
Both Beardsley and Tim Duffy, executive director of the RI Association of School Committees, worried that the reduced pension payments will have to be paid in full sometime down the line causing a problem in future budget years.
Duffy said the April 1 deadline to retire before losing COLAs and other retirement benefits “is going to be a problem for schools. You are going to lose a lot of talent at a critical time when you are trying to wrap up a school year.”
In a news conference after his speech Carcieri said “This has nothing to do with an anti-union agenda,” and argued that the only other option for closing the budget hole would be to raise taxes.
But local mayors said that is exactly what the plan will do – raise local property taxes.
“I invite anyone to come into the Town of Lincoln and tell us how to cut that amount from the budget” in the time left in the budget year, which ends June 30, Town Administrator Joseph Almond said. He added that the governor's plan “is good long term for Lincoln and the state, but in the short term, it is devastating. It is contrary to his proposal to not raise property taxes because that is exactly what it does.”
Cumberland Mayor Dan McKee fumed that “the people of Cumberland are getting the short end of the stick. He said the cuts punish communities that are already running efficiently, while municipalities that have fat in their budgets will be less affected.
“Our only option will be to cut into services where other communities may not have to do that,” McKee said.
Neither House Speaker William Murphy nor Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed offered a specific response to the governor's plan. Both said they had been briefed only on the outlines of the supplemental budget and not the details.
“The supplemental budget proposal contains very large and very major changes to government that will require major scrutiny by the House of Representatives,” Murphy and House Majority Leader Gordon Fox said in a written statement. “We need to be sure there are no unintended consequences and that the Governor’s recommendations are in fact achievable.”
“The introduction of the supplemental budget today is the start of an ongoing conversation between the Senate, the House and the Governor about the best course of action for our state to address the serious budgetary challenges we face,” Paiva Weed said in a statement of her own. “We have not yet had the opportunity to see the budget proposal in detail or to digest its contents.”
The cigarette tax would climb from $2.46 a pack to $3.46, said Paul Dion, chief of the office of revenue analysis, but because the state is removing minimum markup provisions that mandated a minimum price, a pack of cigarettes will still be cheaper in Rhode Island than in Massachusetts even though the Bay State's tax is only $2.51 a pack.
Dion said the price of a pack in Rhode Island will be about $6.67 while the Massachusetts price will be approximately $7.12.
In another budget reduction measure, the state is deferring its $10 million contribution to the settlement of The Station nightclub fire law suit to the 2010 budget year.