Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

Gov. Donald Carcieri denies that the cuts to municipal and school aid contained in his supplemental budget proposal will force cities and towns to increase property taxes. He further denies that the legislative measures he put forward ostensibly to reduce state spending and help local communities eat the cuts amount to using the budget crisis to stick it to organized labor.

The facts, however, do not bear out his disclaimers
There are only five and a half months left in the fiscal year, and members of the House Finance Committee are only going to get their first briefing on the supplemental budget tomorrow. Supplemental budgets are usually simple, thin documents, making midcourse adjustments at the margins of the original enacted budgets, but this one is a monster. There are 50 articles in Carcieri’s revised plan, about as many as in a regular budget. On the web at least — paper copies have not been made available to the press — it runs to 190 pages.
So by the time the House and Senate finance committees wade through it, hold hearings, and get around to passing it, there will be about four and a half months left in the fiscal year.
How are the cities and towns going to make up the $154 million in reduced aid to local units of government in that amount of time?
They ain’t.
Not short of drastic measures anyway, such as Woonsocket Mayor Susan Menard’s threat to pink slip 45 firefighters and 30 cops, close to one third of each department, as her answer to the cuts if those public safety unions don’t agree to givebacks from their contracts. Think of some of the fires that have occurred recently and ask if you want your community’s fire department to be reduced to 66 percent capacity.
Then again, a lot of the cops and firefighters and school teachers and public works employees in your town may not have to be laid off, because a lot of them are going to retire to get in under the wire of Carcieri’s deadline that they leave their jobs by April 1 or forever lose the cost of living allowance in their pensions and face a minimum retirement age of 59. (That is one place I thought the governor didn’t go far enough; retirement at 59 might be OK for a cop or fireman because of the physical demands of the job, but why can’t a school teacher or a City Hall clerk work until 62, or even 65?)
So while city and school officials are scrambling with one hand to fill the budget hole the governor’s budget will leave them, the other hand will be busy trying to replace — or find a way to do without — all the people who will be walking out the door on April 1. (Carcieri made the round of Sunday chat shows this week, saying that April 1 was just a date put in there to get the budget process moving and that he expects that deadline to change. Gee, what else in his proposal is he not all that serious about?)
But the June 30 end of the fiscal year is not going to move and mayors and town administrators are going to have to balance their budgets and if they only have a couple of months to work with, even massive layoffs will not achieve the required savings.
That is when you will get a supplemental property tax bill in the mail. Not to replace your old tax bill, this will be an extra tax bill, sort of like having to make a fifth quarterly payment.  When that happens, Carcieri’s boast that, “The plan I submitted to the General Assembly today eliminates this deficit, and does so without raising broad-based sales or income taxes” is going to ring pretty hollow to anyone who owns property. Property tax rates are supposed to be capped under a law passed a couple of years ago, but one of the exceptions to that cap is a loss of state aid, so cities and towns would be free to hike the rates, perhaps by more than they really need to in case the opportunity doesn’t present itself again for a while.
Likewise the governor’s claim that he isn’t exploiting the budget crisis to hobble organized labor.
Imagine for a moment that all of the pension reduction measures Carcieri has put forward are actually necessary (I don’t buy that for a minute; it is just more of the evisceration of the middle class that is the root cause of the wrecked national economy the governor says helped cause this in the first place, but imagine for a moment), why then did he have to salt his program with laws that, for instance, “explicitly prohibit” work-to-rule actions by teachers unions?
Even if they are ill-advised, steps such as taking minimum manning and health insurance coverage out of the reach of collective bargaining could fall under the rubric of what the governor calls giving cities and towns the tools to cope with his cuts, but nonsense like the work to rule ban and decertifying teacher unions for three years if they “promote” strikes, can’t be interpreted as anything else but jabbing a thumb into the eye of unions.
Work to rule is one of the labor tactics teachers unions have adopted in recent years to avoid going on strike – not only can strikes be disruptive, but teachers can be put in jail for walking out, so they look for alternatives.
It means teachers perform all of the duties required by their contract, but nothing more, no unpaid “extras” such as chaperoning school events, writing recommendation letters, providing additional after-school instruction.
I asked how someone could be prevented from working to rule – “Hey you, you’re following the rules, that’s against the law, you know.”
Peter McWalters, commissioner of elementary and secondary education said that change in the law relies on the theory that a professional’s obligation goes beyond what is covered in a labor contract. There are professional obligations that McWalters asserts one assumes by accepting a teaching certificate that make demands beyond the contract.
McWalters did allow that, “this could end up in court.” Ya think so?
That is never going to stand up in any court. Before anyone can be penalized for violating a law, that law has to explicitly state what conduct is required or banned.
By larding up his proposals with measures such as these, Carcieri loses any moral high ground he hoped to stand on in making the cuts.
Perhaps there is no political downside to bashing teacher and other public employee unions. If that is the case the public should be just as much ashamed of itself as the governor should be for proposing the cuts.
The problem is, if the General Assembly somehow finds the guts to not go along with draconian cuts like eliminating pension COLAs radically restricting collective bargaining rights, then it has to come up with $357 million from somewhere else to close the deficit.
Same thing with that odious global Medicaid waiver. The legislature has this week to reject that waiver or eat it. If it says no, that is tens of millions more dollars it has to come up with.
As the governor said in his televised address last week: “Do not mistake our present economic difficulties for a minor setback or a passing inconvenience. A sea of change is washing over us; a period of profound transformation. The decisions that we make and the actions we take will determine our direction well into this century. How we decide to cure this deficit will have long lasting consequences for Rhode Island’s future.” 
Amen to that, whether you agree with the governor’s proposals or not.