George Nee, of the AFL-CIO, center, talks with Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed, D-Newport, left, and Sen. Frank Ciccone III, D-Providence, after yesterday’s session. Ciccone is a field representative with the Rhode Island Laborers’ District Council.

>

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

PROVIDENCE — Desperate to close the state’s largest budget deficit in modern history, former Gov. Bruce Sundlun did not wait for labor union leaders to come to his office to discuss the situation.

The Democratic governor went to them.

In 1991, several weeks after he was elected, Sundlun personally appeared at the AFL-CIO’s Providence office to negotiate a cost-cutting proposal to shut down state government for 10 days. The subsequent three-day shutdown and pay-deferral plan saved nearly $50 million over two years.

“That’s the only way to get agreement,” Sundlun said yesterday of the importance of collaborating with unions. “If you don’t let labor in the door, you’re going to get nothing but your head handed to you.”

Governor Carcieri, dealing with the second-largest state deficit (by percentage of state spending) in decades, wants to save more than $100 million by laying off 583 state employees, forcing workers to take off six unpaid days before July, and requiring larger co-pays from retirees toward their state-subsidized health insurance premiums.

In his annual State of the State address Tuesday, the governor said that Rhode Island is on the brink of financial disaster and made a case to “bring employees’ compensation, fringe benefits, and workweek back into line with the vast majority of private-sector employees.”

The Republican governor has pledged to negotiate with union leaders, whom he invited to his office last week the day after unveiling plans for the furloughs and health-care changes. Both proposals would likely require either concessions from labor unions or General Assembly action.

Labor officials say they are willing to talk, but that they’ve largely lost faith in the governor.

“[This is] the worst relationship we’ve ever had with any governor we’ve ever worked with,” said AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer George Nee, who has represented Rhode Island workers since 1976. “Everybody else had an attitude of at least, ‘Let’s get business, labor and government working together.’ We’re still waiting for that to happen.”

Carcieri and key members of his team yesterday spent the day after his State of the State address on the talk radio circuit.

The governor went on the late-afternoon Dan Yorke Show on WPRO. Earlier in the day, his director of administration, Beverly Najarian, and his new director of revenue, Gary Sasse, reiterated his talking points on WPRO. Carcieri begins today on WHJJ’s Helen Glover Show.

While Carcieri broke no new ground yesterday, he said: “I get sort of tired of hearing, ‘Oh, he doesn’t reach out, he doesn’t talk.’ ”

In the last two months, the governor said, he’s had three meetings “with probably 10 or 12 of all of the leaders from all the different unions sitting in my office …Our finance team has been talking to both the House and Senate finance teams. There are all kinds of discussion going on…There is outreach going on. There are heavy negotiations going on right now [because] I would like to come to a resolution on this.”

Carcieri administration negotiators are scheduled to meet with union leaders tomorrow, according to Lucie Burdick, president of Local 580, the social workers’ union. No further meetings had been scheduled as of yesterday afternoon. On the radio, Carcieri added: “I don’t like standing up there saying to my own employees, people that work for the state — and lots of them work very hard, I understand that — I don’t like saying: ‘You’ve got to take a pay cut or that we’ve got to [increase] your health-insurance premiums.’ ...That’s not a fun thing to do.”

But, “we got to a point where we got way out over our skis with benefits that just are not affordable, and are too generous by the standards of what the average taxpayers got.”

In Tuesday’s speech, Carcieri said the average state employee works a 35-hour workweek and earns $61,000 per year. A separate Journal analysis found that the average state employee earned $51,400 last year.

The governor later said he’d push for a 40-hour workweek in negotiations with unions, but declined to detail further personnel moves that he may suggest in his fiscal 2009 budget proposal, which is expected late next week.

Suggesting that criticism from both sides may be political posturing, Yorke asked if the governor and the union leaders had an understanding that they “have to whack him in public,” while telling him in private, “we get it.” Carcieri’s response: “There is some of that. I understand. They understand I have to do some things.”

Asked if he believes the state’s legislators “get it,” he said: “They know we’ve got a big problem,” but “whether they get it from the standpoint of solving the problem without raising taxes, I don’t believe ... that that’s [a] commonly held view. They don’t like to say no, Dan. This is a body that is not used to saying no and so they want to find the money so they can say yes, and we have to stop that.”

House Finance Committee Chairman Steven M. Costantino yesterday declined to comment on whether the Assembly would help the governor achieve his personnel cuts. “I am hoping at this point that labor and the governor will resolve those issues,” he said.

Meanwhile, Rep. William San Bento, D-Pawtucket, introduced legislation yesterday that would presumably raise money for the state by increasing the number of video-slot machines allowed at Newport Grand by 399 and Lincoln’s Twin River by 498. Both the Assembly and the governor are considering allowing around-the-clock gambling at the Lincoln slot parlor.

But legislative leaders have largely been silent on alternative ways to address the state’s budget deficits, which Carcieri’s budget office estimates is $151 million for the fiscal year that ends in July and $384 million in the coming year. (The House fiscal staff projects next year’s deficit at $450 million.)

The state Constitution requires a balanced budget. Over the years, governors have sometimes been forced to meet this requirement with chutzpa and ingenuity, delaying an end-of-year municipal payment, for example, until the start of the new year.

In fact, the Carcieri administration’s attempts to close the books on the fiscal year that ended last June 30 were complicated by after-the-fact “audit adjustments” that punched a $15.7-million hole in that year’s spending plan. The administration’s plan: to use money in the state’s $104.2 million budget-reserve account — also known as the rainy-day fund — to plug the hole.

Meanwhile, Burdick, of Local 580, said Carcieri’s pledge to work with labor unions may constitute progress.

“At least he seems to come around to understanding that we have a role in government,” she said. “There are some people who believe that it is just for show, that there isn’t the type of sincerity that we’re showing on our side. But I’m hoping that’s not true.”

kgregg@projo.com