PROVIDENCE -- WPRO radio talk-show host Dan Yorke brought his microphone -- and about four dozen of his sign-toting listeners -- to the State House yesterday to cheer Republican Governor Carcieri on in his head-butting battle with state lawmakers over the state budget.
"Don't you feel . . . the con job?" Yorke asked the shirt-sleeved governor, who joined him at the microphone in a marble hallway, halfway between the House and Senate chambers.
"It's, 'Hey Don. Hey. You're a good guy.' But, you know what? You don't got a rat's . . . chance of getting anything done. I mean, that's what's going on in this building," Yorke told the governor on air. "You're not getting any respect."
"Well, it's not just me. OK? It's all of these people. It's all of us," Carcieri said to cheers from the ragtag crowd of talk-show fans in Bermuda shorts and sneakers and T-shirts that, in the case of Joe Faella from Johnston, read: "The Budget Sucks."
"I think what happens -- and what these people don't realize," Carcieri said of the state's overwhelmingly Democratic lawmakers, "and I realized shortly after I got here, is that what happens within the four walls of this building often bears little relationship with how people feel or what people care about outside this building.
"I don't know whether it is in the air or what it is. But what happens is they are only busy talking to each other -- or the lobbyists," he said of the army of suits and ties camped out across the marble divide.
They included teachers' union lobbyists, casino lobbyists, the father and son who represent local business interests, and the tie-less former senator who represents the insurer with a monopoly on the state employee health contract: Blue Cross.
"These are all working people," Carcieri said of Yorke's talk-show followers. "They are the ones grabbing all of these senators and representatives and telling them, 'This is what you've got to do,' " he said of the lobbyists.
"Where can I get a lobbyist button? I want to start a union for the citizens," said Cara McCarthy, 33, of Providence, who came to the State House with her 9-year-old son, Colin, to show him democracy at work.
And so it went for close to an hour, as Yorke gave Carcieri an open mike to try to whip up public support -- before Friday's House vote -- for some of the cost cuts he proposed that never made it into the $2.8-billion tax-and-spending plan approved by a key House committee last Friday.
Among them: Carcieri's attempts to raise pension contributions by state workers and teachers; limit the annual cost-of-living increases given state retirees to the inflation rate; and eliminate state payments to dog owners at Lincoln Park from the play on the Lottery's video slots.
Carcieri slammed the lawmakers for spending too much and raising taxes unnecessarily. He served notice that he expects state workers to contribute to their health-insurance premiums, after the current contracts expire.
He also served notice that "come the next election cycle, I intend to point out who was with me and who was against me . . . We want a floor fight . . . I want people to know who's voting how."
Some carried signs urging "Fiscal Sanity"; others took turns at the microphone. "The legislators just snub their noses at the voters. It's business as usual," said state Health Department employee Tom Nerney, who came to the rally with his 18-month-old daughter, Meghan.
"It's just not fair," said Diane Giarrusso, of Johnston, an inpatient-care manager for a private health-care company. "I've always contributed to my health insurance . . . They need to start paying their fair share."
"I pay $90 a week for health insurance. But I'm lucky to be working," said a man who identified himself as Steve. "I was laid off."
In interviews earlier in the day, House Finance Chairman Paul V. Sherlock, D-Warwick, and Deputy Finance Chairman Steven M. Costantino, D-Providence, denounced the increase in pension contributions as a "tax on one segment of the Rhode Island work force . . . [the] people who take care of people in our hospitals, the people who teach our children in schools . . . all the people who are meeting the needs of the state."
They defended their decisions to increase school aid by $15 million; undo the cutbacks and constraints that Carcieri sought in state payments to the people who run child-care centers, hospitals and senior centers; and leave Newport Jai Alai, the Lincoln dog track and the owners of the greyhounds that race there with enough money to stay and expand.
"To simply say he didn't raise taxes and we did is disingenuous. A tax is a tax is a tax," said Costantino, asserting that Carcieri's efforts to freeze some local aid payments would have forced cities and towns to raise their own local property taxes -- "the most regressive tax there is."
But Carcieri told radio-Rhode Island he doesn't buy the argument that the cities and towns had no other choice. As an example, he said, Providence teachers are in line for 5 percent raises when school reopens -- and as much as 8 percent if they hit the next "step" on their pay ladder.
He cited Providence as an example of a community that needs to "get in line with the real world." If the teachers there "really were concerned about kids," he said, they would agree to a pay freeze for a year.
As a member of a group that calls itself Campaign for the Future of Newport, Bobby Oliveira suggested that Carcieri follow Newport's lead by going to the state's nonunion employees first for givebacks, before approaching the unions. "For a change in style," he said.
