Thoughts on the Providence Retirement Board’s decision to award even a partial pension to the corrupt Frank Corrente:

Mayor David Cicilline is absolutely right to call this outgrowth of the Plunder Dome scandal an “outrage” and “insult.”

Why do some government officials insist on making Rhode Island look foolish? This story will someday provide fodder for a snarky story in a national publication. The dispatch will say: “What odd things they do here. A guy who is the right-hand man to the notoriously corrupt Mayor Buddy Cianci, goes to jail, comes out and gets a nice cushion of $22,231 per year.”

Sure, Corrente once had been collecting $70,576, and you could say the board decided to slash it. I say he deserves nothing. But, buying the argument that he gave honest service during his first stint in city government and was corrupt only during a second stint, the board voted, 7 to 5, that he deserved something for those early years.

It is to laugh. Or, in Cicilline’s situation, to yell and to vow to block it in Superior Court.

Cicilline is a lawyer, but his words are plain enough. He tells me, “It is not too much to expect that, for every single day that someone has the privilege and honor of working in city government, they be expected and required to provide honorable service.”

Cicilline suggests the Corrente pension is especially offensive to Providence taxpayers who work hard, sometimes in two or three jobs, hoping they can build retirement security, and this during a time of foreclosures and sky-high food and gasoline costs.

“This kind of decision breeds cynicism and disrespect.”

Honest city employees particularly should be enraged by the board’s decision. But everyone can suffer from this, especially when you think of the damage it does to Providence’s reputation. “That kind of decision is not what we want reported about this great city and it doesn’t reflect well on Providence, obviously,” says Cicilline, who has tried to overcome the wreckage of the Cianci years. “You know, when you’re competing with other cities to bring investment to Providence or to bring development here or to encourage a talented person to join your administration or to join your company or to be a part of the community, that kind of decision undermines that work.”

I am amused that some folks grouse over Cicilline’s personally lobbying board members. Hello. That’s his job — to fight to put across his program of reform. I am sick of public officials, including governors and legislators, who outline a position and then do nothing to try to put it across.

I am also amused — bitterly amused — that when Corrente was asked last week if he owes the people of Providence an apology for his misdeeds, he replied, in a masterpiece of evasion, “The decision on Plunder Dome is not over yet. At the appropriate time I will have a lot to say about Plunder Dome and the people involved.”

Cicilline says his parents taught him when you do something wrong and you hurt people you should apologize, but that this is up to Corrente to decide.

Don’t hold your breath.

At the 2002 Plunder Dome trial in federal court, you could hear Corrente, on an undercover tape from his City Hall days, denounce “the [expletive] Jews.”

It was such a repugnant slur that Cianci, a co-defendant, distanced himself from it in a column I did condemning Corrente’s coarseness.

Soon after, Corrente’s wife, Thelma, told me I’d be getting an apology from her husband.

I’m still waiting.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com