Corrente

PROVIDENCE — Mayor David N. Cicilline yesterday proposed a change in local law that would mandate a loss of pension for any employee who commits a job-related felony.

If the change is enacted, the city Retirement Board would lose its discretion to reduce, rather than revoke, such a pension.

The proposal arises as a result of the case of Frank E. Corrente, who was director of administration for former Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., and who recently won a partial pension from the Retirement Board. In the Operation Plunder Dome investigation of city government, Cianci and Corrente were convicted of running City Hall as a racket.

Corrente’s pension was suspended when his conviction became final in 2002, and both he and Cianci served time in prison. The pension has not yet been reinstated at the reduced sum voted by the board in mid-August.

A city ordinance requires honorable service as a prerequisite for a pension and requires that a dishonorable employee’s pension be reduced or revoked upon conviction of a job-related crime.

City officials in some cases have also moved to take away the pensions of people who have committed misdeeds short of a criminal conviction, by invoking case law and the common law as well as the ordinance. It was not immediately clear whether the change would affect such situations.

It is the ordinance that the mayor means to amend, and he will need City Council approval.

Cicilline favored revocation of Corrente’s pension, expressed outrage when it did not happen, and has taken steps to fight the partial pension. The decision of the board to reduce Corrente’s pension is only tentative at this point; the board must file a petition in Superior Court and persuade a judge to order its implementation.

“If you betray the taxpayers, you don’t get their money” in a pension, he declared yesterday at a news conference in his City Hall office.

The mayor has hired special legal counsel to ask the court to take away the entire pension. On the other hand, Corrente is entitled to argue in court for more.

The board voted 7 to 5 to award a pension to Corrente based on the first of Corrente’s two separate stints in city service. He served two distinct terms of employment, interrupted by about three years and eight months when he was out of office, first as a financial specialist and then city controller, and in the second term, as Cianci’s director of administration.

A majority of the board reasoned that although Corrente was proven to be a lawbreaker in his second term of employment, there was no suggestion of wrongdoing during his first term, so he deserves to have a pension based on the first term.

“There is no acceptable explanation for rewarding an individual for bad behavior,” Cicilline said in a statement.

The decision means, tentatively, that Corrente would be entitled to an annual pension of $22,231 rather than the $70,576 to which he would have been entitled if his pension had remained intact. Either way, there would be no cost-of-living escalators.

Cicilline called the news conference to announce the pension proposal, and he was flanked at his lectern by Council President Peter S. Mancini, D-Ward 14, and Councilman Michael Solomon, D-Ward 5, both of whom endorsed it.

“It raises the standards for city employees,” Solomon said later.

Cicilline said that he will try to make the ordinance amendment retroactively applicable to Corrente but that its applicability will be determined in court. Bifurcating Corrente’s service time with the city the way that the board did is preposterous, Cicilline has declared.

The disagreement between the mayor and the board has created an awkward situation for the city Law Department, which is caught in the middle.

With two parts of city government at odds, the city solicitor has taken his department out of the dispute to an extent, and both the mayor and the board now have lawyers hired from the outside.

Cicilline has hired lawyer/lobbyist R. Kelly Sheridan, who has had success representing the council in disputes with the mayor. The city solicitor hired Raymond A. Marcaccio, lawyer for the state Board of Elections, to represent the board.

“We are under no illusion that this will be a difficult case” to win in court, Cicilline said.

Sheridan advised the mayor that his legal position would be strengthened if he had the formal support of the council. So Cicilline said at the news conference that he will seek to enlist the council in opposing any pension for Corrente.

Vindicating taxpayers’ rights and defending the principle of honorable service makes the expense of outside lawyers “well worth” the cost, he said.

When the board voted to reduce Corrente’s pension, some questions were left unanswered. One was whether the city would resume paying Corrente a pension, albeit at a reduced sum, during the court fight.

Assistant City Solicitor Kenneth B. Chiavarini answered that yesterday. It is the position of the Law Department that the board’s decision is only a recommendation to the court and that, until the court rules, the city retirement office will not pay Corrente a pension.

A second question was whether the board would assess interest on the excessive payments that Corrente received when his pension initially began to pay out at the annual rate of $70,576 before it was suspended. Chiavarini said that interest would be assessed, most likely at the monthly rate of 1 percent, but that the issues of what sums are owed and to whom they are owed would have to wait until the court rules.

gsmith@projo.com