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Political scene: State employment up among North Providence officials
09:22 AM EDT on Monday, March 19, 2007
A fourth member of the all-Democrat North Providence Town Council has landed a job on the state payroll, and the winner this time is the council president, Joseph S. Burchfield.
With help from Senate President Joseph A. Montalbano, D-North Providence, Burchfield was hired on March 12 as the Senate’s newest $50,132-a-year “constituent liaison.”
Job Description: Since “the Senate president’s Office of Constituent Services serves as a liaison between citizens of Rhode Island and local, state and federal departments and agencies on behalf of the Senate members ... a constituent caseworker addresses all manner of requests and inquiries.”
“Duties include intake of constituent concerns and inquiries, oral and written communication whether by phone, fax, email or written letter and on-site meetings with Senate members or constituents on the member’s behalf.”
Required skills: “This individual must possess strong oral, written and interpersonal skills…. Previous experience in a government service or customer service setting is preferred.”
According to his resumé and yearly disclosure statement to the state Ethics Commission, Burchfield is the regional manager for Wealth Mortgage Concepts, in Providence, and public-relations manager for Classic Entertainment & Sports.
At one point, Burchfield reportedly thought of running for disgraced former Sen. John A. Celona’s Senate seat. Then, he considered a run for mayor to succeed newly elected Secretary of State A. Ralph Mollis, but “graciously stepped out of that race,” according to his fellow councilman Paul Caranci, to clear the field for acting mayor John Sisto Jr., who subsequently lost the primary.
With Burchfield’s hiring, the number of General Assembly employees now stands at 609. That includes the 113 part-time lawmakers, 96 Senate pages and doorkeepers and 71 House pages and doorkeepers.
(That also includes, by the way, former North Providence Town Councilman Peter Simone, who was hired by the Senate in August 2005 as a year-round constituent liaison. He is currently paid $41,304 annually to supervise the pages and doorkeepers.)
The two other North Providence councilmen who recently joined — or in one case, rejoined — the State House employee ranks are Caranci, a real-estate company owner who is Mollis’ $95,294-a-year deputy secretary of state for policy and planning, and John Fleming, who is Mollis’ $98,781 deputy and chief of staff.
Caranci notes that he was already working for the state — for the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (1979-1995) — when he first ran for the council in 1994 and later doubled as a councilman and State House aide to U.S. Rep. James R. Langevin when he was secretary of state, and that Fleming was not yet a councilman when Mollis hired him in January. (A fourth North Providence councilman, John Zambarano, is a $39,266-a-year janitorial supervisor in the Department of Corrections, first hired in 2001.)
Asked how he would explain four of seven Democratic councilmen on the state payroll, Caranci said it’s “a natural progression” for people “interested in public service as a career to also be interested in it as an avocation.” And vice versa. “I’m not sure that is limited to North Providence.”
For the record, Montalbano’s $7,922-a-year gig as a North Providence municipal judge won’t come up again for council approval — should the new mayor renominate him — until 2009.
Meanwhile on another job front, state Democratic Party Chairman William J. Lynch slammed the Carcieri administration’s attempts to fill two empty deputy director positions — paying between $110,549 and $122,560 a year — while seeking layoffs and pay cuts to avert a purported “budget crisis.”
“This is a perfect opportunity for [the governor] to lead by example and help reduce government spending through attrition,” Lynch said of the two Department of Administration openings.
Lynch also questioned why Carcieri — after making speech after speech during his reelection campaign about “how great the state was doing” — waited until after the election to disclose the fiscal crisis.
But Governor Carcieri stood pat, saying again through a spokesman that the jobs are “critical to the management of one of the state’s most important departments,” and without them, “management and oversight of department activities will suffer … costing more tax dollars.”
Noted his spokesman Jeff Neal: “The elimination of these two positions wouldn’t even begin to achieve the savings necessary to close the $360-million budget shortfall.”
Secretary of State Mollis has snared a seasoned hand in the spokesman business as his new press secretary: Chris Barnett.
Barnett, who from 1991 until just recently was the voice of the Rhode Island Housing & Mortgage Finance Corporation, starts work in his new job today at a starting salary of $64,800, according to Mollis chief of staff John Fleming. Before Rhode Island Housing, Barnett headed public relations for the Picerne Real Estate Group (1984-91).
Barnett succeeds Adam Bozzi, who moved to Mollis’ staff after his former boss, Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty, narrowly lost his gubernatorial bid in November. As previously reported, Bozzi went to Kentucky to work for gubernatorial hopeful Bruce Lunsford, who is among seven candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to face Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher later this year.
Jack Hogan, a veteran tobacco industry lobbyist at the Rhode Island State House, has been hired by Reynolds American, parent company of the second-largest tobacco company in the United States, R.J. Reynolds.
R.J. Reynolds takes credit for “manufacturing about one of every three cigarettes sold in the country — including five of the nation’s top-10 brands.” They include Camel, Kool, Winston, Salem and Pall Mall.
One of the founding partners along with his brother, Tom, and sister, Carolyn Murray, of F/S Capitol Consulting, Hogan is moving to Winston-Salem, N.C., in May to serve as Reynolds’ senior director of state government relations.
He anticipates working with lobbyists in the nine West Coast states on legislative issues pertaining to tobacco.
Asked how he personally feels about smoking in an era where it has become increasingly widely banned, Hogan says he is a nonsmoker but “I don’t have an opinion as to whether it is good or bad.” As he sees it, “smoking is something that some people choose to do” and “a product that some people choose to use.”
“The product is sold and it’s taxed and it’s regulated. So those issues are subject to legislation … [and] those are a range of issues with which I’ve had experience,” Hogan said. And as someone who has lobbied for the former R.J. Reynolds here before, “I don’t think I have to reconcile anything.”
One of the busiest lobbyists at the State House, Hogan and his firm represent cars, motorcycles, liquor and smokes, with clients that include the Cigar Association of America, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Distilled Spirits Council. Last year, the firm also played a role in Donald Trump’s attempt to compete with Harrah’s, on the state ballot, for an exclusive casino license. (In the end, Harrah’s bid was defeated by the voters.)
The bumpy road to place voter initiative on the ballot is a familiar one — going on more than 20 years — but this time around, the journey took a side route to Vegas.
At a hearing last Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee, House Minority Whip Nicholas Gorham raised his annual call for voter initiative. His bill would amend the state Constitution to allow voters to end-run the legislature by placing issues on the ballot directly, through a petition process.
The opponents, including Common Cause Rhode Island, and lobbyists from the state Association of Fire Fighters, the AFL-CIO, National Education Association/Rhode Island, and the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, all said voter initiative could be dangerous and allow special interests with large bankrolls to bamboozle voters into voting for bad laws.
“Representative democracy,” where voters elect legislators to represent their views and make laws, is more efficient, they said.
But Gorham, former state Rep. Rod Driver and voter initiative proponent Harry Staley, of Westerly, all pointed to the Narragansett Indian casino and its deal with Harrah’s as proof that the voters could stand up to big money.
“What happened last fall? Harrah’s came in and spent millions of dollars. How many people did they brainwash?” Gorham said. “What did that prove? That concern about voter initiative is nothing but folly.”
Judiciary Committee member Timothy Williamson, who unsuccessfully pushed for the Las Vegas-style casino in his town of West Warwick, didn’t look at Gorham during his digs about the casino’s failure at the November election. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the Narragansett Indian-Harrah’s casino. Nor did he look up as Bev Clay, of Operation Clean Government, spoke in favor of voter initiative by pointing out how voters stood up to gambling interests in 1992. (The General Assembly later voted on its own to expand gambling.)
Finally, Williamson said, “It’s amazing how we can’t get away from the casino issue.”
No vote was taken. But hold onto your hats.
This year’s General Assembly session has not yet hit the halfway mark and, as this hearing demonstrated, legislative leaders are already starting to throw their own public-notice rules to the winds.
The public got only one-day’s late-afternoon notice that the House Judiciary Committee intended to take up Rep. Roger Picard’s version of the voter-initiative bill.
House rules require 48 hours’ public notice, except when they don’t. Got it?
More specifically, they say: “The chair of every committee shall post in print and electronically at least 48 hours prior to any committee meeting a list by number and title of the bills and resolutions to be heard at that meeting. … A committee shall not hear any said bill or resolution without such notice except by the consent of a majority of its members and with at least one days’ notification to the principal sponsor.”
According to House spokesman Larry Berman, the chairman — Rep. Donald Lally, D-Narragansett — invoked the rule after realizing Picard’s bill had inadvertently been left off the notice for the meeting where another voter initiative bill, sponsored by Gorham, of Coventry, was being considered.
Berman said “Representative Picard thought it was appropriate to have his bill heard as well. He signed a form which waived the notification rule, and no members of Judiciary or the public objected.”
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