Related story: Laffey: City unions must give up plenty

By Scott Mayerowitz
Journal Staff Writer

This was one of those stories where every budget article I had done to date paid off, with dividends.

For months, Cranston Mayor Stephen P. Laffey had promised to make $11 million in cuts to the city's budget but would not announce them until he had all the cuts.

I wrote a few stories chipping away at some of the cuts that we learned about, but this meeting was the night when Laffey would tell all and map out his vision for Cranston's future.

In the past Laffey's staff has miscalculated numbers that they gave us and had also tried to slightly shift numbers around to make things look better or worse then they really were, in order to make a point. (This is nothing like the shifting that Laffey's predecessor John O'Leary tried, but still every politician wants their spin on things.)

Laffey and I met the day before he was to announce his plans. We went over all of his cuts and he gave me a draft copy of his Power Point presentation. Besides some financial items, the presentation gave me some good nuggets of political news for the story -- such as Laffey ending the hour-long presentation with the home phone numbers of the nine City Council members.

I decided to break out all the numbers into a sidebar which detailed all of the cuts and what the cuts represented. The sidebar gave the people who wanted to get down to the nitty-gritty, read about every cut and do the math for themselves a chance to do so. For everybody else, I highlighted the major changes in the main story.

I started typing up the bulk of the story before I left for the meeting. That gave me the chance to call the mayor's office back with questions about their presentations.

It was a kind of mad dash to understand everything before the presentation.

Fellow Journal reporter Barbara Polichetti and I then headed out to the meeting. (She wrote a separate reaction story and gave me some great quotes from union officials to put in my story.)

I usually don't use a tape recorder, except during large meetings to get some of the longer quotes from fast speakers. When I heard something really good, I marked in my notepad the counter number from the recorder. Back in the office, I chose the quotes that I wanted to use and checked them with a tape.

Trying to make sense of everything that happened was the hardest part. There was just so much in the budget that he was cutting.

I realized that all of the issues he was raising for the first time at this meeting I would be revisiting anyway. All I needed to do in this story was give an overview of each issue and put everything in context.

While most of the story was written before the meeting, it was at that night's presentation that I was able to gain context. That is when I realized that the real story was not the cuts, but that the cuts would not be enough.

Laffey was saying that the city's unions have benefits that are ``too rich for Cranston.''

He was also putting the political burden on the City Council. The posting of their home phone numbers was symbolic of that.

It was in the car ride back to the office that I realized that was my top. I put those things in, reordered some of the rest of the story, added some color from that night and filed.

Section editor Marty Funke was a great help in making sure that my frantic writing made sense. There is no way I would have ever been able to get through many of the stories on the city's financial problems without Marty. He knows enough about the issue but is far enough removed to tell me when I am getting too detailed or not saying enough.