There are a few more Governor races next year I'm going to be writing about that I haven't had a chance to write about this year. One race where we are going to really need to get involved in is the Rhode Island Governor's race where it's going to be an ugly primary fight between progressive Providence Mayor Angel Taveras (D. RI) and Wall Street's pick, Treasurer Gina Raimondo (D. RI). Here's what you need to know about Raimondo:
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo – an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist – the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.
Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn't even know how to react. "She's Yale, Harvard, Oxford – she worked on Wall Street," says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. "Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn't know what the fuck she was talking about."
Soon she was being talked about as a probable candidate for Rhode Island's 2014 gubernatorial race. By 2013, Raimondo had raised more than $2 million, a staggering sum for a still-undeclared candidate in a thimble-size state. Donors from Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase showered her with money, with more than $247,000 coming from New York contributors alone. A shadowy organization called EngageRI, a public-advocacy group of the 501(c)4 type whose donors were shielded from public scrutiny by the infamous Citizens United decision, spent $740,000 promoting Raimondo's ideas. Within Rhode Island, there began to be whispers that Raimondo had her sights on the presidency. Even former Obama right hand and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel pointed to Rhode Island as an example to be followed in curing pension woes.
What few people knew at the time was that Raimondo's "tool kit" wasn't just meant for local consumption. The dynamic young Rhodes scholar was allowing her state to be used as a test case for the rest of the country, at the behest of powerful out-of-state financiers with dreams of pushing pension reform down the throats of taxpayers and public workers from coast to coast. One of her key supporters was billionaire former Enron executive John Arnold – a dickishly ubiquitous young right-wing kingmaker with clear designs on becoming the next generation's Koch brothers, and who for years had been funding a nationwide campaign to slash benefits for public workers.
Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo's strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb's Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina's Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer's Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 "Urban Innovator" of the year.
The state's workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn't know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of "proprietary" information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. "When I asked, I was basically hammered," says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island's nine-member State Investment Commission. "I couldn't get any information about the actual costs." - Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, 9/26/13
So yeah, you can see why I don't want Raimondo to win the nominee. Now here's what you need to know about Taveras. He helped save Providence from going bankrupt:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/...
Taveras, a lanky former housing-court judge with rimless glasses, had been elected mayor expecting a deficit maybe half this size. But Providence's ad-libbed measures during the recession—spending down reserves to keep services going and taxes low—were now about to catch up to the city shortly into his term. Well before Detroit would set off a rash of municipal bankruptcy fears two years later, Taveras and Providence would confront a confluence of a potential bankruptcy's worst signs: unfunded pension obligations, a disappearing industrial base, a burst housing bubble, and steep cuts in state aid.
"You go into survival mode," Taveras says. "This is about making sure that the city is able to survive."
On the eve of 2014, Providence no longer looks to be in imminent danger. And Taveras is running on the story of the city's turnaround in his bid to become Rhode Island's first Hispanic governor. His narrative is compelling: Taveras grew up in Providence the son of Dominican immigrants. He likes to say that he went from Head Start to Harvard before coming back home. By inheriting the city at one of its lowest points, he can also now claim the mantle of the mayor who refused to let Rhode Island's capital city fail even as questions remain about its long-term fiscal challenges.
"There had been hundreds and hundreds of articles and opportunities where previous administrations had gone after us, demonized us, gone after certain benefits," says Paul Doughty, the president of the local firefighters union, who fought for years with Cicilline. "These guys had the chance to do that at a level never seen before, and they didn't even touch it."
The city instead gave each union a target for the savings it needed, and then asked them to design their own paths to achieve it. When Taveras publicly announced the scale of the deficit in early March 2011, he also cut his own paycheck by 10 percent. That yielded the uninspiring annual savings of $12,500. But the gesture later allowed him to say that of all the sacrifices the city demanded, the largest salary cut was his own.
The deals slowly rolled out over the next two years. The public-employees union agreed to 1 percent pay cuts and waived raises. The firefighters came next, offering larger health care co-shares, and later pensions for new employees. The school day got longer for teachers. Sick days were reduced. Dozens of public employees agreed to retire. One by one, the city's seven largest tax-exempt nonprofits agreed to make voluntary payments into the city's coffers. Taveras also enticed the City Council to raise property taxes by about 6 percent for the average homeowner.
The last settlement came in April of this year, when a Superior Court judge approved the city's pension agreement with retirees. The deal reduced the city's pension liability by an estimated $170 million, and, crucially, it permits Providence to shift its retirees older than 65 off of private insurance and onto Medicare.
"Without hesitation, if we lost that lawsuit, we would have filed Chapter 9," Taveras says. "There was just no way to avoid it…. I didn't have anything more that I could do." That April settlement marks the last time anyone around City Hall recalls discussing the possibility of bankruptcy, and it was a watershed for the city.
"He deserves a lot of credit for the turnaround, because he has a leadership style that worked very well," says Darrell West, a longtime Providence political observer and former resident, who is now the director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. "He was able to bring together contending parties on pension reform and produce a deal that saved the city money without alienating valuable workers. That's something that's very difficult to do—and the state was not able to do that."
Unions are still challenging the state of Rhode Island's broader pension overhaul in court.
This fall, the ratings agency Standard & Poor's upgraded its outlook on Providence's debt from negative to stable. Just last month, Taveras announced a tentative budget surplus of about $1 million dollars, money that will start to restore the city's rainy day fund. - National Journal, 12/16/13
Taveras is also a strong supporter for universal pre-k education:
http://www.browndailyherald.com/...
Providence Mayor Angel Taveras has announced that if elected governor next year, he would expand the state’s pre-kindergarten program, with a goal of enrolling 76 percent of the state’s eligible children in pre-kindergarten by the end of his first term in office and accommodating all eligible students by 2023.
The plan, announced last Tuesday at a YMCA Early Learning Center in Pawtucket, calls early childhood education a “building block for economic development” and cites recent studies that show positive correlations between enrollment in early childhood education programs and higher rates of employment and college attendance.
“It is great to hear early childhood education being discussed so early in the election cycle,” wrote Kate Brewster, executive director of the Economic Progress Institute, in an email to The Herald. “Not only is this issue so important for the future of our children, but it is also a great long-term strategy to improve our economy.”
In 2012, Rhode Island ranked 40th in the United States in access to pre-kindergarten for 4-year-olds, according to a report by the National Institute for Early Education Research.
Currently, about 1,400 children in the state are enrolled in publicly funded pre-kindergarten programs, 1,200 attend school district programs funded by federal and local sources and about 230 attend state-funded schools that enroll students by lottery, said Elliot Krieger, public information officer for the the Rhode Island Department of Education. An additional 5,200 4-year-olds eligible for pre-kindergarten are not enrolled in any program, according to the plan.
Taveras plans to increase the number of state-funded pre-kindergarten slots from around 230 in fiscal year 2014 to 700 by 2016 and 2,650 by 2019. The expansion would cost the state $6.5 million in its first year of implementation, rising to additional annual costs of $24.6 million by year four. The total cost would amount to less than 1 percent of the state’s education budget, according to the plan. - The Brown Daily Herald, 12/2/13
He's also been looking out for college students:
http://www.providencejournal.com/...
Providence is one of 20 cities to win a $200,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation to figure out how to increase the number of city youth attending college.
The grant was awarded to Mayor Angel Taveras' Children and Youth Cabinet, a group of educators, private sector and community leaders, and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.
Providence was chosen to join this effort because of the work of the Providence Children and Youth Cabinet in partnership with Annenberg and 13 local partners. - Providence Journal, 12/4/13
He's also an ardent support of SNAP and calling on Congress to pass a new farm bill:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
In Providence, more than one third of our residents rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to feed their families. However, SNAP benefits were reduced on November 1, directly affecting all Rhode Islanders enrolled in the program. SNAP is a critical benefit for those who need it. Families in Rhode Island, and across the country, are bracing for even further SNAP benefits cuts from Congress in current Farm Bill negotiations.
The importance of SNAP goes far beyond being a safeguard against hunger. Providing access to healthy food builds healthier communities. In addition to SNAP, the Farm Bill includes nutrition programming that provides children and families with information about, and access to, healthier foods.
In Providence, SNAP provides a crucial benefit to families, and particularly our youngest residents. Nearly 90 percent of our public school children are eligible for free or reduced lunch, and many don't consume the amount of fruits and vegetables recommended by the USDA. The food provided to them in school may be the healthiest, or the only, meal these children receive in a given day.
To help encourage healthy nutritional habits, we are equipping Providence's elementary schools with garden carts that offer fresh produce, as well as an opportunity for children to make healthy decisions for themselves. Critical to the success of these garden carts is the SNAP Education and Obesity Prevention Program (SNAP-Ed), which provides much needed complementary programming in the cafeteria and classroom for students, and training for our teachers. These programs have multiplying effects as children go home and share what they've learned with family and friends.
Providence schools also participate in the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP), which introduces children to a variety of produce they might otherwise not try. Current Farm Bill negotiations are looking to change the program language to permit non-fresh food, including canned and frozen produce. These changes are not in the best interest of our children who often lack access to fresh fruits and vegetables in their neighborhoods.
The Farm Bill also supports local economic development in Providence. SNAP redemption serves as a huge source of income for many of our local retailers and farmers markets, where the nonprofit Farm Fresh Rhode Island provides SNAP recipients $7 to spend for every $5 in SNAP benefits. Nutrition programs strengthen our local food economies by working with local farmers, processors, and distributors to supply healthy foods to our markets and schools in Providence and throughout Rhode Island. - Angel Taveras, Huffington Post, 12/11/13
Not to mention Taveras would be making history next year if he wins his party's nominee as the first Latino governor of Rhode Island and he wants to improve life for immigrants:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
In 2010, as the Mayor of Providence, Taveras took a stand in the “Secure Communities” program and tried to opt out of the agreement with little success.
Fortunately, the following year, the new elected Governor Lincoln D. Chafee dismantled the legislation, revoked the enforcement of federal immigration laws by state police and eliminated the E-verify requirement for workers’ immigration status.
If elected, Taveras will follow on the same path. He believes immigrants are not only beneficial for the state’s economy but also it is a typical American experience. His family is one example of many immigrants who came to this country for opportunities and achieved a position to give back to their new homeland.
“In elementary school I knew I wanted to be a lawyer, do pro-bono work that had impact and have the chance to serve,” Taveras said. He believes Latinos, like Italians, or Irish or any other immigrant community before, will succeed in time if they are given the right opportunities. “We won’t have ‘secure communities,’ not on my watch,” he said. - Huffington Post, 11/20/13
And a Taveras win is not only good for Rhode Island, Latinos will have better representation in the state:
http://www.browndailyherald.com/...
The Census Bureau projects that by 2043, America’s white population will dip below 50 percent for the first time, and a large portion of the population will be Latino, said Tony Affigne, visiting professor of American studies at Brown and political science professor at Providence College. Latinos are an increasingly important demographic in American politics and already play a large role in elections, he added.
“Almost universal” support from Latinos helped Ralph Mollis win reelection as Secretary of State in 2010, Affigne said, adding, “That kind of swing role in Rhode Island politics is the future for Latinos.”
The Rhode Island Latino Political Action Committee has played a pivotal role in shaping Latino politics in the state, said Pablo Rodriguez, president of Latino Public Radio. It’s possible for such a diverse and multicultural organization to exist because of the unique makeup of Rhode Island’s Latino population, he added. In contrast to other states, Rhode Island’s Latino base is not dominated by immigrants from any one country and most of the immigrants arrived in the United States around the same time, he said.
But the state’s Latinos also face many challenges and “inequalities across the board,” said Doris De Los Santos, former president of the Rhode Island Latino Political Action Committee. “Education is at the crux of all the problems that we face,” she said.
The state has one of the largest achievement gaps between white and Latino students in the country, Rodriguez said.
Until this educational disparity is addressed, the country will not be able to “unleash the full potential of Latino communities,” De Los Santos added. All Americans should be concerned with this problem, she said. Though electing more Latinos into office is an important step, doing so will not automatically end systemic inequalities, she said.
De Los Santos also stressed the importance of Latina women’s roles in politics, calling them the “backbone” of many elected officials.
“I want to take this time to challenge Latinas to be more active in the forefront,” she said. - The Brown Daily Herald, 11/14/13
And Taveras has a real chance to win this race:
http://www.browndailyherald.com/...
Providence Mayor Angel Taveras leads the pack of 2014 gubernatorial candidates in job performance rating and perceived ability to improve the state’s economy, according to a WPRI poll of 506 registered state voters released Tuesday.
When asked to choose among the five probable candidates, almost 26 percent said Taveras, a Democrat, would do the best job of improving the state’s economy as governor. About 20 percent of voters said they believed Cranston Mayor Allan Fung would be most effective at generating growth throughout the state, while 16 percent opted for likely Democratic candidate General Treasurer Gina Raimondo.
The candidates’ perceived abilities to improve the state’s economy are poised to significantly influence the election, as 57 percent voters said the economy and job creation should be the state’s primary concern.
Voters also expressed satisfaction with Taveras’ performance as mayor. About 50 percent of voters said Providence has improved since Taveras became mayor, 31 percent said it has remained the same, 8 percent said it has declined and 11 percent were unsure.
The poll asked voters about their opinions on the five likely gubernatorial candidates — Taveras, Raimondo and Fung, as well as Democrat Clay Pell, a former U.S. Department of Education deputy secretary and grandson of the late U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, and Ken Block, a Republican who ran for governor in 2010 as the leader of the Moderate Party.
When asked about the job performance of the candidates who currently hold office, voters gave Taveras, Raimondo and Fung generally favorable performance reviews.
Taveras garnered the highest approval rating, with 57 percent of respondents indicating his performance has been good or excellent, 19 percent calling his performance fair, 6 percent calling it poor and 18 percent saying they did not know enough to answer. - The Brown Daily Herald, 11/20/13
Now Wall Street is going to spend big on Raimondo's campaign so Taveras needs to raise a lot of money to win this race:
http://ripr.org/...
Providence Mayor Angel Taveras is seen by voters as having done a good job running the state’s largest city. Several public opinion surveys show Taveras with the highest approval rating of any elected official in our tiny state.
While the mayor’s poll numbers look great, his campaign bank account does not. At the end of September, the last public reporting period, Taveras had about $760,000 in cash on hand in his war chest. Raimondo’s account was at $2.3 million.
Given the way Rhode Island’s campaign finance laws work, the gap between Taveras and Raimondo is even bigger. The state’s limits campaign contributions from individuals to $1,000 per person per year, which means that Raimondo can go back to her same donor list for another $1,000 beginning in two weeks.
Unlike Raimondo, who worked in the venture capital industry and has cultivated deep-pocketed donors around the country, Taveras has no such connections. A quietly intellectual man, the mayor doesn’t drink alcohol and isn’t a typical back-slapping Rhode Island pol who revels in the relentless schmoozing required to raise money.
Taveras story is a great campaign asset. The son of Latino immigrants who rose through the city’s public schools to get to Harvard is a wonderful biography that fits perfectly with the ethnic and immigrant ballet that has forged Rhode Island’s culture and politics since the state’s founding as a haven for people from around the world seeking a better life.
But without the money to tell that story and to spotlight his record of bailing out the capital city’s red-ink filled budget, via television, social media and at the doorsteps, Taveras faces an uphill campaign. - RI NPR, 12/16/13
And this campaign e-mail from today sounds like Taveras is getting ready to take Raimondo:
A couple days ago, my Democratic primary opponent declared her candidacy in the race for Governor and attempted to diminish all we have accomplished in Providence.
The Treasurer said in her announcement that important investments in our state’s future have not been made, citing in part “too much pension and fiscal uncertainty” in Providence.
Her statement conveniently disregards the difficult, shared sacrifices that so many have made to save our Capital City. Together, we have closed a $110 million structural deficit. We brought everyone to the table in the face of a Category 5 fiscal hurricane, and we have emerged a stronger city with a brighter future.
Now, we need the resources to prevent a distortion of Providence’s comeback and to present a positive vision for our state.
Can you donate just $35, $50, $100 or whatever you can afford today, before our critical Dec. 31 end-of-year fundraising deadline to help us tell the story of how we came together to pull Providence back from the brink?
https://services.myngp.com/...
In a recent piece on Rhode Island Public Radio, political reporter Scott MacKay considered whether our organization could raise the money we need. As MacKay said:
“Taveras doesn’t need to be the top spender to win; he won an easy Democratic primary victory for mayor in 2010 without gobs of money. And Rhode Island political history is littered with candidates who had the most money and still lost. But it is difficult to see how Taveras defeats a tough candidate such as Raimondo if he gets outspent three to one.”
I am proud to have the support of thousands of people from every corner of Rhode Island. This is a campaign based on Main Street values. But we need to make sure we have the resources to make sure our story and vision can be heard.
Can you help us get the word out by donating $35, $50, $100 or whatever you can afford before our Dec. 31 deadline to make sure we have enough?
https://services.myngp.com/...
Tearing down what we have achieved in our Capital City will not help us rebuild Rhode Island. Coming together will.
Thank you,
Angel
You can click here to donate:
https://services.myngp.com/...=
And you can click here to get involved with Taveras' campaign:
http://angel2014.com/