The Legislative Press & Information Bureau
Op-Ed
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Collaboration, cooperation and compromise make for many achievements at State House in 2011
By Speaker of the House Gordon D. Fox
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As hard as times have been for states
across America during the Great Recession and subsequent weak economic
recovery, they have been particularly rough here in Rhode Island.
But this year, my 74 colleagues in the Rhode Island House of
Representatives, working together across party lines and with our 38
colleagues in the Senate, came together this legislative session to
work seriously on the challenges facing our state and to put Rhode
Island on a more solid footing for the future. Collaboration,
cooperation, and compromise characterized most if not all of our
greatest achievements this session, and I believe the state is better
off for this approach.
Most importantly, we passed a budget for the 2012 Fiscal Year that
closed a $300 million gap, largely through targeted spending cuts. Our
priorities in the House leadership and Finance Committee were reducing
the structural deficit and maintaining the most critical services,
while also seeing tax increases as a very last resort. As a result, we
decided that a net sales tax increase of $165 million as proposed by
Governor Chafee was not appropriate. Instead, in collaboration with the
Senate, we made substantial changes to human service programs,
eliminated longevity raises going forward for all state employees, and
made a variety of other spending cuts across state government –
ultimately reducing the structural deficit over the next five years by
42.5 percent as compared to the Governor’s budget.
The budget did incorporate many of the Governor’s ideas,
including full implementation of the school funding formula, increasing
funding to public higher education, and beginning the process of
reforming our funding of transportation to reduce future
borrowing.
Ultimately, this budget will put Rhode Island on the map as a place
that incentivizes people to be industrious, while maintaining the
public services that improve our quality of life and reflect the
compassion that has long characterized the state.
We took another major step forward for economic development by passing
landmark legislation to establish the I-195 Redevelopment Commission. I
am proud that we were able to work with the Senate, in particular
Majority Leader Dominick Ruggerio; Providence Mayor Angel Taveras, and
the Chafee administration to ensure that the commission can create a
brighter future for our state and our capital city, and this
legislation encourages the Knowledge District development that will be
so crucial to our economic future and to providing many new quality
jobs.
We enacted a number of other new laws that will improve the quality of
life for Rhode Islanders. I am proud of the passage of civil
unions’ legislation that makes Rhode Island one of just a dozen
states providing state rights to same-sex couples, even as I remain
committed to establishing full equal marriage rights. We also passed a
bill guaranteeing insurance coverage for services required by children
with autism, capping a collaborative process that brought together
advocates and the state’s major health insurers. We established
for the first time the right for adult adoptees to access their
original birth certificates. And working together with low income and
ratepayer advocates, National Grid, and the Chafee administration, we
passed the Henry Shelton Act, enabling the state to help tens of
thousands of low-income families and elderly residents to keep warm
during our tough winters and to help and encourage those with overdue
utility bills to pay off their debt.
The General Assembly also made substantial strides this year in
transparency, recognizing that technology could help us to better
inform the public we serve about the work that we do. For the first
time, we began posting all floor votes online in real time, and we are
also posting committee votes online within 24 hours of committee
meetings.
I recognize that we could not resolve every issue through
collaboration, cooperation, and compromise. In particular, the fight
over how to resolve disputes between school committees and teachers
over labor contracts was a divisive one, and the issues involved remain
complex. I was not convinced that binding arbitration was the best
means to resolving open-ended labor contract disputes in the schools
and preventing teacher strikes. I will continue to look at this issue
and try to forge a solution that recognizes the needs and interests of
taxpayers and teachers, but especially the needs of students and
parents in our public schools.
While the Assembly is now in recess, we as legislators recognize that
there are still major issues ahead of us to address. First and
foremost, I am committed, as I know President Teresa Paiva Weed is in
the Senate, to decisively tackling pension reform, in a way that is
fair to taxpayers as well as retirees and current state employees.
Along with the Governor and General Treasurer Raimondo, the Assembly
recognizes the magnitude of the issue and we are looking forward to a
fall session that will give us the opportunity to fully focus our
attention on it.
Our state has not left hard times behind, but after the dedicated work
done in the State House this year, we can see calmer waters ahead for
the Ocean State.
(Gordon D. Fox, a Democrat from District 4 in Providence, is Speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives)
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