Dear Friends,

 

It was a short week, but a very good week.
 
As Parker mentioned we published a report on Medicaid this week called "The Age Wave, the Ocean State, and Long-Term Care," which is the result of dozens of interviews inside the healthcare community.
 
And while that was going on, Parker, Holly, and company, were busy preparing for Grover Norquist's visit on Thursday.
 
Thursday started with an interview on the Helen Glover Show, followed by an interview on the John DePetro Show. We want to sincerely thank them both for providing us the time to speak and promote our fundraising event that we held last night.
 
Following those interviews we held our monthly meeting (The Thursday Meeting). You can find more information about that meeting at the bottom of this email. Throw in a few meetings, a lunch meeting, a dinner meeting, some Rolaids, and it was a pretty full day.
 
I also want to thank all the people that came to the event. It was a wonderful success and we sincerely appreciate your support and hope you enjoyed yourselves.  
 
But while this was going on, the Bolsheviks continued to storm the gate, by which I mean that Governor Carcieri came to an agreement with the Union regarding the furlough days. If you recall, he proposed shutting down government for 12 days, but the Union threatened legal action, so Carcieri responded by proposing a cut of 1000 employees. However, now we have a new deal.
 
Rather than have 12 days off for all non-essential employees we now have 8 days off for all employees (staggered so as not to fully impact a single department). Unfortunately, we are giving 4 of those days back when the employee retires.
 
And that brings up another question. If an employee doesn't retire for another 10-20 years, will we be paying them back in 2009 dollars or the inflated 2019 or 2029 dollars? Theoretically, if we put the money in the bank it would increase as with inflation, but who really thinks we are going to do that.
 
In the Governor's defense, the Union's tactic of taking everything to court is costly and delays realization of the savings. You can budget for it, but if wrong the budget will still need to be balanced. So, while we in the private market continue to watch the economy stall those in the public sector continue expecting business as usual.   
 
But that brings us back to OSPRI's busy week. In between event planning and paper publishing, we have also been fielding a lot of questions regarding employee contracts (which you can find on the Transparency Train). Last week, when the Governor initially proposed the furlough days and reducing payments to the towns, mayors and town administrators cried bloody murder. So, we issued a press release stating that we had posted all the employee contracts and they show that those who complained about being "cut to the bone" and having "nowhere to cut" were still paying their public employees (the unionized ones) raises of 8-10 percent. Maybe those living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
 
And this brings us back to our supporters and the wonderful event held last night. Without you we wouldn't have a website to go to with all those contracts. Without you we wouldn't have the staff to process the research. Without you there would be no OSPRI to respond to these issues. Thank you.
 
So, that was the short week in Rhode Island. I certainly look forward to next week.
 

Onward and upward,

 

 

Bill Felkner

President and Founder