PROVIDENCE REPUBLICAN
CITY COMMITTEE
NEWS RELEASE
| Release Date | 2019-03-11 |
| Subject | Providence GOP Leaders Oppose Mayor's Plan To Monetize Providence Water System |
| Contacts | DAVID TALAN < DaveTalan@aol.com > |
| WILLIAM RICCI < ProvidenceRepublican@gmail.com > |
The Co-Chairs of the Providence Republican Party, David Talan and William Ricci, have come out against Mayor Jorge Elorza's proposal to monetize the Providence water system.
The Mayor is holding his first city-wide public forum on this plan, tonight (Monday) at 6 P.M. in Alvarez High School in the Reservoir Triangle neighborhood. The Mayor's plan is designed to protect the city's pension and health plan for retirees, which is an estimated $2,000,000,000 in debt (or $12,000 for every man, woman & child in the city). The Mayor's plan is also designed to delay the city of Providence going into bankruptcy, until a new Mayor is in office.
Talan and Ricci offered 3 reasons for their opposition to the Mayor's plan.
- Water bills would double for everybody, in order to get back the $300,000,000 that the Mayor hopes to get by monetizing the system. Ricci recalled that city residents' sewer bills doubled some years ago, when the city sold the sewer system to the Narragansett Bay Commission.
- Our water might become polluted. Talan, a former Boy Scout leader, who knows something about soil & water conservation, worried that a private entity might try to sell some of the watershed property around the Scituate Reservoir, to private developers to build houses. The watershed land is what filters out pollutants, before they can reach our drinking water supply. Talan recalled the disaster in Flint Michigan, when a new water supply owner tried to save some money, and ended up poisoning the water supply.
- The Mayor's plan does nothing to resolve the overall financial problem with the pensions, and prevent the problem from reoccurring in the future.
Talan and Ricci do agree with Mayor Elorza on one thing. If we do nothing about the unfunded pension & health plans, the city will definitely go bankrupt in the near future, and this would be a very bad thing for Providence residents. The Mayor has demanded that opponents of his plan should offer an alternative. So the GOP leaders offer the following ideas to cut costs, instead of raising taxes and fees.
Some retirees are making so much money, that they would have to take a pay cut, if they came out of retirement to go back to their old job. This is due to excessive cost-of-living adjustments (greater than the rate of inflation) given to employees during the Cianci administration. No retiree should collect more money than current workers doing their old job, and their pensions should be reduced accordingly.
No retiree should be able to collect a pension before the age of 60. Now, some employees retire in their 40's, collect a pension immediately, and go to work in another job.
The city should get out of the pension business entirely. New employees should receive an Individual Retirement Account (IRA), which they own themselves. The city of Cranston did something similar, and we should follow their example.
The Mayor has previously rejected these suggestions. He has said any changes to the union contracts are off the table. And he has said that if the city goes bankrupt, an overseer might sell the water system anyway.
The Providence Republican leaders have consulted with the top R.I. expert on municipal bankruptcies, and have learned the following. If the city were to go bankrupt, the absolute last thing that an overseer would do is to sell the city's assets. The first thing he would do is to force the unions to renegotiate contracts. The threat of losing everything would be enough to force them to negotiate seriously. When Central Falls went bankrupt, retirees lost up to 60 percent of their pensions. If Providence were to go bankrupt, retirees would probably lose everything. This serious threat would be enough to bring them to the table.