Gov. Carcieri v. the RI Pacheco Law

By Jim Stergios
May 8th, 2008

Ah, I feel like I am in a lounge chair in Somerset circa 1993 looking across Narragansett Bay and thinking… why don’t they have the Pacheco law. Well, dumb ideas take a while to travel, so it took 14 years for Leviathan to nose its way across the Bay.

From Reason’s Privatization Watch comes a good summary of the battle lines drawn int eh Ocean State. Gov. Carcieri has been looking to close a half billion budget deficit. He was looking to close some programs and to outsource others. In response, the legislature thought it was a good idea to keep him from doing any of that. They passed an anti-privatization law, which (surprise to all of us in the Bay State) put all kinds of regulatory obstacles in front of the Governor’s path.

Doesn’t that sound a tad reminiscent of the Weldian days of yore?

including requiring a series of detailed notifications and cost-benefit analyses before the
governor can proceed with any plan to replace state employees with private contractors. According to Brian Stern, the governor’s chief of staff, “At this point, we feel that it is not possible to comply with the privatization statute as written.”

The law additionally allows unions, individual employees, or even state program recipients such as hospital patients, to appeal privatizations to the Superior Court.

Lots of red tape. Too bad they don’t have State Auditor DeNucci to do their bidding. Anyway, the RI Courts will take care of that and keep any plan in red tape for years.