Providence Republican Response To Mayor Cicilline's State Of City Address
Publicado el 2010-02-04 21:08:01 [0 comentarios]
Dave Talan
PROVIDENCE REPUBLICAN PARTY
Subject: RESPONSE TO MAYOR'S STATE OF THE CITY ADDRESS
For Release: Tuesday February 2 7:00 P.M.
Contact: Dave Talan 941-3662 (h) 862-7519 (c) DaveTalan@aol.com
David Talan, Chairman of the Providence Republican Party, responded as follows to Mayor David Cicilline's State Of The City address tonight.
The Providence Republican Party urges the Mayor to look for ways to hold down city spending, without reducing necessary services. We commend Governor Carcieri for proposing to relax unfunded state mandates on the cities and towns, to allow them to spend much less money on low priority items. We note that a bi-partisan group of Mayors has come out in support of eliminating unfunded state mandates: Democratic Mayors from Cumberland, Johnston & North Providence (Daniel McKee, Joseph Polisena & Charles Lombardi), as well as Republican chief executives from Cranston and Lincoln (Allan Fung and Joseph Almond). Noticeably missing from this list is the Mayor of Providence. We urge Mayor Cicilline to join this effort, and to take a leadership role. We also urge the Mayor to actively lobby the all-Democrat 20-member Providence Legislative delegation to support eliminating unfunded mandates.
In fact, we urge the Mayor to go even further than the Governor has done. The Mayor should lobby the State Legislature for an "Unfunded Mandates Act", that would relieve the city from having to comply with any mandates that are not funded fully (100 %) by the state government.. We would find that we could get by very well without many of these mandated services. As an example of how this could save money, the city 2 years ago got permission from the state Dept. of Education to increase the size of costly special education classes by 20 perecnt from what was mandated. This does not appear to have done any harm to the quality of instruction. (Indeed, we should look at reducing the number of students in special education. In Providence, the percentage of such children is double the national average.)
Education offers the biggest potential for cost saving. Ninety-nine (99) percent of Providence school children live walking distance to a neighborhood Elementary School or Middle School. And yet we are spending a fortune to bus tens of thousands of students, away from the neighborhood school they could walk to, and to available spaces in schools on the opposite side of the city. This game of "Musical Chairs", involving unwilling participants, costs over $12 million, and destroys the fabric of stable neighborhoods and hurts children. And we are going in the wrong direction under the current administration. A couple of years ago, the city took hundreds of elementary school children away from the West Broadway Elementary School (which they walked to), and bused them all the way to the Johnston town line (to the Springfield School off Hartford Ave). They have to go through Olneyville Square, a difficult trip under the best of driving conditions. The Mayor has been patting himself on the back recently, for deciding to correct his previous mistake, and re-open West Broadway. But the plan still does not call for returning the children now being bused to the Johnston town line.
And the Mayor's School Superintendent recently proposed closing 9 public schools; some of which are in neighborhoods that already do not have enough classroom space, and are busing children across town to available spaces. An example is the Sackett St. School, now the only elementary school in the entire area between Elmwood Ave. and Broad St.
Many children (not by choice) are wasting up to 3 hours a day riding buses to the opposite end of the city, (8 hours during snow storms), through areas with difficult driving conditions in the best of time. We must reduce the number of children being bused against their will.
There has been a lot of discussion about whether to eliminate school bus monitors. The question we really should be asking is, "Why are these children riding a school bus in the first place?"
Difficult economic times require us to consider solutions that we might not consider otherwise. Since the south side of the city has far more students than it has classroom space for; and it has good private & parochial schools with lots of empty seats; then we need to explore a pilot school voucher program to put students into those seats. This would improve education, and save lots of money. ($8,000 per child - the difference between what it costs to educate a child in the city's public schools and what it costs per child in a parochial school).
Another idea is to take advantage of Brown University and Johnson & Wales University. These Universities are eager to acquire land in the "Knowledge District" (where the old Rt. 195 is now) to expand their programs. In return for this land, we should ask them to start up and run free private schools for Providence children. As private schools, they would be free of costly state mandates and teacher contract restraints; and could do this at a fraction of the cost of current public schools. This idea would be far preferable to the Mayor's unwise suggestion to hit up each college student for hundreds of dollars in taxes.
On the subject of education, we applaud Governor Carcieri's Director of Education, Deborah Gist, for planning to essentially take over 7 Providence schools, and run them as if they were "charter schools", free of all work rules from the teachers' contract. The work rules in the current contract would be appropriate for a factory worker kicking a foot press; but are totally inappropriate for a highly-trained professional like a teacher. We must have a school system that puts the children's interests first. Indeed, we should consider converting the entire Providence school system to the charter school model, to improve all our children's education.
We continue to support efforts the Mayor has proposed, but never implemented, to hold down pension costs for new employees (by using 401 K's instead of defined benefits); and to hold down health care costs by providing competition between United Health Care and Blue Cross. These reforms, if ever carried out, will have full support from the Providence Republican Party. This is the sort of thing the Mayor should do more of, to balance the city budget.
Finally, we applaud the Mayor for his recent announcement that he will not run again for Mayor, after this year's election, because he wants to comply with the "spirit" of term limits in the City Charter. (A new change in the Charter limits a Mayor to 2 terms, starting with the 2010 election; i.e. effective in the year 2018). But if the Mayor really wants to comply with the "spirit" of the Charter, he could step down this year, after already completing 2 terms. The Providence Republican Party offers to "assist" the Mayor, in this November's election, to comply with the "spirit" of the 2-term limit.
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Categorias: PRESS RELEASES / Comunicados de Prensa