February 27, 2009
Don't Speak, Don't See
Marc mentioned yesterday that the chairman of the Rhode Island House Finance Committee wishes to control debate on the floor of the House. In other news, the chairman of a House commission on pension reform, Timothy Williamson, again refused to release the product of a publicly financed actuarial study of potential retirement savings:
The state's pension advisers dangled potential savings ranging from $22.6 million to $38.2 million in a single year in front of a legislative study commission yesterday, amid promises by the chairman that this year-long, stop-and-go foray into the world of public employee pensions in Rhode Island will wrap up its inquiry by the end of next month.Rep. Timothy Williamson, D-West Warwick, again refused to make public a letter summarizing the findings of the state-paid actuaries at Gabriel Roeder Smith & Co., and the methodology they used to arrive at their conclusions.
Williamson asserted that the letter, which the actuaries had in front of them as they testified at last night's televised State House meeting, had been written to him personally, in his role as chairman of the commission, and so it was not public. One of House Speaker William J. Murphy's top State House legal advisers, Richard Kearns, backed him up, which kept the letter out of the public arena last night.
The actuaries are being paid a reported $52,000 by the General Assembly for their work, but as of last night, only some of that completed work had been made public.
Given the numbers that were cited — that the numbers were cited — one wonders what's being withheld from public view.
Doesn't this just require that someone file a lawsuit based on the Freedom of Information Act? Maybe some media member? Aren't bloggers part of the media now? *hint hint*
Gee, these Democrats all wanted to tout the great Obama and his new ways in Washington and Obama is promising all this openness in government. Amazing how his disciples don't want to follow the same ideals that their messiah is touting. Interesting how it was bad when the Bush people wanted to withhold information the media yelled and screamed about it, but now when our local Democrats want to do the same, it's ok, because we don't want to "scare" the public. Yeah, because we're all so fat, dumb and happy with the way things are right now too Timmy.
Go throw another staffer through a window.
Posted by: Patrick at February 27, 2009 10:33 AMJust when you thought RI Dems couldnt run a candidate to the left of Lynch and Roberts.
dun dun dun!
Bob Walsh.
at least we get to look forward to them slamming each other.
Hopefully the dems beat each other up and expell so much money their GE strategy will be negativly impacted
Those numbers are based on a minor "tinkering at the margins" with the pension system.
The cited savings are a merely an echo of the savings that could be realized by taxpayers if the pension system were frozen.
That they're going so far to hide the numbers behind even minor changes demonstrates how badly they want to keep the taxpaying serfs in the dark about the billions they expect us to cough up in order to keep the public sector aristocracy in their pensions.
So there we have it. In one corner the public sector union aristocracy and their Democrat court jesters, and in the other corner the taxpaying serf class.
Posted by: Tom W at February 27, 2009 1:04 PMTom
We aren't serfs. We can vote. With our feet. We have been, and will continue to do so until somebody takes notice.
Posted by: chuckR at February 27, 2009 1:13 PM