Central Falls

In the last couple of Projo stories on the Central Falls receivership situation, no references have been made, in the voice of the omniscient news narrator, to the power of the receiver to either raise taxes or fire city employees. For example, today’s news staff story about the city’s bond rating being cut to a…

I am becoming increasingly uneasy with the scope of the powers being attributed to a “municipal receiver” in Rhode Island. John Hill‘s story in today’s Projo on the situation in Central Falls describes a broad range of executive and taxation authority being suddenly transferred to one man, perhaps working in tandem with the court system…

Here is one aspect of the aforementioned exploration. Receivership usually means that an organization, as it has been, is going away. A city itself, of course, can’t actually go away solely due to fiscal problems. And only in the most extreme of circumstances could a city government go away, or even change very quickly, because…

Pardon me for asking what might be a silly question here, but what does a municipal receivership of the kind being undergone by Central Falls actually mean? I’ve looked through the Rhode Island General Laws, and there is no mention of municipal receivership there that I am able to find. There’s something in Federal law…

In today’s Providence Journal, Mike Stanton and W. Zachary Malinowski do a thorough follow up investigation into the story, originally broken by the Hummel Report’s Jim Hummel, about outrageous board-up fees which were facilitated by the official action of that city’s mayor. In it, we learn that Mayor Charles D. Moreau has hired counsel. Moreau’s…