State Government
The State of Rhode Island spent $89.6 million on employee overtime in 2011, according to payroll data acquired by the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity. The free-market think tank will make the individual payroll data for fiscal years 2011 and 2010 available next week through an interactive transparency Web site. The average overtime payments…
From the time she took a job with the State of Rhode Island in 1979 to 2011, Judith Andrade had worked her way up to regular pay of $37,091 as a laundry worker at Eleanor Slater Hospital. According to payroll data collected by the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity she actually took home $76,320…
The Ocean State Current has an article up by Suzanne Bates (freelancing from Connecticut’s Yankee Institute) detailing the sky-high overtime that some staff at the state-run Eleanor Slater Hospital take home. These numbers come to light every now and then — usually with just a glimpse because a nurse or two makes the top however-many…
Rhode Island resident and former human services chief Gary Alexander has been making news back home related to his current job as Secretary of Public Welfare in Pennsylvania. About two weeks ago, Alexander’s work came up on the Current and Anchor Rising regarding a chart suggesting that a single-mother in the PA public welfare system…
With the declaration of emergency for Rhode Island, Hurricane Sandy becomes the first instance in which a new law, passed by the Rhode Island General Assembly and signed by the governor this spring, goes into effect. H7409 (also S2606) outlaws price gouging during an emergency. In the heat of the experience, the adrenaline of survival…
Mainly on government’s bad incentives: bad housing spending in Providence, unlearnable spending lessons for the governor, stimulus corruption, and Medicaid reform. Continue reading the Ocean State Current…
Economic development options, from all-government to government-dominated; the heartless-to-caring axis in politics; Southern New Englanders’ “independence”; solidarity between Romney and his garbage man; the media coup d’etat. Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
I’ve been following taxpayer migration data for years, but in a haphazard way. A new study that I’ve coauthored for the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity finally gave me the opportunity to review all fifteen years of available data from the IRS. The picture — from the 2003 beginning of what can only be…
This Bristol-Warren Patch article is comprised mainly of a press release from the R.I. Turnpike and Bridge Authority announcing that tolls (amount undetermined) will soon come to the Sakonnet River Bridge and that there would be no change in the amount of the tolls charged to cross the Newport bridge. But it also contained a…
1. The formation of the budget commission requested by the Woonsocket City Council was announced last night by Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee. As is required by the state’s “municipal fiscal stabilization” statute, two of the members are the current Mayor (Leo Fontaine) and City Council President (John Ward). Sandy Phaneuf‘s Valley Breeze article on…