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Recovery in the News
Some last-minute jockeying for positions in state budget
Elizabeth Gudrais
Journal State House Bureau
June 7, 2007
Leaders in the General Assembly hinted that when next year’s state budget comes out tomorrow, it may contain provisions to help shift drug-addicted prison inmates into treatment programs.
But the lawmakers stopped short of saying anything more specific. It was just one of hundreds of cryptic conversations taking place yesterday, as advocates flooded the State House in a last-minute drive to get their interests included in the budget.
“This is our house,” former state Sen. Tom Coderre, who now advocates for recovering drug and alcohol addicts, told a crowd gathered in the rotunda. “We send the people here to represent us. … Don’t feel like your voice doesn’t matter here, because it absolutely does.”
Coderre’s group, RI CARES — Rhode Island Communities for Addiction Recovery Efforts — held a rally to encourage lawmakers to find a way to pay for additional drug and alcohol treatment beds.
State prison officials have testified that 70 percent of inmates at the Adult Correctional Institutions have some sort of substance-abuse problem. Even the most expensive drug-treatment program costs just half what incarceration costs: The average per-inmate cost of keeping someone at the ACI is $39,000 a year. The treatment programs’ annual cost ranges from $3,000 to $20,000, and people rarely stay enrolled in the more costly programs for an entire year.
“Let’s reverse history,” Coderre challenged lawmakers. “Instead of building more prisons, let’s build more treatment centers.”
Rep. Steven M. Costantino’s exact words on the issue: “Hopefully, when this budget comes out, we can at least, do, possibly, something to help that situation.”
Costantino, who chaired the Rhode Island Drug and Alcohol Treatment Association in the days before he was a lawmaker, was among the lawmakers RI CARES honored yesterday for their work on the issue. Costantino now chairs the House Finance Committee. He said intense budget negotiations continue, and will continue almost right up until the Finance Committee convenes to take a vote tomorrow.
The other lawmakers honored yesterday, Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed and Rep. Thomas C. Slater, who chairs the subcommittee of Finance that deals with human service programs, also shied away from giving details or even confirming that the budget will address the issue.
“While it may seem simple to say treatment makes more sense than incarceration,” Paiva Weed said, doing something about it “costs, and requires an investment of, funds up front.”
Lawmakers had a particularly tough task this year in closing the estimated $300-million deficit projected if taxes and state services stay at current levels. Just one day after the committee vote, the full House yesterday approved what is expected to be a major part of the solution: raising $195 million by selling part of Rhode Island’s future payments from the national tobacco settlement.
With Governor Carcieri and some House members indicating there may be disagreement about how the state should spend the tobacco money, House leaders offered assurances that approving selling the bonds does not give the state carte blanche to spend the proceeds any way it pleases.
The budget released by Carcieri in late January represents a starting point for discussions. What comes out of House Finance tomorrow will be much closer to what the Assembly ultimately ends up passing.
The posting of the budget for a vote in House Finance means the Assembly will adjourn for the year in a matter of weeks. Already yesterday, lobbyists and lawmakers were scrambling to find out whether their wish lists are embodied in the budget, and whether their bills have a chance of passing this year.
In the hallway above the RI CARES rally, advocates waited for senators and representatives to arrive for the day’s session, each hoping to bend a lawmaker’s ear about adult education programs.
The governor’s budget proposed adding $1 million to the $2.8 million the state is spending this year on programs such as adult literacy and high-school equivalency classes. A group calling itself the Rhode Island Workforce Alliance is lobbying lawmakers to keep this addition and to add $2 million more.
Outside, protesters with megaphones yelled slogans about preserving services for the working poor. They had convened on Atwells Avenue, on Federal Hill, and marched to the State House, planning to spend the night outside in tents. The coalition opposed a variety of proposed budget cuts, including privatizing food services and housekeeping at state hospitals and the veterans’ home; cuts in services for young adults who grew up in foster care; and reductions in state subsidies for childcare.
Last night also marked the beginning of a series of long, tension-ridden floor sessions. Rep. Nicholas R. Gorham, R-Coventry, is known for raising protests on procedural bills, but those protests were longer and louder yesterday.
“Shut up!” Rep. Kenneth Carter, D-North Kingstown, bellowed across the floor to Gorham at one point.
As Gorham and others were parrying on the House floor, Minority Leader Robert A. Watson, R-East Greenwich, was demanding to be let into a closed-door meeting between the governor, the House speaker and the Senate president.
The meeting is held each year just before the Finance Committee budget vote, to go over each party’s priorities one last time. Watson says he asks each year to be included, but the answer has always been no — until this year.
Watson said, and Jeff Neal, the governor’s spokesman, confirmed, that Carcieri invited Watson in this year.
But the meeting, scheduled for yesterday at 5:30, was canceled yesterday afternoon.
Watson was under the impression the cancellation had to do with the fact that he was going to be there. “This governor has to support his Republican colleagues,” Watson said. Speaking to a reporter, Watson said House Speaker William J. Murphy and Senate President Joseph A. Montalbano, both Democrats, don’t want him there because “if I were in the meeting, I’d tell you what went on.”
Neal said the meeting was canceled “largely for scheduling reasons.”
“It’s possible that a meeting could occur tomorrow, but nothing has been scheduled,” Neal said.
Responding to Watson’s comments, Murphy said: “I think there are times when there have to be meetings between myself, the governor and the Senate president.”
He declined to be more specific, and added: “I’ve got a lot to do in the next few weeks, and one of the items on the agenda is not petty politics.”
© 2007, Published by The Providence Journal Co