On August 26, 2014, the Commission met for the fifth and last time.\u00a0 The purpose of the meeting was to approve the Commission\u2019s Report, which it did (well, sort of).\u00a0 The Commission Report was publicly released on September 3\u2014eight days after the wording had supposedly been finalized and voted upon.<\/p>\n
The Behind-The-Scenes Prelude to the Meeting<\/strong><\/p>\n As with its first meeting, the critical business of the Commission was done behind the scenes, prior to the meeting.<\/p>\n For the public, the report drafting process was a mystery.\u00a0 Just as the selection of co-chairs at the Commission\u2019s first meeting was announced and voted on as if by divine providence, the same occurred with the report drafting.\u00a0 At the four previous meetings, there had been no public discussion of who or how the Commission would draft its report.\u00a0 Nor was there a public acknowledgement of which of the legislative leadership\u2019s staff members would be assigned to do the work.<\/p>\n On August 7, the Commission\u2019s meeting chair announced that, as if coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, the Commission\u2019s report would have to be complete by August 25 to meet the Secretary of State\u2019s deadline for inclusion in his Voter Information Handbook, which is distributed at taxpayer expense to all registered Rhode Island voters.\u00a0 Never mind that there is no law stipulating that the Secretary of State must consider, let alone incorporate, the Commission\u2019s report.<\/p>\n But there was a problem with this scenario.\u00a0 The last public hearing was on Thursday, August 21, and the date of the next meeting to discuss and approve the report was August 26.\u00a0 Never mind: the staff would draft the report on its own and send a summary to the Secretary of State by his August 25 deadline for his Voter Information Handbook\u2014without first sending it for review, let alone approval, to all the commissioners.\u00a0 The commissioners did get approximately 24 hours prior to the August 26 meeting to review the draft of the Report on a confidential basis. Commissioners never voted on the final summary text sent to the Secretary of State and at least some were not informed that it was sent.<\/p>\n The August 26 Meeting<\/strong><\/p>\n The public meeting began inauspiciously as a meaningfully accessible public meeting.\u00a0 Unlike the other four meetings, it wasn\u2019t webcast, violating the legislature\u2019s own rules and the Commission\u2019s promises regarding the transparency and accessibility of its proceedings.\u00a0 Fortunately, Beverly Clay, who had raised concerns<\/a> about the transparency of the Commission\u2019s proceedings during her testimony before the Commission on August 7, observed the policy violation and managed, despite some opposition by one staffer, to get the recording started within about ten minutes of the meeting\u2019s start.\u00a0 The result was that slightly more than half the meeting was recorded.<\/p>\n The Jones Amendment.<\/strong>\u00a0 Commissioner Judy Jones (one of the four \u201cpublic\u201d members) moved to amend the report to include the fact that the Women\u2019s Health and Education Fund had testified.\u00a0 Adding the Women\u2019s Health and Education Fund (which did not testify in person but presumably sent a letter to the Commission that wasn\u2019t publicly disclosed) but not, say, The Rhode Island Center for Civil Rights, which did testify in person, brought the total of groups to 5 against and 4 for.\u00a0 Jones\u2019s amendment was approved. \u00a0This part of the meeting wasn\u2019t webcast.<\/p>\n Since the final report would include the names of groups but not individuals who testified at the hearings, the overall impression created by this amendment was that there was more opposition than support for a constitutional convention.\u00a0 In contrast, if all speakers had been treated equally in the report, the overall score for the three public hearings would have been 15 in favor, 7 opposed, and 3 neutral.<\/p>\n No explanation was provided for the missing individuals; for example, why the National Association of Social Workers should be included after only submitting one page of talking point style written testimony but not individuals who spoke at length in person, such as Mayor Alan Fung of Cranston, John Partridge, one of the 1973 Constitutional Convention Framers of both the Periodic Constitutional Convention Referendum and the Bi-Partisan Preparatory Commission, and Phil West, former executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island and author of a major book on democratic reform in Rhode Island.<\/p>\n The Frias Amendments.<\/strong>\u00a0 The primary discussion involved two amendments to the report proposed by Steve Frias (another \u201cpublic\u201d member; for Mr. Frias\u2019 account of his amendments, see Interview with Steve Frias, on the Work of the Constitutional Convention Preparatory Commission<\/a>).\u00a0 The first amendment sought to include in the report the cost of the 1973 constitutional convention as well as the 1986 convention.\u00a0 The cost of the 1973 convention was substantially less than the 1986 convention.\u00a0 Frias\u2019 version of the amendment was voted down, but the meeting chair reworded it and that version was accepted.<\/p>\n A key goal of constitutional convention opponents was to emphasize the costs rather than the benefits of a constitutional convention; for example, by only mentioning the costs of having but not of not having a convention. Convention proponents, in contrast, emphasized that the costs were controlled by the legislature and could be offset by reduced waste, fraud, and abuse (e.g., via the cost cuts expected via a line item veto) and even increased revenue (e.g., as allowing gambling in Rhode Island in 1973 dwarfed the cost of the 1973 convention by more than a hundredfold). \u00a0The Commission refused to include such potential quantified offsets in its report. \u00a0(To get a feel for the referendum cost politics involved here, imagine the General Assembly’s uproar if a different referendum commission report\u00a0included the cost of Rhode Island’s police force or teachers without including\u00a0the cost of no police force or teachers.)<\/p>\n Similarly, the Commission did not acknowledge the email<\/a>\u00a0of former Rhode Island Supreme Court Justice Robert Flanders sent to the Secretary of State\u2019s office on the morning of August 26, and then handed out to every Commission member at the beginning of the meeting on August 26.\u00a0 The key question Flanders asked the Secretary of State\u2019s office to address, which concerned the insertion of the estimated cost of a\u00a0convention, was worded this way:<\/p>\n The question of whether to hold a constitutional convention does not involve \u201cthe issuance of bonds or other evidence of indebtedness or any other long term financial obligation.\u201d\u00a0 So, on what basis can such a statement be included? In my opinion, any insertion of estimated costs or expenses in holding such a convention is not only unauthorized and illegal, but an attempt to put a negative thumb on the voters’ scale.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If it were illegal for the Voter Information Handbook to include such costs in isolation, as it did in 2004, then by logical inference it might be illegal for the Voter Information Handbook to merely link to the Commission\u2019s Report, if the Report exhibited obvious bias by featuring the costs of approving but not of not approving a constitutional convention.<\/p>\n Frias\u2019 other amendment concerned eliminating language in the Report\u2019s conclusion that suggested that a periodic constitutional convention referendum had no distinctive democratic function that wasn\u2019t already provided by other constitutional revision processes included in Rhode Island\u2019s Constitution.\u00a0 Even if the Frias amendment had been accepted, the final report would have been highly misleading because it provides no explanation of the distinctive checks & balances function of a periodic state constitutional convention referendum.\u00a0 In any case, the Frias amendment was defeated, thus retaining what would turn out to be, upon the Report\u2019s public release, its most notable bias.<\/p>\n As in previous meetings, votes were taken without a publicly recorded roll call (nor were there quorum calls to reveal the names of missing commissioners).\u00a0 Even the final vote on the report, although better specified than previous votes, was recorded ambiguously.\u00a0 The no vote was specified (Steve Frias), but the 10 yes votes and one abstention weren\u2019t attached to commissioner names.<\/p>\n The Meeting\u2019s Aftermath<\/strong><\/p>\n Even after the Commission voted on the final report, the\u00a0legislature\u2019s leadership staff refused to publicly release it for eight days (even to Commission members) despite many entreaties over the intervening days.\u00a0 The excuse was that the two minor amendments introduced at the Commission\u2019s final meeting had to be incorporated into the 5\u00a0page Report before it could be publicly released.<\/p>\n As publicly released on September 3, the Commission\u2019s Report did include an additional minor change that wasn\u2019t voted on at the August 26 meeting.\u00a0 The opening paragraph of the Report approved on August 26 included the sentence: “The information in this report was compiled by the Bi-Partisan Preparatory Commission for a Constitutional Convention.”\u00a0 In the final published Report, this sentence was modified by adding at its conclusion: \u201cafter receiving testimony from the public at multiple commission hearings.\u201d<\/p>\n The sentence in both its original and revised version was misleading because it didn\u2019t acknowledge the critical and independent role of the legislative leadership\u2019s staff, including changing the sentence without Commission approval and sending a summary of the Draft Report to the Secretary of State without first passing it by all the commissioners for their approval.\u00a0 The revised version added an additional twist because it implied that the Commission\u2019s Final Report was an objective summary of the public testimony, even though critical arguments in the public testimony were omitted; for example, that a periodic constitutional convention referendum has a democratic role that cannot be duplicated by the legislature and that the costs of convening a convention could be more than offset by creating a more efficient and effective state government.<\/p>\n Unlike the four earlier meetings of the Bi-Partisan Preparatory Commission, the webcast of the August 26 meeting was not posted online within a few hours of the end of the meeting.\u00a0 After queries about the missing webcast, the webcast was finally posted online some time on Thursday, August 28.\u00a0\u00a0 None of the official minutes of the meeting have been posted online.\u00a0 But via a commissioner, we were able to get a copy of the minutes, and they are now posted on RhodeIslandConCon.info\u2019s Bi-Partisan Preparatory Commission webpage<\/a>.\u00a0 We were not able to get these minutes until September 3.<\/p>\n The delayed public release date of the Commission Report came after completion of the text in the Secretary of State\u2019s Voter Information Handbook.\u00a0 This may not be a mere coincidence, since the primary influence of the Commission\u2019s Report is indirect via its influence on the Voter Information Handbook, which is printed and mailed at taxpayer expense to all Rhode Island registered voters shortly before the November 4, 2014 election.<\/p>\n As of the posting of this blog on Thursday, September 4, the Secretary of State had still not released the final wording for the Voter Information Handbook that was scheduled to go to print on Friday, September 5, so the relationship between the Commission Report and Voter Information Handbook remains unknown.\u00a0 Since smart politics would be not to release potentially controversial information until after the primary election, the Voter Information Handbook probably won\u2019t be released until then.<\/p>\n \u2013by J.H. Snider, Administrator, RhodeIslandConCon.info, and Beverly Clay, Advisory Committee Member, RhodeIslandConCon.info.<\/em><\/p>\n P.S. Professor Tim Murphy has pointed out that the cost estimate for the 1986 constitutional convention included in the Commission Report may be flawed. \u00a0The cost estimate, $2.5 million, was based on using the cost of the 1986 constitutional convention and then adding to it an inflation factor. \u00a0Sounds simple and reasonable enough. \u00a0But the number of Convention delegates would be reduced from 100 to 75 because the number of House districts was reduced by that amount\u00a0in the intervening period. \u00a0\u00a0That would reduce the cost of the convention by 25% ($625,000) on a per-delegate basis, resulting in a revised total of $1.9 million. \u00a0Of course, some convention costs, such as preparing a record of the convention debates, are largely fixed so would be minimally affected by the reduction in convention delegates. \u00a0 Other fixed costs, such as the use of the State House for convention meetings, are not included because the State doesn’t charge for the use of its facilities. \u00a0A more accurate estimate of convention costs would separate the fixed and variable costs (a task possibly requiring substantial effort) and then discount only the variable costs by 25%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On August 26, 2014, the Commission met for the fifth and last time.\u00a0 The purpose of the meeting was to approve the Commission\u2019s Report, which it did (well, sort of).\u00a0 The Commission Report was publicly released on September 3\u2014eight days after the wording had supposedly been finalized and voted upon. The Behind-The-Scenes Prelude to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhodeisland.concon.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhodeisland.concon.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhodeisland.concon.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhodeisland.concon.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhodeisland.concon.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1123"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/rhodeisland.concon.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1155,"href":"https:\/\/rhodeisland.concon.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1123\/revisions\/1155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhodeisland.concon.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhodeisland.concon.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhodeisland.concon.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}