6.1.

2000

House votes to save itself

Bill asks voters to reconsider downsizing

By KATHERINE GREGG
Journal State House Bureau

PROVIDENCE -- Cranston Democrat Nancy Hetherington had the question of the day.

"How would you just wipe out 25 people . . . How do you say 25 of us don't matter?" she
asked her colleagues in the Rhode Island House of Representatives.

With that question ringing in their ears, the lawmakers voted 85 to 14 yesterday to put
downsizing on the statewide ballot a second time, in November, in the unabashed hope
that voters will change their minds about reducing the size of the House from 100 to 75
members, and the Senate from 50 to 38 members.

The joint resolution now moves to the Senate, where it is also expected to receive a warm
welcome.

The cutback was part and parcel of the constitutional amendment, approved by voters in
1994, that raised legislators' pay.

While lawmakers are already enjoying the raise, from $300 to their current $10,940 a
year, the cutback was delayed until 2003 to coincide with the once-a-decade drawing of
legislative lines that will take place, in any event, after the 2000 census is complete.

All 13 members of the tiny House Republican bloc voted against the resolution to place
downsizing on the statewide ballot again this November, but only 2 Democrats broke
ranks to vote with them.

"To ignore 1994 as if it didn't happen is revisionist history at its worst," said one of those
Democrats, Rep. Mark Heffner, D-Barrington.

Republican Governor Almond sounded many of the same themes at a rare news
conference on legislative matters earlier in the day. "I'll tell you, I would have a pretty
difficult time telling the voters of the state of Rhode Island that I don't think they knew
what they were voting for on any issue.

"I mean, my God," said Almond, "this was not a constitutional amendment that came all
of a sudden out of the air . . . It was a total package of reform for state government."

But legislators chortled gleefully and, in the end, gave a standing ovation yesterday to
Rep. Mabel Anderson, after the 76-year-old Pawtucket Democrat denounced the voter-
mandated cutback in legislative ranks as an assault on the powerless and forgotten.

Characterizing the 1994 vote as a skirmish between the haves and have-nots in Rhode
Island, she said: "The people at Fallon School voted it down. The people at Agnes Little
voted it down. The people at the Columbus Avenue Fire Station voted it down . . .
Indeed, at every polling place in my district, people voted it down."

"So who voted for it? Rumstick Point in Barrington. Poppasquash Point in Bristol. The
Dunes Club in Narragansett. Carriage Heights in Lincoln. The East Side of Providence.
Well la-de-da," she said to hoots of laughter from her colleagues.

"It looks like the membership of Common Cause," said Anderson, naming one of the
citizens groups that lobbied legislators then and now to keep the package presented to
voters in 1994 intact: a smaller, better-paid legislature.

The debate in the clubby House chamber, presided over by another Pawucket Democrat,
House Speaker John B. Harwood, was rich with irony.

"Having sat here for almost 20 years, I know exactly what is going to happen if . . .
redistricting and downsizing take place together," said Anderson, waxing salty in her
televised speech. "The same old communities are going to be protected, and the same old
communities are going to be screwed . . . They'll just chop up Pawtucket like they did ten
years ago."

Heffner tried stating for the record the way redistricting actually works: "We draw the
lines. We pass the bill. We can assure that the communities that need to be represented
are represented." But he changed few minds.

For those lawmakers around long enough to remember when legislative leaders drew new
district lines around a particular house to accommodate an individual supporter or dilute
opposition strength, the debate boiled down to simple political math.

Since the last census in 1990, the state's larger cities, Providence and Pawtucket, have
lost population while the more rural, GOP-friendly communities at the southern end of
the state have grown by as much as 12 percent in Charlestown, 10 percent in Richmond
and Narragansett, and 8 percent in Exeter.

With population dictating the number of legislators each community has, redistricting
will almost certainly cost the larger cities one or more House seats, no matter how
downsizing fares at the polls in November.

"It is obvious that members of the House feel like inhabitants of a lifeboat," remarked
Common Cause director H. Philip West, sympathetically. "If I were on a lifeboat with 99
other people, and someone said decide which 25 you push overboard, I would resist. But
the truth is this is not a lifeboat, and people are not going to be pushed off into an empty
ocean.

"If this passed, we are simply going to have a basic reform of state government," he said
at Almond's news conference.

The proponents of downsizing make this argument: a smaller, better-paid legislature with
more staff, better accommodations and state-of-the art equipment that would make for a
more efficient legislature in which each vote counts more than it does today.

House Minority leader Robert Watson, R-East Greenwich, tried during yesterday's House
debate to rebut arguments that downsizing will almost certainly reduce the number of
blacks, Hispanics and women in the legislature.

In the 20 years since Providence reduced the size of its City Council from 26 to 15
members, he noted, the number of women has grown from one to five; the number of
blacks and ethnic minorities has stayed at 3. Only the GOP lost out, Watson remarked
wryly, going from four seats to none.

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