The Mayor has vetoed the City Council’s recent changes to the Providence External Review Authority, entity that’s meant to monitor police abuse, which has historically been higher in Providence than in all but a couple of other large cities. And he’s upped the ante, by having the City Solicitor sue the Council too. The Mayor asserts that PERA violates his right to appoint directors of agencies and departments. But the thing is, PERA’s been this way since its inception, and back when he was a state rep and practicing lawyer, the Mayor wrote the ordinance. Here’s RIFuture’s take:
The provision states that the Mayor shall have the power to “appoint all heads of city departments and agencies with the approval of the city council.” Ok, fair enough, but why now? Since 2002 the Executive Director of PERA has been hired by the Board, and for the past eight years PERA has functioned well under the previous structure. It’s strange that it wasn’t until Friday, January 29, that the City Solicitor, Adrienne Southgate, filed a civil action challenging the Board’s power to hire the Executive Director. The Mayor’s argument that the work of PERA is “too important to be undermined by violating the City Charter,” and that the City Council “cannot make good policy by breaking the law” is disingenuous at best.
The assertion that the Executive Director of PERA should be appointed by the Mayor creates a significant conflict of interest. The agency is supposed to be independent. The Solicitor’s civil suit seems to be more motivated by a power grab in order to put PERA under Mayoral control.
Hopefully we can move past these squabbles so PERA can start functioning in a consistent way, after years of half-assedness, as it’s fended off lawsuits and been stuck in the middle of City Hall bickering.
Could it be that the current head of PERA is David Cicilline’s old arch-nemesis? Cicilline is petty and a megalomaniac and would subsume the interests of the City of Providence simply to “get at” the folks that are always “picking on him”. His PERA action pretty much proves that premise.
The bickering will stop once Cicilline gets off his high horse and leaves city hall… or once the people of Providence smarten up and vote him out of office this November.