Prime mover After an eventful first 10 months in office, Governor Donald L. Carcieri looks back and ahead BY IAN DONNIS

Even with his stated intention of challenging business as usual at the State House, Donald L. Carcieri would have been hard-pressed to predict the two most dramatic events — the Station fire disaster and the raid on the Narragansett Indian smoke shop — that have marked his first year as governor. And if the avuncular newcomer to Rhode Island politics proved exceptional in his comforting response to the West Warwick nightclub fire, the latter episode reflected the more complex and nettlesome nature of many of the other issues facing the state.

A case in point is the looming collision between Carcieri and supporters of organized labor in the General Assembly over the level of pay and benefits for state workers. Although the governor made no progress on this in the last legislative session, his eager embrace of the bully pulpit — representing a sharp contrast from his predecessor, the decidedly more laidback Lincoln Almond — has already led the opposition to mobilize. With both sides girding for battle, Carcieri’s second year in office promises to be at least as eventful as his first.

The governor spoke with the Phoenix during a recent interview in his office.

Q: What were you doing 25 years ago?

A: Twenty-five years ago, I was actually working at Old Stone Bank. When you said, ’78, I was thinking, the first thing was the Blizzard. That was such a huge event and Joe Garrahy, Governor Garrahy at the time, with his plaid shirt, you know, bunkered down, and everybody has a story about the Blizzard. But I was at Old Stone Bank, can’t remember exactly what I was doing then, because I had been there from ’71 and left in ’81 — some management role at the time.

Q: Do you have a good story about the Blizzard?

A: Everybody’s got a story about the Blizzard. A fella I worked with at the bank lived right next door to me [in East Greenwich] and we had driven in separately, but I had, like a Ford Granada — not a good thing in snow. He had a Volkswagen Beetle. So I said, listen, leave my car there, I’ll go with him, we’ve got a better shot in the Volkswagen. We left Providence at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and we actually made it. We made it to East Greenwich at 9 o’clock at night. All I remember, once we got on 95 — you’ve seen pictures — the cars were just stopped. The snow was covering over the cars, so what you had [was] almost like [a] snake. There was a single line going like this [undulates] down the highway, going in and out of cars that were stopped and left.

All of a sudden it would stop, so you knew somebody was stuck up at the front, so we’d get out of the car and the wind, it was almost horizontal blowing the snow, and you get out, and go up, and everybody would do the same thing — go up to the front car, push it, okay, because everybody in those days wore suits to work and if they got a trench coat or a top coat, that was it. And push it to get it going and then run like the dickens back to the car and jump in. If you remember the old Volkswagen Beetles with the rear engines, they were air-cooled, so they had lousy heaters [laughs], so we’d be frozen like this [hunches over, rubs hands together] cause if you stayed out for very long, [you could get] hypothermia and you could die, because it was just oh so cold and the wind and the wind-chill.

Q: What would you say has most changed about Rhode Island in the last quarter-century?

A: It’s funny that you should be here today, because I just had breakfast this morning with the bankers’ association. They all fit in a room half of this size. In 1978, the bankers’ association was hundreds. So a whole industry in Rhode Island . . . consolidated down to now a handful. So huge change from that standpoint in an industry, but the two biggest things, probably the most physically evident, would be the major change in Providence.

The city’s undergone tremendous transformation, I think, physically. It’s much more attractive — all of the money that’s invested and a lot of the infrastructure changes to the city. If I compare it today to 1978, I think it’s really looking physically beautiful. Newport’s another one. I mean, Newport, well, the bridge was built in ’65, ’66, I guess, but the whole development of Newport as a real tourist destination and attraction, in 25 years has been just accelerated. And the state just sort of spreads, too. South County now is growing. If you were standing out in space, sort of hanging over and looked at the state now and then, I think those are probably the two things that would jump out at you.

Q: After being in office in office for about 10 months, how has your view changed of what it’s like to be governor?

A: Ah, you know, I didn’t have a lot of preconceptions, not having been in the political world at all, coming entirely from outside . . . Now being here, thinking back, I didn’t fully appreciate how much the job draws you out. The public demand, if you will, of the job. My focus had been very heavily what needed to be done from a managerial standpoint inside state government, to do the things that I think we have to do. ’Cause that’s the background I come from — the sort of large enterprise, how you organize it, how do you manage it and so forth. This job, the difficulty is balancing the need to do that, because we’ve got to do that — that’s a major focus of mine — but the job pulls you out with all the public demands, and whether that [might] just be events, like the Station fire, or we’ve lost — the last month and a half, we’ve had three funerals here of three National Guardsmen and two other soldiers that we lost, and those you have to do, and then you get a fish kill on Narragansett Bay. So the demand of the job from a public standpoint, first of all to be visible and be out there, is, I think, very great, very much greater than I, not having been here [anticipated] . . .

The other aspect is the inside game here, if you will, the political infrastructure and working with and trying to get done what you want to get done. There are so many people between the leadership in the House and the Senate, the politics there as well as working with my own department heads. To make changes in things takes a lot of time, a lot of input, and you’ve got labor’s interest, organized labor’s interest in so much of what you do. So it’s a lot — how would I say it? — a lot more complex to get things done, a lot more constituents on every decision. But we’re learning as we go and we’re adjusting.

Q: How’s the outlook for achieving the top goals that you had when you came into office?

A: I think good. I think that the goals that I had — remember when I said at that whole inauguration, I sort of drew the analogy to this building as a [structure]. I said that my judgment could build the kind of future we needed. There were four or five pieces to that. One, was we had to get the system of governance right, like the foundation on a building, got to rest on a solid foundation. I felt separation of powers was part of that, okay? I think we need more balance up here, which is one of the things I’ll be working on this year. Whether Republican or Democrat, you can’t have one party so dominant, because we’re just not getting healthy debate on issues that I think are too important. So you got to get the governance right.

And then I said the walls in this place that give it integrity, the financial, the budget. You’ve got to have, whether it’s the Providence Phoenix or anything, you’ve got to demonstrate you know how to run yourself efficiently, competently, and we’ve got work to do there. We’ve made some strides this past year, but this year I think the pressure is going to be just as great if not greater, because of a number of things in the case of personnel costs for the state benefit structure — all of those things which we made no progress on last year. Some of that is contractual and we’ve got contracts, some, up this year. Council 94 is a big one that’s coming up next year. We’ve got a lot of work still to do to get the budget of the state under control and bring it into line with the underlying revenue . . .

The fourth thing that I said in that analogy was what powers the place is education . . . We’ve got a lot of work to go to elevate the performance of our elementary and secondary schools in the state. Now that’s not necessarily the state’s — the schools are controlled by the cities and towns. On the other hand, we, the state, puts a lot of money [in]. We put, in fact, just as much if not more money into the education system [as] the cities and towns. Providence, for example, two-thirds of its school budget, comes from the state, so we have a stake in it. One of the things that I’m trying to do is come up with a different approach of how we can focus some resources from the state, instead of just dumping it into school aid generally. Put it into very specific programs for reading or math . . . It can be done. It’s just we’re not spending the money, in my judgment, focused enough to get results . . .

I think we’ve got a pretty good economic strategy now. Mike McMahon revamped the Economic Policy Council and its focus. He’s got a whole plan on economic development strategy that I think is good, and we’re getting some successes to get companies like Amgen investing heavily here, GTECH’s moving in here, we’ve got the new hotel that was just announced down here [in Providence]. So there are some elements happening, Ian. I think the answer to your question is, Yeah, I think we can do this. This is not like Arnold in California, where you got an enormous problem, an enormous financial problem. We don’t. We’ve got a manageable problem, but we can’t bury our heads.

We’ve got to get at it, and there are people who are just dug in, entrenched in some positions . . . but everybody’s got to give a little bit. People are kind of stressed right now. The average person out there, they’re incomes aren’t rising much, okay, if they get one and a half, two percent increase in their pay, that’s a lot. They’re watching health-care costs rise dramatically. I had a women in here yesterday, this friend who runs a small jewelry company, and she told me she’s got employees, she’s got a 401(k) plan that she offers. She’s got employees who are dropping out of the 401(k) cause they need the money to pay health-care insurance. And at the same time, you’re watching property taxes rise, so voters and taxpayers, the average citizen in the state, is really feeling a lot of pressure and has been for a couple of years now. They’re frustrated, and I think this is like California . . . I think the message in California is, people want to see the public institutions, their elected officials, their city and state governments, adjusting to the same reality they’ve had to adjust to, cause their perception is, and I think they’re correct, that that adjustment hasn’t taken place. The whole world at the end of 2000, 2001, when the economy went schweewu [motions down], like that, the whole world has had to adjust. Businesses, whether it be small businesses, large businesses, individuals, have all adjusted. The public sector hasn’t — that’s what I keep trying to say to the leadership in the General Assembly here. We’ve got to reduce the expectations of what can be done, and bring it into line with the reality of the world we’re facing right now.

I’m as optimistic as I’ve ever been about what we can do, but we’re just starting. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.

Q: What would it take in your view to bring about a greater degree of political involvement by the citizenry?

A: People have been switched off about politics. Most people, when I said I was thinking of running, probably nine out of 10 of my friends said, "What, have you lost your mind, that you want to do this?" In other words, the impression of politics and politicians is pretty poor, and therefore, people have wanted to move away. One of my messages when I talk to groups is, Look, you’ve got to stick your head up and be willing to get in the game. If you want to sit back and just criticize and say this is terrible, it’s terrible, it’s terrible, well you can do that and bury your head or sit in your chair at home and nothing’s going to change. You’ve got to be willing to get out and get involved. I see some of that happening, I really do. In fact, I’m seeing it amongst a lot of young people. When I say young, you know, my children — they’re mid-30s. I see with their age group much more interest in it. So I’m hopeful . . . You don’t even think of it as a career. I’m not looking for a career. I think the notion of public service, something you do for a period of time, and then move on, is something we need to encourage a lot more. I think it’s going to happen. I see signs of that changing, and I think that would be absolutely wonderful.

Q: There’s a school of thought that sees President Bush as trying to roll back many of the reforms and social initiatives of the New Deal and Great Society, and there’s concern about the tax cuts keeping us in deficits for many years to come on a national level. What do you make of this critique? Is there a need for the Republican Party at the national level to be moderate?

A: I don’t know him well, I’ve only met him once, okay, and I haven’t been that heavily plugged into even the Republican Governors’ Association. I’m getting more involved, okay, but I’ve sort of been focusing on Rhode Island, what we’ve got to do here, Ian. The conversations I’ve had with other governors, the conversations I’ve had with White House people, and so forth — I think that [critique] is overblown. I think that’s the partisan politics in an election year getting carried away.

To think that any president or any leader in the United States today would put Social Security at risk, or things that are so embedded in our culture, is just unfounded — that’s not going to happen. You can debate the efficacy of the tax cuts. There’s no question there’s been some frustration, if you will, of how to get the economy going. As a business person my whole life, and not being in the president’s seat, my view is, look, when you’ve had an enormous boom the way we had in the ’90s, it’s inevitable that you get an adjustment, and we’d like to be able to say, oh, gee, cut this short, get us back going again. That’s not human nature. That’s not the way it works. So I think there has been, you know, a big effort, policy-wise to try to do everything possible to get this economy going. You can argue all day long, depending on your viewpoint, whether they’ve [tax cuts] helped or hurt. I think the tax cuts helped, and the fact is when you go through a cycle, there are times when you run deficits — that’s what the federal government is designed to do — to try and move the economy forward. And then hopefully, as it comes forward, you eliminate the deficits.

That’s what happened in the ’90s, we ran big surpluses. You had deficits prior to that, so it’s all about the underlying strength of the economy. I think a lot of that [criticism] is just a lot of political rhetoric. I think it’s overwrought criticism. From what I can see, there’s no determined effort to tear up the underpinnings of the social service portion of the economy, if you will. It just won’t happen. It just won’t happen.

Social Security is embedded. My mother-in-law who died a year ago, that’s all she had. She worked her whole life. She had a pension when she retired from the company of, like 50 bucks a month. If it weren’t for Sue and I, and our ability to help her, and Social Security — now that’s changing as the next generation, your generation, you’ve got things like 401(k)s, you’ve got different pension plans and so forth, would be in better condition for retirement. You still want Social Security, but won’t be as heavily dependent on it . . . So I think a lot of it is a lot of rhetoric coming up for the election.

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis@ phx.com