Warwick's “Crisis of the Moment” Governing Philosophy

January 7, 2010 Interview

The Effect of “Crisis of the Moment” Budgeting

In this January 7, 2010 interview with Jim Hummel of The Hummel Report, former Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian acknowledged that City Hall responded to difficult budget cycles by trading tomorrow for today—granting additional holidays, benefits, and employee perks when cash was unavailable. That short-term approach to governing continues to shape Warwick’s city and school finances over the following fifteen years. The growing cost of employee benefits and other long-term obligations has placed increasing pressure on the city and school budgets and contributed to repeated property-tax increases for Warwick residents.

Employee Benefits and Paid Time Off

Another Paid Holiday—Without a Long-Term Plan

Warwick, June 2024

When Mayor Picozzi and his administration proposed adding June 19 as an additional paid holiday for municipal employee, the mayor's chief of staff testified before the City Council Finance Committee that city employees received thirteen paid holidays. That statement was incorrect. The chief of staff did not read the fine print in the contracts where additional floating holidays and half day holidays were also provided to municipal employees. In total before the new holiday was considered, municipal employees were receiving 16 1/2 paid holidays off. Adding the June 19 holiday would bring the total to 17 1/2 paid days off.

The decision created costs beyond the current workforce. Retired Warwick firefighters in the Fire I pension plan—including many who retired decades ago—also receive additional holiday pay when a new holiday is provided to current firefighters. Let that sink in for a moment. As a result, the new holiday added another long-term expense for taxpayers.

A cost-neutral alternative was available. Rhode Island’s largest employer added a simular holiday for its employees by eliminating an existing floating holiday. This resulted in providing the employees the day off without increasing costs. Warwick could have followed that approach.

The broader comparison shown in the above chart makes the disparity clear. A Warwick municipal employee will receive 44.5 paid days off after just one year of employment. By contrast, an employee at that Rhode Island Fortune 10 company never receives that much paid time off, even after more than twenty years of service. A full-time professional employee receives 36.9 paid days off only after more than twenty-five years. In other words, a new municipal employee in Warwick receives substantially more paid time away from work than experienced private-sector employees receive after decades on the job. And many municipal jobs are 35 hour a week jobs.

Warwick taxpayer Ann Sheridan made this clear in her testimony before the finance committee. You can listen to her commentary and that of the chief of staff by clicking the Youtube link below.

By the time the municipal employee reaches twentry years of service in Warwick, not uncommon for many, 60.5 days off per year is awared. That's equivalent to twelve weeks off or three months of paid time off in a year.

Do you get three months off of work every year with pay?

This is another example of “Crisis of the Moment” budgeting: making an immediate decision without fully evaluating existing benefits, pension consequences, available alternatives, or the cumulative effect on future property taxes and city services. When benefits are expanded without understanding their full cost, taxpayers must fund not only the direct expense but also the staffing and overtime needed to provide services while employees are away from work.

Long-term planning requires city leaders to evaluate the entire benefit package, measure its effect on service delivery, and identify the full taxpayer cost before creating another permanent obligation.

Shame on Council Foley, my opponent who sat on the finance commitee and didn't even bother to read the contract lanaguage before the meeting so he could understood how many days off Warwick municipal employees received before voting to add in another one.

Warwick School Fiscal Crisis

The Price of “Labor Peace”

During negotiations for the 2024–2027 teachers’ contract, the overriding objective was to secure “labor peace” and avoid an immediate disruption—not to confront the structural problems pushing Warwick schools toward a fiscal crisis.

Recusals prevented two School Committee members, including its leadership, from participating directly in negotiations. Bargaining was therefore placed largely in the hands of outside professionals whose assignment was to reach a settlement. They accomplished that mission, but the resulting agreement added an estimated $8.2 million in new costs without adequately addressing the widening imbalance among declining enrollment, staffing levels, employee benefits, special education expenses, and available revenue.

The contract preserved stability in the moment while committing future school budgets to expenses the district could not sustainably support. Rather than using the negotiations to begin restructuring staffing, benefits, facilities, and school operations, the difficult decisions were postponed once again.

Warwick taxpayers are now paying the price. The approximately $8.2 million added by the contract became part of the district’s ongoing cost structure—not a one-time expense that disappears when the contract expires. Those higher salary costs also affect payroll taxes, retirement contributions, and the starting point for future contract negotiations. At the same time, taxpayers remain responsible for financing underused school buildings and staffing levels that have not declined proportionately with enrollment. Rising benefit costs, growing special education expenses and the cost to finance the two new high schools under construction will require $12 to $15 million in new property tax revenue over the next 25 years.

The consequences extended far beyond the contract itself. After years of fiscal instability, the district confronted a sudden multimillion-dollar deficit that the School Committee could not resolve. In 2025, the Rhode Island General Assembly responded by creating the Warwick Public Schools Budget Commission and transferring final control over school finances to a state-appointed body.

State intervention did not make these costs disappear. Warwick taxpayers must still pay the bills—through higher city appropriations to the school department, pressure for additional property-tax revenue, reductions in other municipal or educational services, or some combination of all three. Once the School Committee lost control of its budget, it also lost much of its practical ability to control school operations because staffing, programs, contracts, purchasing, and facilities all depend upon who controls the money.

That is the danger of governing from crisis to crisis: the immediate problem is temporarily quieted while the underlying financial problem grows larger and more expensive. “Labor peace” may have been achieved at the bargaining table, but fiscal stability was not. Ultimately, the failure to confront those structural problems will cost Warwick taxpayers millions of more dollars.

To learn more about how Warwick’s fiscal 2025/26 school budget crisis developed—and the years of decisions that ultimately led to state intervention click the link below to read The Cushman Report. The report traces the growing disconnect among declining enrollment, staffing, employee costs, school facilities, and available revenue, showing how repeated short-term decisions allowed the district’s structural problems to become a full-scale financial crisis.

When a Contract Extension Bypasses Taxpayer Safeguards

The $65 Million No-Bid Contract

March 10, 2026

Warwick taxpayers may be interested to learn that the City Council recently voted to extend the City’s healthcare contract without a competitive bid. Because this issue involves both the City Charter and the City’s purchasing ordinances, I want to explain what happened and why I believe the decision undermines an important safeguard for taxpayers.

First, it is important to understand what the Warwick City Charter says about purchasing. Section 6-11 of the Charter establishes competitive bidding as the general rule for City contracts. Just as important, that same section specifically authorizes the City Council to establish the rules for competitive bidding through ordinances. In other words, the Charter itself gives the council the authority to adopt ordinances governing how competitive bidding will occur.

In 2007, while serving on the Warwick City Council, I introduced legislation that ultimately became Section 2-20 of the Warwick Code of Ordinances, which requires the City to put its healthcare benefits out to competitive bid at least once every three years.

For many years after its adoption, prior city administrations followed this ordinance and regularly put the City’s healthcare benefits out to competitive bid every three years. The ordinance functioned exactly as intended—ensuring that the City periodically tested the marketplace for the most competitive pricing and coverage available.

In 2021, the City issued a Request for Proposals for medical, pharmacy, and dental insurance benefits. That procurement resulted in a contract running from July 1, 2021, through June 30, 2024.

In February, however, the City Council approved a resolution extending that contract through June 30, 2028. As a result, the same healthcare contract will extend for approximately seven years without a new competitive bidding process.

The healthcare contract involved in this decision is not a small expenditure. The two-year extension approved by the council represents approximately $65 million in additional spending on employee and retiree healthcare benefits.

During the council meeting where the extension was approved, questions were raised about whether the action violated the three-year competitive bidding requirement contained in Section 2-20 of the City’s ordinances. The City Council Solicitor advised the council that another provision of the Charter—Section 6-12, which allows alterations to existing contracts—permitted the extension and that the Charter provision superseded the ordinance.

This is where the legal issue becomes important. Section 6-11 of the City Charter establishes competitive bidding as the rule and specifically authorizes the City Council to adopt ordinances governing how that bidding process will work. Section 2-20 is one of those ordinances. The question raised by the council’s decision is whether a different Charter provision allowing alterations to contracts can be used to override the competitive bidding rules that the Charter itself allows the council to establish.

Based on the solicitor’s legal interpretation, the council voted to approve the extension. However, the issue did not end there.

At the March 9 City Council meeting, Finance Committee Chairman Ed N. Ladouceur moved to reconsider the healthcare contract vote so the council could review the legal issues surrounding the extension. Most of the council rejected this motion.

As a result, the healthcare contract extension remained in place, and the underlying legal question was never resolved. Allowing the contract to be extended to seven years without a new bid defeats the purpose of Section 2-20 of the City’s ordinances.

More importantly, the reasoning used to justify the extension raises a broader concern. If a Charter provision allowing contract “alterations” can be used to override competitive bidding rules adopted by ordinance, then the purchasing safeguards enacted under the authority of the Charter could effectively be ignored.

The purpose of competitive bidding laws is simple: protect taxpayers by ensuring transparency and fair competition when large public contracts are awarded. When a $65 million public contract can be extended without a new bid, it raises legitimate questions about whether the safeguards established by the City Charter and the City’s ordinances are being followed as intended.

Warwick taxpayers deserve a procurement process that is transparent, competitive, and faithful to the laws adopted to protect the public interest.