Governor’s office keeping wary eye on Woonsocket finances
December 7th, 2011 at 10:10 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Woonsocket isn’t joining Central Falls and East Providence by getting state oversight of its finances quite yet.
The Chafee administration isn’t preparing to appoint a fiscal overseer in Woonsocket “at this time,” spokeswoman Christine Hunsinger told WPRI.com. But R.I. Department of Revenue Director Rosemary Booth Gallogly and her staff are “monitoring the situation closely,” she said.
The Woonsocket Public Schools ended the fiscal year on June 30 with a $2.7 million deficit despite rules requiring the city to run a balanced budget, Woonsocket Patch reported Tuesday.
Gallogly appointed State Police Maj. Stephen Bannon on Nov. 14 as East Providence’s fiscal overseer, the first of three potential steps the state can take to intervene in a city’s finances under the 2010 Fiscal Stability Act. Central Falls, which filed for bankruptcy in August, is the only other municipality that’s under the law’s control.
Woonsocket is doing “anything and everything to avoid a state intervention,” Mayor Leo Fontaine told WPRI 12 last month.
• Related: Chafee taps trooper to oversee East Providence’s budget (Nov. 14)
Tags: chafee administration, fiscal stability act, municipal, woonsocket
Nesi's Notes covers politics and the economy in and around Rhode Island for WPRI.com. (Twitter: 
So what is governor nitwit waiting for, until they’re 5 or 10 milllion in the whole? Get it under control before it gets any worse. Gee, do I have to think of everything?
Why doesn’t Woonsocket take the Surplus of 2.1 M they found and put the money into the school system??? instead of keeping the street lights on that were already turned off to save money.
Really this is a no brainer. What are they thinking.
Woonsocket needs inovators.
1) The trash policy ought to be over-hauled to a “pay-as-you-go” model.
Purchase the trash bags and you pay by volume.
2) Stop planting flowers on the corners and hiring people to travel around the city and water them on a daily basis.
3) The city needs to attract income. Creating an huge tax burden is NOT the way to bring tax generating businesses into the community.
4) Lower the property and excise taxes and people may buy those empty single family homes. No one wants to live in Woonsocket because the tax burden is out of control.
5) Cut programs. Sorry, I hate to say it but some benefits will need to be cut. The city simply can not afford them.
6) Stop allowing the unions to artificially inflate the price of services
There are more, but these are a start.
[...] receiver Robert Flanders. Meanwhile, Chafee administration officials are also keeping a wary eye on the situation in Woonsocket, where an unexpected deficit in the school department’s budget was recently [...]