I’ll have more to say later about the letter Governor Chafee and Treasurer Raimondo sent state employees today outlining their thoughts on pension reform. For now, you can download the PDF on WPRI.com or read highlights from WRNI’s Ian Donnis.

Nothing in the letter should surprise anyone who’s read the months of pension coverage here on Nesi’s Notes or caught the treasurer’s last interview on WPRI 12′s “Newsmakers.” On first glance, then, my favorite part is the governor’s friendly sign-off:

I guess it’s better than, “Sorry ’bout your pension!”

Jokes aside, the personal touch doesn’t surprise me at all, though it’s funny to see. Chafee believes strongly in the more-flies-with-honey approach to leadership, and always says he wants to make sure state workers feel appreciated and supported, particularly as the state is debating reductions in their compensation.

Update: A closer read confirms what I suspected: there’s nothing new in this letter for pension-watchers. The real news is the fact that they sent it at all, and the fact that they signed it jointly.

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Tuesday is Inauguration Day for Gov.-elect Lincoln Chafee, the other four state general officers and the General Assembly. The big inauguration event kicks off just before noon, and we’ll have full televised coverage on WPRI 12 and Web coverage – including live video – here on WPRI.com.

Then the fun begins for Chafee – four years as governor of Rhode Island.

Chafee’s first full day in office will be Wednesday, and he only has one public event scheduled – a 10 a.m. ceremony at the International Institute of Rhode Island in Providence, where he will hold a ceremony to mark the repeal of Gov. Don Carcieri’s 2008 executive order on illegal immigration.

The new governor will spend the rest of the day working out of the public eye. I don’t have any details on his plans, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it included some work on the 2011-12 state budget, which his administration must deliver to the General Assembly early next month.

Michael Trainor will be joining the Chafee administration after all.

Trainor had told WRNI’s Ian Donnis yesterday he was “undecided right now” about whether he was going to stay. But in a brief phone interview following a meeting at Chafee HQ late this afternoon, Trainor told me he will be serving as Chafee’s communications director.

“I’m delighted and honored to be asked to serve in the Chafee administration and look forward to helping him deliver his message over the next four years,” Trainor told me. He managed Chafee’s campaign after J.R. Pagliarini resigned in October and has served as the transition’s spokesman since the election.

Trainor, 62, also said the administration will be combining the communications director and press secretary jobs into one – his – as part of its frugality push. “We’re going with a governor’s staff that’s well below the budgeted level in terms of payroll and manpower,” he said. Chafee and his team will take office next Tuesday, a week from today.

This is Trainor’s first time working in the public sector. He previously had a long career in public relations, notably as a founding partner with what’s now the RDW Group.

The Projo ran a story earlier this month detailing how Trainor and three business partners defaulted on a $250,000 Economic Development Corporation loan taken out in 2007 to fund a storm-safety supply company. Chafee rejected Trainor’s resignation offer after the article was published, and this evening’s announcement shows the governor-elect wasn’t particularly worried about the optics of the loan default even in light of his own criticisms of the EDC.

Update: Just to be clear, the meeting at Chafee HQ I referenced near the top of this item was an internal transition meeting to discuss what to do about the press secretary job – not a meeting I attended. Apologies if the wording was a bit ambiguous.

Speaking of Chafee administration personnel, the governor-elect said today he’s going to keep Craig Stenning as head of the recently renamed – deep breath – Department of Behavioral Health Care, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals, or BHDDH. (Insiders pronounce the acronym “Buddah.”)

Two more appointees are coming down the pike, as well. Chafee is likely to name both his director of the Department of Children, Youth and Families and his Health Insurance Commissioner by the end of this week, spokesman Mike Trainor told me earlier this afternoon. Those jobs are currently held by Patricia Martinez and Chris Koller, respectively.

Once those get filled it will leave open nine high-level posts outside the governor’s office, based on the list I posted earlier this month. (We also know Chafee has talked with Republican John Loughlin about running the soon-to-be-independent Department of Veterans Affairs.) Not all those jobs are going to be filled by the time Chafee gets inaugurated a week from today, Trainor said, because they’re not all as time-sensitive as the ones he’s done so far.

And once that’s finished, Chafee can turn to finding people to serve on the 270 boards and commissions for which he has appointment power. I call the Mosquito Abatement Board, no blitz!

There’s been a bit of discussion today about whether Lincoln Chafee will keep Keith Stokes on as executive director of the much-criticized R.I. Economic Development Corporation following a Projo story that took up the question this morning. Dave Scharfenberg offers some context:

Chafee sharply criticized the EDC during the campaign over the 38 Studios deal, leading to heavy speculation that he would dump Stokes.

But that could be harder to do if Stokes pulls off the grand coup he has been working round the clock on in recent days: poaching an America’s Cup boat race that seemed destined for San Francisco just a few weeks ago.

Also worth mentioning is that Chafee said he was open to keeping Stokes in place during our Oct. 6 TV debate. The two men have known each other for years, and Stokes is widely respected in the business community. Stokes’ emphasis on job growth and infrastructure improvements fits Chafee’s stated goals nicely. And Stokes himself sounded quite conciliatory toward Chafee when I spoke to him the day after the election.

In light of the 38 Studios deal, it still wouldn’t be a surprise if Chafee tapped someone else to lead the EDC. But it shouldn’t be a huge surprise if he keeps Stokes, either. For the record, Stokes’ one-year term expires Feb. 11.

WPRI.com’s Ted Nesi live-blogged Gov.-elect Lincoln Chafee’s budget summit at Rhode Island College. Here’s a recap.

11:27 a.m. | “Well, I learned a lot today,” Licht says after wrapping up the second panel. Then he turns to Chafee and says, “Can I reconsider?” (He was kidding.) Chafee agrees that he learned a lot. He says the importance of continuing to invest in education was driven home to him all the more today, and he wants to keep

However, the $295 million deficit for 2011-12 is foremost in Chafee’s mind right now. “We do have an immediate short-term problem,” he said. His 1% sales-tax proposal would take care of about $100 million of that, the governor-elect noted. To take care of the remaining $200 million or so, he suggested looking at taxing e-commerce, which would require action by Congress, or hiring more state workers if they actually save the state money by performing currently outsourced services at a reduced cost or bring in revenue by cracking down on tax scofflaws.

And thus endeth the budget summit.

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When I posted the schedule for next month’s state Inauguration Day, I mentioned that it wasn’t clear where the private funding for the evening events would come from. A Chafee aide told me this morning the money will come from corporate sponsorships, although who they are and how much they’re going to give hasn’t been figured out yet. The transition promised it will be transparent about the funding sources once things are firmed up.

The aide also said the five Providence restaurants where Chafee, Roberts, Mollis, Kilmartin and Raimondo will do their meet-and-greets during WaterFire haven’t been finalized yet.

The nominations keep coming fast and furious from the Chafee transition team as we get closer to Inauguration Day on Jan. 4. The latest appointee is Michael Lewis, whom Chafee has asked to stay on as head of the Department of Transportation. Lewis has held that job since 2008.

Chafee still has quite a few high-level jobs to fill, though – 12 out of 22 by my count. I double-checked with his spokesman yesterday, and here are the picks we’re still waiting for:

• Adjutant General
• BHDDH Director
• Child Advocate
• Children, Youth and Families Director
• Health Director
• Health Insurance Commissioner
• Chief IT Officer
• Lottery Director
• DMV Administrator
• Public Safety Commissioner
• Taxation Administrator
• Veterans’ Affairs Director

I must admit that I didn’t realize Rhode Island has a Child Advocate. The current one is Jametta Alston, and her website says she’s finishing a five-year term.

Wonk that I am, I’m getting psyched for the budget summit that Gov.-elect Lincoln Chafee is holding at Rhode Island College on Friday. (Budget summits have the best afterparties.)

I posted the list of summiteers yesterday, but I was a little curious about what the event is going to be like. So I called Mike Trainor, Chafee’s spokesman, to ask. “It’s basically designed as a listening event for Gov.-elect Chafee and the transition staff,” he told me.

The summit will start at 8:30 a.m. with remarks from Chafee. After he finishes, Rosemary Booth Gallogly – who is staying on as the Department of Revenue’s director under Chafee – and State Budget Officer Thomas Mullaney will give a presentation laying out the current budget situation.

Then when Gallogly and Mullaney are done, there will be two consecutive panel discussions with the summiteers, each moderated by Richard Licht, who Chafee has picked to run the Department of Administration.

The summit is being held in RIC’s Sapinsley Hall, and registration begins Friday morning at 8. If you want to attend, you can sign up on the transition website.

And for the record, the Chafee administration’s first budget is due Feb. 1. It will cover the fiscal year that starts July 1, 2011.

The Chafee transition team just released the list of speakers for this Friday’s budget summit at RIC. Here’s the lineup:

• John Simmons, Executive Director, Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council
• Robert Flanders Jr., Chairman of the Board of Regents
• Ray M. Di Pasquale, Commissioner of Higher Education
• Elizabeth Roberts, Lieutenant Governor (tentative)
• Anne Nolan, President of Crossroads
• George Nee, Executive Director, AFL-CIO
• Helena Buonanno Foulkes, EVP and CMO at CVS Caremark
• Kimberly McDonough, President, Advanced Pharmacy Concepts
• Scott Avedisian, Mayor of Warwick
• Diane Mederos, Bristol Town Administrator, President of RI League of Cities and Towns
• Scott Wolf, Grow Smart RI
• Pablo Rodriguez, Assoc. Chair of Community Relationships

There will be two panels, one moderated by Richard Licht, Chafee’s pick for the Department of Administration, and the other by Department of Revenue chief Rosemary Booth Gallogly and State Budget Officer Thomas Mullaney.

Update: Commissioner Di Pasquale’s name was a little muddled in the original press release; his first name is Ray, not Raymond, and his last name is “Di Pasquale,” with a space. Mea culpa for failing to fix that when I first posted the list.

Now that Gov.-elect Lincoln Chafee has named many of the senior officials who will staff his administration, I’m hearing two big themes in the reactions among people who pay attention to such things – one positive, one negative.

The positive take is that Chafee is surrounding himself with experienced hands who know how to get things done on Smith Hill and will be able to hit the ground running.

Two Democratic former lieutenant governors will be there: Richard Licht at the Department of Administration and Charlie Fogarty at Labor and Training. If the Ethics Commission gives its OK, outgoing House Finance Committee Chairman Steve Costantino will be running Health and Human Services, where his knowledge of Medicaid and health financing would come in handy. Brendan Doherty and A.T. Wall will continue running the state police and the prisons, respectively. Rosemary Booth Gallogly will still oversee the budget. And so on.

The negative take is that Chafee is surrounding himself with members of Rhode Island’s political old guard, which raises the question of whether they’ll actually take the state in a new direction.

The message from Chafee’s campaign was loud and clear: over and over, he said Rhode Island was in trouble because of “cronyism and corruption” at the highest levels of state government. If that’s the case, and the ways of the Statehouse are to blame, why bring in so many people who’ve spent so many years working there? (For their experience, Chafee would likely say, returning us to the positive case.)

Clearly these two viewpoints aren’t mutually exclusive – if anything, they’re two sides of the same coin. It looks like Chafee is betting that he’ll be a more effective governor if he has aides who are experts in the ways and mores of Smith Hill. In that sense, Chafee is taking the same approach as his friend Barack Obama.

Obama ran for president as an outsider ready to bring big changes to Washington. Then he staffed his administration with veteran policymakers like Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. He kept George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, and Bush’s Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke. Even now, Obama’s leading choice to replace Summers is reportedly Roger Altman, who was deputy treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.

Sometimes that has worked well for Obama; Emanuel’s savvy helped pass health reform, and both Clinton and Gates are widely respected on foreign affairs. Other times, not so much – for all his brilliance, Summers underestimated how severely the financial crisis would damage the economy, and now he’s on his way out.

We’ll have to wait and see whether Chafee turns out to be right to take the Obama approach personnel-wise.

Bob Walsh

National Education Association Rhode Island executive director Bob Walsh, whose union has been caught up in controversy this week, will resume some duties with Gov.-elect Lincoln Chafee’s transition team in about a week while he recuperates from neck surgery.

“Bob Walsh will be away on medical leave for four to six weeks, but he will be participating in transition advisory meetings over the phone starting in a week or so,” Graham Vyse, a spokesman for Chafee’s office, told me in an e-mail this afternoon.

Earlier, Chafee offered his support for Walsh’s continued involvement in the transition while taping WPRI 12′s “Newsmakers,” despite NEARI official John Leidecker’s arrest earlier this week for allegedly sending e-mails that he pretended were from state Rep. Doug Gablinske. Chafee and Walsh have both suggested the e-mails were just “a prank” and did not warrant law enforcement involvement.

(image credit: National Education Association Rhode Island)

My colleague Walt Buteau is accompanying Gov.-elect Lincoln Chafee in Washington, D.C., this week, as the state’s new chief executive heads to a White House meeting for the nation’s governors that President Obama is holding today. Here’s an excerpt from Walt’s fun piece from last night’s newscast featuring highlights from the trip down:

Chafee arrived at T.F. Green Airport alone, but he was quickly recognized and approached by a number of passengers.

The independent former senator passed through airport security, just like everyone else.

“The last time I did use the airport, I did get frisked,” Chafee said. “It was at another airport, not T.F. Green. It’s a full-body frisk.”

When asked if he had a problem with the security measures, Chafee responded, “No. They seemed well-trained and professional.”

Read the rest on WPRI.com. Chafee will also be Tim White’s guest on “Newsmakers” this weekend for the full half-hour broadcast, which should be interesting.

Update: Alas, it appears my original headline is getting a bit ahead of events, so I added a question mark; a source familiar with the matter says there has been no formal discussion about any specific role for Pagliarini in the Chafee administration, so it may be that he won’t wind up working for the new governor after all. We’ll see what happens. Below is the original post.

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Gov.-elect Lincoln Chafee will hold a daylong budget summit next month to kick-start discussions of how to close Rhode Island’s $300 million projected deficit for the fiscal year that starts July 1, WPRI.com has confirmed.

The tax-and-spending conference is tentatively scheduled for Friday, Dec. 17, but that date isn’t official yet, Chafee spokesman Mike Trainor told me on Tuesday. The presenters and participants will be “an interdisciplinary group” that will include legislative leaders and fiscal experts, he said. The event may be held at URI’s rustic W. Alton Jones campus in West Greenwich.

Chafee frequently said on the campaign trail that he would “fix the budget mess” if elected governor, and he blamed local aid cuts at the state level for rising property taxes in cities and towns across Rhode Island.

“The highest priority that Gov.-elect Chafee has is to address in a meaningful way is the systemic budget deficit that we are facing,” Trainor said. “That’s job one.” The new administration must submit its proposed budget to the General Assembly by early February.

New budget estimates released earlier this month project that Rhode Island’s $7.8 billion budget has a nearly $300 million shortfall for the state’s 2011-12 financial year, exacerbated by the expiration of federal aid from the 2009 stimulus law. Even larger deficits are projected in the fiscal years after that.

News of the budget summit comes as Chafee continues to put together the senior staff who will join his administration in January.

Chafee has picked Patrick Rogers, his campaign chairman and longtime ally, to serve as his chief of staff and top legal adviser, Projo.com reported this morning. He also tapped Stephen Hourahan to be his senior adviser, a new position, and Claire Richards and Joseph “Kenny” Alston to be his executive counsel. Richards and Alston will report to Rogers.

Gist addresses lawmakers last April

As I noted earlier this afternoon, Lincoln Chafee may get the chance to replace all but one member of the Board of Regents within a month of taking office. Considering that he and Education Commission Deborah Gist appear to hold differing visions for the future of education policy in Rhode Island, I wondered if he might take that opportunity to shake up the board and put his own people in place.

Au contraire, Chafee spokesman Mike Trainor told me in a phone interview a few minutes ago. “I just spoke to the governor-elect about this, and with all due respect, you may be jumping to conclusions that are not necessarily accurate,” he said. (Who, me?)

“Gov.-elect Chafee does not have any plans for a wholesale replacement of the Board of Regents,” Trainor explained. “He’s going to look at each of the members in light of their experience and their relationship to his education philosophy. But it would be wrong to speculate that the entire board is going to be replaced.”

Chafee was particularly impressed with the Regents’ efforts to solve the crisis at Central Falls High School earlier this year, Trainor said. During that period, Chafee called each of the board members to suggest that they hire a mediator to sort out the situation – which is what they wound up doing.

“The other thing we want to say,” Trainor added, “is Gov.-elect Chafee has been in regular touch with Commissioner Gist and expects to continue that dialogue, and he is looking forward to working with her.”

Fair enough, and quite conciliatory. I suggested to Trainor that quite a few people seem to expect some sort of clash between Chafee and Gist, and he said that’s precisely why he called. “We just don’t want it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, either with respect to the entire board being replaced or the future of Commissioner Gist,” he said.

While we’re on the subject of Chafee’s views about education, one person who has shaped them is Diane Ravitch; if you want to understand why the governor-elect thinks the way he does about K-12, she’s a good place to start. Here’s how The New York Times began a profile of Ravitch last winter:

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

“Astonishing” is the right word for it. The Times story is a good place to begin for a primer on Ravitch, but if you really want to understand her critique of ed reform’s sacred cows, check out the long New York Review of Books essay she published earlier this month. Title: “The Myth of Charter Schools.” Here’s an excerpt:

Most Americans graduated from public schools, and most went from school to college or the workplace without thinking that their school had limited their life chances. There was a time—which now seems distant—when most people assumed that students’ performance in school was largely determined by their own efforts and by the circumstances and support of their family, not by their teachers. There were good teachers and mediocre teachers, even bad teachers, but in the end, most public schools offered ample opportunity for education to those willing to pursue it. The annual Gallup poll about education shows that Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the quality of the nation’s schools, but 77 percent of public school parents award their own child’s public school a grade of A or B, the highest level of approval since the question was first asked in 1985.

“Waiting for Superman” and the other films appeal to a broad apprehension that the nation is falling behind in global competition. If the economy is a shambles, if poverty persists for significant segments of the population, if American kids are not as serious about their studies as their peers in other nations, the schools must be to blame. At last we have the culprit on which we can pin our anger, our palpable sense that something is very wrong with our society, that we are on the wrong track, and that America is losing the race for global dominance. It is not globalization or deindustrialization or poverty or our coarse popular culture or predatory financial practices that bear responsibility: it’s the public schools, their teachers, and their unions.

Lincoln Chafee could have the chance to put his stamp on state education policy almost as soon as he takes office.

That’s because all but one of the eight members of the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education will finish their terms by the end of January, according to the secretary of state’s office. (The ninth member is always the chair of the Board of Governors for Higher Education.) Here’s the list:

Gov. Carcieri nominated four people to the Regents back on May 27: Flanders and Davis, both of whose current terms have expired; Keith Stokes, executive director of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation; and Andrew Moffitt, a lawyer who is married to Treasurer-elect Gina Raimondo. The Senate hasn’t voted to confirm any of them – it could do so at next week’s special session, but whether it will hasn’t been decided yet, spokesman Greg Pare told me this morning.

If that doesn’t happen, the ball will be in Chafee’s court once he takes office in January. With the Senate’s consent, the new governor could quickly gain a majority on the powerful board, which sets statewide K-12 policy and hires the education commissioner, currently Deborah Gist.

Chafee’s spokesman didn’t return a message Monday asking whether shaking up the board would be one of his early moves. That may be easier said than done – serving on the Regents is a lot of work, unpaid, so it may be a challenge to find seven qualified people who want the job.

Many observers are keeping a close eye on the relationship between Chafee and Gist, a favorite of K-12 reformers who is eyed warily by the teachers’ unions that gave crucial support to Chafee’s victorious campaign; he was the only one of the four gubernatorial candidates who declined to say he wanted to keep Gist. Charter schools in particular are an area where the two may find themselves at odds, as my colleague Walt Buteau reported last week.

Gist started in the commissioner’s job last year and is under contract through June 2013. She has said both publicly and privately that she wants to stay in Rhode Island and work with Chafee once he takes office. The question is whether their visions for the future of Rhode Island’s education system will align.

“It’s really up to her,” National Education Association chief Bob Walsh, who is serving on Chafee’s transition team, told WRNI earlier this month. “If she wants to put her energy and enthusiasm and dedication with this new leadership, that’s great. If she wants to run her own shop without that level of input, that will become obvious.”

Update: Mike Trainor, Chafee’s spokesman, just called to argue that I may be “jumping to conclusions that are not necessarily accurate” about the governor-elect, the Regents and Deborah Gist. Trainor said the governor-elect isn’t planning “a wholesale recycling of the Board of Regents,” and he is “looking forward to working with” Gist. More to come in a new post.

Update #2: Follow-up post is up: Chafee not looking to sack Gist or the Regents

The AP’s Michelle Smith has a new profile of Stephanie Chafee, the governor-elect’s wealthy wife, with lots of interesting details about Rhode Island’s next first lady:

Stephanie Chafee grew up on Providence’s East Side in a wealthy family with more than a century of involvement in business and philanthropy. Her late father, Murray S. Danforth, was an administrator at the Rhode Island School of Design, the school her family founded in 1877.

Despite her family money, she went into nursing, graduating with honors in 1981 from Boston University’s nursing school, then received her MBA from the University of Connecticut. She said she was drawn to nursing because, from a young age, she wanted to care for people.

“My parents always said to me, ‘Leave the world a better place than you found it, and always be able to provide for yourself,’” she said. “Nursing is a great career.”

She eventually landed a job at Roger Williams Medical Center following every AIDS patient in the state — a first for Rhode Island, which she called the best job of her life. It was around that time — 1989 — that Lincoln Chafee came permanently back into her life.

How’s that for suspense? Read the whole thing on WPRI.com.

Common Cause Rhode Island’s John Marion has an op-ed in today’s Projo about what Gov.-elect Chafee should do to solidify separation of powers in the state. The whole piece is worth a read – Marion is a walking, talking civics class – but there was one point he made that I wanted to highlight in particular:

First, it will be necessary for Governor Chafee to focus on who is appointed to the dozens of boards, commissions and quasi-publics in Rhode Island. While the work of filling appointments may not be glamorous, it is increasingly important.

Dozens is an understatement. By my count, Rhode Island’s governor is charged with appointing people to a whopping 270 different boards and commissions. And some of those boards – like the EDC’s – have as many as a dozen members each. The governor doesn’t have to make all the appointments at once, since many members serve staggered terms, but it’s still quite a job (and quite a lot of power).

Those figures, by the way, come from the authoritative list put together by the Rhode Island Government Appointments Project, which is pushing to secure a larger share of those slots for women; if you’re interested, apply here. On top of the 270 boards and commissions, Chafee also appoints people to 26 paid jobs in the executive branch. He started the process with Richard Licht’s nomination yesterday.

Richard Licht

Richard Licht, Gov.-elect Chafee’s pick to run the Department of Administration, is best-known as a former lieutenant governor and twice-failed U.S. Senate candidate. “This is the deputy governor,” Chafee said in introducing him this morning, according to WRNI’s Ian Donnis, who was first with the scoop that Licht had gotten the nod.

But considering the scope of Licht’s new job – akin to being the state’s chief operating officer – what’s more interesting to me are his many years as a powerful Smith Hill lobbyist. A cursory look at the secretary of state’s lobbying reports shows Licht has lobbied on behalf of the following firms and organizations since 2005:

• Bank of America
• Beacon Mutual Insurance
• Chicago Title Insurance
• Compass Group
• Fidelity Investments
• Lamar Advertising
• National Assn. of Real Estate Investment Trusts
• Providence Civic Center Authority
• Rhode Island Airport Corporation (T.F. Green)
• Rhode Island Builders Association
• Rhode Island Health Care Association
• Rhode Island Higher Education Assistance Authority
• Ridgewood Renewable Power
• Tufts Health Plan
• Wyndham Vacation Ownership

Lobbying sure is lucrative. Licht is getting $6,000 a month from Tufts and $5,000 from Ridgewood – which wants to build a big power plant at the Central Landfill – to advocate on their behalfs at the Statehouse, according to his disclosures. (Also, why do the Rhode Island Airport Corporation and Higher Education Assistance Authority, which are quasi-public agencies, employ a lobbyist?)

Licht donated more than $12,000 to state-level politicians during the last election cycle, according to campaign finance records. But he didn’t give a dime to Chafee, contributing $900 to his Democratic opponent Frank Caprio instead.

Other beneficiaries of Licht’s largesse were House Speaker Gordon Fox, Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed, Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts, Secretary of State Ralph Mollis, Treasurer-elect Gina Raimondo, Providence Mayor-elect Angel Taveras – and Cranston Mayor Allan Fung, a Republican.

For more on Licht, check out his official biography on the website of his law firm, Adler Pollock & Sheehan. And for more on the tangled web between the Chafee and Licht families, check out Ian Donnis’ post.

Update: The Projo took a quick look at Licht’s lobbying career back in 2007, a year before Tillinghast Licht LLP shut down.

(image credit: Adler Pollock & Sheehan)

Although white smoke didn’t rise from the Statehouse when they finished, it was still news when members of the Revenue Estimating Conference came up with their new Rhode Island budget numbers last week. And for the first time in awhile, their abacuses offered up some limited good news.

When all was said and done, the conferees determined that the state budget is running about $2 million in the black so far this year, House spokesman Larry Berman told me in an e-mail. That’s a drop in the bucket in a $7.8 billion budget – but it’s a lot better than the $200 million deficit the state was running at this time last year.

Because this year’s budget is still balanced, Gov.-elect Chafee and the new General Assembly will be spared having to make painful midyear cuts the way Gov. Carcieri and lawmakers have had to every winter in recent years.

Berman credited the balancing act to higher tax revenue, lower spending, and a surplus left over at the end of last year. “It is also good sign that revenues are running slightly ahead of projections, showing that the economy is turning around slowly,” he said.

Unfortunately, there are storm clouds on the budget horizon. This year’s budget may be balanced, but next year’s – for the 12 months that start July 1, 2011 – ain’t. And as I mentioned last week, the problem is only expected to get worse in the years that follow.

The new projected budget shortfall for 2011-12 is $290 million, State Budget Officer Thomas A. Mullaney said last week – a big hole to fill. Chafee and his aides will have only a month to craft a plan for closing that gap after he gets inaugurated on Jan. 4.

(image credit: RI.gov)

You couldn’t blame the R.I. Economic Development Corporation’s heavy-hitting board of directors if they harbored some ill will toward Gov.-Elect Lincoln Chafee, considering the criticism he leveled at the agency on the campaign trail – particularly for its approval of the 38 Studios deal, which closed today.

But it’s all water under the bridge now, and there are no hard feelings about the incoming governor among the directors, who includes the heads of Verizon, Rhode Island Hospital parent Lifespan, and insurer FM Global, EDC Executive Director Keith Stokes told reporters at a press conference this morning. The comments were made in the heat of a hard-fought campaign, and the executives understand that, he said.

In a follow-up conversation, Stokes reinforced the point, saying he has spoken with every member of the board about the election and none of them was upset about Chafee’s comments. There won’t be any mass resignations when Chafee takes office next January, he said.

Stokes also downplayed Chafee’s eyebrow-raising threat to sue Gov. Donald Carcieri and the board over 38 Studios, saying it was his understanding that Chafee was only talking about a situation comparable to the shenanigans that allegedly went on at the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, another quasi-public agency.

Chafee will get the chance to start putting his own stamp on the EDC board shortly after taking office. The terms of three expire in February: FM Global CEO Shivan Subramaniam, Gilbane Chairman Paul Choquette Jr., and Verizon region president Donna Cupelo. Under a law enacted earlier this year, one of those three seats must go to a small businessperson.

“The governor is the chairman of the board of the Economic Development Corporation, so Gov.[-Elect] Chafee has every ability as chairman of this board to set the tone and the direction” of the agency, Stokes said. “At the end of the day, the governor has the right and the need to pick his team,” he later added.

As for Stokes, whose one-year term also expires in February, he hinted today that he would be willing to stay on board as head of the agency if Chafee wants him – which is a possibility, based on the governor-elect’s comments at our Oct. 6 televised debate. Other members of the EDC’s management team are currently being asked to reapply for their jobs as the agency continues to undergo a broad shakeup in the wake of the 2009 Verrecchia report.

Stokes, who has known Chafee for years, said his knowledge of all levels of government will come in handy on Smith Hill. Stokes also said he plans to invite the incoming governor to the EDC board’s next meeting, which is scheduled for Nov. 17, two weeks from today. The agency’s staff is preparing briefing materials to get Chafee up to speed on its activities.

Stokes, who served on the EDC board before Carcieri appointed him to a one-year term as its chief, also offered strong words of praise for the current board, which was put in place after the Verrecchia report. Calling them “the best and brightest” from Rhode Island’s business community, he said they have been engaged and forceful in their oversight of the agency since their confirmations in February.

We’ll hear from Gov.-Elect Chafee about this and many other issues at a press conference he is scheduled to hold at 3 p.m. in Warwick.