The Prince of Providence by Mike Stanton

Author:Mike Stanton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588362926
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

JOSH FENTON KNEW that he had arrived as a member of the loyal opposition to Buddy Cianci when he started seeing the unmarked police cars outside his house.

Elected to the City Council in 1990, at the age of twenty-seven, Fenton was bright and brash and full of questions. Why, for instance, did city employees who worked outdoors receive a paid day off when the temperature hit ninety degrees? Why were elected officials allowed to collect pensions from the municipal labor union whose contracts they ratified? Why were more than 90 percent of the city’s firefighters going out on costly disability pensions? And why was the mayor, with his million-dollar staff and personal expense account and four police drivers and city limousine, always trying to raise taxes instead of cutting costs?

As the only Independent on the otherwise all-Democratic City Council, Fenton was the de facto minority leader. As a minority of one, he sometimes questioned the council’s actions as well; for instance, holding its annual Christmas party at Andino’s, a Federal Hill restaurant owned by a convicted mob killer. (The killer’s picture appeared in an old state police organizational chart of the Providence Mafia that Fenton had found one day, jammed in the back of a file cabinet in his office at the state Department of Environmental Management.)

If Fenton seemed politically savvy beyond his years, perhaps it was because he had worked in Washington as an aide to two U.S. senators, Maine’s George Mitchell and Rhode Island’s John Chafee. After a difficult childhood in Providence’s Mount Hope neighborhood, a pocket of lower-income families and blacks amidst the wealth of the East Side, Fenton won a scholarship to Suffield Academy, a Connecticut prep school. In 1990, newly married, he ran for council in his old neighborhood, part of the Third Ward, and beat the Democratic incumbent by sixteen votes.

The council was an elected position; Fenton’s full-time job was as a state environmental lobbyist. He was also working on a master’s degree in environmental studies at Brown University; for his thesis he was analyzing the quality of life and health risks in Providence’s twenty-five neighborhoods.

On the City Council in the early 1990s, Fenton emerged as Cianci’s leading critic. He questioned government waste, generous spending on the mayor’s cronies, and Cianci’s giveaways to the politically powerful unions. He called the mayor “a spending maniac,” more interested in his self-aggrandizement than in cutting the city’s runaway labor costs. As a result, Fenton argued, Providence was “wallpapered with FOR SALE signs” as the middle class fled to the suburbs, further eroding the city’s tax base, its neighborhoods, and its schools.

Cianci tried to dismiss him as “a youthful and ambitious politician.” But Fenton remained an effective critic. In 1991 he helped lead a council revolt against Cianci’s efforts to raise taxes. But the mayor, who had been outmaneuvering the council when Fenton was in grammar school, persuaded four members to change their votes at the last minute, and prevailed.

In Fenton’s view, he was a mystery to Cianci.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.