At State House, snow team was no team, Kass says
6:20 PM Sun, Dec 23, 2007 | Permalink
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The governor’s communications director, Steve Kass, views the Dec. 13 snow storm that stranded drivers and schoolchildren for hours as “reinforcement” for his belief that the governor and lieutenant governor should be “bracketed” on the ballot, so a vote for one is a vote for both. You will recall that Republican Governor Carcieri did not even tell Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts, a Democrat, that he was leaving for a week in the Middle East. (Carcieri initially backed Kernan “Kerry” King, the retired insurance executive who is now his State House legal counsel, for the post. King, however, lost the GOP primary to former state Adjutant Gen. Reginald Centracchio, who lost to Roberts.) Asked what difference it might have made in the handling of the storm if Carcieri had had a lieutenant governor of his choosing back in Rhode Island, Kass said: “If you’re the governor and the lieutenant governor is part of your team and you have philosophical similarities, etcetera, it’s easy for the governor to be out of the country or out of state and his right-hand guy is in charge and there is no political stuff going on between the two, which there always is in this state. “That’s a natural to me,” said Kass, who pushed the same idea as a 1980s-era Constitutional Convention delegate and remains perplexed why it wasn’t embraced by the public. “Would you run your company with one guy at the top and the deputy is trying to get his job? It’s just not good. … I don’t know why Rhode Islanders like that.” (In 1982, state voters rejected, 135,832 to 129,459, a proposal to elect the governor and lieutenant governor as a team, according to the state Board of Elections.) Asked why Carcieri did not tell the lieutenant governor he was leaving, Kass said: “You’d have to ask him as to the why of it, but from what I have observed over the years there doesn’t seem to be a lot of cooperation between one party and the other on anything.” For the record, in responding to questions on talk radio last week, Carcieri said he did not hold Kass, his $126,541-a-year communications director, responsible for what he earlier in the week called his administration’s “poor job” of communicating with the public, in his absence during the storm. “This is a responsibility that starts with the EMA (Emergency Management Agency) and then goes up to the general who is in charge of [the] National Guard and EMA,” he said of Adjutant Gen. Robert Bray, “and then to me.” EMA director Robert J. Warren was fired last week; Bray, who called in sick the day of the storm, remains. 
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