To the Editor:

Over the last few months school department officials have noted how East Providence recently completed construction on a $190 million high school. Even Mayor Picozzi joined in by visiting and touring the school.

Everyone came back raving.

It was like driving that shiny new car into your driveway. All your neighbors loved it. And everyone wants one. But some know they can't afford that while making all of their other obligations.

That got me thinking. Did any of these city leaders bother to take a look at East Providences fiscal health to see how they could afford to pay for the school?

Well, I did and what I discovered was shocking

When examining the fiscal health of a city, auditors recommend examining the "Net Position". It is calculated as part of each city and town annual audit.

The auditors write, "net position may serve over time as a useful indicator of a government's financial health". They also state that "over time, increases or decreases in the City's net position are indicators of whether its financial health is improving or deteriorating, respectively".

Warwick's net position is a negative ($558,942,399). That's a negative number greater than half a billion dollars.

What's more alarming is that this didn't happen overnight. Warwick's net position as been getting steadily worse for over a decade. Maybe because no one on the city council reads the annual audit. So, they didn't notice? But they have been warned.

East Providence's net position stands at negative ($61,120,154).

Warwick is almost ten times worse than East Providence. East Providence total liabilities are $389.5 million.

Warwick's total liabilities are $1,015,751,257. That's over a billion dollars. Almost three times that of East Providence.

The debt is almost all related to pension and free lifetime healthcare benefit costs. The annual required contributions to pay for this debt is increasing each year in Warwick at unsustainable rates. Almost half of every new tax dollar allocated to the city budget over the last decade goes toward these costs.

Think about that for a second. If we need one new dollar for a new service, we need to raise $2 in taxes.

Put another way, for every new dollar in taxes, half it pays for benefits to an employee that no longer works for the city (retired) for services theyperformed in the past.

The reason this is disparity is so significant is that East Providence's annual required contributions on its liabilities are far less than Warwick.

Years ago, East Providence went under the control of the state in order to get its finances under control. Part of their financial remediation was planning to build a high school in the future.

Warwick has done nothing of the sort.

Our leaders have been prodding along year after year ignoring these massive liabilities and the growing payments each year from our tax dollars.

Instead, they propose gimmicks, so that they can make hundreds of millions of dollars magically disappear from future financial reports. It's nothing more than a Ponzi scheme and is doing nothing to solve the problem.

Now we want to get them $300 million more dollars. Are you kidding me?

Like East Providence, Warwick needs to get its fiscal house in order before it can undertake the generational borrowing needed to construct these two high schools.

Or we can vote to allow Warwick to borrow $3 5 0 million and after our property taxes increase by the thousands, maybe then the state will come in like in East Providence to fix things.

Robert Cushman, Warwick

Robert Cushman is a former Warwick City Councilman and School Committee Chairman