Mattiello calls Raimondo ‘tone deaf’ on car tax

IN A SERIES of four tweets Friday, House Speaker Nicholas A. Mattiello said Gov. Gina M. Raimondo needed to start listening to the people of Rhode Island who want the “burdensome car tax eliminated,” and called her “tone deaf” on the issue. / PBN FILE PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
IN A SERIES of four tweets Friday, House Speaker Nicholas A. Mattiello said Gov. Gina M. Raimondo needed to start listening to the people of Rhode Island who want the “burdensome car tax eliminated,” and called her “tone deaf” on the issue. / PBN FILE PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

PROVIDENCE – House Speaker Nicholas A. Mattiello took to Twitter on Friday to publicly chastise Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, an unusual step for a politician who rarely tweets.
In a series of four tweets, the speaker said the governor needed to start listening to the people of Rhode Island who want the “burdensome car tax eliminated,” and called her “tone deaf” on the issue.

He said her proposal for two years of free college tuition was “unsustainable,” using the language that his spokesman said has been leveled by the Raimondo staff at his promise to eliminate the auto excise tax.

Mattiello, D-Cranston, won re-election in November after campaigning on a pledge to eliminate the car tax, which varies by community. He has called for a multiple-year phase-out, beginning this coming fiscal year.

“What is truly unsustainable and fiscally irresponsible is her plan to make us the only state in the nation to give away ‘free’ taxpayer-funded college tuition,” he tweeted.

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Raimondo since introducing her fiscal 2018 budget has been heavily promoting the Rhode Island Promise, a proposal to provide two years of free tuition at state institutions.

In a brief conversation, Mattiello spokesman Larry Berman on Friday said the speaker decided to go public after learning that the governor’s press office had been criticizing his proposal in interviews at local newspapers, including the Warwick Beacon. An online headline in its sister publication, the Cranston Herald, on Wednesday said the governor had called the speaker’s car-tax plan “unsustainable.”

Berman said the speaker wasn’t angry, but “he wanted to go public with this.”
Raimondo did not respond to the tweets, but several of her top aides tweeted responses, defending her college proposal.

“90 percent of R.I. high school students want to go to college. Only 65 percent do. Biggest reason they don’t? Cost,” tweeted Mike Raia, communications director for Raimondo.

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