Tax Day is behind us, and the final stretch of the legislative session is looming. So thanks for stopping by for my weekly column. As usual, your tips and comments are welcome, and you can follow me through the week on the twitters. Here we go.
1. The long-expected move toward a new reshaping of Rhode Island’s healthcare landscape emerged when Care New England unveiled its intended merger with Boston-based Partners HealthCare this week. To some, the pairing is a good thing that suggests more competition and collaboration. “This is a tremendous opportunity for both organizations to further advance their commitment to high-quality health care, access to leading-edge clinical treatment, world-class academics, and most importantly, enhanced opportunities for patients,” CNE President and CEO Dennis Keefe said in a statement. “I believe both organizations are uniquely aligned in our commitments to the community and together we will proceed with focus and collaboration.” Yet as RI Public Radio political analyst Scott MacKay notes in his weekly commentary, the proposed merger raises a series of questions involving the impact on healthcare costs and consumers. And there are other questions, as state officials remain largely quiet about the planned merger: “Partners’ big hospitals are affiliated with Harvard Medical School, so what happens to Brown’s medical school? What happens to the 70 medical residents being trained in family medicine and primary care at Memorial? Will patients and medical research money be sent on a one-way train to Boston?” Meanwhile, Lifespan is unhappy about being spurned, and CNE is moving to transfer Pawtucket’s Memorial Hospital to the owner of Landmark Medical Center in Woonsocket.
2. With the General Assembly on spring break this week, Governor Gina Raimondo took to social media to tune up her message on the car tax: “It’s time to get together and finally cut the car tax. But let’s be responsible about it. Let’s make sure the cut is sustainable and affordable. My budget cuts everyone’s car tax by at least 30 percent. It’s responsible. It’s sustainable. It’s fair to every city and town. And it provides relief to every Rhode Islander.” The not so subtle target here is House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello‘s pledge to kill the car tax over five years. While Mattiello waxes optimistic about the states ability to sustain a car tax phaseout — as I reported in a lengthy look at the subject this week — he’s not always going to be speaker, and the state started on the path to eliminating the tax back in the ’90s before later backtracking. At the same time, finding the money to totally wipe out the car tax (an eventual $215 million or so, every year) could cut deep into programs championed by Raimondo. Plus, the governor clearly wants to move ahead to some degree with her proposal to offer Rhode Islanders for two years of free tuition at CCRI, RIC, or URI. Meanwhile, the state Revenue & Caseload Estimating Conference may offer a reality check by the time it ends on May 10. Suffice it to say, the battle lines are drawn for a dramatic closing stretch on Smith Hill.
3. Steven Frias said he doesn’t know if he’s in the mix for a possible federal appointment. “I don’t know — I haven’t talked to anyone in the Trump administration,” he said on RIPR’s Bonus Q&A this week. “You know, I’m happy with the job I have, but it would be an honor to be nominated and to serve. So I’m just waiting to see what the Trump administration wants to do.” If he had his pick, Frias said he’d like to snag the nomination as U.S. District Court judge: “I think the best position is obviously a judgeship.” Meanwhile, if that doesn’t work out, Frias told us he hasn’t given much thought to a possible rematch against Speaker Mattiello in 2018.
4. Inside Elections’ Nathan Gonzalez on the outlook 2018: “RHODE ISLAND — Gina Raimondo (D) elected 2014 (41%). Raimondo is expected to seek a second term after getting elected to replace former GOP Senator/2016 Democratic presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee. Raimondo survived a competitive primary last time and could face another one next year. Her general election winning percentage was low thanks to a Moderate Party candidate receiving 21 percent. Republicans believe they have quality opposition research material against her, but they don’t have a top-tier candidate on the horizon. Solid D.” Meanwhile, Larry Sabato‘s Crystal Ball web site gives Raimondo the edge, but is a bit less bullish on her prospects: “there are reasons to think that she could be vulnerable either to a primary challenge or in the general election. Perhaps that helps explain why the Democratic Governors Association already is spending six figures on her behalf …. Considering Raimondo’s struggles and the Ocean State’s openness to electing GOP governors, the incumbent only gets a slight edge to start. Leans Democratic“
5. At least three more newsroom staffers are poised to leave Fountain Street through The Providence Journal’s latest buyout — and it remains unclear for now if layoffs will remain part of the equation. The exit of two more reporters (Karen Lee Ziner, and one who asked the Providence Newspaper Guild to not identify him) threatens to narrow the breadth of the ProJo’s coverage. At this stage, It’s hard to imagine anyone replicating Ziner’s focus in covering immigrants and their communities (and related issues like wage theft). Her doggedness was evident in covering the case of a Mexican immigrant who was badly injured while working in Rhode Island. But this is 2017, not 1997, and trends like the collapse of retail represent just the latest in a series of threats to newspaper ad revenue. Laments about how the ProJo’s staffing compares to the old days aren’t going to make things better. And despite the cuts that have become more frequent since GateHouse Media bought the Journal in 2014, the Journal still has a number of excellent staffers. To name a few: Amanda Milkovits kills it on the police beat and related issues, like sex trafficking; Jennifer Bogdan and Patrick Anderson deliver valuable reporting while maintaining an important full-time presence at the Statehouse; Kate Bramson aggressively works her economics/development beat; and Katherine Gregg remains a tenacious go-getter with a broad portfolio and a great memory. Expecting the Journal to cover Rhode Island like “the morning dew” across the state is no longer realistic. Instead, the challenge facing incoming Executive Editor Alan Rosenberg and his team is making the most of the ProJo’s remaining staff and Rhode Island’s many intrigues.
6. We’ve learned to expect the unexpected when it comes to Lincoln Chafee. This week, the former mayor, U.S. senator and governor unveiled his opposition to Invenergy’s proposed power plant in Burrillville. So is there any chance Chafee will be a candidate for office in 2018? “I know we’re coming up” on campaign season,” he told me during a telephone interview, “but it’s early, so I can’t answer that.”
7. Stacey Paterno is leaving as VP for communications at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of RI to start her own outfit, KDG Strategies. Gail Carvelli will move up to take over the top comms job at BC/BS.
8. A Brown University poll released this week found Kent County voters very conflicted about President Donald Trump, with 43 percent approving of the president’s performance and 43 percent disapproving. Forty-six percent of respondents in Kent County support building a wall on the border with Mexico, and 50 percent back a temporary ban on travel to US by residents of certain Middle Eastern countries. But repealing the Affordable Care Act was unpopular (although doing away with Obamacare less so), as was defunding Planned Parenthood. Jim Morone, director of Brown University’s Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy, said Brown plans to focus more closely on Rhode Island elected officials in some future polls.
9. Are unconditional cash payments a way to overcome dislocations in the economy? That notion may seem far-fetched, a kind of welfare state run amok. Yet the idea of universal basic income is gaining traction in Silicon Valley, since technology is expected to eliminate 10 million jobs by 2015. Universal basic income is “such a big shift in how the safety net would be constructed,” Matt Krisiloff, part of the start-up incubator Y Combinator tells Marketplace’s David Brancaccio. “It’s really a tremendously expensive idea, so we need to make sure it’s actually a good one before actually advocating for something like this.” Brancaccio’s story continues with this: “Y Combinator researchers want to know, among other things, whether free money causes people to seek out more fulfilling work or robs recipients of ambition. If results are positive, some economists believe the U.S. could implement UBI by dramatically expanding the federal earned income tax credit, now targeted toward poor working families. How to fund such an expansion is an open question, but one that Krisiloff is optimistic about. ‘If the real need for this is something like we have tremendous automation, it’s hard to imagine just how much more wealth we could be creating as a society,’ he said. ‘It could be double, it could be thousand times the GDP we have now.’ “
10. RI GOP National Comitteeman Steven Frias lost a state rep seat to Speaker Mattiello last year by a mere 85 votes. Here’s his take on what RI Republicans need to do to pick up more legislative seats: “It comes down to finding good candidates, number one. I mean the Republicans took the council in Cranston, right? And that was because you found some really good candidates to come out. Candidates make a difference. The second two most important things to me are about money and organization. You have to raise money. It takes an effort. Look, I spent almost $20,000 on my race. Not a lot of people can do that, and by the way, you don’t have to spend $20,000 to run for state rep, usually. I just happened to run against a guy who was spending almost 300Gs. But it takes some money and it takes organization. People have to be able to say, ‘I’m fed up and I’m willing to put in some time and help.’ You can’t just stay in front of Facebook or go on social media all day and say, ‘Oh, they stink, they’re bad.’ You got to go out and work.”
11. Media analyst Ken Doctor points to the ProJo’s collaboration with Crimetown as an example of how podcasts make for good partnerships with local media: “How well and how much could local media — newspapers, public media, and TV broadcasters — learn from Crimetown’s example and leverage their own unique local stories and histories? Can they move beyond digital products that mainly list the news headlines of the day, to offer the fuller knowledge of their cities of today — and how they came to be what they are? Says [Crimetown co-creator Marc] Smerling: ‘If we have learned anything over the last decade, that people are shifting to the Internet for their entertainment, news, and longform nonfiction. Podcasts are growing faster than any other media platform. So it seems only natural for local newspapers to refresh their clip files into valuable storytelling in podcasts. Local newspapers and newspapers in general may very well be the thing that delivers podcasts to that portion of the audience who have struggled with the technology.’ “
12. Sinclair Broadcasting, the owner of WJAR-TV, Channel 10, attracted attention this week for hiring former Trump spokesman Boris Epshteyn as its “chief political analyst” over 173 stations. Meanwhile, with the fallout from recent ownership changes at WJAR and WPRI still to be determined, the Federal Communications Commission this week moved to further relax restrictions on owning TV stations. TVNewsCheck reports that Sinclair and WPRI owner Nexstar were among those lobbying for a related change in calculating coverage by TV groups: “The FCC action opens the door for mergers involving groups that are bumping up against the cap without the discount. Sinclair, Nexstar, CBS and NBC all lobbied the FCC to restore the discount. The immediate beneficiary may be Sinclair Broadcast Group. It is rumored to be in talks to acquire all or most of Tribune Media. With the discount, it will be able to move ahead with any such plans.”
13. The paradox of protest movements, as explained by NPR’s Shankar Vedantam: extreme tactics draw media attention, but cause a lot of people to tune out. Quieter efforts can be more effective, but don’t get broadly communicated. As Vedantam explains: [I]n some ways protests and protesters have an inherent dilemma before them. Extreme tactics may not get you traction in convincing people to join your cause, but they do get you attention. They get you media attention. Milder tactics may do much more to get you traction, but they don’t get you very much attention. So in other words, the psychology of how protests are perceived means that protest movements often have to choose between visibility and effectiveness. Now, there is a way you can get both visibility and effectiveness. You know, protests like the recent women’s march were extremely peaceful and also very visible. But then it also happened to be one of the largest protest gatherings in the history of the country.
14. Even with marijuana legalization once again going nowhere fast at the Statehouse, CBS finds that support for legalization continues to rise.
15. Kudos and congratulations to Ethan Shorey on his promotion to managing editor of The Valley Breeze, and to Marcia Green on her retirement from the editor’s post. Ethan has a great nose for news. The Breeze said he’ll continue to report stories from Cumberland, Pawtucket and North Providence while directing the paper’s news coverage.
16. Two new candidates emerged this week in the race for the District 13 state Senate seat recently vacated by Teresa Paiva Weed. David Hanos is a captain in the Newport Fire Department, chairman of the Newport School Committee, and he owns a steel fabrication and repair business. He joins David Allard, Dawn Euer and John Florez as Democrats running for the post. In a campaign announcement, Hanos said in part, “We must make it easier to operate a small business in Rhode Island. The residents of Newport and Jamestown own and work in many small businesses. They are the backbone of our economy, and we must change the way we treat these businesses. We must enact smart laws that will reduce the regulatory red tape and lower the cost of doing business in this state.” Meanwhile, Mike Smith, who gave Paiva Weed a competitive run in 2014, announced his Republican campaign in District 13. Smith offered this as part of his message, “Newport and Jamestown population continues to drop, as we have become too dependent on tourism. This has made our economy vulnerable to economic downturns and our future far to unpredictable. When elected I will work in a bi-partisan manner to help our local leaders create a diverse year-round economy, and year round jobs. I will then take that message upstate to ensure we get the support we need from the state to begin putting the pieces together that will create a healthy economy that provides for both the good paying jobs and the social programs we need to support both our businesses and our neighbors.”
17. Mark Zuckerberg addressed the Facebook Developer Conference earlier this week, pivoting after touching on the shadow cast by the Cleveland murderer who posted video of his act on FB. “It sounded as if Zuckerberg were about to lay out for his audience — the people helping to build his platform — what they all need to take seriously: That people sometimes hijack the app to broadcast gratuitous violence, to wage propaganda wars with “fake news,” to bully and to hate,” reported NPR’s Aarti Shahani. “But that’s not what he did. Instead he pivoted again, abruptly, to a radical vision for how Facebook will move us from the two-dimensional news feed to vibrant 3-D imaginary worlds. ‘Think about, if your daughter is a big Harry Potter fan, for her birthday you can change your home into Hogwarts.’ The world learned about ‘augmented reality’ through the Pokémon Go craze. Now Facebook wants to take that craze and turn it into a sustained global movement.”
18. Via RI Future’s Bob Plain: “It’s known as lunch shaming. Students are subjected to special, sometimes embarrassing, treatment because their parents didn’t pay the school lunch bill. “Some provide kids an alternative lunch, like a cold cheese sandwich,” according to a recent NPR story. ‘Other schools sometimes will provide hot lunch, but require students do chores, have their hand stamped or wear a wristband showing they’re behind in payment. And, some schools will deny students lunch all together.’ The so-called cheese sandwich policy seems popular in suburban Rhode Island: Bristol/Warren, South Kingstown, and East Greenwich all use it.”
19. “His grassroots rebellion stops a federal railroad plan in its tracks“
20. The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council rates Rhode Island 36th among the 50 states for economic outlook.
21. NPR’s Ron Elving on “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign“: “There is no Big Reveal, no shocking secret answer. Instead we get a slow-building case against the concept and execution of the Clinton campaign, with plenty of fault falling squarely on the candidate herself. Far from a juggernaut, the campaign we see in these pages is plagued with division, unease and anxiety practically from the outset. When things go right, it only means they are soon to go terribly wrong. Win a primary, lose a caucus. Quash a rumor, see three more go viral. Close one wound and find another torn open again. Among those wounds, the first cut is the deepest. The email stories that began in March 2015 never go away. First, it’s Clinton’s own private server, then the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the endless email dump stolen from campaign chairman John Podesta. Email becomes the cyber-incubus the campaign cannot shed. Whether anyone with Trump connections was colluding or complicit in the WikiLeaks-Russian caper or not, the continual media focus on email issues could scarcely have been more convenient for the Trump campaign.”
22. Rest in Peace, Dorrance Hill Hamilton, who died this week at age 88. The Campbell’s Soup heiress was known in part for establishing the SVF Foundation in Newport to preserve rare livestock. As Brian C. Jones wrote in describing “Jurassic Park on Ocean Drive” for a 2005 story in the Providence Phoenix, “while ‘Jurassic Park’ reproduced Tyrannosaurus Rexes and other dinosaurs, the creatures of Newport’s SVF Foundation are smaller, less threatening and even downright cuddly: Tennessee Fainting Goats, Dutch Belted Cows, and Santa Cruz Sheep.”
