We’re kind of a big deal here in RI – otherwise why would the VP visit, right? Thanks for stopping by. Your tips and comments are welcome. You can follow me through the week on the twitters. Here we go.
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1) Although Vice President Kamala Harris had a whirlwind visit to Rhode Island on Wednesday, she spent a lot more time with locals than predecessors Mike Pence and Joe Biden when they were here, respectively, in 2017 and 2016. The way that Harris directed the conversation back to her administration’s ambitious spending plans was predictable. When Philip Trevvett of the Urban Greens food co-op talked about filling the void of a food desert, Harris pivoted to the importance of public transit. When women small business owners talked about the challenge of keeping things going during the pandemic, the VP made her case for a more expansive definition of infrastructure: “I define infrastructure — one of my definitions — is the things you just need to get where you need to go,” she said during the conversation at District Hall at the Wexford Building. “So let’s talk about why child care is part of that. For example, it is our intention to say that no working family should pay more than 7 percent of their income in child care. So you don’t have to put it on your credit card.” Of course, the people who Harris and Biden need to win over to shift priorities are in DC, not RI. Yet the VP’s visit was noteworthy in other ways, and not just because she’s a beacon for women and people of color. In the past, party big wigs/fundraisers demanded home visits by VIPs stopping in RI. This time around, there was no fundraising element and Harris spent the bulk of her time with regular Rhode Islanders.
2) Gerald Zarrella, who co-chaired former President Trump’s re-election campaign in Rhode Island last year, was set to stage a post-work fundraiser at his Exeter home on Wednesday, May 12, for Democratic Gov. Dan McKee. (“We are looking forward to a beautiful (and dry) evening outside at the barn on Gerald’s Farm,” according to an invite. Fellow developer Thomas Santilli is co-hosting.) Those on the invite list include former Cranston Mayor Allan Fung, members of the Tasca family, and a number of state lawmakers. Zarrella, a Democrat-turned-Republican, has a colorful record in Rhode Island. Most significantly, though, his role in staging a fundraiser for McKee’s 2022 campaign points to the incumbent’s potential crossover appeal and a paucity, so far at least, of GOP rivals. (The event was scrapped following a request from McKee.)
3) TGIF obtained a copy of the results in a survey done for organized labor by a respected pollster.
Some highlights:
– Almost 86 percent of respondents support amending the state Constitution to give students the right to an adequate public education.
– As of March, 38.6 percent of respondents said the state is going in the right direction, compared with 34.9 percent for wrong direction. Back in April 2019, the right track/wrong track was 42.1/44.6.
– The poll shows strong support for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour over several years, and for paying a $15 hourly wage to front line workers caring for the developmentally disabled and elderly nursing home patients.
– More than 70 percent favor reducing Rhode Island’s reliance on fossil fuels by 2050. More than 80 percent support using incentives and tax breaks to attract new businesses and help existing businesses expand.
– Almost 80 percent back banning guns at schools, except for police.
– On a charter school moratorium until 2024, 36.9 percent strong support that, 23.4 percent are somewhat supportive, 14.3 percent are somewhat opposed, and 16.9 percent strongly oppose.
– The General Assembly’s approval/disapproval is 41/38
– Almost 47 percent say they never listen to political talk radio, while about 37 percent listen sometimes, and 16.6 percent a lot.
4) Former Rhode Island House Speaker Gordon Fox has kept a low public profile since getting out of prison a few years ago. (In 2015, Fox was sentenced to three years in prison after being convicted of bribery, wire fraud and tax evasion.) Coming up on May 17, Fox will deliver an invitation-only Zoom presentation, entitled, “Ethical Lapses: Learning From My Mistakes.” The program is being presented by the State Legislative Leaders Foundation.
5) Don’t read too much into this, since there may not be much there. However, a public records request by The Public’s Radio shows that Ganesan “Dr Vish” Visvabharathy of Hawthorne Development Corp. in Chicago has been communicating with the Commerce Corporation about the Superman Building in Providence. I got about 30 pages of heavily redacted emails between the two parties, all from early to mid-April. Visvabharathy, whose company was denied when it tried doing a project in Woonsocket a few years ago, declined comment when recently contacted. Whether this amounts to anything more than an initial inquiry about the Superman Building remains to be seen.
6) As governor, Gina Raimondo largely prioritized holding the line against raising taxes on upper-income Rhode Islanders and businesses. Now, as U.S. Commerce secretary, she’s part of an administration that wants corporations and wealthy Americans to pay more for some of the administration’s initiatives. In an interview during her day spent with VP Harris, I asked Raimondo how she reconciled those two things. Her response: “Well, as I always said as governor, as a state, it’s different, because I had to be competitive with neighboring states. And I always also said at a federal level I was in favor of higher taxes, and I am now. Especially corporate income taxes. Last year, there were almost 100 very large, multi-multi-billion dollar very profitable American companies that paid no taxes because of certain loopholes. That’s an unfair system that’s broken, if you have so many companies not paying anything in taxes.”
7) The House of Representatives remains the big question mark this year on legalizing recreational marijuana. Here’s a view, via Political Roundtable, from two-term Rep. Rebecca Kislak (D-Providence): “I think the status quo is a real shame. I see every time I come out of the Vets after session a big sign advertising cannabis in Attleboro. I know that nobody who has the income to purchase cannabis, and the will to drive 15 minutes, 20 minutes to Massachusetts …. everybody who wants to purchase it legally can — it’s not legal to drive it over the border. But we really need to regulate and tax the cannabis here in Rhode Island. And we need to do it through an equity frame. And what I mean by that, and I think there’s a lot of agreement that folks who have past convictions for marijuana should have those convictions expunged. And we should really think about ways that we can make sure that folks from the communities that have suffered the most from the so-called war on drugs, that they can have an equal footing in the cannabis industry here in Rhode Island. I think that we should be able to come together to do that.”
8) A couple of updates in the clash between Prospect Medical Holdings and Attorney General Peter Neronha. Gov. Dan McKee’s office is unwilling to confirm or deny an assertion by CharterCARE CEO Jeffrey Liebman that McKee backs Prospect in the fight. Elsewhere, Sen. Dawn Euer (D-Newport) is renewing her quest to increase the membership of the RI Health Services Council, the group that recommended an ownership change at Prospect despite new financial questions. Finally, with Neronha pressing for release of his report on Prospect – and Prospect trying to keep the report under wraps – there may be a court hearing in the week ahead.
9) The revised IGT-Bally’s bill, governing the provision of gambling services in the state for another 20 years, is on the fast track in the legislature. Speaker Joe Shekarchi and Senate President Dominick Ruggerio call the latest iteration an improvement over the earlier version. Republicans say, not so much, citing the lack of open bidding and other concerns.
10) While most major categories of crime have declined significantly since the early 1990s, domestic violence remains a widespread problem. Don’t miss my colleague Antonia Ayres-Brown’s two-part look at the issue, examining the increased demand for support services during the pandemic and a survivor’s story of how, as she put it, “becoming whole again.”
11) The scale of the Biden administration’s spending plans has sent Meet the Press and other shows running for clips of Ronald Reagan decrying the federal government and its various social and spending initiatives. So it may come as a surprise to some to learn that Reagan presided over an increase in federal spending and debt. As Daniel Yergen and Joseph Stanislaw wrote in 1998, “David Stockman, Reagan’s first director of the Office of Management and Budget, left the administration dejected, disillusioned with supply-side economics, and chastened by the realities of the political process. Failure to achieve fiscal-policy change, he argued, was a clear vindication of the ‘triumph of politics’ — of entitlements over austerity, and of the enduring pork-barrel tradition of American legislation over any cold economic logic. ‘I joined the Reagan Revolution as a radical ideologue,’ he wrote. ‘I learned the traumatic lesson that no such revolution is possible.’ The triumph of politics and what Stockman called the ‘fiscal error’ that went with it spawned a new monster, which would come to occupy center stage in policy debate: the deficit and the federal debt. Between the beginning and the end of the Reagan presidency, the annual deficit almost tripled. So did the gross national debt — from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion. Or, as Reagan and Bush administration official Richard Darman put it, ‘In the Reagan years, more federal debt was added than in the entire prior history of the United States.’ “
12) McKeeWorld: the gov got some pleasant news with Fidelity announcing plans for an additional 500 jobs. Meanwhile, Gov. McKee convened the first meeting in his 2030 initiative, meant to help chart the economic recovery and generate input for how to spend a boatload of federal stimulus money. The session included remarks from legislative leaders, an investment strategist from the Blackstone Group, and Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor led a panel featuring Bruce Van Saun, chairman and CEO of Citizens Financial; Martha Wofford, president and CEO of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of R.I.; Suzy Alba, president, Smithfield Town Council; Roby Luna, president of Aretec and a member of the URI Board of Trustees; and Larry Warner, chief impact and equity officer of the United Way of Rhode Island.
13) Just like Gov. Raimondo did as a candidate back in 2013, Gov. Dan McKee this week put his support behind offering driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Like Raimondo, McKee said this should be done through the General Assembly, not an executive order, so the outlook for forward motion appears cloudy at best. Some lawmakers like the idea, but a critical mass of support has yet to muster.
14) You look pretty good for 50, NPR – happy birthday!
15) Jeremy Bernfeld will be starting later this month as the investigative editor at The Public’s Radio, deepening the station’s capacity for investigative reporting. I was on the search committee, so take it from me: Jeremy is a great guy with an impressive background – including being the lead editor on a multi-state project, Guns and America – and I’m excited about working with him.
16) Andy Burkhardt was one of the hallowed members of the glory days of The Providence Journal. Scott MacKay, who overlapped for many years with Burkhardt, offers this appreciation after Burkhardt’s recent death: “Andy was a beloved editor who did his job with compassion, decency and respect for readers and reporters. A man with a strong moral compass, he was a devoted father to his five children from two marriages, a stellar sailor who was commodore of the Edgewood Yacht Club and a man of great wit and insight. In 1986, Andy was chief of the most far-flung bureau in the Journal’s history – one in Perth, Australia — that covered the America’s Cup races. Andy was a graduate of Amherst College, where he studied history, and a Coast Guard veteran. He was a very smart fellow who treated everyone with decency — reporters, janitors, political mucky-mucks and the scruffy nighttime denizens of Hope’s. He was unflappable on deadline, the kind of editor you wanted on election night or when a hurricane blew in. Peter Lord, the late environmental writer put it best: ‘If a nuclear bomb hit Westerly, Andy would take a puff on his pipe and remind everybody in the newsroom that we still have four more editions to put out.’ He was a union activist. Even as he climbed the management ladder, he always cared about the worker bees who made the newsroom run. Was known for saying ‘thank you’ to reporters who filed stories. He died at age 78, after a courageous bout with Parkinson’s Disease. He will be much missed.”
17) Rep. Leonela Felix (D-Pawtucket) has been selected as one of 19 rising leaders across the country to join NewDEAL (Developing Exceptional American Leaders), a national network of state and local officials. According to a news release, “Felix joins the group at a time when state and local leaders are on the frontlines of responding to the pandemic and as they take on a critical role in implementing the American Rescue Plan recently signed by President Biden. The new law will send hundreds of billions of dollars to state and local governments. NewDEALers are supporting each other in addressing the many challenges created and exacerbated by COVID-19 by innovating, convening virtually, and sharing good ideas. The NewDEAL has launched a database of policies and programs that address the wide-ranging impacts of the pandemic and is publishing recommendations for building back better from this crisis.”
18) The Public’s Radio won a trio of regional Murrow journalism awards this week. We also won a National Headliner Award for this digital gallery showcasing the work of local artists. The thing I will remember, though, is how Dan McGowan’s phone died as we were using it to interview Secretary Raimondo, as Dan and I were riding in a vice-presidential motorcade. Good times.
Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis@ripr.org
