Leave it to Rhode Island to provide a counter-narrative to the notion that the news slows down in summer, right? 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 saga involving state Rep. John Carnevale makes for a dramatic case study in Rhode Island politics. It was fair to wonder even at the beginning of this week if the four-term rep would be blocked from seeking re-election — in a race where Carnevale appeared likely to overcome a split field of three lesser-known Democratic challengers. But on Thursday, the Providence Board of Canvassers ended Carnevale’s campaign (read his statement: he said he has decided against an appeal) by finding he’s not a registered voter in his Providence district. Here are the five key points in how this happened: 1) WPRI-TV got the ball rolling with a story indicating Carenvale was misleading either voters or the state Ethics Commission; Carnevale added fuel to the fire by wrapping his face in what he said was a towel — an effort, he said, to fight allergies; 2) The state GOP challenged whether Carnevale actually lived in his district, and vigorously pursued the complaint; 3) Providence police confirmed a tip that Carnevale had asked for parking tickets at his Providence address, a development that proved the last straw for top Democrats like House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and state party Chairman Joseph McNamara; 4) As the case inched forward, the state Board of Elections made an impactful decision by referring the matter back to the Providence Board of Canvassers, calling on the Canvassers to pursue a wider probe; 5) Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza sent a strong message when he said he was “deeply disappointed” in Canvassers’ Chairwoman Claudia Haugen‘s unwillingness to welcome more testimony and documents. The mayor’s lightning bolt sparked the Canvassers’ tougher posture during the meeting Thursday when they decided Carnevale was not a registered Providence voter.
2. Friday afternoon got a lot more interesting for the Rhode Island media when a State Police advisory went out at 2:27 pm, detailing a 3:30 pm news conference on the findings of the criminal investigation into 38 Studios. Here are a half-dozen key takeaways: 1) there are no criminal charges after a roughly four-year probe; read the State Police report here 2) AG Peter Kilmartin and State Police Col. Steven O’Donnell said the evidence just wasn’t there for a crime, regardless of the bad politics, bad decision-making and lack of transparency that marked 38 Studios; O’Donnell says they followed the money and were able to account for it; 3) Kilmartin says the lack of criminal charges will not affect the state’s civil suit over 38 Studios, slated to go to trial in October; 4) The investigators anticipated the vexation of Rhode Islanders about the lack of criminal charges; Col. O’Donnell again vouched for Kilmartin, a longtime former state rep; 5) Reaction from House Minority Leader Brian Newberry [investigators declined to share specific details from the closed grand jury process]: “I suspect no criminal charges warranted but I would bet details of investigation contain plenty of embarrassment for public officials;” 6) Governor Gina Raimondo, who backed an outside probe on 38 Studios as a candidate in 2014, says she has no plans to call for an outside investigation.
3. Before Carnevale, when was the most recent case when a residency challenge led to an incumbent legislator being wiped from the ballot? Here’s the response TGIF got from Nicole Lagace, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea: “Going through the ProJo archives back to early 1980s, our librarian found three stories related to candidate residency challenges, but none resulted in a candidate being ‘knocked off the ballot’, as you say.”
4. Speaking outside City Hall after the Canvassers’ hearing on Thursday, state GOP Chairman Brandon Bell resumed his familiar line of attack against Speaker Mattiello: “Everyone that has had problems, either as ethically challenged or criminally challenged, is somehow related to Speaker Mattiello, whether it was him as majority leader or as speaker — Ray Gallison, [Joe] Almeida, [Gordon] Fox — everyone was related to that leadership team. It tells me the leadership team has to go. And that’s what we’ve been talking about quite a bit as party — challenging Statehouse leadership.” Steven Frias, one of two Republicans hoping to challenge Mattiello, is the great GOP hope, so it makes sense for Bell to focus his fire on the speaker. Then again, Mattiello moved quickly against Almeida and Gallison, if not so on Carnevale. (And there are vice chairs of 10 committees, so are they really part of House leadership, along with eight formal leadership posts, 10 committee chairs, and about 10 deputy leaders?) Whether the whiff of scandal will dissipate now that Carnevale has decided against seeking re-election is an open question. “Everyone’s talking about Carnevale,” one legislator said, before Carnevale announced his decision. “No one’s talking about Hillary. The rank and file are hearing it big-time.” Meanwhile, state Democratic Chairman Joseph McNamara, a rep from Warwick, offers this response to Bell’s criticism of Mattiello: “Brandon Bell’s shoot from the hip rhetoric has as much substance as his party’s nominee for President, Donald Trump. The fact is that Democratic House Leadership, under Speaker Mattiello, has accomplished more reforms in the last 2 and a half years than any other leadership team in recent memory from elimination of the master lever to lobbying reform to state budget reforms to ethics reform. Many of these reforms, in fact, were done hand-in-hand with rank-and-file Republican legislators in a bi-partisan manner.”
5. Katie O’Hanlon, deputy press secretary for Governor Gina Raimondo, has gotten the nod to manage US Representative David Cicilline‘s re-election campaign. O’Hanlon, a New York native, came in with the governor in January 2015 as a communications associate. Cicilline faces a primary challenge from perennial candidate Chris Young; Russell Taub is running as a Republican in the general. Cicilline, who had more than $800,000 in his campaign account at the end of June, has represented CD1 since first winning the seat formerly held by Patrick J. Kennedy in 2010.
6. Even with the pending exit of another top staffer, chief of staff Tony Simon, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza had a really good week. The mayor forcefully intervened in the Carnevale case at the Board of Canvassers, changing the dynamic and shielding himself from potential criticism about a vacancy on the board. The City Council’s Finance Committee also approved a $40 million infrastructure bond without separate discretionary accounts for councilors — an approach shown in the past to be little more than slush funds. Meanwhile, Simon’s successor, Nicole Pollock, is getting a lot of positive feedback in the political chattering class after a tough 18 months for Elorza. The former assistant to the director at DEM has a bold leadership style, is well-liked, and has good relationships in city and state politics.
7. Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian, Rhode Island’s most high-profile elected moderate Republican, said he will be voting for Donald Trump. “I’m a Republican, and I support the Republican nominee,” Avedisian said during this week’s RI Public Radio Political Roundtable, in his first unequivocal statement on his presidential vote. The Warwick mayor said he “absolutely” has misgivings about Trump, adding, “I think there are lots of issues that I think he could have handled better. You know, it’s really an interesting dynamic. You have people who aren’t really sure that they believe in his ability to govern, and you have a lot of people who don’t believe in her [Hillary Clinton‘s] ability to be truthful. And they have this feeling that — there’s a sense there, a lot of people don’t trust her and yet they’re not comfortable with him. It would, I think, behoove both of them to give an idea of who they’ll put in their cabinet, who they would put on the court, kind of flesh out some of the people they will surround themselves with, because I think that would do both of them some good at this point.”
8. Here’s part of the media coverage of Governor Gina Raimondo‘s time at the DNC this week: she laughed it off when Mika Brzezinski (curiously) assumed she was a Republican. Raimondo told the New York Times‘ Frank Bruni this about being a woman politician: “When you close your eyes and you think ‘leader,’ you probably picture a man …. The only way we’re going to really break through is if people become more accustomed to seeing female leaders,” she told me during an interview here late Wednesday afternoon. In particular, she said, “There aren’t enough women in public executive roles — people don’t even really know what they want to see in a female leader.”
9. Stacia Huyler, who made an unsuccessful primary challenge to Mayor Avedisian in 2014, is now the GOP opponent for Democratic up-and-comer Evan Shanley, for the rep seat being vacated by Joe Trillo. So is Avedisian backing the Republican in the race? He said he’s unsure, although he went out of his way to note Shanley’s noteworthy local connections. “I have reached out to her [Huyler] several times, have not heard back from her,” Avedisian said on Political Roundtable. The mayor said Huyler is apparently “doing her own thing” since a representative district committee was not organized on her behalf, and since she didn’t return messages to see if she needed the Warwick GOP to ask the state GOP to endorse her. More broadly, Avedisian said he’s concerned the number of independents running for legislative seats could dilute the GOP vote.
10. WPRI-TV investigative reporter Tim White plotted a movie about the fabled Bonded Vault heist when he a student at UMass-Aherst, so how’s the outlook for an adaptation now that he’s actually co-written a book on the subject? “Do you know anyone in Hollywood, because I’d like their name,” Tim asked semi-seriously, as part of a Q&A aired by RIPR this week on The Last Good Heist. “The short answer is, I hope so, but we haven’t had any nibbles yet.” Close readers of TGIF may remember that Tim has a good appreciation for Mob movies (see #5), and certainly the Bonded Vault heist would seemingly lend itself to a cinematic treatment. So who should be cast as Raymond L.S. Patriarca?
11. There were high expectations for Chris Torres, a Brown alum who had worked with Graze Diaz and Sheldon Whitehouse, when he was hired to lead Rhode Island Working Families, a new progressive group, last fall. Yet Torres barely got his feet on the ground hereabouts before leaving for a multi-million dollar effort to flex the power of the immigrant vote. RI Working Families, meanwhile, has made its first legislative endorsements.
12. In listicle form, Michael Moore says he believes Donald Trump is on the path to victory.
13. The latest layoff at the ProJo is editorial writer M.J. Andersen, widely considered one of the best pure writers at the paper. She started at the ProJo in 1981, as a reporter in Pawtucket, according to her bio on the paper’s web site. The layoff is seen as a reflection of ProJo owner GateHouse Media’s belief in thinly staffed editorial pages (which have already been cut back at the Journal). On Fountain Street, the two remaining writers on the editorial board are editorial pages editor Ed Achorn and his deputy, Randal Edgar.
14. Justin Katz presents his take on the ProJo’s coverage of the recent Republican and Democratic national conventions.
15. Mark Weiner, a fixture in Democratic politics, died this week at age 62. His uncanny sense of timing could be seen, said Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian, in how Weiner happened to call Avedisian once when he was at the Wailing Wall, during a trip to Israel. “He said here’s what I want you to write and put it into the wall for me.” Scott MacKay: “Mark Weiner was a real character, a real political animal, he loved politics, he bathed in it, he was marinated in it.” As Scott notes, Weiner was able to leverage his connections to make a lot of money and was a generous person who gave extensively to charities.
16. A poignant column from Cara Cromwell on our collective summer of anxiety — “Even Baseball Is No Escape.” Excerpt: “Minneapolis, Dallas, Baton Rouge, Nice — the violence and the rampant killings are hard to understand for adults and harder to explain to children. I’ve stopped trying. The TV is off and there’s no family discussion of the world beyond Rhode Island and Pokemon Go. Perhaps I am doing a disservice to my children by not explaining to them that the roots of these conflicts go back many generations and that they are likely to continue for generations more, but it’s more important to me that their few precious years of childhood are not filled with worries about acts of terror or gun violence.”
17. Wired covers Deepwater Wind’s first in the nation offshore wind farm.
18. TGIF has an abiding fondness for NPR’s Fresh Air, not just because Terry Gross is a great interviewer, but since the show helped sustain us during long commutes on a former job. RINPR carries Fresh Air every weekday at 2 pm, repeating at 9 pm, and the guests this past week have ranged from the fine actor Michael K. Williams, most recently of HBO’s The Night Of, to Amy Chozick, who covers the Hillary Clinton beat for the New York Times. If you haven’t checked the show out, give Fresh Air a listen. You might like it.
19. RIPR’s Ambar Espinoza has the latest on how some of the state’s top environmental groups are staking out concerns about the proposed energy plant in Burrillville.
20. Best wishes to Melissa Czerwein, who worked her last day Thursday as communications director for Commerce RI. Matt Sheaff is the successor. Sheaff was deputy NH director during former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley‘s presidential campaign. He previously worked for Massachusetts Treasurer Deborah Goldberg.
21. Futurist Ray Kuzweil is one of the foremost thinkers on the Singularity — the potentially dystopian time when artificial intelligence will exceed human capacity. So with that possibility looming, Kurzweil says we’re benefiting from the availability of better information (even if it sometimes aversely affects perceptions): “People think the world’s getting worse, and we see that on the left and the right, and we see that in other countries. People think the world is getting worse. … That’s the perception. What’s actually happening is our information about what’s wrong in the world is getting better. A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you’d never even hear about it. Now there’s an incident halfway around the globe and we not only hear about it, we experience it.”
22. Scott Avedisian remains popular enough to have been mayor of Warwick for more than 15 years and he’s once again seeking re-election (Democrat Richard Corrente is challenging him). “I think there are some issues I still want to finish,” Avedisian said, (including the airport, the Apponaug Connector, and City Centre), dropping a hint that a time may come when he will turns his attention elsewhere. For now, Avedisian says personal connections have kept bi-partisanship alive in Warwick. “We have two members of the City Council, I have performed both of their children’s weddings. They are both Democrats …. When we hit a real critical point in airport negotiations, Dr. [Kathleen] Hittner was the chair of the airport board. It is hard to hate someone that you know. And so when we hit an impasse, and she’d say, ‘Come to the house and have a cup of coffee, let’s work through it.’ That’s how you get things done, and that’s what lacking in government today — that old-fashioned relationship building that you have friends for years and you make it work.”
