It always comes back to Rhode Island, 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 Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls promises to remain in the spotlight after a pickup truck driven by a corrections officer drove into contact with protestors this week, injuring several people The investigation by State Police and Attorney General Peter Neronha’s office is focused on reconstructing what happened. One question is whether the jurisdiction for correction officers for the prison (operated by a quasi-municipal corporation created by the legisalature) extends outside the Wyatt. Speaking on Political Roundtable at The Public’s Radio this week, Neronha said correction officers are considered “peace officers” under Rhode Island law. “But that doesn’t mean they have all the same powers of a more typical police officer,” he said “…. There’s a lot to be sorted through here.” Meanwhile, the Wednesday night incident has focused a lot more political attention on Wyatt, with members of RI’s congressional delegation weighing in and local Democrats and Republicans emphasizing the importance of safeguarding the right to peaceful protest. With a municipal government that better reflects the predominantly Latino makeup of Central Falls, a trend that accelerated with James Diossa’s initial election as mayor in 2012, it’s no surprise that Wyatt has come to be seen more as an unwelcome intruder than the original vision of a local revenue source. Yet Wyatt’s bondholders have a lot of sway over the situation, and as knowledgeable legal observer as the RI ACLU’s Steve Brown told The Public’s Radio earlier this year that the bondholders still hold a strong hand. Meanwhile, this announcement came in from Wyatt late Friday: “Captain Thomas Woodworth resigned from his position at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility on Friday, August 16, 2019. The incident which occurred on August 14 remains under active investigation by the Rhode Island State Police and under internal investigation by the Wyatt.”
2) Among RI elected officials, Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea offered perhaps the sharpest criticism of how Wyatt functions as something other than a state-operated prison. In a statement, she called the incident “a painful reminder on the dangers of privatizing our prisons. When companies profit from putting people behind bars, you create an economy that does not value immigration or criminal justice reform. You also get situations like the ones last night at Wyatt where the safety and constitutional rights of people are put at serious risk.” For his part, AG Neronha takes a more mixed view of private prisons. The economic incentive to lock people up bears watching, he said. But Neronha, who formerly served as Rhode Island’s U.S. attorney, said having a nearby facility to detain people awaiting trial in federal court “was a huge benefit. So there’s a balance there. In a perfect world, [the federal] Bureau of Prisons would run all the facilities, but I’m not prepared to say we should get rid of all [non-traditional prisons].”
3) While some gun-rights advocates contend that safety would be boosted if more Americans carried concealed weapons, Col. James Manni, superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police, disagrees with that view. “I strongly disagree,” Manni told me in an interview this week. “But let me also add that I believe in the Second Amendment. I own many firearms, I shoot every week. I compete at an amateur level. I belong to the NRA. So I’m not an anti-gun person. But to answer your question directly, I do not believe that interjecting more firearms into the situation will make it better. The reaon for that is, concealed carry permits in the state of Rhode Island – although it’s tough to get one, the level of training to get one, either from the attorney general or from a police chief – there’s not a high level of training. You just really have to qualify on a target, do the paperwork, then pay a fee and you would get a concealed carry permit. But the more firearms you interject, the more chance there is for friendly fire, for someone overreacting, someone losing a firearm, so forth. It carries many risks.”
4) Amid the relative lull of mid-August in a non-election year, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and Senate President Dominick Ruggerio moved to set the state on the next phase of discussion in the battle between IGT and Twin River by posing a series of document requests to Gov. Gina Raimondo. “We are committed to properly vetting this legislation by way of public hearings to determine the appropriateness of forgoing the normal bid process for a contract of this length, scope and magnitude,” they wrote in a letter sent out as a legislative press release. The requested documents include “a proposed contract or the terms of the agreement in principle as negotiated between the governor’s office and IGT; detailed information about the 1,000 jobs required in the current contract; underlying data used in a report on the economic impact of the 1,100 jobs and capital investments to be required with the contract extension, along with any consultant, legal or other reports relied upon during the Governor’s negotiations with IGT.”
5) With corporate titans trying to breathe life back into the GateHouse Media-Gannett deal, GateHouse (which owns the ProJo, Newport Daily News, Fall River Herald News, and New Bedford Standard-Times, among many other papers) this week continued cutting jobs at its properties across the U.S., including in Massachusetts, Florida, Colorado, and Oklahoma. “There is no more real newspaper in the city of Worcester,” Worcester Mayor Joseph Petty said after the layoff of the Telegram & Gazette’s last remaining columnist, Clive McFarlane, a 26-year employee. According to Poynter, the cuts include two each at the Herald News and Standard-Times. As former Herald News reporter Brian Fraga noted on Twitter, “the Herald News of Fall River now has no news photographers. @HNNow will only have submitted pics and cellphone photos taken by reporters. Smdh. #journalism”
6) RI Attorney General Peter Neronha, a Democrat, thinks the Trump administration’s approach to immigration is misguided. “We need a sensible immigration policy. Nobody who advocates for some of these issues that we’re talking about thinks we should have open borders. But we have to be smart about how we do it, and this isn’t smart,” he said on Bonus Q&A, referring to how undocumented immigrants were targeted, but not company management during a recent federal raid at a Mississippi chicken-processing plant. “This is penalizing. It’s doing what I think this Justice Department is doing a lot – which is going after the low-hanging fruit and not going after the true threats.” Asked whether he sees a political motive in the immigration moves by the Trump administration – which this week unveiled opposition to legal immigration by people likely to need government benefits — Neronha said, “I think that’s part of it. I think it is political. I think it’s a way of looking at the world, and I try not to ascribe motives to people I don’t know, but it’s very difficult to look at some of the decisions that are coming out of Washington around public charge and other things that aren’t motivated by a desire to have a whiter, more affluent America. And as somebody whose mother emigrated from Germany with a high school education – didn’t speak English – and has a grandmother who was detained at Ellis Island because she was ill and had to go back to the Azores until she got healthy. Look, I come from poor stock, not poor in terms of their ability or hard work ethic, but in terms of their economic means. And I’ve had great opportunities because my parents have helped me create them. That’s the country I think we should be, not what this adminisitration is looking for.”
7) Back during the Cianci interregnum in the late 1980s, then-Providence Mayor Joseph R. Paolino Jr. sponsored a billboard on I-93 near Boston encouraging traffic-weary commuters to move to Providence. (A mid-to-late’80s housing bubble in Massachusetts arguably had a bigger impact in leading some Bay Staters to seek cheaper housing in northern RI.) Decades later, traffic – and housing prices – have only worsened around Boston. So people like Mike Raia, the former communications director for Gov. Raimondo who now works for NAIL) can make a compelling case for picking Providence over Boston. “I’ve never commuted more than 14 minutes while living in RI,” Raia wrote, as part of a Twitter thread on the subject. (He also pointed to how home=buyers can get more for their money in the Ocean State.) So while Rhode Island’s job market pales in comparison to Boston’s — and under-performing public schools remain a key issue – the Ocean State enjoys the distinction of being the only Northeast metro area where the number of 24 to 35 years has (barely) increased in recent years. So maybe the state should try to get more people to move here.
8) Meanwhile, the Globe’s Dan McGowan offers an update on the activities of The Partnership For Rhode Island, the non-partisan private sector advocacy group recommended by the Brookings Institution back in 2016: “The group’s willingness to wade into two of the state’s most pressing issues [including the state’s evolving hospital landscape] is exactly what its elite membership had in mind when the partnership was formed in late 2016. Now business leaders and elected officials are keeping close tabs on the organization as it considers taking on a more public role in the effort to turn around Providence schools.” Elsewhere, conservative Justin Katz questions whether the Partnership is attempting to create hegemony with state government and labor unions.
9) While the state’s decision not to retain its cyber-security director attracted notice, State Police Col. James Manni believes Rhode Island has a sound strategy for fighting cyber-crime. “We are expanding the unit,” he told me during our interview. “We’ll be putting a new supervisor in there, which is funded by a federal grant, which is good news. We do have a good plan moving forward, with Gen. [Christopher] Callahan from the National Guard, who is overseeing this. We have Department of Administration personnel also involved and the State Police.” Meanwhile, Manni said interviews began this week to hire a new 911 director for the state, and that 911 call-takers will get certified in the same emergency medical training as their peers in other New England states once the director is in place.
10) Via The Public’s Radio’s Sofia Rudin: “Less than two months into the 2020 fiscal year, Rhode Island’s budget office is anticipating the Department of Children, Youth, and Families will need to request additional funding from the legislature. DCYF’s budget for the 2020 fiscal year is $228.6 million. That’s only slightly more than the previous year’s budget of $227.9 million, which DCYF was projected to overspend by $18.3 million. The department cited an unexpected influx of 350 new kids into state care and a higher number of costly group home and residential treatment placements driving spending up. Department of Administration Director Michael DiBiase said the Office of Management and Budget is already worried about similar overspending this year. ‘I think it’s clear from the level of spending that happened in the last fiscal year and the fact that the FY20 budget is millions of dollars less in resources that it is going to be very challenging for the department to meet its budget,’ DiBiase said.”
11) When all else fails in August, enjoy the pleasure of eating garden-fresh tomatoes. Via The Atlantic: “Psychologists often use the term sublimation to describe a defense mechanism that transforms socially unacceptable impulses into less harmful acts. It’s what you do when you can’t do what you want; people sublimate their desires or rage or despair. Maybe you tidy up your closet to avoid going deeper into credit-card debt by buying new clothes. Maybe you keep your grout so clean because of paranoia that your spouse is cheating on you. Maybe you avoid screaming at your boss by leaving the office to buy your third latte of the day.”
12) Rhode Island is among a number of states suing over the Trump administration’s effort to cut back regulations on coal-burning power plants. Meanwhile, the Ocean State is already among the states showing the impact of climate change, according to a report in the Washington Post.
13) The latest installment of Mosaic, the immigration podcast from The Public’s Radio, looks at how three friends from Fall River, Massachusetts, use the struggles of second-generation Portuguese Americans as inspiration for careers in comedy.
14) Secretary of State Gorbea is encouraging Rhode Islanders to assist in the maintenance of the state’s voting rolls. According to a release from her office, “The Department of State’s Elections Division will send roughly 120,000 postcards to registered Rhode Island voters who did not vote in the past five calendar years or update their voter registration information during that time. Any mailings that are returned as ‘undeliverable’ will mark that voter as inactive, starting the process of legally removing them from the rolls. ‘I’m calling on any Rhode Islander who receives a mailing to follow the simple instructions on that card,’ said Secretary Gorbea. ‘If you receive a card for someone who no longer lives at that address, it is imperative that the card be returned to our office. Your participation is a critical part in helping us maintain accurate voter lists and protecting the integrity of every vote. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact my office.’ ”
15) The new $22 million pedestrian bridge in Providence has opened to both accolades and expressions of disapproval about the sharp escalation of its cost. As is often the case in Rhode Island, some wonder if the span will be properly maintained now that it’s here. For now, we’ll leave it to others to debate whether the bridge is too costly. I got to check it on the way to PPAC last weekend, and it’s lovely. The bridge creates a new public space in Providence and it hints at the potential for more good stuff in the surrounding area.
