TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: All right, let’s get into education. I didn’t know this; I learned, it was about 25 years ago when a new consensus emerged on the need to improve Providence schools. And then, of course, five years ago, the state takes control of the Providence school district in response to the issues brought up in the Johns Hopkins report. And yet here we are all these years later; many people think not much has gotten better. How do you assess the current state of Providence schools right now?
Brett Smiley: So, it’s a hard question to answer because our students have just as much talent and ambition as any other school system around the state. And yet our test scores are not what any one of us should aspire. Our school buildings still need some work and there’s been a lot of tumult and stress in the classroom over the last couple of years, and so my assessment is mixed. My assessment is that we’ve got hardworking educators, talented and ambitious students, but that we are still not doing enough to make sure that nobody falls through the cracks and that every child has a chance at an excellent education in Providence.
Hernandez: Mayor, do you have personal goals that before at least this first term – I’m not sure if you’re running again – but that you’ll see the Providence schools reach a certain point?
Smiley: So last year in the fall, we convened what’s called the Return to Local Control Cabinet. We do expect the state takeover to end in my term and in order to prepare for that moment, we pulled together a group to start working on it just a couple weeks ago. As a result of the next phase of that work, we outlined eight key metrics that we’re going to be tracking to help assess both the progress that’s been made when the schools are ready to come back and to give myself and everyone else in the community stuff to focus on. And so that includes things like third grade reading and math scores. It includes attendance. It includes parent engagement. It includes the number of career and technical classes or AP classes offered to students. And so we’ve tried to focus – all of my team – and hopefully rally the community in the months to come around these outcomes that I believe are most important. And so those are very much my goals. I hope that they can become shared goals in the community.
Hernandez: Providence Superintendent Javier Montañez was very critical of you in a YouTube video. Do the two of you talk? Because why is he making claims on YouTube? Did you take that personal?
Smiley: I didn’t take it personally, but I didn’t think it was constructive either. The superintendent and I see each other all the time. And we know that the school department has been asking for more funding. We also know that the school department – just like the city, just like the state – received a lot of one-time federal funds and those funds are expiring. And so one of the things I’m most proud about the budget that we just signed for the city is that we’ve been able to prepare for, and now get to the point where we’re no longer relying on those one-time federal funds. We were able to accommodate that in our budget and still not raise taxes. The school department, I think, was not ready for the expiration of those funds and didn’t plan for what happens when the money runs out. So it was, I believe, a negotiating tactic. I don’t think it was constructive. I don’t think adults negotiate over a $500 million budget via YouTube videos released at 10 o’clock at night. But I also feel good about the funding increase that we ultimately provided, $5.5 million dollars, the largest increase in 15 years. The Providence Public Schools have been underinvested in. We all agree on that, but that happened over a generation and it’s not going to get solved in one budget year. And so we made, I think, as much progress as we can afford to make this year and we’re going to stay at it.
Hernandez: Allright, when the State Department of Education accused the city of poorly managing school construction projects, RIDE officials said the city had failed to claim millions of dollars in state funding and has failed to pay vendors in a timely fashion. I need to hear your response on that.
Smiley: So our school buildings budget, like every other construction project in Rhode Island and probably in the country right now, was over budget. Interest rates are higher than they used to be. Construction costs are higher than they used to be. Every project was coming in over budget. But as we sit here today, all the vendors have been paid. We didn’t, in fact, miss out on any federal or state reimbursement dollars. The deadline for that was June 30. We hit that deadline and we are improving our budgeting systems going forward so that with the increased cost of construction, we’re budgeting for those new numbers. This problem started under the previous administration and has carried forward. We have several years worth of projects that had cost overruns. And so as we move forward into the next phase of our construction budget, we will be budgeting for today’s costs and not for the costs of pre-pandemic.
Hernandez: Everybody wants to know when do schools, the public schools, go back to the control of the Providence School District. What do you want to see before that happens?
Smiley: We put out this release and folks online can check it out at providenceri.gov/tap, which stands for Turnaround Plan. In that, it outlines our process. It includes community engagement and operational preparedness on the city side and these eight key metrics that I spoke about earlier. Those will be what we’re looking towards. At the same time, the Department of Education is going through what they’re calling an interim assessment – they call it a temperature check – to see how we’re doing, what has progressed or not since the Johns Hopkins report, and both our work and the Department of Education’s work will help inform and answer that question of when will the turnaround end and when will the schools come back to Providence.
Hernandez: I heard in a TV report that you said, “Look, we need at least a year.” Are you confident that they could do it within a year from now?
Smiley: We haven’t seen the test scores yet. I think that will be very informative and telling. Those come out in the fall. And we haven’t seen the results of this interim assessment either. For logistical reasons, for operational reasons, it certainly makes sense to do the transition over the summer. And so next summer would be the earliest because it is, in fact, true that we need at least a year. And if it’s not next summer, it’s probably the summer after that. But we need to see test scores. We need to actually see how these eight metrics that we have called out as the most important metrics, how they’re progressing. There’s a thing called the Turnaround Plan, which came at the beginning of the turnaround. It has something like 30 metrics in it. It’s a good plan. Those are good metrics, but there’s just too many of them. And the targets that they set out, [it’s] going to take a long time to hit those targets. I’m not waiting to hit those targets to take the schools back. What I want to see is that we are on a path. We’re on a trajectory. We’re improving at a rate that will help us get there.
Hernandez: Lots of things I want to cover with you. So let’s move over to something else. We just learned that no company submitted bids to rebuild the westbound side of the Washington Bridge, and it would appear as if this is a setback for potentially opening it up by the summer of 2026. Where do we go from here?
Smiley: So as I understand, and again, this is a state procurement. This is not a city procurement. As I understand it; a couple of things. One, the demolition contract has been awarded. And so the failure to have bidders in this first round doesn’t necessarily mean a delay because obviously the demolition has to happen first anyway. And that contract has been awarded. Two, there were interested bidders, but the timeline was too aggressive that these private companies felt like they couldn’t hit it. And so perhaps the state is going to put out a new request for proposals with updated, more realistic timelines, which sadly means delay. And then three, as someone who used to work for the state and used to oversee the department of purchasing, we need to do a better job just as a state in trying to get a more regional and even national firms to come bid on work. It’s a relatively small pool here, and we need to have more interest from a broader group of professionals from around the country to want to do business in Rhode Island. Taxpayers benefit when that happens. In this case, commuters will benefit when that happens, and so they need to perhaps cast a wider net. Nevertheless, I actually do believe, despite all of the frustration and challenges, very legitimate pain that this has caused on both families and businesses, the director of the Department of Transportation and the governor are highly motivated to get this done as fast as possible. I don’t doubt their motivation in that respect.
Hernandez: All right, I want to move over to housing issues. Since the city’s breakup of the two large homeless encampments, outreach workers, as you know, say that unhoused people are still living outside, often in very secluded areas. And it’s very concerning in the wake of, of the recent uptick in overdoses among the homeless. How do you respond to the concerns by outreach workers that breaking of those encampments might be putting some of these people at greater risk? What do we do here?
Smiley: So, first of all, it’s a terrible situation to have residents and neighbors living on the streets and in encampments. Hopefully, we can all agree that that’s not what we should aspire for any of our neighbors. Sadly, many of these encampments are terribly unsafe. And in my year and a half in office, we’ve had fires, we’ve had acts of violence, we’ve had overdoses in these encampments. As you point out, many times they’re in secluded places. EMS and fire professionals can’t reach those locations and it is not easy for us to provide emergency services. And so we work very hard through social service providers to offer shelter beds when they’re available to try to meet the other needs that some of these folks are living with. But ultimately if an encampment becomes unsafe, we do clear it and it is not a decision we take lightly. Ultimately it weighs heavily on me, but I also know that permanent or long term encampments are not the solution either.
Hernandez: And of course we need more housing. I’m just wondering, where are we right now? For example, in projects like the Superman building, some of it’s supposed to be affordable housing. Where is this?
Smiley: So we absolutely need more housing and the city of Providence is providing more housing. The residents who are burdened by rent or unable to buy their first home and people who don’t have homes at all; the root cause of all of this is a lack of housing supply. And so I’ve been broadly supportive and taken real actions to increase the supply of housing in our community, both permanently subsidized, low-income affordable housing and market rate housing. Last year alone in the city of Providence, there were 800 new apartments put online. This year to date in the first six months of the year, we’ve got 600 apartments under construction. So that’s 1,400 apartments in the last year and a half in Providence alone. When I took office, we did a line-by-line review of the ARPA budget, which is the federal funds we received during the pandemic under the previous administration and we cut unnecessary programs. We found every dollar we could find and we put every one of those dollars into the city’s affordable housing trust fund, which is being used to subsidize projects around the city. So big projects like the Superman building and other areas are really difficult right now because of the cost of construction and interest rates. But there are smaller scale developments happening throughout our city – 1,400 new apartments; you don’t see a crane in the sky, but it’s happening. Those are real numbers that we can show with building permits and certificates of occupancy and new rental units on the market.
Hernandez: Earlier this year, the city conducted the Community Satisfaction Survey. It asked Providence residents and businesses to describe how they feel about city services. In the past, housing, education have been identified as pressing concerns. What did you learn from this recent one?
Smiley: Last year, one of the top concerns was actually public safety. That was not top of the list this year, which suggests to me that people in the city feel safer. We know that housing remains a top priority, and the schools. And so it helps us set budget priorities, and, as I talked earlier about my budget priorities for the year, it’s very much informed by this survey. We want to make sure that we’re investing our residents tax dollars in the things they care most about.
Hernandez: I’m going to let you out on this one. I have to ask because the thing that everybody’s talking about right now is the recent presidential debate. As a Democrat, I’m just wondering your thoughts. Do you think the party right now is better served with a different candidate than President Biden going into November?
Smiley: President Biden has a track record he should be proud of. His track record has been good for the city of Providence. We’re replacing lead pipes, we’re fixing our roads and bridges, all with funding from the Biden administration. That would not have happened with another president. Of course, there’s a concern that his debate was not what any of us would have hoped, his debate performance. But I remain an enthusiastic fan and supporter of President Biden and ran as a Biden delegate and remain a pledged Biden delegate until, and only if, President Biden says he’s not going to run again.
Hernandez: I’ve been speaking with Providence Mayor, Brett Smiley. Mayor, thank you so much for the time. It’s always a pleasure.
Smiley: Thank you.
