Faced with five ballot questions in a high-turnout election, Rhode Islanders authorized more than $343 million in new bonds to fund a broad swath of public projects and declined the opportunity to host a constitutional convention to revise the state’s constitution.
Factoring in the interest the state will pay on the bonds over their 20-year lifetime, the full amount of spending voters authorized is expected to be about $550 million, according to the office of Secretary of State Gregg Amore.
The bonds will fund projects ranging from an indigenous culture museum to an expansion of port facilities for the offshore wind industry to a cybersecurity training center at Rhode Island College. The bond measures were broken up into four separate ballot questions, all of which passed.
Question 2 authorized $160.5 million in bonds for RIC’s cybersecurity center and a new biomedical research building at the University of Rhode Island.
Question 3 authorized $120 million in bonds to expand access to affordable housing.
Question 4 authorized $53 million in bonds for a wide range of projects grouped under the “green economy” title. Land conservation projects were lumped together with port infrastructure at Quonset Point, the restoration of Newport’s Cliff Walk, and pollution cleanup sites.
The last of the bond referenda, Question 5, authorized $10 million in bonds to help fund a trio of cultural facilities: a new location for the Tomaquag Museum on URI’s campus, a building for Newport’s Center for Arts, Dance and Education, and an expansion of the Trinity Repertory Company’s theater in downtown Providence. Question 5 also set aside another $4 million in grants to be allocated later by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.
But it was Question 1, concerning the possibility of authorizing Rhode Island’s first constitutional convention in almost 40 years, that drew the most organized and passionate opposition.
If the measure had passed, Rhode Island’s voters would have elected a slate of delegates to represent them at a convention where they would have the power to revise or even rewrite the state’s constitution. The state used to hold constitutional conventions with some regularity, but has not held a single one since 1986.
Vimala Phongsavanh, an organizer at Planned Parenthood, framed the question’s failure as a victory for “reproductive rights, worker rights, LGBTQ+ rights, minority rights, and more.”
“We are thrilled to see the voters rejected Question 1 just as they have the last four times it appeared on the ballot,” Phongsavanh said.
Patrick Crowley, the president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, also celebrated the question’s failure at a gathering for Democratic leaders at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence on election night.
“We are not going to let special interests and dark money dictate to Rhode Islanders what our laws and constitution says,” Crowley said.
