It almost slipped through as a cute story about a Rhode Island legislator speaking truth to bureaucracy about his unfriendly-to-business experience with the state Dept. of Environmental Management, but readers should pause for a moment on Katherine Gregg’s report about Warwick Senator William Walaska’s interaction with DEM leader Janet Coit.

As a business owner, Walaska had a bad experience, being treated unfairly by the agency, and there are two parts to the story that are so Rhode Island you want to cry.  Here’s the first:

The initial fine levied in April 2011: $49,988. 

With a lawyer in Senate Judiciary Chairman Michael McCaffrey’s law firm representing the company, the fine was subsequently reduced to $21,250 plus interest.

Clearly, when being a senator isn’t enough to get one out of a fine, bringing in a more-powerful senator as representation is always to be advised.

The Rhode Island quality of the story only gets deeper when one heads over to RIOpenGov and notices that Walaska’s company, WAL, Inc., has received thousands of dollars from state government — a total of $12,962 in 2010, 2013, and 2014, most of it from the Department of Corrections.

As readers may recall from the Current’s review of Sen. William Conley’s state contracts, as well as other state payments to members of the General Assembly (including Sen. McCaffrey, as it happens), it is at least the spirit of the state’s Code of Ethics that elected officials and their companies shouldn’t be receiving money from the state.

The as-yet-unwritten third part of Walaska’s Rhode Island story will come when the Ethics Commission either doesn’t bother to investigate or does so and reasons its way to a loophole for the politician.