Add another anecdote to the story of Rhode Island’s decline:

A handful of residential developers and engineers turned out Tuesday at the first public session with officials responsible for selling 19 acres of former highway land now available for development in the capital city. …

“I thought there’d be more people,” said Wayne Zuckerman of Sterling Properties in Livingston, N.J., who said he is familiar with Rhode Island. “I came because I wanted to see who the developers were … . Nineteen acres in the city. You would think — I would have thought — the room would have been filled.”

None of the people in the room seemed very enthusiastic about starting up projects.  There are two telling details in the article.  First:

[Jan A. Brodie, the I-195 commission’s executive director,] spoke of the challenges to develop the land — including building costs as high as in New York and Boston but lower personal income and revenue that developers can generate here.

Second:

Carla DeStefano, executive director of Stop Wasting Abandoned Property in Providence, questioned Brodie about the commission’s selection process after she said the panel had decided not to use a numbered ranking system of proposals. That “sounds a bit clandestine,” DeStefano said.

The reasoning, Brodie said, was to leave the commission room to consider the worthiness of each project, without deciding ahead of time how much specific criteria should count on a scoring chart.

Rhode Island has allowed the people who run its government to drive up costs and squelch opportunities through taxes, regulations, and general here’s-how-you-have-to-live-your-lifedness.  It shows even in the selection process.  The agency that the state set up to offload the land wants private developers to spend time putting together proposals without a clear, fair description of how they’ll be judged, because the insiders want maximum flexibility to pick what they like.

This is another manifestation of Rhode Island’s having no rule of law.