Having to Know Your Precinct to Clean Up Your Town

October 26, 2014/by Justin Katz

While putting together a very simple page for Clean Up Tiverton and a post on Tiverton Fact Check to let people in town know where to vote a week from Tuesday, it occurred to me that it seems like I rarely vote in the same place twice in a row. I pay more than the average attention to these things, and twice in the past few years, I’ve found myself driving from one polling place to another.

It’s not just rearrangement of the precinct map, although that’s played a role, as has a move on my part, but also the different arrangements for budget votes, primaries, and general elections. Making things more peculiar, the locations for four of the seven precincts are right next to each other, sometimes requiring a person from a particular district to drive right past the closest location in order to get to the one at which he or she has to vote.

Does this happen elsewhere, or is there some kind of peculiarity in my town?

Nation-Leading Teacher Pay… and the Constitutional Convention

October 24, 2014/by Justin Katz

With Rhode Island leading the nation in government-school teacher pay, it isn’t surprising that the union would court gun-rights advocates to kill a constitutional convention.

Oversized Signs

October 24, 2014/by Patrick Laverty

Why is one mayoral candidate allowed to flout city ordinances with oversized campaign signs. It’s not the biggest problem facing Providence, but it is indicative of his lack of interest in following laws.

Latest on the Central Coventry Fire District Includes Threat by Governor’s Lawyers to Personally Sue Fire Board For Standing Up For Democracy

October 23, 2014/by Monique Chartier

At the height of election fever, let’s not lose track of the latest developments in the disturbing situation involving the Central Coventry Fire District.

The following report, on “Central Coventry Citizens Taskforce for Fire Protection” letterhead and inclusive of two contact names and phone numbers, was sent out via e-mail this afternoon. It appears that at the Monday meeting and in other venues, Governor Chafee has had no compunction in carrying out the almost certainly unconstitutional order of the General Assembly to the taxpayers of the Central Coventry Fire District: – an order that could well come to every fire district in the state: No voting; just shut up and pay.

Things Go Sour in the Shire

October 21, 2014/by Justin Katz

At the end of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits return from their battle with ultimate evil to find it necessary to vanquish some vestiges in their country home, the Shire. I’m hoping this election season ends up to be something like that.

Depending on your city or town, the 2012 election may have left you under three layers of bad government. The Obama Administration has proven to be more ideological, partisan, and (worst) incompetent than even most of us early skeptics feared. The fruits of Rhode Island government under the General Assembly and Lincoln Chafee (who is still governor, I believe, although it doesn’t seem like it) are impossible to ignore.

And in Tiverton, we’ve had scandal after scandal, failure to oversee employees competently, and a regular practice of back-room decisions and subversion of government processes for political reasons.

Video of a hostile, uncomfortable Town Council meeting, last week, caps off the experience of the last two years. Among the many scandals has been the council’s determination to appoint a specific person to the role of full-time town planner, even though budgets are tight, the voters did not approve enough money for the planning office for a full-time position, the anointed person lacks the credentials, and the Personnel Board did not include her among the finalists. In the course of this battle, two members of the Personnel Board left, and three people have volunteered to fill the slots, one of them the wife of Town Council President Edward Roderick.

Another of the three volunteers is resident Donna Cook (also running for Budget Committee). The day that she was scheduled to interview for the position, Council Member Jay Lambert, who has been on the council with Roderick for quite a while, called Cook on the phone and suggested that she should consider some other volunteer position in town.

Each party to that conversation tells it a little differently. Cook says Lambert suggested that she withdraw her application to the Personnel Board, leaving a clear, uncontroversial path for the president’s wife. Calling her “a liar” (but choosing his other words with a lawyer’s skill), Lambert presents it more as a friendly suggestion that she help the council fill the many vacancies.

I believe Mrs. Cook. You can watch the seven-minute video yourself, but it’s apparent to me that Roderick — who tried to have her physically removed from the podium almost the moment she began speaking — had prior knowledge of the call and that the majority of the council at least had some sense of what was going on.

Sadly, I imagine these scenes are playing out across Rhode Island and the United States after the last election. We might have to reverse Tolkien’s tale and clean things up from the Shire in.

The Message that’s Opened the Door for Cianci

October 17, 2014/by Carroll Andrew Morse

Boston Globe deputy editorial page editor and Rhode Island native Dante Ramos somewhat misses the mark, in his basic assessment of the Providence Mayoral race…

In Cianci’s Providence, as in James Michael Curley-era Boston or Edwin Edwards-era Louisiana, there’s a sharp divide between good-government reformers and a, well, more instinctive style of politics.

“Instinctive” is an appropriate euphemism for describing Cianci’s brand of politics.

However, “good-government reformers” cannot be used to describe an opposition that’s centered on political players who believe that corruption and mismanagement from a Mayor aren’t issues, as long as they are kept at levels that David Cicilline or Lisa Baldelli-Hunt would tolerate.

Democratic Elections Without Roots

October 13, 2014/by Justin Katz

Campaign finance filings may provide a clue showing that different candidates (often from different parties) operate in ways that might reflect where they’ve been and what they’ll do.

Beware the Simple Controversy

October 9, 2014/by Justin Katz

Folks who pay a whole lot of attention to politics and policy (myself included) can be astonished at things that don’t take off as controversies. Manipulated studies about casino gambling. Pension reforms that give the legislature’s authority away to a union-heavy board. Development of plans that seek to undermine property rights and individual liberty (while using supposed outreach meetings to find local activists). An unnecessary government start-up healthcare broker intended as a gateway to increasing the people addicted to government programs.

None of that registers, mostly because it’s complex, and there’s too much space between the walls for politicians and insiders to fill with smoke.

Tom Ward highlights the dynamic on a smaller scale, in Woonsocket, with a view from the perspective of a controversy that actually did catch on — Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt’s political jobs program:

Why was this clumsy move such a bombshell? Because it’s so easy to understand, that’s why. While it may be difficult to decipher funding kindergarten and water treatment plants, everyone understands that their own kids got the short end of the stick. In fact, there are unemployed adults who would have been grateful for the work! They know where they stand with her now, and it’s on the outside, looking in.

What is even more striking is the mayor’s ethical blind spot and lack of any contrition.

Too often, we wait until hubris brings on the obvious corruption. One can’t help but wonder what it looks like from the politicians’ perspective. Hey, they got away with all of these huge power grabs and political maneuvers. A few thousand bucks of straight-up corruption shouldn’t matter if all that didn’t.

Pensions Are Debt

October 7, 2014/by Justin Katz

Rhode Islanders should keep an eye on this story, out of California:

Striking at the sanctity of public pensions in California, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that U.S. bankruptcy law allows the city of Stockton to treat pension fund obligations like other debts, meaning the city could trim benefits.

State laws vary. Judges vary. Circumstances vary. But this is important because it goes to a broadly applicable principle. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein is the judge in the case:

The judge spent much of the morning questioning whether CalPERS and its members enjoy a protected status under federal and state laws.

“One can’t mess with CalPERS, that’s the vernacular way of putting it,” the judge said at one point, summarizing the view of CalPERS and Stockton officials.

“Is CalPERS a state unto itself?” Klein mused later.

The labor unions and their backers want everyone to believe otherwise, but the fact that the debt is owed to people who exchanged their work for promises rather than people who exchanged their money for promises doesn’t mean the deal is signed in magic ink that cannot be edited.

The Whole Sordid Rhode Island Way in East Greenwich

October 6, 2014/by Justin Katz

Another example of Rhode Island government as a political jobs program has arisen in the East Greenwich school department, and it raises deeper questions than does the Woonsocket mayor’s summer street cleaning crew.

The Code of Ethics Applies to Woonsocket

October 2, 2014/by Justin Katz

Following up on Jim Hummel’s discovery of Woonsocket Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt’s friends-and-family jobs program, the mayor’s actions look like they violate at least three provisions of the state Code of Ethics. The first is directly in the relevant statute of the Rhode Island General Laws, specifically section 36-14-5(d):

No person subject to this Code of Ethics shall use in any way his or her public office or confidential information received through his or her holding any public office to obtain financial gain, other than that provided by law, for him or herself or any person within his or her family, any business associate, or any business by which the person is employed or which the person represents.

Broadly, the argument can be made that the mayor revived a jobs program to benefit her son. The argument can also be made that the existence of the program was essentially privileged information that the mayor shared only with her son’s baseball team.

Section (h) of the same statute drives the point home, but would specifically be a violation by the mayor’s son:

No person subject to this Code of Ethics and or any person within his or her family or business associate of the person or any business entity in which the person or any person within his or her family or business associate of the person has a ten percent (10%) or greater equity interest or five thousand dollars ($5,000) or greater cash value interest, shall enter into any contract with any state or municipal agency unless the contract has been awarded through an open and public process, including prior public notice and subsequent public disclosure of all proposals considered and contracts awarded; provided, however, that contracts for professional services which have been customarily awarded without competitive bidding shall not be subject to competitive bidding if awarded through a process of public notice and disclosure of financial details.

That isn’t to say that the Lisa Baldelli-Hunt can get away with hiring her son. Under the regulatory provisions of the code, regulation 36-14-5004(b)(2)(A) addresses this circumstance directly:

No person subject to the Code of Ethics shall participate in the supervision, evaluation, appointment, classification, promotion, transfer or discipline of any person within his or her family or a household member, in the state or municipal agency in which the official or employee is serving or over which he or she exercises fiscal or jurisdictional control, except in accordance with particular instructions and advice received from the Ethics Commission in a written advisory opinion.

The Rhode Island Political Jobs Program

October 2, 2014/by Justin Katz

Jim Hummel’s got a good report out, today, that we can file in the category of People Who Have Political Connections and Then Get Government Jobs. In this case the connection is former State Representative and current Mayor of Woonsocket Lisa Baldelli-Hunt, and the beneficiaries are her son (and his baseball team) and a campaign contributor’s wife:

It’s part of Rhode Island’s illness that the politicians and too many of the people who elect them see no problem whatsoever. Hummel asks the mayor how the city went about alerting young adults about the opportunity for a jobs program. The response? Oh, I happened to be talking to a group of athletes who just happened to be my son’s baseball team. Without a transcript of the conversation, it’s impossible to know, but that explanation is potentially no different from the mayor’s chatting with some parents at a baseball practice and then declaring, Don’t worry. I can take care of you all. How’d you like $10 an hour for cleaning up city streets?

Perhaps Rhode Islanders can take some small comfort in the politicians’ promise that they only give jobs to their political friends and family if they’re qualified for them. Of course, since everybody’s qualified to do something, making the match need only be a matter of creating the jobs that fit.

We need to fix this, and a navel-gazing Ethics Commission isn’t up to the job, mostly giving everything up to an illegal line the seal of “ethical.” But first, we need to somehow make Rhode Islanders aware that, no, things aren’t supposed to work this way.

A Recurring Theme: Uniting People Through Division

September 25, 2014/by Justin Katz

Providence Mayoral candidate Jorge Elorza’s “One Providence” rhetoric strikes a disturbing note against his anti-Cianci rhetoric.

About that “Outside Special Interest” Thing

September 24, 2014/by Justin Katz

I’ve got a new post on Tiverton Fact Check that looks at the first offering of the FakeCheck site that the local political opposition has created to spread fog in the public debate in Tiverton. Most of the post is a lesson in how to judge the credibility that a Web site deserves, but this point may be of broader political interest:

The idea that distant political forces are funding a targeted campaign in Tiverton through me is pure paranoid delusion. (Although the Tiverton 1st crowd may be thinking of the way that national labor unions and progressive groups leverage their members in our town and its government to manipulate the political system. In that case, they may just assume that those of us on the other side would naturally do the same thing.)

Government School Enrollment Over Time

September 22, 2014/by Justin Katz

Somebody asked me, recently, whether there’s any way to know how many students leave Tiverton High School for private schools. It’s an interesting question, and the short answer is “yes,” but in a sense, “no.”

The RI Dept. of Education (RIDE) keeps records of the students from each district who attend private schools, including the schools that they attend. The problem is that the way the state keeps the numbers makes it time consuming to pare them down to a usable form. Even when that work is done, though, I don’t think such records go back for a very long time. Since what we really need are cohorts (tracing grade levels from year to year), and because factors like the economy can affect the data, all of the work cleaning data might produce useless results if they only cover the last few years.

Nonetheless, I thought the question interesting enough to kick off a new feature on Tiverton Fact Check, for which readers can email us questions about Tiverton (about statistics, about process, about the law, or about whatever) and we’ll do our best to answer them. In this case, I looked to RIDE’s October enrollment data, which goes back to the 1998-1999 school year.

Specifically, I compared Tiverton to North Smithfield (because similar) and Barrington (because dissimilar in a way that Tiverton should work to change), and found:

To answer the reader’s question as directly as this data allows, for the twelve years that we can compare the number of students starting eighth grade in Tiverton with the number starting twelfth grade, the average number of students lost is 30. That’s an average of a 17% drop in high school seniors from the start of eighth grade.

For comparison, North Smithfield lost an average of 20 students, or 13%, while Barrington actually gained an average of 8 students, or 3%.

Coalition Radio Introduces Three Fiscal Topics into the 2014 Campaign

September 22, 2014/by Carroll Andrew Morse

Issue 1: Do any candidates for Rhode Island Governor or Rhode Island General Assembly support modifying or repealing Governor Chafee’s Wall-Street-first law regarding municipal priorities?

Issue 2: Will any of the candidates for Governor of Rhode Island have their fiscal staffs look immediately into the possibility of a Providence receivership. Will they tell us if they do?

Issue 3: Buddy Cianci, according to some research done by Michael Riley, once advocated for pension obligation bonds to help finance Providence’s pension system. Might he do so again?

UPDATED: Assessing Credibility and Intention in Political Fights

September 19, 2014/by Justin Katz

Over the course of my education, teachers and professors reinforced multiple times the need to assess the credibility of sources of information. There are external cues — like the people and organizations that testify to the source’s credibility — and there are internal cues. Is the author constructing his or her argument so as to mislead or to inform? For example, are the sources cited and comprehensive, thereby showing an interest in the author in having readers check his or her claims?

The gang of anonymous activists in Tiverton who serve as the plants in the crowd for those who support the status quo and oppose my friends and I locally illustrate the point very well, having set up yet another anonymous Web site with the same URL as my group’s TivertonFactCheck.org, except with dot-com. Call it “Tiverton FakeCheck.”

Over time, we will undergo the tedious work of reviewing their factual claims, which range from debatable to misleading to plainly wrong. In the meantime, I’ve put up a post reviewing some of the cues that show the different intentions of the two sites:

The bottom line is that FakeCheck is not how people act when they’re trying to clarify the public debate. It’s how they act when they want to create fog and get people to vote based on hatred, fear, and some of our other more-base emotions. …

For now just keep an eye on how they argue. It’s the same old Tiverton 1st tactic of insult and manipulation for political benefit. Judge both sides for how we act, and use every resource available to you to make up your own mind about what the truth is.

The Incentive to Rend Communities

September 16, 2014/by Justin Katz

Data from Tiverton Fact Check shows the high school principal and his teacher wife making two-and-a-half times the town’s median household income, which is a lot of incentive to attack people who complain that a few more hundred dollars in taxes actually has to come from somewhere.

Reading the Missing Tea Leaves in Providence Mayoral Primary

September 10, 2014/by Justin Katz

This may mean nothing, but I noticed something in the primary election results in Providence that readers of tea leaves might want to take into account.

Jorge Elorza won the Democrat primary in the race for mayor of Providence, and a major talking point for both his supporters and those of his most substantial opposition, Michael Solomon, was an ability to beat Buddy Cianci, running as an independent. With one precinct yet to report, as of this morning, Elorza won with 10,562 votes, to Solomon’s 9,190. In total, 21,426 Providence residents cast votes in the Democrat primary for mayor.

However, scrolling up to the Democrat gubernatorial results we find, first, that General Treasurer Gina Raimondo beat Providence Mayor Angel Taveras in his own city, and second, that there were a total of 22,315 votes cast. That’s 889 more than were cast in the mayor’s race. (Another 995 Providence residents voted in the Republican gubernatorial primary.)

So what?, you might say. The governor’s race is higher profile and probably attracts more interest, even within the city.

The thing is, that hasn’t held true in the recent past. In 2010, the mayoral candidates attracted 24,206 Democrat votes (11,897 going to Taveras), while Frank Caprio attracted 16,553 unopposed for governor. If we look to the congressional races, a total of seven candidates took in 21,806 votes.

In 2006, 15,225 Democrats voted for mayor (not counting mail ballots), with David Cicilline taking 11,293 of those, versus Chris Young. Charles Fogarty took 12,273 unopposed for governor. The three congressional candidates (spanning two races, remember) took 13,831.

In 2002, the four Democrat mayoral candidates took 26,007 votes (Cicilline receiving 13,826 of those). By contrast, the three gubernatorial candidates took 24,972 (Democrat, non-mail) votes.

It’s a messy comparison, because every election has different dynamics, but as a general rule, more people have tended to vote in the Democrat primary for mayor than for governor. Why didn’t that happen this year? And (while we’re asking open-ended questions), what might it mean for all of those assumptions about ethnic votes that Elorza didn’t quite top Taveras’s mayoral total, and that Taveras failed to win his own city in the governor’s race? (Two notes on the Elorza point: I’m not 100% the 2010 data excludes mail ballots, while the 2014 data does; there’s still a precinct missing from this year’s results.)

What, too, will be the influence of Republican Dan Harrop on the race?

Again, I don’t know enough about Providence to answer these questions, but I thought them worth asking.

Sometimes Transparency Still Requires Some Scraping

September 8, 2014/by Justin Katz

Over on TivertonFactCheck.org, I’ve put up a post giving examples of how the real nuggets in transparency data sometimes require another round of investigation. Partly because of how we got the data and partly because the general public can only handle so much detail before a tool is overwhelming, we lumped all of the “other pay” together.

That’s enough to discover that one local employee was paid more than twice as much in “other pay” than “regular pay” the year he resigned under a cloud of controversy. But more depth reveals the real affront to local taxpayers:

… $28,809 of the money Maintenance Foreman Robert Martin took home in “other pay” during his final year was for unused sick and vacation time. That’s interesting — arguably outrageous — considering that Martin was forced into retirement after Channel 10 filmed him using town time and resources while working on his own projects as a landlord. …

… Mr. Martin could have used the paid time off that employees receive as a benefit in order to take care of things on his own properties. The fact that he didn’t (and got away with it) means that the people of Tiverton essentially wound up paying him double time for every hour he spent on other projects.

The second example might apply to any city and town in Rhode Island. The payroll application is enough to discover that overtime has been on a rapid upswing for Tiverton firefighters, year to year. It takes further inquiry to discover that the department had a corresponding upswing in “injured on duty” pay:

In fiscal year 2012, the town spent $10,310 on injured-on-duty pay. In fiscal year 2013, that number jumped 296%, to $40,777. In fiscal year 2014, the increase wasn’t that huge, but still very large: up 42%, to $58,051.

Not surprisingly, overtime pay jumped up, as well. (Naturally, if somebody cannot work temporarily because he’s injured, his coworkers fill in the gaps.) In 2012, firefighters were paid $209,418 in overtime. The next year, that number was up 66%, to $347,912 and then again, the next year, by 18%, to $410,792.

For a journalist or local analyst, the next step would be to investigate the explanations behind the data. For an activist (or just a voter) the next step would be to demand that government officials do the legwork of explaining it to them.

Insider vs. Outsider in Warwick’s GOP Mayoral Primary

September 6, 2014/by Marc Comtois

While both Rhode Island gubernatorial primaries have been awash in revelations of party-switching and -line crossing, Warwick’s Republican Mayoral primary, pitting long-time Republican Mayor Scott Avedisian against political new-comer Stacia Petri, could also see widespread party-line crossing at the polls.

10 News Conference Wingmen, Episode 42 (Providence Mayoral Primary and Church/State)

September 5, 2014/by Justin Katz

Justin and Bob Plain argue over the Democrat primary for Providence mayor and its implications for the separation of church and state.

Using Transparency Tools

September 5, 2014/by Justin Katz

Part of the mission for the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s joint online transparency app with the Tiverton Taxpayers Association — beyond the first-order goal of increased transparency — is to help people to learn how to use the tools that are already available to them.

To that end, in my role as the editor of TivertonFactCheck.org (on my volunteer time with the Association) I’ll be offering brief tips and tutorials. My first one is on the use of payroll data in conjunction with the state campaign finance search:

Selecting Tiverton 1st and then viewing its “Amendment of Organization” shows who was in charge of the group at the time it was filed and also which candidates the group worked to elect. Notably most of the people on the Tiverton 1st list are on the Town Council, and all three of the endorsed school committee candidates won, which is a majority on that committee. …

In this case, two of the three people listed as “Co-coordinator/chair” show up as employees of the school department. Gloria Crist was already receiving a little over $1,813 per year as a drama coach. More significantly, soon after her endorsed candidates won a majority of the school committee, Linda Larsen was appointed by the school department as the School to Career Coordinator, which paid her $18,988 in fiscal year 2014.

The lessons aren’t all local, of course. Government is interconnected and incestuous from one tier to the next, so it makes sense that political opportunism would cross the breach, too. I also look at the Tiverton Political Action Committee for Education, which is just the local PAC for the teachers’ union:

In fiscal year 2012, Mr. Marx was the second-highest-paid teacher in Tiverton, making $91,394. That might help explain why he became the treasurer of a group that works to elect specific candidates to government offices. The new treasurer was Amy Mullen. Mullen isn’t making Marx money (yet), but $73,521 in fiscal year 2014 is quite a bit of incentive.

Just imagine if every town’s financial information were easily accessible to everybody in the state and a significant number of people understood how to use it to connect dots!

Transparency Site Brings Unprecedented Access to Tiverton

September 4, 2014/by Justin Katz

A new Web site and open-government application in Tiverton kick off the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s project to provide Rhode Islanders with a nation-leading level of transparency in local government.

Running Woonsocket from the State House

September 1, 2014/by Justin Katz

If there were an award for a Rhode Island political item beyond what anybody would make up, the first item in today’s Providence Journal Political Scene might take it.

Former state representative (and Democrat) Lisa Baldelli-Hunt, now mayor of Woonsocket, just fired former state representative (and Democrat) Jon Brien, who had been serving as the city’s part-time prosecuting attorney. Delivering the news to Brien was current state representative (and Democrat) Michael Marcello, who is the city’s solicitor. Filling the prosecutor job on an interim basis will be Thomas DeSimone, brother of current representative (and Democrat majority leader) John DeSimone.

Here’s the kicker. Asked how she settled on Mr. DeSimone as her guy, Baldelli-Hunt:

… she said she called the House speaker’s office and asked for a recommendation when she found herself on a Friday with no one to go to court for the city the following Monday, Aug. 18.

Ultimately, all that can really be said about this farce is that the people of Rhode Island voted for it.

Judicial Objectivity When Politics Is a Job

August 14, 2014/by Justin Katz

Honestly, I’m torn about this one, although it brings me back around to the same place as much political news:

A federal magistrate judge has granted the city’s bid to delay Providence Mayor Angel Taveras’ questioning under oath in a lawsuit involving changes to the retirement system until after the upcoming primary election for candidates for governor.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Lincoln D. Almond late Tuesday granted the city’s emergency motion for a protective order to postpone Taveras’ deposition in the city’s lawsuit against its former actuarial firm, Buck Consultants LLC, until after the Sept. 9 primary. Almond found, without further explanation, that the city had shown good cause to delay Taveras’ questioning and to limit it to three hours.

On its surface, this looks like further evidence supporting the common wisdom that, if you’ve got a lawsuit involving political insiders in Rhode Island, you’re best off getting it in a federal court. On the other hand, if the mayor weren’t the mayor, but something else, and was requesting a brief delay of judicial proceedings to the other side of a major work project on which his career hinged, that would seem reasonable in a case with no major urgency.

Of course, the mayor is the mayor, and it’s difficult not to conclude that he’s worried about the ways in which his testimony (and the opposition lawyers’ spin of it, amplified by other candidates for the office he’s seeking). In that regard, it’s a question of transparency. After all, his administration brought the lawsuit.

And if it’s a matter of the time preparation for the deposition will require, we shouldn’t accept the notion that government must stop operating because people in office are bucking for a promotion.

At the end of the analysis, put this one on the stack of arguments against fostering a government environment in which politics is a career. If public office were in fact — as politicians like to claim — a question of service, then the argument for delaying the deposition pretty much evaporates.

10 News Conference Wingmen, Episode 39 (A Providence Income Tax)

August 8, 2014/by Justin Katz

Justin and Bob Plain discuss the notion of a municipal income tax in Providence

Arthur Norwalk: No Stops for Voter Approval on Providence Streetcar

July 8, 2014/by Engaged Citizen

The proposed Providence Streetcar (a proposal that never seems to go away) is a case study in the problematic funding, planning, and daydreaming that characterizes government projects in Rhode Island.

10 News Conference Wingmen, Episode 35 (Cianci and the Providence Mayoral Campaign)

June 26, 2014/by Justin Katz

Andrew and Samuel Bell discuss the Cianci effect in the Providence mayoral campaign.

Open Thread: Buddy’s Back

June 25, 2014/by Patrick Laverty

Just an open thread for the commenters. Buddy’s back and there are about a dozen declared candidates for Governor, including one from the Moderate Party (not Ken Block) and one from the Compassion Party. Have at it.

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