From the Providence Business News.

The R.I. Commerce Corp. voted to approve more than $7 million in state relocation and redevelopment credits Monday to several corporations that plan to invest in or bring jobs to Rhode Island.

“These are three fine projects that are helping to advance our economy,” said R.I. Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor.

What is actually needed to advance the state’s economy, Mr. Secretary, is substantive improvements to the tax and regulatory climate to signal to out-of-state businesses (and the jobs they bring) that they can come here and prosper without having to go on BENDED KNEE to state officials for CORPORATE WELFARE.

What is even more disturbing is the revelation that taxpayers are, in fact, being forced to come out of pocket via these subsidies to compensate for the business climate and market conditions created by decades of costly, anti-business policies that the Raimondo is studiously choosing not to address.

The company has developed two other hotel properties in Rhode Island, including the Hampton Inn & Suites in downtown Providence. Like those, this project needs state assistance in bridging the financial gap created by market conditions. In Boston, he said, the company has properties built at similar cost that fetch $300-a-night for rooms. In Providence, similar rooms would be booked at $170 a night.

“But for this supplement, this project would not happen,” Karam said.

Remarkably, at a recent stop on her “listening tour”, Governor Raimondo actually touted the fact that she had increased such taxpayer-funded tax credit and give-away programs as though it were an achievement of her administration!

Rhode Island needs someone at the State House to be the adult here. Minimally, these taxpayer-funded subsidies need to be shut down while we wait for the governor to come to her senses about the real action needed on economic development … or, if that is not going to happen, until the next governor is installed which, hopefully for the sake of the taxpayer’s wallet, will be in two and a half rather than six and a half years.