195 Commission Head So Rhode Island

It's difficult to read the Providence Journal's profile of Colin Kane — whom Governor Chafee has appointed to head the powerful commission addressing the land freed up by the I-Way project — without feeling that strong sense that there are two Rhode Islands: His family's relationship with the Chafees goes back to 1976, when Kane's father was a principal of a Providence elementary school and his mother was PTA President at the Chafee's neighborhood public school. Senatorial candidate John Chafee encouraged Mrs. Kane to run for state representative, and she did, and she won.

Colin went into construction — on the development end — and was an early mover on a policy that essentially pushed some zoning decisions into the state's purview:

The partners jumped into the affordable-housing market before a slew of private developers flooded communities with similar proposals. The change in the law had suddenly made private developers eligible to bypass local zoning regulations –– as long as at least 20 percent of their proposals were affordable-housing units.

He's become known around the State House for advocating for causes that help developers, and his mother wants him to be governor. All of this is fine, as far as it goes, and reading between the lines of the article, I suspect Kane and Anchor Rising readers would agree on a number of issues. This land development panel, however, stinks of the state's usual habits. Consider:

Chafee said 70 people jockeyed for the unpaid spots on the Route 195 commission.

It would be naive in the extreme to think that public spiritedness provided more than a gloss of motivation. This is how Rhode Island sluices around power and influence. It's how the insider club rewards itself, sets its members apart, and constructs public policy to reward them.