Adventures in Town Government
John DePetro and Justin Katz explore the increasingly disconnected behavior of RI’s political elite.
John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss the costliness of Rhode Island government’s decisions.
John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss the mysterious ways in which Rhode Island government runs poorly.
John DePetro and Justin Katz examine the ways an excessive purview and incompetence leave Rhode Island politicians and bureaucrats vulnerable to scams and other bad decisions.
A very interesting article from Tamara Sacharczyk, of WJAR, puts a spotlight on an aspect of the people’s interaction with government that doesn’t get enough attention: lawsuits: Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent defending state agencies in Rhode Island in recent years, and the NBC 10 I-Team uncovered taxpayers are oftentimes picking up…
Buzzwords flow through political and ideological debates — at the state level even more so than the federal — to the extent that one has to wonder whether the people using them really subscribe to the ideas that they represent. Consider Democrat Representative from Cranston Brandon Potter, tweeting about the city’s decision to permit construction…
John and Justin run through many of the ways in which RI’s civic system is just not functioning.
For seven weeks, East Providence sent warnings instead of tickets to drivers who went more than 11 miles per hour over the speed limit in school zones. The system issued 69,528 such warnings, in fact, which works out to about 1,420 per day. The cameras have only been snagging drivers for actual $50 tickets for…
Have you ever seen a mainstream news report that treated scary environmental projections with even an iota of skepticism? Consider Tolly Taylor’s report for WPRI, which bears the headline, “Parts of Barrington will be underwater by 2035, sea-level data shows.” The first paragraph of the story gives the impression that the headline is a bit…
Steve Ahlquist has a strange explainer on Uprise RI about how Barrington got away with implementing a minimum wage policy for municipal workers: State law passed during the regime of House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello prevents municipalities from raising the minimum wage within their borders. But the state cannot prevent individual cities and towns from establishing their…
