Infrastructure
Take every pothole that you hit and bridge that you tremble to cross as a reminder of how misplaced the priorities of the state and federal governments have become: In the supplemental budget Governor Carcieri sent to the legislature, he proposed reducing the DOT budget by $74.3 million. The House Finance Committee recommended cutting slightly…
The Rhode Island Statewide Coalition has been making a concerted effort to peruse all of the legislation making its way through the General Assembly and recently unearthed this gem from Senator Charles Levesque (D., Bristol, Portsmouth), creating a Highway Maintenance and Public Transit Trust Fund, financed as follows: … There is imposed a surcharge of…
On his ironically titled blog, US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has announced … a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized. We are integrating the needs of bicyclists in federally-funded road…
And around and around not-my-town goes: Rep. John G. Edwards (D-Dist. 70, Tiverton, Portsmouth), whose district encompasses neighborhoods on both sides of the Sakonnet River Bridge, has introduced legislation that will prohibit tolls from being charged on the bridge. … Instead, Rep. Edwards proposes placing a toll on Interstate Hwy 95 (I-95) in Westerly and…
As a function of compiling a snapshot of the condition of the state so as to enlighten the House Senior Deputy Majority Leader, I went looking for an update on the highway situation. This analysis popped up, a state ranking by the Reason Foundation of highway conditions, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. They looked at state highway…
So Rhode Island — indeed, Tiverton — may be providing the first instance of the federal stimulus at work: It will surely be the first in Rhode Island and there’s a chance that a Main Road, Tiverton, rebuilding job could be the first federal stimulus job in the nation. “We’ve already had some inquiries from…
I’ll admit that I’m generally in agreement with benjones on transportation: In Rhode Island, we’ll never be able to retool our local enonomy to produce the vehicles people are driving today, but we could use our small size and largely non-existent manufacturing industry to our advantage. We can design a transportation supply chain from scratch…
Rhode Islanders are beginning to catch on, I think, to the game whereby the state government spends our tax dollars on labor costs, entitlements, and other non-essential or excessive line items and then returns to the taxpayers requesting the passage of bonds for infrastructural basics, like roads. As has come up on Anchor Rising, before,…
So I took a 14% reduction in my hourly pay rate this week. My other option was to quit and look for another job (without the benefit of a few months of unemployment insurance). Desperate times are here. Meanwhile, the Sakonnet Times did run Richard Joslin’s diatribe against the Tiverton taxpayers group with which I’m…
Hey, Rhode Islanders: That deferred tax increase known as “transportation bonds” (and claiming all those wonderful federal tax dollars) to which you just assented? Not enough: A special state panel yesterday discussed several ideas to raise money to fix the state’s roads and bridges, from tolls on Route 95 and the Sakonnet River bridge to…
