Rhode Island Politics
Somehow, I thought the state would go a bit more slowly when it came to using its new “tool” for taking over governance of Rhode Island municipalities: Again raising the sense of urgency and severity, Governor Chafee appointed a financial commission to oversee East Providence on Tuesday. The decision makes the city the state’s first…
Looks like a load of political garbage has arrived at the Central Landfill. Co-Chair of the [General Assembly Study] commission tasked with investigating the odor emanating from the Johnston landfill, Stephen Ucci, called for the resignation of Executive Director of RI Resource Recovery Michael OConnell. Ucci made the announcement at a public hearing held at…
An interesting tactical question regarding the current state of Rhode Island’s Congressional redistricting process is why “Plan F” instead of “Plan C”. At the municipal scale of resolution, Plan C and Plan F (unveiled last night by the Rhode Island Redistricting Commission) are based on the same concept: Move Burrillville from CD1 to CD2 and…
Question: does the money spent on redistricting get counted as campaign contributions for Rep. David Cicilline? The ProJo reports that Rep. Jim Langevin (among others) isn’t happy about this: Rep. Jim Langevin is accusing fellow Democrat David Cicilline of trying to use congressional redistricting to aid his re-election. A redistricting plan unveiled Monday night would…
Common Cause has posted three proposed maps of potential new Congressional Districts released by the Rhode Island Redistricting Commission. With that caveat that it is difficult to tell whether the new district lines and certain city/town lines are exactly contiguous on certain portions of the maps…There is a proposal to move most-or-all of Providence into…
Various redistricting proposals for General Assembly seats are available for examination at the Rhode Island Resdistricting Project website. In case anyone was worried, the “oversight” where state Rep. Joseph Trillo was drawn out of his district appears to have been corrected (h/t Rhode Island Common Cause, who has been attending & tweeting all of the…
First, they didn’t have Christmas Trees in 1663 Rhode Island, so the answer to the post title is “No.” I’m also pretty sure that, by now, as he looks down upon us, Roger Williams has gotten used to people calling upon his founding authority to help make the case against religion in the colony he…
To steal a line from Mark McGwire, the baseball slugger who was called before Congress to talk about steroids in baseball but would only answer questions with “I’m not here to talk about the past. I’m here to make a positive impact”. David Cicilline is looking to take the same tack and tell people to…
Teasing an hour-long pension special, Ian Donnis breaks this interesting tidbit: A poll of 400 likely voters, commissioned by the National Education Association Rhode Island, shows Republican John Robitaille narrowly beating Governor Lincoln Chafee and state Treasurer Gina Raimondo in a hypothetical matchup for the governor’s office. Walsh says the poll conducted by Abacus Associates…
In his post, Justin correctly points out that First, Rhode Island’s pension reform is simply not sufficient to solve the problem Many observers have marvelled at the scope of the reforms to the state pension system that just passed. The problem, the context that they miss is that the extent of the reforms are eclipsed…