| Dear Neighbors:
I hope you are enjoying this year’s surprisingly successful New England Patriots’ season. In this letter, I discuss last week’s oversight hearing concerning the abrupt closure of the Washington Bridge.
A. The Impetus For The Hearing
The hearing evoked the tedium, frustration and exasperation that thousands of Rhode Island motorists encounter every weekday morning on Route 195 heading into Providence. The General Assembly leadership convened the hearing after reviewing a leaked draft forensic audit report an outside consultant prepared for the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) that analyzed the causes of the failure of the Washington Bridge. RIDOT, which received the report on April 5, 2024, had suppressed its public release, asserting that doing so would compromise its recently filed lawsuit to recoup costs from consultants and contractors.
B. RIDOT’s Definition Of Its Responsibility
Under the able questioning of attorney Zachary Cunha, the hearing clarified RIDOT’s view of its role as “project manager” of the State’s Rhode Works bridge building program and its responsibility for the management failures of the Washington Bridge. More specifically, RIDOT’s Director asserted that the Department had no internal capacity or responsibility to evaluate the work performed by its inspectors, contractors and consultants; instead, it outsourced that role and responsibility to additional inspectors, contractors and consultants in an endless series which cost the Department “hundreds of millions of dollars every year” in fees. As framed by Attorney Cunha, the agency charged with implementing this critical State program viewed its responsibility as consisting of nothing more than “signing contracts and spending money.”
C. RIDOT’s Transparency And Candor
1.The Previous Catch-22
While Attorney Cunha handled the bulk of the hearing, the Committee allowed individual members to inquire briefly about related topics. I focused on RIDOT’s lack of transparency. In my September 2, 2024 letter, I noted that, at a February 12, 2024 hearing, RIDOT’s Director created a “Catch-22” situation by deflecting questions about the Bridge’s failure by promising to provide, at a later date, a forensic audit report with answers to those questions. On April 5, the Governor announced he would not release the report because the State had engaged legal counsel to sue the contractors.
2. The New Catch-44
In the past week, we learned that there was another “Catch-22” embedded within the previous one I had identified. On February 19, 2024, one week after that first oversight hearing and seven weeks before the lawsuit was announced in April, RIDOT received a metallurgical Report which answered the crucial questions of how and when the Bridge’s tie down rods broke. On March 26, 2024, RIDOT sent the Oversight Committee a set of responses and documents that appeared to address all of the questions raised at the February 12, 2024 hearing. The set did not include, however, the February 19 Report RIDOT had obtained or the information it revealed, but that we had no way of knowing existed. In other words, the “before” and “after” chronologies matched up this way: |
