Ward 2 News

Dear Neighbors:

While meteorological Spring arrived last week, for many of us the hope of Springtime will begin on Thursday when the Red Sox open their season in Cincinnati. My letter this week marks a different passage of time, namely the delays in reviving the State’s truck tolling program, and how it reflects on budgeting practices.

A.   The conclusion of the lawsuit

By 2022, the State’s Rhode Works program generated around $40 million in annual revenue from truck tolls. At that time, a court suspended the program in response to a lawsuit filed by trucking companies. In December, 2024, the First Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision permitting the State to resume the tolling program, subject to removing certain pricing policies that favored in-state companies.

B.    The Governor’s 2025-26 truck toll budget

In January, 2025, the Governor’s budget included expected revenue of $10 million from the resumption of the truck tolling program for the upcoming fiscal year (ending June 30, 2026). At a recent hearing, the Department of Transportation informed the House Finance Committee (led by the questions of Representative Tanzi) that the truck toll revenues for this fiscal year (ending on June 30) will instead be $0. The Department stated that the toll gantries were at the end of their useful life, and in need of $19 million in structural repairs and an unknown additional amount of software repairs.

C.   The Governor’s 2026-27 truck toll budget

The Governor’s budget for next fiscal year includes expected truck toll revenues of $20 million. The RIDOT representatives said the budget will be updated to include an estimated cost to repair the gantries and related software, which should be ready in late March. The RIDOT representative also indicated that the Governor will submit a budget amendment to account for anticipated repair costs. RIDOT’s representatives projected that the repaired gantries will be able to come online in March, 2027. The Governor’s budget does not include any legislation or other information about how tolls will be adjusted, if at all, in light of the Court’s decision invalidating price caps that favored local trucking companies. The administration needs to set prices to predict revenues, but it may be avoiding this step because it might not be welcomed by trucking companies.

D.   Questions about the truck toll budget

When the Department of Transportation presents its truck toll budget to the Senate Finance Committee, I hope we can learn more about its history and reliability. Some possible questions include these:

1.     If the gantries reopen in March, 2027, why did it require more than two years to accomplish that?

2.     What contingencies may prevent the gantries from reopening in March, 2027?

3.     Was it realistic for the Governor to include a $10 million revenue item in the 2025-26 budget, given the delays we have seen since then?

4.     Is the current $20 million projection realistic, given that it would anticipate six months of revenue over the last three or four months of the fiscal year?

5.     How will the toll prices change in light of the Court’s decision?

E.    Lessons in budgeting

1.     The difference between hopes and expectations

The opening theme song of the hilarious Mel Brooks movie The Twelve Chairs imparts this message: “Hope for the best; expect the worst.” I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw the movie years ago, but its message had special significance for me in 2011 when, as a newly elected member of the Providence City Council, my first budget had to deal with the wreckage of the City’s Category 5 Fiscal Hurricane. I learned at that time that officials developing a budget (such as those who developed previous City budgets) have an incentive to be overly optimistic. In addition to the questions of whether RIDOT has acted with sufficient diligence and efficiency in resuming the truck tolling program, one can ask whether the administration’s budgeting practices depend too heavily on hopes rather than reasonable expectations.

2.     The hope-based digital advertising budget line

The truck tolling program’s unrealistic budget is but one example; another is a $10 million revenue item in the administration’s 2025-26 budget for a digital advertising tax. While the administration hoped this revenue could have been realized, it was not reasonable to expect this. During last year’s Senate Finance Committee hearing, we learned that only one other state (Maryland) has enacted such a tax, and that it still subject to litigation that may require Maryland to refund the amounts it has collected to date. Replacing hope with realistic expectations, the General Assembly removed this revenue source from the 2025-26 budget, and made necessary other changes to restore its balance.

3.     Lessons to learn

Rhode Island law requires the passage of a balanced budget each year, a requirement that begins with the budget the Governor submits to the General Assembly in January. All elected officials want to deliver benefits to constituents, but we are required in each budget to show how those benefits will be paid for. A hope-based budget can contain popular programs, but if budgeted revenues (or savings) are based on hopes rather than realistic expectations, it becomes the General Assembly’s responsibility to “take the blame” for the hard choices to bring a budget into realistic balance. Though I did not fully appreciate it at the time, the 2011-12 Providence City budget, which made difficult choices to rectify the City’s finances, offered a “best practice” in reality-based budgeting that provides useful lessons for our State.

Dear Neighbors:

When I attended synagogue yesterday, our recitation of the traditional prayer for peace was especially meaningful. We all hope that the war that began last week ends soon without further loss of life or harm to those in uniform or to innocent bystanders. In these times, Rhode Island state government matters appear less significant, but I will discuss with you in this week’s letter the quality of Rhode Island’s state roads and the need to conduct an efficiency study of our State’s road program.

In my December 14, 2025 Letter, I described my plan to file a bill in this year’s session to require an efficiency study of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT). As that letter notes, I based my decision at the time on these considerations: (1) the General Assembly previously required RIPTA to conduct an efficiency study, (2) RIDOT’s answers at an Oversight Committee hearing raised questions about its excessive use of contractors and (3) that a Reason Foundation study ranked the cost-efficiency of Rhode Island’s road program as 30^th in the country.

On Thursday, Ted Nesi of WPRI-TV12 published the “Road Woes” Report that provides additional reasons for an efficiency study based on two sources of data which demonstrate that Rhode Island’s state roads have been the worst in the country for many years, as measured by the percentage of roads in poor condition. I encourage you to take a look at his ” Report, which is brief and easy to read.

The first source of data comes from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), which records the percentage of State roads in poor condition. WPRI reviewed FHWA data from 2014, 2019 and 2024. In each year, Rhode Island had the highest percentage of roads in poor condition in the country. WPRI analyzed the categories of State roads, concluding that Rhode Island’s inventory of “urban principal arterials,” such as North Main Street in Providence and Route 2 in Warwick, are in especially bad condition, with almost 48% rated as “poor.”

The second source is a research paper by professors as Cal-Berkeley, Columbia and Yale Law School (you can read an excerpt by clicking here) that studies the role in-house engineers in state road resurfacing projects. Using their sample of data, the authors compared resurfacing cost per mile across the 50 states. As depicted in Figure D.7 on page 60, Rhode Island’s cost of $2 million per mile was at least twice as much as any other state. Using FHWA data, the authors compared road quality in Figure D.9 on page 62. Rhode Island had the poorest quality by a significant margin. I believe there is a need to study the efficiency of our $1 billion RIDOT annual budget when there are data indicating that our current program produces the nation’s poorest quality roads at what may be the nation’s highest cost.

The authors compared these results against each state’s level of in-house engineering capacity. The data supported the conclusion that states with greater in-house capacity produced better quality roads at lower cost. RIDOT’s status as a low-quality high-cost program is consistent with this conclusion, given the excessive reliance on consultants noted in Director Alviti’s testimony.

I filed the RIDOT efficiency audit bill in the Senate as Bill S-2124. Representative Stewart filed similar legislation as House Bill No. 7499. Her bill was heard by the House Committee on State Government and Elections this past Tuesday. The Senate bill has not yet been scheduled for a hearing.

The challenges brought by the snow storm often brought out the best in people, from the heroic efforts of those who worked around the clock to clear away our streets to the many friends and neighbors who went to great lengths to help those around them. Our return to almost normal in less than a week places us well ahead of the State’s experience during the Blizzard of 1978. With that said, I believe we have opportunities to learn from our experience.

1.     My experience getting home

Lauren and I traveled to San Francisco last weekend to visit our son. We originally booked a return flight for Monday, but changed it to Sunday after initial weather reports. That flight was canceled, and we could not find any others back to Boston until Wednesday. Instead, we took a flight Sunday to Washington, DC. On Monday, we rented a car and drove to Springfield, Mass. on a route that kept us inland from the worst of the storm. On Tuesday, after the Governor lifted the travel ban, we returned the car to T.F. Green Airport and took an Uber to our neighborhood. The last 2½ blocks to our house were unplowed. We covered half of that distance on foot through paths cut into waist-deep snow, as captured in this Video by Providence Journal columnist Mark Patinkin, and the second half by cutting our own paths through the 3 foot hight snow piles. The entire journey took 50 hours.

2.     Our neighborhood’s experience after the storm

When I returned on Tuesday afternoon, I began hearing from neighbors concerned about their inability to leave their homes, and the lack of clarity as to when the streets would be plowed. The Mayor’s office and our East Side City Council members provided us with timely email updates, but for the first few days the City was unable to provide a clear timetable of the snow clearing project. (If you have done so already, I encourage you to sign up for email updates from our City Councilors through their websites: John Goncalves Jill Davidson Sue Anderbois.) By Wednesday, the Mayor’s office provided more specific information with these FAQ’s, which predicted that most residential streets would be cleared for at least one lane of traffic in the coming days. My street opened up in the mid-afternoon on Wednesday, and to my knowledge most residential streets were accessible on Thursday.

3.     The lack of advance notice

While the State and the City made it possible for most of us to leave our homes by Thursday, we can ask why we had such little notice or warning to prepare. I believe part of the explanation has to do with the weather forecasts we received.

a.     The speed of the storm

In this Chart that I compiled of National Weather Service (NWS) data, I highlight in blue the depth of snow at T.F. Green Airport in hours leading up to and through the storm. You can see that there were 5 inches of residual snow on the ground as of 6:51 p.m on Sunday, February 22 with calm weather. The storm began soon after that, dropping sixteen inches of additional snow in blizzard conditions by 5:51 Monday morning, February 23. That was followed by sixteen more inches in blizzard conditions during the seven hours that followed (12:51 p.m.).

The City tried to plow during the blizzard, but the conditions were too hazardous for the drivers. This prevented the City from accomplishing much before the blizzard conditions lifted on Monday afternoon. As a result, the City could not begin systematic plowing until there were more than 30 inches of snow on the ground. Most of the trucks available to the City and its contractors lack the capacity to plow this volume of snow, and the volume required plans to remove the snow rather than just move it. This left the City with a sharply reduced fleet of vehicles that required longer amounts of time to address the City’s 1600 streets.

b.     The lack of accurate forecasts

In the meantime, the National Weather Service forecasts did not predict the magnitude of the storm. This Chart compiles the NWS forecasts for the relevant times. As you can see, on Friday, the NWS predicted a 3-inch snowstorm, which it upgraded to 13-17 inches on Saturday morning. It was not until Saturday afternoon that NWS warned of a blizzard, at that time predicting accumulations of 1-2 feet. Aside from a minor adjustment on Sunday morning, the NWS did not increase its snowfall prediction until the blizzard was in full force early Monday morning. (To be fair to NWS, I have read articles that describe the difficulties in predicting snowfall amounts, though I do not know whether it is typical for the forecast to be off by as much as it was here.)

4.     Consequences of inadequate notice

This lack of advance notice created problems for both the City and for residents. It deprived the City of the opportunity to plan its response, though it is not clear how much that notice could have accelerated its response. More significantly, it affected our planning as residents. Had we known a few days in advance that we were going to be blanketed with more snow than the Blizzard of 1978, we could have prepared better for three or more days of isolation in our homes. For example, I know of neighbors who have home health aides who normally rotate on eight-hour shifts. This became impossible during the storm, and created unexpected hardships for both the aides and their clients. Here, better notice could have made a significant difference.

5.     Our opportunity to learn from this experience

In many ways, we had a “perfect storm” that made our ability to respond significantly more difficult. I hope and believe, however, that our City government will review what happened and take from that review the best possible lessons to help us when the next storm comes our way.

Dear Neighbors:

I hope you had a sweet Valentine’s Day. In this letter, I discuss the State’s plan to ensure the continued operation of the Roger Williams Medical Center and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital.

1.     The Hospitals’ Historic Role

The Roger Williams Medical Center and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital (“the Hospitals”) are essential parts of our State’s medical safety net. Last year, their facilities and staff provided medical care for 9,672 inpatient admissions, 17,070 surgical procedures, 54,165 emergency room visits, 63,678 patient days and 363,222 outpatient visits. The Hospitals rely largely upon limited Medicare and Medicaid funding.

2.     The Private Equity Fund Purchase And Resulting Bankruptcy

In 2014, a private equity firm named Prospect Medical purchased the Hospitals from the nonprofit system CharterCare. In the years that followed, Prospect weakened the Hospitals’ finances by borrowing $900 million, from which it issued a $457 million dividend to its private investors. When Prospect Medical sought to restructure ownership in 2021, Attorney General Neronha required them to create an $80 million escrow fund to cover possible future shortfalls. Those shortfalls followed, as the Hospitals’ debt burden and neglect by their owners led to years of inadequate investment in the facilities and equipment, as well as operating deficits. Prospect declared bankruptcy in 2024, since which time the Hospitals’ operations have been subject to Bankruptcy Court supervision. On a temporary basis, the Hospitals remained open with support from the escrow fund, but this was not sustainable over time. This created a risk that the Hospitals would close, creating a service gap that Rhode Island’s remaining hospitals could not fill.

3.     Creating A Viable Path Out Of Bankruptcy

The Centurion Foundation is a nonprofit organization that finds ways to allow nonprofit hospitals to sustain operations, focusing on the subsidies and cost savings associated with nonprofit status. After more than a year, Centurion assembled enough anticipated bond financing to allow it to purchase the Hospitals from bankruptcy with the help of two additional funding sources. The first is the remaining approximately $50 million from the escrow account established by the Attorney General. The second is an additional $18 million stabilization fund the General Assembly approved this past Tuesday. The Bankruptcy Court will review the possible transaction for approval in the coming weeks.

While the State has little choice but to find a way to continue the operations of these “safety net” hospitals, the new operator (Centurion) appears to have the right skills and priorities. The financial cushion created by the Attorney General’s work in 2021, in addition to making the transition possible at all, increases the chances of a successful outcome.

Dear Neighbors:

I hope you are looking forward to an exciting Super Bowl LX or, for non-football fans, a charming Puppy Bowl XXII (which, for the first time, will include older dogs). In this letter, I discuss the Blue Ribbon Commission’s proposal to revise the state’s school aid funding formula.

A.   The Ribbon Commission’s History

As described in its Executive Summary, the Rhode Island Foundation convened a Blue Ribbon Commission of experts and stakeholders in Winter 2024 to review the State’s funding formula for aid to local school districts. Last month, the Commission presented its findings to State leadership, as well as at a public forum. It is now drafting a legislative bill to implement its recommendations. The Rhode Island Foundation announced it will fund a campaign to advocate for the bill’s passage.

B.    The Commission’s Proposal

The Blue Ribbon Commission’s proposal rests on there four pillars:

1.     Accounting for the full cost of education;

2.     Tailoring costs to student needs;

3.     Matching local contributions to a municipality’s ability to pay;

4.     Increasing fiscal responsibility and reporting.

To understand these pillars, it is useful to review the components of the current funding formula and their shortcomings. The Commission’s analysis is similar to one I provided you in a series of letters I wrote in 2023, which provide further detail for those who are interested.

My January 1, 2023 letter describes the current funding formula’s three basic elements, namely (1) developing a “core instruction budget” per student, (2) adjusting for the additional needs of certain students, thereby creating a “foundation budget” for each district, (3) allocating the responsibility to fund each district’s overall “foundation budget” between the State and local communities.

1.     Accounting For The Full Cost Of Education

As noted in my January 8, 2023 letter, the “core instruction budget” of the current funding formula includes “instructional” elements such as educator salaries, but excludes such non-instructional operating expenses as building maintenance and transportation. These expenses comprise roughly 25% of any district’s budget. The current state formula provides no State aid for those expenses, even though those expenses are just as essential a part of any public school’s operation as the direct cost of instruction. The first pillar of the Blue Ribbon Commission’s proposal is to develop a “core educational budget” per pupil that includes these non-instructional operating expenses.

2.     Tailoring Costs To Student Needs

As discussed in my January 15, 2023 letter, the current funding formula makes a single adjustment for students with greater needs by adding a “student success factor” to the “core instruction budget” of 40-45% for each student in poverty. As described in that letter, the adjustment is helpful but insufficient because it does not provide for other high needs students, such as multi-language learners and special education students. The Commission’s proposal would add additional weights to address the greater needs of these students.

3.     Matching Local Needs To A Municipality’s Ability To Pay

As documented in my January 22, 2023 letter, the current funding formula contains two basic elements to allocate the cost of public education between local funding and State aid. The first is relative ability to pay, based on each municipality’s property tax base per student – districts with larger tax bases per student pay a greater share of the total cost of education. The second element, called the “quadratic mean” directs greater State aid to communities with greater populations of students in poverty regardless of the municipality’s ablity to pay. As documented in my January 22, 2023 letter, the “quadratic mean” effectively transfers millions of dollars of State education aid from some of the State’s poorest communities to some of its wealthiest ones. The Blue Ribbon Commission’s proposal would remove the “quadratic mean” from the funding formula.

4.     Increasing Fiscal Responsibility And Reporting

In general terms, the Blue Ribbon Commission’s proposal contains measures to ensure that school districts use State aid responsibly by (1) ensuring accurate, detailed financial reporting by school districts and (2) ensuring that school districts contribute, at a minimum, the local share of funding required by the core educational budget.

C.   Initial Thoughts

The Commission’s first three pillars will go a long way to improving the funding formula generally, while better addressing the specific funding needs of the Providence Public Schools. I would have preferred to bolster the fourth pillar to include a stronger emphasis on each district’s accountability to produce better educational outcomes for its students as part of its partnership with the State. I believe Massachusetts succeeded in adding this greater level of accountability as part of its 1993 Educational Reform Act, which produced a “grand bargain” of greater funding for greater accountability. I also wish the Blue Ribbon Commission had recommended enactment of a Constitutional right to education, which remains a foundational piece of the successful Massachusetts public education program. With that said, there is much to like in the Blue Ribbon Commission’s presentations to date, and I look forward to reviewing the legislation that the Commission proposes.

Dear Neighbors:

I hope you are looking forward to our expected return to warmer temperatures tomorrow, which should help us recover from last weekend’s snow storm. In this letter, I describe this year’s expected review of the Act on Climate.

A.   The 2025 Climate Action Strategy

In 2021, the General Assembly passed (and the Governor signed) the Act on Climate, which set a timetable to reduce Rhode Island’s greenhouse gas emissions to “net zero” by 2050. It created the Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council (EC4) to develop an implementation plan. EC4 published a Climate Action Strategy at the end of last year. The Strategy contained greenhouse gas emissions models, one of which concluded that the State’s current policies placed Rhode Island on track to reach the emission reduction standard for 2030, but that additional policies needed to be implemented to meet the reductions called for in 2040 and 2050.

B.    Criticisms Of The Climate Action Strategy

The Appendix to the Climate Action Strategy includes comments by advocates, who question the Strategy’s ability to achieve the reduction standards. The Strategy places near-exclusive reliance on the success of certain existing programs whose viability is facing severe challenges. For example, the Strategy assumes a dramatic growth in the sale of electric cars in trucks beginning this year, but those assumptions were based on the continuation of federal subsidies and mandates that have been eliminated by statute or executive order. There is still a chance that court challenges will revive some of these measures, but the Strategy lacks redundancy and/or alternative policies to implement should some of these key pillars be knocked out.

C.   The Governor’s Budget

1.     Extending The Renewable Energy Standard Timeline

As noted in last week’s letter, the Governor’s budget includes an “affordability agenda” proposal to reduce utility rates by an average of $15 per month by scaling back some of renewable energy programs that are added to electric bills, including a proposal to dilute the “renewable energy standard.” Under current law and policy, Rhode Island currently is required to obtain 100% of its electricity supply by renewable sources by 2033, but the Governor’s budget would extend that deadline to 2050.

2.     Resulting Impact On The Act On Climate

As described in a presentation that EC4 made to the Senate Study Commission last Wednesday, this extension would effectively disembowel the entire Act On Climate.  Simply stated, the Act on Climate’s overall plan to reduce emissions in every sector (transportation, industry, building heating and cooling and energy generation) consists of a two-step process. First, each of these sectors must convert their energy source from fossil fuels (gasoline, heating oil, natural gas, etc.) to electricity. Second, the generation of electricity must be converted from a mix of fossil fuels and renewable sources to exclusively renewable energy. For example, even if we succeed in transforming the great majority of cars on the road from gasoline power to electric power, that change alone will not reduce emissions reductions significantly, unless we also change the source of the electric power from fossil fuels (mainly natural gas) to renewables (hydropower, wind and solar).

3.     Other Paths To Affordability

A recent Providence Journal article included this Chart obtained from the Public Utilities Commission identifying the components of a typical Rhode Islander’s electric bill in recent years. The chart indicates that renewable energy programs added $20 to the typical bill in 2025, but that the overall bill declined by almost $15 due to a reduction in the cost of supplying the energy. As noted in last week’s letter, we may see another reduction in the coming year once the Revolution Wind turbine farm goes online. I am hoping we will be able to estimate that anticipated savings through the model that the EC4 developed.

4.     Next Steps

Over the next two Wednesdays, the Senate Act On Climate Study Commission will hold two hearings to receive presentations and testimony from stakeholders and experts. The first will take place on Wednesday, February 4 at 4:00 p.m., at which time the Commission will hear from Timmons Roberts (EC4 Science and Technical Advisory Board), Tina Munter (Green Energy Consumers Alliance) and Mike Stenhouse (RI Center for Freedom and Prosperity).

Dear Neighbors:

I hope you are looking forward to this afternoon’s big football game, and you are ready for our developing snowstorm. In this week’s letter, I will offer some preliminary thoughts about the utility “affordability” components of the Governor’s budget.

A.   The Tension Between Affordability And Sustainability

In last week’s letter, I described how some provisions in the Governor’s budget create tension between the goals of affordability and sustainability. At first glance, the budget’s energy “affordability” proposals appear to produce same type of tension; in this case between rate relief and environmental sustainability. With that said, I believe there is much more to study and learn about how renewable energy advances the goal of affordability in the short, medium and long term.

B.    The Governor’s Proposal To Reduce Distribution Rates

We can review our own energy bills to begin understanding the Governor’s proposal. Those bills have two major components, namely supply and distribution. On my own most recent electric bill, for example, supply was $77.48 and distribution was $96.94. The Governor’s budget proposes scaling back renewable energy initiatives in order to reduce charges on the distribution side which, according a recent Rhode Island Current article, would save the typical rate payer $15/month. The General Assembly will review the Governor’s budget, and the final budget likley will be passed and signed sometime in June.

C.   The Role Of Renewable Energy In Electricity Supply Rates

To understand how costs are set on the supply side for electricity, I encourage you to view Senator Whitehouse’s short video. He notes that electricity generation costs from fossil fuel plants are typically higher than from renewable energy sources. For instance, I have been informed that the nearly complete Revolution Wind project will generate electricity at 9.8₵ /kilowatt hour, compared to 14.77₵ /kilowatt hour for excess capacity natural gas generation currently available, a savings of more than 33%. For that reason, we can expect significant savings in our electricity bills when Revolution Wind (which is expected to serve 350,000 Rhode Island customers) comes online. For a purely hypothetical example, if the electricity supply cost fell by 20%, my most recent bill would go down by more than the average expected $15 from the Governor’s distribution-side budgetary proposals. I do not know if my electric bill is typical of other Rhode Islanders, but I plan to learn more about this issue.

Renewable energy requires capital costs and development time before coming online, but in the case of Revolution Wind, those costs and construction time are close to completion. If Revolution Wind comes online prior to the June passage of the budget, we may see tangible supply-side affordability benefits caused by greater use of renewable energy. That experience may support further consideration of the tradeoff between short-term rate relief and the possibility of lower energy costs in the medium and long term.

D.   The Two Senate Study Commissions

The Senate established two study commissions to learn more about these issues in order to promote the development of best policies and practices.

1.     The Act On Climate Commission

I am Chair of the Act on Climate Commission. Our first meeting is this Wednesday, January 28 at 4:00 p.m. in State House Room 212. We will hear a presentation from DEM Director Terry Gray concerning the Climate Action Strategy published three weeks ago by the Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council (EC4), before the Governor presented his proposed budget.

2.     The Renewable Energy Commission

In addition, Senator Sosnowski (who serves on the Act on Climate Commission) is the Chair of the Senate’s Renewable Energy Commission. It is my hope that both commissions can work together to gain the best possible understanding of the policy issues regarding renewable energy and the implementation of the Act on Climate.

E.    The Thank You Reddit John Fund

Finally, I would like to share news about an initiative by our City Council members Jill Davidson and Sue Anderbois to honor the efforts of Reddit John, the homeless person who provided police with the information needed to identify the Brown University shooter. They created a fund to support the Open Doors homeless aid program in Reddit John’s honor. You can learn about and support their project by clicking on this link.