Thanks for stopping by for my weekly column. As always, I welcome your tips and comments, and you can follow me through the week on the twitters. Here we go.
1) Gov. Gina Raimondo has had the political stage to herself for more than a month — and Rhode Islanders like what they see, as evidenced by a Bryant University poll showing 81 approval for her leadership during the crisis. As I noted in this space a few weeks back, Raimondo’s legacy will now stem from her management of Rhode Island during this cataclysm – and how much progress the state can make before she leaves office. Now, after going on hiatus in March, the Rhode Island General Assembly is showing signs of stirring. In a joint statement, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and Senate President Dominick Ruggerio announced plans for a joint legislative task force on COVID-19 emergency spending, with an initial meeting next Thursday, April 30 (the meeting will be in-person, but it’s not yet clear if the public will be allowed to be there in-person). The leaders call this an appropriate move to restore the checks and balances typical of the three branches of government concept. “No one person, whoever it is, no matter how good a job they’re doing, should make all governmental decisions,” Mattiello told WPRO’s Tara Granahan. (There may be some unintended irony here considering how legislative Democrats argue in favor of their own supremacy in running the JCLS, the hiring and spending arm of the General Assembly.) With the pandemic causing uncertainty about virtually everything, the new task force points to the inexorable need to cobble together a state budget, with a series of draconian cuts. Yet Raimondo has showed no signs of being about to cede her leadership; a time will come when stakeholders will gather to think about long-term issues, she said this week, but the crisis remains front and center. For now, the traditional balance of power has shifted at the Statehouse. Where that goes from here is a story worth watching.
2) So how bad is the budget outlook? The word from the Statehouse is that the red ink for the current and next fiscal years are each estimated at many hundreds of millions of dollars. The state will get a better handle on these questions by the time the Revenue and Estimating conference wraps up on May 8. But an even bigger question is whether and how much of $1.25 billion of federal aid can be use to help Rhode Island reduce its deficit. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made headlines this week by saying a string of state bankruptcies would be better than more bailouts. That utterance came as a $484 billion aid package was gaining approval this week, and you can find details on what’s in that here. Meanwhile, there appears to be bipartisan concern in Washington for the fiscal plight of states, and Gov. Raimondo echoed that view during her Friday news conference.
3) The governor plans to talk Monday about efforts to reopen RI’s economy. Earlier this week, she outlined six factors that will be used in that process.
4) While the reopening of the economy can’t come fast enough for some, polling shows that most Americans favor using social distancing to blunt the impact of COVID-19. Nonetheless, with support from groups (here and here) aligned with President Trump, a series of demonstrations in other states have dramatized the debate. This back and forth is also playing out in Rhode Island: some local conservatives call the response overblown and advocate for loosening restrictions. Health care professionals like Dr. Megan Ranney warn that moving too quickly will make things worse by blowing up the number of infections. Meanwhile, a LTE in the ProJo expressed the view that if people want to protest against social distancing, they should own it by agreeing to stay at their homes, without medical care, if they become infected.
5) Other voices on whether RI’s General Assembly should be back in action. Rep. Brian Newberry (R-North Smithfield): “The governor has been operating under extraordinary emergency powers for well over a month now with zero legislative oversight. Yet House Oversight Committee has no apparent plans to convene to do its actual job of oversight at a time when oversight is needed more than ever. Why?” …. Jeff Grybowksi: “Given legislature’s long history of usurping executive powers, this turn of constitutional events is shocking. With the exec so deeply engaged in the immediate crisis, there is so much hard work to be done in what comes next. And the legislature appears to be just sitting it out.”
6) The media industry, in RI and nationally, has been gripped by cycles of cuts and uncertainty for about 20 years now, ever since the internet upended the financial foundation of newspapers. There are still a lot of excellent reporters in southern New England who are committed to looking out for the public interest. But as I reported this week, the pandemic is exacerbating the financial strain for news organizations and sapping the advertising lifeblood that fuels them. As John Howell, the venerable 78-year-old editor/publisher of Beacon Communications, who is working without a salary, told me: “I don’t think it’s going to go back to the way it was. I can’t imagine it’s going to be the same. I think you’re going to see in the communities themselves, a number of these small businesses won’t survive. It’s unnerving, no question, because people, I think across the board, are trying to find some solid ground and at this point everything’s a bowl of jelly.”
7) In non-coronavirus news, one of the things for Gov. Raimondo to consider is nominating a successor to Rhode Island Supreme Justice Gilbert Indeglia, who earlier this year announced his plans to step down. With that in mind, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University in Law School notes that Rhode Island is among 12 states that have never had a person of color on their highest court. The center says RI and Louisiana are the only two states where a new female justice has not joined the top state court in the last 20 years (the only female member of SCORI, Maureen McKenna Goldberg, was appointed in 1997). On a national basis, a study by the Brennan Center found that people of color make up almost 40 percent of the population, but only 15.5 percent of state Supreme Court seats. Back in Rhode Island, the Judicial Nominating Commission is receiving applications for the Indeglia seat through the end of the month. Asked about Raimondo’s inclinations, spokesman Josh Block said, “The governor has always urged the JNC to prioritize diverse candidates representing a wide array of backgrounds and perspectives, and she has a strong track-record of appointing women and people of color to the bench.”
8) It’s not just Lifespan and Care NE that face financial stress from the pandemic. The outlook is awful for hospitals all over the U.S. “We’re being faced with what I would call a triple whammy,” Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, tells NPR. “We have the increased expenses that have been incurred in terms of preparing for the surge and caring for the COVID patients. And then we have the decreased revenues associated with having shut down regular operations in terms of scheduled procedures. You combine that with the increased number of uninsured as a result of the economic situation, and you’ve got a triple whammy there.”
9) My colleague Sofia Rudin had an excellent three-part series this week on climate change in Rhode Island, asking, when is it time to retreat from the sea. Part I: how South Kingstown’s shrinking beaches are putting the town’s identity at stake; Part II: how SK is considering abandoning roads due to the rising sea; and Part III: how there’s a novel plan being pitched in flood-prone Warren.
10) From John Bender’s story on Gov. Raimondo’s decision to keep Rhode Island schools closed for the rest of the school year: “For the last month, parents, teachers and their students have been adapting to remote learning. Parents have taken the dual responsibility of household-running and home-schooling. Teachers are replicating classes online, and trying to contact students lost in the shuffle. And students have been forced to adapt to learning at home, suffering the loss of school, peers and the rituals of spring semester, like school proms. Still, the system has proven surprisingly flexible. According to the governor, after weeks of handing out laptops and providing free internet, nearly every student is connected to school. The state estimated some 500 students were still without the technology they needed as of last week. Participation rates have been remarkably high. Some schools have reported 100 percent attendance for days on end, and statewide more than 90 percent of all students regularly log onto classes. While this may mean students are present, teachers worry about the quality of the education they can provide online, and how much students are really paying attention. Education leaders are bracing for some lost learning during this time.”
11) The RI Ethics Commission agenda for Tuesday, April 28 includes a possible decision on the RI GOP ethics complaint against Gov. Raimondo.
12) At some point this year, Cranston will emerge as a more visible political battleground, with Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung’s challenge to Speaker Nicholas Mattiello for his rep seat, and the race to replace termed-out Allan Fung at City Hall. One of the latest entries in the latter is at-large Councilor Steve Stycos, a Democrat. He joins Republican Michael Farina, who announced earlier this year, and former councilor Maria Bucci, who has filed paperwork indicating a run. Asked about his campaign, Stycos (who long ago was a freelancer for me at the Providence Phoenix) offered this statement: “For over 20 years, I have worked to make Cranston a better place. From my 10 years on the Cranston School Committee, to my five terms on the City Council, to my role in starting the Pawtuxet Village Farmers Market and launching Cranston’s tree-planting program, I’ve been committed to improving our city. And I have stood against corruption in city government. With others on the City Council, I exposed the Ticketgate scandal that led to a complete change in the leadership of the Cranston Police Department. If elected mayor, I will support better school funding, transparent government, fiscal responsibility at City Hall and diversifying our city workforce so it reflects our community.”
13) Bring some skepticism to stories about politicians and their hair. The classic case in point is how Bill Clinton supposedly delayed air traffic in Los Angele while getting a costly coiffure. The story took on a life of its own. Yet as Snopes reported, the story was complete fiction: “The networks covered the haircut, and it was Page 1 news in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News, among many others. Although Clinton insisted that he had been assured he was not delaying other flights, John McLaughlin, host of television’s ‘The McLaughlin Group,’ told his viewers that the haircut had tied up ‘ground and air traffic, putting as many as 37 planes in a holding pattern.’ Six weeks later, Newsday used the Freedom of Information Act to acquire Federal Aviation Administration records that showed no planes had been forced to circle the airport, no runways had been backed up — and only one plane was delayed … for two minutes.”
14) A riveting read: “He ran marathons and was fit. So why did COVID-19 almost kill him?”
15) Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea this week began sending registered voters a mail ballot for Rhode Island’s June 2 presidential primary. According to her office, “This process will have two major benefits for Rhode Island. First, it ensures that eligible voters can cast their ballot in a safe and secure manner during the COVID-19 pandemic. And second, it will help clean the state’s voter rolls. The process for removing a voter is dictated by strict federal and state laws. One of the key requirements is that specific communities may not be targeted for removal. Due to budget constraints, this is the first statewide elections mailing in Rhode Island since 2006. This mailing is being paid for with federal funding in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Once a piece of elections mail is returned as undeliverable, a voter is marked inactive. A voter who is marked as inactive is still eligible to vote, but if they do not cast a ballot in one of the next two federal elections (four years), they may be legally removed from the rolls. Rhode Island currently has more than 60,000 records marked as inactive. ‘I’m calling on all Rhode Islanders who receive a mail ballot application for someone who no longer lives at that address to return the application to my office as undeliverable,’ Gorbea said.’ ”
16) URI Business College professor Jack Beliveau on what the deal is with toilet paper: “[T]his has been a common occurrence in Japan for years. It is simply a panic reaction. You have an item that everyone considers a necessity and the shelves clear with the slightest hint of panic. It’s similar to what we call ‘the bullwhip effect’ in supply chain management. Unfortunately, it’s the first time it has occurred in the United States, but I’ve seen no basis in reality for it here, other than irrational panic. In the past we have experienced gasoline shortages based upon panic where everyone goes from driving around with a half tank of gas to full.”
17) The MLB sign-stealing investigation found so little fault with the Red Sox that the sporting press is speculating about a potential return of Alex Cora, the skipper who piloted the Red Sox through the team’s superlative World Championship 2018 season. That might be a bridge too far. Still, with baseball still off in the distance, it’s a palatable day dream for these difficult days.