- [Narrator] This week on ""A Lively Experiment", why were the controversial pallet shelters off Route 146 so expensive?

One state representative tried to find out, and the deportation of a Brown University medicine doctor has some crying foul and others applauding the US government's decision.

- [Announcer] "A Lively Experiment" is generously underwritten by.

- Hi.

I'm John Hazen White, Jr. For over 30 years, "A Lively Experiment" has provided insight and analysis of the political issues that face Rhode Islanders.

I'm a proud supporter of this great program and Rhode Island PBS.

- Joining us with the analysis, Providence Journal reporter Antonia Noori Farzan, Republican strategist Jesus Solorio, and Providence College political science professor Adam Myers.

Hello and welcome to Lively.

I'm Jim Hummel and it's great to have you with us this week.

The pallet shelters in Providence were back in the news this week.

House minority leader Mike Chippendale asked the Department of Housing in February for a full accounting of the costs surrounding Echo Village, which finally went online after nearly a year of delays.

Chippendale ran into the same problem that many of we as reporters have had over the years.

The state wanted to charge him nearly $500 and said some of the documents were not available because the nonprofit running the shelter had them and is exempt from disclosures.

There's a lot to unpack here.

Jesus, let me begin with you.

House minority leader sits on the finance committee, is the sitting legislature.

So what's wrong with this story that you want to charge him $500 to get documents?

- Well, Jim, this is an issue that we've seen across the board.

As you mentioned, reporters are constantly having to file OPRA requests and being denied and delayed, and it's just a lack of transparency, and that's what happens when you have a one-party super majority in the state.

It seems like, every single year, it's getting worse and worse, less and less transparency, and I think Rhode Islanders, it's time to open up the books and let Rhode Islanders see where every single dollar's being spent and where it's going.

- Antonia?

- Yeah, and there's unfortunately a bit of a technical confusion with this press conference.

Essentially, the minority leader, when he gave the press conference, said he'd really only gotten one of the things he asked for.

He hadn't gotten most of them.

It turned out they had been sent in a ZIP drive.

The file hadn't been unzipped, and unfortunately that kind of overshadowed what he's pointing out, which is a real issue, which is why are they charging him almost $500 for these records?

Sitting lawmaker or not, that's crazy.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- Yeah, I mean, I certainly agree that lawmakers and members of the media who are trying to inform the public shouldn't be charged these exorbitant amounts for public records.

I do, on the other hand, think that these public records requests can be abused.

I mean, I know that there's a small number of people in this state, this is what I've heard anyway, that make public records requests of state agencies multiple times on a weekly basis, kind of political gadfly types, and I think there should be a limit on the number of requests that people can make.

Maybe not for members of the media or legislators, but for public citizens.

You know, these requests can take a lot of time in certain circumstances to execute.

- You know, that's a good question because we're so used to, in the OPRA space, but I have heard some people that say they're overwhelming town clerks.

What I don't get here, as we've talked a little about this in the green room, is that we had a $14 billion budget.

We got a Department of Housing.

We have people who are paid pretty well.

Where is this money going?

The $500, what, you're paying them overtime?

Or, I mean, is it a deterrent?

I just have a problem with when you have a government this size with a house representative.

- Yeah, and I have no idea where it goes.

It is very true.

I mean, you can look.

Providence, they put their records portal online so you can see what the requests have been that they've received, and reporters are actually a very small percentage of it.

A lot of it is members of the public or people who just want a police report or have some kind of question about something that happened in their neighborhood or stuff like you would never even think about requesting necessarily.

- Yeah, and the larger issue on these pallet shelters is it started out at three-plus million and then it went to four, and I think it's a basic question.

How did we get from here to there?

Is it just rising construction costs?

- Yeah, and right now, there's a lot of criticism at the federal level for DOGE and what they're doing and whether they should be taking a scalpel or what Elon Musk is doing right now, but we just don't know where the dollars are going, and Leader Chippendale got a list of subcontractors, but we don't know where that dollar's going and specifically what they're getting paid to do, and, again, it's over-budget and the timeline is over-extended.

- Yeah.

You go.

- Well, I agree that, you know, the media and Rep Chippendale, the legislators, they need to look into all this.

There could be a good explanation for all of it, and I give kudos to Rep Chippendale in his press conference.

He acknowledged, I believe, that there could be an innocent explanation for why costs went up so much, you know?

And so I think it's important to actually dig into the facts and not kind of have this knee-jerk reaction of, oh, this is just government malfeasance.

It might be, but it also might not be.

- But that's what I think he was trying to get at, and so when you get the information, you know, it's building blocks that we put together.

When we go into a story and we might have a preconceived notion, well, the facts might say otherwise, and we as reporters have to kind of come, you know, down that road to see how it looks.

I do think, in this case, with the pallet shelters, what people missed, and we've talked about it on the show, they had to build out a whole.

It's not just per-unit costs.

They had to build a village.

- Right, and what construction project or affordable housing project has finished that has not been over cost in the past few years?

I mean, if it isn't, it's because they find places to cut and ways, you know, to say, "Well, we were gonna do this extra thing.

We're not gonna do that now 'cause we don't have the money."

So, in this case, yeah, it makes sense that, you know, I don't know exactly where that money went, why there was that overrun, but I don't find it shocking that a construction project was over-budget.

- You mentioned, go ahead.

- And I think one of the areas that we can really look into is a lot of the environmental studies.

I mean, it seems like, every year, there's add-ons and add-ons from the legislature.

I mean, for example, they passed legislation last year for an electric inspection, and so legislation continues to get passed.

You know, there's more bureaucracy, more layers, and that causes projects to balloon and timelines to be missed.

- That's the one you need an electrical inspector if you're gonna get your house, if you're building it.

- Correct, your house.

- So you can't just have a general, and that added a layer and there were arguments back and forth.

Just quickly before we move on.

You talked about Elon Musk and DOGE, the argument here that the Republicans and some Democrats have said now about an inspector general, and that does not seem to be getting traction.

I've said many times on this show.

It's one guy standing in the way, Joe Shekarchi, because a lot of people think that would be a good idea.

What about that for Rhode Island?

- Yeah, an overwhelming number of Rhode Islanders support the Office of Inspector General.

Both Republicans and Democrats have introduced a bill year after year, and unfortunately it's the leadership that refuses to push the legislation forward, because, again, they don't wanna open up the books and really show what's going on.

- What about inspector general?

We've talked about it a lot.

- We have.

I mean, Republicans in this state have made it kind of their marquee issue right now, and, truthfully, lots of states do have inspector generals, and I think there's plenty of, you know, waste and red tape, unnecessary red tape and abuse in other state governments.

I don't know enough about the office and what it would do to be confident that it would make a big difference, but I think it's a good talking point for Republicans, right?

Because they want to emphasize all the ways in which the state government is dysfunctional.

- And the big objection from the speaker has been that it's $2 million.

Where are we gonna find $2 million to establish a new office?

I'm pretty sure we can look into the budget and cut $2 million and find a way to establish it.

- We have a lot of former lawmakers on this show because it's nice to have them in the arena, and I always ask them, "Hey, what was the budget when you were there?"

It was 6 billion, it was 8 billion, it was 10 billion, and now it's 14 billion.

So, all right.

Antonia had a very interesting story this past week that I encourage you to read about.

The hospitals have a lot of parking space, and the question is, can that be used a little bit better?

Especially when we're talking about affordable housing.

So, set the table.

This is a pretty cool conference they had in Providence.

- Yeah, yeah.

So the Congress for New Urbanism is happening in Providence this June, and as part of that, basically, you had this really world-renowned urban design firm come and pro bono do this study for the City of Providence to look at the hospital district around Rhode Island Hospital Women & Infants, and essentially a third of the land there is surface parking lots.

So the idea is, okay, if we could replace that with some parking garages, we free up a lot of land.

We can build housing, build retail space there, and get that land back on the tax rolls, which would obviously benefit Providence, which could really use that extra money right now.

- Yeah.

What about that idea?

- You know, this is the first I'd heard about it, and I have to say I'm excited.

Anybody who's been in that area knows, you know, it's not physically attractive and that space could be put to much better use.

I can certainly understand some of the concerns maybe of people who live around that area that, you know, this new development would render that area unaffordable for them and then that they would have to be pushed out.

You know, the gentrification concern is always there, but your article sort of made it seem as though this kind of group meeting kind of arrived at some sort of consensus that the different stakeholders might be able to live with, and so that was kind of an optimistic take, and so if all the different groups that are involved in this can come to some sort of agreement about what this development might look like, it could be a great thing.

- Yeah, I think it's a great idea, especially if it's a pro bono study.

Those tend to be pretty expensive.

I think we need to go outside the box and figure out ways to bring in more housing, more retail opportunities, and the other thing is give the opportunity to look at ways to make Providence and Rhode Island a little bit more business-friendly, because it's hard to attract businesses.

We're losing businesses left and right.

- Yeah, one of the things you mentioned, and I was trying to game this out in my mind, parking decks are expensive, clearly.

The cost to build, but also, I mean, how much money would you get for that land?

- Right, right.

I mean, that's the question, yeah.

- That helps offset some of it, right?

- Yeah, so I should say, what I wrote about this was basically the way it works is there was about two dozen different planners and architects, designers who all kind of spent four days talking to all the different stakeholders.

- They're all geeking out in planning talk.

- Exactly, and sketching really quickly.

So what I wrote about was what they presented after four days.

They're gonna have a fuller report coming out in June, which is gonna delve more into the questions of how do we pay for this?

Because, right now, that's the big question.

I mean, you know.

- So disagreements might emerge in that process.

- Sure, yeah, and I mean, Rhode Island hospital, you know, their perspective is, like, you know, any spare money we have is gonna go into refurbishing Rhode Island Hospital at this point.

You know, if someone wants to give us a parking garage, sure, but that's- - But you might have, in terms of the hospital infrastructure and the parking lots, I think you had mentioned that the new president came down from Massachusetts, so he'll maybe have a little bit of a different lens, you know, on the whole concept.

- Right, right.

A lot of people mentioned over the course of the workshop that there is new leadership at the hospital, so it's kind of a fresh moment where they can take a fresh start and take a new look at this and say, is this actually working for people who work here and people who live here?

And maybe it's not.

- The affordable housing has been so tough.

We've talked about it every week that we as taxpayers of federal and state have dedicated, what, a quarter of a billion dollars, and really not seen so much progress, and I know that's probably frustrated Speaker Shekarchi too, but it kind of goes to how difficult it is to build in Rhode Island.

- Yeah, and I think the issue with the party in power is that they throw these amounts, $250 million for housing, $30 million for after-school programs, and they think that throwing money into a problem is going to solve it, and it's not.

There's no follow-through.

Again, there's no accountability, and so we need to get some follow-through and make sure that that money's being used appropriately, 'cause we just don't know after it's announced that grants are being offered and projects are gonna get started.

After that, we just don't hear anything about it afterwards, and then we only hear when they're over-budget and over-scheduled.

- You know, I share your frustration, Jim.

we've been talking about this issue for for years.

Every year, at the beginning of the legislative sessions, Speakers Shekarchi unveils this, you know, package of housing bills, and it does seem like we're not making much progress.

On the other hand, look, this is a national issue.

You know, it goes back to the financial crisis of 2008 and the glut of affordable housing that existed in the wake of that, and the fact that, basically, we didn't build in this country for a good 10 years after that, and then, you know, COVID and all of the housing issues that emerged from that.

Every state in the union is dealing with this.

Certainly the Eastern Seaboard.

You know, every state in this part of the country is dealing with these issues.

It's a really difficult issue to solve and it probably will take a long time.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, and with the Shekarchi bills that have been passed for the past two sessions, I mean, a lot of those are kind of wonky process-type issues that they're looking at.

So it's basically about how you get the permits to build in the first place.

So we won't really be seeing the effect of that and how much more actually gets billed because of these bills passing for however long it takes to build those projects.

- Yeah, and it's playing out in Johnston, because we've talked about this the last couple of weeks that a developer out there had a 300-unit affordable housing ready to go.

The mayor steps in and says, "No, we want to take this by eminent domain for a public safety complex."

So the news this week is that a federal judge has stepped in and kept them from doing that 'cause it's gonna go to court.

I wonder, Angel Taveras, an attorney, was sitting in your seat last week.

He said he can't wait to see the discovery on this.

Just ask, when did you start talking about the public?

On the surface, it looks like they don't want this affordable housing, although Joe Polisena Jr. will tell you, we have other projects in other places.

He just doesn't think this is an appropriate site for it.

- Yeah, yeah.

I have to just throw in, the thing that's kind of interesting is that the Pacific Legal Foundation is now suing the town, representing the developer to sue the town over the eminent domain grab.

They're the ones who also sued to overturn the shoreline access law in Rhode Island.

- Really?

- Which is kind of a funny connection.

You know, they obviously got a lot of backlash for that.

Now they're kind of heroes to a lot of people for stepping in in this case, but that's their thing.

- Oh, I had no idea there was a connection there.

- Yeah, they don't like takings of property, so you can't say that they're not being consistent to what they stand for.

- Yeah.

Eminent domain, that's an interesting.

- You know, I think that this issue, this particular controversy in Johnston could rise up through the federal courts and potentially make it up to the US Supreme Court.

There's eminent domain cases going on all over the country right now.

There's a famous Supreme Court decision out of New London.

- New London.

- Back in 2005 that a lot of people- - It's been 20 years, yeah.

- Yeah, and a lot of people want the court to take another look at it.

- You know, I think they won that case and then they never built.

It was ironic that I think they won it, but then time and circumstances changes, 'cause you know how long it takes to get to the Supreme Court, but I mean, I think all of us kind of think, should the government be able to come in and take your property?

- Well, and especially, it's one thing if they have a public use for it that they envisioned long ago.

In this case, it does really look like a pretext, right?

- [Jim] Right.

- Polisena did not want these affordable housing units to be built, and so he conjured up this, you know, public safety complex as a replacement for it, and I think it's an open question, certainly constitutionally, whether eminent domain can be used kind of as or public use can be claimed as a pretext when the real motivation is to prevent a private party from building the way they want.

- And that goes back to the discovery.

When did you start thinking about this for, you know, was it six months ago or was it two years ago?

- [Adam] Two minutes ago.

- And this is one of the things is communities know what's best for them, and I'm not a fan of eminent domain or the government interfering.

Look, for instance, in Woonsocket, they have the 15% of affordable housing.

I think, in Johnston, they're pretty close to that percentage, of meeting that percentage, and so it's gonna be up to the local folks to decide where they're gonna build affordable housing and if they truly need additional units.

- Okay.

Big national story coming right out of Rhode Island here.

A Brown medicine professor from Lebanon, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, was detained and eventually sent back by ICE.

You all know the story.

Adam, it's interesting because you hear now ICE's story.

The Rhode Island Current had a very interesting story that the feds got ahead of the narrative and isn't it?

Isn't that a lot of, in the news cycle, getting ahead of the narrative?

We haven't been able to get a lot of the documents.

It's been difficult to see what the pretext is for sending her back.

Some people say she's a sympathizer to terrorists.

Others say that, you know, the government may have overreacted.

- Yeah, you know, there's a whole lot of fascinating things about this case and disturbing things.

You know, the reason the feds were able to get out ahead of it is because, all of the court documents, you have to go to Boston to look at them, and so I guess it's- - [Jim] Can't do it electronically.

- Right, exactly.

You know, I think we need to know more.

We need those documents to be released so that all of us can look at them and find out exactly what went on here and whether or not the government did have a legitimate reason not to let her back into the country.

I mean, she had these photos at the funeral of the Hezbollah leader who was killed, but, you know, a lot of people in Southern Lebanon probably attended that funeral.

I don't know how close her links are to any of those groups.

I mean, based on interviews with folks that worked with her here in Rhode Island, it sounds like, I mean, they said they would be shocked if she had close ties, but, you know, I just don't know.

- I'll also add, like, you know, taking a photo of something is not an endorsement.

- Right.

- If someone was to go through my deleted photos on my phone, I think they'd probably find a lot of stuff I don't like.

So, yeah, there are a lot of unanswered questions we really don't know in this case, but it's pretty terrifying to think of customs, when you come through, going through everything you've ever taken a photo of and judging you based on that.

- How do they get to your phone though?

I mean, do they order you?

Are they allowed to get you to open your phone?

- Yeah, so I can answer this actually, 'cause my colleague Tom Mooney, just this morning, had a really helpful story basically explaining all of the nuts and bolts of how this happened, and you can say no, but if you're coming here on a visa and you say no, well, then they can say, "Well, go home then."

- Right.

So that's opened the Pandora's box.

- Right.

- Yeah, what I find interesting is the same people that have been calling President Trump literally Hitler are now up in arms because this individual attended a funeral overseas.

She's on a H-1B visa, I believe, and, you know, the United States has the authority to remove that and take that back, and I'm sure there's more information that will come out, but I do wanna say is, whether on the left or the right, right now, everything is, people react immediately without getting all the information, and so we need to wait and see what really happened, but it seems that her visit to Lebanon was a big red flag.

- Well, Adam, it goes to your point.

I think what's frustrating is, and I totally agree with you, everything gets magnified, so it goes back to the documents.

The appro, we need to get that, and so there may be more to it than all of us know, but I think that's what's frustrating is that we don't have access to that.

- Right.

I will say this though.

One thing I learned in reading about this case, which I did not know, is that apparently non-citizens don't have constitutional rights at airports, right?

If you're a non-citizen and you arrive at Logan International Airport from a flight from abroad, you're not viewed as having been admitted to the US yet, so you don't have the same constitutional rights that you would once you're admitted and you don't have the same constitutional rights that citizens would in that situation, and it's just a curious thing.

- So we're looking at it through our citizens' rights lens, right?

- Yeah, that was surprising to me as well, and I think your point, it's very true that, with the lack of access almost in this vacuum, there's been so much, on both sides, conspiratorial talking that's sprung up that I've been seeing on social media.

On one hand, people making claims about her and her alleged terrorist alliances that have no basis on anything from that very little bit we got from the documents, and on the other hand, you see on the left, people saying, well, you know, all of this is just kind of government spin to explain why they deported her.

- And all the doctors who work with her every day show up, 'cause, of course, they know who she is, but let's talk a little bit of national.

You're a Republican strategist.

Trump did great here, a lot better than he has in Rhode Island.

There's a deep division.

There are some people, I think even on the right, who are a little concerned with kind of the bulldozer process.

Some people love it, going in with DOGE.

I mean, we could do a whole two hours on this, but just in the first couple of months, looking at the Trump administration, what's been your reaction to how they've been handling things?

- Look, the people that voted for Trump, they knew exactly what they were gonna get.

He said he was gonna go in there and institute DOGE to cut all the waste, fraud, and abuse, and now that he has his full cabinet in place, now they're gonna be kind of taking over the operation and kind of doing the scaffold approach, but, you know, there's no doubt that the government is bloated.

There's billions of dollars that just are wasted every single year, and we do need a strong government to ensure that people that need the services get those services.

- [Jim] Adam?

- Phew.

There's so much to say.

- Two hours.

- Yeah, so.

- Can you put it in two minutes?

- Well, I might disagree with Jesus a little bit.

I don't think that the 75 million Americans that voted for Trump necessarily had DOGE in mind when they voted for him, and I think that, actually, DOGE, and the whole Elon Musk thing, that is quickly becoming Trump's Achilles heel.

You know, if you read about all of these town halls where Republican congressmen are getting yelled at and so forth, including by Republican voters, including in Republican districts.

- [Jim] So much so that speakers are saying, "Don't hold meetings."

- Right, exactly.

A lot of that has to do with the fact that, you know, Elon Musk, you know, who nobody elected, who's not an official member of the federal government, or at least of Trump's cabinet, is coming in and just slashing all of these departments and agencies, and I think a lot of people, including Republican voters, are very offended by that.

- Just take it back to the local angle of whether we need an inspector general to do the same thing.

I recently did a story about the state's auditors, the Office of the Auditor General and the Office of the Internal Auditor, which was news to me that they're two different things.

- [Jim] I had no idea.

- But, yeah, thank you.

(Antonia chuckles) - [Jim] I've been here 40 years.

I had no idea.

- That makes me feel better, but one thing that stood out to me in that story is that neither of those are truly independent, right?

Because you've got one that's housed in the general assembly, controlled by them, one that is under the governor's office, and therefore, their budget, their staff, everything is within the governor's office.

So that, obviously, even though they are doing what an inspector general could or should be doing, there's always be the question of independence, and I don't know.

I think the question I have about the inspector general now is how do you make sure that's a truly independent position?

- Is it chosen?

Like, who chooses?

- Yeah.

- And, you know, is somebody?

You know, going back to what you said, I think a lot of people who voted for Trump have not heard a lot about what he's doing about inflation.

Eggs is a whole different thing.

They use the price of eggs as the berth.

- Well, the eggs are down now.

They're about three bucks.

- Well, they are down.

They are down now, but inflation costs and immigration, and he is doing, I mean, the coming across the border, but I think a lot of this, I thought it was a little disingenuous 'cause Trump said, "I don't know anything about Project 2025."

This is the playbook.

The Republicans have played the long game to get Project 2025 instituted for years, and that's what you're seeing a lot of.

- Well, remember, President Trump is coming in and having to fix four years of Biden's mess from immigration to the economy, and what we've seen on immigration alone is, within six weeks, he brought down illegal crossings by 98%.

Of course, he's instituting terrorism and trying to course-correct when it comes to the economy, but, again, he's only been in office for about two months now, but he's been doing a lot of great things and we just gotta wait a little, and he's been honest with the American people.

He has said, you know, there's going to be a time where there's going to be, you know, a little discomfort, but we're course-correcting after the four years of, you know, Biden's disastrous administration.

- Just a quick response before we get to outrages.

- Well, I guess I would say the fact that he's been in office for only two months is remarkable given how quickly his approval rating has gone down.

Usually, presidents enjoy a honeymoon period in the first few months of their tenure.

Trump has not enjoyed a honeymoon period, and if his approval ratings continue to go down at the rate that they have been going down, which they won't because he has a base that won't leave him, things could be difficult for him.

- Okay.

Let's do outrageous and/or kudos.

Antonia, let's keep it with you.

- So my outrage came from this week from a story that my coworker Katie Mulvaney did about Willie Washington, who died at the ACI, and it took over a year for his family to get an autopsy report and find out how he had died to get any answers on that, and that is the outrageous part.

There are questions about, you know, was he neglected?

He had the flu.

He was a fairly young man.

So there are questions about whether there maybe was some negligence there.

I don't know the answer to that, but the fact that they had to wait that long to find out how a loved one died is insane.

- [Jim] Was there any explanation as to the delay?

- Nope.

- [Jim] Yeah, all right.

Jesus?

- I wanna give kudos to President Trump for bringing back the astronauts that were stuck in the International Space Station for nine months.

He tapped Elon Musk to help and now they're back.

- Can you imagine, like, you say to your family, "Okay, I'm gonna be up for a week.

I'll see you next week."

I heard someone, like, missed their high school graduation, right?

Their kid's graduation.

- Nine months.

Yeah.

They were supposed to be up there for 10 days.

- And how do they stock it for that long?

I always wondered with food and all of that.

I mean, did they have, like, there are a lot of questions that I have about that, but it's nice to be back.

Adam, what do you have?

- My kudos are to the receivers of the Providence Place mall who decided to revoke the lifetime ban of the former denizens of the secret mall apartment.

- Right?

- And they're showing that new documentary in the mall now.

I mean, in terms of gaining good publicity for the mall, which has fallen on hard times, these are good strategies.

- Were you here when that happened?

- No.

- No, with the mall?

I was here and I remember.

How did they find it and how did they go undetected for all those years?

You would've loved to report that story.

- Oh, I remember when it happened.

Yeah.

- Oh, yeah?

- It's one of my favorite Providence stories of all time, although I gotta say I am getting a little tired of hearing about it with all the mall publicity.

That's me.

- Yeah, well, the guys, well, I think they've jumped on it, like, "Hey, if we're gonna be welcome back, we're gonna have the screening at the IMAX, and then we're gonna, you know."

- I'm getting a little mall apartment fatigue.

- All right.

Either way.

All right, folks.

That is our show for this week.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Jesus, nice to see you back, Adam and Antonia.

Folks, we appreciate your watching this show.

We are heading into the heart of the general assembly session, so a lot going on, of course.

Always a lot going on nationally.

If you don't catch us Friday at seven or Sunday at noon, we archive all of our shows at ripbs.org/lively.

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We hope you have a great week, and join us back here next week as "A Lively Experiment" continues.

Have a great weekend.

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- Hi.

I'm John Hazen White, Jr. For over 30 years, "A Lively Experiment" has provided insight and analysis of the political issues that face Rhode Islanders.

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