- [Jim] Coming up on this week's "A Lively Experiment".

Governor McKee makes it official, he's running for a second full term.

And the latest coming out of Washington as President Trump addresses Congress and faces some setbacks in court.

- [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 in Rhode Island PBS.

- Joining us on the panel, Harrison Tuttle, president of the Black Lives Matter, Rhode Island Political Action Committee.

Ken Block, political contributor and founder of Watchdog RI and Republican strategist Lisa Pelosi.

Hello and welcome to this week's Lively, I'm Jim Hummel.

18 months from now, voters will go to the polls to decide which candidate on the primary ballot make it to the November elections.

Governor Dan McKee announced this week, he intends to be on that ballot.

And while an incumbent has many advantages in an election cycle, the downside also is a record to defend, which in McKee's case is a mixed report card.

Lisa, let me begin with you.

I kind of missed the days of the balloons in the podium and Charlie Bakst asking questions.

Now, it's kind of a softer release by video.

- Yeah, and this was so early in the election cycle.

We just came off of a bruising presidential election a few months ago, and I don't think the general public was really looking at Governor McKee whether he was gonna run or not.

But I think he needed to really address some of the rumors that were going around that he wasn't going to run for a number of reasons.

You wanna make sure your donors are with you and they're not going to someplace else.

You wanna make sure you're retaining and attracting staff.

You know, that people aren't thinking jumping ship right now.

So he needed to do it.

So I looked at the announcement, not for targeting the general public, but more targeting the people up at the general assembly.

- I think part of it, the timing was, it was four years to the day since he...

It's hard to believe four years and five years ago this week we were talking about the pandemic, but four years ago, since he was governor, so since he became governor from Lieutenant Governor.

So maybe that was part of it.

- Right.

And it was a missed opportunity because if you're going to go ahead and do this, then why not have an event that day or at least the next day?

- Right.

- You know, and build some momentum going forward just to remind the public.

So I think it was a missed opportunity on his part just to drop the video and then move on.

- What'd you think, Harrison?

- I didn't feel nearly enough that the governor sold his own accomplishments.

During the announcement, during the interviews that he gave, there was a lot of conversation about the Washington Bridge, of course, and a lot of conversation about getting out of the pandemic.

But still, Rhode Islanders financially are in a terrible situation right now.

Our state is in a budget crisis and that there's a budget that is looming that the governor will sign before he runs for reelection campaigns that may be against the Speaker of the house.

So, not nearly a convincing enough report card to Rhode Islanders about why you should have faith in him over a potential candidate in Helena Foulkes.

- I thought it was pretty cowardly for him to not have a press conference and tackle the issues.

The issues that are gonna matter when we get to the election are gonna be the bridge.

It's going to be the budget, it's going to be RI Bridges and Uhep and the problems that were there.

We've had some massive failures of government under Governor McKee, and I think that he very purposely wanted to not have any of those questions launched at him as he announced his reelection campaign.

So will he be able to duck those issues for the next year and a half?

I don't think he will, and I do think they'll ultimately hurt him badly.

- You know, Ken, polls are tough to read because, you know, it's the job approval rating.

I'm not sure that always reflects what's going on, but I wonder whether the cumulative effect of some of what's going on with Governor McKee the last four years is starting to catch up with him.

Because right off the bat, he had issues with his chief of staff and then there was the ILO contract.

And it just seems like every couple of months there's a pretty big thing to have to deal with.

- I'm fairly fond of saying that Governor McKee is making Governor Chafee look good.

(Lisa laughs) - There you go.

- Yeah.

- So the path, Lisa, if we go to look at the election, it looks like Helena Buonanno Foulkes is gonna be in.

And I wonder, so she's got a little gum on her shoe as some politicians have liked to say in the past with CVS, but I wonder what her path is.

Is it as much, "Look, I'm a better leader than McKee."

How does she set herself apart?

- She has to tell us why she would be a better governor.

Because when a governor, an incumbent governor is running for reelection, he's saying, "Gimme four more years so I can finish the job."

She has to say why she needs to be the person doing the job instead.

So that, you know, I think that's gonna be her main conversation right now.

But you know, Governor Almond used to tell me, "Don't worry about my approval ratings, always look at the question, the direction that the state's going."

And we saw what that AFL-CIO report that only 29% of the folks polled said that state was going in the right direction.

So I think right now, McKee is very vulnerable, and I think he will be challenged not only by her, but I do see the speaker moving forward and running against him.

- Most of the things that we're going to see over the course of the next 18 months is going to be determined by what's going on in the federal government cuts to potential programs that will have to be addressed and require strong leadership from the governor.

Now, so I'm not saying that Governor Dan McKee doesn't have an opportunity to take advantage of an unfortunate situation, but it's gonna require real leadership and it's gonna require that one of his primary goals, which is raising income for Rhode Islanders, that that comes true.

- Remember that in the big, a couple years ago, "I'm gonna raise income" And nobody knew what the metric was gonna be and whether we've ever been able to figure that out.

Joe Shekarchi is the wild card here, and I think if McKee for some reason, look, he's in his mid seventies now, he'd be 80 when he got out.

I wonder, Lisa, he's, you know, Joe Shekarchi's sitting on $3 million.

- Yeah.

- He's got the most money of anybody in this state.

Even Jack White, Jack White, Jack Reed, and Sheldon White House.

Where do you think he fits into this calculus?

- I think he fits in very strongly because he has strong name recognition for somebody, you know, from the General Assembly statewide to do that.

Obviously he has the money.

He has the issues.

He's been out there on housing, which is one of the main issues of Rhode Islanders for years now, you know, banging away and trying to do his part on it.

So as much as he said, "I'm not going to run if Governor McKee is going to run."

I do see him waiting in the wings.

I see Governor McKee not wanting to be a lame duck, so that's why he needed to make this announcement too.

So let's get through this general assembly session in the summer, and let's see where we are in the fall.

- [Jim] Shekarchi.

- I think it's a hard lift to go from being speaker to being governor, if for no other reason in that the speaker literally is the status quo in the state.

The speaker's the most politically powerful person there is.

So all of the problems that McKee has by extension, also Shekarchi has.

So if we're looking for change, change is not best represented from the speaker because the speaker is really the status quo here.

- Just as you were saying that, I was remembering back to one of your runs, I think for governor and what was your phrase?

Because we'll change Rhode Island?

What was your?

You wanted to.

- So we wanted to fix Rhode Island.

- We wanna fix Rhode Island.

Ken, you realized after all these years, Rhode Island doesn't wanna be fixed, right?

- Well, the entrenched power structure that's there in the special interest clearly run the state.

The problem is, what they get and what they ask for and what happens, sets us up for big problems, and we need a better balance than we have right now.

- The other thing is Republicans have done great in the past.

You know, Governor Almond, eight years, Governor Carcieri eight years, Governor DiPrete was six years, and we haven't seen that for so long.

Partially because of the national, but you wonder who's gonna come up from the Republican party this go run.

I mean, Ashley Kalus has pretty much self-funded her.

- Right, and she was a name from nowhere too.

So I haven't been hearing any names coming forward.

Ken, I don't know if you've been hearing on the Republican side.

But I'm not hearing any names going forward.

The only way I see a Republican winning governor either next year or four years down the road is in a three-way split.

A three three-way split, right?

- [Jim] Right, if you had an independent and the Republican and the Democrat.

- Right.

Because I can't see one-on-one Democrat versus Republican with the way the voters are in the state.

A Republican getting enough votes.

- Okay.

Every week, a lot going on in Washington.

It's interesting, just within the last 24 hours we talked about Judge McConnell here in Providence has issued his ruling that they have to back off on some of the federal firings.

And they've also, Harris, lemme start with you on this.

President Trump yesterday said that Elon Musk, although he's going in there and looking at a lot of what's going on with DOGE, that it's now the cabinet members who should be making the cut.

So it sounds like a little bit of softening, but I think it's been whiplash for a lot of us the last six weeks.

Every time you pick up your phone, another outrageous thing is coming, so.

- Steve Bannon had an interview a couple of years ago and he mentioned how one of the Trump's presidency strategies was to flood the media to say that, if I had three stories that two of them would go through and one of them would be covered.

I think that's what we're seeing here effectively right now.

People are overwhelmed, overstimulated, and on the burden of a economic crisis and depression in this country.

I don't know if anybody had checked the markets over the last couple of days.

And so I think right now we're in a position of extreme danger, especially here in Rhode Island, as we have many individuals who are still struggling to get by and will continue to struggle to get by as we have the second largest chronic homeless rate in the entire country.

- And Rhode Island relies so heavily on the federal funding and especially Medicaid.

Where do you begin?

- So yeah, it's hard to know where to begin.

As somebody who, as part of my professional experience has done waste and fraud work, it hurts me to see DOGE rush out the results, the way they're being rushed out right now.

It's impossible to do a good thorough job of analyzing and not even understanding the rules and regulations at play for the different federal programs.

You can't do a waste and fraud analysis and produce results in a matter of mere weeks for one program, let alone dozens of programs like what's been happening right now.

- So it's the hacksaw approach.

- So, well it's, yeah, I mean, but I think it's much more political theater than any real serious effort to identify things.

And I think it hurts the whole...

It hurts the concept of actually doing waste and fraud work, 'cause that's not what's happening here right now.

We desperately need it.

I don't think anybody would argue that there is waste and fraud throughout federal programs.

But to find it and eliminate it and to do so correctly requires months and months of lead time and hard work.

And that's not what this is.

And this is strictly political.

And you know, it's hard for everybody.

I mean, government via using better language, mess around and find out as opposed to putting a different word up front there.

It's a hard way to govern.

It's not a great way to do it.

Chaos is not a great look for government.

- Yeah, and I think the visual too of the scalpel that he wants to use now instead of the chainsaw that we saw Elon Musk, you know, a couple of weeks ago, that you have to realize that you need to.

Like what you said, you need to go in and really look at it.

It's almost like zero sum budgeting.

You really gotta do all the hard work and all the time that goes with it, instead of that big slash across the board.

So when I heard last night that President Trump wants the cabinet, his secretaries to do it.

They're all what?

Two months into it, how do they know who their personnel is?

So they're gonna be relying- - They don't.

- On their staff for support.

- But they're the potential scapegoats.

- True.

- Exactly.

- True.

And the other thing, when you brought up Steve Bannon's name, if you remember the first time, the first Trump administration, Steve Bannon was so much in the news that Donald Trump didn't like that the focus wasn't on him anymore, and then he got rid of Steve Bannon.

So the focus has been on Elon Musk for so many weeks now, I'm just waiting for him to get pushed aside.

- I'm surprised he's lasted as long as he has.

I mean, because all the Democrats were like, "Oh, it's President Musk and Vice President Trump."

And you know, that gets under his skin.

Ken, I saw you posting a little bit about tariffs, and we could do a whole show on tariffs.

But this affects your business.

You also have a business, tell me about that a little bit.

- Yeah, so my traffic signal manufacturing business uses lots of different aluminum components.

And in the first Trump administration, the 25% aluminum tariffs resulted in about a 40% increase in my raw materials costs.

- [Jim] Wow.

- Because all the middlemen who have to pay the tariffs add onto the additional price.

- [Jim] Everybody needs a cut.

- They're taking their piece of it too.

And so, it's really harmful, it's really bad economic policy.

I am actually relieved that the stock market reacted the way that it did, because that was about the only way that we were going to see this particular direction that our government is taking us in.

Maybe ease off and maybe reverse.

- [Jim] Because Trump pays attention to the stock market a lot.

- Even the very conservative Wall Street Journal said it was one of the dumbest trade wars in history.

- Yeah.

- With our allies, right?

- With our allies, exactly.

- Yeah, what concerns you as you look in the weeks and the months ahead?

- Well, I think you could look at it through a national position.

You see kind of the dismantling of an administrative state here at a federal level, that creates multiple issues moving forward for people to have a quality of life, whether that's through their health, whether that's through their education or housing.

One of the difficulties that we have here, moving forward is that the state that we live in, of course the city state is going to be a key state when it comes to the different services that get cut.

And so, I'm particularly worried about our state through a national lens as to the healthcare that we receive, the federal reimbursements that we get.

That's why I believe that we are seeing the court case happen here in Rhode Island because this is the battleground to see if this new Trump era is going to be able to be successful.

And what effects does that have on the citizens here in Rhode Island.

- I also wonder, Lisa, we look the Republican party that you had a part of and, and worked with John Chafee and Lincoln Almond all those years, a lot different than now.

But where are the old line Republicans in the Senate now?

Why aren't they standing up and saying something?

- They're retiring.

I mean, look at Mitch McConnell, you know.

- Well, Chuck Grassley's still hanging out though.

Right?

- And they're stepping out.

You know, it just seems that Donald Trump has been wielding so much power, that the threat that if you don't follow what I want you to do, we're gonna primary you and you're not going to win.

So we need people with more courage to stand up for what they believe in.

And if it means that they can't keep their office and then that, so be it.

But you only give power.

Donald Trump has power because you give it to him.

And the Republicans right now are giving him the power.

- Yeah.

- The checks and balances aren't there.

- Yeah, we're also seeing big money enter politics.

We saw Donald Trump during his State of the Union discuss how the United States controls the Panama Canal.

That was bought by a US company, BlackRock, which owns a majority of this country.

I'm not lying.

And so what we're seeing are the oligarchs, tech oligarchs, the wealthy, the 1% in our state control everything that we're doing.

Musk is a mascot to that.

But there are other oligarchs that are impacting right now, and they donated to Donald Trump's campaign.

That is what he cares about.

He cares about making sure that his friends are doing well and anyone else is going to have to work for them in order for them to make that profit they're looking for, yeah.

- All right, Ken did an interesting project, what a lot of reporters have done over the years, trying to get public records from local cities and towns.

I remember Tracy Breton, when she worked for "The Journal", she had a classic brown university that would go to each town clerk and they'd say, "I want this."

And to see what the access was.

So briefly set the table on what your project was and why you were asking for information.

- Yeah.

So this one is, should have been simple.

What I wanted from every community in the state was there a document called an actuarial valuation for something called OPEB.

OPEB is retiree medical benefits, the cost of those medical benefits.

And this is a report that every community has to produce by law, at least every other year.

So I just wanted the reports for the last 10 years, and I put out an open records request to most of our cities and towns.

A few had these documents on their websites, most didn't.

And I wanted to go through the exercise of seeing how the communities responded to these open records requests.

And then I wanted to, you know, maybe most people wouldn't wanna do this, but I wanted to read the reports and see what I could figure out comparing how every Rhode Island community did.

And from an open records perspective, we were generally pretty good.

Most of the communities got back to me within 10 or 12 days.

Bristol tried to charge me for an electronic document, 10 cents per page, for an electronic document.

- For pushing a button.

- For pushing a button.

I was able to convince their lawyers that wasn't really what the law was about.

And they agreed.

Pawtucket still hasn't responded to my request.

From day one they were telling me that they haven't looked at it, they still haven't looked at it.

And they're putting me all the way out to 30 days.

- But you have 10 days initially.

- Yeah.

- And we deal with this all the time as reporters, if it's really complex and a lot of documents, an extra 20, so 30 business days.

But that's passed already.

- Almost.

- In Pawtucket.

- we're almost there, we're not quite- - But they said they haven't even looked at it.

- Right.

Every time they extended, I've received an original letter and then two extensions and the extensions both said, "We still haven't looked at it."

- So what does it tell you about how the locality is?

Do they need more training?

Is it deny, and then the burdens on you to try to get the information?

What is it?

- Well, because every other community was responded in a far better and more responsive way, I don't believe that Pawtucket is likely to be buried under requests that everybody else isn't.

So I don't really understand why that's happening the way it is.

We look, the whole process, the whole open records process, we deserve a better law than we have right now.

It shouldn't be this hard to get records.

And in fact, the presumption should be that records should be available, but we sort of have through decades of a precedent that's come out of different attorney general's offices, it's become more like, "Prove to us that you should be able to get this", as opposed to making it out there.

So there's a couple of things like that.

Oh, and by the way, Cumberland still hasn't fully responded also, so they're the two laggards.

- It's just kind of depressing.

It's our government, it's our money.

We're paying these people to obstruct us.

- Right.

And then it almost seems to be that any piece of paper before it leaves has to have a lawyer look at it.

So, I don't know if they're so, every municipality is so concerned about being sued down the road.

- [Jim] And that's changed like that wasn't that way five or 10 years ago.

- No.

- Now we're all lawyering up.

As long as we're talking about access to our government.

This is the first time we've had you on since the State of the State.

And for those who don't remember, you can set the table on you wanted to have a protest in the rotunda and it got ropped off.

- Yeah, we organized a group of people to ask the governor to declare public health state of emergency, expand shelters for folks who are unhoused.

- [Jim] And this is when the pallet shelters were still not open and there were a lot of people sleeping on the street, people dying on the street.

- Correct.

Correct.

And we put out a flyer on social media to have the rotunda be a space in which Rhode Island residents could use and exercise their first amendment.

And as we went to the State House and people began to gather, we saw Capitol Police explicitly say, I was not allowed to be in the rotunda.

And then that later turned into everyone was not allowed to be in the rotunda.

And we were confined to a particular area, the Bell room and the State House, which was away from everyone.

And we had our speaking program, we decided to march around the first floor.

And yet again, Capitol Police then stopped us, and said that we could no longer chant or use our voice around the State House, and we were only designated to one area.

An extremely embarrassing moment for the state of Rhode Island in which we have people who are upset about what's going on outside of the people's House.

Coming into the People's House and then being told what you could say, how you can say it.

It's very Trumpian.

- Yeah, and then Channel 12 had a great, they put in a public records request.

It turns out it was just minutes before you wanted to use the rotunda that they said, "Well, we're reserving it."

- It's just, it's a bad look.

- It sure was.

You know, and I just wonder what the discussion was in the governor's office, you know, to lead up to this.

And I think they must regret it now because look at the focus.

We're not talking about Governor McKee's speech, we're talking about what they did instead.

So it took the focus away from what the whole night was supposed to be.

- Government is for the people.

And in Rhode Island we're moving pretty far away from that these days.

- Yeah, let's do this.

We've got a couple other things to get to, but let's do outrages and or kudos.

Lisa, let's begin with you this week.

- So I'm not sure if this is an outrage or a sad outrage, but I'm thinking about the announcement that Roger Williams Zoo made a couple weeks ago that the elephants would be leaving the state.

- So sad.

- You know, because they're old, and they need to be put out to pasture.

And I thought, okay, the elephant has represented the Republican party for 150 years.

- (laughs) Oh it's a parallel.

- And here we are, you know, the sad state of the Republican party.

We don't have any general officers, we don't have any in our congressional delegation, we have one mayor, we have 10% of the general assembly are Republicans.

And then now on top of it, we're losing our elephants to another state.

- So sad.

- I know.

- Harrison, what do you got?

- Kudos to the Economic Progress Institute.

This week they had a press conference debunking the millionaire myth tax of them leaving the state to higher taxes.

That's a key common argument used against raising taxes of the wealthy of the 1% in our state.

And they did a pretty good job outlining that.

- Although I would argue that the one thing you don't hear about that is the estate tax.

I think you can argue about millionaires that they wouldn't leave.

The reason you're losing the Allen Hassenfelds, the John Hazen Whites and Tom Ryans is because that threshold is so low that they don't wanna have all their money.

So I agree with you on that.

I think that's a separate issue that's not being addressed.

- I'm going full outrage and it is a topic that I've hit before and it's Warwick.

Part of the results of what I found in looking at the OPEB data, was that the two years ago, Warwick, who had $400 million in unfunded retiree medical liabilities, opened up a trust fund.

So they started saving money for their OPEB liabilities.

They put $250,000 into this fund for two years.

And as a result of that, they used a much more favorable calculation for what their liabilities were.

So they saved half a million dollars, and they removed &100,000,000 of liabilities.

They went from $400.

- On paper.

- On paper, right?

And the thing is, if they were saving money the way the actuaries said they had to, to save enough money to ultimately get fully funded, they needed to put $30 million a year into the fund.

They're putting 250,000.

So financial sleight of hand, right?

They're just waving at the idea and they're misusing the idea of a trust fund.

They're not putting money in, to help fund future things right now, this was a gimmick to magically erase a $100,000,000 in liabilities.

It's right there in the data that I looked at.

It's outrageous and it's wrong, and it's a very crystal clear example of how some of our municipal governance is so much more about hiding and ignoring the problems that face us as opposed to tackling them.

And the biggest problem we have isn't taxation.

The biggest problem we have is this kind of governance at the local level, which time and time and time again just kills us.

And Warwick is leading the charge yet again in what I consider to be an extraordinarily outrageous abuse.

- But I think Ken, there's also a shoot the messenger mentality, because you've been outspoken down there, Rob Cody of course who like pushes everybody's buttons.

At some point it's just like, "Oh, there's that guy standing up again."

He sounded the clarion call, and I did a story for "The Journal" in "The Humble Report" last year about they passed a $350 million bond for the two new high schools that it's not gonna come anywhere close, because construction costs have gone up in inflation.

And now should you go back?

Rob Cody was talking this about a year and a half ago, nobody was listening to him.

- Look, decades ago it was the 6% compounding COLAs that Cianci did that everybody knew was a bad thing.

A lot of the people who were part of that are gone now.

And now Providence is saddled with billions of dollars of liabilities because of that decision.

Warwick is doing the same thing right now.

They are as aggressively kicking the can down the road as was done in Providence long ago.

In Providence, the long liabilities of $20,000 per person in Warwick to $12,000 per person.

It's really unsupportable.

- All right, something to keep track of folks.

It is a quick show.

That's all the time we have this week.

Ken, good to see you, Lisa, nice to have you back.

And Harrison.

Finally, this week we wanna introduce you to one of our chief content officers, Sally Isley, who is heading up the project we told you about last week "Breaking Point", a joint effort by Rhode Island PBS, and the Publix Radio, that takes a deep dive into the issues surrounding the Washington Bridge.

- "Breaking point: The Washington Bridge" is our most ambitious journalism collaboration to date.

We are looking at every angle of the story that has been with us since the bridge was closed down in December of 2023.

This is a business story.

It is a political story.

It is a money story, it's a transportation safety story, and above else, it's a human story.

Because at the end of the day, this is a story that has dramatically affected daily life in Rhode Island.

We have our entire content team in one way or another, involved in the conceptualization and the reporting and the production for this project.

We're gonna be reporting this story out, on every platform at our disposal.

Online, on the radio, on television, through our local programs.

We already have a robust digital page built out, rhodeislandpbs.org, ripbs.org/breakingpoint where you can find out more about the project and how you could become involved.

- As Sally mentioned, we want to hear from you.

Please send us your stories and ask your questions at ripbs.org/breakingpoint, or scan the QR code at the bottom of your screen.

We appreciate you watching Lively.

We hope you can come back here next week and join us for all the very latest as "A Lively Experiment" continues.

Have a great weekend.

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