- [Jim] This week on "A Lively Experiment," the attorney general settles a lawsuit against the company that used contaminated soil in a major construction project.

And an interview with Rhode Island's junior senator about the first months of the Trump Administration.

- [Narrator] "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 on the panel, Weayonnoh Nelson-Davies, executive director of the Economic Progress Institute; political contributor and founder of Watchdog RI, Ken Block; and Ian Donnis, political reporter for The Public's Radio.

Hello and welcome to "Lively."

I'm Jim Hummel, and we appreciate you spending part of your weekend with us.

Attorney General Peter Neronha announced the financial settlement Wednesday with a Massachusetts-based company named Barletta Heavy Division for bringing in contaminated soil during the reconstruction of the 6/10 connector several years ago.

The caveat?

$10 million will go to dental care for children living around the Olneyville neighborhood, where the dumping occurred.

So Ian, this was breaking news.

We kind of knew this was percolating.

The twist was this whole dental care.

So I'm sure there's a lot of people who are gonna be talking about the budget momentarily.

That $10 million maybe Joe Shekarchi wanted to get his hands on for the budget gap.

But it's not going there, so.

- Yeah, this case has been going on for many years.

And arguably, we have a lot of social need in Rhode Island, dental care for children being one of those.

If a company is compelled to enter into a large dollar settlement such as this, you know, maybe that's a good outcome to direct money for a social need that can benefit low and moderate-income children in a poor part of Providence.

- And appears he's allowed to do this because it's a separate entity going on, or a separate issue.

- Yeah, I mean, it seems a little unconventional in some respects, but, you know, how else would the money be used?

I mean, helping to fill this need, which has been documented.

The journal had a story about a year or so ago about the sorry dental condition of a lot of children in Rhode Island.

So there's a clear need for this.

- It's a little weird to me.

A legal settlement, especially dealing with transportation issues, you would think the money might go to offset the cost of the bridge, you know, or something along those lines.

It strikes me wrong that a legal settlement like this is being directed to a nonprofit and, you know, being dispersed in a really different way.

I think if the fine is there, it should be used within the framework of what the problem was in the first place, which is transportation.

- So fun fact, the summer after my first year of law school, I interned with Steve Fischberg from the Rhode Island Legal Services, who did environmental justice work for many years.

So the connection between environmental, racial, and economic justice is something I understand deeply.

I am happy that some of the settlement money is going towards Olneyville and the Silver Lake communities because black and brown communities suffer when it comes to pollution.

So I'm happy that it's directed towards that.

However, I think the Rhode Island Foundation should put together the advisory committee from people from that community to direct where this money should go to addressing the needs of children.

- So work with them instead of telling them, "We're gonna do this."

- I think so.

I think that's how you have to do it.

That's the whole point of environmental justice cases.

- I'd be remiss if we didn't have you on.

You've been keeping an eye on the Washington Bridge.

We've been in a bit of a lull.

I mean, well, not a total lull, but in terms of talking about this, week to week.

But bids are supposedly gonna be coming out in June.

Do you- - Yeah, I haven't heard anything further about, you know, who's bidding or, you know, how that's all gonna go.

I do believe that we're going to learn that it's going to take many years to replace the bridge.

Although, I have to say, today, I crossed the bridge at 7:15, and, you know, there was no traffic at all.

So yay for today, but, you know, you just don't know when you cross that bridge if it's gonna take you 15 minutes or an hour and 15 minutes.

- We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

- [Ken] Exactly.

- So the bids, too, also, Ian, coming out, we don't know.

I guess my fear is you get down to two companies, and they have to compete to make sure they get it.

But you wonder how big the price is gonna be, and the months and months go on, and whether it's gonna be again sticker shock for the state.

We don't know until the bids come out.

- Yeah, I would agree with Ken.

I think the good news is that traveling on the bridge has gotten a lot better.

I use the bridge fairly frequently, and there are, you know, some slight delays, but it's really not bad outside of intense rush hour.

But you're right, Jim, there has been a lull.

And with the identification of the finalist expected in June and the cost, this could be sticker shock for the public.

There could be more questions and more recriminations if it takes longer than expected.

Speaker Shekarchi had said some time ago that he thought this was gonna take longer rather than a shorter amount of time to resolve.

And certainly, we're gonna hear more about this as a campaign issue in the next race for governor.

- Okay, we are less than a month from the adjournment, hopefully, fingers crossed, of the attorney general.

People can get back to getting some sleep.

We know a lot of people have been up at the State House the last couple of weeks.

The budget is gonna be the big topic.

And now we're hearing that potentially they're gonna set the budget and then maybe come back for an off-session, maybe in October, to talk about this.

Weayonnoh, you've been pretty clear.

EPI has been advocating for what we would call tax the wealthy, tax the upper 1%.

Do you get any sense, being up there, that you're getting any traction with that argument?

I know it's gotten a lot of press, but you need to convince the leadership on this.

- Right.

So this year, for the first time in the three years I've been on this issue, we've been getting movement.

You know, the speaker is saying in the public that he may have to consider it.

That's the first time we've heard him say this.

The governor wants some good reasons why.

And, you know, I actually did a tweet and told him, "Well, childcare and healthcare and a budget deficit and a unstable federal government, to me, are good reasons why you have to think of revenue."

And I have to say this.

A lot of time people say we have a spending problem because our spending increased by 40% in the last few years.

My take on this is this: We have a priority problem.

The reason we went up spending 40% was because we've had unmet need.

We've had this investment for decades in the state of Rhode Island.

This investment in basic assistance, childcare, education, infrastructure.

And so you spend to address those unmet needs, and we use general revenue that increased on the state, including the temporary federal aid.

So anytime I hear spending problem, it gives me financial guru vibes that tell poor people, if you stop drinking coffee or save, you will get rich.

That is not what really happens.

You need income as well.

And so we have to address revenue.

And to shield the wealthy from being a part of the budget solution doesn't make financial and policy sense.

- Yeah, I mean, the real problem is not so much the social safety net programs.

The problem is we waste tremendous sums of money.

We built UHIP/RIBridges at a cost that comes really close to a billion dollars, and we knew from day one, a decade ago, that the project was in trouble, the system wasn't well built.

It's had nothing but problems.

And now Governor McKee has suggested that he has to throw it away and rebid a new system, which will probably cost another half a billion plus, if you're gonna replace everything.

That's money flushed down the toilet, and we can ill afford that.

The Washington Bridge disintegrated in front of our eyes.

And now we're gonna be on the hook for, I'm guessing, close to a billion dollars to replace it.

We cannot afford to make those kinds of errors.

And my problem with the whole thing is that Rhode Island is small, and we have neighbors who are close.

We can't set tax policy outside of what we're competing with regionally and also nationally.

We have seen some of Rhode Island's wealthiest citizens change their place of residence, and they're no longer residents of Rhode Island.

So tax policy matters.

And really, we can't solve the problems, we can't close a $4 billion jump over four years on the backs of the top 1%.

They don't make much money, right?

So we have to put onto the table cuts as well as increases in revenue.

And Speaker Shekarchi so far has said there won't be any cuts.

I don't see how you make that math work.

- I'll get back to you in just a second.

Let me bring Ian in here, because I have a specific question for you.

- We hear a lot about taxes.

I think a case can be made that the single best thing to improve Rhode Island's economy and bring more business here is to raise the quality of public schools.

Unfortunately, the state has been fiddling around with that for about a quarter century and made meager progress.

To come back to the tax issue, I think it's understandable that legislative leaders have been reluctant to raise taxes.

It was 15 years ago when then-Governor Don Carcieri signed off on lowering the top tax rate from 9.9% to 5.9%.

That has not single handedly improved Rhode Island's economy.

On the other hand, I think, to Ken's point, we are small.

It has been a struggle to improve Rhode Island's economy for many decades.

We see how we're back in a new era of persistent budget deficits.

So I think it's right that legislative leaders are treading very cautiously on this issue.

- So EPI put out a position paper widely spread, that you say that there's no evidence that if you tax that upper echelon, that they're gonna walk.

So talk about that, and then I wanna get Ken's reaction to that.

- Right, because I think the prediction that the wealthy will leave the state is something that has been used to threaten us from not doing what we need to do with revenue.

And so we wanted to look into this.

What does history show us?

'Cause we can predict different scenarios, but does the record show or does the data show that this happened?

In every other state in the US, including California and Jersey, it doesn't show that migration is at a place where droves of wealthy will leave a state because of tax.

It shows that there is some minimal out-migration, but there's also in-migration.

What I think is most significant to this argument is the revenue piece.

It has a prediction that we will raise the revenue we say we'll raise, something that has happened before.

Yes, every state that said, "We will raise X amount of revenue," have raised that or have exceeded that.

And so Rhode Island needs to know, if a few millionaires leave the city of Rhode Island, will we still get in-migration, one, and will we raise revenue?

The data shows that that will happen.

- So next year we run into a problem.

You can only go to that well so many times.

So you do the tax, and it'll be built in for next year.

But if you're not doing the spending cuts, to your point, where are you a year, two years, three years, four years out?

- The reality is, our budget exploded by 40% during COVID.

We haven't done anything to reduce some of that spending, and- - Well, we thought the money was gonna flush out 'cause it was federal money, but the levels stayed.

You know, we asked Governor McKee during the debate, I think you were in that debate, what do you think it's gonna be?

And he says, "Oh, it's gonna come back down to 11 billion."

It was still 13 billion.

- Correct.

So when I say some of Rhode Island's wealthiest have left the state, they have.

And I know many business owners who leave the state once they have wrapped up their business, right?

So there is definitely outflow of people who are vested, who invested in the state, who were tremendous benefactors of the state.

They're no longer residents here, and that it's incontrovertible that that's happened.

You know, for myself, as my kids are just about out of college now, we have a very difficult decision to make.

Does it make sense to stay in Rhode Island, knowing that there's no end in sight to the need for more revenue?

And I don't wanna be the piggy bank, I don't wanna be the bank, the ATM machine for bad decisions made by politicians over the last 30 years.

But that's what I think I'm looking at, personally.

And we have to make some hard decisions, and we can't just tax our way out of the problems that we have.

We have to tackle those problems.

And part of it is, yeah, we hired I don't know how many new people as a result of the COVID money.

But now that the COVID money isn't paying for it, what are we going to do with that, right?

- Yeah, final word on this before we- - Yeah, and the point that Ken make about balancing the budget on the back of wealthy, that's exactly the point we are making.

We're trying to balance the budget on the back of the lowest-income Rhode Islanders and middle-income Rhode Islanders that are paying higher percentage at this point.

It doesn't make sense that, yes, we have and agree there's priorities that we need to set if we're gonna talk about spending cuts and not attack the young, vulnerable communities, but we're balancing our budget on the backs of the lowest-income Rhode Islanders that are paying 13% of their income.

Middle-income Rhode Islanders are paying 10% of the income.

And we're saying, "Oh, no, don't touch the wealthy, but let's keep balancing the budget on the back of the people who cannot afford it."

Does not make sense to us.

- You've had an interesting article.

I had totally forgotten the Access to Public Records Act.

It's been kind of under the reforms, which haven't happened for a good decade plus.

Went kind of down in a flaming mess last year.

It's back, and this week it was before committees.

Talking about reforms for us, people think this is a reporter thing.

It's everybody in the state who wants access to their government.

- Absolutely.

And public records are an important source for reporting, but it's ultimately the public's information.

That's why this matters.

John Marion from Common Cause, in an interview with me, pointed to how transit advocates in Providence have been trying to get details about crash data.

That's information of public interest, and they've been stymied in getting that.

That is one thing that would be addressed by this.

I think we've seen a general movement by the Governor's Office under Governor Raimondo and Governor McKee to cite more exceptions and to kind of slow walk the request for information from reporters.

And it really behooves the state to be more free in releasing this kind of information.

It is the public's information.

- The galling thing about that DOT, because that was an Amy Russo story all those years ago when she was with the journal, they didn't wanna release the information 'cause they was worried it would expose them to liability 'cause they weren't fixing the problem.

Hello?

Fix the problem, right?

- [Ian] 100%.

- You've had your own little experiment the last couple of months.

- Yeah.

I'm a big user and fan of open records, and over the years, I've done multiple statewide requests in different areas.

The most recent one, I found that while many communities were transparent and provided the information I asked for promptly, some used and they regularly, like Pawtucket, for example, they almost never replied to an open records request until the very last legal day in which they can do it.

I actually had the town of Bristol attempt to charge me for every page in an electronic PDF document, right?

So there are communities that use the open records laws as they exist right now to try to penalize the people who are asking for information.

It's utterly wrong.

And it's one of the things that I don't think the bills are really directly addressing the practical challenges of using the open records law.

But, you know, the timelines in which to reply, the using charging to try to disincent people from making open records requests, it's really difficult.

And there is no simple way to make the request for every community across the state.

Every community does it differently.

In some websites, you almost can't find how to make an open records request, right?

So there's a lot that's broken with it.

And look, the government serves the people.

The people have a right, and they should have every ability to understand how government works, and part of understanding that is getting access to the data.

- I completely agree.

You know, we need reform.

I can't argue with anything.

To say we need reform, we need less cost, and we need them to step out of the way so people can have access to that.

- I thought last year, I wouldn't have called it a mistake, but there was so, it was like 30 or 40 different changes that everybody kind of got lost in the sauce, and said, "You know, we just can't deal with that this year."

Do you sense any traction this year, or is it just a lot of sound and fury up there?

- It's hard to say.

I mean, I think the Governor's Office and State Departments are still opposed to change.

One difference with this year's legislation is that it includes an effort to try and act against disruptive or bad faith records requests that are not in the public interest.

So whether that change has the dynamic, we'll have to see.

- Okay.

There's been a lot going on in Washington, DC.

We talk about it every week here in the first couple of months of the Trump administration.

Ian had a great interview with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse that ran on "Rhode Island PBS Weekly."

He talked about a variety of things about where the Democrats are in all of this and a little bit about Social Security and potential cuts.

Here's some of his interview with Senator Whitehouse.

- Do you and your Democratic colleagues bear part of the responsibility for not acting sooner to address?

Certainly, there is waste and fraud, but, you know, this has been an issue that has been present for a long time.

How come Democrats didn't seize the initiative in going after this?

- Well, I think, first of all, the waste, fraud, and abuse logo that the Trump regime is imposing on its campaign of destruction is essentially a fraud.

Perfect example: Social Security.

They claim that there's all this fraud in Social Security, that there are people who are collecting Social Security at 130, 140 years old.

The president repeatedly went to it during his big speech to Congress as if it were real.

- According to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old.

- [Congressperson] That's a lie.

- We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby.

- None of it is real.

It's not a Ponzi scheme.

The whole thing is strategically designed, I believe, to cause people to have second thoughts about Social Security, to derogate Social Security as a program, so that when they then put their, what I call them, the Muskrats, the little Muskrats that went into Social Security, to screw things up, when they screw things up so much that then there's an interruption in benefits, now you've got an interruption in benefits.

You've got a public, at least a large part of it, thinks, you know, maybe there's something wrong with Social Security.

You've got the perfect moment to make your move to privatize Social Security, to turn it over to the private equity guys and the tech bros. - And you can see Ian's entire interview at ripbs.org/weekly.

You covered a lot in that 10 minutes.

What else did you take away?

- One interesting thing was Senator Whitehouse acknowledged that in his view, Republicans are better at politics than Democrats.

- [Jim] (laughs) Wow.

- He thinks that the main failing of Democrats in losing the White House last year was not exhibiting enough fight on issues that matter the most to Americans.

I asked him, "Well, wasn't it a matter of Democrats being slow to respond on inflation, immigration, and President Biden's awful debate performance?"

But he is hopeful, looking to the midterm elections next year, that Democrats can muster more fight and use some of these arguments about the Trump administration's attempts to cut in a way that he says is not really effective or in the interest of the American public.

- [Jim] Ken.

- I know a lot about was and fraud, and what the DOGE folks found or thought they found in Social Security was a rank amateur mistake.

Databases that don't have a valid date of birth for somebody usually use a date of birth of 1900, 1850, something like that.

- [Jim] So that's what it was.

- That's what it was.

100%.

And folks who are in the business understand that and know it.

That DOGE didn't is really pretty outrageous.

For Social Security, I still am of the mind that I am not going to receive everything that I've been told that I'm supposed to get.

So we have a massive problem with Social Security in that there are fewer people putting in now for the number of people who are gonna be drawing out.

And the balance is going down, and our politicians have spent decades.

When the fix would've been fairly cheap 20, 30 years ago, now the fix has become a lot more expensive.

- [Jim] Hey, just like the Washington Bridge.

- Yeah.

Right, right, right.

So, you know, I mean, I could talk.

That one minute we saw here, I could give you 30 minutes of description on everything that I'm worried about here.

But the bottom line is I think that DOGE makes waste and fraud, they've given waste and fraud efforts a black eye with the amateur, rushed nature of what they did.

You can't do a quality job looking for waste and fraud in a week, and say, "Oh, we have all these findings."

Right?

That's all about media.

That's all about a splashy headline.

It has nothing to do with actually finding real waste.

- And a lot of those figures were inflated.

It turns out that they turned out that the decimal point had to move on a couple of them.

- Yeah.

- Right, and then what we're saying is they're using waste and fraud, but we're simply saying attack on entitlement programs, like Social Security, like Medicaid and SNAP that people need.

And so we know from the record and we know from the data that these programs are being used by the people who are benefiting from it.

And using the Muskrats, in the words of Shelton Whitehouse, to denigrate programs that we have put years in investing in is simply wrong.

And we really need to do due diligence to understand if there is waste and really go after the real waste, and for protecting the entitlement programs of people who need it.

- Early Thursday morning.

We're taping on a Friday.

Early Thursday morning, the House, by one vote, passed this so-called big, beautiful bill.

It has some other names the Democrats have called it.

Your thoughts about that.

And then it's gotta get through the Senate.

So it's not passed yet.

So people gotta remember, you know, it's a whole process here.

But what do you think as you see that bill?

'Cause I think a lot of people are still trying to sift through what's in the bill, 'cause a lot of it was done behind closed doors.

- Exactly.

You know, I don't see it as a beautiful bill at all.

I think it's a big, bad, ugly bill from the things that are in it.

So there are things we've been following.

In the little information we can get, we know Medicaid's gonna be cut.

We know millions of people in the US are gonna lose Medicaid if it goes through.

We know SNAP is gonna be cut.

We also know that those cuts are happening to give tax cuts to the wealthy.

So we're cutting waste and fraud, but we are increasing the deficit to create tax breaks for the wealthy.

And so that's a big concern for ours.

As far as the Senate, it's not over yet.

You know, this is one part of the reconciliation process.

The House has passed it.

The Senate has different views on what should be cut and at what level.

And so we don't think the bill coming out of the Senate is gonna mirror what is coming out of the House.

So then it has to go back and be reconciled.

Our best bet is if you slow down the process, that the House and Senate cannot agree, and this goes beyond July 4th, we may have a winning chance to get rid of this big, ugly bill.

- [Jim] Thoughts?

- Weayonnoh referred to the cut of SNAP.

That's a food assistance program.

I was working as a newspaper reporter in Massachusetts 30 years ago.

I did a story then on the worsening problem of hunger, even in a prosperous state like Massachusetts.

It's only gotten worse since then.

As Weayonnoh said, there would be cuts to healthcare.

That's another issue that many Americans struggle with.

And it's ironic that given the Trump administration's stated desire to cut government spending, that this bill would actually significantly increase the federal deficit.

- Nobody's talking about the federal debt.

I mean, they didn't talk about it during the campaign 'cause, you know, nobody wants to talk about it.

It's too big to tackle.

- So, you know, big fiscal conservatives for years have been talking about the deficit and how the deficit has to come down.

Everything is about the deficit.

And that's clearly not happening here.

It's going up.

It had went up under Trump one tremendously.

Now, part of that was due to COVID, but the bottom line here for me: It's a really bad look to cut the the social safety net and hand tax breaks to people who those tax breaks will not have a meaningful impact on their finances, right?

So food security is really important.

Really important.

And to take that away in any form is really bad.

- Okay.

Let's go to outrageous and/or kudos.

Mr. Donnis, let's begin with you this week.

- Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem was in the US Senate this week.

She was asked to define habeas corpus, which is a bedrock constitutional right.

She blew it.

She described it as the president's ability to deport people.

No.

She was corrected by New Hampshire senator Maggie Hassan, who explained that it is the ability to ask for review by a judge of what could be an illegal or unnecessary detention.

It's troubling, to say the least, if a federal official who's being shown in hype videos on social media, rounding up people for deportation, does not have an understanding of a fundamental constitutional right.

- That took you back to your first year of law school, didn't it?

(laughs) - It did.

- It did.

- What do you have, outrage or kudo?

- There's a lot to be outraged about in 2025 from my perspective.

This bill is one of it.

And then just the attack on the root of law and due process.

But I will give kudos to communities and organizations that are under attack, that are still hanging in there and doing what must be done.

So my, you know, word to them is hang in there, the fight is not yet over.

- Ken, you get the last minute.

- All right.

I don't know about you, but I've, over the last month, month and a half or so, my phone has been ringing far more often than it used to.

And they're all nuisance phone calls, right?

They're trying to sell me solar panels, trying to sell me insurance policies, scam efforts to raise money, you know, for fundraising for different things.

And it's gotten really bad.

And all these phone calls come with a fake phone number attached to them, right?

And enough's enough.

I think that the federal government has failed us in protecting us from this sort of just harassment.

And there are ways to deal with it, but nobody's tackled it in Congress.

We really need some relief from this.

At least I do, because I'm getting now between 5 and 10 calls a day.

It's really not right.

- But you're a smart guy.

But a lot of elderly people fall for it, and that's a lot of money down the tube.

- It's awful, the scams that are happening right now.

- Okay.

All right, folks.

It is a fast 30 minutes.

We appreciate you spending some time with us.

Ian and Ken and Weayonnoh, good to see you again.

You've got a busy couple of weeks ahead.

It's the end of the session.

We are heading into the home stretch, folks.

So stick with us next week.

We will be back with a full analysis of everything that's happened.

We hope you have a great Memorial Day Weekend.

And come back next week as "A Lively Experiment" continues.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] "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.