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

It's a wrap.

The gavel comes down on the 2025 session of the Rhode Island General Assembly.

And just days later, Governor McKee voices his concerns about the $14.5 billion budget.

- [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 for a reporter's round table, Providence Journal State House Reporter, Patrick Anderson, Nancy Lavin, Senior Reporter for the Rhode Island Current and Antonia Noori Farzan, Watchdog Reporter for the Providence Journal.

And welcome to this week's lively.

I'm Jim Hummel.

It is great to have you with us this week.

The House Finance Committee raised some eyebrows when it unveiled its version of next year's budget a couple of weeks ago.

It added money and included taxes to pay for it that Governor McKee did not put into his original proposal back in January.

And that drew a rebuke from the governor during a meeting with reporters on Wednesday.

He singled out things that he didn't like, but stopped short of breaking out his veto pen.

So Nancy, you and Patrick and I were all in that room.

Let's talk about how that all came about.

We each got a call from the governor's press secretary to come to this event.

It wasn't listed on his public schedule, and then he wanted to talk about the budget.

Little odd how it came together?

- A little odd, yes.

We, I think, guessed what it was about because it was about the time that he was gonna have to decide whether to sign a budget or not.

And maybe some of us were hoping to, that he wouldn't do a big budget signing ceremony out in the 100-degree weather on the front plaza of the State House, which was roasting.

But yeah, it was odd to do it with a half press conference, I guess you could call it.

It wasn't a full everyone can come press conference, and they were cryptic about what it was gonna be about.

The reason, I think, is that it really kind of kicked off, in a way, campaign season.

It really, when you got there, it was an official event that kind of was half a campaign event because that was really the undertone and the subtext of the whole thing is positioning the governor for a re-election campaign.

- When they said budget, you know, and they all told us don't text about this, don't tweet, whatever, don't publicize it.

When they said budget, did you think maybe veto?

- I don't know what I thought, but you know, I think at this point of the year, typically the governor would have, at least in my time as a reporter, already had the big pomp and circumstance, sometimes very toasty outside budget signing.

And in my previous reporting, having asked him for comments when the House Finance released the budget, when it got approved by the full House a couple weeks later, and not hearing anything back, I knew something was up.

I didn't necessarily know it was going to be a veto, but I knew that there was going to be some sort of critique of the budget.

- Yeah.

It's been interesting to see the session.

You've seen some disagreements between the speaker and the governor spilling into the public eye in the way you didn't in the past few years.

Not that they necessarily agreed on everything, but they kind of seem to not want to criticize each other and present more of a united front.

And from the beginning of the session, I mean, I remember when the governor did his state of the state, if you remember, he said we're going to put the assault weapons ban into the budget.

And the speaker, you know, next couple of days comes down and says, well, I don't really think that's legal.

And that was kind of interesting because you weren't really hearing stuff before.

And this was kind of the culmination of all of that, where they're kind of actually taking swings at each other.

- Yep, go ahead.

- Swings, but very passive aggressive swings.

I mean, in the past, you might have had a speaker and a governor really just be at odds and just go at each other and not mince words and just- - Gina and Nick Mattiello, right?

- Yeah, you don't have to go that far.

And some people have said that's kind of like, that they actually got along.

And that was actually partially for show and kind of like pro-wrestling kayfabe.

But they did the proper thing, and they said each other was doing something really bad, and it constantly went.

This is much more, well, they can raise taxes if they want, but this passive-aggressive attitude is kind of a new take on it, and the speaker doesn't directly really go back at the governor and we still don't know if he's running.

So there's this very odd kind of indirect quality to it.

- But I think given the temperament and past behavior of the governor and our current governor and current speaker, this is, as Antonia said, kind of the most we've publicly seen them disagree and take swipes at each other.

They each have said the other's version of the budget was the bad budget and their version was the good budget.

And this is all, you know, as Patrick said, underlying kind of a 2026 campaign where they could be running against each other.

- Because we don't have line item veto, it's an exercise in futility, but it does send a message.

And I asked the governor this directly, bring people back, put them in a hot chamber in July and make them vote again on it.

Maybe he thinks the downside, 'cause there were some things in this budget that clearly it wasn't all bad, but I wonder the message.

To me, it almost came across as, I want to make a statement, but I really don't want to go that far.

And I wonder how that plays with the electorate?

- Yeah, I wonder if that really wins people over.

I mean, 'cause he is making a good point.

There is a lot of kind of nickel and diming going on in this budget.

And I think that probably resonates with people, but just to say, I didn't sign it.

You know, I don't know if people really understand even what that means.

- Yeah, and I think, you know, he claims that we could have closed the deficit and had a balanced budget without doing these on what he says are unnecessary increases in gas taxes and health insurance fees.

However, if you look at the math of the things that he insists we still could have done and also were required to do, such as backfilling for higher than expected contracts with state troopers and corrections officers, education aid that was sort of underrepresented based on inaccurate student data, the math isn't quite mathing.

So I think part of, to me, part of the reason to not veto is you can make a claim and you are not forced to be proven incorrect.

- Yeah, it's for campaign ads.

So he can have ads saying that he was against the taxes and then doesn't have to face ads saying that he vetoed schools and doctors and healthcare and all the stuff that's in the budget that people are gonna support.

- What were you looking at down the stretch?

What particularly were you interested in?

- In the General Assembly, lots of things.

RIPTA funding I think is a big one.

And just last night, I think Patrick was there, they came out and said that they are gonna have to do service cuts.

And of course, they're threatening the beach bus, which is, maybe not lifeline service, but definitely a very popular thing this time of year.

And that's one thing that it seems like we're just gonna go through the exact same thing again next year, where RIPTA has the same exact deficit.

And maybe not the exact same amount, but the exact same problem where they threaten these cuts, maybe some that get a little help, but not enough to solve the problem in the long-term.

- There was an undercurrent of, there was aggravation.

They were supposed to do this big study that didn't come out in time.

RIPTA has just been the forgotten child for so many years.

When are they gonna sit down and make it a priority?

It almost, it's a band-aid approach every year.

Oh, we saved it.

Oh, we had COVID money.

At some point, you gotta look at structurally at what to do with the agency, right?

- Yeah, I mean, I think some of this is a philosophical debate about whether we expect, whether we see RIPTA as like every other sort of government agency, a revenue source that can be sort of financially solvent on its own, or whether it is a service that requires additional aid from our government to ensure that it happens.

And that's how other states like Massachusetts have viewed it, is the latter.

And we are still kind of maintaining, well, the reason why you have a deficit is you have, you know, operational bloat and you need to have this study and cut some things.

But that's not necessarily how other states have approached their public transit systems.

- Yeah, having a consultant do a study and then fixate on the study is just a deflection mechanism.

They're not doing an efficiency study of the Department of Transportation or the Department of Health, or any of the other state agencies.

- And Peter Alviti is the chairman of the board and he would rather build roads and bridges, right?

- Oh, he has specifically said not to fund RIPTA if it includes taking a cent out of his agency.

And the lawmakers referred to that when they shot down an amendment that would have put some extra money in RIPTA.

Yeah, politically it has just never been a priority for any Rhode Island governor that I can recall or really any statewide official.

And while that's the case, it's not going to receive much more funding and it's not gonna get investment that would ever grow ridership or make it like a bigger part of people's lives.

- Little bit of intrigue with the assault weapons ban down the stretch.

That was really the only major piece of legislation after the budget came out.

And to me, I kind of look at it this way, it left both sides unhappy.

So maybe it was a good bill, I don't know.

Maybe it was not a bad bill, maybe it wasn't a good bill 'cause everybody was upset.

I don't know, what did you think?

- I feel like kind of the theme of the session to me overall, particularly on the last night is like compromise that left both sides dissatisfied.

Assault weapons, certainly, you know, the legislation that passed bans sale.

And I guess if there was ever a place to manufacture them here, that would also be banned, but it does not ban possession, which is what gun safety advocates had hoped.

Of course, the gun rights side thinks it's still too far and unconstitutional.

And we saw the state GOP almost immediately after the legislation passed the issue, the series of emails and trying to use this as a sort of foundation to recruit candidates.

- It's a rallying cry, right?

- Yeah.

And maybe it's one that they need, because as we know, there has been a real shortage of even just candidates to run in state legislative races from the Republican side.

- What did you make of that down the stretch, how it played out?

- Well, I think it ends up being positive for Val Lawson, the Senate president.

I think it ended as well as it could have for her.

I mean, through the whole last month, after she became Senate president and cobbled together the coalition in the Senate and the votes to become president, the issue of the assault weapons ban was looming over her nascent presidency because the assumption was that she had made a deal with the Second Amendment supporting folks to kill it in exchange for the votes.

And she managed to find a way to not make everyone happy, but to avoid the suggestion that she made some kind of untoward deal that completely killed it- - But it watered the bill down.

- It watered the bill down to some extent, but I think in a way that is nuanced and that is gonna be tough to really get through to voters and that is not gonna really hit as hard as either a straight kill it or pass it in its original form.

And she managed to keep her coalition, her kind of odd coalition together in the Senate and not have it implode.

- She was the original sponsor of the bill and it shows when you're, I mean, I don't know if she was the majority leader, but when you become the Senate president, your role changes all of that.

- Yeah, and it kind of lets politicians have it both ways, 'cause on one hand, you know, they can tell they're more liberal supporters, we banned assault weapons with an asterisk, and they can also tell their more conservative constituents, well, we're not taking your guns away because it doesn't ban possession.

- Yeah, well, a lot of the Republicans have said, we had Joe LaRusso on sitting in your seat last week, said a lot of them are playing the long game.

There was a federal ban from '94 to 2004.

It's clear the stats have shown, the crime's gone up since that ban sunsetted.

Nobody challenged it constitutionally.

And now a lot of the conservatives think any of these, the magazine capacity or anything, once it reaches the Supreme Court, they're just waiting for a little bit of foundational law to get there.

- Yeah, and I think also the conservatives are correct in anticipating that this will come up again.

You know, the gun control supporters who didn't get everything they wanted are probably gonna be pushing in future years for a full ban.

- Yeah, it's interesting.

We talked last week a little bit about with the passing of Dominic Ruggerio, a lot has changed.

Two things, payday lending and the casino smoking.

Talk about that a little bit.

I mean, he was an ardent, and I always found this ironic.

He had cancer and he was still advocating to have some place to smoke out at Bally's.

But that's played out differently because he's not there this year.

- Right.

I mean, not lung cancer that we know of.

But yes, it was.

- All your parts of your body are connected last night checked, right?

Go ahead.

- And there is more smoking in the Statehouse than other indoors.

- That is true.

And a little bit of drinking, they might not admit to that.

- Other than a casino.

Sometimes it feels like a casino a little bit.

- I'll trade you this bill for this bill.

Go ahead.

- But yeah, it does show you what a difference who the leader is.

I mean, they do control things.

It is their decision what gets passed and he didn't want to pass those things.

And so it's been a different world, and it's been fascinating to watch the new Senate and the new kind of Senate coalition.

As I mentioned before, it's kind of unorthodox.

It's like one part very left and one part kind of culturally right.

It's kind of like a pro-police, pro-union kind of thing.

But it's been fascinating to kind of watch them keep it together and who gets the short end of the stick in that deal.

But yeah, but so a big difference.

Those things I don't think would have passed within there.

- I do think though we continue to see the Senate president's influence, the late Senate president Ruggerio's influence over the chamber even after his passing.

He had indicated at the beginning of the session that he was open to some sort of restrictions on assault style weapons.

And to me, the version that passed is the thing he would have been open to.

The casino smoking ban that passed is like significantly different than what advocates and even the bill sponsor in the House wanted, so much so that the sponsor, Teresa Tanzi, took her name off of the bill on the last day.

And I do wonder, might Senate President Ruggerio, had he still been leader of the chamber, allowed that version of it, maybe.

So I think his presence and his mindset and his attitude continued to sort of infiltrate the way that the chamber navigated these issues.

- Yeah, it's interesting 'cause in years past, there were a lot of people chalk up the failure to pass payday lending reform to lobbyist influence and to the fact that their lobbyist is a former speaker of the house.

But now you see, I mean, same lobbyist, you just get a change in command in Senate leadership and all of a sudden it goes through.

- What drives me nuts is on a lot of these things, so the bill is, and I told somebody else this earlier this week, the bill on casino smoking doesn't take effect until 2027.

It's like they need a nicotine patch for the legislation to wean themselves off.

Go cold turkey.

I mean, give them three months, but what does that do for the workers up there who have to inhale smoke for another year and a half?

It's spineless, in my mind.

- There was also this amendment made sort of after that, another concession that sort of gives this newly created definition for this pari-mutuel smoking facility.

So in addition to the one existing cigar lounge in one of the casinos, now this bill as it's passed says any other cordoned off or enclosed area that has proper ventilation could still allow smoking.

So at least in the house, Rep. Tanzi's fear was, well, they can just cordon off a whole floor and call this part of the pari-mutuel smoking lounge, and that can continue to be a smoking area.

- Were you surprised that payday lending got across the finish line this year?

- Not that much, with no Dominic Ruggerio.

The thing that I always heard from the background was that there were a lot of objections from real estate interests, because a lot of the commercial real estate, like strip malls, where these places are, are struggling anyway.

And they're good tenants.

So it will be interesting to see if there's any kind of new industry, I guess, or new way to get around this law, or if they just completely disappear, which I think has been the assumption.

But who knows, maybe there's another loophole or way to get these unusual short-term loans out there.

- You've covered CRMC a lot.

There's been various proposals including bringing it under the governor's wing as an executive.

They did a little bit of reform this year.

I think maybe incrementally they could go somewhere with it, but they wanna get more professional people on the board.

- Yeah, yeah.

I would say overall it really was not what Save the Bay and other environmental groups were happy.

And a lot of friends actually- - [Jim] A lot of unhappy people at the State House this year.

- Yeah, yeah.

I mean, same with the bottle bill.

You know, they kinda kicked that can down the road and CRMC definitely feels like another thing where they're kicking the can down the road.

- [Jim] With CRMC?

- Oh yeah, on CRM, sorry, I was gonna go to the bottle bill.

- [Jim] Oh, go talk about the bottle bill.

- I mean, it was just amazing the extent, they've studied it like 100 times, and to now put a two-year study with a professional- - Did they wanna study the study, or what were they doing?

- They do not want to do a bottle bill where there's a charge on drinks, they do not want to tax your nips in an election year.

- Yeah, it's hard enough eliminating the NIPS, right?

Don't tax the NIPS.

I can see the sign right now.

- Yeah, it's funny because sort of the running joke at the State House is that study commissions are where bills go to die, but they've already done a big study commission on this.

They just finished it.

So now they can't do another one, instead, they're doing a statewide implementation analysis.

So that's like maybe the new place where bills go to die.

- I thought it was interesting that they passed the statewide ban on cell phones in schools.

We've been talking about that a lot.

The Los Angeles school district did that a year ago.

And the devil's in the details.

What does that really mean?

Do you have access?

Do they have to buy these pouches, which can be expensive?

But I thought that was an interesting step.

I wasn't sure that was going to go through.

- I mean, I was kind of surprised it didn't happen earlier.

I thought that was one that Dan McKee, who does really care about education, it's the one subject where he really cares and really gets involved.

I thought after a lot of governors came out with that, that would have been one that he seized on.

And I was kind of surprised he was lukewarm about it.

And never proposed it himself.

So it's been in the water.

- Yeah, I mean, I wasn't surprised it passed.

Wasn't surprised it passed with strong support.

I think to Patrick's point, at least on the legislative side, obviously, the big shakeup in the Senate chamber with losing Senator Ruggerio, and even before that him being absent for the majority of the session, and then having a new elections.

I think the, at least one chamber was pretty behind, which we saw by the sheer amount of bills they were passing on the last night of session.

So that just kind of put things that might've been easier to pass early in the session back a bit.

- Yeah, but it makes a lot of sense.

I mean, that's kind of a common sense piece of legislation.

How many people really think that their kids should be on phones all day at school?

I mean, we all got by fine without it, I think.

- Exactly.

We shift just in the last couple of minutes before we go to outrages.

Now we look at the governor's race and I talked to some people who said, well, maybe that budget hearing was kind of the beginning of where the next campaign's going to be going.

So I still wonder whether McKee's going to run.

I don't know.

I mean, the polls will see.

But so then the crystal ball question is, does Joe Shekarchi get in?

Does Peter Neronha get in?

Helena Foulkes has been raising a lot of money, but we haven't heard a lot from her.

What do you think as we head into the summer season?

- I mean, that was undoubtedly McKee's like second unofficial campaign kickoff, because he already had an announcement announcing that he was going to be announcing he was running.

But yeah, I think to me, he's sort of made it clear that he is going to run.

It's just how well he does or sort of how that turns out really depends on the number of other primary challengers he faces and who those challengers are.

- Patrick?

- Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any chance he...

I don't think there's any idea in his mind of not running.

I don't know if there is a scenario where someone can convince him to get out, where there's some dynamic that forces him out.

I imagine- - What about polling?

What about internal, his own internal polls?

- That has not seemed to dissuade him to this point.

Is there some kind of polling that could do it?

I guess, theoretically.

But remember, when Joe Biden was polling horrifically, Dan McKee was one of his staunchest supporters and said that the president should not get out.

And those who are suggesting he get out because of bad polling are just, I think it was weak in the knees or something like that.

I don't know.

- Antonia?

- I just hope some of these guys who are on the fence either get in or get out, because right now it feels like this kind of shadow primary going on where McKee is the only one who's officially running, but we know there's certainly other people who are very much raising money or talking about it, or flirting with the idea.

They should just make up their minds.

- When that UNH poll came out, my friend Bill Haberman over at WPRO, he said, "Dan McKee's getting into Linc Chafee territory."

I thought that was an interesting analogy.

And for people who've been around a while will remember, Chafee was a one-termer.

And then they weren't sure that he was going to run.

He called some press conference behind the DMV- - The DMV parking lot.

I was there.

If we thought that McKee's last press conference was weird, the DMV parking lot was weirder.

- And then he said, I'm not running.

But he wanted to be at the DMV to show what a great job he'd done at the DMV?

- I think it was as he wanted to make it seem like he wasn't getting out of the race because Gina Raimondo was going to beat him.

- His choice.

- He was in the DMV parking lot to convince us that it was his choice that he was so intent on fixing the DMV that he was going to drop out of the race- - To spend all of his time focusing on the DMV.

- It kind of defied logic, but that was how he thought of it.

- I can't tell you how many governors, I remember Don Carcieri in his state of the state going, "And we're gonna fix the DMV!"

That's not the hill you want to die on.

Let's go to outrages and/or kudos.

Antonia, what do you have this week?

- Sticking with our theme for today, I will give a kudos to the General Assembly for passing a law that's going to allow the Matunik Oyster Bar to open for outdoor dining in a tent in the parking lot and across the street this summer as they recover from a fire that pretty much gutted the restaurant.

It was really tragic to imagine a summer without Matunik Oyster Bar.

- Who says the assembly can't be nimble?

- Exactly, yeah.

- And that came in- - Or good for business, or at least one particular business in this case.

- Exactly.

And others can take, but it was clearly for Perry Raso and Matunik Oyster Bar.

What do you have?

- My outrage, I'll go to Channel 12's Tim White had a story about the Mount Hope Bridge refusing to release the latest bridge inspection on national security grounds.

And I don't have any reason to believe that the Mount Hope Bridge is in any worse shape than it was.

It's an old bridge.

There have been concerns for a number of years.

But if the Brooklyn Bridge can release the inspection report, you can release the inspection report.

As a lot of us who have had to actually, for the first time, read and look at a lot of inspection reports in the last year with the Washington Bridge knows, unless this is a very different thing, there's not a lot that you're going to get out of an inspection report.

It's just photos of a bridge with like Sharpie markers surrounding the parts that are falling apart.

- And I watched Tim's piece it was great, if you haven't seen it go to WPR's website like Tom Homan has to sign off is that the deal he's worried about what, like illegal immigrants cutting the cables what are we talking about here?

- I cannot tell you, it doesn't make any sense.

- It really doesn't.

Nancy what do you have?

- Well, Patrick stole mine.

But I came up- - That's why you have to come two or three deep.

- I know.

- When you come here, you always have to have a backup.

- My backup is a kudos over an outrageous fashion choice by Senate Majority Leader Frank Ciccone, who chose to arrive to the final day of the session- - Kudos and outrage!

- We love the combo.

- You're mixing it in there.

- Who arrived to the last day of session in a jacket and shorts and some sort of, like, sneaker/loafery combo that revealed a calf tattoo that I certainly didn't know about of his late dog, Gunther.

- Will you ever be able to unsee that?

- Never.

- What else goes on- - I think it worked.

- Did it?

- I thought it worked.

- Was it working for him?

- I mean, I'm not the person who you would ask this question, but for me it did.

- The other thing is your colleague, and I posted this on my Facebook page, your colleague had a great picture of the Senate leadership drinking Dells, no straw zone, they were doing the swish and swirl, I'll tell you.

- True Rhode Islanders.

- Well, the other thing is, one of them had his face like fully in like I didn't get to the bottom either way.

Any other observations?

We just have 30 seconds left from kind of the last night.

No, I you know I don't know how intent voters were really paying attention to it all.

You know, we follow it very closely and I hope people also care about what's happening with their government.

That's the only parting thought I could have because as it goes on hiatus for another six months.

- Any thoughts about the last night?

- Yeah, it was not as crazy as I expected it to be- - The budget went right through.

- Yeah, and the assault weapons compromise didn't sort of, after a very long dinner break where they were undoubtedly sort of bartering behind the scenes, it sort of, you know, went through fairly quickly.

So I guess, pleasantly surprised that there was not more sort of fireworks.

- And now I won't be able to stop thinking about Frank Ciccone's tattoo.

- You're welcome.

- You'll leave that for me for the summer.

Guys, thank you.

We appreciate all of your work throughout the session.

They were long nights and a lot of hard work.

Antonia and Nancy and Patrick, thank you.

Finally, a programming note this week.

Lively is pausing for the summer, on air anyway.

We've been working behind the scenes the past couple of months on some big changes, including a new set that we plan to debut here in the fall.

We're using the slower summer months to put on the finishing touches.

In the meantime, we'll be posting interviews and other segments that will be part of the new format on the station's YouTube page.

So check that out regularly throughout the summer.

And we look forward to seeing you right here back in the fall when A Lively Experiment will continue.

(uplifting music) - [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.