- [Nancy] The initial cost estimate for just getting the equipment back up and running is around $19 million.

- That's a lot of money.

- And they're projecting that we would bring in $20 million.

- It kind of defeats the purpose, just a very inefficient revenue collection.

Everything is negotiated.

Everything in the State House is negotiated between the governor, the speaker, and the Senate president, everything.

And judges are one of those things.

- When you see Peter Neronha, whether it's his personal account or not, people see him as the attorney general.

- He's using this platform to comment on judicial selections, legislative processes, the Catholic church.

- Fair play to the Attorney General for keeping it spicy on social media.

(lively music) - And welcome into this episode of "Lively."

I'm Jim Hummel.

We're joined this time by Providence Journal State House Reporter Patrick Anderson, and Nancy Lavin, senior reporter for the Rhode Island Current.

After taking a year-long break from the social media platform, X, many of us still call it Twitter, Attorney General Peter Neronha is back with a personal account and is waxing prolific on a range of topics, often with a bite to his commentary.

Nancy, this is a great enterprise piece by you.

You've been looking at this and wanting to put it together.

Tell me how this came about and why is he back on X?

- Yeah, so I've been kind of tracking Peter Neronha's personal X account for, I don't know, a couple months.

He, you know, was not on for a while, which I actually hadn't really noticed until he came back.

And, you know, is doing his sort of typical unfiltered style on social media, which is a little bit unusual for most of our state office holders and lawmakers.

And finally, last weekend, he got into a little bit of a back and forth with House Minority Leader Mike Chippendale.

And so I kind of went to his office and said, "Look, I'm gonna write about this, you know, will you do an interview?"

And he did.

So it was, you know, good to get his explanation for kind of why he came back and how he views his personal social media.

- So he has his official account, AG, and this is different.

But can you separate the two?

When you see Peter Neronha, whether it's his personal account or not, people see him as the attorney general.

- Yeah, I mean, in fairness, his personal profile does not actually mention in the little bio that he's AG at all.

It talks about how he is an islander, went to the Jamestown Elementary School, you know- - [Jim] The bridges in the background, right?

- Right.

But, you know, if you know who he is, and he's using this platform to comment on judicial selections, legislative processes, the Catholic church after his office, you know, released this pretty dire report about sexual abuse by clergy in the Catholic church.

So he's commenting on things that pertain to his day job, let's say.

- Fair play to the Attorney General for keeping it spicy on social media.

I mean, he never left.

He migrated over to Bluesky, which is the more progressive, I guess, coded social media site when Twitter became politically toxic on the left because of Elon Musk's various decisions and his involvement in the last election.

So he has been spicing it up on Bluesky opining on all kinds of political topics and doing some, like, a little bit of sailing content and making his opinions known.

So I guess maybe it's a bad sign for Bluesky that people are now going back to X or Twitter.

- Well, he didn't think he was getting the juice on Bluesky, right?

Not enough people were, is that the deal, he didn't get traction?

- Well, I don't think it was about traction, but basically what he was saying is not, and I have personally found this too.

I'm on both platforms for my job to keep up with the news, to see what people in power are saying.

And not everyone is on Bluesky.

So for example, the the post he made sort of attacking Minority Leader Chippendale or, you know, jabbing back at him after Chippendale made an initial, you know, point, he made that same post on Bluesky and there was no back and forth because I don't think Mike Chippendale is on Bluesky or if he is, he didn't engage.

And then on on X, there's this whole long thread that you can see on, you know, developing Saturday and Sunday, you know, they're both at home firing away on their phones about, you know, who's more transparent and why Chippendale wasn't at the House Finance Committee hearing that was to hear about the AG's budget and then Rep Jon Brien jumps in and none of that is happening on that same post on Bluesky.

- It's difficult to find Republicans on Bluesky.

I welcome anybody to try.

- You'll be the first one to find them.

I do wonder though, the larger picture is, look, politicians are using social media now, certainly the president of the United States uses it regularly 24/7, but he's the top law enforcement officer in the state.

And I wonder making endorsements, he's really gone after Kim Ahern, who is running for Attorney General.

Clearly Keith Hoffman is his guy, but he's really start, and whether that's appropriate.

And whether, it gives me pause when I see somebody who is still in the position of prosecuting and being a law enforcement officer.

I wonder whether he'd be doing this if he was still the US attorney for Rhode Island.

- I mean, I don't know.

That's not a question I asked him.

I do think the fact that he's term limited, not running for anything right now, he perhaps feels more emboldened whether he says that or not.

But, you know, I think public officials, they make endorsements all the time and they criticize, I mean, the governor and Peter Neronha have traded some, one might say, less than professional, you know, characterizations of each other in person and on social media and in press releases.

So I don't know that I think that's inappropriate.

What Attorney General Neronha ran into before on his X account before he closed it was that he was posting about a bench trial while it was ongoing and a superior court judge filed a complaint against him saying that's not appropriate.

- Right.

Dan Procaccini, and that goes back a ways.

And then ultimately that didn't turn out to anything, but I wonder if that, I mean, you know, it's not rocket science to figure out that he basically stopped after that, even though the judge didn't find any, you know, sanctions or whatever.

- Yeah, I mean, US attorney is an appointed position.

Attorney General is elected.

So if you're running for election, it's a little difficult to say you can't make policy statements or express your opinion, because you gotta run for office.

Yeah, I don't think he has commented on any trials.

I think that was probably a stove he touched and maybe doesn't wanna touch again.

But other than that, you know, I haven't seen any, you haven't seen that much, you know, negative consequences of opining on other stuff.

- All right.

It's pfnehrona in case people wanna know.

Okay.

(lively music) The general assembly session will pick up significantly in the next several weeks as lawmakers try to get this year's business finished later this spring and get out on the campaign trail for the fall elections, but not before addressing many key pieces of legislation.

So, Patrick, let me start with you.

I think the real action will start after the April vacation as they get more into committee hearings and legislation coming out.

What caught my eye is your story on the truck tolls.

They, they've been talking about, ever since they won the court case, getting them back, they budgeted for the money, and now it turns out it's gonna be at least a year to get the technology back up to snuff.

- Yeah, there's a whole list of things, and it's one of the things that I watch of big government projects that just don't happen.

Not even they get delayed or not even the cost overruns, that happens too, but just, like, something that is put in the pipeline, they start spending money on it, a leader says they're gonna do it, and just, like, doesn't.

And this is just one of those things, they just haven't done it.

And I think the cost is gonna be the reason, also, it's an election year.

Truck tolls have proven unpopular to some degree in the past.

So maybe the governor is thinking, let's hold off on this now and not have a big fight with truckers in a campaign season.

But yeah, if you add up all of the costs since the time that the truck tolls were turned off and all of the legal bills which are extensive and are still being debated and fought over in the courts and the cost of maintaining the system and paying the old contractor and then doing studies on what it's gonna take to turn them back on, I have not completed my spreadsheet and my accounting work, but it's gonna be tens of millions of dollars all told just to get the thing back up and running again and then we're gonna have the whole debate about how much they should be and whether it's worth it and et cetera, et cetera.

- I think also, to Patrick's point, you know, the initial cost estimate for just getting the equipment back up and running is around 19 million dollars- - It's a lot of money.

- And especially when you add in the fact that if we start them a year from now, somehow in the last three months of the fiscal year, they're projecting that we would bring in 20 million dollars.

So we're not really bringing in the money, which is, I think, maybe long term, you know, depending on how the litigation goes, but if the revenue is the incentive, there's not an immediate incentive because the costs equal or outweigh the revenue.

- In the state's defense, people say, "Why didn't you keep up on the technology?"

They didn't know whether they were gonna win the case.

So the money you would invest it all along, if they've just sat there, not surprisingly, technology changes, they need to put the money in.

So I understand that, but it's still, I don't think anybody at the DOT expected almost $20 million to get it back up and running.

- No, and it really does raise new questions about the underlying premise of the truck tolls, just purely from an efficiency standpoint.

If it costs, you're looking for money.

You're looking for revenue, you can just tax things if you're the government, which you do.

Andthis is another way to kind of have a tax or raise money, but if so much of the money you're raising is going back out the door to pay contractors, consultants, and all for all the equipment and everything, it kind of defeats the purpose.

It's just a very inefficient revenue collection.

- So when Lincoln Almond was governor, this is how far back I go, they still charged a toll on the Mount Hope Bridge, and it had not changed.

It was 30 cents.

And people say, "Oh, whatever."

They did a study.

They found out they were paying people $900,000 to run the bridge and they were bringing in about 890.

So that's what finally the tipping point.

But you used to have to throw in a token or whatever.

People still have tokens in their glove compartments from the Mount Hope Bridge.

CRMC, we've been talking about this forever.

You had a great story about how they changed the law last year to get more people who know what they're doing about coastal, but there're still vacancies.

They haven't appointed the people.

What's going on?

- Right.

So last year, the General Assembly, as a sort of compromise fix to these longstanding issues about vacancies and lack of expertise on this politically- - Couldn't get a quorum in a whole lot of meetings, right?

- Politically appointed council, they reduced the size from 10 members to seven members and added some qualifications, you know, specific and general around engineering and environmental.

The deadline to swap out the members or the existing members could apply if they met these criteria, was March 1st.

And, with the caveat that the existing members could continue to serve if they didn't have the new panel up and running.

No new appointments have been made.

And the thing that, you know, my initial thought was, well, no one will want to serve on the CRMC right now, right?

They're under scrutiny.

It's kind of an undesirable job if you look at like the, you know, it's unpaid, it's not a job, it's a volunteer position.

They're under a lot of scrutiny for the decisions they make and just kind of poor public opinion.

There's still this effort to disband them, so you might be signing up for something that doesn't even last.

But actually, there are people who have applied and who are interested and who want to and have submitted letters to the governor's office and just not heard anything for like months.

- So it's the Coastal Resources Management Council, which is a quasi.

So they're separate and one of the proposals is to bring it under the Department of Environmental Management.

They talked about that last year, but it didn't go anywhere.

- I mean, this is another area where things are just kind of in stasis and there aren't really decisions being made- - It fits your theme.

- Yeah, it does fit my theme, so thank you.

But I mean, you could easily just have a very, you know, like on land for zoning or something, you could just say, "These are the rules, you can't build X, Y, and Z."

The issue is, should there be a way around those?

Should we allow some kinds of development that don't fit those rules?

And I don't think anyone really has decided, no one in power has decided.

They like having the flexibility to say, "Yes, you can actually build there.

You can do this thing, especially if you're maybe you're a donor or something like that."

So they haven't gone back to like first principles and decided like, do we wanna just make this strict and you can't build anywhere near the water ever?

Or do we wanna have some kind of, or do we want things to be like more, have more discretion to be able to do this or do that and whatever.

And there's really been no leadership or kind of decision at the top of like which way we wanna go on those first principles.

- I think to that end, there's no real champion, at least among State House leaders, you know, the House Speaker, the Senate president, the governor.

Certainly there are lawmakers who want reforms in some way or another, but it's not a priority, I would say, for the people who are at the top of the two chambers nor the governor.

And I think especially in a year like this where there are so many other priorities and problems, it does- - And an election year.

- It does not seem like there will be this big shift that advocates are hoping for, despite what I would say is growing public opinion, thanks to these really high profile cases, you know, going back to Champlin's on Block Island, the latest ongoing saga that I seem to write about every week is- - The sea wall.

- The Quinnatisset Country Club Rockwall that is still there and- - Yeah.

- In court.

So people are paying attention more to this kind of obscure council that they didn't maybe know about, but at the State House, it's not kind of on the radar.

- Patrick, you've been keeping your eye on judicial openings.

We've had a slew of them in Superior Court.

We had a lot of institutional knowledge walk out the door.

Maureen McKenna Goldberg is retired as Superior Court Justice.

Now we're talking about potentially House Speaker Joe Shekarchi, who I've said numerous times, I'd say to his face, "He's no Clarence Darrow.

I mean, he's a lawyer, but I mean, look, is he Supreme Court material?"

And it's interesting because our Roger Williams law professor said, "Would this set us back if we went back to appointing a sitting speaker of the House?"

- As for what's going on at the State House now, right now we're in a period of judges.

Everyone is watching the judicial stuff now, and I think that's the main thing being negotiated and talked about.

All the budget stuff, taxes, all the big issues will be later when they get revenue numbers and after the judges are sorted out.

- So chits are being gonna be cashed in, quite frankly, for the judges, right?

- Everything is negotiated.

Everything in the State House is negotiated between the governor, the speaker, and the Senate president, everything.

And judges are one of those things.

So if the speaker wants to be on the Supreme Court, that's gonna have to be negotiated.

And so you can feel a change in the weather up there when they are negotiating something like that, something with a political dimension, it's much less public and kind of going back and forth and things tossed around.

It gets very quiet relatively speaking.

And so Justice McKenna Goldberg's last day is Friday.

After that, I actually asked the governor earlier this week when he is gonna declare a vacancy, which starts the process going and he didn't say, he said, "Sometime after her actual last day," but that's the thing people are watching on.

- He said, "After I get those CRMC appointments done, then we'll get to the judges, right?"

But so you have a house speaker and it's interesting.

So he decided not to run for governor and then all of a sudden it's, "Oh, maybe he wants to be on the Supreme Court."

Doesn't seem like that's the path to the highest court in the state, in my mind.

- I mean, not necessarily.

I think the reason why this has, like, become such a topic is because everyone sort of thought Joe Shekarchi has been, you know, eyeing or aiming for something else, some sort of higher- - The US Senate seat?

- Position- - Right?

- For some time.

His decision not to run for governor, and then by chance there's this additional court opening, you know, whether or not he has the litigation experience, you know, is a separate question, but I think in terms of interest and political power, it certainly seems like something that would be up his alley.

- This is the way we used to do it 30 or 40 years ago.

If you looked at all the Supreme Court and Superior Court Justice, the grand committee of the house would choose the Supreme Court, that's why we had the judicial nominee- - Everyone's talking about the 90s.

It was a meme a couple years ago.

- Back to the 90s.

I was talking about Lincoln, but I can't get out of the 90s.

- Well, that's when the reforms were made that brought in the current system with the judicial nominating commission.

- Which is also political.

We understand that's political too.

- After all these, well, there's no, I mean, you have to, every way to select judges is worse except for the way, I'm getting this wrong, but you have to select them somehow.

And there's no way to do it without politics.

It's a government office.

So this is how we're doing it, and it is political.

- Yeah, it would be naive to assume that there is any, or to think that there is any way in which someone's sort of friends and favors are not being traded in to get a spot on one of the state courts.

- Final question on this.

You know, I had heard a lot of people thought that Joe Shekarchi was gonna run for governor, and that maybe Dan McKee with the bad polling was gonna step aside.

There's this whole, okay, who's gonna be the next leader?

What's the leadership team?

Has he lost the House?

I mean, did people mentally check out, say, Shekarchi's moving on, Chris Blazejewski, who was his second in command majority leader, is now gonna move in.

How has the mood been in the house since he said, "No, I'm gonna stay as speaker with no defined ending here?"

- He hasn't lost the house, but everyone is waiting to see what happens to kind of see how the dominoes are gonna fall and then what the next move is.

It's the first thing that, it's the next thing that needs to happen so everyone else can then plan their political future.

I mean, I think everyone does expect at some point the speaker, relatively soon, that the speaker will move on and the majority leader, Chris Blazejewski, will become the speaker, but until that actually happens, everything is in wait and see mode to get that domino moving.

- You both spent a little bit of quality time at the Ethics Commission for a trial.

We talked, I don't know how many times on this show about the Philly fiasco.

Can't believe it's been three years.

The two state workers went down.

They were talking to consultants about the Cranston Street Armory.

I had forgotten about the vegan cheese.

There we go.

- How could you forget?

- Exactly.

Well, it all came rushing back as I read your articles.

So Jim Thorsen who has since left state government, wants to clear his name instead of settling.

So tell us what happened at the Ethics Commission.

You were both there.

- It was interesting to refresh my memory on things that I had sort of forgotten about, and also interesting because there was quite a few things where, whether this was, you know, his defense or true, Jim Thorsen was kind of saying, "I don't remember," because they're asking him these super specific questions about, like, you know, the croissants and the cold Diet Coke that David Patton infamously demanded in an email, Jim Thorson says he doesn't remember seeing, and perhaps there were none, which would be very disappointing after that email.

But, you know, for him, for anyone, it's hard to remember all the details and it sounds like there was a lot going on.

I think the thing that I found, why Jim Thorsen is doing this, why he's using this sort of rarely invoked process to clear his name three years after makes more sense now because we know that he lost his contract job with the US Treasury Department soon after the news came out and he has not had a job since except to be a referee of high school track meets.

So there's some sort of personal implications for him.

- And I didn't hear that because that was, the word was he was going back to his federal job, well that evaporated, so.

- Well, he did.

I believe he was in Indonesia on a contract with that job when they found out, or when it hit the headlines, the vegan cheese.

- 'Cause there was a delay because of the public records request to get the email.

So we didn't know all those details from lunch.

- The administration tried to bury the whole thing as much as they could and block disclosure of those emails.

When it all came out, it didn't look good for Thorsen, that's led to where we are.

I mean, among the interesting things is, you know, this took up a whole day at the Ethics Commission and it's these funny kind of things that they end up having long trials on that revolve around a lunch and people who are now out of government, but the big stuff, you know, and lunches involving governors or actual Supreme Court Justices, those things usually kind of go away there recently.

We haven't seen them do much on the people who really hold the power.

- To that end, there's, you know, continues to be in just at an Ethics Commission meeting this week, this question about sitting lawmakers voting on bills that affect them personally and Senator Todd Patalano saw an advisory opinion and got the okay to not only vote on, but to sponsor a bill that would improve benefits for state troopers.

He is a Cranston police officer, but one of his sons is a state trooper and will be among the 250 troopers who benefit from this.

And there are exceptions in the ethics code for if you're part of a big enough group of people or your family is part of a big enough group of people, then, you know, it's okay to vote on it.

But the commission advisory opinion, and there was really no discussion, didn't really get into the idea that he's not only voting on it, but sponsoring it.

And, you know, we see these things come up every year.

- The public sees that and you can, I think for those of us who cover it, I understand the class exception.

Todd Patalano, what are you thinking?

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

And maybe, I don't know what's worse.

- They don't think it is anything.

That ship has sailed.

- That's a bad look where he doesn't think that's a problem at all.

- That ship has sailed.

Particularly in the Senate, it seems like there isn't an, there is not an idea that you're not supposed to- - Foul Lawson.

- Yeah, exactly.

The Senate- - The teachers.

- Exactly.

The Senate president is the President of the Teachers Union and routinely is involved in legislation that directly benefits the, and she does not make any bones about that.

Like that is the case.

So they do not see that as a serious- - A conflict.

- Conflict or any kind of perception issue or problem.

- Just before we get to Outrage, just a couple of minutes left, the governor's race, did they know that the primary's in September, Helena Foulkes, big mistake two years ago, she didn't get going fast enough.

She has four million dollars.

I've seen no ads on the air.

- Well, to be fair though, if you look at the polling, she is winning.

So this time, I mean, before she was completely unknown the last time she ran and she was running against an incumbent.

This time, according to all the polling we've seen, she's ahead.

So it makes a little more sense this time.

I mean, you could also flip it the other way.

Does the governor need to do something to turn this around?

- Yeah, both of them.

- So right now, it does not appear that he's in a great position.

- Are you surprised we haven't heard more?

- I mean, a little bit.

More surprised we haven't heard more from the governor trying to perhaps reframe all of the, you know, ongoing stuff about the Washington Bridge, all of these continued payroll problems that are happening week after week with state employees.

I think he has more reason to be on the defense and therefore also to be proactive about putting stuff out about his campaign.

But at the same time, as the governor, he can use all of his sort of gubernatorial, promoting his affordability for all agenda- - Holding the press conference, we show up- - As like a pseudo campaign thing.

But I don't know that like people in the general public are really paying attention to that.

- Yeah, exactly.

And we are gonna see a lot, a lot, of TV ads on this governor's, like, don't worry.

It's coming.

- [Jim] We'll be tired of it four months from now.

- Yeah, you were gonna be begging for them to stop very soon.

- All right.

Be careful what you asked for.

Let's do Outrageous and/or Kudos.

Nancy, let's begin with you this week.

- So my kudos is to my, and actually Patrick's, also former employer, Providence Business News.

So I wrote about yesterday, Interim Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor finally had his confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee seven and a half months after he was appointed.

And this was actually first pointed out by PBN in August that statutorily, the governor cannot appoint an interim commerce secretary.

So while the governor insists he has the constitutional authority to do it, the statutes say there are only, you know, 11 specific department directors that can serve on an interim basis until they're confirmed by the Senate, and that anyone who's not one of these positions cannot serve on an interim basis.

- [Tim] So that forfeit?

- And commerce secretary is one of them.

And yet, we still waited seven and a half months and let Stefan Pryor, you know, dole out millions of dollars in tax incentives.

- Yeah, kind of the dog wagging the tail, wagging the horse, whatever.

Last for you, last minute.

- I'll go back to the judiciary.

And my colleague Kathy Greg had a story yesterday about the judiciary has, again, not done something that they said they were going to do.

They were going to create a public record system like other states have where members of the public and the media can look up cases and get documents, public records of what's going on in court.

You can't do it here in Rhode Island and they just aren't.

- We've been talking about that for years.

- Years.

- Yeah.

- And they've spent money on it- - 40 years we've been talking about that.

- They've gone through a public comment process, nah.

- Wow.

All right.

Kudos to her and to you guys, both.

Thank you so much, Nancy and Patrick.

Great to see you again.

And thank you for joining us.

Be sure and check us out on Facebook, X, Instagram, and on the Ocean State Media YouTube channel.

We'll see you next time right here on "Lively."

(lively music) - [Narrator] "Lively" is generously supported in part by John Hazen White's "Lookout."