Beth White is a believer in showing, rather than telling, when it comes to what she promises to contribute to residents as a representative within their local government.

White, running for the Ward 1 seat on the East Providence City Council (which represents all of Rumford among other areas north and northwest of Taunton Avenue), has spent a good amount of time building a comprehensive campaign website showing exactly why she believes her skillset would be valuable to East Providence taxpayers.

“If I'm not planting a flower, I have been working on that website,” she said in a recent interview. “I spent much of the winter pulling data, doing research.”

The site, White4Ward1.com, brings together all you’d like to know about White. She owns a small business doing specialty gardening, has four kids, and has served as treasurer for Troop 55 in Riverside for a decade. It explains what her priorities would be if she got elected.

But perhaps most importantly, the site demonstrates an intricate understanding of city finances, all broken down into easily digestible tables and placed in proper context to illustrate her main theory about East Providence, and her main reason for running for the city council.

“I would like everybody in the city to know that we're actually a pretty well-run city,” she said. “But we could definitely be better.”

White moved to Rumford in 2007 from her native Atlanta to take a position in retail innovation with CVS.

“We were responsible for deciding, along with the category manager and the buyer, how the stores looked, how the products sat on the shelf, which products were in which spot. We had relationships with the buyers and the brands themselves,” she said. “I loved that job.”

She ultimately became an assistant category manager, and was subsequently responsible for choosing products and carrying out retail deployment strategies utilized within each of the company’s 9,000 stores.

“I dealt more with the negotiations, budgets, forecasts, large vendor relationships at CVS on the healthcare team and then upstairs in general merchandise with household cleaners,” she said. “And it did not matter if it was store number one or store number 9,000, we were serving the stores, so we had to answer for the finances and then also answer to the stores themselves. Can they execute the programs we send down? Are they happy with the programs we’re giving them? It was an extremely demanding role, but it was so rewarding when you did get it right.”

White then left CVS around 2016 to help homeschool her youngest daughter, who has additional learning challenges due to autism. All four of her kids all went through at least some portion of East Providence public schooling.

It wasn’t until recently that White considered a run for city council, and it was sparked by questions she had about fiscal prudence and relying on data to make decisions — two pillars of her intended approach to governing.

The major issue that sparked her decision to run, she said, was in regards to the city’s new community center, which is currently under construction and slated to open in the fall.

White said she was disappointed that the city scrapped a plan for a bigger community center that included a community pool. She said that happened, in part, because incumbent Ward 1 councilman, Frank Rego, refused to vote for the measure as a negotiating tactic to get a full-time rescue truck for the Rumford fire station (as it was the only station with a part-time rescue at the time). White said the data presented at the time did not prove to her that a fourth rescue was even necessary.

“That is the decision that really didn't make sense to me,” she said. “When we already spend so much in public safety — that we would jeopardize one-time funds for a major community investment over something that was not justified with data and could have been paid for in another budget year when we would not have had access to the one-time funds to invest in a pool — that logic that really bothered me. It made me you wonder about how other decisions are made.”

White said that utilizing data and public input would be the foundation of her approach to performing her duties on the council. She said she would love to see people take a more active role in asking for what they want.

“What is missing from each ward? What do people wish we had? Like a city wish list,” she said. “Instead of responding to offers, I would love to see us go out and seek the sorts of development we want. The restaurants people want. The grocery stores we want. Whatever amenities we don't have, by ward, that we'd like to see. I'd love to see the city take a proactive stance and go after those things.”

As for development as a whole, White said that the financial realities of running a modern city — where just around 86% of the budget is tied up into contractual necessities, public safety, and the schools — dictate that development is not a hypothetical discussion, but rather an issue of picking and choosing how it gets done.

“Development is happening, and has to happen,” she said. “We have to develop to take pressure off the property tax bucket. But what we can do is control it and make it look how we want to. And that is what people really care about — is not waking up one day and having some terrible, ugly thing. If they had some sense of ‘Here's our list of the things we want to go after and here's how we want these things to look by word,’ I think people would feel a lot better about it. I think they don’t like waking up and seeing something unexpected.”

Day-to-day, White said she would be a bulldog for Ward 1 but also advocate for issues across the city, taking care to listen to what people want.

“Not just the loudest people, but everybody,” she said. “My approach is very straightforward. Not political but responsive. Find things that people really care about. Like this particular pothole is a problem? I'm going to fix that pothole. We're going to figure it out. That's how I think.”