Five members of the Rhode Island General Assembly met with a room full of local business leaders, and the predominant topic of conversation was how to spend about $1 billion in federal monies.

The East Bay Chamber of Commerce’s “Coffee and Commerce” event was held Friday morning, March 25, inside the Events Room at Cutler Mills in Warren. It began with each legislator talking briefly about their priorities for the 2022 legislative session.

Rep. June Speakman, Democrat representing areas of Bristol and Warren, said housing is her top priority, specifically addressing “regulatory issues that restrict development.” She also mentioned efforts to regulate products containing PFAS chemicals.

Rep. Jason Knight, Democrat representing areas of Barrington and Warren, said the biggest focus for everyone is “how to spend all that federal money that we’ve got sloshing around … to improve the lives of Rhode Islanders.” He also added, ”My personal number-one, 24/7 priority is to fix those bike path bridges.”

Sen. Wally Felag, Democrat representing areas of Warren, Bristol and Tiverton, is a vice chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and spoke about the challenges and opportunities with the state budget.

Rep. Liana Cassar, Democrat representing areas of Barrington and Riverside, said she’s focused on directing those federal stimulus funds to “the struggling human services sector.” She spoke about three critical areas of need: housing, mental health and access to health care.

Rep. Susan Donovan, Democrat representing areas of Bristol and Portsmouth, said she too is focused on creating affordable housing stock, including for young people who can’t afford a first home. She also talked about workforce transition programs, to train people who lose their jobs in one field so they can get back to work in a new field, such as the “green” sector.

Thinking long-term
The first question of the day came from Chamber board member Andy Arruda, who asked why the state is always in a hurry to spend surplus money, citing a report that Rhode Island may be looking at a $600 million budget surplus. He challenged legislators to make long-term investments rather than spending the money quickly, then added: “Or why not do something different, like reduce taxes?”

Rep. Speakman talked about her priorities in affordable housing. She’d like to use federal funds to build housing stock, to reinforce infrastructure and to build bike path bridges. “These are long-term investments,” she said, “and they put builders and electricians and plumbers and realtors to work.”

Rep. Cassar went back to her top priority, human services, and talked about how Rhode Island has historically underinvested in areas like public health and transportation and has a lot of work to do to catch up. “Our Medicare reimbursement rates are deplorable, and causing many of our human services sectors to barely hang on by a thread,” she said.

“Or look at child care; we did not raise rates for almost 30 years … So we actually have a lot to backfill.”

She said the state must make major investments in these sectors soon. “We won’t have a human services sector to address these needs if we don’t invest in things like mental health and behavioral health … areas where we’re really struggling,” Rep. Cassar said.

Rep. Knight said the state needs to think longer than one year at a time. Long-term investments are difficult, but critical, he argued. “Choose your analogy,” he said. “We haven’t fixed the car, we haven’t tended to the garden, we haven’t cut the grass … We have to think more than ‘what do I have to do to get to first base this year’ … We have to think 10 to 15 years down the road.”

Suspend the gas tax?
Chamber board member Don Saracen, who facilitates a manufacturers roundtable group (it includes nine East Bay CEOs who employ about 1,000 people), asked legislators to temporarily suspend the state’s gas tax as an economic boost for both businesses and households. “The gas tax affects us all, and this would have a dramatic impact on all of us in this community,” he said. Last week, Connecticut passed an emergency order to suspend its gas tax from April through June.

Rhode Island’s excise tax on gasoline is 35 cents per gallon. Several legislators responded without a lot of support for Saracen’s idea. Sen. Felag explained that the monies raised by the gas tax go directly into highway maintenance with the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, and directly into bridge maintenance with the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority. Cutting the tax would impact critical infrastructure investments, he said.
Rep. Cassar said, “I’d love to pay less for gas, but we have to be mindful about the impact.”

A member of the audience added that the state’s highway funds are used to match federal highways funds, so reducing Rhode Island’s transportation monies could have an oversized impact on the state.

Help for staffing crisis?
Mark Lescault, who with his wife and son owns Grace Barker Health in Warren, pleaded for help with the “staffing crisis” that is impacting their industry. He asked if anyone is working on workforce development programs for the healthcare industry, to help incentivize and train RNs or LPNs.

“There is a major, major staffing crisis brewing right now in health care, and Covid sent it over the edge,” Lescault said.

He talked about the oversized impact of health care pool agencies, which hire nurses and other health care workers and then lease them out to employers in need. “They offer our employees more money to work for them, and they in turn sell our employees back to us at higher rates,” Lescault said. “They need to be shut down. They’re essentially extorting us.” He went on to suggest the state could waive income taxes for workers in their industry, or conceive of some other kind of incentive for employees to enter and remain in the field.

Rep. Donovan attempted to respond to him without having any obvious solutions yet, though she promised to meet with the Lescaults and learn more about their challenges.

Rep. Knight returned to his theme that the state needs to think longer-term about problems. He suggested that maybe, just maybe, if the state had not cut Medicaid reimbursement rates so low for so many years, “maybe we would have weathered a crisis like this a little better.”

How to change a culture?
Noting that many times throughout the morning, both legislators and guests talked about “changing the culture” at the Statehouse and “thinking long-term,” one audience member asked whether, and how, it would be possible to actually change culture.

Rep. Jason Knight said it comes down to electing the right people to office.

“You get what you pay for,” he said. “We’ve had some bad leadership over the decades. You have to hire a General Assembly every two years that has a vision, and that has the courage to do the right thing even when it’s not popular … You have to have the right people up there on Smith Hill.”

He concluded: “Hire people with integrity who are going to do what they say they’re going to do.”