Old Playbook

Having lost a Nineteenth Century major league franchise, Providence Grays (debuted first black professional baseball player, featured Babe Ruth, won first ever inter-league championship by beating Boston Red Stockings and New York Metropolitans, wound up as the Washington Senators), this field of garden dreams and plantation schemes has been in decline ever since. Rhode Island was a premier destination through the 19th Century. Newport is still rated around 10th in USA. Providence once had clubs, corporate headquarters, department stores, fountains, gardens, hotels, parks, remarkable bronzes, restaurants, sports venues, and theaters worth seeing, State once successfully mixed business with pleasure and sustained nation’s highest per capita income. What went wrong?

If tourism is your principal industry, better be extremely conscious of attractions you present and how to keep them pristine and safe. Never going to rival Disney World, planet’s #1 tourist trap, even if you're cooler year round. Disney has air conditioning everywhere, an army of gardeners who primp plantings overnight, battalion of technicians who maintain buildings and rides, and cohorts of alligator wranglers. Here, casinos ravaged discretionary cash, factories failed, navy pulled out, robber barons caused recessions, series of hurricanes devastated resorts, and string of obtuse officials undermined reputation. No building or housing standards are enforced, except those that collect fees for permits. So little was done to promote tourism, visiting suggests slumming. Fiscal health means diverse enterprise, and state has done its best to eliminate farming, manufacturing, and mining, the 3 core industries upon which all others depend. Where do eco-sensitives think food and smart phones come from? Virtual world is a conduit, not a source. Coal, gemstone, and gold mines ran out, yet heavy metal sediment could still be recovered. Some small produce farms, orchards and ranches defy punitive property taxes to hang on, though manufacturing has been scaled back even further after centuries of toxic effluent left untreated. But at least Rhode Island isn't involved in the death dealing enterprises of tobacco cultivation or weapons manufacture, like state to its west.

Governance may enhance or ravage a place. No matter how much corporations or individuals invest, when elected administrators or robotic bureaucrats create and enforce untenable policies, nobody thrives. Seems somewhere along the line our winning playbook was mislaid or went obsolete; losing strategies have been repeated ever since, a merry-go-round for aliens and rogues, not citizens and taxpayers, spinning continually downward. Takes insanity to repeat same behaviors that caused self harm and dug a grave for what was once so vital. New administrations must be repeatedly retrained on how to serve public, even though democracy is ancient. Hopefuls ought to pass tests in civics and history before they're allowed to run as candidates, followed by drug and mental health screens. Already, a representative hooked on opioids had to resign, and string of sociopathic politicians were disgraced for malfeasance. One representative pleaded desperately because he was on the verge of raising $50,000... for what, he never disclosed. Not like taxpayers weren't already paying him hundreds of thousands in salary. Just betrays his contempt for constituent and temerity of entitlement.

In Athens 2,500 years ago, citizens were conscripted to serve as legislators. Any who didn’t vote or voted ignorantly was deemed ἰδιώτης, idiot. Parasite, παράσιτος, was reserved for those who didn’t act in public’s best interests, instead filled themselves piggishly alongside society's hard working contributors. Legislature has forever seemed loaded with both. Casts doubt on old truism, “That government is best that governs least.” They get reelected again and again, and serve no interests except to stuff own pockets. The business of government is far too important to leave to idiots or parasites. If enough Athenians gouged offender’s name on an ostraka, a shard of pottery, and handed in, accused would be banished from city for 10 years, “ostracized”.

From this millennia old model of democracy, society retains right to recall representatives, but it’s a lot harder now, no longer just a few thousand votes of no confidence. Impeachment costs almost as much as one scoundrel can steal with impunity. Imagine trying to impeach tag teams trying to outdo each other? So many crooked officials have been caught, hardly anyone notices anymore. None have served a 10 year sentence. You can hardly blame those who do for being angry and occupying demonstrations after generations have passed without equitable resolutions.

Instead of ensuring maximum advantage for majority, what have Rhode Island's leaders done? To rebut a new round of state sponsored ads asking people to put up and shut up, only dialogue works to expose problems that require solutions and prioritize them as to extent of detriment. Better talk than terrorism; in other states fed up populace has lately acted out their frustrations. If you can't stand negativity, why not invite a positive response by doing what's right for entire community? Say what you really think. Examine failed policies, neither naming names nor spinning excuses. These plays they've applied and ploys still tried only aggrandized individuals, possessions and pride. Who did they think they were fooling?

• Appointed bad candidates to important roles, such as cabinet members and other highly visible positions, who show no interest or knowledge of Rhode Island customs or populace, so straight away looked shabby. For decades they allowed a fiasco at DCYF. Wouldn't attracting talent based on merit make more sense?
• Built landfill within miles of Scituate reservoir, state's main water supply. Didn't carry forward on Big River expansion or promote gasification or other measures to reduce waste. Cancer rates are high, usually linked to water supply. Home recycling is allegedly being dumped instead of sorted. If small countries such as Switzerland manage 100% recycling and zero land filling, why can't visitor-hungry Rhode Island?
• Caused banking crisis by withdrawing hundreds of millions from a few credit unions, which collapsed them all, devastated small businesses statewide, and fortified biggest banks, probably its sole purpose. Skip ahead a decade: Biggest banks, CDOs, subprime mortgages, and Wall Street aggression diverted trillions from middle class nationwide and drove millions of families out of homes. From 2006 to 2010, recession begun by dopey Dubya slammed all Americans. Only a fool or liar would deny this severely impacted situation locally.
• Cut aid to cities and towns to make up for state shortfalls, so property owners’ tax bills increase to cover losses and services are cut, another zero sum shell game.
• Despite recently expanded rail and road infrastructure, railroads don’t visit warehouses near seaports. Closest state comes to a shipping hub are cars unloaded into Quonset lots, coal dumped into train cars from ships stopping at Providence Pier, gas and oil pumped into tanks lining banks, and smugglers running dope up Mount Hope and Narragansett Bays, though all are intermittent and tentative.
• Destroyed reputation through criminality and scandals. Plunder Dome continues as an ongoing capitol hill farce, a theater of the absurd under a big marble dome.
• Drove out smelly or ugly enterprises, even if they didn’t pollute and instead employed residents, when it can be controlled with zoning codes on plenty of empty industrial sites. What’s the alternative, welfare? Already can’t afford yet have country’s fewest TANF families, about 6,700, and highest unemployed rate, arguably 35%. Congress approved $20 million to expand Port of Providence, yet Save the Bay argues it's just to exonerate a toxic site owner. Without a line item veto, any sketchy rider can be sneaked into a bill.
• Enable panhandlers. Why are there so many? Elsewhere, beggars are restricted to avoidable precincts. Conversely, prosecute talented buskers, hawkers, musicians and performers who enliven urban dead zones. Listen to local ACLU, who have historically been on the wrong side of every argument - against majority's liberties and rights - for a half century. In fact, heed every loud blockhead and crackpot instead of major demographies.
• Force dangerous industries into residential and rural areas, probably land owned by friends and relatives of legislators, and thereby multiply ill will. Half empty industrial sites already exist for this, yet seldom get considered, though eminent domain could be applied. Then sell electricity or products outside state with no benefit to local community.
• Give sweetheart deals to billionaires, cable monopoly, corporations, and realtors every time critics fall asleep. Few journalists who still investigate do bidding of old money and university boards. Not to say that a convention center or sports venue wouldn’t attract improvements and create minimum wage jobs, but when will they address essential issues, like free parking, living wages, low cost housing, and public transportation, without which no city can thrive. Who here can afford games and shows?
• Let politicians align with party most likely to win, so no voter is ever really represented. We had a Republican governor run for nomination as a Democrat president. Huh? Party platforms and priorities mean nothing anymore.
• Make excuses about road jurisdiction, who’s stuck with responsibility. Named roads belong to city or town, numbered roads to state, except interstates, which feds control and fund. All are crumbling potholed disasters owned by a public who can’t afford them anyway.
• Permit persistent joblessness statewide. For a population of 1.05 million, only 514,000 positions are offered. So many have given up looking for work within state, has begun to resemble a freegan squat. census shows a decade long exodus of 150,000, and 20% employed daily and paying taxes in neighboring states. Recipients trapped in aid arrangements don't dare leave.
• Prescribe pills to criminally insane without behavioral therapy, and set them loose on public to repeat malicious conduct. About 9,000 individuals are hospitalized annually for mental and substance disorders. Note related panhandling comment; to deny begging is to expose this perverse turnstile. All should not be indefinitely locked up, just use more discretion in profound and violent cases. Already know that drugs and poverty cause mental disease, yet they’ve cut funding for interdiction and intervention, increased wealth inequality, legalized drugs, and misappropriate taxes. Each makes situation worse, but together bring total bedlam.
• Privatize economic development at high cost for a net loss, scandalous and shameless. Look to "eds and meds" for leadership. Colleges, hospitals, medical startups, and nonprofits disappoint, evade taxes, and glean; can see why like minded governors lean on them.
• Raise no new revenue. Distrustful residents suspect they'll misappropriate any new resource, such as bridge or road tolls. Yet all New England states, except sparsely populated Vermont, have tolls on interstates earmarked for infrastructure upkeep. Whoever registers vehicles here could be given transponders that permit free passes through booths. At least 25% of traffic comes from out of state, so residents pay road costs and outsiders pass for free. A Hopkington plaza could consolidate collection and eliminate existing bridge toll mainly targetting Rhode Islanders.
• Spend billions on enormous highway projects to the exclusion of basic road maintenance. Lots of cash means quite a bit can invisibly be diverted. Zooms out of state travelers through; never invites them in. Feds probably prefer, so they don't have to witness urban blight they caused. State favors because it brings in federal funding, fills campaign chests, and forestalls bankruptcy.
• Tolerate crime, gangs, graffiti, lapses in minimum housing standards, mounting homicides, neighborhoods left to decay, overfull prisons, recidivism, and vermin infestation. "What do you expect us to do?" is they perennial response. If you repaint immediately and roust loiterers, doped up vandals get dispirited, give up, go elsewhere. To address, courts could issue more community service along with fines, or state create more minimum wage jobs for cleanup and maintenance.
• Train an army of workers for tourism, which, unlike Caribbean or Florida, means only 6 months of work each year for them. Among key reasons corporations don't headquarter here are high cost of utilities with an ineffective PUC, lack of qualified chemists, engineers, and researchers, poor business climate, and state inventory taxes. Hospitality can't be your only opportunity; must have many reasons for visitors to book hotel rooms.
• Transplanted foreign nationals with no interest in citizenship to ensure elections or federal funding, then turned a blind eye to ensuing bedlam. Entirely different from becoming a place where people want to emigrate due to opportunities, then can’t complain that new citizens have outcompeted you for your job.
• Treat political office like a stepping stone to selfish ambitions elsewhere, even hire PR teams at taxpayer expense to promote self on national stage, so forever leave everything in worse condition.
• Turn municipal workers (fire, police, teachers) into beggars by cutting promised pensions and forcing continual renegotiation of contracts. Some cities operate for years without contracts, no way to retain best and brightest, but sure to minimize public safety.
• Wrangled every failure into another fee paid by middle class, so decimated middle and increased gap between poor and rich. Repeated bond referenda have dug debt so deep, $12 billion, revenue mainly goes to paying interest. Every citizen owes about $12,000, and repays constantly in terms of services not performed for taxes paid.

All this is just a fraction of what they figure they got away with, not to mention what else. Can't deny widespread discontent. No wonder knee-jerk reactions to government proposals are vehemently reject and vow to fight. "Not in my back yard!" Change isn't always bad, may sometimes mean improvement; stagnation spells doom. Trust must first be built through deeds, not words. Every constituent has been conned so many times circumstance demands consistent decorous performance from governance. Do the job for which you were elected, community servant, not supreme monarch. Citizen apathy, resentment and stupidity compound nightmare: hit-and-run scofflaws, hostile waitresses, neighbors who don't know each other, rude bus drivers who don't run on schedule or stop for those they might dislike. Not just those elected, everyone together needs to restore balance and seek partnerships. But parochial attitudes pervade outlying districts; yokels who'd rather see cities go bankrupt also vote against burgeoning local businesses, such as a century-old seaside inn, as if they had any say on what neighbors do with own property. Some are so privileged they don't need opportunities, expect to deny others a livelihood, and presume to exclude everyone else from their overgrown hideaways. Puts in doubt any chance for economic stability or responsible governance.

To thrive you must strive for balance. All news is not bad. Magazines rate beaches among top in nation. Roads do get repaved, though approaches haven't always been sensible, like first addressing main streets and park roads, and generating more revenue to cover instead of borrowing. Garden City has flourished on private investment. Proves that adapting to whatever economy throws at you has a magnetic effect on retail customers, who could make purchases online instead. Other successes despite above snafus include:

• Bike paths, despite ridiculous expense of reengineering and refurbishing abandoned rights-of-way designed to handle burly train tonnage for dainty bicyclist poundage amounting to $1 million per mile, have attracted eco-tourists, complied with federal laws, enabled funding influx, provided 70 miles of commute corridors for poor workers, and yielded an estimated 20:1 return, to date, $1.3 billion. Compare to $10 million per mile for simple highways, or $500 million per mile for I-way and Viaduct Projects, which will last 5 times shorter before replacement 10 years hence. Maintaining entire bike net since inception, except for repairing engineering mistakes in erosion control and safety improvements, has been 50 times less than constructing 1 mile of highway, though they spent $25 million on a hard-to-access linear park parallel to Washington Bridge when repairing Bold-India-Point-to-Point Bridge for a small fraction would have sufficed.
• Entrepreneurs, micro-startups, and small businesses like diners, dives and shops, which have been state's flimsy mainstay, employ biggest percentage of workers, though tax paid municipal and state positions expend more revenue than they generate yet forget to inspect eateries, supposedly state's biggest draw after beaches, on any regular schedule endangering patrons. Kudos to joints that source from local aquaculture, farms, and ranches.
• Historic preservation enhances ambience and maintains links to illustrious past. Costs are mostly paid by owners voluntarily adhering to standards.
• Intermodal connections, while jeered by know-nothings and naysayers, are proven improvements. Airports from which you can hop on a shuttle or train, ferries that visit many bay ports, rail terminals, and smooth roads bring in big revenue as long as they directly connect with each other.
• Waterfire, which annually raises its own $2 million budget, imports $70 million in total spending from around nation and world. None of this would have been possible without Cianci fighting public opposition and spending millions to relocate confluence of Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket into Providence River. The denigrated, late mayor honorarily and personally ignited very first Waterfire held ever since. Return on this investment already exceeds $1.7 billion.

What can be concluded? Modest investment of taxes with federal matches applied toward beautify, health, practical and safety improvements increase commerce and tourism. But quality of life more directly tracks availability of housing, jobs and transportation. You can promote a delightful facade, but won't play complete game without underlying strength. You can't legislate every problem away, or rely on politicians to act fairly. The ultimate blame lies with everyone who thinks one's only responsibility is to vote. Careful study, community awareness, crime reportage, evaluating performance, keeping up property, knowing issues, and paying taxes all come before voting. Foremost, more must give a damn what happens and whether state has any future, which is why you so seldom see such outspoken tirades as this regarding Rhode Island, possibly too small to warrant attention.