Raimondo: New plan for old problems needed

GRINDING IT OUT: Jeff Rosenzweig, right, the program manager for SLIDE, instructs Guillermo Diaz, a sophomore at the Met school, as he constructs a skateboard rail. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
GRINDING IT OUT: Jeff Rosenzweig, right, the program manager for SLIDE, instructs Guillermo Diaz, a sophomore at the Met school, as he constructs a skateboard rail. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

When Beth Cunha tells her students how some of the United States’ best colleges and universities are right here in Rhode Island, she often hears the response: “It doesn’t matter, Miss. I wouldn’t get in anyway. I don’t have the money and ‘they’ would never give someone like me a scholarship.”
When she tells students about the different career paths they might follow and join Rhode Island’s economic workforce, the typical responses are similarly devoid of hope: “There is nothing here for me. No jobs, no future, no opportunities. Why should I stay?”
These were among the examples Cunha, executive director at the Providence-based Center for Dynamic Learning, shared during the eighth annual Rhode Island Small Business Economic Summit held at Bryant University Jan. 9.
She was one of more than 250 small-business owners, leaders and advocates who gathered at the event, put on by the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Center for Women & Enterprise.
Cunha, born, raised and educated in Rhode Island, co-founded and now runs the educational center, at 1 Louisa St., Providence, which introduces children to the world of manufacturing by providing them the opportunity to develop spatial skills through learning about science, technology, engineering, art and math.
Cunha sees a communication disconnect between lawmakers, businesses and Rhode Island’s future workforce: its youth.
“I think, unfortunately, our young people only hear the negative voices about Rhode Island and its potential is not seen as viable,” Cunha said, a few days after the summit.
In theory, the summit was designed to bridge these different groups and create a realistic discourse between the state’s small-business community and its top elected officials. The goal is to spark conversation among the different groups, like the one brought up by Cunha, about the needs – new and old – of the business community. Businessman Larry Fish owns and operates a dry cleaning company called Pier Cleaners Inc. with his wife. He was pleased with many of the ideas he heard brought up at the summit, including an initiative to implement more lean practices within state agencies over the next four years.
A lot of the proposed ideas, Fish added, wouldn’t be too difficult to accomplish.
“You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to come up with some of these ideas, and they could be implemented fairly quickly,” Fish said, adding that if Rhode Island could make a lot of little, easy changes, it would eventually add up and give the state a better image as being business friendly.
Other ideas raised during the summit included reinstating tax credits benefiting business, like the SBA Loan Guarantee Fee Tax Credit, which was discontinued in 2004, adjusting Rhode Island’s minimum corporate tax of $500 by either suspending it for the first three years of any new corporation, or suspending it if gross receipts were less than $100,000, or establishing some type of sliding scale.
Other ideas tossed around included building new industrial parks, improving Rhode Island’s infrastructure, image and brand, and bolstering the state’s tourism market, to name a few.
Lists of the different ideas were given to attending lawmakers, who were urged to consider taking action during the legislative session.
Nearly 40 state and federal politicians attended the summit, included Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello, Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. The elected officials each addressed the crowd and talked about the state’s slowly recovering economy, which continues to lag behind the rest of the nation.
Raimondo told those attending that she needed not only their ideas, but also their optimism.
“If we’re going to do this [economic] turnaround, what we do is important, but how we do [it] is just as important. I don’t want negativity. I want positivity and openness to being great and to doing something differently and igniting the comeback that Rhode Island deserves,” Raimondo said. The new governor’s optimism was welcomed with cheers, and perhaps some relief, as many had spent a portion of their morning listening to University of Rhode Island economics professor Leonard Lardaro, who spoke candidly of the state’s economic health.
The professor, who releases a monthly index report on the state’s economy, laid out specifics of how the Ocean State – in comparison with other New England states – has struggled and will continue to struggle through the current recovery without systemic change.
Referencing the Great Recession, Lardaro noted that Rhode Island employment rates peaked first, before falling the furthest, hitting the bottom first, and ultimately recovering the slowest.
He says a large part of the state’s slow recovery has to do with the fact that a lot of those lost jobs will never come back to the state, which means they must be replaced with different jobs. He says many Rhode Islanders are having a hard time coming to terms with this fact.
One of the only reasons Rhode Island’s economy is recovering at all is because it’s being bolstered by a bullish U.S. economy, he added.
“The economy doesn’t turn itself around … that’s just wishful thinking,” Lardaro said.
The new governor, who missed the professor’s morning recap, echoed some of Lardaro’s sentiment, saying that while the economy is improving, it’s a different economy than what Rhode Islanders remember from the past.
But her outlook remains hopeful.
“There is no one thing [to fix the economy] and it won’t happen quickly. We need to focus on our strengths and we need to implement that strategy every single day,” Raimondo said. •

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