Providence City Council President Luis A. Aponte – who represents Ward 10 – has served many terms on the council, first elected in 1998. He is the first Latino council president in Providence history.
“Young people are moving out of the city and commuting in to work because we don’t have an adequate stock of available rental housing. I’d like to look at ways to identify parcels of land for moderate-income rental units,” he told PBN at the end of 2015.
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Though Aponte has been involved – working with city officials to open a new park in the Mary Fogarty Elementary School neighborhood, for example, and advocating for Pavilion Homes, an affordable-housing project that just broke ground, there have also been distractions.
A state Board of Elections report says Aponte borrowed thousands of dollars from his city retirement account to reimburse his campaign fund for more than $15,000 in personal or undocumented expenses over the past six years.
The Ethics Commission voted Sept. 13 to investigate whether he violated state ethics laws by voting on a zoning matter involving his ex-landlord.
But it’s the so-called “zombie bond” – a $40 million infrastructure-improvement measure that got majority vote but now won’t allot any funds – that raises other leadership questions.
The mayor and city council hadn’t agreed to a spending plan in time for voting day, but the question still showed up on the fall ballot. Mayor Jorge O. Elorza reportedly wanted specifics on how money would be spent in the wards. Those details never materialized, the council withdrew bond support citing debt concerns, and the city was left searching for ways to fund new roads, an out-of-compliance wastewater treatment system, and other economic fundamentals. •
