Cranston Mayor Kenneth J. Hopkins scored one for the locals by persuading the owners of a large golfing complex under construction in the city to drop their preferred name of Topgolf Providence. But he also reinforced a nagging perception of the state as a place that is generally unfriendly toward business. Rhode Island politicians and
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It is sheer ignorance to not understand that Rhode Island is a city-state where Providence is a more important city than Rhode Island is a state. Providence has a separate economy as does Pawtucket with its strong presence in the Blackstone Valley. So it makes sense to call the area Providence-Pawtucket whereas Providence-Warwick makes no sense at all. Both Cranston and Warwick are bedroom communities borne from the Providence economy and that is optically clear considering that neither city has any kind of downtown despite their ranking as 2 and 3 in population size in the state. Parochialism of the type shown here was more seriously shown many years ago by Mayor Sardella of Newport when he opposed the bond issue that would have built a RI historical Museum in what is now South Street Landing in Providence. The bonds were to paid off through a special hotel tax levy and Sardella didn’t want Newport hotels to in effect pay for a museum to be built in Providence. In the face of that shortsightedness, it is no surprise that to this day, RI is one of the few states without a historical museum. To not understand that all RI communities are in this together is shameful.
Seriously? Those are your reasons for poor ratings every year? What about the high taxes and the $14 billion budget? High insurance rates, high property taxes, business regulations. Businesses are moving out of Providence. They cannot fill the tallest building! We have poor school systems with the exception of a few. We wanted to toll truckers and our labor force is mediocre at best. We are a one party state so there is no balance. But oh yeah RI is a city state…
Who said anything about ratings. My comments were in direct to response to Mayor Hopkins display of parochialism and that was my only focus. You seem to misinterpret that and go off on a tangent into the broad subject of RI governance on which I expressed no viewpoint.
As a small example of the Rhode Island ‘business climate’; Providence leadership insists on Bike Lanes to capture federal money and to detriment of local businesses that barely scrapped by during the Covid shut-downs (enforced by that same leadership to keep federal covid money flowing as well as by Gina Raimondo lecturing the population of the State every day in her kindergarten teacher tone).
Yes, Providence is just like Malibu or Fort Lauderdale …. let’s all commute on bicycles in November, December, January, February, March and in ‘freezing-rain’ April and when its dark at 4pm during winter months. Self-serving, immature, unintelligent, idealogue leadership is what kills the Rhode Island ‘business climate.’
I lived in Holland-Belgium for 5 years and in the dead of winter it did not get light until 9 AM and turned dark well before 3 PM. Since school buses were not used, children biked or walked to school and both going and coming home was done in total darkness. Hordes of children on bikes were everywhere in the commuting hours and there were no problems Everyone learned to co-exisit and everyday life was not characterized by narrow or broken sidewalks, high speed vehicle lanes, wide one-way streets and the many other vestiges of a car dominated society.