(Second of two parts)
What’s the status of the Route 195 relocation?
That’s a good project. That puts 195 out across where the hurricane barrier is, straightens out the road. Build it and then knock down 195 as it sits, and we create some 42, 45 acres, depending upon the condemnations, of land that’s waterfront land. That opens up more land for development, more tax revenues, more people.
Rhode Island's Market Has Changed. Developers, Builders, Investors and Sellers Must Change With It.
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Where is that project?
They’re going to start knocking ramps down in six to eight months. The environmentals are done. There’s a problem – and I don’t mean a political problem, Democrat or Republican, I mean a political problem how it’s going to be funded as far as the revenues from the land, the state or city. I don’t mind sharing it, but I don’t want to lose it.
What does the state say?
The state says that the reversion rights to the land goes to them to develop the property. I say that’s our land.
How do you resolve that?
We sit down and negotiate.
Are you concerned that if a Quonset Port is developed it would essentially shut down the Providence Port?
I certainly have that concern. You can’t be provincial, you can’t be myopic. We’re a small enough state already. If Quonset is where a port ought to go for this region, that’s where it ought to go. That place should be the industrial mecca of the Northeast. It has deep water port. It has runways. It has every utility. It has railroads. It has highway access. It’s within a four-hour drive of a third of this country’s population. It should be marketed, and I’m not criticizing.
There should be a real visionary plan of what should happen there. There are ideas. It’s taken them far too long. And Providence has got to consolidate there, I have no objection. As a matter of fact in my application to Washington on the empowerment zone, $100 million, I insisted that some of our money go to Quonset. And I overruled staff recommendations. If we are going to employ people in Providence, and Quonset can be a tremendous employment opportunity, then we ought to be supporting it. But we need the transportation system to make that happen. I think we’re going in that direction.
We’ve got to create jobs where they can be created and I’d love to create jobs in Providence, and we are. But we’re now a fire town. We’re in finances, health care, real estate, insurance, bio-tech, research , banking and our industrial base has slowly diminished.
Other than Pfizer, what other prospects are there?
The city of Providence is a city in many ways that is responsible for the state’s economy driving the way it drives. We made an industry out of destination venues. Restaurants, entertainment, civic centers, performing arts centers, convention bureaus, universities, health care institutions. That’s where we’re at. Do we have an industrial base? Yes. We send up about $500 million or more a year in sales tax and income tax revenues to the state. The best paid jobs in Rhode Island are in Providence — $37,000 a year. They’re the highest paying jobs. There’s a reason for that. Those buildings and the hospitals and the universities, that’s the reason. Also, we’re going to recapture the retail economy in nine or 10 months, when the mall opens. This will be the strongest retail area in Rhode Island, maybe the region.
Where do we go from here? You’ve got to reduce the excise, inventory taxes, because that’s very debilitating to business. We’ve got to get around the two-tier system of taxation. That’s what will happen. With the elimination, the reimbursement from the state. When I say reimbursement, we only get back what we put in. Because we don’t tax sales, we don’t tax income, and yet we only have the property tax. The property tax was never intended to provide the services that we have to provide as a central destination for a region.
You have to make business taxes highly competitive with any other state in America, number one. And we do these tax stabilizations all the time. And they are very welcome. They’re part of real estate. We have tremendous enterprise zones, but so does everybody else. It’s quality of life that brings people here. It’s affordability of work force.
What are your three top priorities for the city of Providence?
Educational reform. Business taxes, being made highly competitive. We’ve begun to do that, albeit slowly, with the phase out of the excise tax. And continue the renaissance of the Downcity and neighborhoods.
What are you talking about in terms of educational reform?
We’re talking about building smaller schools. We’re talking about building middle schools, which are of the stature of a Classical High School. We’re talking about a reformed teachers’ contract. We’re talking about paying teachers — we’re among the lowest paid teachers in the state now – bringing them up to the level of livability, competitiveness. We’re probably going to lose 500 teachers in the next year, year and a half. We’re going to have to hire 500 new teachers. In the last couple of years, I’ve built 225 classrooms to compensate for the increase in population in the schools. It’s an amazing number. More accountability on the part of teachers in exchange for the higher wages. More professional development on the part of teachers. More parental involvement. We can eliminate busing. Build schools so that kids can walk to the school house doors as opposed to the bus stop in a safe neighborhood. That we’ve been able to accomplish. We could celebrate a lot of good things in the schools. We built the B.J. Clanton School on the South Side. We built the two elementary schools. Microsoft says those are the two most technologically well equipped schools, the best in the country. Because they gave us the stuff. And they are partners with us. The Feinstein School of Public Service, that will win an award. The Arts across the curriculum. Then I want to build some high schools in places like the Mall. Special High Schools, like the performing arts high school. I want to make the high schools, and the middle schools and the elementary schools in the city highly competitive to the suburban atmosphere and also the private schools. So actually people fight to come here. They fight to come to Classical.
One of the problems we have – it’s great to have artists lofts, build five hotels, build skating rinks. Do all that stuff that we’re doing. Do three new cities. That’s great. If you really want to have neighborhoods, you have to have schools. You don’t have schools forget about it. That’s the future. It’s economic necessity the city improve the schools or nobody’s going to locate here.
Reform requires money too. All the minorities are here. In the second grade at Camden Avenue Elementary School, there are more minorities in that school, in the second grade, than there are in the entire school system of Barrington. In the entire Camden Elementary School there are more minorities there than the entire school system of Warwick, the second largest school system in the state. Now there’s demographic changes. We’re multi-cultural. That’s a challenge and there’s also opportunity. Kids cost me(Providence) more to educate. English as a second language, special ed, all those kinds of things. We don’t get reimbursed nearly what we’re entitled to.
I don’t want any more subsidized housing around here either. I’m going to create wealth, not perpetuate povertyCouncil-man don’t want any more subsidized housing in their neighborhoods. They don’t want SROs. Why should they have them all. Just like why should we have the oil tanks. I don’t know why. It doesn’t mean anything to me. It gives me less than a million eight in taxes a year. Seventy three jobs. They don’t even live in Providence. I don’t want to look at it and I don’t want your lousy million eight. Get outa here. Go someplace else and by the way pay us when you leave because you polluted it all.
If you were to put yourself up at the State House – and I’m not suggesting you want to do that at the moment – what would your top priorities be for the state of Rhode Island
It would be education number one. It would be reducing the business taxes as much as I could. I talked to the governor about this the other day. What do you do about the lag years. If you reduce business taxes you get business. If you promote it and go after that and you have the right land masses for it. Getting business should be the business of Rhode Island. To create jobs. To make people want to live. And also to reduce business taxes and make living a more easy environment as far as taxes are concerned. Taxes are what kills people. Taxes are what is killing the state of Rhode Island. Excise tax. What do you do in the lag years, when you don’t have the income coming in ’cause the industry you have not attracted is not here, but they’re going to be here. I think you have to be a risk taker. I don’t know if the governor is a risk taker. I respect him, but I don’t know if he is a risk taker as much as maybe we need at this point. I’m not saying go mortgage the state. You can be too overly cautious. When you’re overly cautious you can lose.
What kind of risks?
I think that we ought to have a dramatic – for instance like I announced the three new cities, that’s risk taking. Tomorrow morning in the paper there could be 25 organizations from the Sierra Club to the Mountain Climbers to Save the Bay that could be against it. But somebody has to say this is the way we have to be thinking. I think someone ought to develop an urban strategy for the state of Rhode Island. I’m not just talking Providence, I’m talking Woonsocket, Newport. Those are the major generators of dollars. It’s not Little Compton. It ain’t Kingston. It’s Providence, it’s Newport. Add it up, the state budget, $2 billion. You probably get $400 million from them down there, $600 million from us. That’s half of it. Two cities. If I were the governor I’d make those cities chime. I’d make them work like no other cities work. I’d partner with them. I would be supporters of them. And I think he’s getting that way, or the state is.
