(second of two parts)
Name: Vincent A. Cianci, Jr.
Occupation: Mayor of the City of Providence. The longest sitting mayor in the city’s history.
Backround: First elected mayor of Providence in 1974, at the age of 33, winning reelection in 1978 and 1982. Elected again in 1990, and reelected in 1994 and 1998.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in government from Fairfield University, Master’s in political science from Villanova University, and law degree from Marquette University School of Law.
Age: 59
Family: Divorced, the father of one daughter, and has two grandchildren.
Residence: Providence
Seifert Systems Invests in Energy Efficiency to Strengthen Operations
For manufacturers, energy is more than just another operating expense. It plays a critical role…
Learn More
Mayor Vincent A. Cianci, Jr.: ‘Every mayor needs a project. We’ve got downtown on a roll.’
This is the second of two parts of a wide-ranging interview with Providence Mayor Vincent A. Cianci, Jr. The first part ran in last week’s newspaper.
PBN: What is the status of your three-cities project?
CIANCI: Every mayor needs a project. We’ve got the city running well. We’ve got downtown on a roll. We’re building hotels, the plans are there. Intermodel transportation will be ready next November. We’re doing Burnside Park. We’ve got thousands of dollars going into neighborhoods to finish sidewalks, do affordable housing, community police. This is where we ought to be going. If we don’t go in this direction then shame on us. I hired a consultant for the port area. Then I hired a company to do the covering of Route 95, but see it’s not the covering of 95, it’s those areas on either side of the highway to reclaim the site lines before they built 95. It was so beautiful in front of the Cathedral and all the boulevards.
Let’s take the waterfront. We’re getting less than $1 million in taxes. There are 80 jobs there. I want them out. It’s a big environmental problem.
What about the port?
The port can stay. This isn’t the port. The port stays, but there’s no reason that ports need to be ugly. The Seattle Port is a tourist attraction.
The fact that it now appears that Quonset is not going to happen
Don’t let me get started on Quonset, because Quonset ought to be, and I’ve said this since 1980, Quonset Point ought to be the industrial Mecca of the Northeast. Think about it. It has a deep water port. It has every utility, an airfield. It is within a five hour drive of probably 35 percent of this country’s population. It’s sitting there, wasted basically.
Whose fault is it that it hasn’t progressed?
I don’t want to get into that. I think we should look into the future to see what we can do. I’ll tell you what I did to help it along. Because a lot of jobs will be created there, we applied for an enterprise zone grant. I allocated – and I overruled my planning department. They wanted everything to go to Providence. I said no. I said allocate several millions of dollars – we didn’t get the grant, we’re going to get part of it in the future. I’ve already got that confirmed. Let’s allocate some of this for Quonset Point. We’ve got to create jobs for our people, and if we can take two, three million bucks, help them create that place. It’s not that far.
The other thing we talked about was this whole area behind the mall. Wasserman Associates has that project and he has the authority to do that. But we hired the developers from Toronto. They said that area, we’re selling ourselves short with that project. They think we should be thinking bigger than what the original plan was. I didn’t put a hold on it, but I said let’s revisit that. We’ll move ahead and down at the port, think about how we have denied ourselves. People just didn’t care. Sewer plants, oil plants, we just robbed ourselves.
We’ll be in Washington for two days, where we will meet with either secretaries or undersecretaries, from everybody from agriculture to HUD to energy, to put funding applications together. We’re hiring a lobbyist to pull it altogether. I don’t care if the Journal criticizes hiring a lobbyist because that’s what everybody else does. And we’re going to see about getting us proper funding to bring this to fruition. Maybe by April we’ll present another film with the consultants showing what will really go there and how we’re going to fund this. And I want the university and college community to be part of this. This is just as much for neighborhoods.
Does that put Wasserman out of the picture?
No. No. But I think he can be a little bit more sophisticated in what he wants to do than just build another shopping area. I think there’s more to it. I want to listen to what the consultants have to say. We’re paying them a quarter million bucks. I want to hear what they’re going to say.
Somebody’s got to say this is what I think we should be doing. If you don’t like it, fine. Then tell me what do you like. Let’s all put our heads together.
Another thing helping us is the Grow Smart Coalition. Today, in the suburban communities, when the city changed back in the ’50s, ’60s, after World War II and everybody moved out and we were left with an increasing number of minorities, increasing number of elderly and the retail all left and the neighborhoods deteriorated. We made cities happen again with the development of arts, restaurants, cultural activities, zoos, neighborhood rejuvenation. Made people proud to be here.
One of the things, when we dedicated the mall, I was asked what was your biggest accomplishment in your administration. They thought I was going to say the tracks or the mall. None of that, some of it, but none of it in this sense. The one thing we did was build the level of self-esteem back into this city to heights we never ever thought we could achieve. And that’s been the legacy of these years. Once we had a vision, and a substantial number of people bought into it we were able to continue and finish it. Now we’ve got some finishing touches to do with garages and things, but those will happen. The airport we very much supported; that was something we needed. High-speed rail we supported, and that’s going to happen. So all these things bode well for us in the future.
We need to change tax structures. We also need to understand that we’re in this thing on a regional basis. Just think of New England. You have 12 United States Senators. I don’t know how many congressmen, but a lot . You have some pretty strong mayors from New England. There’s no reason when we compete for things that we have to compete for Providence.
Same concept as Kip Bergstrom and the Economic Policy Council?
Exactly, but this is what I’ve always .. in fact I was with Murray and Ray Flynn on this years ago and nothing ever happened. Never had any more meetings. Ray’s out of office now, Terry’s winding down. Somebody’s got to pick this up. Let’s say a government project or a non government project. Yes I’d like to have it, but the fact is that if I don’t have it certainly, Worcester should get it, or somebody up here in New England should have it. Work together, some of the tax dollars to us. Or if we get something new, some of the tax dollars to them. Certainly in numbers of jobs, we can share all of it. Especially with the infrastructure transportation system we’re trying to build. We need more public transportation.
Look at the waterfront. If you went up in a helicopter you’d see how close Roger Williams Park is to the waterfront. It’s a stone’s throw. Now you can build a necklace of green space, high tech buildings, marinas, businesses, and marrying light rail into the city.
Much like Baltimore?
Yes. We can do all of that. We’ve got to learn to play the big time. We don’t think big enough. We have recently, and we’re going to continue to do that.
Banks have been a big part of the revitalization in the past. What role will Sovereign play?
I’ve met with (Joseph P.) Campanelli (president and chief operating officer of Sovereign Bank New England). They want to be so much a part of this community. We’re a city that has a vibrant economy. There are a million people here (in Rhode Island). There are a lot of businesses here. Banking is a special situation. I know one thing, Citizens has been good to the city. Fleet has been good to the city. They support the kinds of things they’ve always supported. We’re a major customer of those banks. They’re not going to abandon Rhode Island. When Fleet merged with BankBoston it was better that they merged than have somebody from Texas buy them, because both of those banks have long roots in Rhode Island.
What impact does the situation with the Economic Development Corp. and John Swen’s resignation have on the city?
I think that’s the governor’s choice. I have confidence he’ll select someone who is active and cooperative with the city. Whenever you bring someone in from the business sector, they sometimes compare business sector practices with governmental practices. That’s where John Swen got caught. I don’t think what John Swen did – I don’t know about any trips to Disneyworld – it’s almost ironic. I run a business here with a very strong board of directors, the council. It spends almost a billion dollars a year, between the water board, tax collections, community development, public housing. It’s amazing that no one can buy you a lunch. You can’t you have to jump through hoops to do that. So I sympathize with John Swen, because, as I said before, mayors have to be entrepreneurial. I don’t think John Swen needs anybody to take him out to dinner. And I don’t need anybody to take me out to dinner. But you find yourself in situations, like for instance the Florence trip I took. They make such a big deal out of that. My campaign, my organization paid. We figured it out the other day, almost $40,000 on the Florence trip. Not the trip, but to bring them over here. We paid $40,000 bringing the mayor, entertaining him, bringing him to Washington. Florence just didn’t pick us. They picked us because we picked them to be a partner with us, and there’s a certain amount of cost that goes with that. The city didn’t pay for it, but my campaign organization did. Not the city. So I get kind of disappointed when news media say we made a mistake with that. In the private sector they wouldn’t even look twice at that, when you buy someone dinner or take a trip to lure someone to come. It’s just part of America today. It’s part of what you have to do.
How closely do you monitor that kind of spending within the city?
Not as well, we have pretty good checks. We have some pretty strong rules here. We get audited every year. I don’t see any problems that I know about. First of all, we don’t have credit cards. There isn’t a credit card in the city. I don’t have one. Nobody on my staff has one. The only credit card I have is a campaign credit card, which is the business I have to go through with the Board of Elections and all that. And I can justify all my expenditures. Whenever I have a doubt, I always charge it to the campaign.
What impact has Plunder Dome had on the city?
Originally it had a lot of impact. Now it doesn’t have very much, because it seems to be restricted to the tax office. We’ve cooperated 100 percent. Whatever records they’ve wanted they’ve got. We continue to do our jobs. I’ve done what I have to do. I have proposed as part of the commissioner’s office an ethics unit. That’s up in the council now. I’ve terminated the people who were on those boards who were accused. In addition we continue to do background checks on people and we try to run our lives consistent with the everyday accepted practices of good government.
Are you confident that this has gone as far as it’s going to go?
They don’t share with me their information. But the fact is, I know right now, from what I know, it is restricted to the tax situation. I certainly have no concerns, myself personally. I think it’s where it’s at. Only they know.
If you were governor what would your priorities be?
My priorities would be education and I probably would want to change the tax structure to make it more competitive business-wise.
Are we talking the revisions to the income tax structure that favor the wealthy?
I want to attract businesses here to create jobs. I would not overlook that. I would not say I’d support it as it is. Certainly, I’m not criticizing the governor, he’s done a good. You have to understand we’re only a million people in the state. We have a lot going for us in the way of tourism, promotion of tourism. We ought to be taking our assets and really understanding what we have and putting them to the best possible and efficacious use.
Let’s take the Civic Center. The city of Providence taxpayer, we operate that Civic Center. It has been the gran-dam of all the arena entertainment that we’ve had, from circuses to national figure skating championships to frozen four(college hockey championships), which are coming here in March. We handle that at a deficit every year. Yet it generates millions of dollars to the state of Rhode Island every year. The city of Providence sends up almost a billion dollars in income taxes and sales taxes to the state of Rhode Island each year. And the state should be helping us with things like the Civic Center, because it’s their venue. The state should be helping us with things like Roger Williams Park, which is one of the largest tourist attractions in the state.
The metropolitan area of Providence and Warwick is 93.5 percent of the state’s economy. So we ought to be pay a little more attention to it. We ought to make sure that high speed rail stops in Providence. Because now we can promote that Boston connection a lot better because of the high speed. Providence is less expensive to live than in Boston. We should be promoting businesses to come here. We should not bank on gambling.
What do we hear about Pfizer?
We’re not at liberty to talk about that. but that would be a wonderful thing to put at the Port of Providence.
Is that a possibility?
Why not.
Anything you’d like to add?
The one thing I like to do when I travel around the country… go to mayors meetings or something. One of the things that truly impresses me that people know Providence, they know about its changes and they’re eager to learn. We are truly an American city that people respect now, and that wasn’t the case 15 years ago.
