What Is Good Government?
It’s efficient. Our government is paid for by us, and it’s reasonable to want our money to be used wisely to get the most out of our hard-earned dollars. Good government achieves that by working in well-organized and competent ways.
It’s thorough. We want our government to fix problems and make our lives better. Halfway solutions are not enough, and good government works on problems rigorously, methodically, and with great care and solves them as completely as possible.
It’s responsive to its citizens. We know what we need, and we’re happy to share our needs with our representatives in the Statehouse. Good government actively listens to its citizens and works on the things that concern them the most.
What Would a Good State Government Do?
If Rhode Island had an efficient, thorough, and responsive state government, what would it do?
Ideally, it would have its own version of the One Minnesota Plan, an ambitious project to build a healthy and vibrant state and to meet the needs of all its citizens—including healthcare, child care, education, housing, and better government.
Sadly, Rhode Island state government isn’t functioning well enough to take on a complex task like the One Minnesota Plan, so we need to improve our government and get it to a place where it can start solving our biggest and most difficult problems.
How Can Rhode Island Get Good State Government?
Our state government is struggling to keep up. It has a lot to do, but obstacles are getting in its way.
Our legislators don’t have enough time to complete their work, and it’s forcing them to settle for quick fixes instead of developing real solutions to our problems.
Laws that don’t align with the missions of our state agencies are interrupting their work and distracting them from their objectives and goals.
Rhode Island’s climate change law isn’t working, and the threat of climate change to property, our economy, and a stable government continues to grow.
To get a more effective government that truly helps us, we need to remove these roadblocks, and happily, we can with:
With these changes, we can make our government more efficient and thorough, and we can give our legislators and elected officials more time to hear us and find out what we care about and what we want.
These are the first steps toward the good government that Rhode Island deserves and needs, and they’re the first goals I want to work on to give us better lives and a better future.
One Minnesota Plan
For the past 40 years, US government has been taking money from working people and giving it to the rich, but it wasn’t always that way.
The generations of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s kept their share of our country’s wealth because government used to watch out for workers, and we can keep our share if our government goes back to helping everyone like it used to.
The One Minnesota Plan is aimed at supporting and giving back to Minnesota workers:
Child and Family Well-Being expand access to healthcare and reduce childhood poverty
Children's Mental Health support kids with prevention, treatment, and recovery programs
Educational Opportunity expand the number of students reading at or above grade level
Child Care Access increase access to high quality child care and early education programs
Workforce Shortage create a diverse and skilled workforce
Housing Stability prioritize reliable, secure, and affordable housing
Public Safety reduce violent crime
Health Disparities ensure high quality health care for all
Substance Use Disorder reduce opioid deaths
Inclusion and Retention build an inclusive environment in state government
Equitable Procurement open opportunities for small businesses to become state vendors
Climate Resilience make all communities resilient
Greenhouse Gas Emissions meet or exceed statutory greenhouse gas emissions goals
Customer Experience guarantee high-quality customer experiences for all government services
Government Systems implement systems that support all people
A Full-time General Assembly
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Rhode Island General Assembly is one of the 10 state legislatures in the U.S. that work the least, is the lowest paid, and has the least amount of staff to help Senators and Representatives do their jobs. They call these states Part-Time Lite, and they’re a throwback to citizen legislatures of the past.
But in the 21st century with its complicated and difficult problems, that old model isn’t working. It takes time to identify the cause of a problem, which is what you need to know before you work on it, and it takes even more time to come up with a realistic solution. And the simple fact is that our legislators can’t do that on a six-month, part-time schedule.
Instead, our legislators are forced to cut corners like settling for short-term fixes that will need to be worked on again instead of fixing the problem outright. Or letting outside groups that want to help themselves instead of helping us write their bills. Or voting on bills they haven’t studied or even read. And of course, there’s less time to interact with the people they represent, too.
The problem is most apparent at the end of the legislative session in May, when the Statehouse is like a pressure cooker that’s ready to burst. Senators and Representatives run around like school kids in a panic, pulling all-nighters to get their papers written and projects done before the semester ends. The place is chaotic and unprofessional and doesn’t help anyone do their job well. It’s a bad way to treat our legislators and a terrible way to get things done.
If we want a General Assembly that works for us, we need to give our Senators and Representatives the time to study and deliberate and develop real solutions to our problems. We need to give them the space to be thoughtful and thorough and to hear us when we tell them what we need, and a full-time legislature is a way we can achieve that.
State Agencies That Are Fully Focused on Their Missions
The civil servants who staff our agencies are smart and talented people who work hard to carry out the mission of their divisions. Yet even with their commitment and expertise, their organizations sometime struggle with underfunding, interference from the General Assembly, and bad leadership.
The Department of Transportation has a leadership problem.
In July 2020, construction company Barletta Heavy Division Incorporated dumped contaminated and toxic landfill at the Providence 6/10 Connector construction site. The landfill came from the polluted Pawtucket/Central Falls Commuter Rail Station and the MBTA in Boston. It threatened the health of workers at the site as well as adults and children in the neighborhoods nearby.
After whistleblowers came forward and GoLocal Prov reported on the illegal dumping, Director of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, Peter Alviti, went on talk radio WPRO to assure the public that the landfill was clean. He did so more than a month after RIDOT discovered that the landfill was contaminated and had asked Barletta to remove and properly dispose of it.
Documents obtained by GoLocal Prov from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management show that RIDOT knew about the contamination and that Peter Alviti’s assertions were misleading and false.
The landfill was eventually removed. Barletta plead guilty to federal charges, and state charges are pending. And that might seem like the end of the story, except that Peter Alviti is still Director of RIDOT.
It’s troubling that the head of our Department of Transportation would deceive us, and it’s shocking when you consider he was covering up a threat to our health. And now that the Washington Bridge has failed, his willingness to spread falsehoods is alarming. We need the truth about what happed to the bridge, and businesses and commuters who rely on the bridge need honest assessments about how long it will take to be rebuilt.
But with Peter Alviti in charge, we can’t know if what we’re hearing is true or not, whether it’s about the bridge or any RIDOT project in our state. Peter Alviti is an obstacle in the way of transparency and accountability, and that’s a problem for us that needs to be fixed.
Underfunding and pressure from the General Assembly to expand logging is compromising Department of Environmental Management efforts to protect our forests.
In 2021, the General Assembly passed the Forest Conservation Act and established the Forest Conservation Commission. Overseen by the Department of Environmental Management, the commission is tasked with various conservation objectives, including finding money to conserve Rhode Island forests, encouraging private landowners to maintain their forests, and expanding Rhode Island’s timber industry by identifying obstacles to growth and finding new markets for Rhode Island trees.
And if that sounds like they’re saying we can protect our forests by helping loggers cut them down, they are. You see, Rhode Island doesn’t have laws to protect its forestland and DEM doesn’t have the staff to maintain state forests, so the authors of the Forest Conservation Act were trying to solve those problems by letting loggers in to cut down trees and, hopefully, getting a little free forest conservation from the timber industry on the side.
And the loggers say, of course they’ll protect the forests because it’s in their interest to have woodlands they can harvest again and again, but that idea is flawed because no matter how sincere the timber industry may be about conservation, in every situation where loggers have to choose between protecting a forest or making a profit, a conflict of interest will arise between their interests and ours.
A better solution was proposed by Rhode Island Old Growth Tree Society president Nathan Cornell in 2023 when he advocated finally using Rhode Island’s Natural Areas Protection Act. Added to Rhode Island’s laws in 1993 to provide the highest level of protection to our state’s most environmentally sensitive natural areas, the Natural Areas Protection Act has never been used. No one knows why, but considering DEM’s persistent financial woes, underfunding is a likely culprit.
The Natural Areas Protection Act allows the director of DEM to establish a system of natural area preserves and to ensure that the preserves are maintained in as natural and wild a state as is consistent with educational, scientific, biological, geological, and scenic purposes. The director may also adopt regulations for establishing and managing the natural area preserve system, including adopting a management plan for each designated area.
Rhode Island needs clear and enforceable regulations to protect our forests, and while the Natural Areas Protection Act won’t protect them all, it at least gives us a way to preserve Rhode Island’s threatened natural spaces. Of course, implementing a system of preserves will take time and money, and a reasonable approach would be to give DEM the resources it needs to survey our natural areas and identify which need protection and to put the timber industry on hold until DEM is done.
These are our forests and an important part of our heritage, and before we’re surprised by another catastrophic failure that one of our state agencies was supposed to prevent, we need to do the right thing.
Act on Climate is a burden on all of our state agencies.
Passed in 2021, Act on Climate is Rhode Island’s climate change plan, except it isn’t a finished plan. It’s more like a starter kit for growing a plan.
Act on Climate sets mandates for the reduction of Rhode Island’s greenhouse gas emissions—a 45% reduction by 2030, 80% by 2040, and no emissions by 2050. It makes the mandates enforceable by allowing Rhode Islanders to sue the state if those goals are missed, and drops finding a way to achieve those goals in the lap of a climate change council made up of state agency directors and officials.
It’s an update of the Resilient Rhode Island Act of 2014 that adds social and environmental justice requirements and the threat of being sued. Environmental activists were upset that nothing was happening with Resilient Rhode Island, and they wanted to make the state take it seriously by adding teeth. What they didn’t consider was that Resilient Rhode Island had stalled because they were asking the wrong people to work on it.
Cutting emissions is hard. It’s easier now than it was in 2014 to get the electricity from renewable sources because there’s a lot of it around and there’s always more being built—and transitioning to clean electricity will shrink Rhode Island’s emissions somewhere around 29%. But fixing heating, cooling, and transportation remains complicated and complex, and that’s where two-thirds of Rhode Island’s emissions are coming from.
Our state agencies don’t have experience in cutting emissions. The people working in our agencies are experts in their fields and skilled at managing elaborate systems in our state, but we can’t expect them to be experts outside of their specialities, too. We need to give that project to people who specialize in emissions reductions.
So three years after Act on Climate was passed, there’s still no plan, and people are getting worried.
In January 2024, Timmons Roberts, Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at Brown University, told EcoRI News, “The big message is, we are not on track. If the state fails to come up with a legitimate plan to reduce emissions in the next two calendar years…then the state could be sued as early as 2026.”
And on the December 7, 2023 episode of the podcast Bartholowmewtown, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha candidly announced that Rhode Island isn’t going to hit its emissions goals.
They didn’t mean to, but the authors of Act on Climate saddled us with a law that’s sucking up millions of dollars and unknown hours of agency time, distracting us from finding real solutions to our emissions problem, and pushing our legislators and state officials into inaction as they wait for a plan.
A Real Solution for Climate Change
Rhode Island’s future isn’t bright. Climate change is making New England wetter. The Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University reports that extreme precipitation in the Northeast has grown 60% over the last 60 years and will continue to increase, and at the same time, sea levels are also rising.
What this means for Rhode Island is that the heavy rains that are flooding Rhode Island streets, homes, and businesses, and the water that’s sweeping into neighborhoods and business districts near rivers, the ocean, and Narragansett Bay every time there’s a storm are on track to surge further and flood even more as climate change gets worse.
It also means that tides will soon flood our coastline and low-lying roads like Route 114 in Barrington every day. In the 2022 WPRI article “Rhode Island Homeowners Already Suffering Due to Sea-level Rise,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse notes that almost three miles of Route 114 will regularly disappear underwater by 2035—which is only 10 years away.
As a result, the amount of money we’re spending on cleanup, repairs, and rebuilding our infrastructure to handle the worsening weather will keep going up, and when we add in other costs, like rising insurance premiums, higher mortgage rates, real estate that won’t be able to get insurance or a mortgage, a tax base that shrinks as property becomes unusable and is abandoned, and roads that become unusable and cause economic losses like the losses that the Washington Bridge is causing right now, we will reach a point not too long from now where none of us—not citizens, cities, or the state—will have enough money to keep up, and our economy will break.
Thanks to climate change, we’re on a path of increasing financial pain and eventual economic collapse, and we’re already partway there.
To get ourselves off this path, we need two things. We need more revenue to keep fixing what climate change keeps breaking, and we need to stop climate change from getting worse. Of course, stopping climate change is a worldwide project, and cutting Rhode Island’s emissions alone will have little to no effect on global warming, but if we design an attractive way to power ourselves with renewable energy that other states and countries will want to copy, we can spark the clean energy revolution we need to survive.
Samuel Slater revolutionized the world with his textile mill in 1793, and we can change it, too, because what’s more attractive than making money and having complete control over your energy? The energy business is profitable, and with today’s clean energy technology, Rhode Island can build and run a new, state-of-the-art, statewide, publicly-owned utility that will make us energy independent and rake in the dough.
Right now, we rely on companies outside of Rhode Island to sell and distribute our energy, and we have limited control over how our energy system works and how much we pay. Like the timber industry, energy companies also have a conflict of interest between serving their customers—us—and making a profit for themselves, but if we build a utility that we own, we won’t have a conflict of interest because all of the decisions about our utility will be made by us for us.
So, we’ll get to decide:
And we can do things like:
We’ll also need to look at the bigger picture and consider how to electrify heating, cooling, and transportation which account for most of our emissions. Commuter rail is an excellent way to zero out emissions. Can we build an easy-to-use and reliable system to get us around the state? And how do we help homeowners, businesses, and landlords transition to electric heat and cooling? Some of us can afford the investment, but it will be an extreme hardship for others. We need to make it affordable for everyone.
And we need to protect the businesses and citizens who will suffer economic losses from a transition to clean energy. Some of our neighbors are going to be hurt through no fault of their own, and they deserve a quick recovery. We need to account for everyone and make sure everyone is okay.
And with a good design, we should be able to do most, if not all, of these things. We should be able to keep ourselves afloat and, at the same time, show every country and every region in the world, how to keep themselves afloat, too.
To get a design, we’ll need to hire experts in energy, economic, and legal and regulatory issues, like The Brattle Group and Cadmus. Both have helped states make plans to cut their emissions, and they’re examples of the kinds of firms states hire when they have questions that are too big and complex for state governments to answer.
Ideally, our state government should be working on this, but it’s not. And waiting for an election that’s several years away to get the ball rolling, isn’t a good alternative. So, a group of us have launched two nonprofits to start the project and raise $3 million for a blueprint. Once we have a blueprint, we’ll hit the ground running and do everything we can to get a utility. Our nonprofits are Noble Owl and Generous Crow, and you can learn more and donate at nobleowl.org and generouscrow.org.
Hello!
I’m Wil Gregersen, and I’m a librarian at Warwick Public Library. I serve the people of Warwick—helping them find answers for their problems and ways to achieve their goals—and I’m running for governor of Rhode Island to get our state to serve the people of Rhode Island better and to do a better job of fixing Rhode Island’s problems.
My path to becoming a librarian was a long one. When I was in my 20s, I was in the seminary studying and thinking about becoming a pastor. I wanted to help and serve, but pastor wasn’t the right role for me. Then, when I was almost 40, a librarian asked me if I had ever considered joining the profession. I hadn’t, but she opened my eyes. And in no time at all, I decided to go to library school.
And when I became a librarian, it felt so good to finally be serving a community. And in my almost 20 years of being a librarian I’ve had the privilege to serve three—first Cumberland, then Barrington, and finally Warwick.
Being a librarian has also helped me make sense of the world. I’ve always been curious about how the world works. I want to know what makes it tick and how it got this way, and as a librarian, I’ve learned how to dig deep for facts and answers that help explain the complicated systems that affect our lives, including our state government and why it struggles to get things done.
As a librarian, I value public service and expertise. I know what it means to listen and help because that’s what librarians do. That’s why you can walk into any public library in Rhode Island, talk to any librarian, and get help with any problem you’re having. The librarian will listen, ask questions so they understand what you’re looking for, and work with you to find answers to your questions and ways you can get the help you need.
And even better, when you talk to a librarian, you’re not only being heard, but you’re getting solid answers, too, because librarians are trained to recognize expertise. The world is filled with opinions, half-baked ideas, and bad advice, but librarians know how to push through all that noise to find experts who know what they’re talking about and who are offering facts and reliable information.
Librarians don’t need to know the answers. They need to know how to find them. And in the same way, governors don't need to have all the solutions to our problems. They need smart and experienced people they can work with to find solutions. That’s why a businessman, a U.S. senator, a treasurer, and a mayor could be governor and why the successes and failures of their administrations rest on the quality of the help those governors were getting.
It’s so important to bring in experts who can help our state government make informed decisions. Too often our elected officials rely on homegrown solutions to fix our problems when they should be asking specialists to help them find more effective answers. And they should be talking to multiple specialists because the best answers are usually where experts agree.
Finding where experts agree is how librarians work. It’s how they come up with reliable answers, and finding reliable solutions for Rhode Island is what I want to bring to state government and the Office of the Governor.
So, maybe it’s time to give a librarian a try because, if we want to fix our problems, we need experts who give us good advice, and if we want a state government that works for the people, we need a Statehouse that makes public service its first and primary goal.
I love Rhode Island, and I want to help us be okay. It might be foolish to want to serve when the challenges are so great, but service is a fundamental part of who I am. So, please think about what good state government means to you, and if you like my ideas about it, I’d be grateful for your support.