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.