- [Jim] This week on "A Lively Experiment," a cyber attack puts the personal information of hundreds of thousands of Rhode Islanders in jeopardy.

And the head of Crossroads Rhode Island talks about affordable housing, homelessness, and how the state is handling them.

- [Announcer] "A Lively Experiment" is generously underwritten by- - Hi, I'm John Hazen White, Jr. For over 30 years, "A Lively Experiment" has provided insight and analysis of the political issues that face Rhode Islanders.

I'm a proud supporter of this great program in Rhode Island PBS.

- Joining us with the analysis: Brown University political science professor, Wendy Schiller; The Public's Radio political reporter, Ian Donnis; and Steph Machado, "Boston Globe" reporter and contributor for Rhode Island PBS Weekly.

Hello everyone, and welcome into "Lively."

I'm Jim Hummel.

There is something about the month of December in Rhode Island.

The December debacle for Providence school children during the snowstorm in 2007, then the closure of the westbound side of the Washington Bridge a year ago.

And late last week, a computer hack that has state officials and hundreds of thousands of people scrambling to protect their personal and financial information.

Steph, you and Ian have been in the middle of this.

Let's start with Ian.

Just something that the McKee administration doesn't need at this point.

- Yeah, it's a headache for the Governor.

And it's the kind of thing that can really erode trust in government because hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Rhode Islanders face the potential loss of their personal data.

You can protect that by locking down your credit, but that can be a pain in the neck if you need to unfreeze it to, you know, refinance your home or do something like that.

And also, the state pays huge amounts of money to Deloitte, seemingly with the, you know, this kind of thing should not happen.

It's known in this day and age that cyber hacking is a prevalent threat, and something clearly went very wrong.

The details on that have not yet been forthcoming, but it's a bad situation.

- [Jim] Steph.

- Yeah, and we're talking about some of the most vulnerable Rhode Islanders who are on Medicaid, who are on food stamps, who need these benefits.

And, you know, while luckily the December benefits were paid out before the cyber attack was discovered, there's a question about how are the January benefits going to get to people if this system is not back up and running by then.

I also wanna emphasize, because I don't want people to look at this story and say, oh, it's the welfare system, well, I'm not on public assistance, I'm not affected.

HealthSource RI is private health insurance that people in the middle class and above, you know, shop for on the state's portal because if they work for themselves or, you know, or a freelancer or a sole proprietor in some way.

So a lot of people who don't get public assistance, but have private health insurance are affected by this too if they shopped through HealthSource RI.

- Yeah, I mean, I just think that, you know, you think about other cities, I think Baltimore was subject to a really bad ransomware.

And, you know, the trade off is that in order to have the kinds of systems in place to protect this kind of information and have the people in place, you have to pay a lot of money.

There's a big market for people with these skills.

And then you think, well, public officials, state government, it's hard to pay those kinds of salaries.

So the people who are doing the job are doing the best they can, but it's not like government can spend the kind of money to protect itself that private companies can spend.

That's just true of all places all over the country.

I don't think there's anything particular to Rhode Island about that.

- And to Wendy's point, I think as the internet was popularized in the '90s, so a lot less thought was given to the security and how you had to make the transactions safe online, and the state has been warned about this repeatedly.

I remember the previous auditor general Dennis Hoyle in 2019, warning that there was a threat of possible intrusions and unauthorized access to the state's IT network because of problems with it.

Unfortunately for the state, that was in the context of a 400 plus page report so it didn't exactly jump out.

But now we see that there were a series of past warnings.

- And just practically, I mean, everybody probably within the last couple of months has seen more two-factor authorization with your email and with a lot of the online.

So I agree with you, a lot of the horse got kind of out of the barn and I think they're trying to catch up now.

I think the aggravating thing is Deloitte was the one that was the problem with UHIP.

Remember UHIP?

Everybody having a little deja vu.

They tried to recast it as Rhode Island bridges, but it's the same system, and Deloitte's been re-upped.

And so the governor said, "Well, everything seemed to be going fine."

And I think that's a tough pill to swallow for some people.

- Yeah, I think that that will be among the many, many stories that we cover in 2025, which is what happened with Deloitte?

Did they do something wrong?

I mean, we've seen these cyber attacks hitting, it seems every company in America these days.

So did they do something wrong that they were, or did they not do something they were supposed to have done?

The Attorney General already heavily hinted that he's going to seek some sort of legal action against the company.

And then certainly there's the money question, will the state end up having to pay for anything here in terms of the credit monitoring for people or any, you know, class action lawsuit from people?

- But a company the size of Deloitte, you would think they would be ahead of this.

And as Ian said, and "The Globe" had a great story on this, that the state was warned.

It's not like we're, it's not like this came out of nowhere.

Oh, oh, all of a sudden, hack.

They were given these warnings and they were seemingly ignored.

- Well, we can also make an analogy to the bridge where the state was warned that there were problems with the bridge.

So I just think what this is contributing to is the overall sense, and I think it affected the outcome of the '24 elections, is that government doesn't work.

That we have all these benefits and services that government's providing, but it's still a government public entity, not a private entity.

And so either there should be a much more oversight from the legislature than there is now, I think, of that our administration works in the State of Rhode Island.

You have a nearly a $14 billion budget.

So, but this is what worries me is that people say, well, government doesn't work, so give it to private sector.

But if Deloitte is a private company and running it and can't protect, then that makes no sense.

But I am concerned that that will be the narrative that comes out of this on top of the other failings that people see in the state government.

- And even separate from the warnings from the Auditor General, there was just a very similar cyber attack at the Providence Public School District that affected tens of thousands of people, not hundreds of thousands.

Then the state controls that district.

And my question to the state was, "After that hack, why didn't you shore up every system you have that has people's sensitive data, including encrypting and things like that?"

And I was told that's all part of the investigation.

So no clear answer on that yet.

- Well, we're hearing a lot of that.

It's the investigation.

And, you know, we wanted to know that.

You knew more than you could report and then finally reported it the ransomware.

Right?

- Yeah.

- Are we gonna pay it?

Are we not?

Well, then if you don't pay, I mean, I'm kind of torn on that.

I think you probably shouldn't pay the ransomware, but then you have a third of the state's people's information.

It's not a smaller subsect.

That's a lot of people.

- It's a lot of people.

It could be, well, more than a third of the state.

And state officials been very tightlipped about the status of communication with the hackers and what is happening with that.

But as Steph said, this is a story that will get a lot of attention going forward.

- You know, they have to figure out how they got in, right?

So, and, you know, when you have a really huge number of people who are accessing the site from lots of different internet portals, you don't know how secure any of those portals are.

And if they are people who use, let's say, you know, computers at the library or use somebody else's phone or whatever those are, and you don't know what else is on their phone, there's lots of entry points to get in.

We're seeing that all around the country.

So in some ways, you know, we have to find out how they got in to really understand how we're gonna move forward to fix it.

- And unfortunately, what my understanding from the reporting I did about the Providence hack is that a lot of times it's something really simple, like someone clicked a phishing email.

And I'm not saying that that's what happened in the RI Bridges cyber attack 'cause we don't know yet.

But there are a lot of ways to get in, and it's clearly happening so often that a lot of hackers have figured out how to do it.

- Well, I joked years ago when they had the Equifax breach, I thought, you know, there's like 200 million people, they got a lot of people to go through to get to me.

The bad guys waited, didn't they?

During the pandemic.

So sometimes they play the long game, we've got this information, and then when the PPP and all of that came out, then they started cloning people's information.

- Yeah, absolutely.

That was a huge hack.

And I think a lot of people who knew about that or were potentially affected froze their credit after that.

But that's a great point about did Deloitte fail to create a firewall against a phishing email for someone who gets some kind of benefit in Rhode Island?

On one would think that would be a bare minimum of security for that kind of firewall to exist.

But at this point, I don't think we really know.

- Okay, we've been talking an awful lot about affordable housing, the homeless Pallet shelters.

Steph had a very timely interview.

She sat down with the president and CEO of Crossroads, Rhode Island.

She had an extended interview that you can watch online.

But let's take a listen a little bit, and that'll set the table for our discussion.

Here's her interview.

- There was a story recently in Johnston.

There's a 250 unit affordable housing development proposed, and a planning department member said, "This project is the future Chad Brown of Johnston."

And that was him opposing the project.

Of course Chad Brown, the well-known public housing community in Providence.

How do we break this stigma that having affordable housing in your community is somehow a bad thing?

- Yeah, it's a great question, Steph.

You know, I think people don't often realize that affordable housing is something that they may have benefited from at a point in their lives, or that their neighbors or their children, or, you know, their coworkers, or the person who, you know, is serving them their coffee in the morning.

Affordable housing just means that it's housing that is affordable for people at different income levels and at lower income levels.

Affordable housing, public housing is not today what it was 30 or 40 years ago.

I think we have learned a lot in the business of housing.

And creating housing that is attractive, that is suitable, it's safe.

And well, sometimes large developments are certainly much more cost effective.

Crossroads owns and operates housing throughout the City of Providence that you would never know is Crossroads and would never know it's affordable housing, right?

So I think helping folks to understand who the folks are that are going to live in this housing and that it's really, it's your neighbors, it's your friends, it's, you know, people just like me and you.

- And if you wanna see Steph's entire interview, you can of course, you could read her story at at theglobe.com, bostonglobe.com.

Let's start that over.

- It's just globe.com/ri.

- All right.

And if you wanna read Steph's story, you can read it at the "Boston Globe" and watch her full interview at ripbs.org/weekly.

Steph Crossroads has had this model for a long time, trying to get people into housing.

That's just, the housing is so much more expensive for everybody.

- Yeah, and they're really trying to build more apartments and really move away from, not that they're moving away from shelters altogether, but, you know, the big tower that everyone knows on Broad Street currently has these single rooms with no bathrooms, no kitchens that people are living in.

And so they have to share the bathrooms.

And they're going to gut that and turn it into apartments because they really feel like this is the answer.

And I think a lot of people don't know that.

You think of Crossroads as a shelter system, but actually the majority of the way that they're housing people are in apartments.

And they have a bunch of different construction projects underway.

- So there's a lot of misunderstanding about affordable housing, whether that is subsidized government housing for people who are very poor, or merely something that is affordable for people who work a job that pays reasonably well, like a firefighter or a nurse, but who are struggling to buy a home in the current environment where the median price of a home in Rhode Island is a half million dollars.

I think in Johnston, it's worth noting that 60% of voters approve the November housing bonds.

So that shows in contrast to some of the local officials there, there is support for creating more housing and this is a vital economic issue for the future of the state, because there are working people, firefighters, nurses, teachers, et cetera, who wanna live in Rhode Island, wanna stay in Rhode Island, but who are struggling to get into the housing market because of the cost of housing.

- Yeah, I mean I sometimes think that there's sort of a inverse relationship between what a community or a town needs to sustain economic growth and what it's willing or wanting to accept.

And I think people also, there is a stigma attached to the idea of, I live in public housing as opposed to affordable housing.

And, you know, maybe there are people in Johnson that would really benefit from this, and the town speaking as if it's a bad thing, when in fact their own people would really benefit.

And until we can move forward and say this is a good thing and then there's nothing wrong with it and changing the sort of the moniker to affordable housing will hopefully help.

But, you know, town officials have a responsibility to make sure that the people in their own town are getting the services that they need.

And that includes Johnston.

- And I'm interested to see if at any point state officials will start punishing cities and towns to some extent, whether it's withholding aid or other types of disincentives, if they are refusing to allow affordable housing, 'cause right now there's a lot of local control.

They can pass as many bills as they want at the State House, but there's a lot of local control when it comes to- - [Jim] Slow walking.

- Whether- - Slow walking.

- Yeah, whether or not a development will get built.

- You said last year during our year-end program, it was something interesting to me that you said, you know, having housing is, so education's always important, but when people are coming to a place to get a vibrant workforce, if they have nowhere to live, you can't attract them.

- Right, and there's gonna be instability in that workforce.

And that we just, I believe have the Amazon distribution just open there.

And you have to think about sort of the short-term and the longer term and think about what people need and how to sustain things.

And it seems that Rhode Island, I think maybe watching what Massachusetts has tried and failed to do.

I mean, Massachusetts has a huge NIMBY problem.

You know, they pass these big sweeping bills and then they refuse to, Milton in particular refuses to take public housing or affordable housing.

- [Ian] It's true, and rent them also closer to Rhode Island.

- Right, and so then you think, well, what is the state doing?

And, you know, is the state actually punishing?

Because you're punishing taxpayer base also.

You're paying local taxes and state taxes.

So it is a real challenge.

And I hope that Rhode Island leaders are more forward thinking about it because it helps Rhode Islanders.

- Also under the headline of government not getting it done, the whole Pallet shelter.

We talked about this at length last week, ECHO Village, off Route 146.

We've gone from winter to spring to summer to back to winter again, and it's just maddening.

I understand the fire marshal wants to make sure that everything is safe, but to have sprinkler systems in these seams a little bit over the top.

- Yeah, I mean, no one wants to revisit the Station fire disaster.

That was horrible.

But at the same time, this seems like an emblem of how a small state like Rhode Island where in theory it should be easier to get things done, it often seems more difficult to get things done because of excessive bureaucracy or red tape.

- Yeah, the point of the Pallet shelters was supposed to be that you could deploy them so much faster than it would take to build an apartment building.

At this rate, potentially, they could have built a building in the time it took to get the Pallet shelters up to code.

And the fire marshal was very emotional in that hearing that they had last week about why we have such stringent building and fire codes.

I will say Speaker Shekarchi told me he is interested in legislation to fix this.

He wants the fire marshal to propose the legislation, but also said he would be willing to do it without the fire marshal support.

- 'Cause all of us who were around for the Station nightclub fire, they passed this raft of stuff, I think it was, I wouldn't call it knee jerk legislation.

But if they just had enforced the laws that were there.

I mean, if you really look at what happened at the Station nightclub fire, there were missed inspections and foam and all of that.

And so, but we've lived with that for 20 years.

And now I think that stringency, I think part of it was they didn't have a code to put this in.

They couldn't really figure out what the, 'cause the Pallet shelters are new.

- Right, I mean, you know, what you don't want is somebody who may or may not be smoking or may or may not have a space heater plugged in or something to die.

I mean, we don't want that to happen.

And in Rhode Island, a small state, one or two deaths that could be prevented with better fire safety is something that could really be triggering and traumatic for a state that's, you know, the Station fire.

But you also think Providence, I believe pulled back on some of its really stringent rules about hard wiring to the fire departments and how many smoke detectors you need.

And really, we have a lot of old housing.

And we just think if it's preventable, we wanna take that extra step.

To me, how come people aren't living there already in some way, shape or form, even if it's day shelters?

If you don't want people to sleep there, just use 'em for day shelters.

It is a really not a great example of a public attempt to try to solve a problem- - I mean, people, it's gonna be bitter cold this weekend.

I mean, people- - People are dying out in the cold.

- Exactly.

- Let's just say that.

There have people who have died already.

The smoke detectors are hardwired, and they have somebody on premises 24 hours a day.

So I don't know what more you can do.

- Yeah, one of the things they said they were waiting for was fire-retardant paint that was gonna come in the mail.

- [Jim] Made in Malaysia?

I mean, what?

- And so I think it's a tough pill to swallow to hear you have to sleep outside rather than in the shelter because we're waiting on some paint.

I think that's where the disconnect is.

And you mentioned there was no code, the- - But the location is not great, right?

I mean, the location is fairly isolated.

The location, you know, if you're sort of surrounded by people or a block you know, or a city you know, and then you're somewhere else and you can't really get out of there that easily, I do think it's not as appealing overall for people to want to go there.

You know, these are people who are on the street for lots of reasons.

And so that's, I think a misstep to begin with.

- [Steph] Yeah.

- Okay, the legislative leaders on the House and Senate side both sat down with various reporters.

Steph, you were one of them.

Let's just talk about looking to the future.

The budget is clearly gonna be the big gorilla in the room.

but what did you take away from some of those interviews beyond that?

- Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big takeaways was Senate President Ruggiero seemingly stepping back from his strong opposition to an assault weapons ban.

He didn't go as far to say that he supports it, but he did refer to as his former position.

And so I think if I were to compare it maybe to the abortion rights bill, if the support is there from the majority of the caucus, will he let this go to the floor even if he personally is going to vote against it, I think we'll have to see.

- And Senator Palma said if it gets to the floor, it'll pass.

He's pretty confident.

- Yeah, and we- - That's been always the issue in the past.

It gets held up in committee 'cause the speaker of the Senate president don't want it out.

- Right, we've seen some broad changes in the legislature over the last 10 years or so.

There used to be very strong support among Democrats for gun rights.

And that has been reduced, particular due to the election of more progressive women.

And the legislature has backed a number of gun safety measures or what advocates would call new regulations on guns in the last 10 years that once would've been inconceivable in the Rhode Island legislature.

- Yeah, the difference in politics on gun legislation is that a lot of the things that have Rhode Island's been either ahead of the curve or right with them, red flag laws, particularly domestic violence.

If you are convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence, you can't have a gun.

That's federal law.

Was until 2018 Rhode Island also passed that law.

Those are specific things that people who have guns legally say, I'm not that person.

I didn't do that.

A ban, I think generates more opposition, because even if you don't have an assault weapon, you don't want an assault weapon, you feel like I'm a legal gun owner, I should have the right to have one if I want one.

So the idea of a sweeping ban, I think is politically more difficult than some of the more targeted things that Rhode Island's done over the last couple years.

- I know things have changed a lot, but Wendy, it was what, for 10 years nationally?

Remember in the Senate, it didn't, it was from '94 to 2004?

- 2003 actually.

- We had a Federalist- - Yeah, yeah, expire at the end of 2003.

We had an assault weapon ban.

Yeah, It was a sunset provision.

Bob Dole was the majority leader of the Senate at that time, and he agreed to it with Clinton.

But he put a sunset in, which was the NRA made that happy.

You know, it's a very, we have a lot of mass shootings in America.

How many more assault weapons shootings, depending on how you define assault weapon, AR-15s are just easy, you can kill a lot more people a lot more quickly.

But we have so many deaths by gun and frequently there are two and three people that, you know, now it's just become a mitigating injury.

Now I think that, you know, it's just become so uncontrollable that now it's how do we mitigate injury?

So we identify the people are more likely to commit violence with a gun and try to keep guns out of those people's hands.

- In many ways, the cat is out the bag in the sense that since that assault weapons ban expired, a lot of people, AR- - 20 years of, yeah.

- 20 years of people buying AR-15s and them being in people's homes.

So even if there were to be a federal ban and people had to turn them in, not everyone's gonna comply.

But it is a step that can be taken by a state, even if it's not going to solve the gun violence problem.

- What else did you take away from those interviews previewing the session?

- Well, I think clearly the budget is gonna be a big topic this year.

I expect legislative leaders will repel efforts by progressives to raise taxes on the wealthy.

You know, Speaker Shekarchi told "The Globe," I believe, that he doesn't think the jury is in on how a millionaire's taxes worked out in Massachusetts.

Supporters point to that same tax and say it hasn't caused a dire impact on the Bay State.

But legislative leaders have been very sensitive to the tax climate image of Rhode Island.

So I think there'll be, you know, I mean, in the context of a $14 billion budget, a $300 million deficit is not a massive amount of money, but it is gonna cause some tougher choices.

- Yeah, in terms of taxes, it spends, you know, a millionaire is a millionaire, is a million, not true.

So if you're a small business owner and you generate, let's say net income of a million dollars, but you're spending a lot of money, you're self-employed, you don't feel like the same millionaire that's just getting paid by somebody else a million dollars.

So when you're taxing, we have so many people who are small business owners in Rhode Island that I think that's one of the differences between Massachusetts and Rhode Island, is sort of who's generating all that income and how is it coming to them, and how do they feel about it personally?

So Massachusetts hasn't seen Exodus of people who are making a lot of money, but politics also intervenes.

Where are you gonna go?

If you're a progressive or a liberal and you're living in Massachusetts, how many other states are gonna be better than Massachusetts?

So politics is intersecting with tax policy right now in a very new and interesting way.

- I'm interested in the oversight that we might see from the legislature.

They're gonna have finally a second oversight hearing on the Washington Bridge in January.

And, you know, sometimes there's a question that reporters ask 50 times at the news conference and don't get an answer.

And then when the state officials have to go before the legislature for an oversight hearing, they come up with some kind of answer.

So I'm interested in the time, if we're gonna get a timeline on the bridge and what other kind of oversight we're gonna see.

- Well, and now they've got UHIP bridges, whatever you wanna call it.

they're gonna have to have- - Yeah, I'm sure- - I wonder does that come ahead of the bridge.

- The Speaker said they were definitely holding an oversight hearing on the bridge in January.

So I don't know if they'll do the cyber attack before or after that.

- Okay, let's do this.

I got a couple other things.

Let's do outrageous and/or kudos.

Wendy, what do you have this week?

- Well, I'm just wondering if Donald Trump is running the country, you know, as president-elect or president or Elon Musk is running the country.

My outrage is that Congress struck a deal to keep the government open, you know, as we're taping.

I don't know if that deal has completely collapsed yet, but people are hurt when the federal government closes.

People lose income, businesses have difficulties.

People who need things from the federal government.

We've seen this movie before.

Many years ago Newt Gingrich shut the government down right before Christmas.

Did not work out that well in the long run for the Republicans.

So I don't know how you start an administration by shutting down the very government you were elected to run.

- How long does the bromance last between Trump and Musk?

Can you give that six months?

- At the outside.

But I'm just more concerned about the fact that Elon Musk can tweet something at 4:00 in the morning and blow up, you know, another branches of governments responsibilities.

And, you know, this is really worrisome if you're thinking about as we move along in the next couple months.

- [Jim] Steph.

- I've been thinking about this a lot with the cyber attack.

The number of entities that have my social security number and have treated it so cavalierly.

And I don't think I'm a victim of the RI Bridges attack, but I've gotten at least three letters this year about a security breach in which my social security number was leaked.

It's almost like noise to me now.

- [Jim] And you only get one social security number, don't you?

- Yeah.

- I was in the Equifax breach and I was at a doctor's appointment earlier this week at an unnamed location that had a security breach last year, and on the intake form, they wanted my social security number, and I just left it blank.

I was like, "You don't need it to treat my medical condition."

- And you don't have to provide it, by law, you don't have to provide it.

- And I feel like my private data is treated, like, so casually because it's being leaked every five minutes to the point that my credit will be frozen forever.

So that's my outrage.

- Syria faces a very uncertain future, but it comes after 13 years of depravity, torture, and murder by the former regime.

The US and the world community basically stood by and did nothing while all this played out for more than a decade.

President Obama warned the former leader of Syria not to use chemical weapons.

Chemical weapons were used to devastating effect.

The US did not do anything.

There's a lot of heartache, and it seems like the world community should have been able to do something more about it.

- I've seen the pictures of the prisons.

It's just, it's brutal.

- It's terrible.

- And fortunately they found some people, but you think of all those people, they haven't seen their loved ones for 10 years.

It's awful.

What do you think the Trump administration is gonna do coming in on that?

- Well, it seems like Trump has a more hands-off approach to foreign policy more kind of drawing back from international commitments.

We'll see how that plays out.

You know, he talks about getting NATO countries to contribute more, so that bears watching.

- Quickly, one minute left.

You have some update on a story that we talked a lot about?

- Yes, we reported on this show and on "Weekly" about the DOJs investigation into the State of Rhode Island warehousing, children in DCYF custody at Bradley Hospital, which is the psychiatric pediatric hospital in East Providence.

The day that we are taping this show, there's been an agreement between the DOJ and the state of Rhode Island, the McKee administration has agreed to make a plan to solve this problem.

The issue is that it children who were at the psychiatric hospital ready to be discharged but are not being discharged because there's nowhere for them to go.

There's either no foster family or there's no, whether it's their own parents or another family member who can take them and also have community supports for the mental illness or behavioral issue that the child is having.

And the DOJ said these children were being unnecessarily institutionalized.

So that is a settlement in that case.

- Okay, and Steph will be writing about that.

You can check that out in "The Globe."

Finally this week, a long time panelist on "Lively Experiment" has passed away.

Former Lieutenant Governor Tom Dilulio died earlier this week.

Dilulio, an attorney and prosecutor, served for six years as Lieutenant governor in the late seventies and early eighties.

But he was known to a lot of our viewers as a veteran and often feisty panelists in the early days of "A Lively Experiment."

He was one of a set panel of four people every week, often getting into spirited exchanges with "Providence Journal" reporter and columnist, M. Charles Bakst.

Tom Dilulio was 93 years old.

That is it for us this week.

A programming note, join us right back here next week for our year-end review show with this same panel.

We hope to see you back with us then as "A Lively Experiment" continues.

Have a great weekend.

- [Announcer ] "A Lively Experiment" is generously underwritten by- - Hi, I'm John Hazen White, Jr. For over 30 years, "A Lively Experiment" has provided insight and analysis of the political issues that face Rhode Islanders.

I'm a proud supporter of this great program in Rhode Island PBS.