- [Jim] This week on "A Lively Experiment," a new year ushers in a new session of the General Assembly.

We'll talk about the challenges that lawmakers face in 2025.

And Rhode Island was stung by a cyber attack last month.

What have state officials been doing to mitigate the potential damage?

- [Narrator] "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 and Rhode Island PBS.

- Joining us on the panel, Patrick Anderson, State House Reporter for the "Providence Journal," and "Boston Globe" columnist, Dan McGowan.

Hello and welcome into our first program of 2025.

I'm Jim Hummel.

The beginning of the General Assembly session is like spring training.

Everyone has high hopes before settling in for a long and often challenging session.

And this year it feels like "Back to the Future" as lawmakers are facing a huge budget deficit again after several years of being flushed with federal ARPA money that has now largely run out.

Now, I should let you know, programming note, We had planned to have Nancy Lavin here, a reporter for the "Rhode Island Current."

She is a little under the weather.

So, boys, do you think you can handle it?

You'll be able to talk?

- I think this one time.

- All right.

- We're nervous about it.

We miss you, Nancy!

- We do miss you, Nancy, but we'll be able to muddle through.

Patrick, before we get into the General Assembly, we have a lot to talk about.

The latest is the cyber attack that happened early in December.

The Governor had a press conference on Monday.

Just bring us up to date where we are on that.

- People's data has been stolen in the hack, probably 650,000 people or so.

And we don't know exactly how much of that data, how many of those people, their information is actually gonna be distributed, made public.

Some has, but maybe more will as time goes on.

There's a kind of weird dynamic where it's the state's information that has been stolen, but everything is happening through the private contractor, Deloitte, who built the system and runs the system.

The attack was essentially targeting Deloitte even though it was stealing Rhode Island's data.

And so the state has been channeling questions, or not answering questions by saying, "Deloitte is handling this."

So we don't have really that much information about what's happening in negotiations, how much the ransom demand is, that sort of thing.

Even though the Governor has said it would ultimately be his decision on whether to pay something or not, but we're waiting to see if it gets worse or if there's some kind of resolution.

And then there's also the question of whether the state does something to try to recoup expenses against Deloitte, again, which is kind of a replay of the original problem of the system.

- Yeah, UHIP going back better part of a decade.

- So there's a little deja vu there, and that's just gonna be a lingering issue heading into the new year.

- I will say, I'm wanna give Governor McKee some level of credit here.

I think he has handled this far better than he handled the initial stages of the Washington Bridge.

He was pretty quick to have that Friday night press conference a couple of weeks back, was informing us, has pretty much informed us at every step of the way about what's happening here.

He's the victim of being a little bit unlucky here.

This is a private contractor that has this, I don't think there's a real appetite at all to actually bring this in-house.

You hear that a little bit from some kind of fringe lawmakers, but it's a project that Deloitte or a company like Deloitte is supposed to do, right?

They do this in many states.

And so I think the Governor, again, victim of circumstance, he has handled this and answered questions as best as possible.

I think we've all been a little bit frustrated by kind of referring everything to Deloitte.

But if I'm the Governor, I also don't wanna stand next to a Deloitte representative who is in some ways responsible for all of this in any press conference.

- Well, lemme take the opposite of that.

On Monday, it was tremendously frustrating.

I do give the Governor props for being out there, but it's like, "We really can't talk about that.

It's Deloitte."

Put a Deloitte person there to say, even if he says nothing, then the optic is, "Look, we have to rely on these people."

And look, the Governor re-upped them twice with that contract.

And it was the UHIP situation we had with Gina Raimondo.

I thought it was bad optics on Monday when he just said, "Well, I really can't answer that.

We don't know the-" And Kathy Greg, your colleague, asked questions that I think a lot of people who were not paying attention over the holidays, "Hey, I hear there's ransomware.

How many people?

Who's affected?

If we paid that out?"

All things, and we got no answers from that.

So I think not having a Deloitte person, how many hundreds of millions of dollars have we paid for them to have put them on the hot seat, I dunno.

- Well, two factors though, right?

On one hand, if I'm Deloitte, I'm not in any way sending anybody out there because I'm not gonna send someone to stand next to the Governor and be thrown under the bus necessarily.

And again, from the Governor's perspective, I'm not sure I wanna stand next to the people who screwed this one up.

- And they're gonna probably be in some kind of negotiation against each other.

That's where these things, as we see with the bridge, the Washington Bridge, these things usually result in- And the previous UHIP thing with Deloitte, it ends up in some kind of legal standoff.

Either there's a lawsuit or there's just threats of lawsuits and they have to settle something.

The feds might get involved 'cause they paid, UHIP paid for most of it.

And that wasn't the first one that happened.

So there was also negotiations.

So think there's part of that, where they don't want to ruin or hurt their own bargaining leverage when that turns into a fight down the road.

I mean, I think the only other question on how McKee has handled it, to me, is around the timing of shutting everything down and letting people know - There was a lot of time.

- There was, there was, yeah.

- There was about almost two weeks from when they initially knew something and there was a week before they knew this is real before they actually turned it down.

I don't know how many people signed up for Medicaid or went on the Health Benefits Exchange to look for health insurance in that gap who may have had their information made vulnerable.

- Let me just also, just to button up this point about the optics.

It came across to me, I was having deja vu to the Washington Bridge stuff after they filed the lawsuit.

"Well, what about this?"

"Well, we really can't.

You need to talk to the lawyers about that."

"Well, they're not available.

You need to talk to Deloitte."

Who's gonna talk to us?

So, I mean, I understand the Governor wants to take responsibility for what he can, but to the person who's not really paying attention, to me it came across as a bit of a dodge.

- No, I think it's a reasonable point.

I just, I think he's in a tough spot because of potential negotiations there.

It's a little bit, you used the Washington Bridge lawsuit.

It reminds me a little bit of, sometimes you deal with the US Attorney's office, and they have a press conference and you ask 10 questions.

- [Jim] "I really can't talk about that," right?

So why are we here, right?

- Exactly.

There's a little bit of, "Why are we here?"

At the same time, if we weren't there, every reporter in the state would be, and every, rightfully, advocates and people would be saying, "Well, the Governor's hiding information."

Again, I think the Governor's, we tend, and this is true across the country, but we tend to mistake incompetence for corruption.

And then we often mistake- - [Jim] Sometimes for good reason.

- For a very good reason at times.

Sometimes though we also mistake mistakes for complete incompetence.

This is a terrible thing that happened and Deloitte should not be let off the hook, but I don't think it falls on the Governor's plate to be blamed for everything here.

- You know, I also, I was talking to Kathy 'cause I had asked her, 'cause she was at the press conference, we had a text exchange.

650,000 sounds like a lot of people.

And I thought, "Well, does that bleed into me?"

Well, that's all people who have had past and present.

So there are a lot of people in the system.

Some people might not be active, plus outsourced Rhode Island.

- It's not 650 people on food stamps right now.

- Out of the million No, right, outta the million.

- That's what people keep thinking, that that means that that many people right now are receiving public benefits.

- That's right.

- That this is over all those years, and even if you just signed up and either got something for one day or signed up and didn't even use it, your data, once it's out there, that could be packed.

- Yeah, think about during the pandemic if you might have signed up for extra assistance in some sort of way.

- Right.

- We remember all that with the social security numbers and the bad guys got them and waited.

Just to button this up, how do you see this playing out over the- We talked about, we always have the political lens.

We've turned the page into 2025, so we're gonna start thinking about the governor's race.

He's gotten out in front of it, but you wonder this is affecting people who probably are in, some people who are least in a position to be able to handle it.

Freezing their credit, going on computers, all of that, right?

- Yeah, I mean look, far be it for me to defend the Governor, I'm pretty critical of him on lots of different factors.

And in this case, I don't think it is entirely his fault, and at the same time I still think he's gonna get plenty of blame for it and it's not gonna stop someone like Helena Foulkes from attacking him over sort of the broad idea that the government is sort of not running very well right now.

- Yeah, I think there will be questions about whether the system was funded enough 'cause there have been requests for putting more money into the system to make it better.

And they have renewed Deloitte's contract a couple of times.

I mean, Raimondo did it, so the bigger focus was on her, but they've also renewed it since McKee has been in.

- Do they almost think there are very few companies that do this to this scale, and maybe to have to totally give it to somebody else?

Is that the impediment?

Do you know what the thinking was on the re-up?

- That was the big thinking when Raimondo did it.

It was unclear who was gonna be able to come in and take over this mess, because Deloitte at least knew what they were dealing with.

And these are nasty systems to build, as far as I can tell.

I mean, we remember healthcare.gov, That was the federal government building it, and this thing was actually built originally to create a Health Benefits Exchange to be like Rhode Island's little healthcare.gov, and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger.

So it's not something where any IT office can do it.

I don't think the state in-house has even close to the level of expertise.

I don't know how many companies can do something like this, but it's not an easy one.

- This is why I'm sort of dreading the next couple of months when it comes to oversight hearings and things like that because every question's gonna be like, "You know, my cousin or nephew can handle their AOL email address.

Why can't you?"

And it's gonna be a lot of- - Do you think we're gonna see oversight?

Are we gonna see it on, I call it UHIP 2.0, are we gonna see it on that?

Or are we gonna see it on the Washington Bridge first?

What's the over under on that?

- Oh, God, this might surpass the Washington Bridge.

They might get this one first.

But I don't think you're gonna get a lot of answers.

I think this is, to Patrick's point, this is a very complicated system.

It's not something you can do in-house, at least not right away.

And so I think there's gonna be a lot of the kind of sometimes reasonable questions, sometimes very goofy questions from legislators.

There's gonna be a lot of pontificating, "Let me get on the news" and that sort of thing.

I think that's what we're gonna be looking at for the next couple months.

- Patrick, before the holidays, you and Kathy had a chance to sit down, as your colleagues did at the Globe, with the leadership on this and the House and the Senate side.

So what did you take away from that going into the session?

Everybody will be sworn in, the first day of the session will be Tuesday January 7th.

What did you take away?

- Well, very different things on both the House and Senate side.

On the Senate, the focus is entirely on who is leading the Senate, is on Senate President Ruggerio and his health.

And how does he look?

How does he sound?

Does he look like he's up to it this year to be there day after day, not only leading the Senate but doing the negotiating with the Governor and the Speaker.

- [Jim] And he missed large chunks of the session last year.

- Yeah, and was not really a part of those negotiations.

And you felt it just talking to people in the House or people in the Governor's Office about what's going on.

You didn't hear the usual, "Well, the Senate wants this kind of thing."

There was this kind of void on the Senate side that was unusual.

So that was really the focus of trying to figure out what's going on, on the Senate side, of what's going on and do they kind of have a plan for who's gonna pick up the different pieces or is Donnie gonna be back sort of the way he used to be?

And it's still really murky.

- We'll get to the House in a second.

What do you think about that?

- Yeah, I mean, we did the same thing as Patrick and Kathy and had a couple of reporters in, and I think depending on your experience with Dominick Ruggerio, I think that in the group of reporters that I came in with, I think we had one reporter who said, "Boy, Senate President Ruggerio doesn't look very good.

I think this is gonna be a rough session."

My takeaway on interviewing Dominick Ruggerio was I've seen him do worse than he did this time around and do much better.

I think in the last couple of years prior to being sick, Senate President Ruggerio has been remarkably comfortable, way more comfortable than he had ever been before.

- He really was the second to Teresa Paiva Weed and he did all the dealing.

And I remember we had him here with Joe Shekarchi and Governor McKee.

It was the first time they'd all three been together right after McKee became Governor, and I was surprised at how he was comfortable.

- Yeah, for a guy who, and Patrick, you covered him so much when he was sort of mostly focused, before he was President, mostly focused on sort of the 195 land.

And they'd have a story to tell you, but then he wouldn't be able to kind of nail it out of the park.

He was always uncomfortable with reporters.

I thought he became much more comfortable in recent years, and then of course being unhealthy and having his health issues, I think he took a little bit of a step back.

But it wasn't his worst performance.

But I agree with the idea that there's still lots of questions about how often they're gonna meet, how much they're gonna be seeking.

And there wasn't a very coherent message coming out of talking to both him or Val Lawson, the new Majority Leader, about sort of what their priorities are.

With one exception, one of the things that Senate President Ruggerio left open to us was this idea that potentially he would support or at least let a vote happen on an assault weapons ban.

That's a big headline.

That's something Governor McKee has said he's gonna put into his budget, and so that is an interesting change.

He had acknowledged that it's a change in sort of his position to some degree.

And so I think that's something to be paying close attention to, but the other question of course is, "Is that just taking, 'Hey, look over there.

Look at the shiny thing because my health is still pretty poor.'"

- Was that a deal with the progressives to get votes to get Majority Leader?

Have you heard anything about that?

Why is he changing his- Is he getting older?

- Not that I know of, I just think the politics has...

There's a couple things.

The politics has continued to kind of shift towards that.

In terms of that's become in Rhode Island, I think, a slightly more popular position, which is why you see the Governor on it.

You see more people saying they support an assault weapons ban.

And then you also look- So if the Governor is supporting it and the Speaker is not against it and it doesn't cost anything, when you're looking at issues going forward in the next year, it kind of looks like one that maybe you could do.

Whereas a lot of the other things that the Senate traditionally wants are gonna have big price tags and are gonna be tough in a budget year without raising taxes, which I also don't think is on the table.

So, the politics of it are just making it a little more appealing, and so he's, I think, softening a little bit in response to that.

Now, whether he actually lets it happen I think is a whole nother question.

- Well, it might have been like Nick Mattiello and the abortion bill, you know?

He personally opposed it, and he got a lot of grief from the Catholic church because of that, but he let it go to the floor.

And so many times, the issue is not getting to the floor.

It gets held in committee 'cause they get the call from upstairs, and Senator DiPalma, I saw him, I dunno if he talked to either of you guys, said he thinks it would pass if it got to the floor.

- Yeah, Senator DiPalma told me that, and he views this as yes, if it gets to the floor, it passes, sails through I think in both chambers.

- Oh yeah, no question.

- And remember, in this case, if you put it in the budget, think about how the budget kind of process works, I'm sure there will be gun hearings in the judiciary committee, but if it goes through the finance committee- - The finance committee it gets lost in a lot of other things!

- Yeah, and Senator DiPalma is right there.

- [Jim] In the center of the finance committee.

- Yeah, to lead that through.

- What about the House?

What'd you take away from Speaker Shekarchi and Majority Leader Blazejewski?

- I don't see anything- It's not obvious what the big issue is really going to be.

It almost feels like...

It's not an election year coming up, but it's almost feeling like we're starting an early election cycle.

We've spent through the pandemic money, there is no appetite politically, it looks like, to raise taxes, at least that I can tell.

And so it's not clear what the big issue is.

I'm sure something will blow up, but there's a lot of kind of hold the fort kind of thinking that comes out of when you talk to especially the House.

Just kind of pay, find a way to pay for what we have and maintain things, and not a huge appetite to do really big new things except for maybe some more housing stuff.

- I think this is a super dangerous thing to be watching.

The House is on cruise control.

They're the model of consistency, the Speaker is the Speaker, the Leader Blazejewski is the Speaker in waiting, and comparing it to the Senate and comparing it to past interviews, usually, I don't know if you felt this way, Patrick, but usually you go in- When you're doing these legislative, and you've done a million of these, when you're doing these legislative previews, the legislative leaders almost always know exactly what they want us to write.

Now, we don't just agree to it, but they have three talking points, they know, "Here are our top priorities" and I was so frustrated sitting in that room with the Speaker and Leader Blazejewski because they talked a lot about how they've done so much, and then had no vision for what they wanna do next.

It was, "Yeah, we're gonna get more housing done, but we're gonna wait until all these obscure commissions that no one's ever heard of come back and make more recommendations."

And if you were to read a transcript of the conversation that I had back and forth with Speaker Shekarchi, we kept on asking, "Are you gonna hold municipalities more accountable when it comes to developing housing?"

Things like that, and he would say, "Well, I wouldn't rule it out."

- "I wouldn't rule it out."

Hundreds of millions of dollars, too.

'Cause I think this is the year people wanna see what are we doing about housing?

And it doesn't look like it's gonna happen in the calendar year a lot more stock, right?

- No, and Patrick alluded to this, I mean, I think this is a strange year.

Usually in the off years is when they get stuff done 'cause they don't wanna get anything done in 2026, but if you're thinking about leaving that open possibility if you're Speaker Shekarchi potentially running for Governor or if a US Senate seat opens up, now you start to second guess every decision that you make because you know, "I can't upset the people in Johnston over this."

- [Jim] It's through a political lens.

- Yeah, everything is political.

- Yeah, I mean, we're basically in the 2026 cycle right now.

I mean, everything has just been very status quo since sort of McKee took office.

He's not someone who has really burning policy desires, except maybe in education.

And so he's been there for a while and is looking toward reelection, and as far as we know doesn't have any major things that he wants to rock the boat on.

The House and Speaker Shekarchi may also run for Governor.

So he's looking towards that and has done his kind of big things in the last couple of years and is sort of in status quo mode.

And the Senate is a little bit uncertain of where it's gonna be.

So you're kind of in this waiting period of waiting for the next thing.

Either the governor's race to really kick off and know who the field is gonna be and what those dynamics are gonna be, or someone new to come into the scene who's gonna do something good, bad, different, just something to really rock the boat.

But it's just very settled and in that kind of holding pattern right now.

- What do you think's gonna happen?

What do you think's gonna happen with the budget?

I was thinking about this.

$300, $400 million seems like a lot of money, and it is, but as a percentage of the overall budget, it's a smaller percentage than it was when the budget was nine and a half million, right?

- Yeah, if you listen to Senator, Former Majority Leader, Ryan Pearson, I heard him on Ian Donnis' podcast this week say it's a big number, $330-ish million, but one, as Speaker Shekarchi always says, wait until May until we actually know the numbers.

But also it's a manageable number.

It sounds crazy that 330 million would be manageable.

But it's something that more, you're just trying not to find new spending, you're trying to plug some holes here or there.

But his message has been, "It's not that big of a deal."

- What do you think's gonna happen with truck tolls?

They got a decision to make because the court cleared it, but they can't do the cap on the local trucks, so now they're gonna be turned on 'cause they need the money, right?

- Yeah, I think they're going to try to bring them back.

I don't know what, I think they're trying to work on some new mechanism to throw a bone to the local industry without getting slapped down by the Supreme Court.

Or another federal court.

I don't know what that mechanism is gonna look like, but I think they all want to turn them back on.

They really would like the money.

It'll be a problem if they, not a huge problem, but it'll be a problem if they don't have the money.

So I think they're trying to cook up some way to help the local industry.

And just to protect themselves against another lawsuit.

Because something else could happen again.

They're gonna have to make some changes, will those changes end up in court?

They wanna prevent that.

But I would expect them to come back at some point.

- Yeah, Governor McKee's gonna give his budget, what, in a couple of weeks?

I would expect if it's not fully kind of formulated, there'll be a number in the budget- - They're gonna plug a number.

- Yeah.

Because they're gonna figure it out as they go, and they need that revenue.

I mean, you've heard the Speaker and the Senate President both said that they want these things turned back on.

- All right, let's do this.

We have a couple other things to get to, but I don't wanna short on outrage and/or kudo.

Dan, let's begin with you this week.

- Sure.

My outrage is super in the weeds, but it's something I've covered for a long time and it's called the Providence Ethics Commission.

The Providence Ethics Commission is similar but not the same as the statewide Ethics Commission created under David Cicilline.

He never empaneled anybody, nothing ever happened.

So what happens in 2014?

Mayor, at the time Candidate Jorge Elorza is running against Buddy Cianci, bad, evil, corrupt former mayor.

And he says, "My number one, day one promise is I'm gonna impanel that Ethics Commission and we're gonna hold everybody in the city of Providence accountable."

Well, he followed through on the empaneling people.

The Commission in 2024 met zero times, never met.

Met once in 2022.

I think it met three times in 2023.

- You wrote they had one scheduled, then it got canceled.

- They had a meeting scheduled for December 30th, and then they canceled the meeting.

Now, you could say this is way in the weeds, but that is suppo- If anybody thinks that there is nothing unethical happening in Providence city government, I think that- - [Jim] We all need to find a new job as reporters, right?

- Exactly, it's clearly that that is happening.

That panel should be more powerful.

There's lots of whistleblowers and things going on in city government that should be scrutinized.

And unfortunately it's one of those situations where it was a great campaign promise, made everybody excited when they had a big scary monster like Buddy Cianci running against them, and then nobody did anything about it.

- 10 years later.

- I know this has been asked before, but what was supposed to be the point of it?

Because there is a State Ethics Commission that meets a lot, does a lot of stuff, and does municipal stuff a lot as much as it does state level stuff.

- I think the thought- Well, first of all, the thought very clearly was just simply, "Buddy, boogieman, we're gonna do this right."

- "This sounds good."

- "It sounds good, let's do it."

I think the bigger picture, I suppose, was there's a lot of issues that happen in government that may be fine under the ethics code, but are questionable that you could have been able to look at.

I would say smaller type issues, workplace harassment, kind of things like that.

Things that you don't necessarily see at the Ethics Commission.

- [Jim] What do you have for outrage or kudo?

- Well, it's not original, I might have probably had done this before as an outrage, but the pallet shelters are still not open!

I'm sorry.

- And think about the weather the last two weeks.

- I know!

It's freezing out.

And if you thought this was a bad idea, if you're the state government and you thought that this wasn't gonna work because of the fire code or anything else, you didn't have to do it.

You didn't have to spend the money and try to open these pallet shelters.

But if you decided that you were going to try to open a pallet shelter village, the whole point was to try to do it quickly, efficiently, and before it becomes freezing.

So they've kind of defeated the point on both.

If you didn't wanna do it, don't do it.

If you wanna do it, do it and do it right.

It's not the biggest deal in the world.

There are other places where people on the street can go, but it's just another one of these signs of the state and governments all over the country not being able to do actual physical things efficiently and for a decent price and to do them quickly, and getting just tangled up in their own processes and red tape.

- It's also such a giant symbol, right?

- [Jim] Of government inefficiency.

- Yeah, lots of things when it comes to the House, it's very complicated, right?

Solving the homelessness problem.

But normally it's settled behind closed doors, there's lots of just messy stuff in between.

But this is, we can see them, we drive past the highway- - [Jim] Should the Governor step in?

- Yeah, of course he should step in.

I do understand the argument around, "Look, I'm not gonna be the governor who lets a fire code violation go and then the things go up in a blaze," but yeah, he should step in and fix this.

- All right.

I have a quick one.

The Cannabis Control Commission, according to Nancy Lavin's colleague at the "Rhode Island Current," just hired $110,000 a year public relations person.

How much do you think we're gonna hear from them over the next year?

- I think we're gonna need to be able to talk to them 'cause I think you've got- - [Jim] It's gonna be a lot going on.

- You've got adult use, the retail centers coming on board, so they better be available.

- All right, folks, quick half hour, whether we have two or three panelists.

Patrick and Dan, good to see you.

We look forward to your coverage as the session goes on.

Folks, next week's special programming note, we have our Annual Legislative Leader Show, so the House and Senate Majority and Minority Leader, all four will be on the set.

We're gonna be talking about them throughout the year, next year we get to talk directly to them and see if we can get answers to some of their questions.

We look forward to a great 2025.

We hope you are along with us the rest of the year and every week as "A Lively Experiment" continues.

Have a great weekend.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "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 and Rhode Island PBS.