- It's awful.

It's awful.

It's awful.

The delays are real.

Nobody died.

And it was absolutely the type of leadership decision, the tough decisions that governors need to make.

- Is that gonna be one of the governor's slogans?

Nobody died?

- No, no.

- Trump has done more with the presidency than any president ever has.

The trouble is the house is gonna come after him maybe even impeach him.

- It's got enough power to power half the houses in Rhode Island if it gets up to a full scale, let's make sure Rhode Island gets its piece of the jobs.

(light upbeat music) - And welcome to this episode of "Lively."

I'm Jim Hummel joined this week by our political contributor, Bob Walsh, and attorney and former Chief of Staff to Governor Almond, Joe Larisa.

Offshore wind projects are back on track after a federal judge said, president Trump's halting of the permitting process was arbitrary and capricious.

The Revolution Wind Project off Rhode Island's coastline, of course, resumed work after another court ruling in September.

So Bob, this is an ongoing issue with the Trump administration.

It seems like it's been going back and forth, but the larger issue is where is wind gonna fit into the energy grid?

- I think wind is gonna fit into the energy grid in a significant and meaningful way.

I mean, it's clean power.

I was thinking about this knowing this was gonna be one of the topics, I never heard about a tanker filled with wind spilling and killing fish.

I never heard about any issues with wind causing increased carbon in the atmosphere.

I mean, it's not the final answer to clean energy, but it's gonna be an incredibly important solution for the next 20 or 30 years.

Eventually we'll figure out solar in a more meaningful way and geothermal and all the other things we've been sitting in on our hands about.

But I'm thrilled with the court ruling.

I mean, a lot of people put a lot of time, money and investment into getting these projects going.

And I think it's the right ruling and I hope some of the other projects are going.

A lot of the European countries have already figured this out and it's giving them a competitive advantage.

Plus the environmental, you can't underestimate how important it is for the environment.

- Well, it's interesting 'cause a lot of environmentalists are against wind power and you say no pollution and no issues.

But I remember a blade coming off one of those turbines, it was either last year or the year before that caused havoc on Nantucket and the shores and just one turbine, the fiberglass pieces.

It was a mess.

This is one issue, Jim, interestingly, that's not ideological, liberal, conservative or Democrat, Republican.

You've got those on the left who do not like wind power.

Those on the left who tout it.

Whether it's part of the future, the jury is still out.

The Trump administration just doesn't want to treat it with the subsidy.

A heavy subsidy.

It's very costly to get these operations done.

But I agree that this one here is already almost done.

80%, 5 billion.

It should be completed.

- What about that?

When it started under the Carcieri administration, offshore wind off Block Island, deep water, there was an issue that we were gonna be subsidizing it.

Now they're talking about economy of scale.

- Yeah, obviously, well, first of all, subsidizing energy companies as an objection is a funny thing.

'Cause there was something called the oil depletion allowance, which for those of us who have been around forever, remember, was one of the biggest subsidies to energy companies going,~ subsidizing clean power for all sorts of reasons.

And I agree with Joe.

This is in many ways this isn't a non-partisan issue, although the current president's trying to make it somewhat partisan.

But you look everything net, net, net, yeah.

Occasionally there are gonna be problems, mistakes, a turbine coming off.

Better than an oil spill, better than an increase in carbon in the atmosphere, better than a lot of the other, you know, the least egregious alternative right now is wind.

And let's put all our resources behind it and yeah, we subsidize new industries to get them a running start.

But this project gets done.

I think it's got enough power to power half the houses in Rhode Island if it gets up to a full scale and the other project that's on the back bench right now, if it gets going, I mean, it's a phenomenal thing.

And Rhode Island can be an industry leader in this.

This isn't something that's going away.

This is something that is already embedded in the infrastructure in many European countries.

So if we want to be a leader, this is happening.

This administration will go away.

This is happening in America.

Let's make sure Rhode Island gets its piece of the jobs.

- Yeah, the Trump administration and their party is all of the above, all energy sources should be promoted.

And equally, and one dormant, one that we're gonna see coming back right now is nuclear.

- Nuclear.

- Yeah.

Talk about clean energy and the advances made since Three Mile Island are phenomenal.

It's clean, it's safe and it's relatively cheap compared to wind power.

- But I also think the issue is, wind power, you see, I mean if you drive in upstate New York, you go up to Utica and Watertown, I mean and in Europe, as far as the eye can see, it's offshore that's the issue.

Because of the cost to be able to bring it in.

I do think it made no sense at all with the revolution that we are 80% into it and then it got stopped.

That seemed like it was just a little bit of a jab.

But I wonder for the permitting, Joe, for the Trump administration now, the judge has said what's in the pipeline now, but going forward, they didn't say that they could halt it or pause it.

It seemed a little bit ambiguity in the court case.

- Yeah, and that's a good point.

I was gonna bring that up.

There's been no ruling that these projects have to be 100% approved.

The ruling is the process must continue.

All the Trump administration did was slow it down, which has the effect of hurting it severely.

But there's no ruling that it must be 100% approved.

The environmental review must be shortcut, the review that Trump is saying can't happen.

- So it could be rejected, ultimately- - It could be rejected.

- But you've gotta go through the process.

And that is a whole 'nother process if it's rejected.

- And in this part of the world, offshore is where the wind is.

So you put the turbines where the wind exists.

- Yeah, but we've got plenty of going in Cranston, in West Greenwich along the Narragansett Bay.

Commission uses theirs for their energy.

So it's been successful onshore.

- But to bring it to scale, you're offshore.

That's just- - But they already have more onshore than they do on, I mean, you've got five on Block Island- - It's easier to build on shore.

That's absolutely correct.

- But then you've got people who are upset with the blades and everything else.

- Well there's a downside to everything.

And I don't discount that.

It has everything, every new energy source.

And I don't agree with the Trump administrations, all energy sources should be treated equally.

I mean, coal is something we have to get away from.

You know, it's the decarbonization.

If you're trying to reach those goals, if you actually believe climate change is real and some of it, or a great deal of it is caused by us, by people and by the fossil fuels we're burning, then you wanna pay real attention to this issue.

- [Jim] Final word?

- The big question that climate change is real.

Yes, it is.

The question is, are the harms and the predictions made with climate change anywhere near correct?

And the past has shown no.

They don't have a handle on what's really going on and whether it's really as harmful as the left says it is.

- Alright, well that's a whole 'nother show on climate change.

(panelists laughing) We'll get to that next.

- So there is some words in this instance.

- We'll get to that on next time.

An investigation by the Providence Journal's Katherine Gregg this week shows that the Rhode Island DOT is still employing seven of the 13 companies it is suing over the failure of the Washington Bridge to conduct inspections on other bridges around the state.

Joe, we'll get to that in a minute.

You and I came in from the East Bay today, we're taping on the second anniversary of the bridge closure and how fitting that there was an accident that piled us up an hour back into Massachusetts?

- Yeah, it's not gonna change, I don't think, until we get the new bridge open, which I'm sure everybody's trying to get open well before the next election, but it remains to be seen whether it could be done.

- What about the issue Kathy had reported about, I guess it's a small pool of inspectors, but you're suing people at the same time you use them to inspect other bridges.

Do we see any problem there?

- Well, you nailed it, obviously.

Of course it's a problem.

I had the same problem when I was legal counsel for the governor.

When you've got a finite pool of entities working on everything and you're adverse to them or suing them, but you need them on the other end.

It's not a legal problem because as we've talked about in the show, let's assume they're part of the problem.

Say 10 or 15% of the negligence is theirs.

We can still recover a lot of money under Rhode Island law.

So yeah, they're gonna be inspecting 'cause there's just not enough inspectors.

And at the same time they're going to be sued and have to pay damages.

- Yeah, I don't think this is really a story.

There are people in our state who have had bad experiences with individual doctors and individual hospitals and they had bad experiences.

That doesn't mean you closed down the hospital and put that doctor outta business unless there was something incredibly egregious.

We have, as Joe says, a limited number of companies doing bridge inspections, doing bridge work.

On this particular issue, there is enough of a question, there's a litigation going on to see if somewhere in that company someone did something wrong to bring the accountability to bear that was promised.

That doesn't mean you throw the entire thing out.

I mean, we see CVS in the news over the opioid thing.

I get my prescriptions at CVS, CVS is a great company, they're a great employer in Rhode Island.

They've got 7,000 jobs here.

That doesn't mean you forgive them for the thing they did wrong.

That merits investigation.

And I think they've already settled some of those lawsuits in the same way, and any other business, if they do something wrong, they're gonna be subject to litigation and potential punishment.

That doesn't necessarily mean you shut down the entire business.

- Isn't the public perception though, that they, and the whole case has been on, we haven't had you once since Peter Alviti had the hearing last month, talked about inept, inept, inept.

They should have caught it.

They should have caught it.

But every other bridge is okay now, we feel confident in their ability to assess the other bridges in Rhode Island.

- Well, it's the go-along to get-along feeling that's plagued Rhode Island and a bunch of other places for a long time.

You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

So yeah, you did something wrong.

We're coming after you for this, but don't worry, we got you over here.

And it's just like, it's the good old boys network and the public just doesn't trust, that boy, if they're really that bad, what are we doing employing them to paying tax payer dollars to do more work?

But it's much more nuanced than that, as I agree with Bob points out.

But you understand the public frustration with it.

- Yeah, and again, an article like that makes the average person think, oh, that's terrible.

Well, they should never do business with that company again.

But that's just not how it works in the real world.

If there's someone there that did something wrong, then that's gonna be brought forward and subject again to the litigation that's ongoing.

The Washington Bridge was a unique structure.

It's the only one like it in the country.

They didn't build any others like it probably for a reason.

It was hard to maintain.

It wasn't well inspected over lo, these many years, this goes back certainly before Governor McKee, before Governor Raimondo- - I will take issue with that.

It was inspected and the DOT, if you look at those reports, it said, we've got clogged drains, we've got all this.

Nobody did it.

You've got a whole maintenance staff.

I mean, Peter Alviti made it sound like, oh, you know, nobody knew anything or we were relying on the incident.

They have a whole maintenance crew that goes out and cuts grass and sweeps.

What about all these clogged drains and water infiltration?

So I disagree that they didn't know.

I think people within DOT knew, my personal opinion is they didn't take action on the reports they were receiving.

- No, I don't disagree with that.

They did not do proper maintenance of this bridge over a long period of time.

They did not know- - Many administrations.

- Many administrations.

I don't think they fully understand that the way this bridge was built could lead to this potential catastrophic failure.

I think, and I've read a lot of this stuff.

- The original engineer took issue with that.

- Yeah, yeah.

Right.

- He wrote several columns on the journal.

He was the original young engineer.

Now he's the old engineer.

- The original young engineer who designed a bridge.

And again, suffice to say, for whatever the wisdom of the world is, they decided to never build a bridge like this again.

That to me said something.

Usually if something works, it gets duplicated, replicated and and brought to scale.

This was the only one like it in the country.

- And it was a hybrid for cost-cutting reasons.

That's the whole reason they did it.

Doing it the normal way, the right way cost too much.

Doing a cheesy bridge, no, it's not gonna do that, but oh, look at this new plan.

Let's try this.

This should work.

And that's the way it is.

But I do remember, and I agree with Governor McKee when he said, I'm actually glad looking at the glass half full, we're talking about this because we were really close to a lifetime for every story of that bridge collapsing and hundreds of cars going off.

- President Biden took that bridge over.

Remember he did that clean energy thing or whatever it was in Somerset?

And I thought about that the summer before the presidential motorcade is going over.

Just briefly, I had alluded to Peter Alviti's hearing, we really didn't get, I mean they brought Zach Cunha in.

I thought he did a good job of questioning him.

We didn't get a lot of new stuff other than it appeared to me the director was trying to preserve the lawsuit.

- Yeah.

- Did you feel that too?

- And right, and we've talked about this before.

There is really no reason for all the information to come out on both, we already have a major report that was leaked and came out.

All the discovery should come out.

And again, in Rhode Island, I don't think it will hurt our lawsuit because it's comparative negligence.

If anybody was negligent, it's not like we have to prove that the contractors were more negligent than the state or the taxpayers get nothing.

The chips are gonna fall where they may.

And like I've said many times, there's not gonna be a lawsuit that goes to trial.

- You're gonna settle.

- Yeah, it's gonna settle.

- I fully agree with Joe.

This is a case made for settlement.

There is nothing Peter Alviti did in his testimony that hurts the case.

In fact, if you're a lawyer for one of the defendants in this case, you look at that testimony, if he could withstand the question and extensive questioning of Zach Cunha, then the rest of the committee and consider them in place of a jury.

If I'm advising my client on that side, I say, we gotta settle this thing, talk to the insurance companies and let's just get this thing settled.

- We give the disclosure with you.

You're on Team McKee.

- I must've said that six or seven years ago.

- Team McKee.

And just looking at this through the political lens as we head into next year, how does the governor get over people like me and Joe and a couple others coming in every day.

There's not an accident every day, but it's a lot of lost time.

How do you get over that to say it may have been previous administrations, but it's mine that's been in charge the last three years.

- No, it's an incredible problem.

I'll point out that Bruce Sunland took a lot of heat for closing the banks.

He felt it was the right decision to do and he did win his next reelection.

The things that brought Bruce Sunland down two elections later were unrelated to closing the banks.

And that was a catastrophe of similar proportion.

It disenfranchised a third of the state.

The governor absolutely made the right decision two years ago to close the bridge.

I am the first to say, and he gets mad when I say it, that the communication after that could have been better and lead with empathy.

I agree with everyone who said, I don't like those signs say, you know, please pardon the inconvenience.

I think you have to say, no, it's awful.

It's awful.

It's awful.

The delays are real.

Don't tell me it's 11.3 minutes on average when I have to plan an extra half an hour every day.

But- - Or you have one accident and it backs you up an hour.

- But nobody died.

And it was absolutely the type of leadership decision, the tough decisions that governor need to make.

- Is that gonna be one of the governor's slogans?

Nobody died?

- No, no.

That the slogans gonna be- - Will that be on the campaign?

- For Bill Belichick, yeah.

- Yeah, the slogan's gonna be, affordability for all.

So it's gonna be- - That's a whole 'nother- - Or one of the slogans.

That's a different topic for a different time.

- Jim, here's what's gonna happen.

We're gonna have a bitter democratic primary.

He may lose it and this may be the issue, but then a few months later, a beautiful new bridge is gonna open and why didn't it open six months earlier?

But it looks like the timing.

That's going to happen.

- Then, you know, after it's all over, you say, wow, you know.

- Great.

Nice job.

- He did the right thing.

So the legacy's preserved.

The election's gonna be a fight.

- Alright, two year anniversary.

It's only seemed like 10 years.

President Trump hit the road to tout his economic plan and try to convince skeptics that the cost of living for Americans is really going down.

For those who buy anything these days though, it has been a tough sell.

Joe, let me start with you.

Affordability, affordability, affordability.

That seems to be the word.

Trump sometimes likes it, sometimes he doesn't.

But I think his advisors have told him, if you hit the cash register, what you're saying may not square with the message.

- Well, inflation's down, is probably gonna be 2.5% this year.

But affordability is the democratic buzzword.

And with the liberal media, that's all that's gonna be talked about.

But prices are still going up, not as radical as they were before.

And as we know, elections are on one thing, economy, economy, economy.

So Trump's touting the tariffs, trying to get the $2,000 rebate, which I think is a shot of happening to all Americans.

The tariff rebate.

And yeah, gas is down, groceries still keep going up and they're going up at a lower rate.

But Trump's gotta keep touting what he's doing to fix the economy.

- Yeah, it's not always about the change in prices, it's about how high the price is.

That's something that hurt my team in the last election, you know, saying, oh, we've got the inflation rate moderated is great, but when you have less money leftover after you get your paycheck and buy your groceries, then it's not so great.

I think James Carville actually cursed the world when he was famous for saying it's the economy's stupid.

Because he actually said three things in that race advising Bill Clinton against George Bush.

He certainly said it's the economy's stupid.

But he also said elections are about change versus more of the same.

And he also said, don't forget healthcare.

And I think the Trump vulnerability is not only going to be on, it's still really expensive to buy anything except for gas.

Gas is coming down.

I think the devastating things that might be happening in healthcare, if the Republicans in Washington don't get their act together combined with, I think Donald Trump has worn out his welcome.

You know, he was president for four years.

He wasn't president, but very noisy for four years.

And I think people are getting to the, we need a change from, Trump is just wearing on people at this point.

- [Jim] We've got another- - Other than his core fans.

- A memo to Bob, we got another three years to go, so.

- Well we gotta get out.

We've gotta get through the midterm elections and then we'll see if we get some.

- Yeah, the midterms elections are huge.

And the scary part is, is those against Trump are gonna show up in equal numbers as they did to vote against him.

The pro-Trump show up for Trump, he's gotta really get his road game together and early voting and everything to get people to vote for Republicans as opposed to him when the Democrats are just, they don't care.

It's Trump on the ballot and they're gonna go after him.

So it's gonna be a real challenging midterm election.

- Yeah, and I think Joe's absolutely correct.

Without Trump's name on the ballot, the faithful may be wandering and if you look at the midterm or the off year elections for governor, both Virginia and New Jersey, and then more recently, the Miami Mayor's race- - Florida.

- The Democrats for the first time in 30 years took that seat against a candidate that Donald Trump endorsed.

So coattails are always tricky in politics anyway.

But those Trump coattails- - And there's the local nuances that you don't know about.

- Are getting shorter and shorter.

- But what about the November elections?

It's kind of an weird off year that we don't do here, but we were looking at around the country.

What did you take out of it?

- I don't place much stock in those at all.

Mostly blue states, blue elections.

But the troubling thing is from the Republican's perspective, even in the ones that we should win, it got closer and we're supposed to lose seats in the midterms.

But here's the big thing for Trump, and he knows this and that's why he's gonna fight like heck, if he loses the house, the house is gonna do what it did to him last time.

Endless investigations, calling the cabinet in, and just anti-Trump, anti-Trump, anti-Trump.

- It's going to neuter the last two years of his term.

And he knows basically the presidency is done if they take back one of the chambers.

- Well not done because of what he's done in the unitary executive, which we haven't talked about.

Trump has done more with the presidency than any president ever has.

And he's about to get complete control over all federal agencies.

The bureaucrats are gonna be gone.

So he can do a lot with just the presidency.

The trouble is the house is gonna come after him, maybe even impeach him.

Again, it's just a lot of time.

- Sadly, Joe is correct.

The potential Supreme Court ruling on the expansion of executive powers over appointed positions in so many commissions at the federal level is devastating.

Overturning precedent that goes back to FDR and before is gonna have a phenomenal impact because a lot, and you could, depending on which side of the legal argument you're making, is this authority vested in these or is this executive authority invested in these commissions?

But wholesale changes in the appointees are gonna be amazing.

So what my team has to do, and it's our reach school so to speak, is also take back the Senate to try and stop mischief on that level as well.

And that's a long process.

- The Supreme Court has been generally favorable.

I mean the whole immunity thing I think has given him, you know, put his foot on the gas pedal.

But I wonder, as you're looking through, we've talked on another show about gun issues that they're just waiting to get a couple of cases together before they file.

What do you see as working in his favor but potentially maybe that he might not be successful when it goes to the Supreme Court?

- Well, I think- - Issues.

- I laugh every day when I see another district court judge did this, they stopped his deployment of the National Guard.

They're overturning redistricting.

No, no, no, no.

Those are just wrong decisions that the Supreme Court is going to fix and then they always do.

So I expect them to win almost every case with a couple of exceptions, the birthright citizenship he's not gonna win.

The tariffs, he's going to get his ability not here, the 10% tariffs for doing business, he's going to lose that.

But he's got other ways to put all the other tariffs in.

But I do wanna make an important point on the unitary executive.

Trump is exercising power that the Constitution has given to the presidency since its inception.

The Supreme Court is recognizing it.

But for Democrats, somebody finally rode a Democrat, don't worry, this is Trump.

When we get back in power, the unitary executive, not a Republican, we can do everything the same way the Democratic president can do.

So it's gonna be, but just like when Harry Reid got rid of the filibuster for nominees, they were telling him, you do this, the Republican didn't come in.

- But don't you think that's why John Thune held the line during the government shutdown?

'Cause he knows Congress swings back and forth.

You don't want to get rid of the filibuster 'cause then when the Democrats are in power- - We were one vote away.

Joe Manchin from getting rid of the filibuster then.

But if you get rid of it for one issue, it's over.

It's 50 votes on everything forever.

- Joe's correct.

I mean this is, the swinging back and forth that will occur if the presidential powers are, your argument, given their due course that was embedded in the Constitution, my argument, expanding beyond what the Constitution intended.

It doesn't matter how you get there if you get there.

And my team takes over and they do it the right way, they'll erase a lot of the bad things that happened.

And that's no way to run the world.

This is not how the country has survived with these volatile swings back and forth.

- Just briefly, Pete Hegseth has been in the news a lot.

These strikes on the boats.

The Jack Reed's been right in the middle of some of the closed door hearings.

What is your take on this as they've been hesitant to release the second part of the tape.

Hegseth is on some thin ice.

He has the president's support.

But now Congress is starting to grow a spine a little bit.

- This is where Trump's genius comes in.

This is a media non-issue.

The public does not care.

You've got drug lords, you've got Venezuela, you've got cocaine coming in, you've got Trump going after them.

They don't care.

They don't care about the illegal immigrants being arrested for law enforcement.

It's a big issue for Trump and this is gonna continue.

So the focus on this Maduro drug strike, two guys killed issue is really inside baseball.

It really doesn't matter in in the scheme of things.

- This will be our strongest disagreement on the show.

I think people care deeply about how America is behaving on the world stage.

And even if you accept the argument that the initial action was allowed, it is absolutely a violation.

Even if we are at war and we have not declared war to go cycle around and go back and take out the survivors.

That is not what America is about.

And I think people care about.

- And I also think it's a troubling look.

You know, the Trump administration might consider it collateral damage.

You have, even in Rhode Island, that court clerk, the Superior Court judge had to come out and stop the ICE agents.

This kid's legal, he's fine.

The judge has to step in.

- They were gonna break the window of a judge's car on a false arrest.

- Does that trouble you at all?

- Exactly my point.

That one story, if you reported that, it does trouble me, but I'd like to see the hundred stories that are never published of the rapists.

The criminals who are apprehended, who've been here for years, keep committing crimes.

You only see a few of them on Fox News.

There's never an equal story.

Yes.

One in a thousand is wrongly detained, they're an American citizen.

But what about all the ones who are not?

And what about all the legal ones who are trying to get in, who we praise who did it the right way?

There's never any stories on that, Jim.

I like to quote Buddy Cianci or paraphrase.

And with everything Trump does, Trump could land in TF Green Airport, see kids drowning on a capsized boat in arrogance at bay, walk out on the water, rescue them all and bring them back in.

And the media headline would be, Trump Can't Swim.

That's what's going on here.

- Let's go to outrageous and or kudos, Bob what do you have this week?

- Kudos.

Last June, a year ago in June, I was on the show and it was the day after the "WaterFire" documentary appeared.

Mary Steele, our producer here, was the writer for that documentary.

And I talked about, I had just rejoined the WaterFire board after an 18 year absence.

And I talked about we were in dire straits and kudos to the Mayor of Providence, to the Providence City Council, Rachel Miller, and Jo-Ann Ryan as finance chair and their staff for stepping up.

They have bought the WaterFire building.

We're gonna lease it back as a WaterFire art center for the next 20 years that allows us to recapitalize the organization.

Now we're not done yet.

Donate, buy stuff, go to WaterFire.

Encourage your friends to donate, encourage your government to donate.

But thank you to the mayor, thank you to the city council for giving us a new lease on life over at WaterFire.

- Joe, what do you have?

- Agree with that.

I've got an outrage, Jim.

If we remember back to the old days when the PawSox were wooed to the Woo Socks in Worcester, we couldn't get a deal done because we wouldn't put state backing and moral obligation bonds on the hook.

I think that was the right decision.

But recently the government just bailed out the soccer stadium, $60 million of moral obligation bonds, which really means the taxpayers are 100% on the hook for a project that was flailing and they couldn't get any other financing.

So we shouldn't be doing that stuff and if we were going to do it, we could have had the PawSox here today.

- Alright, well said.

Joe and Bob, thank you.

It's always a quick half hour.

Thank you for joining us.

Be sure and check us out on Facebook, X, Instagram, and on the Ocean State Media YouTube channel.

We'll see you next time here on "Lively."

(light upbeat music) - [Narrator] Lively is generously supported in part by John Hazen White's Lookout.