- [Jim] The critics of Rhode Island's truck tolls are saying the juice is not worth the squeeze.

- The state has spent about $5 million more than the program has brought in so far.

It was very curious to me that despite a lot of efforts on my part to get Governor McKee to sit down for an interview, he was unwilling to do so for this story.

- Rhode Island's in a crisis, not only from a perspective of a workforce, but also from a perspective of we need to get people immediately into housing.

- Rhode Islanders are the ones who wind up homeless 'cause they can't afford the $2,500 a month rents.

So it's friends and neighbors who are out there homeless.

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

I'm Jim Hummel.

We're joined this week by Eric Hirsch from the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project and our political contributor, Harrison Tuttle.

14 years ago, the state mapped out a plan with the aggressive goal of ending homelessness in Rhode Island, but the problem has only gotten worse, and many are wondering what happened to the 100 million plus of taxpayer money allocated to help solve the problem.

So, nice to have both of you gentlemen in here.

I had done a series for the journal on The Hummel Report on homelessness, and this is kind of an extension of that.

Eric, this has been in your wheelhouse for so many years.

So I talked to you about where we were 10 years ago, got a little bit better, and then it's worse.

What's the state doing here?

Or what are they not doing?

- They're not doing enough.

And we have this, as you've pointed out, incredibly expensive system designed to put people in permanent housing.

But we do not have the apartments, the units to put people in.

And so we essentially have a failed system, and everyone's adapted to that failed system, and they spend a lot of money, but it's not accomplishing what it needs to accomplish.

The big problem recently was COVID.

COVID forced many people out of shelters.

We had to keep the density down.

It forced people out of doubled up situations with friends and family, and they wound up on the street.

We went from having 70 people outside to hundreds of people outside, 500, 600.

Right now it's probably a little over 300.

We can't have people outside in winter especially.

And we had three people freeze to death outside.

That's three too many.

In one case, a 75-year-old mother and her 50-year-old son froze to death in their car outside of Miriam Hospital.

So the state needs to do much more to build permanent supportive housing, which is permanent housing with wraparound services for people who need that and deeply subsidized housing.

Even their plan going forward is woefully inadequate.

The state's proposing to build 75 units of permanent supportive housing and 100 units of deeply subsidized housing per year between now and 2030.

We think it should be more like 200 units per year of permanent supportive housing and 300 units per year of deeply subsidized housing.

- On the ground, it's awful.

You know, folks are really going by day by day not knowing where they're gonna stay.

They're entering some shelters in which they're being physically and sexually abused.

There's no accountability.

And folks feel like they're being used as merely a data point for grants.

So it's something that, not only do we lack the infrastructure to be able to handle the problem, but people also feel as though that they're being treated like a non-human.

- And a lot of people wonder where is all this money going?

In my articles, I had pointed out $83 million.

That's a tremendous amount of money over the last three years.

I mean, not citing any of them specifically, but this is a big business for some of the nonprofits.

And you wonder what the metrics are.

If you're gonna invest in something, you want to know if you're getting return on investment.

- Exactly.

And I think it's mainly going to staffing.

And if we had the units, I feel the system would work well.

That's the thing.

I mean, no one's just trying to rip off anyone.

Everyone's trying to end homelessness.

But they can't do that job unless they have a place to put people.

Imagine being an outreach worker and going out to tent encampments and what are they gonna be able to offer people in the tents?

Because the shelters are often full.

There's not enough housing.

- And the waiting lists are years out.

- Right.

We're talking thousands of people on waiting lists.

- Yeah, I had talked to somebody who was living in his car with his three dogs and his kid down by, actually the irony was he was living in Pawtucket on the Seekonk River.

And he could see the brand new, sparkling Rhode Island FC Stadium across the way.

He had a classic story that he had lived in his apartment 30 years.

The landlord died.

The new guy came in, kicked him out.

And this guy worked his whole life.

It wasn't like he had been homeless before.

So there's more, you see more of that.

- It's an affordability crisis.

I mean, we hear it all the time, but it's truly come home in a way that is, throughout the country but here specifically in Rhode Island, due to the fact that we're a service economy.

We do not have a lot of the manufacturing jobs.

We don't have the influx of technology in which we've been able to re-skill our workers.

It's an aging population.

And unfortunately a lot of our younger workforce are poorly educated due to the fact of our school systems.

And so Rhode Island's in a crisis, not only from a perspective of a workforce, but also from a perspective of we need to get people immediately into housing.

And it's not being built.

It's certainly not being built at the rate in which taxpayers have funded it.

In a senate finance committee, the housing secretary, Deborah Goddard, mentioned that we are below our housing production metrics.

So we're not even hitting the goals in which we've set out- - Despite a quarter of a billion dollars and more housing bonds.

Eric, I got a lot of reaction to my series.

And I'm sure you've heard this over the years, undocumented people are flooding the market, they're taking housing from others.

There are a lot of people who just wanna live outside.

They don't want to come in.

So when people talk to you about that, what is your answer?

One is to the undocumented.

And two, there are people with mental health and drug addiction issues who just don't want to come inside.

- Both of those ideas are totally false.

There are not a lot of undocumented people.

Overwhelmingly it's people who live in Rhode Island.

Rhode Islanders are the ones who wind up homeless 'cause they can't afford the $2,500 a month rents.

So it's friends and neighbors who are out there homeless.

The idea that people won't come in if you offer them a permanent place is also false.

Just about everyone wants an apartment.

There are people who won't go to shelters because the conditions, the lack of privacy.

You know, I don't think I would go to some of our shelters.

I would get a tent and sleep outside.

- When you hear that too, what do you say to that?

- I'd say that we've gotta create a standard of expectations.

I mean, Operation No One Dies sought out to have a standard of expectations, not only for ourselves, but the entire sector as a whole.

We've got major, major issues when it comes to staff not being paid for very important positions like front desk positions in which, you know, they're there to greet people.

Sometimes that's the only face that they see in which is coming to someone to assist them.

And so what we've gotta do is we've gotta focus on making sure that the places in which people go, that there's a working shower, that there's not mold on the, you know, on the walls, that there's enough towels for people to be able to use.

There's some significant, significant system errors that are going on throughout the sector as a whole.

- Let's set the table for those watching.

You are a regular on Lively, but we've had you on you at the beginning.

You, along with the Rhode Island Council of Churches, pitched Operation No One Dies, pop up shelters, and said, "Look, this winter, "when the temperature gets below a certain degree, "we want to offer a place that people come in."

So explain to people out there what it is, who was involved, and how that worked this winter.

A winter that I think none of us expected with more than 50 nights of really, really cold weather.

- Sure.

It involved really everybody in the community who had been protesting and advocating over the last couple of years.

And it was driven towards a solution.

We got tired of asking the same questions to the same elected officials over and over.

We said we're gonna do it ourselves.

Eric has been a huge help in making sure that the folks and the voices in which our homeless have their voices heard when developing a model.

And we opened when the temperature reaches 22 degrees real feel and below.

We saw many nights we weren't anticipating.

We were maybe anticipating about 30 days.

We were open for over 50 days.

And what we- - And these were three churches from east side to downtown to south Providence.

- Correct.

Correct.

And we were open during the two snowstorms this winter.

So we had to adapt our model to meet the demands of really being open 24/7 to keep people inside so they weren't exposed to the elements.

- What was your view on how that worked this winter?

- I thought it worked really well.

And, you know, one of the points I want to make is that the only reason why so many people are outside is because they've been dehumanized.

You know, as soon as people become homeless, everyone assumes it's their fault, and they talk about all the possible things that could be wrong with that person, when actually it's about a failed housing market.

You know, the main way we distribute housing is through the market.

And the market is not serving two-thirds of the households.

And certainly not someone who, let's say, they're disabled and they're getting about $1,000 per month to cover all of their expenses, they don't automatically get housing.

Where is that person supposed to live?

They absolutely cannot afford any apartment in the state.

So the blame is going to the individuals, and therefore we find it acceptable, quote unquote, that they're outside or in tent encampments or in shelters, when actually it's the fault of the market and the fact that the government is not picking up the slack.

So it was really important to try to get past that dehumanization and treat people like human beings.

And that's what No One Dies did, absolutely, in terms of how people are treated with respect at places like Mathewson Church, which is where- - It's kind of ground zero for all of it, right?

- That's right.

- And they've been doing the work over the years for years.

Kevin Simon.

So you said you're gonna do kind of, look back, look forward.

And I know you're kind of divided on this, 'cause when I interviewed you said, "I love these popup shelters," and you wanna scale up for next year.

You're hoping that we wouldn't have to have them, but that's the long run as opposed to the short run, right?

In terms of you wanna bring in more churches next year to be able to do this.

- We wanna bring in more churches, but we also want to redefine the path of recovery for folks.

We know as we're having conversations around the unaffordability, the lack of permanent supportive housing, we wanna be able to the best of our ability advocate, but also transition folks to the best of our ability into transitionary housing from the point in which we see them from an emergency popup center to a shelter that we are expecting to open next winter.

- Eric, a lot of people say, you know, the speaker of the house has been, this has been his thing the last four or five years.

Housing, housing, housing.

We put a quarter of a billion dollars of the ARPA money into it, another $100 million plus bond, two bonds.

And so I mean, I understand progress is incremental, but why wasn't any of that in your mind devoted specifically to the homeless situation?

I understand you have to build housing, but all of that money and we don't see, the problem only seems to be getting worse in terms of people out on the street.

- It's about the politics of it.

So, you know, middle class people are seen as the constituency and they're out there voting and there are more of them.

You know, maybe we have 2,500 people homeless when we do a one point in time count.

They're just not seen as an important constituency.

And so a lot of the money goes to middle class housing.

And not enough is even going to that.

I mean, you know, the other problem is the not in my backyard issue where we can't cite shelters, we can't cite any kind of housing for our people.

And even trying to cite middle class housing is difficult.

So that's one of the reasons why it's so hard to meet the, you know, goals that you have for any kind of housing construction.

- And a lot of the restrictions are coming from the local zoning boards where they're not able to push through some of the regulations in order to build that housing.

I'd make the argument that instead of trying to convince people that affordable housing, public housing is good, talk to people in the neighborhood who can't afford to pay their mortgage or can't afford to pay their rent and organize them towards the solution.

- You spent a lot of time at the sites, particularly Community Church of Providence as part of Operation No One Dies.

So you had a lot of interaction with people coming back and forth.

What were some of the stories you heard?

I would assume not what we would think of as maybe the prototypical person who's fallen into homelessness.

And what Eric said is that it's kind of a cascade of circumstances post COVID.

- I talked to an individual who was a former engineer who said that "I couldn't afford housing "'cause I was in a domestic violence situation."

- [Jim] Wow.

- And how he chose to leave the situation rather than stay in an abusive household and there was no resource for him to go.

And so that's where we met.

- Yeah.

What else did you hear?

- Well, you've got couples who are dealing with disabilities who are using each other to literally get by every day whether that be mobility issues, whether that be medication.

Folks are consistently trying to find the next, especially in the winter, trying to find the next place that they can stay warm, whether that's a Dunkin Donuts.

The individual who froze to death outside Dunkin Donuts frequent inside that Dunkin Donuts.

And because that Dunkin Donuts closed and there was not enough outreach as to where to go, he passed away.

- Wow.

I've always heard, Eric, that if the homeless population, and I think that's the problem, it's kind of scattered.

If they had the same lobbyist that some, if they had the former speaker Bill Murphy working on their behalf, we might see a little bit more going on.

And I say that kind of tongue in cheek.

But it's true, 'cause if you don't have a voice up there, as they say, if you're not on the menu, you're gonna, if you're not at the table, you're gonna be on the menu.

- Well, that's exactly it.

You know, the politics of it is very difficult for us to overcome.

I mean, we do lobbying, we have protests, we try to raise public awareness, but it's hard to get over the hump in terms of actually getting the number of permanent units we need.

And, you know, in the past we've had section eight vouchers, or now they're called housing choice vouchers, where you give someone a voucher, and then they go around looking for a landlord to accept the voucher.

But now landlords are not accepting them.

They can get higher rents in the private market.

They don't need an inspection.

And there are a lot of really, truly pathetic apartments that are being rented for over $2,000 a month.

- And the section eight under the federal changes last fall, 250 of those vouchers, there were people immediately out on the street 'cause they expired.

- That's right.

Well, a lot of times you'll get the voucher.

You go around for a month.

You can't find, you know, a landlord willing to accept it.

You might get an extension.

You still can't find a landlord willing to accept it, and you have to turn it back in.

And you go back to the end of the line, which is years long normally.

So that is depending on what's causing the problem, which is the housing market, to solve the problem.

And guess what?

It doesn't work, particularly in the kind of hot rental market that we have in Rhode Island right now.

- Yeah, and there are very prominent individuals that are working to solve this.

Case management workers who can't find housing as well.

You know, they're transitioning out of homelessness trying to find some, you know, stable housing and they're unable to.

So it doesn't matter whether or not someone who's homeless gets back on their feet, does all the right things, they still can't find housing.

- Last thought, if you had the governor at the table right now, what would you tell him?

- Change the, how many supportive housing and deeply subsidized housing units that you're going to produce between now and 2030.

- [Jim] What would you tell him?

- [Harrison] Same thing.

- Yeah.

It's a pretty straight message.

We need supply.

- Yep.

- All right, Eric Hirsch, thank you so much.

Harrison, good to see you again.

Hope to have you guys back.

Coming up momentarily, they say you have to spend money to make money, but critics of Rhode Island's truck tolls are saying the juice is not worth the squeeze.

And we are back with my colleague from Ocean State Media, Ian Donnis.

Ian, you had a great story last week on the truck tolls.

The governor has been writing this into his budget ever since they won the court case.

And they spent a lot of money on that court case.

But set the table for us now.

It's gonna take a lot of money to get them up and running again.

- That's right, Jim.

The truck tolls operated for four years from 2018 to 2022 until they were halted by a legal challenge.

Ultimately, courts decided that the program was constitutional and permissible, but not a discount program created by former governor Gina Raimondo to try and limit the cost for in-state companies.

So as you say, the McKee administration for at least two years has been booking tens of millions of dollars into the state budget based on an assumption the truck tolls would restart.

The acting RIDOT director Robert Rocchio appeared before a house finance committee subcommittee in March and said that the tolls will start in the first couple of months of next year.

And that raises the question, how has the program worked out so far?

My findings show that the state has spent about $5 million more than the program has brought in so far.

And, you know, of course once the tolls are up and running, RIDOT projects that'll bring in about close to $40 million a year, that could change the balance sheet pretty quickly.

But strangely, Governor McKee and Director Rocchio did not want to speak with me for the story, which seemed a little noteworthy.

- We'll get to that in a minute, and I understand people have said to the state, why did you let these things just sit and not keep up with them?

Look, technology changes over the course of a decade.

I think that in the state's defense, they didn't wanna put a lot of money in if they were gonna lose the court case, right?

- Sure.

But at the same time, it's $19 million to update the gantries and possibly as much as around 10 million more for the back office functions.

That's a lot of money.

And, you know, yeah, anyone who has a smartphone knows how many iterations and updates you've gone through over the last 10 years.

But at the same time, that's a lot of money, a lot of tax, a lot of dough to upgrade the equipment.

- We as reporters deal with this all the time.

Sometimes it's a battle to try to get information out of state government.

Usually people like Governor McKee or the director of the DOT are readily accessible.

So your antenna must have gone up when they said that they didn't want to interview you.

So you put in a public records request for the communication surrounding you.

Tell us what you found.

- Yeah, this was interesting.

I mean, we both been at it a long time, Jim.

You know, sometimes your reporter sense just goes up.

And it was very curious to me that despite a lot of efforts on my part to get Governor McKee to sit down for an interview, he was unwilling to do so for this story.

And, you know, the truck tolls have been debated, but it's not exactly the third rail of politics.

So why did he not want to at least... You know, he could offer the rationality it's gonna bring in a lot of state revenue once they're up and operating.

But I sent a public records request, and it showed that the spokesman for RIDOT was repeatedly communicating with the governor's communications staff about, of having the RIDOT director avoid doing an interview with me.

- Specifically talking about you?

- Yes.

And, you know, I'm just a humble reporter.

But the point is they're putting a lot more effort into avoiding me than just having these principles do an interview and it would've gotten a lot less attention.

- And I don't understand to say, look, we understand there are costs to up and run.

We think for the long run this is gonna be good.

It's gonna be bringing it in.

I think part of the problem is they may be getting a lot of backsplash from Cardi's, Ocean State Job Lot who got the carve out when Governor Raimondo first pitched this all those years ago.

They potentially are gonna get hurt because the court said you can't have a different tier of tolling.

- Right.

100%.

And the trucking industry says in-state companies will now pay 94% of the truck tolls.

And they say that puts them at a competitive disadvantage.

I spoke with Mark Perlman, the CEO of Ocean State Job Lot.

You know, they donated 80,000 coats to charity last year.

And, you know, there's trucking involved.

- You gotta get 'em from here to there.

- Right.

And is is it fair that they're gonna be taxed on that kind of charitable effort?

- Yeah.

Let's shift gears.

Ken Block is a regular on "Lively."

You had him on "One-on-One.

And then all of a sudden two weeks ago, he says, "I'm gonna run for governor."

Did that surprise you?

- I was a little bit surprised.

I know that Ken's, you know, we're all at the behest of our wives or significant others.

- [Jim] Yes, we are.

- And I know Ken's wife has not look kindly on a new campaign for him in previous years, but he told me that a trip to Puerto Rico kind of sealed the deal.

The little sunshine and beach goes- - Was that the payoff or is there gonna be a continuing payoff of stuff he has to get her during the campaign?

- That's probably between Ken and his wife.

But I mean, here's the interesting thing.

I think Ken has been building his credibility over time.

When he ran as a moderate party candidate back in 2010, he got 6.5% of the vote.

Not a lot.

But he stayed in the public eye.

He's, you know, kind of struck a role as a critic of state government.

And I think he's certainly a credible candidate, whether he would fare as well as a poll he released this week, I think that's uncertain.

That would take time to figure out.

But I think it's very interesting.

His poll showed him having a tougher time against Helena Foulkes than Dan McKee.

So of course a lot of it depends on who wins the Democratic primary.

Governor McKee clearly has his work cut out for him.

And if he is somehow able to win the Democratic primary, I think Ken Block could be a challenging adversary for him.

- What is McKee's path at this point?

He's had low polling, but he has labor behind him.

- Yeah.

And labor was a crucial factor last time in 2022.

You know, labor brings a lot of people who can knock on doors and encourage voters to lean in a particular direction.

A primary election has a lot fewer votes than the general election.

It's more kind of activists and people who pay a high degree of attention to politics.

So I think, you know, folks have superior financial firepower.

I think we will see debates before ahead of the primary that will give voters a chance to take their measure of the candidates.

But, you know, we can't completely write off Governor McKee at this point.

- Lastly, just last couple of minutes, the Providence mayor's race is beginning to heat up, and the central issue right now is rent control in Providence.

Mayor Brett Smiley vetoed it.

The council passed it.

State Representative David Morales, who is challenging him, favors rent control.

Is this an issue that can really make inroads for Morales on Smiley?

- Potentially yeah.

And it's probably better politically for him that Smiley has vetoed this, and if there's not an override, because Morales can point that to how the issue is not moving forward.

You know, we all know that housing is a crisis in Rhode Island.

You discussed that with Eric Hirsch and Harrison Tuttle on the other half of this show.

And, you know, Smiley says he has his own approach on housing.

He says there have been a big expansion of new units in Providence, but Morales says you need rent control to kind of level the playing field for renters.

- It's gonna be interesting when they get into the debates because as I read it, there are a lot of exemptions.

It's not like everybody's gonna be rent controlled.

And Smiley's argument is what is gonna give an incentive for a landlord not to raise rents the maximum amount every year if they, you know, they have a repair come up, somebody comes out, they have to replace appliances, that type of thing.

- Yeah, it's a very contested idea.

I mean, Massachusetts outlawed rent control some years ago and now there's an effort to bring it back there.

I mean, housing is such a huge problem.

It affects all of us.

And, you know, I don't think there's a perfect solution, but this is a, I think it's certain to be an issue in the race for mayor.

- Outside of the rent control issue, is Morales making inroads on Smiley?

He had an internal poll, which we all have to take with a grain of salt.

We know about Ken Block's poll.

But it showed him doing pretty well.

Do you see him making inroads on the mayor?

- I think it'll be a competitive race.

You know, Smiley talked about doing a back to basics style of governing.

You know, I think snow removal did not impress everyone when we had some big snowstorms this winter.

But, you know, Morales is an articulate guy who's gonna bring the fight to Smiley.

An incumbent has a lot of advantages.

I expect it'll be a hard fought race.

And the question is whether Smiley's base on the east side is enough or whether Morales can make more inroads in other parts of the city.

- And if nothing else, it'll give you and I a lot to talk about.

- You can say that again.

- Heading into the fall.

Ian, thank you so much for spending some time with us this week.

- Thank you, Jim.

- 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 right here on "Lively."

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