- You cut through everything else, David Morales ran a joyful campaign.

In the first debate he had with Brett Smiley, he waved right to the audience and it just connected.

That hi, neighbors thing connected with people.

- Now he's got to govern.

- He is going to have to negotiate with people who are politically on kind of a different wavelength than him.

And he's gonna be in the minority on how progressive he is.

The Narragansett Bay Commission said, "If you're gonna do this, we're gonna charge, you know, $2,300."

And when they fought back, they said, "Well, really, we're giving you a discount because of the full cost of this."

- (laughs) Don't question us.

- "Would be $11,000."

(lively music) - And welcome in to this episode of "Lively."

I'm Jim Hummel.

It's great to be back with you this week.

We are joined by Senior Reporter for the "Rhode Island Current," Nancy Lavin, and our Political Contributor, Bob Walsh.

For years, it was something as short as death and taxes, baby boomers making up the majority of voters.

But that changed on primary day when younger voters turned out in droves to help propel David Morales to an historic upset of Brett Smiley in the Providence mayor's race.

We have got a lot to mop up from the primary day and look ahead, but Bob, let me start with you.

I was wrong on this.

I said, I thought, "Well, all these people who are like talking that they're gonna vote for David Morales, will they really show up?"

Boy, they did.

- They absolutely did.

I will confess, I was tied for first in my lunchtime political poll and one of the, one of the ones I got right was the Providence mayor's race.

My analysis during the time was Mayor Smiley was good for about 12,000 votes.

And when the turnout got above 24,000, those were gonna be Morales votes, and they did the job.

Ben Shanahan, who came from out of state to manage his campaign, they did a very impressive ground effort of turning out folks who are not normal Democratic primary voters.

And they overwhelmingly voted for change.

They voted for rent control.

They voted for, you cut through everything else, David Morales ran a joyful campaign.

In the first debate he had with Brett Smiley on Channel 12, I think it was, when they introduced him, he waved.

He waved right to the audience.

He went beyond the commentators and waved to the audience and it just connected.

That hi, neighbors thing connected with people.

- Yeah, and I think anyone who knows David Morales, I've covered him at the State House.

That is, he is sort of effervescent.

He's very outgoing.

You almost, I remember when I met him, I sort of thought like, "This can't be who he really is, right?"

But he's so happy.

He's so outgoing all the time.

But they did a really good job in that campaign of capturing that, of using social media, sort of playing to their strengths while limiting the weaknesses of, of course, he does not have the campaign cash to run the ads that, you know, Brett Smiley did.

And I think that, you know, Brett Smiley, part of this is David Morales' success, and then part of it is that Brett Smiley, I don't want to say failure, but he couldn't quite connect.

He obviously did not deliver in the way people had hoped on the sort of staple issues like snow removal and the blizzard.

And obviously, as Bob said, rent stabilization was really the defining issue of Providence.

And he is the mayor who vetoed the city council's rent stabilization proposal.

- How much did that play into it?

- Oh, I think that was the marquee issue.

And I don't understand why Mayor Smiley chose the crime issue because I don't think in the Democratic primary electorate that was the right issue.

David Morales did a David Cicilline first mayoral campaign strategy.

He looked at the Providence electorate a little differently.

He said there are folks that don't normally vote that we can talk to and encourage and motivate and get involved and get active.

And he did it.

I mean, my analogy for a Morales mayorship goes back to New York in the '40s, the '30s and '40s.

It's a Fiorello La Guardia who, by the way, is the one who put in rent control in New York City.

La Guardia was a Republican, but he worked across the aisle.

He worked with the Roosevelt administration.

He worked with Labor, he worked with others.

So I am choosing to be joyful and optimistic on Providence's behalf of what may come.

- There's a generational divide too, because those of us who are fortunate to have housing, look, I've said many times I would never be able to afford the neighborhood I'm in now.

I think there's a bottleneck because some people in my demographic who have low-interest mortgages, they don't move out, so that doesn't free up the inventory.

I misjudged how serious the housing situation is, not only in Providence, but across the state.

And unless you're living it, I don't think you fully appreciate it.

Bill Bartholomew was talking a couple weeks ago about how his rent's gone up 68% over whatever period of time.

And so, I think maybe that, and you're in that generation now.

I know you have a house that you're living in, but if you can't afford to live, everything else kind, and the way they solve that is go to the ballot box.

- Yeah.

I think, I mean, we've seen this across the country, that affordability is really the driving force between a lot of these state and even national primaries and elections.

And that's certainly true in Rhode Island.

And I think one thing about Providence that makes Providence perhaps a little bit different than other communities is that yes, of course, the younger voters who ideologically and just, you know, demographically identify with David Morales are renters, but there are, you know, middle-aged and even older people in key Providence neighborhoods that just sort of the way the neighborhoods are, a lot of the properties are rental properties.

And if you look at the "Providence Journal" did a really good story kind of breaking down the neighborhoods where Brett Smiley won, whereas David Morales won.

And the areas where David Morales won were renter neighborhoods, but not all just, you know, college kids and Gen Z right out of school areas.

- And remember, David Morales also had a majority of the council with him.

There were some council seats that flipped on the rent control issue.

- John Goncalves fought.

- Yeah, right.

He lost on the rent control issue.

And when the vast majority of the council is against you and also working their wards to bring out the vote, Providence has always had an undervote in Democratic primaries, overwhelmingly Democratic registration, and they don't vote.

This time, you know, the normal turnout is what, 21 to 22,000 and this was 25, 26,000.

- And I think when we saw that early turnout, that was a good sign for Morales.

Now he's got to govern.

And so, now you have, and we'll see what happens in the November elections, but clearly he's gonna have a council that's with him, but it's money.

It's money, money, money.

- My joke, Jim, was the first thing he should do is hire Brett Smiley to run the administration in the city.

So he needs, right, the rude awakening for every municipal leader in the state is you get there and most of your budget is locked down, in Providence compounded by the large unfunded pension liability.

So you find that 15% of your money's going for the the prior pension issue and you're locked into police, fire, teacher.

- [Jim] And now he's got to deal with the schools.

- State employee contracts.

And he's got the schools coming back.

So his work's cut out for him, but what he needs to do is bring in a group of talented people like David Cicilline did when he became mayor and run the place.

He is inheriting things in relatively good shape despite all the problems.

- And, you know, the state officials that David Morales is going to be working with, you know, regardless of what happens in the governor's race, but, you know, a lot of the other, the Speaker of the House, the Senate President are not as progressive as he is.

And so, when it comes to sort of bigger issues that the state is involved in the capital city, he is going to have to negotiate with people who are, you know, still Democrats, but politically on kind of a different wavelength than him, which means, and he's gonna be in the minority on how progressive he is, which means he's gonna have to make some concessions or sort of.

I think all of the dreams are not gonna come true, you know, as laid out in the campaign, which is always true.

- Well, it is.

- This is always true.

Right.

It's always true.

- But there are a lot of people not paying attention to politics who voted for the first time who want to see immediate results.

And I think it's going to be a rude awakening for him.

I wish him the best of luck in Providence, but there's some guy living in a triple decker in South Providence who's like, "Why isn't my rent, you know, why aren't things better?"

- Well, the problem, this is the inflation problem, right?

Rent control at the new high prices.

- Yeah, it's still high.

- It still hurts.

So then you need the economic development to raise wages and everything else, which is the bigger picture vision that he's bringing to the table.

- The final thing I found interesting was Brett Smiley said, "I'm not gonna endorse him."

And that rarely, rarely happens.

We'll get to Governor McKee in a second.

What did you make of that?

- Yeah, it's interesting.

I think in some ways, you know, I spoke with a, I wrote a story about who's endorsed versus who's not endorsed and kind of what that means and is this a meaningless gesture?

And the political scientist I spoke with said, you know, in general, voters really aren't paying attention.

I think also in a city like Providence, which even more than the state, is so heavily Democrat, doesn't have, I would say, a serious Republican or independent candidate running for mayor in the general election.

So David Morales isn't like really.

He's the mayor-elect essentially at this point.

Whether Brett Smiley endorses him or not, if every single Smiley supporter doesn't vote for David Morales- - Doesn't matter.

- He's still gonna win in the general.

But I think it speaks to sort of the starker ideological divide between the two versus in the governor's race where despite, you know, a pretty heated primary between Helena Foulkes and Dan McKee on personal stuff and resumes, they're not that far apart ideologically really at all.

- And we give the disclosure with Governor McKee, you were kind of part of the kitchen cabinet and advising whatever it was.

- I was working on the governor's campaign from the last campaign.

- [Jim] So what went wrong?

- Well, things, what went wrong?

- How much time do we have?

- No, things change.

The governor, well, the reason that it is rare for incumbents to lose is most incumbents look at the data upfront and say, "Well, I don't want my legacy to be a loss, so I'm not going to run."

Governor McKee, like Governor Sundlun- - Governor Chafee saw that and stepped aside.

- And got out, and Governor Garrahy, he saw that and did not run, but Governor Sundlun and Governor McKee said, "The best way to preserve my legacy and to preserve the work I'm doing is to continue by running, to go and talk about the message."

And for three very different candidates who were long-term incumbents or perceived to be long-term incumbents lost this time, Governor McKee, Mayor Smiley, and Mayor Grebien, which we haven't talked about yet, and voters were hungry for change.

New voters turned out.

The bridge, I always said that Governor McKee's goal was to get people to look beyond the bridge at his many accomplishments, and there were many, many accomplishments.

And Helena Foulkes, who has been running since the last time, and now I'm like the governor, I endorse the Democratic ticket, so I endorse Helena Foulkes.

It was a mud fight.

I don't like mud fight campaigns.

In fact, in the free advice to Helena Foulkes, here's the message I was waiting for her to deliver.

I wanted her to say, "I chose Rhode Island.

I got out of Harvard Business School.

I went to CVS because it's in Rhode Island and I want every kid in Rhode Island and every grandkid in Rhode Island to have the same opportunity I had to have a good job in Rhode Island after getting a good education here."

And the other thing she should have said, in my opinion, is, "Hey, it's not the job of a pharmacist to interfere between a doctor writing a prescription and the patient getting it."

The pharmacist does not call the doctor and say, "Well, Jim Hummel was in here getting his insulin and he bought a big bag of Snickers."

That's not their role.

But they did do everything they were legally allowed to do to try and curtail the amount of opioids put out and the thing they could control, tobacco they did.

That's what she should have said.

Positive uplifting.

Everything they could do, they did.

I don't know why she never said that.

- The governor's strategy right off the top was the day Helena Foulkes announced they went after her on the opioids.

And it seemed, I think that resonated with some people, but not enough.

I think people got tired of hearing about that.

It was like, "What are you gonna do for me?

I don't really care about this issue anymore."

In my mind.

- I think that, you know, obviously the opioid crisis and addiction is something that we all have, you know, know someone or know someone who knows someone who it has affected their lives.

But I think for more Rhode Islanders, the traffic and the frustrations around the Washington Bridge are a present and current problem that is sort of more tactical and less ideological than, you know, and for some people, the opioid crisis.

You know, PRI in I think their most recent poll before the primary asked voters like, how much they're upset about Helena Foulkes with the opioids and how much they're upset about the Washington Bridge.

And voters were upset with both, but they were more upset with the Washington Bridge.

- And like Bruce Sundlun and the banking crisis, right?

It wasn't his fault.

He inherited a problem.

Now to, I guess to Governor McKee's credit, he didn't do the old playbook of blaming his predecessors.

He didn't constantly harp, "Hey, I inherited this problem.

I inherited this problem."

He just dealt with the problem.

Communication about it after it was closed, absolutely could have been better.

That was talked about incessantly.

But sometimes it just plays out.

He'd been governor for six years, lieutenant governor for six years.

- [Jim] Some people are maybe just ready to flip the switch.

- And his campaign team, I want to say this publicly, strongly, did a great job.

His original numbers were, you know, 12 or 14%.

They brought him up to 38%.

I told the folks on the campaign, "If you're in education, we'd make you commissioner if you move numbers that far in that short period of time."

Outspent, I don't know, four or five or six to one on TV, outspent by independent expenditures.

You know, 38% of the people said, in the Democratic primary said thank you to the governor by voting for him.

- Now we go to the general election.

Ken Block, I think Ken Block would have a much better path if Aaron Guckian dropped out, probably not gonna happen.

How do you see this over the next seven weeks?

- Yeah, it'll be interesting.

I mean, Helena, unlike David Morales, Helena, she's still gonna have to campaign.

She's still gonna have to, you know, she has two opponents who to some, you know, percentage of the electorate are a good option.

And I think especially even among Democrats, people who are sort of turned off by not, maybe not even as much her opioid stuff, but just this idea of another sort of corporate executive who's not, Dan McKee I think was able to play a little bit more to the like one of us, the Cumberland Boys and Girls Club over and over and over again.

- And she's buying her way in.

- That's who he was.

- Right.

So, you know, like her pedigree, her money, her past positions don't sort of lend to that one of us story.

And so, some people are gonna be turned off by that and they're going to look at Ken and Aaron as alternatives.

The problem for Ken is that Aaron is the more New England Republican versus his opponent that he lost to Elaine Pelino.

So the daylight between Ken and Aaron, they're both releasing these plans right now on tax savings and affordability, and they're very similar.

- Neither Ken nor Aaron raised enough money to qualify for matching funds.

This isn't an outcome bet, this is a prop bet.

Helena will get 50% of the vote or more.

She will win this election.

The prop bet is, will Helena beat Ken more than Ken beats Aaron because I think that's the order finish.

And the killer question for Ken Block, because he's a very honest guy, he's a very smart guy, is how many times did you vote for Donald Trump?

You had three choices.

How many times did you vote for him?

If he says three, he divides the Trump vote with Aaron.

He's not gonna say three because we know his feelings about that.

Anything less than three, but more than zero.

- He loses the conservative side.

- Right.

He and Aaron are swimming in the same very small pool of hardcore Republicans and the few remaining independents who think Donald Trump's doing a swell job.

- The lieutenant governor's race may be the long race where a Republican has a viable chance to try to, so it's John Loughlin, former state rep who ran for Congress years ago against Sabina Matos.

Were you surprised that Sabina Matos won as handily as she did?

- Yeah, I was.

You know, the polling, and again, and I wrote a story about all the problems with polling, which has, you know, never been a forecast, but it's increasingly difficult to sort of gauge opinion because the sample of voters that you're asking questions to is not reflective often of the wider demographics.

But all the polling said that Sabina and former Newport Mayor Xay, now a city councilor, were sort of neck and neck.

And he had way more money than her.

He had a lot of, you know, picked up a lot of key endorsements.

I think is really like has a good network of connections even beyond Newport.

And she defeated him pretty handily.

And especially in the face of so many incumbents who lost, she was an incumbent who hung on.

- This is where Labor made a difference for Sabina, multi-candidate race made a difference for Sabina, and being underestimated made a difference for Sabina.

So actually, there's some homework, fellow Democrats out there, Xay and the other candidates in that race need to step up and say, "Of course we support Sabina in the general election."

- And we haven't heard that, we haven't heard that yet.

- I don't think we've heard that yet.

- But I'm not surprised that, I wouldn't think.

It was a civil race.

- It was a very civil race.

I wouldn't expect- - It wasn't contentious.

- And Sue AnderBois was a great candidate.

Cindy Coyne was a great candidate.

I don't know Ross McCurdy, but I think he was one of my members back in the day.

But, you know, they're all trying to take advantage of opportunity that was not really there for them.

- What does Loughlin have to do to win?

- There is no way John Loughlin can win.

He is a true Trump, you know, the prop bet there is can he get the 40% of the vote?

And I'm not sure.

- Do you work for Sportsbook Rhode Island?

You got all these bets lined up.

What's the parlay?

- Well, because the outcomes are not certain, you've got to say, "Oh, what are the percentages?

What are the probabilities?"

Your baseline Republican vote's usually in the high 30s, but Trump is less popular than normal.

So I mean, I don't see a path for John, I don't.

He didn't raise the money either.

Sabina was a matching funds candidate.

She's got the money now to get her message out there.

Democratic Party unified, it's gonna be a great year nationally for the Democrats.

Rhode Island is gonna be no exception.

- Last race, Don Grebien goes down after 16 years.

What about that?

- Wild.

I was not, you know- - [Jim] That was not on your bingo card.

- I had not followed that race that closely.

And I think this is interesting because the national sort of news, the way they cast the Rhode Island primaries was like three progressives oust three incumbents, and that's really not true.

And that's most especially, I think, not true in Pawtucket.

Adam Greenman ran a really good, again, kind of grassroots campaign, but really more on bread and butter issues and things like Hasbro and things like the hospital and McCoy Stadium.

And I think, again, the appetite for change was what sort of propelled him.

- Final thought?

- He ran a very good campaign.

Don had the burden of having been there for 16 years.

- And seen a lot go out the door.

- And a lot of things that were not, he had no control over Hasbro, no control over McCoy, no control over Memorial Hospital.

- But he owed it.

He had to own it.

- But it's the downside of politics.

You get blame for everything that happens while you're there.

And he is a wonderful guy.

I wish Mayor Greenman well.

I think that if the community thought that Mayor Grebien was vulnerable, there would've been a lot more candidates in that race.

So in two years, we'll see what happens in Pawtucket.

- All right.

We shall see.

The law governing the public's access to government records has not seen major changes for more than a decade.

And now one community is finding out what the public and reporters have known for years.

Quasi-public state agencies can withhold a lot of information because of loopholes in the law.

Nancy, you had an amazing story on this.

This kind of comes out of North Kingstown.

We've heard sludge, sludge, sludge.

Set the table on what the problem is here.

- Sure.

So, as you alluded to, there's been a longstanding effort since really 2012, which was the last time that Rhode Island's public records law was updated to update the law again.

Some of it is like really outdated, like text messages, body-worn cameras are not included in what's public.

There's a lot of like exemptions that public agencies can use to withhold information.

The fees can really be astronomical.

It just says reasonable and, you know, reasonable, obviously in the eye of the beholder.

Hasn't gotten a lot of traction because the agencies that are subject to the public records request don't want to have to fill more and do more work and charge less money and be more open.

Now, a public agency, admittedly not one of the ones that has really taken a stand against it, which is the town of North Kingstown has filed for public records from two quasi-public state agencies related to this proposed sludge plant in Quonset Business Park.

North Kingstown hired some attorneys.

They might be filing a suit with the EPA, but first they need to gather information.

She files off some public records requests, things like- - Quonset Development Corporation and the Narraganset Bank Commission.

- Narragansett Bay Commission.

Both quasi-public state agencies, both notoriously, I think to reporters, hard to get information from.

They think bing, bang, boom, we'll get this information back in a month.

You know, just some basic like internal correspondence about the project, you know, project materials, that kind of thing.

Mostly denied.

Parts were filled by Quonset Development Corporation and then parts were withheld.

And the Narragansett Bay Commission said, you know, "If you're gonna do this, we're gonna charge, you know, $2,300."

And when they fought back, they said, "Well, really, we're giving you a discount because of the full cost of this."

- Don't question us.

- "Would be $11,000 based on the 750 hours of work it would take us to retrieve these documents."

So now North Kingstown has appealed to the Attorney General's Office, which will sort of intervene in disputes over public records.

But the exemptions in the law, and the AG hasn't ruled yet, the exemptions in the law that both of these public agencies cite as reason for not handing over some of the documents are things that journalists have frequently gotten in their letters of why they can't get information.

- Well, two things are gonna cause those excuses to collapse.

The first is artificial intelligence where you could program the bot, so to speak, to say, "Give me all records and redact this confidential information.

And it doesn't take 750 hours.

It takes about 75 seconds.

So your bill is a dollar.

Here's all your information.

It cost you to print it, I guess."

- In our dreams.

- The second, and this is a challenge for the incoming administration, and it sounds like they want to meet the challenge.

You're gonna lose the quasi part of the quasi-public if you don't behave.

You go back to being a public institution.

Quonset could easily be put under the Aegis of North Kingstown or the state directly.

No quasi.

Same with the NBC, same with a lot of these organizations.

So if you do not want to lose your quasi status, you better start acting like a public agency when it comes to open records, open meetings, open everything else.

And that's it.

It is that simple.

What happened with the sludge plant in North Kingstown where people weren't allowed to talk about it because it was a hidden vote for a year and a half is ridiculous and had a detrimental impact on that community.

They had to race around at the end to try and fix the problem.

You can't do that.

There is no more dark of night.

- And QDC has had generally goodwill, I think, the last 20 years.

The combination of asphalt plant, sludge, and potential battery storage has been a brew of, it's just a lot of discontent down there.

And then when you hide documents or you put up a fight, then it kind of breeds, you know, mistrust.

- And that's a fair statement.

Quonset has done a superb job for a very long period of time and turned that into an economic powerhouse for the state.

But you've got to play by the rules of openness .

If the community turns on you, if the host community turns on you, you're in trouble.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- Yeah, I think, you know, Quonset cited attorney-client privilege and some confidential financial information as reason why it couldn't release some of the documents.

And I think that there are bonafide reasons why that is fair.

But one of the things that North Kingstown wants that is not required by law now is essentially a privilege log of here's all the things that we asked for that, that North Kingstown asked for that we couldn't fulfill.

Because right now, they don't even have a list of what was not fulfilled and the explicit reason why for each of them.

- And we would sometimes get that.

And the thing, we can't do this because of this.

They are not even getting that.

- And one of the things that, you know, good government advocates pointed out when I interviewed them for this story is that in other cases, for example, when Dan McKee's administration has cited similar, you know, attorney-client privilege investigation, confidential information, why they couldn't release information about the emails when former state officials went to Philadelphia, the education contract, his former chief of staff.

When the AG overrules him and says, "Yes, these are released and we get the emails," like, they could have been released all along.

- Right.

- And the sludge issue's gonna have to be dealt with, and the battery storage issue's gonna have to be dealt with.

I mean, these things- - [Jim] They're not going away.

- Yeah, they're not going into Quonset, but they're not going away.

- Exactly.

All right.

Let's let's do outrageous and/or kudos.

Nancy, let's begin with you this week.

- Sure.

So I have an outrage.

"The Boston Globe" wrote a story about it recently, and then that sort of prompted me to look at Uprise Rhode Island, which is a long time sort of Rhode Island news blog, formerly run by Steve Ahlquist, who's now out on his own doing excellent work, Uprise Rhode Island is now has a team of reporters with personalities and names who are all AI bots.

And they are promising to cover every single meeting in the state and, you know, do the most because they are basic, it's basically a group of bots synthesizing, you know, the information that's discussed and spitting it back out from meetings.

So speaking of Quonset, one of the town councilors has been sending around an Uprise article about a meeting or a filing that has to do with the battery storage, but it's written by a bot.

- It was bot written.

- [Nancy] It was written by bot.

- Do you have to pay the bot benefits?

- No, but they're really, they're, you know, they're quite open about that they're using AI, but they're assigning, there's like seven reporters with individual personalities and beats.

- That's awful.

- To report.

It's really upsetting.

- It's our worst nightmare.

- And it's gonna get worse before it gets better.

- You get the last minute.

- Well, my kudo will be to Governor McKee.

As you know, I was never with the governor before he became governor.

He called me up.

He said, "What do you want to do?

I'm about to become governor."

I said, "These are the concerns teachers had."

He led right off by getting shots in the arms of all the educators.

We established a great working relationship.

And I had known him personally forever, but from an organizational standpoint when I was still on the job.

And I, you know, there will be a great legacy thing.

Bruce Sundlun also lost and his legacy is intact with a lot of accomplishments.

We have 21 community learning centers across the state, thanks to the governor.

We are going to have a brand new bridge with a ribbon cut in in a couple of years.

There'll be another governor standing there.

- Will he get invited?

- I hope he gets invited.

I hope he gets invited.

He endorsed Helena Foulkes as well he should have.

And I just want to say thank you, Governor McKee, and I'm glad that 38% of the people saw beyond the bridge and said, "Thank you for everything you've done to the state.

You created jobs, you improved education, did a lot of great things."

And people don't say thanks enough.

So I want to say thank you because we're not gonna be talking about it much anymore.

- All right, Bob and Nancy, thank you for coming on.

We appreciate it.

Okay, finally, this week marks the 10th anniversary of my becoming moderator of "Lively."

I'm only the fourth host in the nearly 40-year history of this program.

When I took over this chair in 2016, the set looked a lot different and has undergone multiple changes over the past decade.

What has not changed?

Our pledge to bring you the best political analysis in Rhode Island every week, featuring a wide-ranging panel of pundits and journalists weighing in from all different angles.

We appreciate your loyalty to this program, and we'll see you next week for another episode of "Lively."

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