- Just buy the cheapest energy, whether it's a new plant in Connecticut, whether it's a natural gas plant in Massachusetts, whether it's a hamster on a wheel in Burrillville, whoever is making the cheapest power, buy that power.

- I don't support the rent stabilization statewide.

I'm not convinced that it would work.

I believe that what works is building more housing.

- Welcome to "One-on-One," I'm Ian Donnis.

Dan McKee got the opportunity few lieutenant governors ever get when he defaulted into the governor's office in 2021, after Gina Raimondo left to join the Biden administration.

But many Rhode Islanders still question whether the state even needs a lieutenant governor.

Democratic incumbent Sabina Matos has prioritized access to fresh, affordable food, while Republican challenger John Loughlin says he'd focus on lowering energy cost.

Voters will decide who gets the job on November 3rd.

We'll hear first from Matos and a bit later, Loughlin.

(upbeat music continues) Democratic Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos, welcome to "One-on-One."

- Thank you, Ian, I'm glad to be here with you.

- Give me 30 seconds on why you're running for reelection.

- I'm running for reelection because I have demonstrated that the Office of Lieutenant Governor can be used in an effective way to defend the consumers and the people of the state of Rhode Island.

I enjoy the work that I'm doing.

I'm making sure that I represent every community throughout the state of Rhode Island, and that I hear, I listen to them, what are the issues that are affecting every community throughout the state of Rhode Island.

And I'm taking action, responding to the needs.

It could be with the small businesses, it could be with the long-term care coordinator council, bringing resources directly to the different senior centers, with the small businesses, making sure that they have access to the information and how they can improve, and how they can have access to actually funding.

This is one of the number one issues that I heard through the small business advisory council is how do we get access to capital?

And that has been one of the number one things that we have been bringing resources to them.

- What difference will you make if you win reelection as lieutenant governor?

- Continue the work.

I started doing this work, as I said, responding to the need of the consumers of the community.

In just listening to what was needed in Woonsocket, I learned about their need for supermarkets.

They've been trying to add a supermarket, another supermarket for quite some time.

And once I brought an investor that wanted to open a supermarket, we discovered that they couldn't use the building that used to have a grocery store in the past because the big corporations, once they leave a community that they don't feel is good enough for them, they block that building and don't allow another grocery store to go in there.

So I started this work.

We were able to pass the legislation this year, and it was signed by the governor, and there's still work to be done.

Now, the second part of that legislation is going to ensure that we are able to remove the restrictive covenants that are already in place here in the state of Rhode Island.

When it comes to the work that I already started, creating a center for employee ownership, because so many of our business owners are thinking about retirement, and in many cases they don't have a family member that is willing to continue the business.

- You're campaigning, in part, on a theme of standing up to corporate power and representing ordinary Rhode Islanders.

Nonetheless, during the primary campaign, you got some campaign support from the Democratic Lieutenant Governor's Association that was funded by some major corporations.

How do you square those two things?

- Well, what I can tell you, the only thing that I'm responsible for is the fundraising that I do directly, and I did not fundraise for any of those commercials that were placed.

My campaign has been working really hard, as you know.

I'm the candidate that had the less amount of money.

My opponents actually had more resources that came from different corporations and different supporters, but I had the less amount of money.

So I can tell you the fundraising that I did, it came from people.

- You stood by Governor McKee's decision to keep Peter Alviti as the director of the State Department of Transportation until Alviti left on his own earlier this year.

Many Rhode Islanders thought that he should have gone because of the failure of the Washington Bridge.

Why did you choose to stand by Alviti?

- What I said is that, I was asked if the governor should have fired him when the bridge was closed, and my answer is that not in the middle of a crisis.

There were so many things that we still needed to know and find out.

And there were so many projects that the state has going on fixing the bridges in our state.

So my answer is, not in the middle of of a crisis, but eventually, yes.

I think he needed to leave eventually, but not in the middle of a crisis.

- We see how rent stabilization is likely to come to Providence now, with David Morales likely to be the city's next mayor.

- Yeah.

- You're of course a former city council president in Providence.

Do you support the idea of rent stabilization in Providence?

- I don't support the rent stabilization statewide.

It looks like in Providence it's going to pass.

I'm still observing and looking at it.

I'm not convinced.

I'm not convinced that it'd work.

I believe that what works is building more housing.

Since even before I was elected to office, I was part of the board of Olneyville Housing.

I have seen the difference that building homes and affordable homes can make in a community.

I believe that the state of Rhode Island has not been building enough homes.

And I remember the time in which talking about housing and talking about affordable housing, it was not popular, right?

Now people are more open to the idea.

We understand the challenges that we're having in that, in order to solve the problem that we have right now and the housing crisis, we have to build more housing.

I believe that the rent stabilization alone is not going to fix it.

We have to continue to build more housing.

- Sabina Matos, you're being challenged by Republican, John Loughlin.

He has lauded your efforts on fighting food deserts and overcoming restrictive covenants that inhibit competition on supermarkets, but at the same time, he says the effect of this is rather limited.

How do you respond?

- Well, what I think is that he doesn't understand the law and the intention.

The number one thing that we wanted to do is, as they said, to stabilize the patient, stop the bleeding, right?

We needed to make sure that no more restricted covenants were being added here in the state of Rhode Island.

We heard that the major supermarket chains was planning on closing more stores here in the state of Rhode Island.

We have to make sure that they don't put a restrictive covenant in those buildings because that means that for 30 years, those buildings may not have another grocery store, and that's going to have a big impact in our community.

I can tell you that just having this conversation, just passing this legislation has opened opportunities of buildings that were being held.

One of the tactics that the corporation was using is paying the lease of the building and not allowing anything else to go in there.

This was happening in Richmond.

And if we can see right now, because of the conversation we're having, and because we passed the law, what they decided is that they're not going to renew that lease.

And that opened that building and that area in there for that development after being almost abandoned for decades.

And now they're able to get another type of business to go in there.

So that's the impact that the legislation is already having.

- As you know, Rhode Island faces a healthcare crisis.

Is there a role for the Lieutenant Governor's office to play a more formal place in responding to that?

And if so, what should it be?

- Yes, and I can tell you, the Office of Lieutenant Governor, sometimes people call us when they have knocked every other door and feel like no one is listening to them.

I can tell you I have this experience meeting with a doctor who is struggling to keep their practice open.

And one of the things that we can do is to make sure that whenever we're creating any programs to help the small businesses, we have to remember the care economy.

We have to remember that those doctor practices, they are small businesses, that they are employing people in our community.

So whenever we're thinking about what programs we're going to create to help our small business ecosystem here in the state of Rhode Island, we cannot forget about the doctor practices, the nursing homes, the childcare centers, because the care economy is very important.

Also, something else that we're doing right now, but it's early in the work that we're doing, is trying to create a system to help match those practices that are closing, or the doctors that are retiring, and those patients with new doctors as part of the work that is happening right now when it comes to the care economy.

But we have to do more to include the care economy in any economic development initiative that we do.

- Speaking of healthcare, I reported a few years ago on how the top union at Roger Williams Medical Center and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital seemed surprised when you supported, without reservation, a change in the ownership of the parent companies of those hospitals, Prospect Medical Holdings.

Prospect was under fire at the time for channeling hundreds of millions of dollars from its hospitals to investors and running down the quality of its hospitals.

Did you fall down in doing your homework on that issue?

- No, actually my testimony for that was about my experience with the hospital.

If you remember, my father was the first patient with COVID at Roger Williams Hospital.

And my testimony was more of my personal experience with the hospital, and actually thanking the staff, and the nurses, and the rest of the staff that took care of my dad in a very scary moment.

I believe that the process that we have in place work.

We have the balance of the health department plus the attorney general doing the check and balances in any merger of hospitals.

And I believe that the process worked.

We're still going through it actually.

We're still trying to figure out what we're going to get with these hospitals.

The most important thing is, we have to make sure that we keep those hospitals open.

In our community, we need them, those communities here in the state of Rhode Island, make sure that we don't go through the same way that Memorial Hospital went through in Pawtucket.

We need them open.

- We talked a bit earlier about the Washington Bridge, and we see how the state has often struggled with IT issues.

Is there a government competence problem in Rhode Island's state government?

And if so, what needs to be done to address it?

- No, but I believe what we have is a salary problem with the state of Rhode Island.

I work in the office of outreach and diversity doing outreach recruitment for the state of Rhode Island.

And one of the biggest challenges that we had is we could not attract enough qualified individuals for different positions that we were posting because the state doesn't pay a competitive salary like the private sector.

Or either we would hire individuals that stay for a little bit of time, get the experience, and then someone from the private sector would get them.

We have to make sure that state government is a competitive place for people to work.

We have to make sure that we are able to provide the benefits that would make an individual to decide to build a career in a state government.

Because if we don't do that, we're not going to be able to attract the workforce that we need.

- Democratic Lieutenant Governor Spina Matos, thank you for sitting down with me.

- Thank you, Ian.

(upbeat music continues) - Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor, John Loughlin, welcome to "One-on-One."

- Thank you very much, Ian, great to be here.

- Give me 30 seconds on why you're running to be Lieutenant Governor.

- Great question.

A couple of your viewers may know that I hosted a radio show on WPRO for about a dozen years, and one of the things I like to always talk about on my radio show is that it's important for people to get involved.

It's important to step forward, run for office, have input, have basically a voice in your government.

And after 12 years of telling all of my listeners, all seven of them, to do that, I decided to take my own advice and run for office.

And we decided to run for lieutenant governor largely because it's an office that I think has been underutilized, and could be utilized in a much more forceful way to be able to shape the debate and influence policy.

- To your point, what difference would it make if you were elected lieutenant governor?

- Well, you know, we're already making a difference.

And you may recall on May 12th I held a press conference at my campaign headquarters where I basically said, look, if the Rhode Island General Assembly is not going to give us an Inspector General after 24 years of talking about it, then I will do it.

The Lieutenant Governor's budget has about $1.4 million and I could put together a pretty decent Inspector General's office for that money.

And lo and behold, within four days, the Speaker announced, yep, we got a bill.

And then a few days, like 10 or 12 days after that, it was passed into law.

So that's the kind of influence you can have, and it's by surfacing those common sense ideas and having the ability to communicate those ideas on a much broader stage than even WPRO.

I mean, Lieutenant Governor has access to the media in ways that they can really move the debate and make positive changes in the lives of Rhode Islanders.

- One of your top campaign issues is trying to lower the energy prices paid by Rhode Islanders, but these prices are influenced by global markets, and the prices are set by the Public Utilities Commission.

If you were to win as Lieutenant Governor, beyond using the bully pulpit of your office, what mechanism would you use to try and lower energy prices?

- Great question, great question.

So basically there are two things we can do with electric utilities immediately, and we can talk about gas after that.

Maura Healey is pushing the, it's called the RARE pipeline, and it's basically an existing pipeline of natural gas that they're expanding to be able to bring more natural gas into New England.

But on electric bills, there's basically five things that you pay for on your electric bill that have nothing to do with the cost, and production, and transmission of electrical power.

My proposal is, if you want to have those things that they want, a green energy growth fund, you want LIHEAP, which I happen to support, and you want some of the.

- That's the emergency.

- Low income heating assistance program.

And if you want some of the other programs that are on there, you can have them, but you package them as bills, you put them through the committee process in the Rhode Island House and Senate, and you vote them, debate them, vote them up or down on the House floor, and then fund them out of the general fund, get them off the electric bill.

By doing that, you've just now cut the electric bill by 20%.

Another 27%, and I'm being conservative on these numbers, they could actually be significantly more, another 27% can be cut by just telling Rhode Island Energy, and it's a simple piece of legislation, that just buy the cheapest energy, whether it's a new plant in Connecticut, whether it's a natural gas plant in Massachusetts, whether it's a hamster on a wheel in Burrillville, whoever is making the cheapest power, buy that power.

And if the proponents of wind energy are correct and wind energy is going to be significantly less expensive than current energy, then guess what?

We'll be buying a lot of wind energy.

But if you do that, you cut another 27% off the bill.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

How does John come up with these numbers?

How can that possibly be right?

We have a real world example.

In a little place called Pascoag, which is up in Burrillville, their electrical power is provided by a company called Clear River Energy.

They're paying, Clear River customers are paying roughly half of what Rhode Island Energy customers are paying.

And the reason is that Clear River was specifically carved out of the legislative actions that Rhode Island Energy has to deal with.

So if you provide Rhode Island Energy the same legislative environment that you provided to Clear River, you've cut your electric bills by about 50%.

- John Loughlin, you're one of the best prospects for the Rhode Island Republican Party this year, but as you know, it's been a tough road for the GOP.

Republicans haven't elected a statewide official since 2006 when Governor Don Carcieri won reelection.

Why is it such a struggle for Republicans in this state?

- Well, I think you have to look at it in terms of individual candidates, right?

And that's one of the points that I made earlier in the broadcast was, it's important for people to step up, for people to get involved.

And it's hard to convince good people to run, especially on the Republican side, because of what you just outlined, that your chances of success are de minimis, right?

So if you're able to provide a success model, you're able to finally provide a general officer who's a Republican, I think you're going to see the quality of candidates both in House and Senate races and for statewide offices, the quality of candidates is going to improve dramatically, and I think you'll see us gain in places that we haven't before.

And it goes back to your philosophy class that you probably had in college.

It's the Hegelian dialectic, right?

And the Hegelian dialectic is you have a thesis, and then you have an anti-thesis, and the compromise in the middle is where the best public policy comes from.

Right now, we don't have that.

We have one party that controls everything.

So they have a thesis and we all love the thesis.

Or we can have a thesis, an anti-thesis, and we can arrive at a much, much better public policy solution.

- Speaking of the Democratic Party, we've seen Democratic Socialists gain a lot of ground in Providence.

If you look five years into the future, from a policy perspective, what are your top concerns about what this might mean for Rhode Island's capital city and beyond?

- Well, I think the proof is going to be in the pudding, and we're going to see exactly what socialist policies bring in terms of actual outcomes for Rhode Island voters.

And I don't think they'll be pleased.

Rent control I think is going to stifle the housing market.

It's going to stifle the creation of new housing units in Providence.

My opponent actually, on a debate, said that she wants people to pay for their electric bills based on how much money they make, which is classic Marxism.

And so it's once you see the outcomes of that sort of thing I think Rhode Islanders are going to say, "Well, wait a minute.

We tried this, we saw it in Providence.

It doesn't work.

Let's go back to a traditional capitalist model and grow a real economy.

Let's cut costs, let's cut expenses, and let's have a real economy that Rhode Islanders can thrive in."

- You oppose the state's new surtax on income over a million dollars.

- [John] Yes.

- Which is being phased in over multiple years.

If you oppose that, how would you try and get the revenue needed to operate state government?

And yes, we know that the state budget has grown by billions of dollars over the years.

- Yeah, it's grown dramatically.

Even since when I was in the general assembly, it's ballooned really out of control.

But basically one of the things that I think, we have an opportunity, right?

Massachusetts has a millionaire's tax, New York has a millionaire's tax.

We've seen a lot of the wealthier individuals go to Palm Beach, Florida and go out of state, because they, frankly, don't want to pay additional taxes.

They don't think it's fair.

They think it's confiscatory and they don't want to pay it.

We have an opportunity to attract them here, and I think we should make it more attractive to attract more millionaires here, because what happens is, as that base grows, your tax revenues grow.

They pay the largest share, high income people in Rhode Island pay the largest share of income taxes.

So why wouldn't you want more of them?

And even if your policy only chases away a few, why would you want to chase away a few?

Wouldn't you want more of them in?

Because that ultimately results in more revenue.

- President Trump is unpopular in Rhode Island right now.

A lot of people are concerned about high gas prices.

If voters are going to the polls and they see an R next to your name, what is your argument for why they should support you when they might be disinclined to support a fellow party member of President Trump?

- One of the things you have to remember is, here in Rhode Island, our problems are homegrown.

We have the worst roads and bridges and have for decades.

We have the worst climate for business, according to CNBC, the second worst, I think, for business development.

We had a computer system that was supposed to cost $35 million.

We ended up spending half a billion on it.

We've grown our own problems here.

Our problems did not come from a campaign rally.

They didn't come from an administration in Washington.

When an administration in Washington benefits Rhode Islanders, I will support it.

And when they don't, I will oppose them viciously.

- John, you remember the late Robert "Cool Moose" Healey who, a charismatic guy, bit of a character, who proposed limiting the Lieutenant Governor's office with an annual budget of about a million dollars.

He said taxpayers would be better off without the LG's office.

Did he have it right?

- No.

No, he didn't.

And in fact, our plan, and one of the things that we're going to do is, as part of my original proposal for an Inspector General, is we're still going to hire auditors and investigators, and we're going to use them to look at public information.

The stuff that you go after as a journalist, the stuff that a mom in South Kingstown goes after to find out what her schools are doing.

And we're going to create a report card based on that.

Now, if we uncover any evidence that shows either wrongdoing or potential fraud, the good news is, now that we have an inspector general, we can walk it right across the hall to the inspector general, present our evidence, and let them take the ball and run with it.

If we return only 1% of the state budget, if we uncover 1% of efficiencies or savings, we've returned a 10X multiplier to the cost of Rhode Islanders for that office.

- John, as you know, Rhode Island faces a healthcare crisis with a lot of complex issues.

Should there be a more formal role for the lieutenant governor in responding to that?

And if so, what should it consist of?

- Well, absolutely.

One of the things that my opponent favors is spending $219 million to build a new medical school at the University of Rhode Island.

We already have a medical school in Rhode Island.

What we need is doctors.

And we already have an existing program that's very similar to a program I experienced in the military called STRAP, which is Specialized Training Assistance Program.

And the way STRAP works, and the way the Rhode Island program works is, if you're a board certified primary care doc, we will pay for your student loans in exchange for you agreeing to practice in the state of Rhode Island for six years.

If we get our reimbursement rates up to where our neighbors are, and we institute the STRAP program, we can literally have 100 primary care physicians practicing in Rhode Island tomorrow for just the cost of the feasibility study for the new medical school.

And the beauty of that plan is it has the ability to be flexible.

If we find ourselves five years down the road and we've got too many primary care docs, but we need orthopedic people, we can lift and shift fires and say, "We're not paying for primary care docs' student loans any longer.

We're going to pay for board certified orthopedic docs."

And it solves the problem immediately but the most efficient way.

And again, it goes back to my initial point that we never hear opposing point of views.

We never hear alternative ideas because we have a one party state.

- You mentioned earlier some of the IT boondoggles the state has suffered from.

There are a lot of Rhode Islanders who question the competence of state government.

What do you consider the root cause, if we have a problem with government and competence?

- Well, I think the root cause goes back to initially what we talked about, is we've basically had one party in charge.

And when you have one party in charge you never get any dissenting voices.

You never get anybody to stand up and say, "Hey, is this a good idea?

Do we have the expertise to run this?

Is there a better vendor?

Should we be looking at something else?"

Because everybody marches in lockstep and we keep moving in the same direction, and that's, I think, part of my value proposition is bringing that alternative voice into the chambers of state government right on Smith Hill.

- Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor, John Loughlin, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you, Ian, it was my pleasure.

(gentle music continues) - Thanks for watching "One-on-One," I'm Ian Donnis.

You can find all of our past interviews on the Ocean State Media YouTube channel.

You can also listen to "One-on-One" wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you love Rhode Island politics, sign up to receive my free TGIF column in your inbox every Friday at oceanstatemedia.org/TGIF.

We'll see you next week.

(gentle music continues) (gentle music continues)