- Ted, welcome back, it's always good to see you.

Rhode Island US attorney, Zachary Cunha, has put the state on notice that it could face a lawsuit, and he is making some very serious allegations.

He says that the state violated the civil rights of hundreds of children who have mental health and developmental disabilities.

- Right, these are all children in the care of DCYF, the renowned Department of Children, Youth, and Families, which is the state's long-troubled child welfare agency.

- Cunha says that DCYF routinely left children who were admitted to Bradley Hospital for months after their treatment ended.

Let's keep in mind these children are meant to be there for one to two weeks to stabilize during an emergency, but Cunha says the average length of stay was 51 days.

He says there were some cases where children were kept there for over a year.

And Ted, when this news broke, it was shocking to me.

How many people were not surprised to hear this?

- Yeah, I mean, it is, and these are shocking allegations, I would never want to undermine at that point.

But we have been hearing about this for a long time, Michelle.

Just to take an example I'm familiar with because it was in my own newsroom, my colleagues, Tim White and Eli Sherman, did an investigation in 2020 where they found that some of these children being kept at Bradley for long periods of time weren't even getting any education.

And it was actually a whistleblower from inside who came to us because they were concerned.

They said they aren't getting any schooling.

Tom Mooney of The Providence Journal, who's covered DCYF very closely for a number of years now, he had a front-page story in the paper after Cunha spoke and said that, you know, the allegations were nothing new to people who followed DCYF, and the proposed solutions are not really anything new.

So, I think that just shows what a thorny problem this is.

- Cunha gave the McKee administration 10 days to respond to his letter outlining the problems at DCYF, but again, he's not ruling out litigation.

So right now, it's unclear where we go from here.

- Yeah, the Governor McKee's Office, they've said they're going to cooperate, they're going to respond within the 10 days that Cunha has asked for.

We know that they're working on the budget.

We're in kinda the final weeks of budget negotiations, so perhaps lawmakers will try to put more money in for DCYF.

That remains to be seen.

But the question is if that will satisfy Cunha.

And then, of course, will it move the needle?

Because we've been hearing about these problems at DCYF for so long.

- Speaking of the state budget, let's turn to that now, Governor Dan McKee submitted his $13.7 billion budget proposal back in January, but now is when state lawmakers start to make those big decisions ultimately about what gets funded and what does not.

And they recently received some good news on that front, what was it?

- Yeah, we just got the latest financial update from the sort of number crunchers in the state budget office, and they say Rhode Island is on track to run a budget surplus of almost $250 million this fiscal year, which ends June 30th.

Now, a portion of that, a significant portion is already been allocated toward next year's budget.

So it's not all freely available, but about $80 million of that money is new money that hasn't been sort of spoken for yet in the governor's budget plan.

So, it gives them more flexibility, though of course, Speaker Shekarchi has said over and over and over that there's over $1 billion of additional asks floating out there for the budget.

- Right, there are so many competing interests, like requests for free lunches, of course, RIPTA needs more funding.

Healthcare providers are saying they need more of an investment.

What are you watching most closely?

- Well, those are all good examples, obviously DCYF, as we touched on earlier, I mean, we really have no visibility into how expensive or not making the US attorney happy could be there.

The Washington Bridge, we spoke last week about the $455 million price tag now for that project, will they try to move any money around there?

I'm also curious what bond questions will wind up going on the ballot for voters to decide on.

So, this is how the end of the budget season always is.

There's a lot of different competing interests and we wait to see kind of what pops out from those closed-door negotiations.

- Absolutely.

Thanks so much, Ted, appreciate it.

- Good to be here.