Green Bond important to protect Rhode Island from effects of climate change
By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff
Last week, just as the last of the weekend storm
began to fade, state and local officials gathered inside the Looff Carousel in
Crescent Park to launch the campaign for one of November’s ballot questions:
the semiannual Green Bond.
The bond, a regular feature on election day in Rhode Island,
is the ballot question that asks voters to approve funding for a number of
environmental and climate resilience projects. The Sept. 28 event was aimed at
encouraging people to vote yes on Question 5 this year.
The $55 million bond includes funding for state beaches,
parks, and campgrounds; watershed restoration around Narragansett Bay;
brownfield remediation; and farmland and open space preservation.
Local state Rep. Megan Cotter worked hard to get
more funding for the Green Bond
The Green Bond is one of five bond questions on the ballot this
year, as voters are being asked to approve $600 million in new borrowing. Other
bond questions include funding for capital improvements at the state’s three
public higher education institutions; an affordable housing fund; economic
development for Quonset Business Park and the I-195 District; and a new State
History Center.
The clear winner this year for the Green Bond is climate
resilience; $25 million from the bond would go toward the Resilient
Rhody Infrastructure Fund administered by the Rhode Island Infrastructure
Bank (RIIB).
If passed by voters, it would be the greatest share of the Green Bond given to the program in recent memory.
“We are on the front lines of climate change,” Terry Gray,
director of the Department of Environmental Management, said at the kickoff
event in East Providence. “Anyone who walked down to the beach on Saturday and
Sunday will have seen what I mean. We’re dealing with more frequent, more
intense weather events across the state, and we need to prepare for the impacts
coming our way.”
The RIIB
is the state’s main financial vehicle for financing climate resiliency projects
in state and local government. Projects include upgrades that mitigate
flooding, coastal erosion, and coastal hazards and manage stormwater.
Attendees at the recent event didn’t have to look far for an
example of the benefits of the Green Bond. Just steps from the Looff Carousel,
the Crescent Park beach was a beneficiary of funding stemming from a previous
bond.
In 2024, RIIB announced the city would receive $1.8 million
for a project to protect the park’s beach and stabilize nearby bluffs, which
face erosion from the lower Providence River. The RIIB grant was funded by
2022’s Green Bond.
Mayor Roberto DaSilva said the city was about to sign a
contract to continue the shore stabilization work, funded in part by that $1.8
million grant awarded to East Providence.
“Every year we see these big storms coming in, and we lose
more and more of our shoreline,” DaSilva said. “It’s creating a serious
situation, but with the $1.8 million we’re going to be able to protect that
shoreline.”
“The money is critical for Rhode Island; the majority of the
state is coastal,” said Sen. Louis DiPalma, D-Middletown. “The majority of
Rhode Island [will] be impacted by climate change and future storms.”
DiPalma, along with Rep. Megan Cotter, D-Exeter, was one of
the lawmakers credited with making this year’s Green Bond “greener.” While Rhode Islanders have regularly voted for an
environmental-minded ballot question since the 1980s, in recent years the bond
itself has become something of a political football.
For the last two election year budget cycles, lawmakers such
as DiPalma and Cotter have said the bond proposals presented by the governor
were insufficient: past proposals left off farmland preservation and/or open space protection
money.
Programs like resiliency efforts, or brownfield remediation,
typically exhaust their funding on roughly two-year cycles, expecting to get
funding replenished during the next election cycle. Proponents have noted that
many if not all of the programs funded always have higher demand than they have
funding.
It’s why DiPalma and Cotter, almost from the moment the
governor’s budget proposal was introduced in the legislature this year,
quarterbacked the effort to increase the bond’s funding for resiliency and
other programs in the bond.
“It was a shame that we had to work so hard for something so
important that should have just been included in the first place,” Cotter said.
“And just like we need housing, health care, and affordable food, we need a
clean environment and trees that cool the earth and contribute to healthy air
and healthy water.”
Here’s everything else appearing on Question 5 this fall:
$12 million for facility and capital
improvements at state parks, beaches, and campgrounds, including new and
upgraded visitor centers, campsite enhancements, and infrastructure
improvements.
$7 million to restore watersheds around
Narragansett Bay, coming in the form of matching grants for private or public
projects that improve water quality and habitats.
$3 million for brownfield remediation, the DEM
program responsible for cleaning up former industrial and commercial polluted
sites.
$3 million for open space protection grants,
allowing the state to buy property or place conservation easements on green
space, farmland, and/or recreational properties.
$3 million for the state Agricultural Land
Preservation Commission, the state’s only program for preserving farmland as
farmland.
$1 million for outdoor recreation grants,
specifically for municipalities to create new or renovate already existing
recreational amenities.
$1 million for boat launches, docks, and other public
marine infrastructure.
