Rhode Island municipalities “Doing more with less” is a slogan, not a plan

No municipality can realistically make that happen every single year, for all time.

Tom Sgouros in SteveAhlquist.news

We often hear about the property tax cap in Rhode Island. I mentioned it in an article about revaluations last month. The cap limits property tax increases to 4% per year. But it’s not a limit on increases in your tax bill, as it used to be, but a limit on increases in the total amount collected in property taxes, which is a little weird.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a movement in the plains and mountain states out west to establish a Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR). The idea was that property taxes should go up no faster than inflation plus population growth. Colorado passed a version of TABOR through a state referendum in 1992. 

After a decade of experience -- watching the devastation these tax limits caused to public schools, libraries, police forces, and pretty much all other local services -- the bill was partially repealed in 2005, again by referendum. After Colorado, despite billionaire-funded campaigns in around a dozen states. No other state has passed TABOR.

Except in Rhode Island, where, in 2006, under the leadership of Senate President Teresa Paiva-Weed and Governor Donald Carcieri, the state enacted a tax cap that was actually more restrictive than TABOR. 

The new law lowered the limit on increases and changed it to apply to the amount collected, rather than the tax rate. The number is written into law, so a city or town can increase its tax revenue by no more than 4% in years with zero inflation and in years with 4% inflation. And if the town grows by 5%, too bad, the limit is still 4%. If new construction increases the property tax base, it’s too bad; the limit is still 4%, and any increase in tax revenue above that must go toward lowering the tax rate rather than improving services.

This, of course, is crazy and a recipe for long-term municipal fiscal disaster, as cities and towns accumulate responsibilities and grow their populations while their overall budgets are strictly limited. 

Things that used to matter to Republicans

Support commuter rail service in Westerly

 

Cut your heating bills this winter

Heating Assistance and 80-100% Off Weatherizing Your Home

By State Senator Victoria Gu

Rhode Island, like a number of other states, has a free energy audit program that works in two steps:

1) the free energy audit identifies places in your home that would benefit from air sealing, insulation, and more.

2) the program pays for 80-100% of the cost of doing the weatherization work.

Every Rhode Island homeowner (and tenant, with landlord permission) can request their audit and benefit from these energy savings. Schedule your audit at https://www.riseengineering.com/residential/get-started or through RIEnergy’s website

Know someone in need of emergency assistance to pay for heating oil/fuel? A couple places to contact are:

Westerly: Jonnycake Center of Westerly

Charlestown: The Charlestown Senior Center

South County towns: Tri-County CAP for Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) applications, Heat Pumps and Weatherization, and Emergency Boiler Repair

Pentagon report says Hegseth created a risk to national security with cellphone messages

Signalgate report unsurprisingly condemns classified real-time military information in unsecure communications

By Jennifer Shutt, Rhode Island Current

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated official policy when he used the publicly available Signal app to message about military plans from his personal cell phone, including imminent bombings in Yemen, according to a report released Thursday by the Pentagon’s own watchdog. 

The Defense Department Inspector General’s 84-page report concluded Hegseth sent information about the “strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes.” 

From The Onion

“Although the Secretary wrote in his July 25 statement to the DoD OIG that ‘there were no details that would endanger our troops or the mission,’ if this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes,” the report states. “Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”

Trump wants your personal data or else!

DOJ hits Rhode Island with lawsuit over voter list data

By Nancy Lavin and Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current

Trump want personal data from every source

Add Rhode Island to the list of states facing legal action from the Trump administration for refusing to turn over personal voter information.

The U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit, filed in federal court in Rhode Island Tuesday morning, comes amid a nationwide federal probe into state voter rolls under the pretense of preventing election fraud, including noncitizen voting — which is extremely rare. 

Since May, the Justice Department has reached out to at least 40 states seeking voter lists, including personal information typically protected under state and federal laws, like Social Security and driver’s license numbers.

Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore refused to comply, responding to the DOJ probe in September by offering to provide a free copy of the statewide voter list already publicly available — typically provided upon request with a $25 fee. But Amore made clear he would not hand over confidential personal information without legal action.

More than two-and-a-half months later, the DOJ answered. The 10-page complaint echoes the same arguments made in its lawsuits against eight other states, including Maine and New Hampshire. 

In all of the cases, federal attorneys say the government is entitled to personal voter data under the 1960 Civil Rights Act, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993.

The lawsuit, which names Amore as a defendant, seeks a federal judge’s intervention to force Amore to turn over the voter registration information within five days, while declaring his refusal a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

Amore, a former high school history teacher, maintained the DOJ’s request was unconstitutional in a statement Tuesday. 

Pope Leo tells Trump: no war against Venezuela, urges compassion toward immigrants

Pope Leo Presses Trump to End Military Escalation Against Venezuela

Stephen Prager for Common Dreams

But I'm sure he's paying close attention to what
the Pope is saying

Amid escalating threats from the White House in recent days, Pope Leo XIV pleaded for President Donald Trump to pursue diplomacy with Venezuela rather than another regime change war.

“It is better to search for ways of dialogue, or perhaps pressure, including economic pressure,” said the first American pope as he returned to Rome from Lebanon.

Since September, the Trump administration has launched airstrikes against at least 22 boats mostly in the Southern Caribbean that have extrajudicially killed at least 83 people. While the administration has claimed these people are “narcoterrorists” from Venezuela, it has provided no evidence to support this.

Trump said he had ordered the closing of Venezuela’s airspace on Saturday, which has left many observers holding their breath in expectation of military action against the South American nation.

As Reuters reported Monday, Trump also offered safe passage to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last month if he left the country, suggesting that regime change is the administration’s ultimate goal.

Remember when

Trump gets phony peace prize.

What? Not Job Lot?

New England kicks off $450M plan to supercharge heat pump adoption

Grabbing energy from the air

Sarah Shemkus, Canary Media

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

New England winters can get wicked cold. This week, five of the region’s states launched a $450 million effort to warm more homes in the often-frigid region with energy-efficient, low-emission heat pumps instead of by burning fossil fuels.

“It’s a big deal,” said Katie Dykes, commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. ​“It’s unprecedented to see five states aligning together on a transformational approach to deploying more affordable clean-heat options.”

The New England Heat Pump Accelerator is a collaboration between Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The initiative is funded by the federal Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, which was created by President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The accelerator’s launch marks a rare milestone for a Biden-era climate initiative amid the Trump administration’s relentless attempts to scrap federal clean energy and environmental programs.

The goal: Get more heat pumps into more homes through a combination of financial incentives, educational outreach, and workforce development.

New England is a rich target for such an effort because of its current dependence on fossil-fuel heating. Natural gas and propane are in wide use, and heating oil is still widespread throughout the region; more than half of Maine’s homes are heated by oil, and the other coalition states all use oil at rates much higher than the national average. The prevalence of oil in particular means there’s plenty of opportunity to grow heat-pump adoption, cut emissions, and lower residents’ energy bills.

At the same time, heat pumps have faced barriers in the region, including the upfront cost of equipment, New England’s high price of electricity, and misconceptions about heat pumps’ ability to work in cold weather.

EDITOR'S NOTE: We've installed two heat pumps as adjuncts to mini-split units and can attest to their efficiency and cost-effectiveness. We installed the second one this year in anticipation of Trump cancelling the energy tax credit.  Glad we did.  Still, even without the credit, they pay for themselves.   - Will Collette

Bobby Jr.'s inexplicable war on vaccines ramps up

FDA official proposes ‘impossible’ standards for vaccine testing that could curtail access to immunizations

Liz Szabo, MA

Before vaccines, 50% of children did not reach adulthood.
With vaccines, that dropped to 4%

The top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to impose vague but sweeping new standards on vaccine testing that, health experts say, would impede the development of new immunizations and likely curtail access to life-saving shots, according to a memo sent to staff on October 28.

Vinay Prasad, MD, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), proposed the "path forward" in an internal memo in which he claimed—but provided no evidence—that COVID-19 vaccines caused the death of 10 children. 

Many infectious disease experts say Prasad should share the evidence on which he based his argument. Linking a vaccine to an adverse event requires a high level of evidence, including autopsy results and medical records that rule out other causes of death and show whether the affected person was infected with the coronavirus itself, said Paul Offit, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine.

Prasad is "making a fairly fantastic statement," Offit said. "He should provide extraordinary evidence that that's clear, and he didn't, which is incredibly irresponsible and unprofessional to do."

In the memo, Prasad wrote that the FDA's current vaccine approval process falls short.

In the future, the FDA will "demand pre-market randomized trials assessing clinical endpoints for most new products," including vaccines, Prasad wrote. He noted that COVID-19 vaccines have not been tested in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in pregnant women. Such trials are the most rigorous type of study, but they can cost millions of dollars and take years to produce results.

"We will not be granting marketing authorization to vaccines in pregnant women" without such evidence, Prasad wrote. The memo's contents were first reported by a PBS News correspondent in a series of posts on X, the social media platform.

Sen. Jack Reed leads push to publicly release video of US war crimes

“The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage,” said Sen. Jack Reed.

Brett Wilkins

Calls mounted Thursday for the Trump administration to release the full video of a September US airstrike on a boat allegedly transporting drugs in the Caribbean Sea following a briefing between Pentagon officials and select lawmakers that left some Democrats with more questions than answers.

“I am deeply disturbed by what I saw this morning,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after the briefing. “The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2 strike, as the president has agreed to do.”

Reed’s remarks came after Adm. Frank Bradley and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine briefed some members of the Senate and House Armed Services and Intelligence committees on the so-called “double-tap” strike, in which nine people were killed in the initial bombing and two survivors clinging to the burning wreckage of the vessel were slain in second attack.

Lawmakers who attended the briefing said that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth allegedly did not give an order to “kill everyone” aboard the boat. However, legal experts and congressional critics contend that the strikes are inherently illegal under international law.

Trump Is Lying About Grocery Prices. What Else?

Why should you trust someone who says things you know from your own experience are false?

Mitchell Zimmerman

Remember the old saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

President Trump has fooled too many people too many times – many more than twice. Perhaps many people are ready to believe anything Trump says because he attacks people who they enjoy seeing targeted. But what if this time it is people like us who are actually the targets of Trump’s attacks?

What else can you make of it when Donald Trump tells flagrant falsehoods about something important to our families’ well-being: the fact that rising prices are eating up our income? What should you make of it when Donald Trump denies something you know to be true from your own experience?

In 2024 Trump promised voters that when he was elected, “inflation will vanish completely.” He even vowed, further, that “prices will come down, and they’ll come down fast, with everything.” “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down.”

It has been nearly a year. Prices have not gone down. Everyone knows this. But Donald Trump refuses to admit it.

Trump: “We have no inflation. We have no inflation.”

On October 31st, Trump was interviewed for the CBS News’ program Sixty Minutes. When reporter Norah O’Donnell pointed out that “grocery prices are up,” Trump blew up.

“No, you’re wrong,” he insisted. “Right now they’re going down. . . . Inflation, I’ve already taken care of. … We have no inflation. We have no inflation.”

Trump asserted prices have already dropped. “Every price is down,” he said in early November. “Everything is way down.” Gasoline prices have “plummeted” and “we’re at almost $2 for gasoline.”

Really? At a gas pump near you? Here in the real world, on Thanksgiving weekend, the national average gas price was three dollars a gallon.

“Everything” is certainly not “way down.” Prices are obviously going up again.

You are not alone if you see a disconnect between Trump’s pontificating and our reality.

On November 19^th Fox News released a poll on the cost of living. Eight-five percent of Americans say they are paying more for groceries than last year. Four out of five say their cost of utilities has gone up. Two-thirds say their health care expenses and their housing expenses have increased. “Everything is” not “way down.”

Nope. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the jump in food and other prices for the first nine months of Trump’s presidency. (Beef up 13%. Oranges up 15%. Electricity 7%. Natural gas 6%. Gasoline 6%.)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture certainly did not tell Trump that produce prices are “way down.” The USDA said food prices would “rise faster than the historical average rate of growth” in 2025 – and projected food prices would continue to rise nearly as fast in 2026.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for September 2025 (the latest month for which data is now available) shows prices 3% higher than one year ago.

No one misinformed President Trump. He invented his own lies.

Just making things up that sound good is second nature to Donald Trump. 

Remember he was going to make Mexico pay for the wall? Cap credit card interest rates at 10%? Make in-vitro fertilization treatment free? End the Ukraine war on Day One? (Trump now claims that was “said in jest.” Ending a war is a joke?) Provide a tax credit for family caregivers? (Forgotten on Day One, and certainly when Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave the richest one percent of Americans a $75,000 tax break!)

But it takes a special kind of chutzpah to tell people who see their grocery prices going up that their grocery prices are going down. Trump, like one of the Marx Brothers in a 1933 movie, is saying, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

If you believe your own eyes about the prices you see in the supermarket and on your utility bill, Trump thinks you’re a sucker – for being taken in by “a con job by the Democrats.”

It’s time to ask ourselves: Who’s running the con job? And what else has Donald Trump been saying that just ain’t so?

Here’s one easy example: Who is paying the tariffs on the things you buy that come from overseas?

Donald Trump told voters over and over during the 2024 campaign that they would not be paying for tariffs. Tariffs are “a tax on another country,” Trump insisted. “It’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”

That was a lie. Ask any business person. Tariffs are a sales tax that U.S. importers are paying, and since they are passing the expense on in higher prices, you are bearing the expense. They are part of the reason prices are going up.

Trump recently admitted the lie. In response to the soaring prices of tariff-burdened foods like coffee, tea, and bananas (coffee is up 20%), Trump recently cut those tariffs, saying that would bring down coffee prices “in a very short period of time.” The only way a tariff cut can bring down prices is when tariffs were the reason prices went up in the first place.

Sometimes Trump’s lies are so obvious it’s hard to believe even MAGA supporters take them seriously. Consider the lie about renaming the Gulf of Mexico.

“I called the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America,” Trump explained, “because to me, it was always the Gulf of America. We have 92 percent of the frontage. Why isn’t it the Gulf of America?”

Let’s look at the map:

The black line shows U.S. coastal frontage from Texas to Florida. The red line shows the rest of the Gulf’s coastal frontage, along Mexico and part of Cuba. Does it look to you like the black line is 92% of all the shoreline? No one could claim that with a straight face. Except Donald Trump. He thinks Americans are too dumb to notice his lies.

Here is a more consequential lie for the 83 million people – about one in five Americans – who rely on Medicaid for comprehensive coverage of health and long-term care. What Trump called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” made savage cuts in the Medicaid program, based on One Big Ugly Lie.

$1 trillion dollars taken from Medicaid. $1 trillion given to the one percent.

Trump said he was going to leave Medicaid alone. “We’re not doing any cutting of anything meaningful,” he said. “We’re not changing Medicaid.” Immediately after his Big Beautiful Bill was passed, Trump repeated the claim that “we’re not going to touch” Medicaid.

False. Trump’s bill will, over a ten year period, hack $1 trillion off Medicaid funding, by making it more difficult for individuals to qualify or remain qualified for Medicaid, reducing benefit and reimbursement rates, and other changes. Over 14 million people will lose health coverage.

The American Medical Association condemned the bill:

“Care will be less accessible, and patients may simply forego seeing their physician because the lifelines of Medicaid and CHIP [the Child Health Insurance Program] are severed. … This bill will make patients sicker. … Acute, treatable illnesses will turn into life-threatening or costly chronic conditions.”

About one trillion dollars taken from Medicaid is just about the right amount to pay for the One Big Beautiful Bill’s $1 trillion tax gift to the top one percent of Americans. These are people who make more than $1,149,000 each year. They will get a much-needed $75,400 tax break next year.

Finally, let’s look at Trump’s lies about undocumented immigrants. He wants to deport over 10 million people, an action that Trump’s own Labor Department has said is already making food shortages and increased food prices likely, and is impacting home construction, meat packing and the availability of home health aides.

Trump seeks to justify the disruption and downright cruelty by saying he’s only deporting “the worst of the worst.” But there aren’t millions of criminals among the immigrants who came to America without proper authorization. They came seeking a better life or desperate to escape brutal gang violence in their homelands, and the overwhelming majority are law-abiding and hard working.

The ice cream man isn’t the “worst of the worst”

Even Fox news reports that the “worst of the worst” claim is false: “The majority of people currently detained by ICE have no criminal convictions. Of those who do, relatively few have been convicted of high-level crimes.”

A U.S. government-funded study confirmed the point, finding that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.”

Common sense tells us Trum
p is lying. ICE is not seizing people for deportation by the millions by targeting particular individuals found guilty of serious crimes. By the U.S. government’s own explanation in court, ICE “contact teams” try to find undocumented immigrants by looking for individuals who have a Spanish accent or look Hispanic and who are found in locations such as bus stops, car washes, day laborer pickup sites, and agricultural sites.

ICE’s targets are not the worst of the worst. In Culver City they seized a beloved ice cream man. Law-abiding young people, who were brought here as small children, are being targeted for deportation from the only country they know, the U.S.A. when they are about to graduate from high school. Day laborers at Home Depot. Shoppers in a Walmart parking lot. Patients in a hospital.

Trump’s lies about immigrants are shameful.

It would take an encyclopedia to list and correct all the lies Donald Trump has told. When you encounter Trump’s pronouncements on matters such as whether federal troops are needed in our cities – whether crime is out of control – whether all third-world immigrants are a threat – whether voter fraud is a real problem – whether civil rights laws discriminate against white people – whether the 2020 election was stolen from Trump – or whether anything Donald Trump does not like to hear must be fake news, ask yourself: Are groceries cheaper?

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. He's also a longtime contributor to Progressive Charlestown. His writing can also be found on his Substack, Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman.

Subscriptions to Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman are free at this time. If you find my writing of value, please like, subscribe and recommend Reasoning Together to your friends. Thank you.

You may also be interested in my road-trip novel / social thriller Mississippi Reckoning. Read an excerpt. Read the Progressive Charlestown review HERE.

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