Taxpayers are out because Johnston gave them a 20 year “tax treaty” (aka subsidy) and we will spend millions for a new interchange on I-295 at Greenville Avenue, and to extend sewer lines there. Providence Gas Company executives started Grow Smart RI because they were concerned with the high costs of providing infrastructure to such developments. Now that company is part of National Grid and they closed their building in downtown Providence, you cannot even pay a utility bill there any more. It seems corporate America is not interested in smart growth. Putting development where we have infrastructure is the core of land use planning, but everyone, including Statewide Planning, the Governor, RIDOT, and our congressional delegation seems ready to ignore this and roll over for Citizens. They don’t even seem to care that I-295 may become more dangerous with more traffic and more exit/entrance merges.
The site being developed, about 123 acres, is mostly forest and brush, and Greenville Avenue, now a pleasant residential area, will inevitably suffer from traffic and ugly sprawl development from the new interchange. Citizens employees may well live even further out, perhaps within the Scituate watershed, risking eroding our drinking water quality. Employees will do a lot of driving, there is no serious chance for transit there. Gasoline consumption in the US just set a record high and Citizens Bank seems determined to make us use even more. Perhaps the “fossil free” folks opposing some specific fossil fuel supply projects, (e.g. the Burrillville power plant, Keystone pipeline) should pay more attention to actually reducing the demand for fossil fuels.
Not everyone in Johnston is so pleased with this. I note the Johnston Sunrise had an “open letter” from the Johnston Homeowners and Neighbors Association decrying what Raimondo and Mayor Joseph Polisena have done to facilitate this project which can turn their neighborhood into another ugly commercial strip choked with traffic and gobbling up more green space. But nobody helped or even paid attention, the town council and the planning and zoning boards did what Citizens Bank wanted, including amending the apparently worthless comprehensive plan.
I note that potential subsidies for reusing downtown Providence’s Superman Building have drawn criticism from both liberal and conservative groups but the Citizens project has not. As a city kid originally from New York, I think this reflects a Rhode Island suburban mind-set, cities are for the poor and minorities, we move out when we can, no reason to put the jobs there. The East Side, anchored by Brown and RISD, is the main exception. Liberals and conservatives also mostly see the bus system as for the poor and minorities. Liberals are willing to subsidize it to keep it going, but for the most part will not use the buses themselves. Not even if service is pretty good – as it is in many places.
Finally, I’ll contrast this with what I just read about Denver, Colorado which has had unusual success in recovering from the 2008 recession. One key element noted in the article was regional cooperation in which various communities there support each other in generating development and building transit, rather than undermine each other as Johnston has done, So our cities struggle, maybe face bankruptcy, sprawl spreads further, and our life style keeps us pumping out the greenhouse gases.
Here are two very different scenarios.
If Citizens was sold to another bank, that would be bad news for Rhode Island. The 2,000 or so employees who work in local branches would likely retain their jobs, unless the new owner downsized. But the 3,000 or so jobs in bank operations would be vulnerable, depending on whether the new owner was already performing such operations in the United States.
There’s also a way that RBS could liquidate Citizens AND help (rather than hurt) the Rhode Island economy. It could spin off Citizens and sell it in a public stock offering rather than to another bank.
I’m not sure if a stock offering would rake in more or less money for RBS – nor do I really care. But I’m pretty sure that if Citizens Bank didn’t have a parent company it would need more operations in Rhode Island, not less, and retaining and creating jobs here is something I care about!
RBS is owned almost entirely by the British government, which wants the bank to sell off its Ocean State subsidiary.
]]>In an article titled “Why is the RBS fine so small?” Douglas Blakey writes:
There is however one thing that the UK government could do and do quickly. It could stop pussyfooting about over RBS’ US-based subsidiary, Citizens Bank.
Analysts forecast that if Citizens was on the block, it might fetch around £7.5bn. The party line from RBS has, to date, taken the line that Citizens is a core asset and not for sale. Poppycock.
RBS will, eventually, have to bow to the inevitable and cash in its Citizens chips. It is now time for the government, via UK Financial Investments Limited, the organisation set up immediately after the October 2008 bailouts of Lloyds and RBS, to bear its teeth.
Citizens Bank has told Rhode Island employees that it won’t be sold. But political AND economic pressure could cause RBS to cash in on its Rhode Island-based property.
Ted Nesi has more on the potential sale of Citizens.
Citizens Bank, started in Providence in 1828, is the state’s seventh largest employer with almost 5,000 employees, according to the EDC in 2011. Many of those employees work in call centers and would likely lose their jobs if Citizens was sold to another bank.
]]>Staff cuts at the state unemployment office may not matter to most of us, but to many of Rhode Island’s most unlucky residents (the ones who were laid off during the down economy) efficient unemployment insurance payments can make the difference between being foreclosed or not. Here are the stories Jonathan Jacobs has filed for RI Future on the situation.
Also, just in case you missed it, Aaron Regunberg has also been covering the unemployment crisis in Rhode Island. Every week he profiles a local person who is out of work (here’s a list of all his stories on the crisis). The idea is to show that unemployment is more than just a a quarterly percentage sent out by the state to compare our woes with Michigan and Nevada. There are real Rhode Islanders whose lives are being severely scarred by this crisis.
And speaking of unemployment, the Projo reports that WPA plaques are disappearing from sites where the government put people to work building up the commons and our shared infrastructure that we still use to get to the office and other places today … maybe trickle-down Republicans are taking them hoping we won’t remember what got the country out of the last big economic downturn?
Here’s hoping employees of Citizens Bank don’t have to join them on the unemployment line as a result of RBS’ issues. Either way, it’s high time we start talking about relocalizing banks.
All this talk about the economy has taken the focus away from climate change – something humanity can little afford to do, GoLocal’s Rob Horowitz reminds us this morning.
Awesome sentence about the Navy testing unmanned military drones in Narragansett Bay: “The bay known as a playground for the rich is the testing ground for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, where the Navy is working toward its goal of achieving a squadron of self-driven, undersea vehicles.”
Speaking of completely unnecessary military endeavors … today in 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, “giving President Lyndon B. Johnson nearly unlimited powers to oppose “communist aggression” in Southeast Asia.”
I love the irony in Fox News seeming to care more that US Olympic uniforms look American than they do that they actually be American.
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