government – RI Future

April 1, 2015

Homeless shelter standards legislation would reduce discrimination

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Advocates for the homeless say a Providence shelter discriminates against clients based on their sexual orientation. This, and other complaints, inspired the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project to work with legislators on standards for homeless shelters in Rhode Island.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Betty Crowley of Central Falls, will be heard by a Senate subcommittee today after the full Senate commences. A House version is sponsored by a wide range of Democrats, from Rep. Aaron Regunberg, a rookie and one of the more progressive legislators, to Doc Corvese, a veteran Democrat but also one of the most conservative members of the General Assembly.

The idea for the legislation was conceived in large part by the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project (RIHAP), headed by Barbara Kalil, Bill Chamberlain, and John Freitas.

“What we’re trying to accomplish is to set standards for anyone who is trying to shelter the homeless,” Freitas said. “As an advocacy group, we have to deal time and time again with people who have been denied shelter for arbitrary reasons.”

Among those reasons, they said, were girls wearing too much makeup, an unwed pregnant woman and sexual orientation.

The bill was inspired, in part, by the conditions at the Safe Haven shelter in Pawtucket, which was run by the Urban League and forced to close during the summer of 2014.

But RIHAP has also received many complaints about the Providence Rescue Mission at 627 Cranston Street. Freitas said he has seen a number of these violations themselves – including forcing residents to attend a church service which talks about the evils of homosexuality.

“I was talking to a gay resident while I was staying there, and the staff questioned my manhood,” he said. “When we were in line to shower, they separated us. I don’t deny anybody the right to their beliefs, but I don’t think shelters should be dependent on me falling in line with those beliefs. Shelters should be just that, a sanctuary.”

RIHAP also received reports that gay individuals have been discouraged from going there. And when they are do, said RIHAP members, they are purposefully made to feel uncomfortable, and are identified as gay to both the staff and residents.

They have been told the staff believes it is their religious right to turn people away because it is not publicly funded.

“They don’t answer to anybody, so they can get away with it,” Chamberlain said.

Jim Ryczek, executive director for the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless, said that although they have received the same complaints, the Rescue Mission has not broken the law.

“Since they are not a member agency, they are free to operate their program as they see fit, as long as it doesn’t violate state law,” he said.

Sometimes, RIHAP members said, the discrimination is simply personal. “In some cases, it’s just a matter of a staff member doesn’t like you, so you’re gone. And there’s no accountability,” Freitas said.

Chamberlain said when such abuses are brought to the state, the response was that they did not want to withhold funding from the agencies. There were many times, though, when a grievance was brought forward and it did not receive a proper procedure.

“If you were to make out a grievance against a shelter you were staying in, it could potentially go into the circular file,” Kalil said. “Nobody is really watching anybody to make sure it’s getting heard. Not only does it not get heard, but they’re going to make it all nice, and nobody gives any timeline to when things will get fixed.”

Kalil added that they have also heard incidences of a shelter telling a homeless person they are barred, when in fact they are not. “We need to make sure their rights are respected,” she said.

The bill says “all homeless persons have the right to homeless shelter services regardless of political or religious beliefs, immigration status, former geographic location of residence, ethno-cultural background, (dis)ability, gender identity, criminal background, and/or sexual orientation.”

The bill also outlines that homeless individuals should not be expected to pay a fee to stay in a shelter and nutritious food should be provided and that shelters should provide residents an atmosphere of dignity, and that staff should accept gender identity as defined by the individual, among others.

These guidelines would be enforced by a committee formed by the Housing Resources Commission (HRC), which would include one homeless or formerly homeless person, as well as one resident or former resident of a domestic violence shelter. The committee would be responsible for several tasks, all of which would address the concerns outlined in the bill, such as resident rights and responsibilities, and organizational standards for the shelter itself. The HRC would be required to enforce and implement any of the approved regulations drafted by the committee.

The bill would also impose baseline standards for homeless shelters in Rhode Island. An External Review Committee would conduct four onsite inspections of all shelters in Rhode Island per year. Only one of these inspections would be scheduled two weeks before their arrival, the other three would remain unannounced. Penalties for violating any of these standards would be monetary; between 2 percent and 10 percent of their average monthly expenses, based on the severity of the infraction, and the agency’s history.

Concerns about the legislation include aversion to new regulations, as well as aversions to potential new costs, Ryczek said.

“The members are rightly bringing up that if there are increased costs, where is that coming from? We will advocate with state and federal governments and say that if we need to do this, you need to provide,” he said.

H5242 will be heard in the Senate Committee on Housing and Municipal Government meeting on Wednesday, April 1, at 4:30 pm. Updates to follow.

March 12, 2015

A cleaner Rhode Island through carbon pricing

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Graphic courtesy of the Rhode Island Carbon Pricing Coalition

The Carbon Pricing and Clean Energy Investment Act bill before the General Assembly has two goals. The first is to create a tax on fossil fuels – coal, oil, natural gas, petroleum – during their first point of entry within the state, which would be $15 per ton of carbon dioxide that would be released by the burning fuel.

The second goal is to use the money collected from the tax to set up the Clean Energy Fund. Money from the fund would be used to coordinate and invest in development research and commercialization of different green practices, including energy storage, wind and solar energy, and “other projects that are deemed to be potentially revolutionary breakthroughs in clean energy technology,” as stated by the bill.

Other uses for the Clean Energy Fund would be paying for the administrative costs associated with collecting the tax, funding programs to assist in the installation of clean energy technology, contributing to a green bank in the state, or investing in public transportation. The fund will also provide dividends to households and businesses for the first two months of 2016, in order to avoid financial harm to them because of the carbon price.

Goldstein-Rose stated that the bill presents a unique opportunity for Rhode Island, because it will make the state one of the frontrunners in addressing climate change.

“Rhode Island can be the first state to pass a carbon pricing bill, catalyzing momentum for other states and national legislation to follow – essentially doing what we did for gay marriage, for clean energy,” he said. “We can also make our state a center for clean energy development and sustainable towns, which we’re already starting to do by being the first state to build an offshore wind farm, and which we can go farther with by passing a carbon pricing bill.”

The bill is being sponsored by Rep. Dan McKiernan and Sen. Walter Felag,. Felag said the bill will be heard in Senate Finance at the end of April.

The information session to be held on Saturday is hosted by the Rhode Island Carbon Pricing and Green Jobs Coalition, which is a group dedicated to making Rhode Island a national leader in reducing carbon pollution, as well as strengthening the local economy. It will take place at 1 pm in room 106 of the Urban Environmental Laboratory at 135 Angell Street in Providence.

March 29, 2012March 29, 2012

Dear RI: Where’s the Work?

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For those who have never had a day of unemployment that they did not choose, there are no words which can describe the state. For those who, like me, have, you know the feelings. You know the self-loathing, the worthlessness, the despondence, the anger. But most of all, the fear. There is a special terror reserved for the jobless, a dark vicious terror that constantly lurks in the back of one’s mind. It is the terror that the bills will catch up with you. The terror that this may not be temporary, that you may never work again. That it will catch you, and in the end, kill you. And you carry that with you for months.

The job hunt is nearly as disheartening. Each letter sent out is a gamble, each interview a risk. Plenty will offer you tips, plenty will suggest you talk to so-and-so, plenty will say “perhaps if you tried here.” And you force yourself to nod, because you think to yourself, “I have done all of that already,” but you do not wish to get into a fight. But no one will treat you with respect; be it the callous souls who tell you, even in the midst of the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, to “get a job,” or the people whom you are applying for a job with. You will be left on the line for weeks, sometimes without ever getting a response telling you someone else has been hired. Alternatively, they will send you some of the cruelest words in the English language, “thank you for your interest…”

I have sympathy for employers; it is not easy to pull the trigger and tell the job-seeker they will not be hired. But I have no sympathy for the politician who sees the suffering of their policies and yet continues with their madness. The politician says that they have imposed their policies so cities and towns “will get their fiscal house in order.” But they have not imposed fiscal order; they have imposed pain and suffering. Tell the victims of these policies that the political leadership has brought fiscal order. Tell the family who has abandoned their home and is living in their car because property taxes went too high, or the landlord forced to raise rents on tenants they know cannot afford it. Tell the vast majority of the people of this state who pay taxes at a rate nearly twice that of those who can most-afford it that we are bringing fiscal order. Our political leadership has a perverse definition of “order”.

Where’s the work that was promised? I was fortunate enough that I could work for free as a volunteer while I searched for a job. Most are not that lucky. They languish, in trouble, waiting for work that will end their weariness and replace it with accomplishment. Through this hell that has been imposed, they march onwards, driven by the idea of hope, our state motto. The motto so sacred to Rhode Islanders that we placed it on our flag so that it might symbolize us. The Statehouse should be the house that hope built. Instead, it is hope’s marble mausoleum.

The party in power names itself “democratic”. Perhaps they need a lesson in democracy. The word means the people rule. The people. Not the Speaker of the House nor the President of the Senate. If the representatives of the people delivers a bill, “democracy” means the leadership must consider it and bring it to vote by those same representatives, not hold it for further study, their epithet for saying they have killed it. This means that if the people cry out for fairness in our taxes, you cannot dismiss this cry as not having a chance. The people get to decide that, too.

But our “leadership” tells us that we must wait, that the tax policies they enacted six years ago during good times have not yet had their full effect. And yet, our unemployment rate has risen back to 11%, while the rest of the nation sees declines. Our “leadership” tells us we must not tax job creators, while the state loses the very jobs we are asking the creators to create. Our “leadership” tells us business favors tax consistency, but only if that consistency is going down. Our “leadership” tells us they want Rhode Island to be a place where anyone can live, but their policies force cities and towns to raise property taxes so high no one can live here.

I say this as a Rhode Islander. I say this as someone who only recently found a job in this state after nearly a year of trying, and I was not confining myself to only the state. I looked beyond our borders reluctantly, because deep in my heart, I know there is truly no other state for me. I am not ashamed or abashed to say I love Rhode Island, in all its oddities. I do not believe any true Rhode Islander can contemplate fleeing this state without any regret or sadness. And yet, that contemplation has been very real to me. And it is real to the thousands of Rhode Islanders who remain without work, many who have been searching longer than I have, many of whom are more deserving then I am.

There are those who will despise me for what I’ve written here. They will attack me, perhaps call me a demagogue. They will find fault with whatever I say, and seek to undermine my reputation. I do not care about my reputation though, I care about Rhode Island. The naysayers will point to our 11% unemployment rate and deride the citizens of this state as stupid for not abandoning it. They will insult the place of my birth, and me, not knowing or comprehending that the reason the unemployed stay is because as much as circumstances prevent them, they also have hope. They believe in this state. The naysayers look at an idea and say “we cannot do this,” and they will find such and such a reason to stop it. But those with hope will look at an idea and say, “how can we make this work” and search for ways until they have exhausted all possibilities.

We want to make our state work. We want to rebuild this state with our own sweat. We are not asking the politicians in the government to break a sweat, we will do that. We will work the hours, we will do the labor. We ask merely that the politicians on Smith Hill have the decency to relieve the pressures that prevent us from doing so, that they reverse their mistaken policies and free the people of this state to work. That they keep those already working employed. That they enforce policies that actually will bring the idle gainful work. That they take no more from those who have already sacrificed too much.

There is a dividing line between people. On one side are those who do not love this state, who cannot imagine a way out of this crisis, who call for it to be abandoned or else denigrate its people and its government. On the other are those who wish to give their lives for this state, who wish to improve it, who see its possibilities even in the midsts of its failures. I ask the leaders of this state to be the leaders that we know they can be, and lead this state to greatness. Where’s the work? It is before us.

February 19, 2012February 19, 2012

Inventing the Internet

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I attended a fascinating conference last week in DC, the 20th anniversary celebration of the National Information Technology Research and Development program (NITRD), a 15-agency cooperative mission launched in 1992 to coordinate federal R&D around information technology. Funded as a consequence of the 1991 High-Performance Computing Act (a/k/a the “Gore Bill”), this was the funding that created the backbones of the internet, and persuaded the admins of ARPAnet and NSFnet and the other smaller networks to join in creating the single internet that we know today.

There were a bunch of interesting points passed along by the various speakers, too many to cover, but here are some highlights:

From Tom Lange, the director of Modeling and Simulation R&D at Proctor and Gamble, we learned about the challenges of creating computer models of the flow and absorption of non-newtonian fluids on a porous substrate, and why that’s important to the design of Pampers. P&G apparently funds research at Los Alamos and Argonne national labs, among others.
From Sebastian Thrun, a scientist at Stanford and Google, we saw videos of automated cars negotiating Lombard Street in San Francisco and one-and-a-half-lane mountain roads with oncoming trucks. He says that in 250,000 miles logged on California roads, they have had only one accident, when the car was rear-ended as it stopped at a red light.
From Kevin Knight, a researcher at USC, we heard about the limits of machine translation and how statistical language analysis can make increasingly good translations of text from one language to another even if it still can’t tell you what the text was about.

These were all fun, but there were two big points made that have to be passed along, too. One is the phenomenal return we’ve seen on government investment in this science (and many others, but the conference wasn’t about them). Samuel Morse’s development of the telegraph was supported by government funding, and so was virtually every aspect of the internet, computers, mobile devices, and communication technologies that have changed all of our lives over the past 20 years.

We take the internet for granted, but there is no sensible reason to do so. The people who made the decisions to make it possible were not corporate buccaneers or rich investors. The necessary investments to make it possible were too risky and too large for the private sector to take on. So the government did. They managed to find private partners to manage important parts of the result, but to imagine it would have happened without government is to live in a fantasy world. Fortunately, your government hadn’t yet been so defanged in 1991 that it couldn’t envision something ambitious (and equally fortunately, George Bush Sr. was persuaded to support it). One speaker said, after accounting for the economic impact of NITRD, “not bad for a bunch of faceless government bureaucrats,” and everyone laughed.

There’s a train station opening up near my house soon. Driving by it recently, I thought about how much I am looking forward to its opening and how seldom I get a chance to express some pride in the workings of our government. The people who imagine that government can do no good have had the upper hand in our politics for the past 30 years. Even when Democrats hold office, discussions of what government can do is dominated by the limitations in resources imposed by the starvation resulting from decades of tax cuts to rich people. Our ambition to use government to improve our lives has been squeezed out of public discussion. But here it is in 2012, you are reading this text electronically. While you thank one of those faceless government bureaucrats for that improvement in your life, you might also wonder what equally astonishing innovations have been squeezed out of your future by the fashionable austerity that rules our days in 2012.

What’s the other important point to make? Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn were at the conference, too. Together, they invented TCP/IP, the communication protocol that makes all this internetworking possible, and not a few other communication innovations along the way. Cerf introduced Al Gore, who gave the keynote address after lunch, and pointed out three or four different ways the internet might not have happened at all without intervention, support, and initiative from the geeky Congressman and then Senator from Tennessee. Aside from the Gore Bill itself, Cerf recounted a hearing in 1986 about the national supercomputing centers, then a half-dozen or so universities and research institutions around the country with supercomputing facilities. At the hearing Senator Gore asked, “Would it be a good idea to link the supercomputing facilities with a fiber-optic network?” According to Cerf, the question took everyone by surprise, but it resulted in a three-day meeting in California six months later where they decided the answer was “yes.” So that’s the other point: the next time you hear an Al Gore joke about the internet, know that you’re listening to someone who was taken in by press malfeasance in 2000.

How did that joke really happen? It sounds ridiculous, but this is how: Gore made a completely accurate claim in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN and a few days later, Michelle Mittelstadt of the Associated Press restated it for him, exaggerating his meaning. The restatement was restated again by Lou Dobbs on CNN, with some flourishes stolen from a press release by Jim Nicholson, the Republican National Committee chair. That was repeated and further embroidered by the press many zillion times, sometimes mindlessly and sometimes maliciously, and the result was that Al Gore lost that election — the imagination reels — and I have a joke that can make you click on this post. Isn’t history fascinating?