How hard is it to spend $230 million?

Since the R.I. State Police received $45 million in a multistate settlement with Internet search giant Google in the spring of 2012, the department has gotten no shortage of suggestions on how it should spend the money, according to Lt. Col. Karen Pinch.
“We had lots of people writing to us asking us to share the money,” Pinch said. “But not as many now as we did when it was first announced. People have realized it has to be spent on something with a law enforcement nexus.”
Nearly three years after Rhode Island received $230 million of a $500 million Google forfeiture connected to Canadian pharmaceutical advertising, the five Ocean State organizations and communities that received money have spent roughly $89 million of it.
Perhaps fittingly for a state with well-known public pension problems, by far the largest portion of spending to date shored up the underfunded police pension systems in the two communities that received money: East Providence and North Providence.
Take away the police-pension spending – $49.2 million in East Providence and $20.6 million in North Providence – and roughly $19 million of the Google money has been spent. An exact total is not available because East Providence officials have not returned calls seeking comment.
The R.I. Office of the Attorney General, state police and the National Guard, the other three recipients, have spent roughly $16 million between them.
While the slow pace of spending may seem counterintuitive considering Rhode Island’s chronic budget shortfalls, spending $230 million on purely police-related capital without putting it to existing salaries and routine operations, or without wasting it, is more difficult than it seems.
And that’s probably how the U.S. Justice Department, which must approve all Google-settlement expenditures, envisioned it.
“You could get foolish with this money,” said North Providence Mayor Charles Lombardi, whose plans for the town’s Google settlement have been at least temporarily thwarted by a power dispute with the Town Council. “[The U.S. Department of Justice] said [to] just spend the money, but how many new police cars can you buy with $60 million?”
While Rhode Island’s total Google settlement spending is relatively low, there are plenty of proposals in the pipeline that, if they go forward, would quickly use a large chunk of it. The state police, who have spent roughly $9.5 million of the $45 million awarded from the Google forfeiture, according to Pinch, have a number of significant projects in the planning stages.
They include a planned replacement for the Hope Valley Barracks off Route 3 in Richmond, which the state is trying to finalize a location for. An early cost estimate for the project is $8 million, Pinch said, and potential sites include the former state welcome center on Interstate 95.
Another building project in the planning stages is a combined state and municipal police academy on the site of the former Ladd School in Exeter.
Pinch said the state is seeking architectural services for the project and doesn’t have a cost estimate yet.
Other proposed uses for the money include a garage for specialty vehicles at state police headquarters in Scituate, Information Technology upgrades and additional trooper training.
So far, the state police have spent $5.3 million on new vehicles, $400,000 for special patrols such as drunken-driving checkpoints, $2.2 million on technology upgrades, $37,000 on training and $1.5 million on miscellaneous equipment, including Tasers, SWAT team gear and guns.
Of all the Google-settlement recipients, R.I. Attorney General Peter Kilmartin has taken the most long-term approach.
The attorney general’s office was awarded $60 million, and has so far spent $6.5 million of its share.
Spokeswoman Amy Kempe said Kilmartin sees the Google money as a resource supplementing the office’s capital budget years into the future.
“The attorney general has always taken the perspective that this is a once-in-a-generation windfall,” Kempe said. “It is most prudent to have these monies available to this office to make current and future upgrades at no expense to the operating budget, than to spend it all in one shot.”
The largest purchase so far has been the $3.4 million acquisition of a new office building next door to the attorney general headquarters on South Main Street in Providence.
In addition to the purchase price, a large chunk of the $6.5 million in Google money spent by the office, roughly $546,000, is related to renovating that new property at 180 South Main St., with another $50,000 for monthly operating expenses. The Department of Justice allows the attorney general to pay ongoing operating expenses related to the new building, but not any existing facilities. Other expenditures include IT upgrades to the state criminal-history database and precious-metals database and the purchase of at least one new vehicle.
The smallest of the Ocean State’s Google distributions went to the R.I. National Guard, which will receive $5.5 million.
Lt. Col. Peter Parente said so far the Guard has spent a modest $127,000 of its Google money, with the bulk of that going to salaries for seven people working on a drug-enforcement task force with local police.
Right now Parente said the National Guard does not have any proposals in the pipeline for the remaining Google money and staff members are waiting on potential Department of Justice rule changes before putting a proposal together. Aside from the $49.2 million used to bail out its police pension plan, it is unclear exactly how much of the remaining $10.8 million of Google money East Providence has been spent. News reports have detailed approximately $1.9 million in spending, mostly for police cruisers. Calls to City Manager Paul Lemont were not immediately returned.
North Providence used $1.2 million in Google money to purchase 17 new police cruisers and invested $62,000 in a shared indoor firing range with Johnston.
But the dispute between Lombardi and the Town Council over who controls the forfeiture account has frozen millions in additional spending already approved by the Justice Department.
The spending on hold includes $120,000 annually to hire two new officers who would work in middle school and elementary school; and $40,000 for new Tasers. Three new sport utility vehicles for administrators were delivered just after the spending freeze came down and were impounded for months until general town revenue was found to pay for them last month.
The most significant item on hold is a new public-safety complex for both the police and fire department, estimated to cost $20 million, that can’t move ahead until the dispute is settled.
A Lombardi plan to invest $20 million of the Google money with the Rhode Island Foundation as a kind of endowment, with returns paying the mortgage on a new public-safety building, was rejected by the Justice Department. •

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