In search of a job revival

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of articles focused on the 2014 gubernatorial candidates and their plans for economic development.

The experience of General Treasurer Gina M. Raimondo’s late father, Joseph Raimondo, who worked for 28 years in the Bulova Watch factory in Providence before the company left in search of cheaper labor overseas, plays a large role in the gubernatorial candidate’s campaign biography.
It also echoes in Raimondo’s economic plan, which promises to revive the manufacturing sector and bring back some of those departed factory jobs that once sustained Ocean State workers.
Employer-specific training at the Community College of Rhode Island and an applied sciences institute in advanced manufacturing, possibly on the former Interstate 195 land, are the plan’s chief tools for doing so.
Whether a state-sponsored research institute modeled on New York City’s Roosevelt Island project with Cornell University will work here is one question.
Another is whether the pillars of the Raimondo plan – manufacturing, workforce development, tourism, regulatory reform and infrastructure – represent the radical new course she says the state needs, or have been tried before.
After all, focusing on the “fundamentals” of infrastructure and education are the mantra of Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee, who Raimondo has criticized for a lack of urgency and leadership.
But Raimondo rejects the notion that her economic plan wouldn’t result in drastic change, or that it is at all similar to Chafee’s policy.
“I have often heard a version of ‘hasn’t this been tried before,’ ” Raimondo said in a recent interview about her economic plan, “but that is what I heard with the pension issue. I was certainly not the first person to say this is a problem. The difference is I took a sense of urgency to the issue and demonstrated an ability to bring everyone together, work with the General Assembly and bring it to a result.”
Promising to be an “activist governor” on the economy, Raimondo said her plan will create tens of thousands of new jobs, but only if adopted in its entirety.
“You can’t just take one part – we need to hit on all cylinders,” Raimondo said. “We are in such an economic crisis with tens of thousands of Rhode Islanders struggling every day because they are out of work or underemployed. We need to do it all.”
As with many campaign platforms, the Raimondo economic plan includes more broad strokes than specifics. The plan does not include any tax policy and it does not come with any cost estimates attached to the proposed investments.
To fill in those details, Raimondo said she will sit down after elected and, just like on pension reform, conduct an exhaustive study of the numbers before proposing specifics.
In keeping with previous Raimondo proposals, her economic plan features three state-level special funds to finance local infrastructure projects.
She would expand the Municipal Road and Bridge Revolving Fund created last year, from legislation she proposed with former House Speaker Gordon D. Fox, to lend to cities and towns at low interest rates through the R.I. Clean Water Finance Agency. The initial Revolving Fund was seeded with $7 million and Raimondo’s plan does not say how much she would add to it.
The Raimondo economic plan would also create a “Green Bank” of unspecified size to finance energy-efficiency projects by local governments, businesses and homeowners.
And based on the system across the border in Massachusetts, Raimondo would create a school building authority to share the cost of public-school construction projects.
The concept behind special funds is the ability to leverage the state’s low borrowing costs for projects smaller entities could not afford on their own, while stimulating the economy and the construction industry.
But Raimondo wouldn’t only rely on borrowing or revolving funds to pay for infrastructure.
Diving into the contentious arena of state highway and bridge maintenance financing, Raimondo reiterated her promise not to seek tolls on the Sakonnet River Bridge and instead fund maintenance through a general-fund supported “road and bridge funding formula.”
Though she spent part of her first campaigning day on a R.I. Public Transit Authority bus and said she strongly supports mass transit, neither are mentioned in the economic plan.
“I have always been and continue to be a big supporter of public transportation – it’s how I got to high school every day from Smithfield to Providence on [a] RIPTA bus,” Raimondo said. “Unfortunately we have a very bad situation with our roads and bridges, and it is a matter of prioritizing to figure out the highest and best use.”
On workforce development, Raimondo’s plan links with her proposal to dedicate resources at Community College of Rhode Island toward employer-specific needs.
Raimondo said in discussions with employers over how they can expand, the “skills gap” between what jobs require and what Rhode Islanders can do is the most frequent topic raised. Even Electric Boat, which has secured federal submarine contracts estimated to generate more than 2,000 new jobs over the next 20 years, may not be able to find the workers it needs, she said.
In response, Raimondo would make CCRI an “engine of workforce development” that would partner with local employers to develop training specific to their needs.
She would also look to bolster vocational education, especially in “science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics,” to high school students who aren’t looking to go to college.
The Raimondo plan also would create a loan-forgiveness program for graduates who stay in Rhode Island, although again no estimates of the program’s costs were included.
Raimondo would also direct workforce-development efforts toward hospitality as part of her effort to bolster the tourism industry.
Tourism is one of the leading employers in the state, and Raimondo’s plan would increase funding for state tourism promotion, which annually features some of the lowest funding in the country.
The fifth pillar of Raimondo’s economic plan is regulatory reform, which echoes efforts from Chafee during his time in office, including the work of the existing R.I. Office of Regulatory Reform, which she promises to “supercharge.”
To improve notoriously sticky local permitting, she supports the effort already underway to create an online permitting system for use by local authorities.
Perhaps surprisingly for a former venture capitalist, Raimondo’s economic plan does not include a section on access to capital for local businesses.
The efforts of Rhode Island’s much-maligned economic-development arm are perhaps too politically unpopular to touch, but Raimondo gave no sense of how, or even if, she would use it to help local companies grow, outside of continuing the Renewable Energy Fund.
“I think we need to pause and take a good look at what will work and won’t work,” Raimondo said. “This is something I know about: The state should not be in the business of venture capital. It should not be in business of picking winners and losers.
“It seems like we are always looking for that home run or silver bullet,” she added. “My core principal is to get the companies that exist in Rhode Island to expand in Rhode Island, from littlest to the biggest.” •

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