Camron Segalla is taking a shot at toppling Pawtucket's Mayor Grebien

"We talk about national politics, but at the end of the day, local politics is where your vote counts the most."

During the 2022 election, Camron Segalla launched a last-minute write-in campaign for Pawtucket Mayor, challenging Democratic incumbent Donald Grebien. This year, the 25-year-old Segalla is on the ballot, challenging Mayor Grebien once again. Segalla sent me a press release, but instead of running it, I asked for an interview. We met at Slater Park in Pawtucket on Wednesday and talked for about 40 minutes. The interview has been edited for clarity.

Steve Ahlquist: What were your thoughts when you decided to run for mayor?

Camron Segalla: People in Pawtucket are tired of seeing the city decline. We're tired of seeing the current administration not keeping up with our needs and ignoring what we're telling them. Mayor Grebian has been there for 14 years and that's too long. We have homeless people on the streets. We have a divide in the city we need to work on. We don't have enough accountability for city officials who are doing the wrong thing. There are a lot of reasons: I'm new, I'm young, and I want to get young people involved in the political system because right now, they're not. I want young people to feel that there's hope and I'll allow them to say, “You know what? We should get involved. He's 25 and he's running for mayor, so let's go out, vote, and participate because local politics is where it matters.” We talk about national politics, but at the end of the day, local politics is where your vote counts the most.

Steve Ahlquist: If you're voting in Rhode Island, you're not going to be the deciding vote on Trump or Biden, but you might be the deciding vote on a mayoral candidate, a city council member, or a school committee person.

Camron Segalla: There have been situations where people have won by one vote, so every vote does count.

Steve Ahlquist: Why run for mayor right out of the gate? Why not run for city council?

Camron Segalla: I think the mayor's office is where I can make the most impact. I didn't want to take the stepping stones. People told me I should start small and work my way up, but I don't want to do that. I want to be able to make the most change I can and impact the most people I can. I can do that from the top.

Steve Ahlquist: Grebian is a machine in Pawtucket. He's been there a long time, as you pointed out, and I think he's relatively popular. Has he had an opponent challenge him?

Camron Segalla: Not a lot of people come out and vote during the primaries. I believe the last couple of times we've seen about 6,000 people out of around 21,000 registered Democrats voted. He's had challengers: David Norton in 2018 and 2020m but I don't think he made it past a third of the vote. And Costantinos Stratis in 2022 also got about a third of the vote.¹

Steve Ahlquist: What do you think, what was the problem with their messaging? What were they not doing?

Camron Segalla: I think a lot of people didn't know they were running. There's kind of a media blackout sometimes, and that's what I'm trying to do differently this time. I'm trying to reach out to the media directly and get my message out. I have a strong message.

I don't have any political experience and people are going to see that as a weakness. But I see it as a strength because people are tired of the same old, same old. They want something new. And that's what I'm going to offer. I don't want people to vote for me again if they don't think I did a good job and I want them to hold my feet to the fire. They should hold all politicians' feet to the fire because that's how you get things done. You have to advocate for yourselves. All of us, as voters, have to advocate. That's what I'm going to encourage everyone to do. If I'm not keeping a promise, if I say I'm going to do something, you bet your butt I'm going to do it. And if I don't, I want you all to come out and hold my feet to the fire.

Steve Ahlquist: What kind of management experience do you have? Being mayor is being a manager.

Camron Segalla: I've never been a manager. I've followed politics at a national level my whole life. It's something I've always been frustrated with and I've had ideas of how we could do things better here and there. It's something I constantly think about. People ask me, “What's your hobby?” My hobby is following politics, policy ideas, and what politicians are doing. What I've noticed, across the board, is that people say a lot of things, but they nibble around the edges of issues and don't go to the root cause. I want to get to the root cause of these issues.

What's causing all this dysfunction? What's causing an uptick in crime? What's causing the uprise in homelessness? We've got to look into that. A lot of it has to do with our mental health. My generation in particular is probably the most depressed and anxious generation in close to 100 years. I don't think we've seen this situation since the Great Depression. The sense of hopelessness is deep and that affects every part of life - crime and homelessness increase because some people give up.

Once you're out on the streets - and I was homeless myself, I slept in my car for 10 months - it affects your mind. You get hopeless. You feel like there's no way out and you get stuck in a cycle. We're a working-class city. We're working-class people and we're all one lost paycheck away from being homeless ourselves.

There has to be empathy for what we're going through. There's a lot of negative connotations with homelessness and we have to get rid of that and have some humanity for them because they are human beings and they're residents of Pawtucket. We need to make sure they're housed. As mayor, I would connect all the existing programs that are helping the homeless together because they're doing great work independently, but we can do a lot more for them and be more effective at getting the problems solved if we all work together.

Steve Ahlquist: You've lived in Pawtucket all your life and you went to public schools.

Camron Segalla: Yes. I went to Shea. I grew up on Pleasant Street. I went to Varieur Elementary School and then to Slater Junior High. I hate to break the city into sides, but that's my side of the city. I love both sides of the city. I live on the other side now, off Newport Ave. I bring that up because there's a lot of talk about this side and that side. We have to talk about unity in the city because we are divided in so many ways. We're talking about racial divides, economic divides, and geographic divides. Were divided by a river that splits the city and that's where this east side/west side of the city situation comes from.

Steve Ahlquist: Let's talk about the schools. You brought up the two sides but there's this idea of a unified high school, which some people are worried about because it's going to bring the two sides of the city together. Can you talk about that and what your thoughts are?

Camron Segalla: The concept of a unified high school is fantastic - is .blameand n theory - but there has to be work ahead of time to bridge that divide. We have to start working on a unified city before we start working on a unified high school. This situation has been the case for many years - since my parents were kids and probably even my grandparents. There's been this deep divide in the city from one school to the other - there's legitimate gang violence. These are not bad kids, but they feel hopeless. They don't see any economic path forward. They don't see themselves buying a house, starting a business, or having children. They don't see that as a reality.

If you're not on the college path in high school, you get left behind. They pass you through and kids are graduating barely able to read at a fifth-grade level and without basic math skills. They're not learning anything of substance about how to build credit, buy a house, start a business, do their taxes, or basic civics - the real-life skills that we need to survive. They don't teach us about voting - at least it's not required. It's an elective class and it shouldn't be. These are the things that should be required.

We should have programs in place for trade skills. That's one of my ideas - creating a program where we connect high school kids and adults to trade skills - electricians, stone masons, cement layers, electricians, plumbers - and getting them apprenticeships. I would love to do it with local tradesmen and be able to connect them to these jobs so that they have a chance for a career and a good-paying job. A lot of them are union jobs and unions are what built the middle class in the fifties, sixties, and seventies - but they've been on the decline ever since.

My father didn't graduate from high school, he just started going to work as a roofer. He's been a union roofer for 20-plus years now and if he had an injury, they didn't just say, “You're fired.” When he recovered he went back to work. Unions offer you protection. We've got to connect kids to that because a lot of them don't see that path forward.

Steve Ahlquist: Housing is out of control. Buying a house or renting a place is becoming more and more unaffordable. What do we do about that?

Camron Segalla: There's a program for first-time home buyers out there, and that's something I will connect people to. It's a Rhode Island program, but sometimes it's a matter of being able to show them that there's an opportunity. The program helps you with a down payment. They teach you how to take all the steps you need to take. That's something we can work on. We've got to stop big companies from buying up dozens and dozens of houses because that's what's driving up the cost nationwide - not just here. These big companies are buying up thousands and thousands of housing units and then they're making enormous amounts of profits. They're not selling the houses so people can be home buyers. They're renting them out at ridiculous prices. People's rents are being raised every single year and it's not right. There's no law in place to stop that. State Representative Jennifer Stewart passed a bill...

Steve Ahlquist: ...to give renters 90 days' notice for a rate increase...

Camron Segalla: She did a great job with that. On a city level, we can try to stop bigger companies from coming in and purchasing all these houses.

Steve Ahlquist: There's rent control, tax incentives... At a certain point being a landlord is your business and housing is a commodity, not a basic need.

Camron Segalla: If you decide you're just going to keep raising rents every year, then there should be a fee for that.

Steve Ahlquist: Although I think landlords would say, "You can charge me a fee, but that means I'm going to have to pass it on to the renter." So rent control becomes the only viable option.

Camron Segalla: As mayor, I'll figure out every legal avenue I have. I want to get into the property taxes as well. If you're a first-time home buyer, for the first couple of years you should pay a lower property tax, to get you on your feet. Same thing with a new business. New businesses should have a lower rate to start, and then, after a couple of years, we go to go up a little bit. And after a couple more years, we'll go to the regular level. We can't just raise property taxes and incentivize companies to move into Pawtucket. Businesses are fleeing from Pawtucket in droves. Covid shut down many of them, but with rising property taxes, it's not worth staying. Part of the problem with downtown is that no one wants to stay.

Steve Ahlquist: Pawtucket has lost a lot in recent years. The hospital closed, the PawSox left, the Gamm Theater has moved, and Apex closed all those years ago. I'm sure if we could come up with more. Did you go to a lot of PawSox games as a kid?

Camron Segalla: Yeah, we always got free tickets. We'd go on field trips and stuff. The fireworks were a thing. It was part of my childhood. To see it go was disheartening. It's been a part of all of our lives for a long time.

Steve Ahlquist: I blame the new owners more than I blame anybody locally, to be honest. They were trying to hold us over a barrel. I don't love the former Speaker, Mattiello - a lot of people blame him for the loss of the PawSox, but I don't know that it was his fault. The owners were trying to force big concessions. The way they were dealing with us was terrible.

Camron Segalla: I don't know if I could have done any better. I don't want to blame anyone, but it happened under Mayor Grebien's administration and people see it that way.

Steve Ahlquist: What are your thoughts on the Tidewater Stadium?

Camron Segalla: That was my old neighborhood. I lived on Pleasant Street just a couple blocks over. As kids, we'd all hang out and go fishing there and stuff. To see it all used for a stadium that nobody asked for is upsetting.

Steve Ahlquist: When you go door to door is anybody excited about the idea of it?

Camron Segalla: I've come across a handful of people - mostly people who haven't lived here their whole lives. That neighborhood is at the bottom of a hill, so there's lots of flooding, and when you start removing forest land from the waterfront, there's nothing to absorb all of that.

If there's tidal flooding, that whole stadium will be flooded. Then what happens to all the money the city invested? Where does that go?

The price has risen exponentially since it started. Every time we hear something, it's that the price is going to be more, and more.

Do we need economic development? Sure. The mayor said we weren't going to be putting any public funding in, but I'm pretty sure he used American Rescue Plan funding for that. We used the money for the stadium instead of using it for other things. I think the soccer stadium would've been better where McCoy Stadium is.

The unified high school would've been better at the Apex location. That's the core of the city. If you wanted to have a unified high school, that would've been the perfect location. It's the halfway point between Tolman and Shea.

Steve Ahlquist: A lot of the things you're talking about are set. A new mayor is not going to come in and suddenly move the unified high school to the Apex land, is he?

Camron Segalla: The city owns the Apex land, so there's potential.

Steve Ahlquist: When I visited the new East Providence High School, it felt like the Starship Enterprise. There's evidence that shows that if you're in a shitty unmaintained high school where the roofs are leaking and everything's falling apart, you feel like you're not valued. When you go to a new, well-maintained school, you feel valued. The psychological impact on children is worth the investment.

Camron Segalla: I love the idea of it. We just need to do the work ahead of time. We need to make sure we're getting kids together beforehand to mitigate any issues and rivalries. Working through that starts at the top. The administration needs to start talking about it.

Steve Ahlquist: Pawtucket City Hall is falling apart.

Camron Segalla: Yes.

Steve Ahlquist: I'm going to say this out loud, and you tell me if it makes any sense. The strategy of allowing city hall to rot seems to me similar to the strategy of allowing Morely Field to rot. The field is wrecked so we have to sell it to a developer as a parking lot. City Hall is wrecked so we have to sell it to a housing developer for market-rate apartments.

The strategy seems to be to neglect a potentially valuable property, and then sell it off. Talk to me about that. Am I making sense?

Camron Segalla: At this point, they've let City Hall go so far that it now will cost a hundred million dollars to fix according to one estimate. The mayor has talked about turning it into condos, and I don't think that's right. It's a historic building. It's been city hall forever, and I think it should stay city hall.

Steve Ahlquist: It was built during the Depression by the Works Progress Administration. It's on the National Registry of Historic Buildings and is a true gem.

Camron Segalla: The plan is to let these places fall apart and then sell them off. We learned recently that they already bought another building to move City Hall to, without talking to anybody about it.

Steve Ahlquist: How did that happen without talking to the city council and having vigorous debates on the city council floor?

Camron Segalla: There probably has been, but these meetings aren't well known. It's difficult to know when the meetings are. People don't get notified. People get weekly updates from the mayor, but they don't get weekly updates from the city council saying, "We're going to have meetings this day or that day." People don't know what's happening. There's a handful of people that go to these meetings on a semi-regular basis, but people have work and lives. It's difficult to get to these meetings in general. There needs to be more access for people to see what's going on and to participate.

I'm sure there's been discussions. It's just not widely known and it's not talked about until the last minute - until the decision is made. It's like, "It will cost a hundred million dollars to fix. Oh, by the way, we bought this building, so we're going to work on moving over there."

Morley Field is another issue. They have let it become overgrown. There have been issues with the city trying to sell it when they didn't have any right to sell it. It's locked up now. It's overgrown and people can't use it. It's become an environmental justice issue. It needs to be a recreational space for people to use, but just last week there was a discussion at the city council meeting I wasn't able to make, where they were discussing turning Morley Field into a dog park. Now I love dogs, but we have to prioritize humans and children.

Steve Ahlquist: I'm in touch with many of the people working to save Moley Field, and I haven't heard anybody say it'd be great as a dog park.

Camron Segalla: That's what Councilman Gregor said, nobody discussed it with him. Nobody discussed it with the people in his district. It would be an absolute shame if we go forward with this proposal. It's not right because people don't want it.

Steve Ahlquist: Ideas like this should come from the people in the district...

Camron Segalla: It comes back to there being more transparency - more direct democracy. I want to enact a system where people can directly vote on specific issues - a system where registered voters can go on the city website and vote on these issues.

Steve Ahlquist: Constantly polling the public to figure out what they're happy and not happy with. Interesting.

Camron Segalla: I have a lot of those ideas that I don't see other cities doing. We don't talk about direct democracy, but I think we should do more of it. People think we're living in a democracy but we're living in a representational republic. The founders never wanted direct democracy because they felt the people weren't smart enough to make decisions. I don't think that way. I think people are smart enough to know what they want in their community and to be able to advocate for themselves.

We've also got to talk about the transfer station and have the city own that again because the city no longer owns it. It's privately owned and not being kept up so we have a rat problem.

There needs to be more discussion of what we can do as a city to take that space back and do something positive with garbage. It sounds crazy, but other countries do this a lot better than us. We need to sort through all the trash, get everything that can be recycled and reuse it. You take all the plastic stuff, melt it down and you create stuff with it. Create bracelets or a plastic string.

Steve Ahlquist: That's a huge undertaking.

Camron Segalla: It would be, but I think it's something that would be worth doing. If you take that, sell it, and make money off it, then it becomes a net positive. Whatever you invested initially, you're ultimately going to make back if you sell these products. If we get to the point where we have no garbage and we're actively seeking to get more garbage, we can take garbage from other cities. If we're preventing giant hills of trash from being created all over the place, that's a good thing. Other countries have done this. It sounds crazy, but you can burn anything that can't be recycled and turn that into energy.

You can put enough filters on there so you're not polluting the environment. We can talk about compost too, start a giant compost pile and you can sell the dirt. You can start raising worms and sell the worms. There's money to be made out of garbage. It sounds silly, and people are like, "That's crazy." But if you do it right, you can make money off it and it's free money we can put right back into the city.

That's the kind of idea I want to get into on a citywide level. I want to cut wasteful spending. I want to try to lower property taxes as much as possible without affecting the rest of the budget. Prioritize things that need to be prioritized to make the city rise. It's not going to be easy. I'm going to have a lot of pushback, but I think the people will back me up and that's all that matters to me.

Steve Ahlquist: Let me ask you one more question. When you meet somebody at the door, what do you tell them to get them to vote for you? “My name is Camron, I'm running for mayor. Here's why you should vote for me...”

Camron Segalla: That's a tough one. I think it's time for a change. The current mayor has been there for 14 years and our city hasn't markedly improved in any way. I'm running to give the power to the people. I'm not running to line my own pockets. I'm not running to be all-powerful. I'm running to put power back into the hands of the people where it belongs, so if you vote for me, you're voting for yourself."

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