Senator Dawn Euer has represented District 13 (Newport, Jamestown) since 2017, after a special election to replace Senate President M. Teresa Paiva-Weed. We met at Empire Tea and Coffee in Newport on Sunday, and our conversation was wide and free-ranging.
Steve Ahlquist: Let’s start with you telling me a little about yourself.
Dawn Euer: I come from a working-class background and never intended to run for office, but here I am, running for reelection.
Steve Ahlquist: You say you never intended to run, but obviously you did. What made you want to do that?
Dawn Euer: I’d been doing a bunch of organizing. I helped run the Marriage Equality Campaign...
Steve Ahlquist: Which is how we met.
Dawn Euer: ... and I kind of took it over; I jumped into that. People had been fighting for that for decades. I was fortunate to be on the tail end of that. Public opinion and the national conversation were shifting. When I first started working on that campaign, everybody said it wasn’t possible because Rhode Island is too Catholic. It can’t be done.
Then we ended up getting the Civil Union bill in 2011, and everybody was rightfully pissed about that. That bill got a lot of criticism.
Steve Ahlquist: That’s what got me involved, by the way.
Dawn Euer: Oh, really?
Steve Ahlquist: I always thought, because I wasn’t paying attention, that marriage equality was going to happen. After the Civil Union bill came out, and it was so bad, I got involved and pushed for better.
Dawn Euer: That resulted in my first New York Times quote. I talked to a reporter at the New York Times, and he asked why civil unions aren’t good enough, and I said people want marriage, not some made-up bureaucratic status. Through that effort, we sought to amend the Civil Union Bill back to the Marriage Equality Bill in the House, and then we were able to use what’s called scoring. We were able to score that vote on the amendment, and then we ran folks in the 2012 election cycle to flip enough seats in both the House and the Senate to have enough people in office to pass an actual marriage equality bill.
Steve Ahlquist: I remember that even just bringing it to a vote was impossible.
Dawn Euer: Yeah, bringing it to a vote was impossible. That was my first involvement in real politics in Rhode Island, working on an issue that I felt very passionately about, and I didn’t understand why we weren’t getting it done. I learned that who is in those seats makes a difference. Then, fast-forward to 2017: the Senate seat opened up, and a bunch of people called me and wanted me to run.
I was unsure, and I talked to some folks, thinking about where we were on so many issues in 2017. One of the issues that was really important to me is reproductive justice and abortion access. I started talking to some of the other candidates, asking where they stand on abortion access and reproductive justice, and their response to me was, “Why does it matter?” And a lawyer who cared about the issue and had been watching what was happening, I, like everybody who cared about that issue in 2017, knew that the roadmap to overturn Roe v. Wade had been set up.
Steve Ahlquist: We all felt it.
Dawn Euer: We knew we had to do something at the state level to protect reproductive rights. Getting that response from someone on an issue I was very passionate about flipped a switch. There was nobody else in the candidate pool who was going to fight as hard as I would for that issue. Two years later, we passed the legislation to codify Roe v. Wade.
Steve Ahlquist: Casting that vote must have felt good.
Dawn Euer: It was really great. I was on the Judiciary Committee then; I knew where the votes were and where all the conversations were, and I was able to help rally my colleagues.
Steve Ahlquist: Even then, it didn’t pass out of Judiciary. It had to be moved over to Health.
Dawn Euer: If you remember, they wanted to vote on the Senate bill first, and voted down Senator Gayle Goldin’s bill. I then moved to hold the House bill for further study. I did that because a bunch of us had had internal conversations with Senate leadership, telling them they couldn’t just torch this issue. We all care about this and want this to move forward. I give Senator Goldin a ton of credit on that because people like to turn these important issues into petty politics and try to demonize the advocates.
Steve Ahlquist: Senator Stephen Archambeault cast the deciding vote to kill Senator Goldin’s bill, and it was all based on personal animus.
Dawn Euer: I’ve been reminded recently of the saying, ”Well-behaved women seldom make history.” This was a good example of that. Gayle stood up and did the right thing in pushing that bill through. At the end of the day, we passed Representative Anastasia Williams’ House bill, and not out of Judiciary; it got transferred to HHS, and that’s how it made it to the floor of the Senate.
I saw how people can manipulate petty politics to stifle bold progress, but the number of people willing and able to set aside their egos and have the political courage to do the right thing was greater.
Stuff like that, and the history I have working on major issues like that, quite frankly, is why I am seeking reelection.
Steve Ahlquist: As a side note, I’ve always felt that it was a mistake having the abortion bills in Judiciary...
Dawn Euer: A thousand percent.
Steve Ahlquist: ... these bills should always have been in health care committees. I don’t understand why we continually treat reproductive rights as a criminal matter. Putting these bills in Judiciary presupposes that they’re criminal, not health care matters.
Dawn Euer: I will say that part of what we did in the bill was to repeal criminal law, but that being said, I agree with you. We edit statutes and different titles in every committee. Also, the Judiciary Committee was stacked with some of the most conservative members of the Senate, and then leadership would throw up their hands and say, “We couldn’t get it out of committee!”
Steve Ahlquist: When people asked me why it’s so hard to get this through the committee, I would say it’s because Senate Judiciary is a conservative machine built to kill this and similar legislation. It’s all theater to make it seem like your issues are getting a fair hearing.
What are you thinking about as the major issues you want to tackle in the next two years?
Dawn Euer: I want to do a lot more around consumer protection. One of the bills I had last year was to address toll transponders because there’s this weird thing where, unbeknownst to me and the rest of the world, your transponder battery can apparently die.
Steve Ahlquist: Didn’t know that, but I guess that makes sense. It is battery-operated.
Dawn Euer: Yeah, it makes sense and I could have known that, but what I’ve heard from a ton of constituents and quite frankly, people across the state, is that all of a sudden they end up getting these huge bills from the Bridge and Turnpike Authority because their battery died and they’re getting kicked into a different process and =instead of it being 83 cents, it’s $10 per passage...
Also, our debt collection statutes are problematic and, quite frankly, in line with many southern states’. We need to do a lot more to streamline the process and make it easier for consumers. We shouldn’t be streamlining the process for the debt collectors as much as we always do, but that’s always been the preference.
I have a couple of ideas on housing that I’ve been working on. In the district here, in Newport and Jamestown, we have a problem with the missing middle. We have a lot of income-restricted subsidized affordable housing, and a lot of high-end housing, but we don’t have much in the middle.
Steve Ahlquist: That makes sense. I don’t think I could afford to move here.
Dawn Euer: I can’t afford to live here. I’m a renter. If my landlord kicks me out, I don’t know that I would be able to stay in the district.
Steve Ahlquist: I live on the East Side of Providence, and if I sell my house, I’m not sure I can translate that into equivalent housing in this district.
Dawn Euer: I’ve talked to other elected officials about this. Some feel that people only want to increase their equity in their homes, their largest asset, but we’re in a housing bubble. Young people and first-time homebuyers are being priced out, so I want to do some things to help renters. I want to push a renter’s tax credit. I used to live in Minneapolis. We had one when I lived there, and I think that would be useful.
Steve Ahlquist: How does that work?
Dawn Euer: When you’re doing your taxes as a renter, there’s an additional schedule. You wouldn’t be required to itemize, but you’d get a credit, a little bit off your taxes...
Steve Ahlquist: We get something like that for our mortgages. Why shouldn’t a renter get something similar?
Dawn Euer: That’s exactly right. The piece I want to do to help homeowners focuses on homeowners insurance. There’s a package of legislation - huge shout-out to Representative Jennifer Boylan, who’s been working on how to climate-change-proof home insurance. One of the bills I had would prevent insurance companies from investing in fossil fuel infrastructure because the world is already on fire, so let’s not pour gasoline on it.
Steve Ahlquist: So insurance companies are investing in companies that make it impossible for them to insure people. That’s certainly burning the candle on both ends.
Dawn Euer: And plenty of studies show there’s no negative impact on insurance premiums; it just stops the problem from getting worse.
Also, there’s the judicial selection conversation.
Steve Ahlquist: Can we do something about that?
Dawn Euer: I submitted a three-bill package last year and secured a hearing at the end of the session. I thought the hearing went well. The assumption is that a former or current politician put their name in for a judicial appointment and then everybody assumes that is who’s going to be picked.
Steve Ahlquist: So far, that’s the way it goes.
Dawn Euer: That’s why that’s the assumption, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Steve Ahlquist: I’m sick of it, to be honest. I don’t think people should be able to leave the Senate or the House and jump into a judicial seat, which we know the governor’s going to give them, with doors opening throughout the entire process.
Dawn Euer: One of the things about this conversation that’s been frustrating to watch is that supporters of specific judicial candidates have manipulated it into a debate over whether the person is a good lawyer or qualified. I think that’s intentional deflection.
Steve Ahlquist: Just because someone is a senator or representative does not make them a better choice than others.
Dawn Euer: Some people dismiss this concern as optics, which I don’t think is true, but, at a time when we have record-low trust in our governmental institutions, optics matters as well. The other thing that hasn’t been talked about enough is that one of the number-one things I get asked about is, “What are you doing to protect Rhode Islanders because of the Trump Administration?”
Because any state law we pass will go through the state court system, we need a state court system that’s trusted and up to the job. I very much appreciate, at the federal level, all the conversation about defending the federal judiciary and the judges who are making the hard decisions. And there’s criticism of it too: The Trump appointments seem beholden to whatever outcome he wants.
Steve Ahlquist: And people lied during their selection period about issues like reproductive rights, which I think happens in our state judge selection system too. I strongly believe that Michael McCaffrey’s sudden change on issues like abortion and trans rights, things he was against for three decades as a state senator, is just words he said to clinch his seat. I see no reason to believe that he has changed his views. I see no evidence whatsoever that this is true. These are just words he said. It feels like the same lies we heard from Amy Comey Barrett and Neil Gorsuch.
Dawn Euer: The political opportunism is real. You know, Rhode Island is unique in having these positions be lifetime appointments. That’s something I want to think about more deeply. In any of this stuff, there’s no perfect structure. Any structure we have is going to be subject to the people who are trying to enforce it, which, quite frankly, is why I think it’s so important to continue to have a conversation about judicial selection.
Even the process that’s happening right now around the Supreme Court appointment, where, if the solution is that there needs to be a lawsuit against the Ethics Commission- I don’t think that anybody who voted on the judicial nomination reforms thought, “We’re going to include every court except for the Supreme Court.”
Steve Ahlquist: The lawsuit is a bad look. There’s no evidence that the Ethics Commission was unethical or did anything outside the bounds of their duties. I don’t see any indication that those people are somehow being dishonest or biased. I believe these are good people making moral decisions. I like Joe Shekarchi, but this judgeship is not owed to him.
Dawn Euer: That’s a really important point. One of the things that has troubled me is the quotes that I’ve read that betray the perception or reality of feeling entitled to the position. Nobody is entitled to that position. Just as I’m not entitled to the Senate seat: It belongs to the people of District 13. That Supreme Court position belongs to the people of Rhode Island. People can be in another role of public service and want to do that, but they are not entitled to it.
Steve Ahlquist: It raises the perception that deals were made behind the scenes and that this judgeship is a consolation prize for not running for another seat. I don’t know that for sure, but the whole thing creates that perception, and Rhode Island politics are not immune to it.
Dawn Euer: Many of the things I tried to do through the legislation I proposed were within the Judicial Nominating Committee’s authority to do on its own, without legislation. For instance, they did end up fixing how many days before a hearing people need to sign up for public testimony.
Steve Ahlquist: There are many improvements to be made, but they’re getting there.
Dawn Euer: That was moving in the right direction. I’m a big fan of giving credit where it’s due. You need to reward people for taking those steps because none of those changes are easy when you’ve had a system that’s been doing something completely different for so long.
Steve Ahlquist: And some of the dead wood - people who have been on that committee for way too long - has been taken care of. Not all of them, but that’s been moving in the right direction as well.
Dawn Euer: There are still a couple of holdovers.
Steve Ahlquist: I would like to see them move on.
Dawn Euer: Creating a blind review process is incredibly important. They do it in Massachusetts. Everyone says it’s not possible in Rhode Island, but if there’s a will, there’s a way. We have a lot of smart people to figure out how to do it. Because I do think that one of the handicaps of the JNC process is who wants to be the no vote to a person who has a four million dollar campaign account, who’s also a practicing and well-respected lawyer? If you’re a no vote, any human is going to think, “How is this going to affect my practice?” Quite frankly, I’ve talked to lawyers who practice in state court who have appreciated me speaking up and said to me, “I can’t say anything because what if X, Y, and Z get on the bench and then I’m in front of them?”
Steve Ahlquist: I feel the same way because of my activism on McCaffrey’s nomination. If I ever had to appear before him in court, I would have to request that another judge preside. I also think, by the way, that when you talk about the JNC and voting, the Rhode Island Democratic Party here has an open forum where everybody declares their votes out loud. They all vote knowing that their positions in the party and any alliances they might have are affected by their votes. Rhode Island Republicans vote by private ballot. They have more democracy.
The Democratic Party in Rhode Island would be incredibly different if people could vote their conscience instead of having to declare their vote out loud. I also think better people would show up for the votes, because at these meetings a lot of people don’t show up since they’re only going to cast votes that make them look bad.
You’ve been knocking on doors. What are people in Newport and Jamestown concerned about?
Dawn Euer: It’s a mixed bag on some of the housing stuff that we’ve done. As you know, there’s been a statewide legislative effort around housing. I voted against some of it because I knew it would affect Jamestown and Newport differently. So one of the things I’ve heard a lot about is, “How are we going to get the housing costs under control? People who own their homes are worried because their assessments are rising and the properties around them are being flipped.
In Jamestown, a longtime town council member was actually priced out of his apartment. I don’t remember where he ended up moving to, but he was looking for a new rental after his landlord sold the place he was living in. He was looking everywhere for somewhere to live. He decided not to run for reelection, so he wasn’t on the council last term, and about six months ago, he had to leave Jamestown altogether. He’s a veteran, in a wheelchair, so he had some specific housing needs, but still.
Steve Ahlquist: I see many people who are facing homelessness or people who have to leave Providence due to rising rents and housing scarcity.
Dawn Euer: Part of the reason I had us meet here is that I’m a huge supporter of Empire Tea and Coffee because they are locally owned. CJ, who’s the owner, gives health insurance and a livable wage to his employees. I was talking to him the other day, and he said, “We’re so on the cusp of flipping into too many only summer homes. In the off-season, there almost isn’t enough business to keep all his employees on and paid. I’ve had this conversation with other locally owned small businesses that will have to reduce their hours in the winter drastically.
Steve Ahlquist: That becomes a spiral. So all Newport businesses will be like Del’s Lemonade, only open in the summer.
Switching gears, I saw that you did an expungement clinic last week.
Dawn Euer: Which was great. We helped over 100 people. 85 people signed up in advance, and then we had a ton of walk-ins. A lot of folks I talked to can’t get a job because of their records. I know someone who works at the Newport mansions. She hires the people who do the tours and stuff like that, and she can’t hire somebody if they’ve got a record. It’s their company policy.
On the one hand, how do we make that connection between the Newporters who already live here and have housing, and those who could come and work in some of these jobs, when all these barriers don’t allow that to actually happen? I was talking to Representative Cheri Cruz about this. She said that in Pawtucket, many social service agencies offer expungement as part of their wraparound services, or help people fill out the forms, so I’ve been talking with some of the Aquidneck Island groups about how we can make that be one of the wraparound services they provide and how we can create supports for that.
Steve Ahlquist: Bills for automatic expungement never seem to get traction at the General Assembly.
Dawn Euer: When I first got elected, I put in a Clean Slate bill. The biggest problem with it is, and this isn’t an excuse, but it’s the state that’s holding the records, and the state is who knows which expungements are eligible or not. So to me, they should do automatic expungement without needing to be petitioned.
Steve Ahlquist: It sounds like a couple of keystrokes on a computer from someone who knows a little programming.
Dawn Euer: The biggest problem and the biggest pushback from the courts is that database piece. You can only get out of databases what you put in. They don’t have the record tagged or structured so they can run an easy internal query and say, “These are all expunged.”
Steve Ahlquist: As a state, we invest significant funds in businesses and expect a return in employment and economic growth. Expungement could be seen as a business investment in people. Every expungement means greater earning potential for people.
Dawn Euer: Absolutely. One of the things is having that conversation with the courts, getting them to see it that way, and getting them the resources, while also making sure it’s not one of Rhode Island’s failed data projects. It’s not impossible to solve. You need the will to do it. I’ve found during my time in the office that people can get very creative about what they say their objection is versus what their actual objection to something is.
Steve Ahlquist: I’ve seen that.
Dawn Euer: There are a lot of people hiding behind this, treating it as a technical challenge. And it certainly is a technical challenge, but it’s easy enough to resolve.
Steve Ahlquist: We heard that the expungement provisions of the cannabis legislation took less than a year. People testified that it would take three years. They were wrong.
Dawn Euer: That’s right. The conversations we had about cannabis and auto expungement were that it was supposed to be the start -building out the elements in the database so the next round we can do as auto expungements. So, I mean, the fact that it took a lot less time, but now they’ve already done it.
Steve Ahlquist: Let’s switch to climate. Newport feels like it might eventually be Denmark, with a dam built around it to keep the water out. What are you thinking?
Dawn Euer: Both Newport and Jamestown have maps showing where the islands will be cut up by sea-level rise. I’m proud of this last legislative session. We held our ground on the Act on Climate and the Renewable Energy Standard. We didn’t lose as much of the statutory benchmarks as was originally proposed.
Steve Ahlquist: Good point.
Dawn Euer: It’s still under attack in these conversations about whether or not this stuff is feasible. Well, it’s feasible if we actually work on it, take it seriously, and we understand what Act on Climate was intended to do. It was intended to create structural solutions to this issue. It’s funny, because I’ll talk to people about climate change or whatever, and they’ll say, “I recycle.”
When you think about how much our transportation emissions cost, yet we’re not funding RIPTA. Our roads and bridges are crumbling, and this DOT has submitted proposals to the Federal Highway Administration saying they’re going to address it by expanding freeways; I mean, we’ve known that expanding roadways doesn’t reduce traffic congestion. It’s the most basic thing...
Steve Ahlquist: Every transportation director knows this, except Rhode Island’s...
Dawn Euer: We need to be installing EV chargers in places people can access, but it can’t just be about cars. We need to get real about public transit. The public transit piece has a double effect because the amount that it costs a household to own a car or multiple cars is so high. People don’t realize it can cost like 10 grand a year to own a car, including maintenance, gas, and everything else. It would be household savings, and you wouldn’t have to sit in traffic.
Then, on the energy transition conversation: We had just had a very basic building-benchmark bill vetoed, and that bill was literally the least of the least that we could do, and we couldn’t move that forward. And the policy reason that the governor put in the veto message was nonsensical.
Steve Ahlquist: Nonsensical describes this governor.
Dawn Euer: Then, in Jamestown, we have a road on the edge that floods during King Tide. NPR and The New York Times have reported that we have the highest number of colonial homes in this area, which is prone to flooding. The city has taken steps to ensure the water can’t back up from the storm drains, and they’ve been repairing seawalls. There are also a couple of projects to reduce erosion and related issues, but we need to continue funding more of them.
Steve Ahlquist: I was in a city in Massachusetts that’s literally moving some of their houses away from the water and up a hill. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per old colonial-era house. Is the solution to find higher ground?
Dawn Euer: Depending on the topography, a managed retreat is a necessary conversation to have. The conversation right now is about the cliff walk, where the cliffs by private property are being compromised by climate change, and the whole conversation about who’s responsible for shoring them up.
Steve Ahlquist: Maybe the cliffs are like New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_of_the_Mountain, and eventually it’s going to be gone... Nothing is forever.
Dawn Euer: True, but that’s also why we shouldn’t be building massive data centers and pouring gasoline on the fire.
Steve Ahlquist: Should Rhode Island ban these data centers?
Dawn Euer: I think so. There are so many harmful environmental impacts. And the conversation about the energy costs. One of the things that people don’t always realize is that our energy systems, like our roads, bridges, and public schools, are socialist. We all pay for those systems. When you have major users like a data center, we all pay for infrastructure upgrades and system build-out to handle peak load and demand.
Steve Ahlquist: We have nice water in Rhode Island, and they’d be using a lot of it to cool their data centers. That would suck.
What are your thoughts about Flock cameras? There’s been an interesting conversation happening in towns across Rhode Island. At least three municipalities have voted down Flock cameras. In the attorney general race, all four Democratic candidates say we need to put guardrails around Flock, but that Flock is inherently a good system and important for crime-fighting and stuff. I don’t know that that’s true. What are your thoughts?
Dawn Euer: I’m going to back up and say something about legislation that I worked on this year. There’s the traffic camera block-the-box legislation for Providence, and Majority Leader Ciccone had the bill to renew that. I worked with him to do what you’re saying, to put guardrails on it. I worked with the ACLU and the city of Providence and secured an amendment to his bill stating that the data can be used only for traffic enforcement and nothing else, and that it can’t be shared.
So that’s now in the statute. But that’s different than speed cameras, and that’s different from Flock. As a grounding, that’s where my head is at on privacy stuff. We need to do more on privacy stuff and look at the other ways we’re using camera systems. The thing about Flock and the other similar systems is that they’re general surveillance systems. The question is, should there be a general, broad surveillance of public areas in the United States of America, or not?
I fall on the side that there should not be ongoing general surveillance of the American people.
Steve Ahlquist: I feel the same way.
Dawn Euer: Proponents of these systems point to the way the private sector tracks us on social media with AI and facial recognition, so we’re already being surveilled. I have yet to talk to anyone who says, “You’re right, that’s great.”When I talk to people, they say, “I hate that too.”So that’s a false analogy. It’s a red-herring argument meant to distract from the conversation at hand, which is: Should we have a state-sponsored mass surveillance system?
I do not believe that we should. And it’s made worse by the fact that there is a horrible gray area in how law enforcement and state actors interact with the private sector to build databases about people.
META is doing it to market to us, but in the law enforcement context, there have been conversations about how much ICE has tapped into the network. There’s a ton of case law about how these private contracts between the police and private companies get all this data on individuals. We need to shut that down. There should not be an end run around the requirement for a warrant to search, and that’s what this is. They’re creating a massive end run around our constitutional rights, and I think that that’s wrong.
I don’t think we should be deflecting from that by saying, “They do it in the private sector.”What that means is that those of us in government need to step up and better regulate the privacy protections in the private sector as well.
Steve Ahlquist: META may want to market to us, but it also has political ambitions and is working to influence politics. Very dangerous
Dawn Euer: That’s correct.
Steve Ahlquist: The South Kingston Town Council had a very interesting discussion with a Flock rep in the room. One of the town councilors noted that these license plate readers can also read bumper stickers. And the Flock rep said that South Kingstown couldn’t do that because they weren’t paying for that feature. In other words, sure, Flock can do that, but we want to get paid for that. Suppose the government wanted a list of people who publicly support Dawn Euer so that they can generate a list of people driving with her bumper sticker on the car? Or MAGA? That’s creepy.
Dawn Euer: It’s feeding into this narrative of certain politicians that we should fear one another. That’s not the way I approach the world. They’re selling fear.
Steve Ahlquist: It’s how they sell us stuff. You need to buy a gun to protect yourself from the neighbor who has a gun. We need 24/7 surveillance to protect us from each other...
Dawn Euer: Some of the folks pushing the idea of Flock have been talking about the Brown University shooter. I would much rather focus on making sure that we’re regulating who has access to guns and doing a better job at mental health wraparound services.
Steve Ahlquist: It’s security theater. Flock cameras did not stop the Brown shooting. The shooter was already dead by the time we found him on Flock cameras, and we only knew to look for him on the Flock system because of an eyewitness.
I’m going to wrap this up. What do you want to say at the doors when you’re trying to convince someone to vote for you?
Dawn Euer: Since I’ve been in office, I’ve accomplished a lot of big things, from codifying Roe v. Wade to creating early voting, and just this year holding institutions accountable for childhood sex abuse. I’ve made an impact since I’ve been in the State House, and I also know that nothing big gets done alone. I’m committed to continuing to work with like-minded colleagues in the Senate to advance a bold, ambitious agenda that will improve the lives of Rhode Islanders.
Steve Ahlquist: That’s very simple. I think we’re good.
See also: Angela Lima is running for State Senate District 13
Proud to say she's my Senator!
I think she is one of our best legislators, always working for civil rights, affordability, housing, reproductive freedom, and environmental protection - when I think of elected officials such a as Dawn Euer it makes me angry when people say things like "all politicians are crooks" - that kind of cynicism certainly helps protect the status quo.