My lunch with Speaker Joe Shekarchi
"...we had an incredible amount of legislation this year. The system was overwhelmed. We're going to look at a limit next year."
I met Rhode Island Speaker of the House Joe Shekarchi at Lemongrass in Warwick less than an hour after the governor signed several housing bills into law in front of the now-vacant Aldrich Junior High School, soon to be converted into 75 housing units for seniors. The Speaker successfully passed 13 out of 14 bills in his housing package, an attempt to address the roadblocks the state faces in building much-needed housing as a way of tackling rising rents that are squeezing the poor and middle class, and contributing to an ever-growing eviction and homelessness crisis.
Full disclosure, the Speaker paid for my General Tso’s Chicken lunch special.
Joining us was the Speaker’s Communication Director Larry Berman and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Kavanagh. The interview has been edited for clarity, but not brevity.
Steve Ahlquist: 13 out of 14 bills passed. That's a solid A.
Speaker Shekarchi: Not without criticism from my friends in the Republican Party, but that comes with the territory.
Steve Ahlquist: It does. But are they really upset? They got some legislation passed this year, as the minority party.
Speaker Shekarchi: Well, there are Republicans in the chamber and there are Republicans out in the community.
Steve Ahlquist: Oh, I see what you're saying.
Speaker Shekarchi: They are two different groups.
Steve Ahlquist: What kind of criticisms were you getting?
Speaker Shekarchi: That the housing bills are a conflict of interest, that I'm doing it for myself. They put out a couple of releases.
Steve Ahlquist: I did see some of that. There are plenty of lawyers at the State House, Democrat and Republican, constantly shaping legislation that might benefit them professionally...
Speaker Shekarchi: I don't represent any affordable developers, any of them. Zero. I did some pro bono work for House of Hope about 12 or 15 years ago. I helped them with a homeless shelter. I didn't take any money from them.
But it is what it is. I won't let that criticism stop me from addressing the issues. I understand that I'm a high-value target and I understand people want to take me down or criticize me and that comes with the territory. I knew that when I became Speaker and I'm prepared to continue to fight for the issues I believe in and will benefit Rhode Islanders.
Steve Ahlquist: Coincidentally, just this morning someone wrote to me complaining about rental application fees, saying that they know a family that's been getting hit hard by them. They wanted to know if there was any way to organize around the issue, and I was able to tell them that as of January 1, 2024, rental application fees in Rhode Island will be going away. They were ready to gear it up for a fight, and I was able to say, "This is almost over. We've already won this."
Speaker Shekarchi: It would've been nice to do it earlier. I wish it could go into effect sooner. I want people to understand that the moment you do something, you're suspect. People think that you're doing it for selfish reasons. The Housing Legislation goes into effect next year, on January 1st, which gives everyone a chance to understand and gear up for them.
Steve Ahlquist: I think that makes sense, but it's tough because there are people right now getting hit with application fees.
Speaker Shekarchi: Look at that piece [paywalled] from Alexa Gagosz from the Boston Globe.
Steve Ahlquist: She's great.
Speaker Shekarchi: She wrote that story about the family that's paid thousands of dollars in application fees. Unscrupulous landlords were taking in 15 or 20 applications, knowing that they had already picked one. It's an abuse of the process.
Steve Ahlquist: There's a lot of profit to be made exploiting poor communities because many people are desperate and need essentials. You and I can wait. We don't have to engage in a bad process. But if you're actively experiencing homelessness, you don't have time. When you’re living with your kids in a car, you take those shots for an apartment and get ripped off.
Larry Berman: We put money in the budget that went into effect on July 1st to help with different things about housing.
Steve Ahlquist: On housing, I think we're moving in the right direction and I'm happy to see where we're going. More was done this year than I thought possible, to be honest.
Speaker Shekarchi: Thank you. It was hard. I will not tell you it was easy. It was not easy. People in my party, in my chamber, and in my caucus, were hard to convince and then the Senate took a while to get on board.
Steve Ahlquist: And at the end of the session, there was a lot of deal-making to get stuff done.
Steve Ahlquist: At the signing, you said you were going to work on the only bill in your housing package that did not pass, the Accessory Dwelling Unit bill, and try to get it passed early. Are there other ideas you have for next year? Any previews on future housing legislation?
Speaker Shekarchi: I don't know. The committee’s working hard.
Steve Ahlquist: Okay, let me turn this around. Jennifer Wood, from the Center for Justice, said that a lot of the Housing crisis solutions we're looking at and passing are on the supply side. But what about the demand side, that is, getting more money into the hands of people who are renting? To me, that means things like poverty alleviation, raising the minimum wage, and providing subsidies that help with rent. Rent Relief RI was effective in keeping people housed because it was helping people pay the higher rents they couldn't otherwise afford. What are your thoughts on that aspect of housing going forward?
Speaker Shekarchi: Let's see what the session brings. I can't give you any details, but I'm working on something very big, with [Senator] Jack Reed [Democrat Rhode Island], to tackle that issue. That will be a separate press conference, hopefully before Labor Day. Something federal, similar to what you talked about, rent relief.
Steve Ahlquist: Let's talk about criminal justice reform bills, starting with solitary confinement reform.
Speaker Shekarchi: It's being mediated right now in the federal court and we're going to wait for the outcome of that mediation and see what happens. I've been told that they're very close to a resolution and there will be a consent order. Everybody will agree to the consent order and the legislature can memorialize it. I think it's important for that to happen before we preemptively take a step. I have a general rule, it's not a hard and fast rule, that I don't like to pass legislation that's affecting current litigation. It was the same thing for Representative Carol McIntee and her child sex abuse legislation, the contract continuation legislation, and some of the other issues that are being litigated or mediated.
It's being mediated in the federal court right now. It's very close to a resolution. Both parties agreed to mediation.
Steve Ahlquist: How about probation reform? Because as you know, Rhode Island has the second-highest rate of probation in the country.
Speaker Shekarchi: I think we did some stuff on probation.
Steve Ahlquist: Specifically, I'm thinking of the bill to give parole violators a probation hearing.
Stephen Kavanagh: For some reason that didn't bubble up. There wasn't a groundswell of support for it.
Larry Berman: I know we had a couple of advocates for it, like Reps Jose Batista and Leonela Felix.
Steve Ahlquist: That gets me to something I wrote about. When the House Judiciary Committee took up the shoreline access bill they took the testimony on that bill very early in the hearing. It was one of those nights where there were 30 bills stacked up and the first or second bill they took on was shoreline access because the room was filled with people from South County and the beaches.
But the very next week, when the committee was hearing bills on criminal justice and there were crowds of people eager to testify, the committee took those bills last, after most of the committee members had left. By the time they got around to hearing bills important to the community, it was after midnight. A lot of people felt, given what happened the week before, that because they were mostly Black and brown people, their issues were not considered to be as important as the issues of the mostly white people who came to the State House for the shoreline access bill.
Speaker Shekarchi: That's the feeling they had.
Steve Ahlquist: You said there wasn't a groundswell of support for it, but part of the reason there wasn’t a groundswell is that 95% of the people who wanted to testify on those bills had left. They have jobs, lives, families, schools, and children to care for. It was too much.
Speaker Shekarchi: That's a legitimate issue and a legitimate concern. What I will tell you is that I don't set the calendars in terms of the order the bills are heard or who gets to speak when. On gun night I was adamant that I wanted everybody to be treated fairly. To make sure both sides were accommodated the hearing date got changed three times.
Steve Ahlquist: And ultimately started earlier in the day and on a Monday to accommodate everybody.
Speaker Shekarchi: Exactly. I didn't want to go until midnight.
Also, we had an incredible amount of legislation this year. The system was overwhelmed. We're going to look at a limit next year. The Senate has a limit of 10 bills per Senator. We have twice as many Reps as we do Senators. So we're going to try to limit it this year and that will make for more efficient hearings. No midnights, no 30 stacks.
Steve Ahlquist: Those hearings are sometimes difficult to follow.
Speaker Shekarchi: But what do you do when it's a gun night? Do you have people come up to testify two or three times?
Steve Ahlquist: I think that's different. It was the same for abortion. When the abortion bills are heard the committee would lump them all together and let people testify for or against whichever bills you want. I think that makes sense. But it's hard when it's a mixture of different bills like probation, LEOBOR, and solitary confinement.
Speaker Shekarchi: Let's talk about LEOBOR [The Law Enforcement Officer's Bill of Rights].
LEOBOR is an issue I'm committed to working on. It just came over from the Senate too late. It came over in the last hour of the session and all my reps who were involved - me, Thomas Noret, Jose Batista, Raymond Hull, Jen Stewart - nobody wanted that bill to be brought to the floor for a vote without it having a public hearing. I didn't want that either because I think it's a bad look for the House to consider a bill without a hearing.
LEOBOR is not about criminal conduct by police officers. When a police officer does something criminal, nothing is stopping or prevents them from being prosecuted. LEOBOR has to do with civil discipline for work-related conduct and to some degree non-work-related conduct. But it's civil discipline. I think in the last six years there's been five LEOBOR hearings. It's not that many. It's not an unimportant issue, it is an important issue. It sends a signal to the community that we understand and hear them. But I don't want to pass a bill for the sake of passing a bill. I want to pass a good bill.
Steve Ahlquist: LEOBOR is a set of labor protections that don't apply to anyone else. We don't have a public school teacher's Bill of Rights that allows a tribunal of teachers to decide whether or not certain conduct was right or wrong. We don't have that for civil servants. We don't have it for firefighters. We only have it for the police.
Speaker Shekarchi: That's not true. We do have it, to some degree, for lawyers. We have it for realtors and we have it for accountants and doctors. So it's not unique to police.
Steve Ahlquist: True, although for public employees it's just the police.
Speaker Shekarchi: Good point.
Steve Ahlquist: What are your thoughts on probation reform? The salient issue is that we have the second-highest percentage of our population on probation in the country. Is this a workable system?
Speaker Shekarchi: That's good and bad. That means that people are on probation and they're not in prison.
Steve Ahlquist: Direct Action for Rights and Equality [DARE] has been working on a bill to get people on probation bail hearings if they are accused of violating the terms of their probation. Too often people picked up as probation violators, after a hearing, are determined to have not violated the terms of their probation, but their time in jail waiting for a hearing leads to job loss, which means loss of income, which means loss of shelter, children, everything. DARE wants a system where an accused violator, if it's not a major crime, can post bail. Then, after a hearing, the judge can decide whether or not they were truly in violation.
Speaker Shekarchi: I don't practice criminal law. So I don't know, I have to rely on others. I don't know where the Attorney General was on that particular issue, but I listened to the courts and the advocates. I listened to the sponsor on it. I don't know if we passed it.
Steve Ahlquist: It didn't pass it, at least not the bill I'm talking about. With all the bills, it's hard to know sometimes what passed and what didn't.
Speaker Shekarchi: We usually get about 900 to 1000 bills. We had 2,600 in the system last session.
Steve Ahlquist: I usually read at least the final paragraph of every submitted bill. I didn't this year.
Larry Berman: I think we had a very good freshman class that was fired up and they put in a lot of bills. Representative David Morales alone put in over 50 bills.
Steve Ahlquist: Shots on goal. You take a lot of shots, and a few of them will get through.
Larry Berman: He's a good legislator.
Steve Ahlquist: I think so too.
Stephen Kavanagh: There were two probation-related bills passed. One was by Rep Batista, allowing individuals on probation to serve on juries.
Speaker Shekarchi: We passed that.
Stephen Kavanagh: And then Representative Felix had a bill requiring courts to return bail money to the defendant or whoever provided the bail upon completion of the case.
Speaker Shekarchi: We passed that too.
Larry Berman: Both of those passed. There was some pushback on the jury duty bill.
Steve Ahlquist: That's interesting.
Speaker Shekarchi: It's the AG. It's legitimate because it only takes one person to hang a jury and if you might get somebody who's in the system and upset, just mad at the system and they're like, "Oh, he's innocent because I'm innocent."
Speaker Shekarchi: Where did you go to college?
Steve Ahlquist: I went to CCRI and then URI a little bit, but I never graduated from URI. I left to start a business.
What did you think of the Hope Scholarship?
Steve Ahlquist: I'm happy with that. For me, and this may be unfair to the work you guys do, I'm there to complain when it doesn't go right. When the government is functioning well I give a thumbs up and keep going. I don't have a lot of time to spend on the good stuff because people need the stuff that didn't pass too.
Larry Berman: In his first year as speaker, he made the CCRI Promise Program.
Steve Ahlquist: That was very important. I know it's hard because it's expensive...
Speaker Shekarchi: Not that expensive. It's worth it because it's done a lot of good things. I do a lot of research. People don't realize this. My team, Steve Kavanaugh, Larry Berman, Lynn Urbani, Danica, Nicole, and Jason, researched every single bill. We go through it politically. We go through it legally. We go through it policy-wise. We look at it fiscally - how much it will cost, who's going to benefit from it. I'm proud of the legislation we pass.
I know there are pluses and minuses for every bill, including my housing package. People don't like it and don't want it because it might have unintended consequences. We go through a process and I'm proud of the process. I'm not going to be Speaker forever. That's the reality. But when I leave, I want to know that I did the best possible job I could do.
Steve Ahlquist: I'm glad you're not leaving to pursue Congress, to be honest. I know that must have been a tough choice. But there's more to do on housing in this state, and you seem to have the commitment and the power to make it happen.
Speaker Shekarchi: Thank you for saying that. That only makes my angst even more because somebody stopped me the other day and said, "You should have ran, you would've won." And I'm like, 'Yeah, but winning doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do."
Larry Berman: He can do more for Rhode Island as Speaker.
Steve Ahlquist: One of the rationales behind passing the online gaming bill is that it will bring more money to the state. We know from studies that online gaming money comes disproportionately from those in poor and marginalized communities.
My thought is, if bringing more money into the state was important, why not pass something like Representative Karen Alzate's Tax the Rich bill, which increases the tax on the richest one percent? That would be targeting people who aren't in the tough position of being poor and marginalized. I want to understand your thoughts on this.
Speaker Shekarchi: Let's talk about the Tax the Rich bill. I know it's a priority of Representative Alzate. We've talked about it. It's very difficult to raise taxes on anybody when you're sitting on huge amounts of federal money and surplus money. We had $600 million of surplus money this year.
We are in a competitive environment with Massachusetts and Connecticut. We have to be careful not to raise our taxes and scare away wealthy Rhode Islanders. Now, more than ever, it's so easy to become a Florida or New Hampshire resident and not pay any taxes and still live here for six months a year. We have Zoom, you can work remotely with Zoom.
The Senate President has been vocal that he's adamantly opposed to it. So I'm not in a rush to pass the bill if it doesn't move in the Senate. I think it's something that needs further discussion. Massachusetts has done it by ballot and theirs starts at a million dollars. Rep Alzate's bill starts at $600k. When we talk about a $600k tax, that could be an extra tax on you when sell your home on the East Side.
All of a sudden, the year you sell that, you're rich. Let's sock it to Steve or whoever. So we need to be careful. I'm not saying I'm opposed to it, I'm open to the idea. But we have to look at the environment we're in, the geographic location we're in. And what is the right number? Is it $600k or a million or somewhere in between?
I also think it's a false narrative. People have unlimited requests for more money and they say "Tax the Rich, Tax the Rich!" You're going to get a finite amount of money out of that. One estimate I saw was around $60 million per year, but the ask is for $600 million a year. What do you do with the other $540 million in asks?
Steve Ahlquist: Well, we eliminated the car tax. We had to find that money somewhere to make it up for it. But towards the end of the elimination of the car tax, we were only talking about cars that belonged to very rich people. My car was excluded the first year and I was like, "That's cool because it's hitting me and people poorer than me." And then the next year it was like, "Okay, it's people a little bit richer than me and people poorer and that's fine." But at a certain point, we're only excluding the car taxes on the very richest people. We could have stopped at any point and after the first two or three years of car tax elimination and said, "This is fine."
Speaker Shekarchi: It was a promise made to everybody. If someone's originally said, we're only going to tax the first $20,000 in value, like we're doing with the tangible tax, that would've been easier to do. But it's very difficult, once you commit to the public, to reverse yourself. Politically, ethically, and morally difficult. If you say you're going to get rid of it for everybody, but in the end not do it, A, you look like you're lying, B, you look like you're ineffective, and C, you're punishing people.
That's why, when we were talking about the tangible tax, we drew the line at $50k a year. If you have a small business, like Lemongrass, and you have less than $50k in inventory, you're exempt.
Well, not exactly exempt. Understand that this is a criticism people like to level at me. "You've grown the budget, you've grown the state.” No. We are reimbursing cities and towns. The City of Warwick, they're still going to get their tax from Lemongrass. Well, they're going to get it from the state and not from Lemongrass.
Online gambling is here. I mean, I don't know if you like the Red Sox but I watch the Red Sox, kind of like misery. But I can't watch one commercial inning without a DraftKings or a FanDuel ad.
We have iLottery. You can go right now. Scratch your tickets and do iLottery on your phone. You can do Keno on your phone right now. One of the things that never got mentioned by anybody in the media, which I thought was important, is that the House, me in particular, and Finance Committee Chairman Marvin Abney - we negotiated, as part of the iGaming contract, a $30 million insurance policy for the state. If our iGaming revenues go down, which I hope they don't, they're predicted not to go down but if they do, Bally's will kick in up to $30 million for the State of Rhode Island. That's significant.
Steve Ahlquist: I'm not opposing gambling here, per se. I'm talking about the logic of it. If we're talking about increasing revenue, then I think we should be talking about increasing it in ways that might not impact poor people the most.
Speaker Shekarchi: I will tell you that the federal money is gone and people should recognize that. Some people want to continue to spend and fund all these programs, but where's that money coming from?
But it's not only new revenue. We're also protecting our investment. We get one-third of our state revenues from gambling. And if we're not allowing the venue to be the latest and greatest and most competitive, then we're hurting ourselves. If you're going to do gambling - and that decision was made 30 years ago before I ever got elected for office - let's do it right. Let's keep our competitive advantage. There are about six or seven states that do iGambling right now. The trend is that they're all going that way. So let's keep our gamblers here in Rhode Island and our gambling revenue protected.
Steve Ahlquist: Passing the Equality in Abortion Care Act was a major victory this year. What are your thoughts?
Speaker Shekarchi: I met this guy. He was a reporter for Uprise and I told him that I would pass it. We passed it on the last day in April. And then you wrote in your story that I interviewed you.
Steve Ahlquist: That was cool. I like being interviewed.
Larry Berman: He reads everything. I make sure he does.
Speaker Shekarchi: It was an important issue to the members of my chamber, particularly Whip Katie Kazarian. It was her number one priority, her number one ask. I recognized how important it was last year. And when you break it down, and I know this might not sound popular, but we in the state already use public funds for abortion. We've been doing it for years. All you needed was a note from a doctor to say it's medically needed. No one asks, no inquires. It's all HIPPA protected and the state will gladly pay for it.
Speaker Shekarchi: The EACA was important to the women in my chamber. It was important to my members and important to me. And I wanted to make a statement. I was talking with the Senate from the very beginning of the session. The governor put it in his budget but I didn't want to wait until the end of the session. Too many things happen so I wanted to pass it early, which we did. There's very little fiscal impact. As I said, it was more symbolic because we already do it and not many people knew it.
Speaker Shekarchi [paying the restaurant bill]: Let me pay for this and leave a tip.
Steve Ahlquist: Tipping is important.
Speaker Shekarchi: I used to be a bartender.
Steve Ahlquist: I worked in restaurants most of my life while in school.
Speaker Shekarchi: You were born and raised in Rhode Island?
Steve Ahlquist: I grew up in Warwick. My little brother went to Aldrich. I went to Lockwood. My parents' old home, on Perkins Street, is in your District, I think.
Speaker Shekarchi: Yes it is. That's in my district.
Steve Ahlquist: There are bills that I’m interested in that maybe don't get a lot of attention. The first one is the Attorney General's bill to allow his office to convene grand jury investigations that result in reports. I know that was important to the AG during his first couple of years in office. I don't know if he's still pushing for it, but why didn’t that happen?
Speaker Shekarchi: The courts didn't like it. The defense bar didn't like it. And it was not a priority for the Attorney General.
Steve Ahlquist: The courts didn't like the usurpation of power or something?
Speaker Shekarchi: The courts thought you'd have people be less truthful and honest. In other words, the grand jury proceeding is not about a finding of guilt. It's an investigatory tool. And the courts felt that people should feel that they can speak freely and not worry about making an allegation or discussing something in public. [Editor: Allegations made in grand juries are not meant to be made public, because they aren't vetted in courts.]
Steve Ahlquist: The other bill is from the Economic Progress Institute. This would attach a social equity statement to each bill. It's something the House could just pass, it wouldn't require Senate approval. The attached statement would acknowledge that House looked into what the impacts of the legislation would be if passed. What do you think of that Bill?
Speaker Shekarchi: I don't even know who had that bill.
Steve Ahlquist: Representative Rebecca Kislak had one of three related bills.
Speaker Shekarchi: It seems like a lot of staff work to put together a statement for every single bill. It might slow down the process because what do we do at the end when we decide to pass a bill and it gets up on the calendar in two days? The bill gets sent to the committee in two days and then two days to the floor. And then we have to stop and do impact statements on each one? As we talked about, we had 2,500 pieces of legislation. Most of those don't pass. Do we put impact statements on those? Economic impacts? Social? There wasn't enough detail in it for me. I don't think the Senate had an appetite for it either. And I don't know if the membership did, other than Rep Kislak. I don't know if there was a groundswell of support for that.
Steve Ahlquist: If we had something like these statements back in the eighties, maybe we could have at least acknowledged that some of the drug war bills we were passing were problematic, racist, and classist before we passed them and put ourselves into a devastating and counterproductive war on drugs.
Speaker Shekarchi: Do you think it would've changed anything though?
Steve Ahlquist: I don't know. It's hard to say. People then were different than they are today. I think we're more open to ideas of impact and equity now than we were then. But having more information about a bill is rarely a bad thing.
Larry Berman: Can I bring up two quick things? The codification of the ACA.
Steve Ahlquist: That was on my list and personally important to me.
Larry Berman: That was Rep Kislak.
Steve Ahlquist: It was important to me. My wife has been dealing with cancer and those ACA protections are important to us because even with the ACA, we are much more in debt than we expected to be at this age.
Speaker Shekarchi: It was important to my members as well, and something that's been kicked around for a long time. We wanted to make sure that we had the proper protections in the bill. There was no fiscal impact. We're already paying for it now. And it's under threat. They say it will never be overturned but they said the same thing about Roe v Wade.
You don't know what's going to happen with the Supreme Court. I felt it was the right time to lock in the protections that currently exist for Rhode Islanders. And I felt comfortable with the amendments that Rep June Speakman put in so we can serve both sides of that debate. And quite frankly, with Roe v Wade and the EACA passage, it was a lot easier to pass that bill.
Larry Berman: And the other one was the added funding we put in the budget for Head Start and daycare funding. That was big.
Steve Ahlquist: As I said, the demand side of the economy needs help as well. We must be paying people adequately. We know that what we traditionally consider to be women's work - teaching, childcare, and eldercare - is some of the lowest-paid work. And it feels very backward that the people who do the most essential work are not paid accordingly.
Speaker Shekarchi: There was federal money left over, and we could use it or lose it. I wasn't going to lose it. Head Start and daycare was the best opportunity.
But also, we're going through a wage study, which should be out by the end of September. That will do a lot of work for providers. That report will be given to the governor and the General Assembly in October. And the governor will have more than ample time to incorporate that in his next budget.
Steve Ahlquist: The wage theft bill is on my list.
Speaker Shekarchi: I never worked so hard on any piece of legislation. Wage theft was the easy part of that bill. It was the misclassification that was difficult. I must have spent 200 hours on it during the last session. We wanted to make sure that people didn't get ripped off for working and that bill helps poor people. I recognized that that was a priority of the Attorney General and it was a priority of my caucus, a priority of mine, and a priority of the labor community.
But real problems are going on with misclassification, primarily in the construction trades. You have people who claim to be paying prevailing wages but are not. They come in and they bid the job so low that you cannot pay a prevailing wage and bid it that low.
So we needed to do that, but we didn't want to overreach. I had a lot of people who said to me this bill is going to hurt realtors or it's going to hurt independent contractors. I could hear and see their fear. I didn't necessarily agree with it, but I was able to craft a bill that surgically attacked the problem as it exists. Also critical, the bill doesn't start until January. There's an education component to it, and there are two separate reporting mechanisms that come back to the General Assembly. The first reporting mechanism comes back from the Department of Labor and Training, which would be the first line to adjudicate that. The second report comes back from the Attorney General.
Steve Ahlquist: Does the bill only cover the construction industry? I thought that retailers and restaurants were excluded.
Speaker Shekarchi: No. Wage theft is everybody. Everybody in the world. Felony wage theft. It's the misclassification part that only applies to the construction industry. That had to be delineated in the law and spelled out, looking at federal and state laws. I looked at Pennsylvania. I spent 200 hours of my life on this. I'm not complaining, it's my job. That's what I do. But 200 hours of my legal brain without any kind of compensation. I didn't work on other projects that I was working on because I was working on this project. I'm proud of it.
Steve Ahlquist: It's an excellent bill. I've experienced wage theft and witnessed it in my life when I was working in restaurants and retail. It's very common.
Steve Ahlquist: The anti-trans legislation from Representative Patricia Morgan never got heard in committee this year.
Speaker Shekarchi: There's no need for it to get heard.
Steve Ahlquist: Environmental Justice Zones passed in the Senate, but didn't get a House vote.
Speaker Shekarchi: Karen Alzate's bill. It needs more work. I'm not sure if there was strong opposition from the labor community because they thought it would impact the offshore wind. I also think the Senate had some regrets after they passed it. I talked to Karen about it. She knows it needs more work and so does [Department of Environmental Management Director] Terry Gray.
Steve Ahlquist: I'm always interested in developing tools to help clean up the Port and combat environmental injustice.
Steve Ahlquist: The school library book-banning bill didn't have a hearing.
Speaker Shekarchi: You make an interesting point. A lot of times everybody wants to give you credit for what passes. But everyone forgets and doesn't talk about what doesn't pass.
Steve Ahlquist: That's why I'm bringing these up.
Speaker Shekarchi: I don't see that passing in any form or shape.
Steve Ahlquist: I also have on my list the bill to increase political donations that passed. What was the thought behind that? It's not a popular bill.
Speaker Shekarchi: It passed overwhelmingly in both chambers, not veto-proof, but it passed. Political contributions hadn't been indexed in 31 years. There was no opposition at all in the committee. One person, I think Pat Crowley from the AFL-CIO, said he was against it but didn't offer any testimony. I looked at the committee process. There was no one opposed to it and it hadn't been indexed in 31 years. Republicans wanted it. Democrats wanted it. The governor's office wanted it. The Senate wanted it. And I didn't hear a lot of people oppose it.
Again, it doesn't go into effect until next year. It doesn't affect anybody in any race this year. I think there was some floor debate on it that didn't center around raising donations from $1000 to $2000. It centered around the $100 exemption. It's now $200 under this bill. Previously if you collected under $100 you didn't have to itemize it on a report. I report everything, so it doesn't matter to me. But that was raised to $200. If you look at what other states are doing, we're still on the low end. I think New York is at $10,000. Other states have some ridiculous amounts. I think $2000 is still on the low end.
Steve Ahlquist: Some people felt it was introduced very late in the session. And it kind of surprised them.
Speaker Shekarchi: It was introduced in February or March. It was introduced early. It was just brought up later in the session.
Steve Ahlquist: Right, it became a Republican priority. And then seemed to percolate through the process real fast. I don't know if people were expecting that.
Speaker Shekarchi: Again, with 2500 bills that's hard to avoid. I can't manage people's expectations.
Steve Ahlquist: Two gun bills were most in people's minds.
Speaker Shekarchi: Two? There were like a hundred gun bills.
Steve Ahlquist: True. But the two that were most in the minds of advocates on both sides were the assault weapon and safe storage bills.
Speaker Shekarchi: I’ve said this to many people: Those bills, in my opinion, are like abortion. People have very strong convictions on both sides of the issue. And I respect both sides of the issue. Those are very difficult bills to move unless you get an agreement with the Senate. The Senate President said, at the Boston Globe forum, that he was opposing those bills. I said I was open to them.
It's hard to move them alone. The Senate President wants a federal solution to assault rifles. Last year when we passed the magazine ban, I had to go down to the committee and vote. That passed on an eight to seven vote. If I didn't grab [Majority Leader] Chris Blazjewski and the two of us didn't vote, that bill would have died.
People might say 80% of the public wants this, but not 80% of the room. I have to weigh both sides of that. When we were making decisions on the gun bills last year, the Attorney General, the governor, and all the so-called experts said, especially the Attorney General told me, "If you take care of the magazines, you are in essence taking care of the assault rifles because that limits the assault rifles." That's why we went there. That bill is being challenged in the court system.
But it's the first year of a two-year term. Next year is five months away. You can pre-file legislation in November. So I'm sure they'll come back. They're perennial issues.
Steve Ahlquist: We're out of time, but is there anything else I should know?
Speaker Shekarchi: I worked very hard on making sure the state got compensated from offshore wind to lay the cable. At first, the state got zero. When we met with Deep Water Wind, I said, "You’ve got to pay for it." And they said, "We don't have to."
"Then you can go to court because I'm saying you have to," I said. We went back and forth and that delayed it. In the end, they offered us like $20,000 or $18,000, some ridiculous number. And I'm like, it's not happening. We want six million dollars. We went back and forth and we got it up or down, depending on your point of view, to $2 million.
We must get compensated for that. That money will ultimately go to the Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council (EC4). It's important because there will be other projects and now we've set the precedent. Other developers, who want to do the same process, have to come to the General Assembly. We've laid down the law, so to speak. We set a precedent and now others are going to have to follow that same precedent. That was the last Sunday of the session. I was with the Senate President. We were at Zorba’s in North Providence. We were going back and forth on iGaming, back and forth on a bunch of stuff, and back and forth on that. We were having conference calls with Deep Water Wind on Sunday at two in the afternoon.
Steve Ahlquist: Before we end I want to make a pitch for minimum wage.
Speaker Shekarchi: We raised it. It's raising this year.
Steve Ahlquist: It's raised, but, because of inflation, it went down last year
Speaker Shekarchi: Inflation rates are coming down though.
Steve Ahlquist: I know they are, but because of inflation, people lost purchasing power. And in a time when apartment rents are going up, it might be time to look at it again.
Speaker Shekarchi: Where is the minimum wage now and what's the schedule?
Steve Ahlquist: It's at $13 and it's scheduled to go to $14 in January. And $15 a year later.
Speaker Shekarchi: Every time you raise the minimum wage, just so you know, inflation goes up.
Steve Ahlquist: They say that. That's not true. I have a report I can send you.
Speaker Shekarchi: I'd like to see it. I've heard both sides of that argument. What I will tell you is that it's going to cost a lot more for me to buy my hamburger than It ever did.
Steve Ahlquist: Maybe. But, in Europe, they pay people living wages and it doesn't cost that much more for a Big Mac. It's one of those things we hear a lot, but it's not true. Economists mostly protect corporations.
Thank you for your time. I appreciate it.
Speaker Shekarchi: My pleasure. Thank you.
I appreciate this interview! Helpful!! Appreciate the issues you advocated for , Steve.
agree with Jen and Jodi, a great interview,. I'll add that Shekarchi made a good impression too, he is so much better as Speaker, in accessibility decency, and in substance, than his predecessors such as Mattiello, Harwood, even though naturally all advocacy groups (including mine) wish he had done more - in my case I think his excuse for giving away big tax benefits for those with lots of luxury cars was pretty lame