Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung: Broaden outreach to reach more in the urban core in the pandemic

Broad Street in Central Falls

While medical professionals stare down Round #2 of our COVID-19 nightmare, the arrival of a vaccine in Rhode Island is like the bright stars on top of our trees this holiday season.  Indeed, it is a beacon of hope for so many whose loved ones have been afflicted by the disease and  for those who have cared for those patients for the past 10 months.  

So it is imperative that we learn from the bumps in the road in testing rollouts earlier this year.  When negative national headlines surrounded such communities as Central Falls, where the consequences of socio-economic disparities created a horrific storm of disease transmission, government was on its heels when trying to right the ship to create buy-in for the vaccine's  distribution and use in our very diverse communities. 

This is particularly a challenge in urban-core neighborhoods, where there is a large non-native English-speaking population and where many use languages that do not use Latin-based alphabets. Very few and far between are the official government communications in Khmer script for our Cambodian residents, or Chinese pictographs, or Arabic for our neighbors from the Middle East.  My own mother-in-law's native language is Cantonese, and I can remember her not quite understanding the full scope of COVID as it hit Rhode Island.  But once my husband, Allan Fung, who had to deal with some of these issues as Cranston’s mayor, laid it out in her native language, she became the biggest promoter of guidance from our public-health leaders.  To have better outcomes, we need to go the extra mile in different languages via digital video communications, mailers and multilingual media entities to reach those we didn't  reach the last time around.  

And effective communications also include having the right messenger.  That, in some cultures, may not be a government official.  Indeed, the cultural aspects of medicine are often overlooked in the midst of a pandemic when time is of the essence.  Yet revered religious leaders or well-known community organizers might be the best people to connect with marginalized communities and work through cultural hesitations towards medical treatments. 

As we look toward mass vaccination,  let’s start now in connecting with these influencers in our faith communities and social organizations to create a more cohesive and effective community response.  Government officials need to engage with, and empower, other community leaders here, and  not act as if they alone had the right answers.  

We all can agree that 2020 was a year of challenges, including many that will stick around in 2021.  As we enter the new year, we should vow to be smarter and more inclusive in our approach to beating the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure that we lift everyone, in communities from rich to poor, up and across the finish line.  

Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung (MSPT) is a physical therapist, whose expertise includes the cultural aspects of medicine. She is also a Republican state representative-elect from Cranston.

Some COVID-19 symptoms

The essential monster of Central Falls

The Wyatt Detention Center, in Central Falls, R.I.

I can see why many of the good people of Central Falls don’t like having the privately run Wyatt Detention Center in their heavily Hispanic city, especially since the jail has controversially housed some illegal aliens from South of Border. But the tiny and impoverished city needs the tax revenue from the facility, which employs some locals.

Perhaps when the ballyhooed new passenger train station/bus hub opens in 2022 in Pawtucket, making the two cities more accessible to people from Greater Boston seeking more affordable housing, and boosting local small businesses, tiny Central Falls will gain enough new tax revenue to offset the closure of Wyatt. The new transit center will connect riders to Boston and Providence and some Massachusetts communities in-between, as well as to T.F. Green Airport's InterLink and Wickford Junction. It might gradually transform Central Falls.

And would the looming prison be torn down, or could the relatively new structure (opened in 1993) be used for, say, some manufacturing and/or distribution functions? A high-security luxury hotel?

Chris Powell: As in Detroit and Central Falls, bankruptcy could finally make Hartford responsible

Constitution Plaza, in downtown Hartford.

Advocates of a financial bailout for Hartford city government warn that a bankruptcy filing by the city will be a "black eye" for Connecticut, as if the state isn't already mortified by the failure of Gov. Dan Malloy and the General Assembly to enact a budget three months into the new fiscal year.

But last week a series of investigative reports by Eric Parker of WFSB-TV3 in Hartford examined the recent municipal bankruptcy reorganizations in Detroit and Central Falls, R.I., and concluded that the cities have greatly improved as a result.

Hartford's situation is much like those in Detroit and Central Falls before their bankruptcies, with debt and pension obligations outpacing revenue. Indeed, the two federal judges who handled Detroit's bankruptcy reviewed Hartford's financial data and recommended bankruptcy. While Hartford's city government would lose authority during a bankruptcy, the Detroit judges suggested that Mayor Luke Bronin could be appointed the city's emergency manager, thereby preserving some democratic supervision in the process.

Detroit, which long had been losing population and was becoming a giant slum, dragging its suburbs down with it, began to revive at the moment of its bankruptcy filing, Parker reported. That's when businesses gained confidence that management of the city would become responsible. Downtown is prospering again and real estate values in the city and its suburbs have risen sharply.

Detroit's bondholders and bond insurers absorbed huge losses, pensioners smaller but still substantial loses. The blow to pensioners in Central Falls was harder. But there probably won't be much private-sector investment in Hartford until the city, which is not only broke but riddled with corruption and incompetence, is reorganized both financially and politically, and that can't be done without pain.

After all, just in the last few weeks former Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez pleaded guilty to bribery and a developer, James C. Duckett Jr., was convicted of defrauding the city of hundreds of thousands of dollars in the guise of building a soccer stadium. Of course, Hartford's new minor-league baseball stadium was completed last year at $30 million or so beyond its $50 million budget even as city government had become insolvent and had stopped maintaining its schools.

The $50 million Mayor Bronin wants in additional aid from state government so that the city might avoid bankruptcy -- and probably only postpone it -- would pass the bill for the stadium along to municipalities that are not quite as corrupt and incompetent as Hartford is.

Far from giving Connecticut another "black eye," bankruptcy for Hartford would restore virtue to the city's bondholders and unionized employees, who long have been operating as if the city will be rescued financially no matter how incompetent and corrupt it becomes. For the bondholders and unions have enough political influence to prevent incompetence and corruption. Instead the bondholders have been indifferent and the unions have encouraged city government to keep giving the store away, especially to themselves.  

Imagine how different Hartford might be if, instead of assuming that state government would underwrite its corruption and incompetence forever, the bondholders and the unions were compelled to audit city government constantly to maintain its fiscal responsibility, thereby insuring their bonds and pensions.

But while cities can file bankruptcy, states can't, and the way things are going, Connecticut state government soon may be little more than a pension and benefit society cannibalizing public services.


Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

 

They should have an urge to merge

Central Falls City Hall a reminder of the city's industrial-era prosperity.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary'' in Golocal24.com

Congratulations to tiny Central Falls, R.I.  Moody’s Investors Service, touting financial progress in Rhode Island’s smallest city, raised the city’s bond rating by a notch and says it may well achieve an investment-grade rating within 12-24 months. The city is on schedule to complete its court-ordered post-bankruptcy recovery plan by June 30.

Now all eyes turn to a couple of proposed projects. The most important by far is to build a train station in Pawtucket, next to Central Falls and hyperbolically called "The birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution,'' to serve it and Central Falls with MBTA (and maybe eventually Amtrak?) rail service. It now appears that this $40 million project, funded by federal, state and local money, will probably go forward, with completion by sometime in 2019.

What a boon this would be to the two old mill towns! It would attract business and by making more accessible the inexpensive housing in them, could lure people from very expensive Greater Boston. Actually, for that matter, it would help make northern Rhode Island more part of Greater Boston than it already is.

The project, by taking cars off the road, would also reduce traffic congestion on Route 95 and some local roads.

The other project is the Pawtucket Red Sox plan to build a baseball stadium surrounded by a public park, on the site of the Apex store in downtown Pawtucket. A carefully financed public-private project could lure a lot of people into both Pawtucket and Central Falls from a wide two-state region and pay for itself in more property- and sales-tax revenue. But we still don’t know the financial and many other details of this still rather vague plan. The public is quite properly leery of such raids on the taxpayers as Hartford’s infamous new $71 million Dunkin’ Donuts Park – another slam at the finances of what used to be called “the Insurance Capital of the World’’.

 Once Central Falls  fully has its act together, it, Pawtucket and the state should work together to merge the two cities. Central Falls is far too small to be a separate jurisdiction. The cities should seek the economies of scale that would come from a merger.

Bankruptcy filing would be a basis for Providence resurgence

From Robert Whitcomb's Dec. 15 "Digital Diary'' in GoLocal24.com.

Ken Block, the systems analyst and formerRhode Island gubernatorial candidate, and Alan Hassenfeld, former CEO of Hasbro, are right to urge that Providence promptly be put into bankruptcy protection. (I have said for years that the city should do this.)

The city’s vast $1.9 billion liability for unfunded pensions and capacious retiree health benefits, and largely intransigent municipal unions, make it impossible for the city to dig itself out of its hole unless it goes into bankruptcy, with a  highly experienced, decisive and tough receiver appointed by a federal judge to make drastic and long-overdue changes.

The aforementioned liabilities can be blamed largely on  past mayors’ (especially the late, outstandingly corrupt  thug Vincent Cianci) sweetheart deals with labor unions in return for their political support,  and wishful thinking about, for instance, the rates of return possible for the city’s investments.

Paying for this immense debt eats up money that otherwise could go into better city services and lower taxes. Better services and lower taxes would, of course, make Providence much more attractive to taxpaying businesses and individuals that might consider moving to it. The city’ssuperb location, distinguished educational and other institutions (albeit too many of themofficially “nonprofit’’ and thus sharing little of  the tax burden) and many cultural charms would have drawn many businesses, large and small, over the past few decades if its fiscal condition had been healthy.

Providence is already effectively bankrupt. It’s past time to accept that and enter a fast and efficient bankruptcy process. Detroit has recently done just that and is now enjoying a revival. So has Central Falls. And Providence has much more going for it in the long run than Detroit, especially in  location and institutions. It’s embarrassing for politicians and residents in general to admit that their city is bankrupt, but energizing to know that bankruptcy can help shovel out the manure left by years of irresponsible governance.

Disinfecting Providence’s finances would, of course, be a big boost to all of Rhode Island, which is in many ways a city-state, and indeed to all of southeastern New England, of which Providence is the center.