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DeSmog
Mar 11, 2019 @ 15:57
Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, squashed a letter by her own state health agency, which raised serious concerns about a proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in a densely populated Providence neighborhood. Documents obtained by DeSmog show that last summer Raimondo nixed a letter by the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) critical of National Grid’s Fields Point Liquefaction project right before it was to be submitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
FERC approved the project three months later.
“Sadly, I’m not surprised by this,” Monica Huertas, coordinator for No LNG in PVD, an umbrella group of various organizations and citizens who have been fighting the facility since 2014, told DeSmog. “She’s always said this is a federal matter and there was nothing she could do, but now we see that she could do something and that she was involved.”
Through thick, thin, and even a pandemic that virtually shut down legislating last year, Rhode Islanders stuck by their lobbyists.
Ocean State companies and organizations spent $12.4 million in lobbying fees in 2020, according to a summary of reports filed with Secretary of State
Nellie Gorbea s office.
That s around $100,000 more than state-registered lobbyists collected in 2019, despite being mostly exiled from the State House last March and told that almost no new policies would pass.
Good work if you can get it. And maybe not as surprising as it may seem.
After all, since the virus struck and Congress stepped in with more than a billion dollars in help, the importance of public-sector spending is more important to business success than before.
David Spradin is the CEO of a California-based marijuana company called Perfect Union.
It has 14 marijuana stores between Los Angeles and Sacramento, six stores in New Mexico and has had stores in Oregon and Washington, says Rick McAuliffe, a Rhode Island lobbyist who now also serves as a director for Spradin’s new local affiliate: Perfect Union-RI.
The company and 27 other businesses all filed applications last month for a chance to run one of six new medical marijuana dispensaries planned for Rhode Island.
While Spradin’s local venture incorporated just in November, the Californian has been around, buying up one marijuana cultivation operation, in Warwick, and purchasing a Providence site for a possible second indicators of the interest some outside investors have with Rhode Island’s booming, multimillion-dollar marijuana industry.