By Sam Reisman (May 21, 2024, 9:32 PM EDT) — A California lawyer who has challenged state and local cannabis licensure programs across the country is accusing Rhode Island marijuana regulators of designing a plan to award cannabis retail licenses that unconstitutionally discriminates against out-of-state players….

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RHODE ISLAND — A predicted 3.2 percent 2025 cost-of-living increase for about 71 million Social Security recipients, including about 30,575 people in Rhode Island, may not be enough to keep pace with inflation, according to advocates.

The federal government won’t make a decision on the COLA, as the cost-of-living adjustment is known, until October. Under current government estimates, the COLA would be about 2.6 percent, as it had been for about 20 years before last year’s 3.2 percent increase. The final amount hinges on inflation.

Mary Johnson, an independent Social Security and Medicare analyst who formerly worked for the nonprofit Senior Citizens League, believes the COLA will fall around 3.2 percent. She revised the prediction after April inflation data showed consumer prices were 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, but down slightly from March’s 3.5 percent inflation rate.

Johnson told MarketWatch that even as inflation cools from two-decade highs, all consumers are still feeling less buying power. But increases in some sectors — including housing, up 5.5 percent, electricity, up 5.1 percent and medical care, up 2.7 percent — hit older adults harder, Johnson said.

Even with the increase in 2024 benefits, older Americans’ buying power increased only marginally.

In a statement, Senior Action League executive director Shannon Benton said the 2024 increase only marginally increased older Americans’ buying power. The average benefit increased by about $50, “and after subtracting $9.80 to cover Medicare Part B premium increases, the total change in benefits came to just $40.20 a month.”

Unless the adjustment is increased, “it appears seniors will continue to suffer financial insecurity as much next year as they have this year,” Benton said.

“While COLA payments will increase to offset the effects of inflation, the problem many have with the potential percentage jump is it won’t get far enough to meet most of the financial needs of seniors,” Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek.

“Obviously,” he said, “daily expenses for this age group continue to rise, but the uptick in health care costs are putting an additional strain on them, and COLA payments may not be enough to match that uptick.”

About 71 percent of older Americans who responded to a 2024 survey by The Senior Action League said household costs have exceeded the 3.2 percent increase in benefits.

“The majority of seniors still feel like their costs are rising faster than those annual adjustments,” Michael Ryan, a finance expert and founder and CEO of michaelryanmoney.com, told Newsweek. “So while the COLA certainly helps, it often still doesn’t fully cover the real inflation draining seniors’ buying power.”

According to AARP, 40 percent of Americans 65 and older rely on Social Security for half of their income, and about 14 percent of them rely on benefits for 90 percent of their income.

Have a news tip? Email jimmy.bentley@patch.com.

When you eat an apple, you can do one of two things with the core. You can put it in your garbage can and it will likely end up in Johnston, at Rhode Island’s Central Landfill. There, it will be buried among tons of other organic and non-organic waste. It will break down in the absence of oxygen to release methane, a greenhouse gas that is 28 times as damaging to the climate as carbon dioxide.

Or, you can compost that apple core. Instead of filling up the landfill, it will be converted into a nutrient-rich and valuable product. Instead of contributing to climate change, it can be used to enrich your local soils.

Every day we are mostly choosing that first option here in Rhode Island. And it’s not just an apple core — we are paying millions to haul and dump thousands of pounds of food scraps in our quickly filling landfill.

Compostable material including food scraps accounts for 33 percent of the waste we dump in the landfill. If we keep doing what we’re doing, our landfill will reach capacity and be forced to close by 2046. When that happens, the price we all pay to throw out our trash will increase exponentially as we are forced to ship our waste out of state.

Our neighbors in Massachusetts have already had to go this route, at significant taxpayer cost. Rhode Islanders enjoy the lowest costs in New England to throw out our trash and we want to keep it that way. Extending the life of the landfill is the best way to keep our costs down – and investing in composting is an essential part of that.

That’s why we recently proposed new legislation that aims to fund composting and organic waste diversion programs with just a $2 per ton surcharge on the trash we send to the landfill, a strategy that is already working in 12 other states. The money generated from that small fee will go right back into our cities and towns through a grant program, funding things like compost facility builds, curbside service for residents, and organic waste diversion education.

Reducing food waste dumped in the landfill will bring down waste hauling costs on our cities and towns, and that small surcharge will quickly result in savings. Composting is an affordable, scalable solution to our waste crisis that we should be implementing in every community, and this program will put us on the right track.

In 2023, municipalities in Rhode Island spent over $23 million to landfill over 350,000 tons of waste. Imagine if we removed a third of those totals from the equation!

Cutting down on waste not only extends the life of our only landfill, it’s also good climate and economic policy. Let’s change the way we look at our food scraps. Instead of turning them into polluting garbage, let’s give them a second life enriching our soils. Let’s provide our communities with common-sense, long-term solutions that are cost effective and sustainable in every sense of the word. The action we take now will pay dividends for decades to come.

Senator Bridget Valverde, a Democrat representing parts of East Greenwich, North Kingstown and South Kingstown, and Representative Terri Cortvriend, a Democrat representing parts of Portsmouth and Middletown, are the sponsors of the Composting and Organic Waste Diversion Act (S 2753 / H 7856).