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New laws in 2025; Pacino arrest; 2024’s dining highlights: Top stories this week
Providence rings in the new year
Illuminate PVD: New Year’s Eve Celebration and Fireworks at 195 District Park and the Van Leesen Pedestrian bridge
Here are some of The Providence Journal’s most-read stories for the week of Dec. 29, supported by your subscriptions.
- We’re now several days into 2025, but forgive us for still taking some backward glances to make sense of all that happened in 2024, which was … a lot. Who better to put things in perspective with tongue firmly in cheek than columnist Mark Patinkin – from the evolving mess of the Washington Bridge, to the weddings of Olivia Culpo and Elizabeth Beisel, to the arrival of giant trolls in Charlestown and elephants in Newport, not to mention all the celebrity sightings during the filming of “Ella McCay” and the Watch Hill visits by Taylor Swift and her A-List posse.
- You might not expect newsworthy stories to spring from the real estate listings, but again, Rhode Island did not disappoint. We even had a historic island for sale.
- In sports, Jacob Rousseau reflects on his first year with The Journal, including that rookie mistake he made in the Fenway Park press box. His colleague Bill Koch looks ahead with predictions on what 2025 will bring for the college hoops scene in Rhode Island. For those stories and other college, high school and Patriots action, go to providencejournal.com/sports.
Here are the week’s top reads on providencejournal.com:
PROVIDENCE – New Year’s Day ushers in a raft of new state laws, and the final step in a years-long march to a $15-an-hour minimum wage for Rhode Island.
Some of these laws were debated and passed during the legislative session that ended in June, and others years earlier with phased-in effective dates, as was true with the minimum wage law passed in 2021 that raised the rate from $11.50 to $15 an hour over four years.
Other laws taking effect on Jan. 1 include one of the most popular to emerge from the 2024 session, benefiting those age 65 and older. Read the full story for a rundown of changes affecting Rhode Islanders in 2025.
Politics: Minimum wage hike, flavored vape ban and more: These new RI laws go into effect Jan. 1
PROVIDENCE – As feared, the hackers who breached Rhode Island’s expansive, Deloitte-run public benefits computer system RIBridges have released “at least some” files to a site on the dark web, the governor’s office disclosed on Monday.
“Right now, IT teams are working diligently to analyze the released files,” the governor’s office reported in a news release that went out at 11:52 a.m.
“We do not yet know the scope of the data that is included in those files, but as we’ve been saying for several weeks, we should assume that data contained in the RIBridges system has been compromised,” the statement said of the benefits system formerly known as UHIP.
The system contains the records of roughly 650,000 people who are receiving – or have previously received – Medicaid and SNAP (formerly known as Food Stamps), or who enrolled in private health insurance through HealthSourceRI.
Data breach: Stolen info from RIBridges hack being posted to the dark web. What to know.
In 2018, Timothy and Anne-Marie Corbett paid $2.2 million for a four-bedroom home near Sandy Point Beach in Portsmouth. The real estate listing featured photographs of a lush, green lawn with panoramic Sakonnet River views and gushingly described it as “one of the most spectacular waterfront sites available.”
Over the years, that lawn has grown smaller as the ocean has gotten closer. According to the Corbetts’ lawyer, Michael A. Kelly, approximately 30 feet of the couple’s property washed away in storms during the last two winters.
He blames the Coastal Resources Management Council, which prohibited the Corbetts from using heavy boulders to fortify the crumbling bluffs at the edge of their backyard – a defense mechanism that can help stave off erosion but often at the expense of neighboring properties and nearby beaches.
In December, Kelly filed a class action lawsuit that alleges it’s unconstitutional for the CRMC to stop homeowners from taking such steps to reduce erosion. He expects dozens of other waterfront property owners to join in.
Read on to learn more about the latest chapter in Rhode Island’s tug of war between public shoreline access and private property rights.
Political Scene: RI couple’s lawsuit challenges whether CRMC has say over homeowners’ seawalls. Why it matters.
It has the ring of an urban legend.
So it’s easy to understand why one What and Why RI reader wrote in to ask, “Was Al Pacino really arrested in Rhode Island?”
But it’s true.
Years before he made his movie debut, Pacino was briefly inmate #48634 at the Adult Correctional Institutions, which listed his occupation as “unemployed.” He’d been picked up by the Woonsocket Police Department early on the morning of Jan. 7, 1961, and charged with possession of a concealed weapon.
What happened next? Read the full story to find out.
What and Why RI: Was Al Pacino really arrested in Rhode Island? Here’s the story
As 2024 drew to a close, Journal food editor Gail Ciampa declared that it was one delicious year.
Restaurants and chefs in Rhode Island put on a remarkable show. Ten were honored with James Beard Foundation nominations, widely considered the Oscars of the dining world. Many were noted for excellence by Yelp, the crowd-sourcing platform and Open Table, the reservation company. National media including the New York Times and USA Today cited several for excellence.
Here are five experiences that topped Gail’s list. Will they be on your menu of dining destinations for 2025?
Dining: Five memorable meals across RI made 2024 a delicious year. The places to try in 2025
To read the full stories, go to providencejournal.com. Find out how to subscribe here.
New East Bay Bike Path bridges are open and ready for bikes
What’s it like to ride over the new East Bay Bike Path bridges? We sent a reporter to try them out.
I’ve long thought bike paths are among Rhode Island’s premier attractions, up there with the beaches, the mansions and the bay.
We like to knock government, but credit where it’s due, the state has done an amazing job building out an incredible pedaling network.
It’s clearly a priority.
At least I thought it was.
But they’ve just dropped the ball on what should have been a beautiful new stretch.
The plan was to finish a mile-long connector from the East Providence end of the Henderson Bridge all the way to the East Bay Bike Path.
There was even $25 million set aside to get it done.
Except WPRI recently reported that it’s now been canceled.
The main fault lies with the Trump administration, which is no friend of bike paths, and moved to kill that $25 million.
But it gets complicated, as government funding always does.
To try to rescue that money, the state DOT reportedly worked with the administration to refunnel it into a road project. Specifically, the $25 million will now be spent helping upgrade the mile-long highway between the Henderson Bridge and North Broadway in East Providence, turning it into a more pleasant boulevard.
That totally sounds worthy.
But it’s insane to throw away the bike path plan.
Especially for a particular reason in this case.
They’d already put a ton of money into starting it.
When state planners designed the new Henderson Bridge between the East Side and East Providence, they included a bike path.
It’s a beauty – well protected from traffic by a barrier, a great asset for safely riding over the Seekonk River.
The plan was to continue it another mile or so along East Providence’s Waterfront Drive, ultimately connecting with the East Bay Bike Path, which runs all the way to Bristol. Which, by the way, is one of the nicest bike paths you’ll find anywhere.
But alas, that connector plan has been canceled.
So the expensive stretch over the Henderson Bridge to East Providence is now a bike path to nowhere. Once the bridge ends, the path on it continues a few hundred yards or so and then, just … ends.
Too bad.
We were so close.
Most of the stories on the issue have been about the complex negotiation to rescue the $25 million by rerouting it to that nearby highway-to-boulevard project. But I don’t want to get lost in the weeds of that bureaucratic process here because it loses sight of the heart of this story.
Which is that an amazing new addition to one of the nation’s best state bike path systems has just been scrapped.
You can knock the Rhode Island government for blowing a lot of things.
The PawSox.
The Washington Bridge.
But they’ve done great with bike paths.
And especially, linking many of them together.
Example: not too many years ago, Providence bikers had to risk dicey traffic on the East Side to get to the more pleasant paths in India Point Park and on the 195 bridge to the East Bay Path.
But the state fixed that by adding an amazing connector that starts behind the Salvation Army building and beautifully winds along the water of the Seekonk River for a mile or so.
That makes a huge difference – and no doubt has avoided some bike-car accidents.
We were close to a comparable stretch on the other side of the river – that’s what the $25 million would have done.
But it’s now apparently dead.
Online commenters aren’t happy about it.
On a Reddit string, “Toadscoper” accused the state of being “complicit” with the feds in rerouting the money from bikes to cars.
And there was this fascinating post from FineLobster 5322, who apparently is a disappointed planner who worked on the project: “Mind you money has already been spent on phase one so rejecting it at this point is wasting money and also against the public interest … but what do I know? I only worked on the project as an engineer … I didn’t get into this to build more highways. I do it … to give back to communities and give them more access to their environment.”
Wow. One can imagine the state planning team is devastated. That’s not a small consideration. Good people go into government to make life better in Rhode Island, and it’s a bad play to take the spirit out of the job by first assigning a great human-scale project and then, after a ton of work, trashing it.
A poster named Homosapiens simply said, “We just accept this?”
Hopefully not.
The first stretch of the path over the Henderson Bridge is done, money already sunk.
What a shame to leave that as a path to nowhere.
It doesn’t have to happen.
Between Governor McKee and our Washington delegation, there’s got to be a way to get this done.
There’s got to be.
mpatinki@providencejournal.com
WARWICK, R.I. (WPRI) — Two people are dead and another person seriously hurt after a crash involving two vehicles on the highway in Warwick Saturday.
Rhode Island State Police said the crash happened around 1:34 p.m. on the ramp from Route 113 West to I-95 South.
According to police, a Hyundai SUV that was driving in the middle lane of the highway started to drift to the right, crossed the first lane, and then crossed onto the on-ramp lane. The car struck the guardrail twice before driving through the grass median.
The Hyundai then struck the driver’s side of a Mercedes SUV that was on the ramp, causing the Mercedes to roll over and come to a rest. The impact sent the Hyundai over the guardrail and down an embankment.
The driver of the Hyundai, a 73-year-old man, and his passenger, a 69-year-old woman, were both pronounced dead at the hospital.
A woman who was in the Mercedes was rushed to Rhode Island Hospital in critical condition.
State police said all lanes of traffic were reopened by 4:30 p.m.
The investigation remains ongoing.
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A federal judge on Friday tossed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit aiming to force Rhode Island to hand over its voter information as part of the Trump administration’s push to acquire voter data from several states.
Rhode Island U.S. District Court Judge Mary McElroy wrote that federal law does not allow the DOJ “to conduct the kind of fishing expedition it seeks here,” siding with Rhode Island election officials. She added that the DOJ did not provide evidence to suggest that Rhode Island violated election law.
McElroy, a Trump appointee, wrote that she sided with the similar decision in Oregon. That decision ruled that the DOJ was not entitled to unredacted voter registration lists.
“Absent from the demand are any factual allegations suggesting that Rhode Island may be violating the list maintenance requirements,” she said in her ruling.
Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore (D) praised McElroy’s decision. He said in a statement that the Trump administration “seems to have no problem taking actions that are clear Constitutional overreaches, regularly meddling in responsibilities that are the rights of the states.”
“Today’s decision affirms our position: the United States Department of Justice has no legal right to – or need for – the personally-identifiable information in our voter file,” he said. “Voter list maintenance is a responsibility entrusted to the states, and I remain confident in the steps we take here in Rhode Island to keep our list as accurate as possible.”
The Hill reached out to the DOJ for comment.
The DOJ called for the voter lists as it investigated Rhode Island’s compliance with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which allowed Americans to register to vote when they apply for a driver’s license.
The DOJ sued at least 30 states, as well as Washington, D.C., in December demanding their respective voter data. This data includes birth dates, names and partial Social Security numbers.
At least 12 states have given or said they will give the DOJ their voter registration lists, according to a tracker operated by the Brennan Center for Justice.
The department stated after it lost a similar suit against Massachusetts earlier this month that it had “sweeping powers” to access the voter data and that, if states fail to comply, courts have a “limited, albeit vital, role” in directing election officers on behalf of the administration to produce the records. The DOJ cited the Civil Rights Act as being intended to unearth alleged election law violations.
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