RI Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor to quit, run for state treasurer

PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor is leaving his present $232,778 a 12 months cupboard publish in two weeks to run for state treasurer.

Pryor’s long-anticipated announcement on Tuesday creates a two-way contest for the Democratic nomination between Pryor and former Central Falls Mayor James Diossa. The winner will face North Kingstown Finance Director Jim Lathrop, a Republican.

It’s not but clear who will take Pryor’s place at Rhode Island Commerce. However he promised that within the two weeks earlier than he steps into his new position – as a candidate – Pryor mentioned he wouldn’t settle for any marketing campaign contributions from any Rhode Island-based donors.

In Rhode Island, the state treasurer oversees the state-run state worker, trainer and municipal worker retirement funds, the funding of greater than $10 billion in pension-fund property and a crime-victims compensation fund.

For months after his Yale Regulation Faculty classmate Gina Raimondo resigned as Rhode Island governor to take a Biden cupboard publish in March 2021, political oddsmakers guess her commerce secretary would comply with her to Washington.

However that was not the place Pryor, 50, hoped to land subsequent.

If elected, Pryor – in an unique interview with The Journal –  mentioned he would double down on term-limited Treas. Seth Magaziner’s faculty building bond marketing campaign.

However he described an extended record of latest packages and targets he hoped to usher in, together with the funding of extra state {dollars} in “Rhode Island-based property,” and the creation of a state-backed “mortgage loss reserve” for personal financial institution loans

“I imagine that the platform of the treasurer’s workplace might be utilized to help small companies, to put money into inexperienced vitality, to help people and households who’re unable to entry the banking system of our state.”

Some private info about Pryor: he’s the son of two public faculty lecturers. He ran for workplace as soon as earlier than – whereas nonetheless an under-graduate at Yale – and served a short while as an alderman in New Haven, Conn.

Pryor held off saying till the year-old McKee administration was able to announce the phrases of the deal that Pryor has been working – and re-working behind the scenes – to avoid wasting the long-empty “Superman” constructing that defines the skyline in downtown Windfall.

The magnitude of the proposed state and native subsidies – and the potential value to purchase or lease the 285 envisioned flats within the reborn financial institution constructing – have sparked some controversy.

However Pryor – who’s bullish on the potential for the proposed deal that caps his seven years in authorities – mentioned Tuesday he negotiated exhausting, driving the dimensions of the state subsidy package deal down from the $48 million the constructing proprietor wished to $26 million.

He mentioned the 20% inexpensive housing carve-out within the deal will embrace properties for “low-income residents in addition to people and households who’re firefighters, lecturers, cops and nurses.”

Pryor was certainly one of then-Governor-elect Raimondo’s first cupboard picks in December 2014, when she employed him away from his then job as Connecticut’s commissioner of training, to develop into Rhode Island’s first commerce secretary.

Earlier than that, he served 5 years as Newark’s deputy mayor and director of financial and housing growth underneath then-Mayor Cory Booker. Pryor additionally labored as president for the Decrease Manhattan Improvement Company, created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror assaults to coordinate financial revitalization of Decrease Manhattan.

As head of the Manhattan redevelopment after, he mentioned, he “efficiently managed the funding of billions of {dollars}.” 

And now Pryor – who by advantage of his previous positions, has targeted on increase the reputations of rising Democratic leaders on the East Coast – has to promote himself as one of the best certified successor to Magaziner, who’s operating for Congress.