Lawmakers are frantically finishing number-crunching and negotiating ahead of a fiscal 2026 budget reveal, tentatively Tuesday night.
Equally frenzied are advocates looking to make a final push for their causes by hosting a State House rally or press conference. Demand for rooms is quickly exceeding availability.
“At this point in the session, it’s hard to break through the noise,” Jed Thorp, advocacy director for Save the Bay, said.
Last Thursday, Thorp managed to join lawmakers and environmentalists for a press conference in the House Lounge to push for passage of the hotly debated bottle bill. Down the hall, Attorney General Peter Neronha simultaneously pushed for raising Medicaid rates for primary care providers, while gun safety advocates converged on the House of Representatives leading up to a vote on an assault weapons ban.
Ahead of the much-anticipated climax in the legislative session, here are three bills to watch as the Rhode Island General Assembly races toward the finish line:
1. Tax the rich
The longstanding push to raise taxes on high-income residents has gained new attention this year, with organizers hitching their wagon to striking Butler Hospital workers, whose cries for better pay, among other demands, could be met with the revenue generated from a tax on the top 1% of earners.
“For both SEIU leadership and for the workers, they see a direct connection between [Butler President and COO] Mary Marran not hammering out an agreement on what is fair, and the funding of the system overall that could be helped by passing a wealth tax,” said Zack Mezera, political director for the Rhode Island Working Families Party. Both SEIU 1199 and the Working Families Party through its legislative arm, Working Families Power, are advocates for the wealth tax.
Doreen Gagivan, a spokesperson for Care New England, which owns Butler, said the proposed income tax was unrelated to the labor dispute.
“Throughout Butler’s negotiations with SEIU 1199 NE, the Hospital has remained committed to reaching a fair agreement that supports our dedicated caregivers by offering meaningful improvements in staffing, safety, wages, benefits, and retirement security,” Gavigan said in an emailed statement Monday.
But Mezera hopes the attention on the plight of Butler workers might put the wealth tax higher on this year’s legislative agenda.
It helps, too, that the proposal would bring in an extra $190 million a year to state coffers, according to estimates by Economic Progress Institute — sorely needed as lawmakers grapple with a projected $185 million deficit for fiscal 2026 and potentially devastating federal funding cuts.
“In past years, we’ve said things like, ‘We really have to get this done or else the cuts are going to happen,” Mezera said. “This coming year, we’re talking about it in much clearer terms: a third of RIPTA routes being gone, the closing of full hospitals. It’s a pretty dire situation.”
And while opposition from business groups like the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council and Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce remains, Mezera feels like their countermovement has dwindled. There are no traditional advertisements put out by opposition this year, for example, to plug their message that raising taxes on the rich will hurt businesses and the economy.
Meanwhile, the Revenue for Rhode Islanders coalition has hosted at least a dozen State House events since the session began in January, garnering support from other groups, including transit riders, child care workers and health care providers.
One potential wrinkle: There are more groups clamoring for money than the wealth tax would generate in a single year. The legislation as drafted does not specify how the state could spend the additional revenue from a wealth tax.
“We are kind of just taking that concern and swallowing it, and saying we’ll worry about that later,” Mezera said. “There are some very, very smart people in the State House so we hope they will put that money toward RIPTA, and Medicaid and early education in a way that makes sense.”
House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi and Senate President Valarie Lawson have remained noncommittal, though Lawson and Senate Majority Leader Frank Ciccone are cosponsors of the Senate version of the wealth tax bill.
2. Raising Medicaid reimbursement rates
Health care providers have for years decried Rhode Island’s lower rates, compared with neighboring states and with commercial insurers — it’s hard to attract and keep doctors, nurses and other critical health care professionals if they can make more money somewhere else. And unlike other longstanding debates on Smith Hill, there’s little opposition, at least in theory.
The biggest barrier to more sweeping rate hikes: price.
When lawmakers agreed to include the $160 million cost in fiscal 2025 to raise Medicaid rates for behavioral, community and at-home care providers, the state was still flush with federal pandemic aid cash to spend. That money is mostly no longer available, but the asks for rate hikes kept coming.
The Hospital Association of Rhode Island has thrown its weight behind a joint resolution asking for $90 million to increase Medicaid payments to physicians and advanced practice providers. Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha came out with his own, more targeted proposal on May 28, which would increase Medicaid payments to primary care providers to match Medicare rates, for an estimated $50 million cost. Neronha hosted a second press conference on the Medicaid rate proposal at the State House on June 5.
In a later interview, Neronha said he tried to hone in on a smaller group of the most critical health care workers — for a lower cost — to increase chances for success.
“We were looking at what was possible, not an aspiration,” he said in an interview.
Even that might be too costly.
Sen. Pam Lauria, a Barrington Democrat and a nurse practitioner, has proposed a third option, increasing Medicaid patients to 130% of Medicare payments for pediatricians. For Lauria, the $7 million cost to raise rates for primary care providers for children, along with funding to prop up Rhode Island’s federally qualified health centers for uninsured and underserved residents, were the most important priorities of the session.
“There’s a lot of need out there,” Lauria said. “We just can’t help all of primary care at once. So when we think about rate review, I think we need to look at which groups are the most vulnerable.”
Lauria also supports Gov. Dan McKee’s plan to speed up the states’ review of Medicaid rates for other primary care providers, mandating a September 2026 completion date rather than the following year.
Neronha, a vocal adversary and critic of McKee, disagreed.
“I don’t think we need to study rates further,” he said. “Most people would agree with that, including people working in health care.”
More broadly, Neronha said the governor and lawmakers have failed to correctly prioritize health care in initial budget discussions rather than in the final revisions at the end of the session, when money is scarce and requests are many.
“It’s like a family budget,” he said. ‘You budget for the most important things first, not last. It’s only now dawning on people that health care should be the center of the family budget — meaning the state budget — not at the end of it.”
Medicaid rate reimbursements for providers will likely be incorporated into the state budget, rather than as standalone bills, said Greg Paré and Larry Berman, spokespeople for Lawson and Shekarchi, respectively.
3. Bottle bill or not?
Amid disagreement between environmentalists and beverage industry representatives over the mechanics of a bottle bill, lawmakers kicked the can down the road in 2023 by punting the issue to a legislative study commission.
But after the 20-member panel came back with recommendations, forming the basis for a trio of bills introduced in April, consensus proved elusive. As advocates pressed for lawmakers to finally pass the proposed 10-cent bottle-deposit refund program, beverage manufacturers and retailers stepped up their opposition, repurposing a website formerly used to oppose a tax on sugary drinks to market their opposition to the bottle bill. The Stop the Rhode Island Bottle Tax Coalition also released a survey funded by the American Beverage Association showing a majority of residents don’t support a bottle bill. The poll directly contradicted the findings of another commissioned by Save the Bay several months prior, showing support for a 10-cent deposit on recyclable containers based on environmental concerns.
Thorp with Save the Bay claimed opponents misrepresented the legislation, which was modified significantly to assuage industry concerns. In legislative hearings last month, some retailers referenced provisions no longer in the bill, Thorp said. Among them: Retailers would no longer be required to take empty containers, a task now handed to a nonprofit contractor hired by the beverage industry to set up and run redemption centers to take back empties.
Opponents refer to the proposed 10-cent deposit on recyclable bottles and cans as a “tax.” Thorp calls that “intentionally misleading” because the upfront fee would be returned to customers who bring back their empty bottles and cans.
Christopher Hunter, a spokesperson for the Stop the Bottle Tax group, countered that the proposal would “significantly” increase the costs of beverages sold in Rhode Island.
“Most Rhode Islanders already pay for convenient curbside recycling and will choose not to lug bags of cans and bottles back to a store to wait in line and feed them into a machine one at a time, not to mention the seniors and people with limited mobility who will have difficulty doing it,” Hunter said in an emailed statement. “For all those people, who are likely the majority of Rhode Islanders, the bottle bill is a new, high-priced tax.”
The many groups and interests affected by a deposit-refund program, not to mention the complexities of how to run it — evidenced by the 57-page piece of legislation — make it a tough political sell, Thorp acknowledged.
But one boon for proponents: Setting up the program doesn’t require dipping into state coffers at all. This also means any version of a bottle recycling program won’t be part of the final fiscal 2026 budget, but, if approved, as standalone legislation.
All three versions of the program remained held for further study in their respective chambers’ committees as of Monday. However, Lawson is a cosponsor on two of the proposals in the Senate side, suggesting preliminary support.
“The commission worked for almost two years to research and put forward thoughtful legislation to address this issue, which impacts every Rhode Island(er),” Lawson said in a statement. “I believe it is a very important conversation we are having in the Senate this session.”
Shekarchi favored his standard response that he was “reviewing all the options.” But he also noted he would receive input from his recently tapped advisor, Janet Coit, who formerly worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and before that, as director of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
