More than 2,500 bills and resolutions were introduced across both sides of the State House rotunda this year. But far fewer — about 300 when discounting resolutions extending congratulations and condolences, and granting officiants’ wedding rights — survived the six-month session.
Some were killed outright, while others were left to languish in political purgatory known as the legislative committee, or without the necessary budget funding to survive.
On Thursday, we brought you five wins from the legislative session. Now, here are five losses.
1. Gas tax hike not enough to avoid layoffs and service reductions at RIPTA
Cuts are coming soon to the state’s public bus service. That’s even after the General Assembly propped up the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) with nearly $15 million in the fiscal year 2026 budget, including with revenue from a 2-cent increase in the state’s gas tax.
It wasn’t enough to fill what was a $32.6 million shortfall when Gov. Dan McKee released his version of the budget in January. After state lawmakers reduced the deficit to $18 million, RIPTA CEO Christopher Durand said 90 layoffs and a 20% reduction in service may be necessary.
Durand told reporters Thursday afternoon that the deficit was down to $10 million after the agency identified another $8 million in savings from a “favorable price lock” in diesel fuel, along with a positive market performance for the agency’s pension plan.
When cuts would take effect is still to be determined. The agency plans to hold a series of public hearings on potential service changes starting July 28. But RIPTA already has a guide available — an efficiency study of its operations and financial situation mandated in the state’s fiscal 2025 budget. The governor and legislative leaders wanted the agency to finish the study by March 1, but the board of directors was focused on finding a permanent CEO and didn’t commission Canadian engineering consulting firm WSP to conduct the study until March 27.
The final report is expected to be complete no later than mid-July, Durand told the agency’s board of directors Thursday. Transit advocates said they believed the late efficiency study hurt RIPTA’s chances of getting additional state funds.
“Our hope was that the efficiency study would point out a menu of options for reducing costs before the session ended,” McKee spokesperson Olivia DaRocha said in an email Thursday. “Now, the vendor and RIPTA must continue the work of right-sizing operations to protect taxpayers.”
The efficiency study has been released in phases. A May 30 draft report identified underperforming routes, including the 88 bus, which travels between Simmons Village in Cranston to the Walmart off Plainfield Pike; Route 69, which connects the University of Rhode Island to the Port of Galilee; and the 59X express route in North Smithfield and Lincoln.
A June 16 draft memo suggested fare increases and rerouting rural routes to low-income areas, along with “reverse commutes” from Providence to other municipalities.
RIPTA was not without its champions in the General Assembly this year. On the final night of the session, Sen. Sam Zurier, a Providence Democrat, sought to raise an additional $10 million via a floor amendment that would have tapped a bit more into the gas tax and highway funding shares that would normally go toward the Rhode Island Department of Transportation. But the proposal was defeated by a 16-20 vote.
2. Building decarbonization dreams deferred
Providence Democratic Rep. Rebecca Kislak beamed after the House of Representatives passed her bill requiring the state to track energy usage from large private and public buildings over 25,000 square feet. Kislak has been trying to set up a state building decarbonization program for four years.
But her celebration of the June 20 vote was short-lived.
As the hours stretched from night into early morning during the marathon session finale, it became clear the Senate would not take up the legislation, ultimately dooming the measure advocates had viewed as crucial to meeting mandatory state emissions reductions.
The Senate instead passed a resolution asking the state’s Office of Energy Resources to recommend how to begin measuring large building energy use. Lawmakers had received a letter from Chris Kearns, the state’s acting energy commissioner, citing concerns about the bill’s “aggressive” timeline and lack of staff to achieve its mandates.
Deadlines for carbon reductions under the state’s 2021 Act on Climate Law are approaching. The first legally enforceable benchmark calls for cutting emissions 45% from 1990 levels by 2030. Preliminary modeling already suggests the state might miss its 2030 target if it doesn’t take action, including in the building sector, which accounted for nearly half of annual emissions in 2022, the most recent data available.
“We are absolutely ready to do this,” Kislak said in an interview. “We should already be doing this.”
Meanwhile, the city of Providence has laid the framework under a municipal building energy benchmarking program, with an inaugural December 2024 report documenting the energy and emissions usage for 63 city-owned buildings above 10,000 square feet.
Much like the capital city’s program, Kislak’s bill, having already been revised, doesn’t prescribe target emissions for buildings; instead, it seeks to get a handle on how much energy they use now.
Yet even in her own chamber, lawmakers fretted over the burden on business owners, with 20 representatives — all 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats — voting against the bill.
Kislak acknowledged the bill’s name — “the Building Decarbonization Act of 2025” — might have caused some confusion.
“I should have called it the ‘building energy use measuring bill,’” she said. “That’s what it is, a measuring bill.”
3. Administration v. public records reform
Advocates for legislation to reform Rhode Island’s Access to Public Record Act, unchanged since 2012, steeled themselves for criticism from McKee’s office. But the force and breadth of opposition — spanning a dozen state agencies, each with multiple points of contention — surprised even Sen. Lou DiPalma, a Middletown Democrat and bill sponsor.
“In my 17 years as a lawmaker, I have never seen that many agencies respond to something on their own,” DiPalma said, referring to the letters and testimony to the Senate during an initial May 22 bill hearing.
The legislation was held by the Senate Committee on Judiciary following the hearing. The House companion never received an initial hearing.
DiPalma insists McKee’s office orchestrated the takedown, an allegation McKee’s office has not directly addressed in inquiries for comment.
“Transparency is in the public’s interest—that’s not in dispute—but the state must balance transparency with privacy rights and costs to the taxpayer,” Olivia DaRocha, a spokesperson for McKee’s office, said in an emailed response.
The 15-page legislation encompassed minor language tweaks and major updates meant to protect and expand access to affordable public information, while integrating new data sources like traffic accidents, police body-worn camera footage and text messages between officials into the definition of public records.
Based on the onslaught of administration criticism, DiPalma had already accepted defeat long before the Rhode Island General Assembly went on recess June 21.
“I’m going to spend my energy and calories where they are needed,” DiPalma said.
But, he pledged to resuscitate the public records reform bill in the same form next year. Nor was DiPalma willing to meet with McKee’s office to talk over his concerns.
“I am not meeting again to hear them tell me the same thing, ‘no no no,’” he said.
Seconds later, DiPalma added a caveat: “But I am willing to meet with anybody if they are willing to figure out how to make something better.”
4. Universal school meals not on the menu
Lawmakers’ recurring appetite to provide free meals to all Rhode Island schoolchildren went unsatiated yet again in 2025.
Three bills this year would have provided free breakfast and lunch for every kid attending public school, regardless of their family’s income. All three bills were heard by committees in their respective chambers of origin. And all three bills died before making it to a floor vote, just like last year. (The legislation did pass the Senate in 2023.)
Rep. Justine Caldwell, an East Greenwich Democrat, led the legislation in the House of Representatives, just like she did last year. Caldwell’s bill was mirrored in the Senate by Sen. Lammis Vargas, a freshman Democrat from Cranston. Also in the Senate was another bill by Sen. Jonathon Acosta, a Central Falls Democrat. Co-sponsored by many of the same senators who signed on to support Vargas’ bill, Acosta’s bill sought to flex more regulatory muscle, with stricter rules around participation for local school districts.
All three bills would have taken effect on July 1, 2026, and would have phased in universal school meals over three years.
The push for universal school meals is not unique to Rhode Island and derives from programs adopted during the COVID‑19 pandemic with two years’ worth of federal waivers. As of May 2025, nine states had made this pandemic-era reform permanent by taxation, ballot initiatives, or maneuvers in the budget.
McKee included $800,000 in his proposed fiscal 2026 budget in January to upgrade approximately 6,500 Rhode Island students from reduced-price meals to gratis ones.
And as a new legislative session dawned in January 2025, then-Majority Leader Valarie Lawson named school meals as one of her policy priorities this session. Lawson co-sponsored both Senate bills, and in April, the East Providence Democrat became Senate president.
But even a friend in a high place was not enough to uplift the bill in the chamber.
“The Senate President continues to support this bill and believes that it is a worthwhile investment,” Greg Paré, a Senate spokesperson, said in an email Thursday. “She will continue to support it when it is reintroduced next year, and will monitor if developments at the federal level impact the program.
Those federal developments could leave a crater-sized impact. The budget outlined in the “Big Beautiful Bill” has free school meal advocates worried that school meal programs could be severely delimited by changes to eligibility requirements.
5. McKee’s priorities forced to take a backseat
Gov. Dan McKee railed against legislative leaders for passing a “bad budget” that included higher taxes and fees he deemed unnecessary and burdensome to working families.
Many of his priorities were also stripped from the final $14.3 billion tax-and-spend plan, or significantly reduced.
Take, for example, the governor’s pledge during the 2024 State of the State address to raise residents’ incomes by $20,000 by 2030. The “Rhode to Prosperity” plan remained merely an outline until a year later, when McKee unveiled his proposed fiscal 2026 budget. The governor wanted to spend $9 million from state coffers and employer taxes to train secondary and higher education students, and the existing workforce, with the goal of boosting their income.
These programs are “crucial” to help residents adapt amid nationwide economic uncertainty, DaRocha, a McKee spokesperson, said in an email.
But lawmakers did not sign on to the funding needed for new apprenticeship programs at the Community College of Rhode Island and the expansion of existing training programs through Real Jobs Rhode Island and PrepareRI.
Initially, the fiscal 2026 budget unveiled by the House Committee on Finance also scrapped any new money for McKee’s signature Learn365 program, though state representatives agreed to add back $1.5 million for the after-school municipal learning program just before approving the spending plan on June 17.
Shekarchi in a June 10 briefing with reporters explained the cuts were necessary because of competing priorities and requests that exceeded available funds.
“What’s obvious was part of the solution was not doing the expenditures that the governor wanted,” said Michael DiBiase, former state administration director who now serves as president and CEO of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council. “That’s how they reached balance.”
Meanwhile, both chambers took another swipe at McKee over his role in steering a 2021 state education contract to the ILO Group, with overwhelming support for a bill banning bid-rigging and penalizing public officials and vendors who flout the rules. McKee has not yet signed the legislation into law, though he indicated at an unrelated press conference Wednesday that his concerns with the bill were addressed.
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
