Countdown to a new beginning
Mayoral memoirs: Avedisian looks back in city career
Mayor Scott Avedisian said he was optimistic that the city would continue to run in a good trajectory, even after he departs on May 15 to become the new CEO of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority.
He said it with the same charismatic smile he often flashes when he answers a question reflexively off the cuff; a smile visible in his eyes as well as his cheeks that accompanies an answer not quite rehearsed, but one that comes from a savvy place of many years of political experience all the same. What else can an exiting mayor say about the future of his city, anyways?
But then Avedisian paused for a few seconds. Not a drastic pause, but long enough for one to imagine a carousel of images – flashes of memories and people and places and milestones and the relentless flipping of calendar pages – projecting through his mind in that short span.
“It’s hard for me too,” he said. “Twenty-seven and a half years I’ve been coming to this building. It really is hard.”
It’s also hard to put in perspective how rare it is to have a local politician stay local for so many years. Often a spot on a city council, or a school committee or even a time as mayor is just a stepping stone for some higher ambition – a state rep or senate seat, national Congress or a job in the Governor’s office; maybe even becoming a governor.
However, Avedisian has never sought any of those positions. Might he question that decision now?
“No regrets,” he said with certainty.
Past to present
It is difficult to win one election, let alone nine of them. Even if some politicians can catch lightning in a bottle and win a race, if they get caught up in scandal or if the public turns on them for any of a multitude of reasons they might feel fit to do so, they will find themselves out of the game as quickly as they finally got in; sometimes in handcuffs.
Yet one of Avedisian’s most unique qualities is his untarnished longevity, as it isn’t easy to go nearly 30 years in any arena of politics without something happening that causes people to turn on you – whether that something is actually their fault or it simply bruises their image to a point where public trust is eroded irreconcilably.
Nobody is without flaws, of course, but those flaws are magnified under the public lens – and Avedisian has not succumbed to flaws in character or in policy, as evidenced by the voting record.
Avedisian has not only won election after election, but he has actually never come close to losing a bid for mayor in Warwick. His first race in 2000 he won over Michael Woods by a little over 14,000 votes. A challenger never got that close to Avedisian again until just this past election in 2016, when Richard Corrente only lost by 12,000 votes.
These are landslide victories consistently achieved throughout a stretch of history that began in the dawn before 9/11 and has persisted through scandals at the state level and through a historically bad economic recession. It has lasted throughout exponential changes in technology and culture – where politicians have been felled by lewd text messages, secret recordings and even simply yelling too enthusiastically during a campaign rally once that cry went viral.
Avedisian thought back to his first campaign for mayor, when he ran for a seat left vacant after Lincoln Chafee was appointed to the U.S. Senate following the death of his father, and how his platform included a few key issues. One of the most important issues, he said, was bringing more fiscal stability to the city.
“There’s now $26 million in the bank [in the city’s reserve fund]; that’s pretty stable and allows you to withstand a lot of trouble and downturns,” he said.
Avedisian pointed to other examples of achievements he is proud of during his time at the head of the city’s executive office, including securing Rocky Point as protected open space in a partnership with the state, connecting the MBTA to T.F. Green and connecting that station with an indoor walkway directly to the airport and working to redevelop what some considered to be undevelopable brownfields in a plan to create a thriving city center.
While another hotel, the Hyatt, is on schedule to open this month and Proclamation Brewery just celebrated its grand opening at the former Dean Warehouse (another unlikely success story in the area), Avedisian said realistically it will take another 10 years or so for the City Centre dream to fully become realized.
“I’m hopeful that, with a renewed economy, things will pick up and we’ll see that whole plan come into play,” he said. “It’s a lot better off than it was when it was contaminated brownfield sites. They’re now actually revenue-producing, well-utilized properties.”
Ironically, as one of his proudest achievements is financial in nature, his white whale that he was never able to capture is related to pensions and other post-employment benefits (OPEB) liability. Avedisian said that looking ahead to these highly burdensome, but unavoidable costs is an essential part of any wise financial strategy.
“It’s one of the things I wish that I would have been able to prevail on, but that wasn’t to be,” he said. “Several times we put in a request for a resolution to create an OPEB trust, and that was rejected by the council. But I think that’s the reasonable, wise thing to do.”
Ironically, Avedisian feels that one of the reasons that the city has to face added challenges posed by city employees retiring is because they work here long enough to qualify for those retirement packages.
“One of the reasons why people tend to stay is that the work environment is good,” he said. “So, you’re going to have people who are here for 25, 30 years and that’s good for stability in the city.”
A glance to the future
While Tuesday’s piece covered the preparations Avedisian is making to ensure that City Council President and future acting mayor Joseph Solomon will be ready to assume his new responsibilities, it did not so much touch on the impending November election that will, for the first time in a long time, allow somebody not named Scott Avedisian to assume the role of mayor as a result of the city’s voting populace.
“I have faith that the people of Warwick will choose wisely in the future,” Avedisian said, again in that tone that indicates while he probably does have optimism for the city’s future, not even he truly knows what a new administration will mean for the trajectory of Warwick going forward.
“I don’t even know who is going to run, so I can’t say that yet,” he said in response to a question about who could potentially replace him and what they may do.
Regardless of who eventually announces, Avedisian does believe that the best person will be chosen for the job because, as he has seen over the years, Warwick voters make their political decisions based on facts and an analysis of the actual candidate, not simply based on party affiliation.
“I think Warwick is very different from most communities. I don't think people have paid one iota of attention to party labels,” he said. “The majority are independent, but there are more registered Democrats than registered Republicans. But I think people in this city are very, very savvy, and they don't pay attention to it.”
Despite this openness from the population in Warwick, Avedisian said flat out that there is a rising tide of toxicity in modern politics, from the national level and all the way down to the local level.
“There is a total loss of civility in politics today,” he said. “And it never bothered me, especially when I was on the Council, to lose a vote 8 to 1; it was over. That vote was done and that was history, and I wouldn't stop talking to people because they didn't vote my way. The whole thing was to have a better argument next time I make that pitch. But it's not that way now…There is a toxic element to the culture right now.”
Avedisian hinted at the notion that this toxicity contributed to his decision to move on from being mayor, as he has recently had several not-so-secret squabbles with some members of the current City Council over conducting business.
“You almost need to kind of have an implosion to start again,” he said. “And that factors into my decision as well.”
On the most memorable memories
Throughout the years, Avedisian has been able to go on political trips to Israel, China, Ireland and multiple trips to the Middle East, including a trip to Cairo in the tumultuous days of negotiations leading up to the Arab Spring.
However one of the most memorable and experiential memories Avedisian recalled immediately stemmed from the unprecedented flooding that occurred in 2010 and overflowed the Pawtuxet River and the city’s waste treatment facility.
“There’s no tabletop exercise in crisis management that prepares you to tell people not to flush their toilets. Or saying coin-operated laundromats cannot operate today. Or saying restaurants can open but you can't let people use the restroom...Bizarre days,” he said. “The weather channel was interviewing me and a hot tub was floating down the street. Like, is this really happening?”
There have been other more tragic lowlights as well, but Avedisian would rather focus on the positives, such as when a difficult decision to bring all chronically absent and truant students and their parents/guardians into truancy court during an election year resulted in a more positive outcome for at least one young student. The teen was consistently late to school because an unfortunate family situation forced her to play parent and get her siblings ready for elementary school.
“She was keeping that family together even though mom had addiction issues,” Avedisian recalled. “Working through that whole process we got the grandmother to move here, we got mom into rehab, all behind the scenes and all quiet. That girl stopped while going across the stage and said we’d all be in DCYF care if it wasn’t for what you did.”
Avedisian has told the story before, but it clearly resonates with him for a reason. Although he will be leaving City Hall, he won’t be leaving Warwick, and the memories will remain. Sure, it’s not as though his new job is in a different state or even more than one city away, but there’s another reason for staying put – he truly does care about the city of Warwick, and the people who, like him, know it as their only true home.
“I don’t know how you could do this job if you didn’t [care],” he said. “The people of this city are very kind and very generous in spirit. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been invited to Sunday dinner at somebody’s house. This is a very special place where people have very, very generous and big hearts.”
