Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council

• RIPEC President and CEO Michael DiBiase spoke with the Brown Daily Herald about the Q4 2024 Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Quarterly Briefing. Released in partnership with the Center for Global and Regional Economic Studies at Bryant University, among the Briefing’s findings were that Rhode Island has been experiencing both rising unemployment and substantial growth in its gross domestic product.  DiBiase noted that Rhode Island’s strong GDP showing was significant given that “typically, we lag the nation,” and attributed the rise in unemployment to a “mismatch” between available jobs and the skill sets of unemployed Rhode Islanders.  

• GoLocalProv reported on a newly introduced package of housing legislation, highlighting RIPEC’s finding in its October report on housing that recent investments in affordable housing “deemphasized” project costs, and that more than half of projects had total development costs of over $400,000 per unit.  

• RIPEC offered testimony to the Rhode Island House Committee on Finance in opposition to the governor’s proposed tax on digital advertising. RIPEC raised concerns with potential negative effects of the tax on the state’s tax competitiveness—which already ranks 11th lowest among the states, according to a recent Tax Foundation analysis—and pointed to its potential for raising the cost of doing business in the Ocean State.

• RIPEC submitted testimony to the Rhode Island House Committee on Municipal Government & Housing in opposition to a series of bills that would enable more municipalities to offer homestead exemptions not based on need. As RIPEC found in its June report on property taxes, homestead exemptions shift the property tax burden indirectly to renters, who cover the cost of property taxes through their rents, and who on average have less ability to pay.

Inside Insights

• An analysis by Moody’s Analytics found that America’s wealthiest households are accounting for a record-setting share of consumer spending. The top 10.0 percent of households—defined as those earning at least $250,000 per year—are responsible for 49.7 percent of all consumer spending in the United States.  

• The Education Recovery Scorecard—a joint report by Harvard and Stanford Universities—measuring recovery from pandemic-era learning losses, ranked Rhode Island 14th in math recovery among the states and 13th in reading recovery. The report cited Rhode Island’s sharp rise in chronic absenteeism as a hinderance to the state’s recovery, a development previously analyzed in-depth by RIPEC.

• The cost of affordable housing developments in Rhode Island continues to rise, with the third project with costs above $500,000 per unit approved by the Board of RIHousing in February.

What to Look for in March

• RIPEC will be releasing a report on the major shift in the mix of state and local revenues in Rhode Island over the past several years, analyzing local and state contributions to K-12 schools, a sharp jump in property values, and growing disparities among taxpayers.