Among the hearings held in the Senate's 10 committees that go unrecorded is the Senate Finance Committee, which vets the state budget. The House Finance Committee's Room 35, by contrast, is equipped with permanent, mounted cameras.

In a world of celebrity politicians and aspiring YouTube stars, the Rhode Island Senate maintains a refuge for the camera shy within the Rhode Island State House.

While the House records all of its committee hearings — many of them on video and the rest on audio — and posts the recordings to its website, the Senate hasn't quite followed suit.

All Senate Judiciary Committees hearings in Room 313, such as the recent abortion bill marathon, are videotaped and other high profile meetings set in the large Senate Lounge are frequently televised.

But the majority of the hearings held in the Senate's 10 committees go unrecorded, including many of those held by the Senate Finance Committee, which vets the state budget. The House Finance Committee's Room 35, by contrast, is equipped with permanent, mounted cameras.

The tight quarters in many of the second-floor hearing rooms is blamed for the lack of video for many hearings.

"Our Rhode Island State House is a treasure, an active capitol building in which the public can make their voices heard under the marble dome," Senate spokesman Greg Pare said in an email. "However, it is not a modern building, and it is not conducive to holding multiple, simultaneous televised meetings. Some meeting rooms are very small and not outfitted for television cameras at this point."

But it doesn't explain why there are no audio recordings. In fact, the lack of seating in many of the rooms arguably makes taping the proceedings more important, not less.

Certainly the resources are available in the General Assembly's proposed $51-million budget to find some audio equipment.

Pare: "We have never utilized the audio recording system in the Senate. There is limited equipment, the system is incapable of streaming, and listening to the recordings can be very confusing. The Senate’s focus is on making improvements to accommodate the far superior video broadcasting, streaming and archive system."

The House started audio recording the hearings it doesn't videotape in 2014 when Speaker Nicholas Mattiello took power.

Will the Senate pivot to audio or video?

"After we adjourn this summer, in the off-season, the Senate will be working with JCLS to explore the possibility of making improvements to our smaller hearing rooms so that they are capable of handling Capitol TV cameras," Pare wrote.

Plan to convert building

into state morgue DOA

Quietly, Gov. Gina Raimondo's administration appears to have killed plans to turn the home of the state Board of Elections into a morgue.

Last year, Raimondo included $15.7 million in the state capital budget to move the medical examiner's office from Orms Street in Providence to the Board of Elections' longtime home on Branch Avenue. Design work was supposed to begin this year with the medical examiner moving in sometime in the fiscal year starting in July.

That, in turn, would have sent the Board of Elections, which has been considering a move for several years, packing, potentially to a building owned by the Department of Transportation on Colorado Avenue in Warwick.

Now neither move looks likely.

The medical examiner's move to Branch Avenue, which was a Mack truck dealership before becoming the state's elections central, is being "re-evaluated," said Department of Administration spokeswoman Brenna McCabe.

The re-evaluating will start with Raimondo's 9-member Efficiency Commission, which has been tasked with wringing $10 million in savings from next year's state budget through better use of state property. The commission meets Monday.

Meanwhile, the state is conducting a feasibility study of potential uses for the DOT's Warwick property, a 52,000-square-foot former printing plant the state bought six years ago with $2.3 million in federal cash so it could be turned into a materials testing lab.

When the estimated price tag for the materials lab renovation swelled to $14 million, DOT Director Peter Alviti Jr. balked and the building has sat vacant since.

Last year the state Emergency Management Agency said it wanted to move to the Colorado Avenue building, but that's also being re-evaluated.

McCabe said the EMA move hasn't "been ruled out," but is being considered as part of a larger analysis of all executive branch buildings.

While state officials look to the "efficiency commission" to find $10 million, the capital budget for next year includes $7.5 million to draw up a new master plan for state buildings, including the Pastore Center complex in Cranston and a feasibility study of Colorado Avenue.

Where does this leave the Board of Elections?

"As of this email I don’t have any information on where the BOE will be located," Executive Director Robert Rapoza wrote Thursday. "As of this email the Board has not taken a position on where the BOE will be located."

The Board of Elections also stores voting machines in the historic Cranston Street Armory in Providence, which the Raimondo administration continues to search for ways to reuse.

Gov. blocks DOH

letter to regulators

Rhode Island Department of Health Director Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott has been a key member of Raimondo's cabinet from the early days and her job performance just earned her a healthy raise.

But neither of those things was enough to stop Raimondo from blocking a letter Alexander-Scott wrote to federal regulators last summer asking for a more critical review of a proposed liquefied natural gas plant on the South Providence waterfront.

The letter, revealed in a scathing article posted on Canadian environmental website Desmog, said building the plant would continue a pattern of ignoring the low-income communities in South Providence and expose them to a "low probability but high impact scenarios" if the facility ever went up in flames.

The letter was never sent to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which approved the National Grid LNG projects last year.

Raimondo's support for large construction projects popular with her supporters in the building trades is well known and has drawn the ire of environmentalists for years. But in 2015, Alexander Scott was allowed to submit a letter to FERC making some of the same critical points about the Fields Point project.

Why did the governor's office step in this time around?

Raimondo spokesman Josh Block offered this response:

“A FERC review is a federal decision-making process, and the consistent position across our agencies has been that the State does not have a specific regulatory role to play in this application’s review. In this case, DOH had previously expressed its concerns with this proposal to FERC, and the Administration felt that further State comment in the federal process was not necessary.”

Raimondo has also clashed with environmental groups over a proposed natural gas power plant in Burrillville.

Challengers step up for

Democratic leadership

While Rep. Joseph McNamara of Warwick appears to be headed for reelection as state Democratic Party chairman unchallenged, there are contests for other party leadership posts.

For starters, Rep. Lauren Carson of Newport is challenging the longtime vice chairwoman, Rep. Grace Diaz, of Providence.

The two have been on opposite sides of several high profile battles including the reelection of conservative Cranston Democrat Nicholas Mattiello as House Speaker, with Diaz voting for Mattiello and Carson abstaining along with other dissident Democrats in the "Reform Caucus." More recently, Carson voted for — and Diaz against — a bill to keep abortion legal in Rhode Island no matter what happens in Washington.

Carson told Political Scene last week she is "not running against Grace ... [who] is very beloved in her community ... does a wonderful job [and is] supported by the establishment of the party." But this is "not 1980 anymore. I think the party could use a rejuvenation,'' Carson said.

Among the issues she said she started thinking about last summer: the party leadership is very concentrated now in the metro area, with "a very low profile'' where she lives at the end of Aquidneck Island. If she were elected, she said, she would "bring the party into the community'' beyond the Providence metro-area.

A third candidate is competing for first vice chair: Linda Ujifusa, vice president of the Portsmouth Town Council.

Other challengers have also put the party on notice they intend to run for other leadership posts when state Democrats gather Sunday, March 24 at 6 p.m. at the Cranston Portuguese Club.

Others in the current lineup include: Central Falls Mayor James Diossa, second vice chair; former Rep. Lisa Tomasso, third vice chair; Robert Johnson, fourth vice chair; Rep. Arthur Corvese, D-North Providence, secretary; Allene Maynard, corresponding secretary; Jeff Padwa, treasurer; former R.I. Federation of Teachers president Marcia Reback, assistant treasurer.

Here are the contested races: first vice chair — Diaz, Carson and Ujifusa; second vice chair — Diossa, Ujifusa; third vice chair — Tomasso, Ujifusa; secretary — Corvese and state Rep. Teresa Tanzi of South Kingstown; corresponding secretary — Ann Gooding, Tracy Ramos, chairwoman of the Rhode Island Democratic Party Women’s Caucus; recording secretary — Ujifusa, Stephen Mulcahey, former chair of the Burrillville Democratic Town Committee, and Tracy Ramos.

On Monday, Ujifusa called Political Scene to say she submitted her name for multiple positions not knowing who else might do so, but has decided after seeing the line-up of candidates to run for one only: recording secretary.