The Cranston City Council held a Special Finance Meeting followed by a Regular Council Meeting on January 20, 2026. The meetings covered a new revolving loan fund for school capital improvements, budget amendments for fire rescue services, zoning updates, property sales, appointments, and a contentious discussion regarding a charter school's lack of local authorization.
To call a special finance meeting to order on Tuesday, January twentieth at six oh seven p.m. Clerk, can you please take a roll? Pastor Ritz. Present. Pastor Trafficante. Councilman Baziri. Present. Council Vice President Haroyan. Present. That's President Wall. Here. At this time I am I am opening up public comment. Is there anyone in the audience that would like to speak on docketed items only? Seeing none. Technical clerk, is there anyone online that would like to speak on items? There is no public comment online. At this time, I'd like to close public comment. We're moving on to committee business matters carried over. Uh moving on to ordinance twelve dash twenty-five dash oh two s ordinance authorizing the established the establishment of a revolving loan fund for school building improvements, sponsored by Mayor Hopkins. I believe there are some amendments. But due to that fact, we're going to substitute this uh ordinance in place of what was uh posted. We're asking the committee to vote this audit committee, we're going to uh advertise it for two weeks, and then we can probably vote on it at a full council meeting uh in February. Thank you. So I'm pretty sure everybody has us. So may entertain a motion to approve the amended um document that's in front of us. Second. Is there any discussion? Just to be clear, we're gonna um table the original and we're gonna substitute this ordinance for the one that was on the docket tonight. Yes, correct. So we're voting on the amended one. Correct. Okay. No discussion. Any any further discussion? So since we're in the discussion, my understanding is we are voting on the amended version, and it will be posted online, and we'll be voting on it at our council meeting in February. So they'll give the public enough time to view. We clarified some issues about bonded interest. We added the mayor uh to the administrator of the fund. We also gave uh uh the the city council authority to approve any expenditure above 50,000. So there's a check that's already you know built into this that the the uh the city council will have a 50,000 dollar uh threshold in which they would have to approve these projects, and we make sure that these projects are that are eligible for reimbursement, are all approved by Ride. Well, the purpose of this fund is that the and just so purpose of this is in a lot of cities and towns have done this. You submit a uh of there's a school building committee that's established by state statute. They go out and they uh they come up with a uh a schedule of things that they want their schools to be approved with. Right, then has to approve those projects. If Ryan approves the approves those projects and they're eligible for reimbursement, um say for instance it gets uh a new roof needs a hundred thousand dollars, right? Will approve that hundred thousand dollars. Now, I don't know what Cranston's reimbursement rate is, but I'm assuming it's like sixty-six percent, maybe less 35%, maybe all right. So we'll let's take a round number. I'm not good at math. Say your reimbursement rate is 50 percent.