The Newport City Council met on July 9, 2025, at 6:30 p.m. in Council Chambers. The meeting covered a broad range of items including a contentious Citizens Forum on state neglect of the Pell Bridge gateway landscape, a split vote on the Newport Kite Festival permit, several traffic and parking ordinances, fee increases for harbor mooring and city services, and resolutions addressing pedestrian safety and mobile food establishments. The council also continued a transparency resolution for the Sister Cities Commission to a workshop.
And also on behalf of my colleagues and on behalf of this body. With immediate to do so again, whether intentionally or not was irresponsible. And it's caused a lot of speculation. Six to one vote to go into executive session. Thank you for being wise and wanting that meeting to be held in public. I understand the hesitation to do so to hold it in public, but in hindsight, had I had it to do again, I would have wanted that meeting held right here in public, so that it was explicitly clear, as I mentioned earlier, that this was not about any individual counselor. And again, I'll close with this. I say so selfishly and on behalf of this body. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Counselor. And uh Councilor Pinnock. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. I just also want to take a moment of um personal privilege. We have a really special person who often comes to our meetings, but she's here today. She does a lot for our community, particularly our seasoned, our more seasoned folks are um community elders, and today is her birthday. So I just wanted to wish Carmel Aguera a really happy birthday. Thank you for birthday to you. Happy birthday to Louis. Happy birthday, dear Carmela. Happy birthday to you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. You didn't know I could sing. We do now. Uh Madam Clerk, would have anyone sign up for the uh Citizens Forum, please. Yes. Uh first up, we have Maureen Cronin. Good evening, and hello. Um, Maureen Croner and 10 Harvard Street. Tonight I'm actually uh peering on behalf of the tree and open space commission, and we have a statement that we need some help with, and we thought that this might be the best opportunity to have everybody uh get together in one place and decide how we're gonna get this done. Um I'm here to talk about a serious problem, and it's one that affects all of the residents and the millions of visitors who come to this city every single day through the Pell Bridge Gateway. The good news is the problem has a solution. The bad news is is the solution is ignored by the responsible party, and that's the state of Rhode Island. Umfortunately, most of the public believes from the input that we receive that the city is responsible for the appearance and what's going on over there, and they don't know that it isn't us, and it isn't lack of responsibility on council administration or the tree and open space commission that it's a state problem. The landscape was left in disarray after the realignment project. There's over 81 dead and dying trees that are there. There's an unfinished dog park, there's a gateway corridor that leaves an amazingly bad impression to anybody coming over the Pelt Bridge into this beautiful city. It is nowhere near the way the impression is when somebody's coming in by the water, and we were always promised that that would be the way it was going to be finished when it was all done. I have about six bullet points just to share with you, so you should reflect on them and about what we're gonna do. The first is the Pell Bridge realignment was put into two phases, phase one and phase two. Each single phase had a detailed landscape plan that both the city administration, the commission, and the state agreed would be followed upon the completion of the phase. So there were two individually that were out there, and the promise was the state was going to underwrite and was going to do what was on there. They were going to do those together in collaboration with the city. Second, phase one, when phase was was finalized. Ride Ot said, we are not going to do phase one now. We think we're going to do phase one with phase two, but don't worry, we'll do it. We begged, we said, please do it, and they said no, we're gonna do it. We're gonna not replace the trees that we took out, which was a major leak thing that we asked, because they took out quite a bit, hundreds of trees.