As we close out the year and head into the next, the Johnston Sun Rise takes the opportunity to reflect on the events of 2024. Here are staff retrospectives on the year in Johnston.
By BARBARA POLICHETTI
Looming on a ridge above Interstate 295, Amazon’s mammoth new fulfillment center opened in late November.
The 3.8-million-square-foot building sits on a hilltop site at 2120 Hartford Ave. Construction began in 2021, and its opening means that the center will be buzzing with human and robotic activity as the e-commerce giant uses state-of-the-art technology to fill online orders and meet customer demand.
The company hopes to celebrate the opening of the Johnston site with a ribbon-cutting ceremony sometime in early 2025, according to an Amazon spokesman.
Over the summer, Amazon gave Gov. Dan McKee and the media a tour of the Johnston facility, which was already busy with humans and robots practicing the workflow of expeditiously filling orders.
They described the Johnston site as a “fulfillment center” that will also provide warehouse space.
At the time, Jonathan Greeley, Amazon’s economic development manager for New England, provided some “fun facts” about the building, noting that it is 3.8 million square feet, which just shy of about 66 football fields.
He also said that more concrete was poured at the Hartford Avenue site than for the building of the Empire State Building.
The center will employ about 1,500 people, according to Amazon officials. A job fair at the site drew hundreds of applicants on Nov. 12.
Greeley said Amazon would be posting new shifts weekly through the end of the year and into 2025, and encouraged interested applicants to visit amazon.com/applynow or text JOBEVENT to 31432 to create a profile and receive notifications.
Last week, the newly opened Amazon center became the target of a union protest as members of Local 251 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters picketed outside the building. The union said it was protesting the lack of union representation for employees and that it was also showing solidarity with strikes and other labor actions at Amazon facilities across the country.
Amazon rejected the union’s claims, stating that neither the Teamsters, nor any other union, has been legally selected to represent its employees. It also denied the union’s assertion that there were strikes at any Amazon sites in the country.
“The truth is that the Teamsters have actively threatened, intimidated and attempted to coerce Amazon employees and third-party drivers to join them, which is illegal and is the subject of multiple pending unfair labor practices against the union,” a company spokesperson said.
Beacon Media staff reports
Climate scientists have been telling us for decades that Northeastern winters would become warmer and wetter, and for Johnston in 2024, the skies would deliver ample evidence that the predicted trend had arrived.
Less than two weeks into the new year, with the ground still saturated from a Dec. 18 storm, a truly daunting deluge arrived.
On Jan. 10, Mayor Joseph M. Polisena Jr. announced the grim news on social media: At Park Plaza Apartments on Park Street, “20 units had to be evacuated with the Fire Department using boats.” Not far from there, he said, “We are also sending another boat to the residents trapped on Belfield Drive. Our military Humvees are shuttling employees to Briarcliffe Manor…. There’s also large-scale residential flooding throughout Johnston.”
The impassible routes would include Atwood Avenue from the Stop & Shop plaza to the Route 6 overpass and from Simmonsville to Central avenues, River Drive at Lafazia Drive, Memorial Boulevard and, of course, Belfield Drive.
The next day, an evacuation was ordered on Belfield Drive, but not everyone left. Some felt they couldn’t.
“Police officers just came in a huge truck and told us about the evacuation but they aren’t taking us by force,”said resident Cynthia Nova. “We have food here. We wouldn’t be able to buy food since we don’t have a car on the other side of the water.”
The water stood 40 inches deep in places along the road, too deep for the Humvees, and it was starting to freeze over, leaving 10 houses and about 30 people cut off from emergency services, fuel, food and medicines.
Polisena, with little assurance of help from the state, saw proximity to Interstate 295 South as a possible avenue of aid and pursued the possibility of a temporary delivery route to the neighborhood through a back channel involving former CVS executive and Democratic candidate for governor Helena Foulkes (a member of Johnston’s School Building Committee), former Governor and then-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and finally Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and the Federal Highway Administration, not to mention the state’s congressional delegation.
By Jan. 17, the feds had granted permission for a temporary road with locked-gate access.
But even before the storm hit, it was clear to Polisena, whose first year in office was buffeted by one downpour after another, that Johnston needed a plan to improve drainage where it could and retreat where it couldn’t. He ordered engineers to list “recommended projects that will help alleviate flooding for the highest number of people possible.” With that list and a projected cost, he said, “Let the voters decide. Tell them they have two options: We can continue to Band-Aid the problem by pumping water, closing roads and dispatching first responders or we can spend money and do this right.”
On the November ballot, the list of projects became a $40-million bond referendum that 75% of voters approved.
What will all that money buy? Some of it is likely to be the things town officials have discussed publicly over the last year, the upgrading of public-works infrastructure to channel, retain and disperse heavier and heavier loads of precipitation falling on an increasingly developed landscape. And some of it may be the things that are politically less palatable but little by little, storm by storm, seem economically inevitable: the buyout of properties and creation of wetlands in New England’s retreat from the rain and tides.
By BARBARA POLICHETTI
Earlier this month, Mayor Joseph M. Polisena Jr. made it clear that he is adamantly opposed to a 250-plus unit apartment complex for low-income residents that was recently proposed for George Waterman Road. And he said he will use his authority and all legal means to fight it.
The project, which is being proposed by Waterman Chenango LLC of Johnston, would build a 255-apartment building on land at 178 and 200 George Waterman Road, consisting entirely of rental units for low-income residents.
“Let me be crystal clear: if you insist on moving forward with the currently proposed project, I will use all the power of government that I have to stop it,” Polisena wrote in a letter read into the record of a Planning Board meeting on Dec. 3, adding that he plans to challenge the constitutionality of the proposal in court.
About a dozen residents spoke out against the project at the Planning Board meeting, citing concerns about the size of the proposed development and the impact on schools, town resources and public infrastructure.
The project is still in the pre-application stage. Town Planner Thomas Deller said that, as an affordable-housing development, it would be eligible for certain streamline processes and zoning relief as outlined in the state’s Low and Moderate Income Housing Act.
The law also requires all cities and towns in Rhode Island to make at least 10% of their total housing stock affordable housing.
Approximately 7.91% of all housing in Johnston is currently classified as affordable, making the town one of about a dozen in the state with the highest percentages, according to Deller.
Melina Lodge, executive director of the Housing Network of Rhode Island, urged Polisena and the town to recognize the need for and importance of the proposed affordable apartment complex.
“The Low and Moderate Income House Act … has long been a necessary tool to ensure municipalities contribute to solving our statewide housing crisis,” Lodge said. “Mayor Polisena’s threat to challenge the constitutionality of the LMIH Act is concerning and misaligned to actual housing needs of his constituents.”
According to Polisena, a proposal to build affordable single-family homes, rather than rental units, would be a better fit for the town at a time when house prices are sky high.
“This is really all about the almighty dollar,” he said. “These people (the developer) are not the saviors of affordable housing.”
By RORY SCHULER
The long row of registers at the Stop & Shop in Johnston were often empty, with more employees than customers, before the store officially closed in late October.
In July, the grocery store chain announced that the location was one of 32 “underperforming stores” that would close by the end of the year.
“The decision to close the Johnston store was difficult, and only made after careful analysis and deliberation,” Stop & Shop spokesperson Stephanie Cunha said. “The store was underperforming, and the decision was necessary to create a healthy base for the future growth of our brand.”
Like most Johnston residents, the news of the store’s planned shuttering was a disappointment, but not necessarily shocking, to Polisena.
“While it’s always sad to see a business close, this is the free market at work,” the mayor said. “It’s why I advocate for as much market competition as possible, so businesses have to compete against each other for the consumers’ dollar.”
Town residents had long noticed the mostly empty parking lot outside the Stop & Shop since a new Market Basket opened a few blocks away on Hartford Avenue two years ago.
When the store’s fate was announced, our readers shared their reactions on social media.
“They don’t want to cut prices or even try to beat out the competition and charge 10 cents for bags. Ridiculous,” one reader, Melanie Cross, wrote. “Good riddance, I love Market Basket!”
Another reader, Steve Ruskin, shared a similar sentiment.
“After frequently going to Market Basket, this Stop & Shop looks old and dated,” he wrote. “The regular prices are too high, there’s too many self-checkouts, and the robot Marty is always in the way.”
Will another large corporate retail client move into Stop & Shop’s place?
“As far as what goes there next, I’m open to anything modern that will serve the residents of Johnston,” Polisena said.
– With other Beacon Media staff reports
By RORY SCHULER
Peter C. Fontaine, 77, award winning sports columnist, died an hour after deadline on March 27.
Although he had submitted his final byline several weeks earlier, the Johnston Sun Rise’s faithful freelancer held on until the last pages of the paper were on the presses. The man had ink in his veins.
Pete could be a feisty, cantankerous pain in the butt. He was unapologetic and authoritative.
His writing was packed with adjectives and superlatives. He owned his beat and defended territory with ferocity (though defining that beat would prove impossible). And we loved him for it.
Members of the town’s business community and those Pete met over the years shared notes of sympathy and remembrances on our social media accounts.
“Pete made such an impact on our community and enjoyed highlighting local events and success stories,” wrote Gina Brown Schino. “He will be missed by all.”
Sun Rise staff reports
Sen. Frank Lombardo III, 65, died on Feb. 21 after a battle with bladder cancer. Representing District 25 in the Rhode Island Senate, he was first elected to the seat in November 2010.
Lombardo, 65, was born July 12, 1958. He and his wife, Patricia, have two children, Frank and Victoria. A graduate of Smithfield High School, Lombardo also attended Rhode Island College.
“Frank was one of the kindest and most generous people I have ever had the good fortune to know,” said Senate President Dominick J. Ruggerio.
“He was full of energy and adventure, living every moment of life to the fullest, from helicopter skiing to cross-country motorcycle trips with his father,” Ruggerio said. We are grateful to have shared part of that adventure with him.”
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