to award a Scarlet Letter for the quintessential example of mismanagement and perhaps corruption in Rhode Island, that Scarlet letter would be a W, a W for Washington Bridge.

He'd have to hang it around the necks of some Rhode Island Department of Transportation employees, governors, past and present, and the leadership in the Rhode Island General Assembly.

(Arlene clapping) Hello, I'm Arlene Violet and this is My Take on the Washington Bridge.

You know engineers depend on maintenance for a bridge.

Yet here in Rhode Island, year after year, we never cleared off the salt brine after the winter.

That salt brine then leached into the structure of the Washington Bridge.

It would've cost only $2,000 a year to clear off that salt, but it was never done.

Repairs, of course, were sometimes made to that bridge, but sometimes it was totally deficient.

Rhode Islanders will remember giant chunks of concrete falling into the Providence River because it was substandard concrete.

As a matter of fact, the federal government refused to give the last millions of dollars for that project on the Washington Bridge because the siding was also deficient.

But yet Rhode Island made up that money that the Feds withheld with that contractor by renting, for two and one half years, his orange barrels and his jersey barriers.

Serious structural problems were identified in 2020.

Yet in Rhode Island, our leaders were like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

They did nothing.

The report was greeted with a giant yawn.

The cozy relationship between RIDOT and the contractors continues unabated.

There was a company hired to make some repairs on the Washington Bridge, but that company had been cited in Massachusetts for inferior work.

It was also a defendant in the lawsuit brought by our Attorney General for the work that it had done here in Rhode Island.

And it was a no bid contract that started off at $40 million and then grew to $80 million, all without any bid.

The governor, of course, bragged when he announced his reelection, that he had secured $240 million from the Biden administration toward the bridge.

Yet he neglected to get the money out of the Biden administration to Rhode Island, and now that money is jeopardized after Mr. Trump won the election.

The Rhode Island General Assembly held a farcical, quote, unquote, investigation.

Witnesses were called but not put under oath, and the legislators who were on that investigative group were told not to ask any questions negatively toward the Department of Transportation because they don't wanna let the contractors off the hook.

Accordingly, there are people in the DOT who are going to get a free ride.

We don't know what corruption may or may not have occurred.

The statute of limitations is running and it will run out, and those people will be able to retire with their full pensions.

I wonder whether Nathaniel Hawthorne ought to give all of us taxpayers a Scarlet W. W for wimps because we acquiesce to all this nonsense.

(Arelene clapping) I'm Arlene Violet and this has been My Take on the Washington Bridge.