This Nov. 5 voters will again be asked to green Rhode Island. Election-year Green Bonds have become the de facto means of protecting the state’s natural world. I thought that’s what elected representation was for, to make decisions that protect public health and the environment?

Fun fact: You can’t have a healthy public without a healthy environment.

The Ocean State’s environmental successes are largely accomplished by voters spurred on by nongovernmental organizations. Elected officials count on free lobbying from small to large nonprofits to get approval for vital climate crisis and environment-related funding that they can’t be bothered to adequately address.

Sure, General Assembly members pass and governors sign environmental laws, but most end up being unenforced, underfunded, ignored, or forgotten.

In 1993, for example, the Legislature passed and the governor signed the Natural Areas Protection Act, to provide the “highest level of protection to the state’s most environmentally sensitive natural areas.”

The legislation was supposed to elevate “the health and welfare of the people of Rhode Island by promoting the preservation of areas of unique natural interest” and “to allow significant public and privately owned lands of critical environmental concern to be designated as natural area preserves.”

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management has never designated even one Natural Area Preserve. In fact, “No one currently at DEM recalls the genesis of this Act,” an agency spokesperson told ecoRI News last year.

The highly touted 2021 Act on Climate law relies on others to hold the state accountable. Funding for farmland preservation — a vital component for a state that repeatedly claims it wants to grow more of its own food and help mitigate the climate crisis — was left out of the governor’s original Green Bond proposal he submitted in January. He had to be lobbied to include it this year.

Even as the climate crisis rains down on us, many of Rhode Island’s politicians, especially in leadership positions, continue to minimize the importance of protecting the natural world and the biodiversity it supports.

Thus, for reasons mostly related to creative budget accounting, the desire to pass the environmental buck, and perhaps not wanting to be labeled a “tree hugger,” the vast majority of leadership needed in Rhode Island to ensure the air is clean, the water drinkable, and the soil isn’t dirt doesn’t come from lawmakers.

Instead, they rely on people to donate money and volunteer time to nonprofits and causes that protect these pillars of life. Lawmakers then use the passing of green bonds to say, “See what we are doing to protect the environment.”

It’s an illusion, and the Smith Hill power brokers are learning how to dull the shade of green featured on the ballot, to authorize the state to borrow money for purported environment-related projects.

This year’s Green Bond would provide $53 million to fund various programs and projects. It leads with an ask of $15 million for the Port of Davisville in North Kingstown, for the “continued growth and modernization of Rhode Island’s only public port.”

Money from the bond would be used to finance new berthing spaces, port access roads, cargo laydown area improvements, and security upgrades for the new Terminal 5 Pier and Blue Economy Support Docks, which state officials have noted will accommodate offshore wind projects. The Quonset Development Corp. port is also one of the top auto importers in North America.

Placing what is most assuredly not an environmental project in a Green Bond is a neat trick. Great way to build public trust.

The $15 million ask — Question 4’s biggest — for the Port of Davisville should have been its own ballot question. Explain the need for a modernized public port and its connection to offshore wind development in a separate appeal and let the voters decide without running interference.

Don’t greenwash the ask, possibly jeopardizing the approval of truer environmental work. The state’s purported leaders wouldn’t substitute affordable housing for Port of Davisville and use it as the Green Bond lede, or even include it for that matter.

This change to a darker shade of green started in 2022, when voters were asked to approve $12 million for Roger Williams Park Zoo, to build a carbon-neutral education center and event pavilion. Voters were told the project would improve access and further enhance the zoo’s “positive economic impact on Roger Williams Park, the city of Providence, and all of Rhode Island.”

Fun fact: Economic growth isn’t compatible with environmental protection. It’s insulting to suggest otherwise, especially in a Green Bond.

The zoo’s funding deserved to be a separate ballot questions, like when voters are asked to approve University of Rhode Island upgrades.

Why does funding for sea level-rise mitigation, in the Ocean State of all places, need voter approval in the first place? Voters didn’t get to decide if loaning $75 million to a loudmouth pitcher to make video games was a good investment — a million dollars more than the single-highest Green Bond approved since 2016 (2021, $74 million).

All four of the state’s Green Bonds since 2016 have been approved by 60% or better, but what happens if voters decide they are being taken for granted or, worse, bamboozled, by the Port of Davisville “environmental” request and other less-than-green asks?

Lawmakers will likely shrug and determine their constituents, like many of them, aren’t that interested in protecting the natural world and, thus, human health.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.