Warwick year in review

Posted 12/24/24

Spotlight on Warwick schools in ‘24

By ADAM ZANGARI

Perhaps the most frequent subject of our Warwick stories in 2024 involved the public school system. 2024 started off with a big …

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Warwick year in review

Posted

Spotlight on Warwick schools in ‘24

By ADAM ZANGARI

Perhaps the most frequent subject of our Warwick stories in 2024 involved the public school system. 2024 started off with a big change there – with Shaun Galligan taking over as School Committee Chairman in January – and major news items would continue throughout the year.

One of the largest occurred during the final weeks of the 2023-24 school year, as Oakland Beach Elementary School teacher Milissa O’Neil was named Rhode Island’s Teacher of the Year in a surprise ceremony attended by state Commissioner of Education Angélica Infante-Green.

Warwick students also had many accomplishments of their own. In March, Hoxsie and Park elementary schools made history as they played Rhode Island’s first-ever unified basketball game at the elementary level – something that Hoxsie Principal Gary McCoombs said will be significantly expanded in 2025.

 Four Warwick culinary students also got to take part in the National Restaurant Association’s ProStart Invitational, where they got to present their vision for a restaurant in the restaurant management competition. Their restaurant concept – Cristofori, an upscale Tuscan restaurant named after the inventor of the piano and with a music-inspired theme – won Rhode Island’s competition in February.

The biggest of school stories, though, involved plans for construction of new Pilgrim and Toll Gate high schools.

In February, LeftField Project Management was brought on as the project manager for both schools, and Dimeo was tapped as construction manager in April. The push for new schools saw greater urgency in March as well, with Toll Gate closed for two weeks due to a leaky heater unit and transformer failure in the school’s library.

Throughout the spring and summer, LeftField, Dimeo and architects Saccoccio & Associates and Saam Architecture gave monthly updates on the project’s progress. August saw a major milestone reached when both architecture firms showed their designs for Toll Gate and Pilgrim to the public in a special meeting.

However, in October, things hit a significant snag, with new projections showing that the high schools would cost $387.8 million – well over the $350 million passed by the voters in a bond referendum in 2022. Since then, LeftField and the committee has been looking at and approving value engineering, a process that lowers costs by removing or replacing certain items of the overall project.

2025 will bring even more news items – perhaps, most notably, the groundbreakings of the new Pilgrim and Toll Gate. 2024, though, is not a year that Warwick Public Schools will soon forget.

 

Picozzi nets 73% support; Water Division rocked by abuse claims

In an election year, Warwick City Hall saw some major changes, though most of Warwick’s top governmental officials would stay in office.

The beginning of the year saw a fight at the state level over legislation to give the mayor’s office the power to appoint one member of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation Board of Directors. Currently, all members of the board are appointed by the governor. While that measure was not signed into law, both Mayor Frank Picozzi and Speaker of the House K. Joseph Shekarchi have promised to continue the fight in 2025.

Budget season saw heated disagreements on whether to include projected revenue from new traffic cameras that the City Council had not yet included in the city’s budget projections. In total, Warwick’s budget came out to $361.2 million and included a 1.97% tax increase – higher than Picozzi’s requested 1.48% rise.

In June, a former employee of the Warwick Water Division alleged that there was a culture of sexual harassment within the division, and that she was sexually harassed by three employees in 2022 and 2023, including both of her direct bosses. Another former employee filed a similar lawsuit in October, corroborating much of the first lawsuit’s claims and claiming that he had been the target of an anti-Semitic joke that had led to the arrest of Water Division head Terry DiPetrillo. Both cases remain pending.

Following months of rumors that he would challenge Mayor Frank Picozzi for his post, City Council President Stephen McAllister announced in June that not only would he not run for mayor but would step back from politics altogether. McAllister was among four council members not to seek reelection, including 15-term Councilwoman Donna Travis and councilmen Tim Howe and James McElroy.

Warwick’s mayoral race, among incumbent Frank Picozzi, School Committee Vice Chair Leah Hazelwood and former School Committee member Patrick Maloney, made sparks fly at the Beacon’s debate in October, though in the end Picozzi picked up more than 72% of the vote. The City Council remained secure in Democratic hands after the election, although Ward 4’s contest between eventual winner Salvatore DeLuise and independent candidate Joanne Miller was decided by less than 100 votes.

With McAllister’s departure, the new council needed to choose a new president. After a closed caucus on Nov. 16, the members emerged in agreement that Ward 8 Councilman Anthony Sinapi would lead the City Council – and its four new members – into the future. 

2025 will mark the beginning of the first four-year mayoral term in Warwick’s history, and will also see the installation of the new traffic cameras, which were approved by the council in June.

 

Construction abounds; turbulence hits T.F. Green

Throughout 2024, Warwick got significant infrastructure projects completed, and plenty of others started.

One of the largest projects of the year was the City Hall Plaza project – which got off to an unusual start when two companies each claimed to be the low bidder. Following the claim’s resolution, the plaza’s groundbreaking was conducted in May.

In addition to the plaza, construction began on several new housing projects, with one of the largest being a 214-unit apartment complex on Post Road next to the airport connector. Ground was broken on that project in May.

Speaking of Post Road, the city’s main artery received a fresh coat of asphalt this year from Route 37 through Main Avenue, following repaving work on the rest of the road in 2023. While Post Road’s work was done by the state, the city also repaved the longest non-state road in Warwick – Jefferson Boulevard.

Post Road’s repaving, which happened throughout the summer, also finished up one of RIDOT’s major projects in the city – the T.F. Green Airport Connector Beautification project.

The airport also made headlines in 2024. Tensions between the airport and city came to a head in the fall, when the airport proposed to build a sound wall and berm to mitigate the impacts of an air cargo facility near Strawberry Field Road that has received stiff opposition. In October, the city passed an abandonment of some streets in the area to allow the Rhode Island Airport Corporation to build the berm – something that raised public opposition as well.

That wasn’t the only bit of tension between T.F. Green and members of the public, with the Beacon writing in August about employees claiming that airport CEO Iftikhar Ahmad had created a toxic work environment in the workplace.

2025 promises more road work throughout the city, with current RIDOT plans showing portions of Centerville Road planned for repaving and City Hall Plaza expected to be completed.

 

The lighter side

While the schools, city government and infrastructure provided plenty of material for the Beacon throughout the year and made a major impact, a newspaper is nothing without its community – and we are proud to have covered major community accomplishments throughout the year.

The Beacon’s commitment to community coverage began with a trip to Newport on New Year’s Day for the 2024 Polar Plunge. The plunge was done in part to support 6-year-old Warwick resident Sofia Skipworth, who had been fighting leukemia for about two years.

From there, we covered other people and places that truly make Warwick special. One of them, the Trudeau Center, got to celebrate 60 years of helping educate Rhode Islanders with intellectual disabilities. Another Warwick-based organization – Child, Inc. – opened a clothing closet on wheels earlier this month, bringing an idea from a 5-year-old boy to fruition.

103-year-old Rosalee Malaby is one of the city’s oldest residents, and she served as a nurse in World War II, where she was stationed in Japan and the Philippines for 15 months. For that service, she was officially honored by the RI Nurses Honor Guard along with four other residents of Halcyon West Bay.

In July, the Beacon talked with Christina Peacock and Chris Lussier, two Warwick residents who were part of Special Olympics RI’s Athlete Leadership University’s first-ever graduating class.

As Warwick got to see 92% totality when an eclipse occurred in April The Beacon was at Rocky Point to talk with those gathered about the experience. And we weren’t the only ones on the scene for T.J. Murray’s Eagle Scout project in late August – fixing up the Conimicut Point overlook – as it was unexpectedly overtaken by a wedding party.

2024 has been a tumultuous year for many. Within the city, the year began with a new School Committee chair and ended with a new City Council president. We’ve had changes here as well, with Joy Fox becoming the new Beacon publisher in May.

Through it all, though, the Beacon has strived to provide the city and its 82,999 residents with the most relevant, accurate and up-to-date information possible on as many topics as possible. We look forward to doing the same throughout 2025.

Thank you to each and every one who has read our articles this year. It may be clichéd, but we literally could not do this without you, your trust and your support. It means the world to us.

From the Beacon to Warwick and all of our readers beyond the city’s limits, Happy New Year.

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