I'm not kicking the can down the road. I'm picking it up and putting it in the recycling bin. No more blame game, no more baloney. It's time to work together and make our neighborhood feel like a community again.
ABOUT JOE
My name is Joe Casoli, and I'm running to be your next City Councilman in Ward Four in Providence and I've proudly called the North End my home for decades. I'm no stranger to hard work, that's how I was raised. Working my way through Rhode Island College at the Providence Police Department as a dispatcher honed my abilities to manage crises with compassion and composure. Throughout my career, I moved on to various roles in city and state government, all with the same solutions-oriented approach in each position. If there is a problem, I want to fix it.
THE PROBLEMS
Our neighborhood has deteriorated to an unacceptable condition: Drug dealers zooming in and out of our affordable housing complexes to poison our neighbors, drug overdoses every day, at all times of day, used needles on the streets, in parks, and in playgrounds. We've got catalytic converters being stolen, potholes the size of moon craters, and absentee landlords abandoning their responsibility to their tenants and their community. Our seniors can't walk down the sidewalks safely because they're uneven, broken, or blocked by overgrowth.
We have been better than this, and we can be better than this again.
THE SOLUTIONS
- Revitalize community policing. People who are selling drugs in or stealing from our neighborhood will think twice if we have a more consistent, active community policing presence. This solution alone will have an outsized impact on many issues in our neighborhood.
- Get our housing insecure neighbors and substance dependent neighbors off the street and into homes and treatment programs, with outpatient followup and support. It's not compassionate to simply ignore our most vulnerable neighbors.
- Refocus attention to the details: fill the potholes, repair the sidewalks and bus shelters, cut the overgrowth, sweep the streets, clean the storm drains, and plow the snow down to the pavement. It's all in the details, and that's my specialty.