CityState: Reporter
of John Hancock; the letters of state
founder Roger Williams; and the colony’s
renunciation of King George III. But it
places little value in how those records
are preserved and stored. Rhode Island
is the only state in the nation without its
own state library and historical records
building. Since she took over the Secretary
of State’s office in 2015, Nellie Gorbea has
been on a mission to end the archives’
nomadic existence.
“If you look at Massachusetts and Con-
necticut, you see that they have a well-
developed historic and cultural tourism
economy,” Gorbea says. Our past deserves
a better future.”
In 2016, the Rhode Island Foundation
awarded the Secretary of State funds to hire
a consultant to assess what would be needed
to properly house the archives, possibly
combining it with other repositories held
by the Rhode Island Historical Society, the
state Supreme Court and the city of Provi-
dence. In 2018, the state budgeted $150,000
for a study to identify a permanent home.
Contractors DBVW Architects considered
undeveloped land and existing buildings,
before concluding that the best option was
a new facility to be built on the empty lawn
in front of the Department of Administra-
tion building on Smith Hill.
As envisioned, the $52 million, 52,000-
square-foot Rhode Island Archives and
History Center would feature “state-of-the-
art light, climate and security controls,”
3,000 square feet of exhibition and meeting
space and a preservation lab. Last year, Gor-
bea requested $5 million for engineering
and architectural plans, but Governor Gina
Raimondo only allocated $100,000 in her
capital budget recommendation to develop
an existing building. Gorbea asked for
$150,000 for fiscal year 2020 and $5 million
for fiscal year 2021, but received nothing
in the Governor’s proposed budget.
Investing in state archives collections
is often a hard sell, says Barbara Teague,
executive director of the Council of State
Archivists. A 2017, CoSA survey noted
that annually, states only spend, on aver-
age, .007 percent of their total budgets on
archives and records management.
“I don’t think legislators always realize
that the archives are a central function of
state and federal government’s account-
ability and transparency,” she says.
Why build repositories for old paper,
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RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY
l MARCH 2020 33