My Letter to the Voters of Ward 4

Dear Neighbor,

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When I was a kid, Tuesday nights in our house on Phenix Avenue meant science shows with my father. We would sit in front of Nova and I would ask him questions until he ran out of answers, which took some doing, because my dad was hard to stump. I grew up in that house. I went to Hope Highlands Elementary just up the road. And I live in that house today, at my mother's kitchen table, where the questions I sit with now are the property tax bill, the cost of groceries, and how much more expensive it has become simply to live in the city where I grew up.

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My name is Dante Diwan, and I am running for City Council here in Ward 4 because I believe City Hall should live by the same basic rules every Cranston family does: spend carefully, plan for the future, tell the truth about the bills, and never forget whose money you are spending.

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My family's story here starts in 1900, when my great-grandfather Emidio Piotti came from Italy alone at fourteen years old. He worked his whole life, ran a bakery, saved carefully, and bought property. Family legend has it that the man who came up with the recipe for Del's Lemonade was a tenant in my grandfather's house. My grandmother Irma is 96 now, still in the same Cranston house the family bought in 1964, still taking care of it herself, and still convinced nobody should leave her kitchen hungry. My mother grew up here, graduated from Cranston West, worked as a hairdresser to put herself through school, and became a teacher. My father took a very different road to Cranston. He grew up in Karachi, fell in love with science as a boy, and worked his way to America to study computer science. He was working at Brown University when he met my mother, and they married at Manning Chapel.

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Their backgrounds could hardly have been more different, but the lessons in our house were the same. Work hard. Save what you can. Take care of your family. Tell the truth. And do not spend money you do not have. Those were not political ideas in our house. They were simply how we lived.

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I had a good Cranston childhood. Cones at the Newport Creamery in Garden City, pastry boxes from Solitro's, Sunday dinners that started early and ended late. I played clarinet from the fourth grade, sang in choir, and earned a third-degree black belt in karate, which I am pleased to report I have never needed. I tutored Latin and geometry and volunteered at the library sorting books. One afternoon in ninth grade, while my brother practiced driving in the Hope Highlands parking lot, I grabbed a garbage bag and cleared the trash off the big field out back. I never told anyone. I only mention it now because running for office means explaining who you are, and that afternoon is who I am. If something in my community needs doing, I would rather just do it than wait for someone else.

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In August of 2016, a few weeks before I left for college, my father passed away. I went anyway, because he would have marched me there himself. I studied the subjects we had spent all those Tuesday nights talking about and earned degrees in neuroscience and biological physics from Brandeis University. I graduated in May of 2020, straight into the pandemic. There was no commencement, and not much of a job market for a young scientist either. So I came home. I love Cranston, but the honest answer is that I came home for my mother. Today I work a service job while I build my career in medical research, I help with the bills, and I do the math at our kitchen table, because in our house that math has to work.

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The doors I have knocked in this ward tell me my family is hardly alone. Parents are helping adult children. Adult children are caring for aging parents. Families are combining incomes because groceries, utilities, insurance, and taxes all cost more than they used to. When a household budget is already stretched, another few hundred dollars is not an abstraction. It is money that has to come from somewhere else. I am not embarrassed to be one of those families. It is why I understand what a tax increase actually means.

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Here is why I am running. A year ago I started attending meetings and reading Cranston's budget documents with a group of residents who wanted straight answers about the city's finances. I read them the way my father taught me to approach a question and the way I was trained to read data: carefully, line by line, without accepting an answer just because somebody in authority gives it. What I found alarmed me. Cranston is now facing a ten million dollar deficit that keeps growing, and the council just approved the maximum four percent tax rate increase allowed by law. This did not happen overnight and it did not happen by accident. It happened through years of short-sighted budgets, one-time fixes for permanent costs, and wasteful spending on pet projects and ribbon cuttings, while our schools, our roads, and our basic services kept sliding backwards. When that tax increase passed, I realized I could keep studying the problem from the audience, or I could stand up and do something about it.

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I want to be fair to our current councilman, Frank Ritz, who sits on the Council's Finance Committee, so I will simply tell you what the public record shows. Through his time on the School Committee and now on the council, he has never once voted against a budget or a dollar of spending the Mayor requested, except for the Mayor’s budget with a 7% tax increase which was voted down 9-0, while the deficit ballooned. And when other council members pushed to get honest answers out of City Hall, he said that sort of thing should be handled in private. I was not raised that way. When the checkbook does not balance, brushing it under the rug is how the problem gets worse. Ward 4 deserves a watchdog and an advocate, and I will fill that duty with honor, integrity, and accountability.

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Cranston's financial problems are too serious for petty partisan politics. I am a Democrat, but there is no Democratic or Republican way to balance a checkbook, fill a pothole, pick up the trash, or make sure taxpayers get what they pay for. I will work with Democrats, Republicans, independents, the Mayor, and anyone else with a good idea for Cranston. I will support a proposal when I believe it is right, oppose it when I believe it is wrong, and explain my reasoning publicly either way. The City Council should never be a rubber stamp for any mayor or any political party. My responsibility will be to Ward 4 and the City of Cranston.

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I will not pretend the next few years will be painless, and I will not insult you by promising easy answers. Hard decisions are coming, and the job of your councilman is to face them honestly and protect taxpayers from the worst of the harm. My plan is spelled out in full at DanteforCranston.com, and it comes down to a few commitments:

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• Cut waste and modernize City Hall, starting with the hundreds of thousands of dollars Cranston loses every year in avoidable recycling penalties, and the millions drifting into overtime instead of proper hiring, so we can fund what actually matters, like fixing our crumbling infrastructure.

• Grow revenue without squeezing homeowners, by allowing housing where it makes sense, never at the expense of our neighborhoods' character, and by making Cranston a city where a new business can actually open its doors.

• Deliver real oversight, including a plain-language public report every quarter on the city's true finances, because we cannot fix what we will not face.

• Say no to data centers, massive industrial facilities that consume enormous amounts of power and water, strain our electric grid, create almost no permanent jobs, drive up our electricity costs, and do not belong beside Cranston neighborhoods.

• Reject Flock and other mass surveillance cameras, because law-abiding Cranstonians should not have their comings and goings tracked and stored in a private hackable database. I will back our police with real resources, but I do not trust a private company's camera network with a record of where your family drives.

• Protect the rural character of western Cranston, our farms, woods, and open space, from commercial solar sprawl, warehouses, and industrial development pushed up against residential lots. Once that land is gone, it is gone for good.

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I do not pretend to have every answer. What I can promise is the thing I have done my whole life: I will ask the questions, I will sit with the hard problem until the numbers make sense, I will tell you the truth about what I find, and when something needs doing, I will pick up the garbage bag myself.

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I love this city. It gave my great-grandfather a start, my grandmother a home she still lives in today, my mother a community to raise her family, my father a career, and me everything I have, including the house where we watched Nova on Tuesday nights. I am running to make sure Cranston can still make that promise to the next family.

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The general election is Tuesday, November 3rd. I would be honored to earn your vote.

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Sincerely,

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Dante Diwan

Democrat for Cranston City Council  ·  Ward 4

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3 WAYS TO VOTE

1.  By Mail: Apply by Oct. 13 - apply online at: mailballot.sos.ri.gov

2.  Early Voting: Oct. 14 to Nov. 2 - Pastore Youth Center, 155 Gansett Ave

3.  Election Day: Nov. 3 - 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.