Government
Providence serves as Rhode Island's capital, housing the Rhode Island General Assembly as well as the offices of the Governor and the Lieutenant Governor in the Rhode Island State House.
Providence's city government has a mayor-council form of government. The Providence City Council consists of fifteen city councilors, one for each of the city's wards. The council is tasked with enacting ordinances and passing an annual budget. Providence also has probate and superior courts. The U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island is located downtown across from City Hall adjacent to Kennedy Plaza.
David N. Cicilline finished his term as mayor in 2010, 8 years after taking office as the first openly gay mayor of an American state capital. (notably, the second was elected 8 years later in neighboring Hartford, Connecticut.) Providence was the largest American city to have an openly gay mayor, until Sam Adams took office in Portland, Oregon on January 1, 2009.
The city's first Latino mayor was elected in 2010, Angel Taveras, who assumed office January 3, 2011.
Read more about this topic: Providence, Rhode Island
Famous quotes containing the word government:
“The scope of modern government in what it can and ought to accomplish for its people has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old “laissez faire” school of political rights, and the widening has met popular approval.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world. If a man is thought- free, fancy-free, imagination-free ... unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)