Leading members of Rhode Island’s statewide tea party group have defected to form their own organization focused on state legislative issues.
Lisa Blais, a board member of the two-year-old RI Tea Party, announced Friday the formation of Ocean State Tea Party in Action.
Blais said the group formed out of a growing unhappiness with the direction of the RI Tea Party, which was founded by Colleen Conley in 2009 as the tea party movement –– generally in favor of reduced government spending and against tax increases –– gained momentum across the country.
“We’re going to continue the work that has proven effective,” Blais said Friday. “We’re not looking to compete with the RI Tea Party, but, organizationally, it took a different direction.”
Ocean State Tea Party in Action, which filed with the state earlier this week as a domestic nonprofit corporation, expects to be a “strong voice” at the State House and provide a “constant spotlight” on elected officials and their voting records, according to Blais.
She and other members of the new group were among the tea party advocates most vocal this past legislative session, strongly opposing a proposed overhaul of the state sales tax as well as the creation of binding arbitration for teachers, two proposals that ultimately did not pass.
Both Blais and Conley denied that there was any open hostility between the two tea party factions.
“We look forward to collaboration with all good-government groups, tea parties and citizen advocates,” said Blais, a Providence resident who worked at the now-defunct advocacy group The Education Partnership. “We’re all really working towards many of the same goals.”
Said Conley: “I know they’ll do a fantastic job. They are very passionate, focused and detail-oriented women.”
She says RI Tea Party, which last April said it had more than 2,500 people on its e-mail list, will continue to focus on the national debt and federal spending, help coordinate the state’s many local tea party and “patriot” groups (which mostly focus on municipal or regional issues) and push a statewide agenda through its media presence and its own State House lobbying.
“RI Tea is the core,” Conley said. “You got to think of it as the mother ship. And it just launched another ship.”
The union-backed progressive coalition Ocean State Action poked fun at the apparent splintering of its philosophical foil in an e-mail to supporters Friday.
“We’re flattered that the RI Tea Party likes us so much that they would stick their name in the middle of ours. Who knew that they wanted to be us when they grew up?” Kate Brock, the group’s executive director, wrote. “We thought about calling the press. We thought about calling a lawyer for name infringement. But the most important place to beat the Tea Party is at the ballot box in 2012. We need progressive champions in the General Assembly, not ‘Tea Party Patriots’ who are committed to dismantling our state one piece at a time.”
Among those involved in Ocean State Tea Party in Action are four members of the RI Tea Party steering committee, who, like Blais, resigned from their volunteer posts recently.
They include Lyn Jennings, who this year helped found an advocacy group of her own: RI Salons United, which represented hair salon owners opposed to Governor Chafee’s proposal to lower the state sales tax but broaden it to a number of currently exempt items and services, like haircuts.
Blais says state Rep. Doreen Costa, R-North Kingstown, who has been active in the RI Tea Party, is also expected to join the new group’s board of directors.
Costa says she’ll also continue to be involved with RI Tea Party. “The more groups we have, the better,” she said. “That’s the way I look at it.”
RI Tea Party, meanwhile, is still set to organize the Tax Day rally at the State House in April, produce the “TeaTV” show that started airing in this past April on the same channel that airs sessions of the state General Assembly (Cox Channel 15), as well as prepare for the coming election, according to Conley.
The group recently announced that the national Tea Party Express Bus Tour is making a stop in North Kingstown’s Wilson Park on Sept. 7. That bus may potentially bring a presidential candidate or two to the Ocean State, according to the announcement.
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