Will He or Won’t He? RI Commerce Secretary Pryor Continues to Mull Run for Office

Will He or Won’t He? RI Commerce Secretary Pryor Continues to Mull Run for Office

For months, Rhode Island Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor has been talking to top players in the Democratic party about a potential run for Rhode Island General Treasurer.

To date, the only announced candidate for the Treasurer’s office is former Central Falls Mayor James Diossa. Despite announcing in 2021, Diossa only has $155,788 cash on hand.

Pryor,  a graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, has held top positions in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut before coming to Rhode Island to assume the top economic development position. And in building that resume, he has developed a top-tier network of government and business leaders.

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Besides serving as the top economic development officer for Governors Gina Raimondo and Dan McKee, he worked in a key economic development job for Republicans George Pataki and New York City Mayors Rudy Guiliani and Michael Bloomberg (the billionaire Bloomberg who later became an independent and ran for President as a Democrat).

 

Pryor served as head of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation — the agency rebuilding the area of the World Trade Center attack.

Not all of his work was lauded. Then New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer blasted the agency. The New York Times reported, “In May, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, the leading Democratic candidate for governor, said, ‘The L.M.D.C. is an absolute failure.’”

Spitzer went on to be elected Governor of New York and later was forced to resign for his involvement in a sex scandal with a prostitute. The 9/11 Memorial that Pryor helped create is the 7th most visited site in New York City.

And then, Pryor moved south to New Jersey.  He served as Deputy Mayor for then-Newark Mayor and now U.S. Senator Cory Booker. Pryor and Booker attended law school together.

That meant more big-time deals and more connections for Pryor, who was still in his 30s at the time. He helped booker transform the city.

 

On to Connecticut

Five years later, Pryor was recruited by then-Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy to serve as the Commissioner of Education. In Connecticut, he was billed as a reformer. The son of two public school teachers, he also was one of the original board members on the mega-charter school corporation Achievement First.

And four years later, he had packed up and headed north to Rhode Island to serve as Raimondo’s most influential advisor.

 

Commerce, Raimondo and Success and Failures

For more than seven years, Pryor has been the go-to guy for the state of Rhode Island in deal-making.

He helped to strip Providence of its oversight over the 195 lands, and he was a major factor in pushing the Fane Tower forward — a $300 to $400 million project that appears to be presently stalled —and he has been the point person on the Superman deal.

There has been a range of successes under his tenure and some failures.

The PawSox now play in Worcester, and the new Hasbro headquarters has not been built.

There are many questions still to answer about the Superman deal, but no doubt Providence looks different with a stream of new hotels and apartment buildings. He created innovative programs for small businesses and the Wavemaker fellowships program that has helped slow the brain drain out of Rhode Island.

If Pryor runs, the question for voters may be simple --  do they want the $11 billion state retirement system run by the former Mayor of Central Falls or Pryor, a person with deep experience and a top-tier network.

So -- will he or won't he -- run for offfice? Stay tuned. 

 

Pryor declined to comment for this story.