16-05-2025
City leaders in the spotlight: What to know about Providence Mayor Brett Smiley
PROVIDENCE – When Brett Smiley talks about the city, he frames it as a business. The city departments are the operations, and as mayor he's the manager whose job is to make Providence run better.
Unsurprisingly, he went to college for business. While he was living in his native Chicago and enrolled in graduate school, a friend of his made a run for local office. Smiley took a gig helping with the campaign, and what started as a favor for a friend altered the trajectory of his career.
'I ended up moving around the country, working on campaigns and helping who I thought were good people get elected to office,' he said. 'I landed in Rhode Island in 2006 to manage the governor's race that year. I met and subsequently married a Rhode Islander, and Rhode Island became home.'
Smiley's résumé includes working for two former mayors of Providence – David Cicilline and Jorge Elorza – along with former Gov. Gina Raimondo. Fifteen years ago, he was wholeheartedly devoted to working behind the scenes, but in 2014 he made his first bid for mayor because he believed he had something different and better to offer than the other candidates. He eventually dropped out of that race but made a comeback in 2022 when he was elected mayor.
Smiley has been a polarizing character for the city, and his proposal to raise taxes later this year by nearly double the usual yearly increase is his latest action to draw ire from unhappy constituents. Although many of Providence's fragilities predate the Smiley administration, his retro potholes-and-police dialogues may lack the popularity needed to get him reelected next year.
Smiley said he works every day, and the lines between his personal and professional worlds are blurred. It's not uncommon for people to flag him down when he goes to watch a Providence College basketball game or on early-morning runs with his husband. It was jarring the first time someone knocked on the front door of their house with a constituent concern, but Smiley said he's become accustomed to those interactions.
'You're always on. Always mayor. So, it is in fact a 24-hour job,' he said. 'I'm very cognizant of the fact that I only get to do this for a certain amount of time, and I want to make the most of it, so it has significantly overshadowed any personal goals I might have.'
Smiley is married to one of the state's most successful real estate agents, Jim DeRentis. Eighteen years older than his husband, DeRentis grew up in Warwick and is a regular at selling multimillion-dollar properties. He's one of the Rhode Islanders in his field to exceed $100 million worth of sales in a single year. Along with their East Side brownstone, the couple own an apartment in New York City.
Despite those points, Smiley thinks people make untrue assumptions about him and DeRentis.
'My husband came from very humble means,' he said. 'I was raised by a single mom, and she worked very hard to provide a life for us. We grew up in the suburbs with great public schools. We weren't the richest family on the block, but we weren't the poorest either. I know the privileges that I was raised with.'
Smiley feels he does a good job of staying plugged in with communities by hosting events, visiting schools and answering calls on one of the local Spanish-language radio stations every month. The only way to get elected was to knock on thousands of doors, so that's what he said he did. Providence is nothing like sprawling cities in bigger states, he added.
'People know their mayor, and they're not shy about sharing their concerns,' he said. 'It's usually a complaint or a concern. It's rarely a compliment.'
Smiley's campaign hinged on quality-of-life issues, from fixing sidewalks to plowing roads and policing noisy neighborhoods. Last year, he helped the city roll out modernized parking meters, and this month he announced plans to replace trash and recycling carts. Those efforts might seem small, but they help people in tangible ways, he said.
The mayor unveiled his proposal for the 2026 fiscal year budget in early May. Because of the city's requirement to contribute millions of dollars more to public schools this year than it did in last year, there was a significant budget shortfall. Smiley believes that residents understand the problem, but people have different ideas about how to address it. His solution, he explained, was to propose a little bit of everything.
At one community meeting, someone suggested cutting money for the zoos because they aren't essential. Another person chimed in to say that the city definitely shouldn't reduce funding for youth summer jobs, and they should actually increase it. A third voice asked, why not just lay off city employees? Someone else responded, 'I am a city employee. Don't do that.'
'I think the right thing is to do some cuts that don't severely impact services – particularly anything that impacts children and families. I think we should eliminate some jobs but not be callous to the fact that these are real people,' Smiley said. 'Next year, the people of Providence will have a decision on whether they think I got it right or not, and on the ballot, they'll either give me another term or vote me out of office. That's the job.'
Along with reducing the city's operating budget, his plan also involves raising property taxes that would affect most residents and looking for alternative revenue sources, such as a commercial parking lot tax that targets visitors in town for events at the Providence Performing Arts Center or the Amica Mutual Pavilion.
What Smiley wants most for Providence is a dramatic amount of new construction. He argued that because there is such a high demand for housing, it leads to skyrocketing prices, and the best way to combat that is to increase the housing stock as they did in Austin, Texas, and other cities that developed rapidly. With so much vacant land for sale in Providence, new housing should be under construction 'in every corner of the city,' he said.
'I think that Providence can be that next proof point, but we have to stop squabbling over individual incentive packages for buildings where nothing exists currently,' he added. 'The governor and the Rhode Island Department of Housing have all been asking for shovel-ready projects. We've got a ton of shovel-ready projects, so I hope that the state continues to award its dollars to projects that are actually ready, which are right here.'
Smiley took a jab at suburbs where community leaders create barriers to constructing affordable housing, even though those are state-mandated projects. The most notable example is an ongoing dispute in nearby Johnston.
'It is like a new day in Providence. There was a long time where we had a lot of NIMBYism [a not-in-my-backyard attitude] in the city, where our residents fought new development. They don't do that anymore. Everyone seems to agree that we need more housing,' Smiley said.
With the reduced stigma against income-restricted housing, he thinks the city now needs to work with the state to get more subsidies, and he hopes the City Council is on board for that. Even though all 15 councilors and every member of the Providence delegation in the General Assembly is also a Democrat, they come in slightly different shades of blue.
'They're doing their job to represent their constituents. My job is to represent the entire city. Sometimes what's good for one neighborhood is maybe not good for, in my opinion, the whole city,' he said. 'That's where conflicts sometimes arise.'
However, Smiley feels there's a healthy atmosphere that helps them reach compromises, and he has a lot of respect for City Council President Rachel Miller.
As the election gets closer, Smiley knows that this time it'll come down to people evaluating his track record. Because it's his dream job, Smiley hopes to serve one more term and really focus on the school district, but he's not sure what his plans are after that.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Who is Providence Mayor Brett Smiley? Everything to know.
