City Planner Almeida takes Westerly post
WOONSOCKET —After some 20 months on the job, City Planner Rui Almeida is about to cut a beeline – a diagonal one – for a new job in the state’s other big “W.”
Almeida will move from the northeast to the southwest corner of the Ocean State as town planner of Westerly – a place where it’s easier to understand how Rhode Island got its nickname.
“Forty-six percent of the town is water,” said Almeida.
Almeida’s last day at City Hall is tomorrow and he starts his new assignment on Monday. As town planner, he’ll essentially be in charge of Westerly’s Planning Department, which has just one other employee, he said.
“We are looking forward to Rui joining the Westerly team,” Director of Development Services Lisa Pellegrini said. “His impressive skills, vision and insight, combined with his unique experiences in urban planning, historical preservation and architecture will no doubt be very beneficial to the community as he begins work on the many diverse and complex projects within the department.”
As town planner, Almeida will be responsible for carrying out a variety of “current, complex, and long-range municipal planning activities,” Pellegrini said.
Famously, Westerly is the part-time residence of pop singer Taylor Swift, and one of the more vexing issues currently facing town officials is whether to allow parking on her street. No comment yet from Almeida on where he falls on that.
Before Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt hired him in September 2016, Almeida had worked as the assistant director of architecture and redevelopment in Central Falls for a year. A native of Portugal, Almeida has a degree in architecture from the Technical University in Lisbon, and he worked from 1994-2012 as an architect and interior designer for the government of Ponta Delgada, part of the North Atlantic archipelago some 900 miles of the coast of Portugal. He is also a former professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Almeida says he’s proud of his accomplishments during his relatively brief tenure in City Hall. Among other things, Almeida says he helped persuade the Rhode Island Department of Transportation to add $5 million into its Transportation Improvement Plan for projects associated with Main Street during the next decade by coming up with a concrete blueprint for applying the funds.
Almeida says he also strove to make the city planner’s job a more central hub of city government, particularly its economic development functions.
“The role of city planner, I tried to redefine it,” Almeida said. “The city planner should have a more prominent role and a leadership role. That never happened here before.”
The Main Street Master Plan for the future of the city’s historic mercantile district was “almost done” on his watch as well.
“He’s a good guy, a very smart guy,” said Planning Director Joel Mathews, who recently came out of retirement to succeed the late Planning Director N. David Bouley, who died after a battle with pancreatic cancer in March.
Almeida said he was enamored by the historic architecture and quaint charm of the city. A resident of North Providence, Almeida says he’ll miss all of it, as well as his colleagues and friends at City Hall.
“I’ll miss everything,” he says.
Though he won’t be here to shepherd the city along to a rebirth, he still believes there is one on the way for the onetime cradle of the Industrial Revolution. But Almeida says it will take care, perseverance and – above all – cooperation to get there.
“Work together,” is his advice. “Create, sustain and expand relationships. It’s where everything comes from.”