U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer delivers a keynote address during the Western Governors’ Association annual meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on June 24, 2025. (Photo by Austin Fisher/Source New Mexico)
U.S. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer is making a visit to Cranston Thursday afternoon as part of her “America at Work” listening tour, Rhode Island Current has learned.
Cpt. Ryan Tellier, a member of the Cranston firefighters union’s executive board, confirmed that Chavez-DeRemer is scheduled to visit the Pontiac Avenue station around 1 p.m. to have lunch with firefighters, tour the station, and observe a hazmat training class.
Her stop is expected to last about 90 minutes, Tellier said.
“Here at the union in Cranston we work hard to make sure we have close relations with our representatives in Washington,” Tellier said. “We’re fortunate to have the secretary come down and spend the afternoon with us.”
Chavez-DeRemer’s visit to Rhode Island comes less than a week after the Trump administration issued a stop work order on Revolution Wind, the state’s first large-scale offshore wind project. The Aug. 22 order issued by the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy has left an estimated 1,000 unionized workers involved in the multibillion dollar offshore wind farm in limbo. The project is 80% complete, with 45 of 65 turbines already in the water off Block Island’s coastline.
U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who joined the rest of the state’s congressional delegation in deriding the Trump administration’s move to halt Revolution Wind at a press event Monday at Quonset Point, saw irony in the timing of Chavez-DeRemer’s scheduled visit in a post on X.
Chavez-DeRemer was sworn in on March 11, 2025, as the federal government’s 30th labor secretary. In 2022, she became the first Republican woman elected to Congress from the state of Oregon and was the mayor of Happy Valley, Oregon, from 2011 to 2019.
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