A $1 billion rebuild of Providence's public schools, an $813 million tunnel under Pawtucket cleaning up Narragansett Bay, and a $427.9 million replacement for the failed Washington Bridge headline the Ocean State's public pipeline.
*How to read the total: the sum of the published figures in the list below. Bases differ by project — most are total cost estimates, some are federal grants, program totals, or construction contracts as awarded. Each project's expanded view labels its own basis. We add them up with the labels showing rather than pretend they're all the same kind of number.
Hover a pin for the project snapshot. Pin numbers match the project list below. Locations are approximate (nearest city or corridor midpoint) on a schematic state outline.
Click any project to expand its full record — description, owner, dates, funding, the law behind it, and its source. Filter by who owns it and where it stands, or sort by cost.
13 major public projects are listed. The listed figures sum to $3,554,971,138 — ≈$3.6B — and two records account for just over half of it: Providence's ≈$1B school facilities programme and the Narragansett Bay Commission's $813M Pawtucket Tunnel. Bases differ and are labelled on every record — programme totals, total estimates, one awarded contract (Newport), one bond-issuance figure (URI housing) and one committed-funding figure (RIPTA). This is a majors list, not a census of every city and town job in the nation's smallest state. Two of the 13 are 2026 completions, listed under the current convention with their dates printed: Route 146 ($196M, completed summer 2026) and URI's Fine Arts Center ($99M, opened September 14, 2026).
How the programme cases were handled: Providence's schools are counted ONCE at RIDE's $1B programme figure — the roughly 20 school builds inside it are not tallied separately. The Bay Commission's CSO programme is counted at Phase IIIA only ($813M): the full three-phase programme is roughly $1.5B and Phase III's later subphases run to 2041; neither is tallied. The Washington Bridge is tallied at the $427.9M rebuild total, with the wider $571M programme figure (including demolition and the emergency response) disclosed on the record rather than added. URI's Meade Stadium is counted at its $42M stadium figure, not the $83M athletics overhaul it belongs to. Naval Station Newport is counted only for the one discrete, priced pier contract.
News- and trade-flagged sources: several rows rest on news or trade-press reporting of official figures, flagged on their records — the Washington Bridge totals (Roads & Bridges, Providence Journal/RIDOT figures), the Eleanor Slater freeze (Providence Journal), URI housing (Construction Dive, developer figures), Meade Stadium (School Construction News, URI figures), the Fine Arts Center (Providence Journal, URI figures), the transit centre (Mass Transit, RIPTA release) and T.F. Green (Coastal ABC/WJAR, RIAC figures). Each record names the underlying official source. The softest records on the page are Providence's school programme (an agency's rounded $1B programme headline, counted once) and URI housing ($210.8M is a bond-issuance total stated by the developer, printed because it is the only published all-in figure).
Deliberately excluded: completed in a prior year, however large — the Rhode Island State Health Laboratories building in Providence ($81.7M CDC-funded, opened October 2025 — also a private-developer building housing a state tenant), the I-95 Providence Viaduct Northbound ($265M, RIDOT finish 2025), the Route 6/10 Interchange (completed about 2023) and the Newport Pell Bridge Approaches ($85.5M, finished 2024). URI's Ocean Robotics Laboratory on the Narragansett Bay Campus OPENED June 25, 2026 but is not listed: no published cost for the discrete building was found, and tallying its $300M multi-phase campus programme would double-count other campus work — it is named here instead. The Quonset / Port of Davisville $234M Port Master Plan is not listed as a programme (it would overlap the listed Missing Move ramps, and its discrete pieces are completions from 2025 or grant-funded works without a verified discrete build figure above the floor). The November 2026 ballot's Question 1 — a $275M higher-education bond ($165M URI health building, $60M CCRI, $50M Rhode Island College) — is excluded as unfunded: voters decide it on November 3, 2026, after this page's build date. The Mount Hope Bridge's $8M federal BUILD grant (July 2026) funds DESIGN of a deck rehabilitation only — below the floor as a build. The South Quay Marine Terminal ($35M state, 2022) had no current priced status verifiable at the build date. Excluded by the owner rule (private): Brown University's builds, Lifespan / Brown University Health hospitals, private development in the I-195 district, Centreville Bank Stadium in Pawtucket, Revolution Wind and other offshore wind (private generation), and Electric Boat's Quonset facilities. No verified TERMINATED Rhode Island major was found in this cycle; the one suspended record (Eleanor Slater) is a funded project frozen mid-design, with its unfunded replacement site disclosed on the record.