First-time candidate Adam Greenman announced his campaign for mayor of Pawtucket on Monday, vowing to do more to move the city forward than longtime Mayor Don Grebien.
While Grebien has proved a reliable vote-getter since first winning election in 2010, Greenman said it’s time for a change, particularly with the state’s fourth-largest city losing Memorial Hospital, the PawSox minor league baseball team and the headquarters of Hasbro.
“We’ve lost so much over the last 16 years and we deserve a mayor who works as hard as the people in Pawtucket,” Greenman said in an interview. “I’ve spoken with hundreds of people across the city in the last few months, and I’ve spent my career working on the issues that they talk about most – education, affordability, housing, community building – and I want to take everything I’ve learned and put it work on behalf of the people of this city.”
Greenman formally announced his run Monday evening at a restaurant on Broadway in Pawtucket.
While factors outside Pawtucket influenced the closing of Memorial Hospital and the exit of the PawSox and Hasbro, “I think the mayor has a crucial role to play in these things and it starts with relationship-building,” said Greenman, a 43-year-old resident of the Pawtucket neighborhood of Darlington. “It starts with being proactive and making sure that you’re having conversations with the businesses in your community, that you’re not taking them for granted. It really is about listening to what their needs are.”
“So I think you could look at one of those and say it was market forces,” he added, “but when you look at all three, and other things we’ve lost as well – the Gamm Theatre – and then just tons of small businesses that have left, you start to see a pattern that doesn’t look good. And it’s one of the reasons why I think we need new leadership in this city. We need a fresh start.”
Pawtucket, once the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, has focused on a new transit station on the Central Falls line and the residential conversion of old mills as it tries to bounce back from losing the PawSox and other former cornerstones.
Grebien announced his re-election campaign last year, with a theme that he’s building a better tomorrow for Pawtucket. He secured 66.5% of the vote in 2024.
The contest is one of the top mayoral races in Rhode Island this year, along with state Rep. David Morales’ challenge to Providence Mayor Brett Smiley.
The Democratic primary is Sept. 8.
Greenman grew up in Philadelphia. He met his wife Erin, a Rhode Island native, while working as a middle school teacher for Teach for America in Camden, New Jersey, and they moved to Pawtucket in 2009.
Greenman initially worked for the United Way of Rhode Island after relocating here. Until recently, he served as president/CEO of the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island. Greenman said he left the job to focus on his campaign for mayor.
He said he hopes to raise between $125,000 and $150,000 to support his campaign.
Greenman pointed to how a local ordinance limits home-based child care centers in Pawtucket to eight students at a time, as an example of a small change he would support to make a difference.
The limit “stymies the ability for Pawtucket to have more kids in child care centers even if those child care centers have the space for it, even if they’ve got all the accreditation for it,” he said. “Versus our neighbors in Providence and Central Falls, where the upward limit is 12 or 14 kids.”
Asked about his strategy for unseating a long-term incumbent, Greenman said, “We’re going to get out there and talk to as many people in Pawtucket as we possibly can. I’ve been doing that for the last six months as I’ve been thinking about this campaign. And what I hear again and again is that people are ready for change.”
