Michael Riley

Michael Riley earned a high school diploma from the Florida Air Academy. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Rhode Island and a law degree from Roger Williams University School of Law in 2016. His career experience includes working as an attorney and small business owner.[1]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I'm a husband, a father of four, and a Scituate kid — third generation.

My grandparents ended up here. My parents raised me here. I went away for school and work like a lot of people do, and then my wife and I sat down and figured out where we wanted to raise our own family. We came back. That wasn't an accident. It's a small town where people still know each other, still show up for each other, and still expect their kids to grow up the same way we did.

We've got four kids. Two of our girls play softball, and my son plays in the Scituate Foster Gloucester Little League so a lot of my spring and summer is spent standing behind a fence at a ball field. That's not a complaint. Some of the best conversations I've had in this town happened in the bleachers.

For work, I'm a real estate lawyer. I hung out my own shingle in 2017 and I've run the practice by myself ever since. Most of my days are spent helping regular people buy or sell a house — first-time buyers, families trading up, folks selling a parent's home after they've passed. I'm also a licensed real estate broker in Rhode Island and Florida.

I'm not a politician. I'm a guy who's lived here, worked here, and is raising four kids here. I've spent my whole career sitting across the table from people at the biggest financial moment of their lives, listening to what they actually need and getting it done. That's the same job, honestly.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

Repeal the assault weapons ban.

The people this law hits are the people who did everything right. They bought legally. They passed the background check. They keep their firearms locked up and they've never given anyone a reason to worry about them. Now the state has decided they're the problem.

They're not. Nobody who's willing to shoot someone is going to be stopped by a law about what a store can sell. All this does is punish law-abiding people and make politicians feel like they did something.

I'd rather we spend that energy on the people actually committing crimes with guns, and leave everybody else alone.

I'll vote to repeal it. No hedging, no "it's complicated." Repeal it.Scituate isn't a neighborhood of Providence.

Every year the State House passes another law telling small towns what they have to allow, where they have to allow it, and how fast. People who have never driven down Chopmist Hill Road are making decisions about our land, our water, our roads and our schools.

We're a rural town. That's not an accident and it's not a problem to be fixed. It's the reason people move here and the reason families stay for three generations.

I do zoning and land use for a living, so I know exactly how these mandates land on a town our size. The answer isn't a one-size-fits-all rule written for a city.

Decisions about Scituate should get made in Scituate.Stop making it more expensive to live here.

I sit at closings for a living, so I see this up close. Last October the state raised the tax you pay when you sell your house. Not a debate, not a vote people paid attention to — it just went up. Same with the estate tax. Rhode Island taxes estates that other states wouldn't touch, and it hits regular families who own a house and a little land, not the wealthy. Then there's your electric bill, which everyone knows about and nobody at the State House has fixed.

I'm not going to promise you I can cut your utility bill. One state rep can't. What I can promise is that I'll be the vote against the next increase, every single time.

That's the job. Stop making it worse.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

Schools. Specifically, who gets to decide what happens in them.

Scituate has good schools. We have them because this is a town that shows up — parents at school committee meetings, teachers who live here, a community that pays attention. Nobody at the State House built that. We did.

So it bothers me when the state hands down another mandate about what gets taught and how, written by people who will never set foot in one of our buildings and won't be here to answer for it when it doesn't work. Our school committee answers to parents at the grocery store. That accountability is worth something, and every mandate chips away at it.

And parents come first. You know your kid better than any agency does. If a family decides a different school or a