Here are the four state senators who will chair high-profile committees this session

PROVIDENCE − New leaders have taken the reins of four high-profile state Senate committees with sway over laws that govern how the $13-billion state budget gets doled out, the environment and the large divide over guns and abortion.

On Tuesday, Senate Democratic leaders appointed:

• Sen. Louis DiPalma, D-Middletown, as the new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, replacing Ryan Pearson, the Cumberland Democrat who is now Senate majority leader.

• Sen. Dawn Euer, D-Newport, as the new chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, replacing former Sen. Cynthia Coyne, who did not run for reelection.

• Sen. Alana DiMario, D-Narragansett, as the new chair of the Senate Environment and Agriculture Committee, a post held by Euer during the last legislative session.

• Sen. Mark McKenney, who returned to the Senate this year after an election defeat two years ago, as the new chair of the Senate Rules, Government Ethics and Oversight Committee, which has in the past, under former chairman DiPalma, dug into a wide array of issues, from the status of the state takeover of Providence schools to the RIPTA data breach to alleged mismanagement by past administrators of the state hospital.

In his day job, DiPalma is an engineer at Raytheon. Euer and McKenney are lawyers. DiMario is a mental-health counselor.

What to know about the new Senate committee chairs

DiPalma, who represents portions of Little Compton, Middletown, Newport and Tiverton, has been the detail-oriented "first vice chairman" of the Senate Finance Committee, which conducts its own hearings throughout the legislative year on state agency spending.

But he is perhaps best known for his role as the aggressive and outspoken oversight committee chairman with no qualms about digging deep in the weeds to get at explanations — and sometimes documents state officials are reluctant to turn over.

This Journal headline reflects one such fight in 2021: "RI Senate's Oversight chair takes fight for denied state hospital records to AG."

"There are no words which truly express my disappointment," Sen. Louis DiPalma wrote [then] Health and Human Services Secretary Womazetta Jones of her agency's refusal to provide documentation of the work that a consultant — Manatt, Phelps & Phillips — did for the state during a year-and-a-half-long suspension of Medicaid billing.

Euer first made her mark at the State House as one of the leading advocates for the same-sex marriage law — also known as "marriage equality in Rhode Island" — before winning a Senate seat in a 2017 special election.

She was the lead sponsor of the state's high profile Act on Climate, requiring the state to develop a plan to incrementally reduce fossil fuel emissions to "net-zero" by 2050.

As for where she stands on litmus-test issues that resurface in the Judiciary Committee in some form every year: she was part of the effort to codify "safe and legal abortion access" in state law, and introduced legislation banning high-capacity magazines for firearms and removing the spousal exemption from the state's rape law.

DiMario's credentials in the environmental arena are perhaps less well-known than her past child, health care and small business initiatives.

First elected in 2020 to represent Narragansett, North Kingstown and New Shoreham, she sponsored bills that required DCYF report all suspected cases of childhood sexual abuse to the Children's Advocacy Center, allowed restaurants to continue expanded outdoor dining, and barred insurers from charging co-pays for COVID-19 treatments during Rhode Island's state of emergency.

In 2021, she sponsored a Senate passed bill to implement a "Transportation and Climate Initiative Program" that never made it through the House.

The aim, according to a legislative news release: to provide the "funding the state needs to make clean transportation options available and affordable for all Rhode Islanders."

She also took sides in the continuing dispute over shoreline access by sponsoring legislation to prevent the prosecution of anyone "for fishing, gathering seaweed, swimming or passage along the sandy or rocky shoreline within ten feet (10') of the most recent high tide line." It stalled in committee.

Gone from the Senate the last two years, McKenney served a single term in the Senate in 2019-20. He was among the state lawmakers pushing, without luck, for a sales-tax holiday in Rhode Island.

Among his arguments: “Our two neighboring states have tax holidays ... Instead of Rhode Islanders leaving the state to purchase goods elsewhere ... I want to see people from other states coming here to make their retail purchases."

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI state Senate committee new chairs: DiPalma, Euer, DiMario, McKenney