Welcome to the July issue of WPS in Brief. This month covers key topics from one school committee meeting.

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Let’s get to it:

Superintendent’s Goals and Self-Reflection.

At the beginning of each school year, the superintendent presents annual goals to the School Committee for approval. At the end of the year, he reports back on how those goals were met (or weren’t). It’s an important process because, when done well, these goals serve as both a roadmap for the district and a key accountability tool for the superintendent, the School Committee, and the public.

While Allen’s presentation lasted just twenty minutes, his 44-page self-assessment covered a lot of ground. I could do a deep dive on every goal, but in the interest of keeping this brief, I try to highlight the biggest takeaways.

Because Allen has been in the district so long at such a high level, it allowed him to hit the ground running as a first year superintendent. One thing I want to emphasize is where Allen’s strengths lie: he has an expert’s understanding of operations, systems, and organizational structure (as I reported when he got the job, he’s one of the best in the state, if not the region). His leadership has focused on turning the district’s strategic plan into concrete systems and processes, with nearly every initiative tied back to that plan, which runs through 2028—the same year his current contract expires. As Allen put it, “Running the Worcester Public Schools is equivalent to running a massive, highly regulated enterprise. We are more than a half billion dollar operation navigating complex legal, civil rights, and special education mandates... ultimately our role is shielding schools and classrooms from many of these operational challenges.” Whether you agree with every decision or not, his emphasis on building systems that support schools is a consistent theme throughout his leadership. It’s also what I believe sets him apart from many of his peers.

Student Goal.

The Superintendent set a goal of increasing the percentage of students meeting or exceeding benchmark on Star Reading (grades 2–9) and Star Math (grades 1–9) from 33% to 36% by the end of the 2025–26 school year. By June, 35% of students met the benchmark in both subjects, representing a 6 percent gain in reading and a 5 point gain in math. According to the district, this is the largest single-year improvement since Star was implemented districtwide in 2021–22. That’s encouraging, though I’d be interested in seeing the data broken down by grade level and student group. Districtwide averages can mask important differences, and some grades have historically shown as much as an 11 percent gain over the course of a single year.

The district also noted that fewer students fell into the lowest benchmark category than at any point since Star was adopted, suggesting growth occurred across the achievement spectrum, not just among students already close to proficiency. As always, though, the bigger question is why scores improved. How much reflects stronger instruction, increased familiarity with the assessment, changes in testing conditions, or other factors? It’s also worth remembering that Star is a universal screener and that student proficiency rates are heavily influenced by factors outside a school district’s control, including family income, home language, and parents’ educational attainment. Worcester’s student population saw decreases in both low-income students and English learners this year, which likely plays some role as well.

There was a deeper conversation around assessments later in the meeting, which I touch on farther down in this brief.

Collaborative Teaming Goal.
The district exceeded its goal of creating more consistent collaborative meeting structures across schools. The target was for 70% of collaborative teams—including Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), grade-level teams, departments, and school leadership teams—to consistently use four core meeting practices by the end of the year. According to Allen, 84% of team meetings included all four practices (using a standard agenda, sharing it in advance, reviewing meeting norms, and documenting action steps), and 38 of the district’s 49 schools met the district’s standard for implementing the collaborative teaming model with fidelity. This is one of those goals that’s hard for the public to see directly, but schools are full of meetings, and having consistent structures can help make those meetings more productive. It’s another example of Allen’s broader focus on building systems and processes that he believes will lead to stronger instruction over time.

Communication Framework Goal.
Allen also reported that the district met its goal of implementing a unified communications framework. The idea is to create a more consistent approach to how Worcester Public Schools communicates with staff, families, and the broader community, while also expanding multilingual outreach and accessibility. The framework is also intended to ensure district messaging aligns with the Vision to Action strategic plan.

The communications strategy document itself is pretty impressive, and I know I sound like a broken record, but communication is night-and-day compared to WPS before 2022. According to the Superintendent, the district will track the framework through communication audits, analytics, and surveys of staff and families, to see whether communication becomes more consistent, transparent, and responsive over time.

Future Teacher Pipeline Goal.
One initiative that seems to be off to a strong start is the district’s new “Grow Your Own” Future Teacher Pipeline. The goal is to recruit Worcester students who are interested in becoming teachers and, ultimately, bring them back to work in Worcester Public Schools. Given that Allen is himself a WPS graduate, this seems like a particularly meaningful initiative for him.

The district far exceeded its first-year goal, enrolling 41 students in the inaugural cohort instead of the 15–20 originally planned. According to the district, 78% of participants are students of color and 56% identify as Hispanic or Latino. Through a partnership with Worcester State University, 13 students completed their first college education course, and 25 graduating seniors took part in the district’s first “Future Educators Signing Day,” committing to pursue careers in education with the hope of returning to teach in Worcester.

Allen has also said he hopes the concept eventually expands beyond teaching. At a recent CPPAC meeting, he noted that WPS is the second-largest employer in the city and said he’d like to see similar pipelines developed for careers in areas like accounting, information technology, and other district professions.

Areas to Improve.
In his self-assessment, the superintendent reflected on several challenges during his first year, emphasizing that continuous improvement requires identifying problems, understanding their root causes, and making systemic changes. He acknowledged that communication was a common issue in several situations, including the principal selection process at Nelson Place, the proposed merger of the Worcester Alternative and ACT programs with the Central Massachusetts Collaborative, proposed administrative reorganization related to equity, and changes to elementary prep periods. In each case, he stated that the district plans to improve transparency, stakeholder engagement, and communication moving forward.

The self-assessment also outlines plans to strengthen the district’s advisory structure by restructuring groups that have seen low participation, while continuing to support established parent organizations such as CPPAC, SEPAC, and ELPAC and maintaining active middle and high school student advisory groups. The superintendent also plans to launch new teacher and community advisory groups, integrate school safety discussions into existing advisory structures, and continue efforts to improve district decision-making through broader stakeholder feedback.

Some other bits and bobs from the self-assessment:

• Artificial intelligence remains on pause. Allen reiterated that he has suspended instructional classroom use of AI with students while privacy concerns continue to be evaluated. Both the Future Ready Technology Committee (which includes parent representatives like me) and an internal AI Steering Committee are working on recommendations, with the administration saying any future AI use will be guided by student privacy, educational value, and state law.

• Screen time guidance. The school committee approved screentime guidelines that recommend that devices remain classroom-based through grade 3, and students may start bringing Chromebooks home in grade 4. The administration said it plans to revisit those recommendations during the coming school year as new medical guidance and research become available.

• A longer elementary school day is still on the table. Allen wrote that “there simply isn’t enough time in the school day” to accomplish everything the district is asking schools to do. He noted that extending the elementary school day remains part of the current collective bargaining process, making this something to watch for the fall.

• Seven elementary libraries will open next year. The superintendent said that with seven elementary school libraries operating during the 2026–27 school year, it will be the most Worcester has had since the 1989–90 school year. Future expansion will depend on available space and funding for books, materials, and furniture, but it’s encouraging to see libraries included as part of the district’s long-term vision. (Donate here!)

• Planning continues for the Advanced Scholars Academy. The district is continuing to redesign the selection processes for its admission-based programs while a working group develops plans for the proposed Advanced Scholars Academy at Worcester East Middle School and North High School. The stated goal is to make advanced academic opportunities easier for eligible students and families to understand and access.

• A new central office leadership position has been created. The district established a Chief of Equity, Access and Opportunity position by reallocating existing administrative funding. The role will oversee equity initiatives, family engagement, and several priorities within the Vision to Action strategic plan.

• The Elementary Wellness Support Center is back. Modeled after the district’s former Safety Center, the reopened center is designed to provide students with social-emotional and behavioral supports before situations escalate. The goal is to improve school climate while reducing disciplinary removals from the classroom.

• The district continues to standardize teaching and learning. More than 70 new curriculum maps for elective courses will roll out next year, while existing K–12 curriculum maps continue to be refined based on teacher feedback. The district is also implementing five required instructional practices intended to better support multilingual learners across all classrooms.

• Higher education partnerships continue to expand. Worcester Public Schools is building new partnerships with Assumption University, Clark University, Worcester State University, and Quinsigamond Community College to expand scholarships, early college opportunities, internships, educator discounts, and its Grow Your Own teacher pipeline. Allen also noted that Holy Cross and UMass Chan have expressed interest in supporting North Quadrant schools.

• Allen offered an interesting glimpse into how governance works. In his self-assessment, he wrote that he meets individually with every School Committee member each month, saying those conversations help ensure there are “no surprises” at public meetings. One-on-one meetings between superintendents and committee members are common practice, but it does provide some insight into how much discussion and relationship-building happens before issues ever reach the public agenda.

The committee will formally evaluate the Superintendent at the August meeting, which is a requirement of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE).

Common Assessments and Benchmarking.
The school committee approved a three-year contract with Renaissance Learning, which the district uses for Star assessments and district common assessments. During the discussion, Vanessa Alvarez (District B) asked some clarifying questions about how these assessments are used. Dr. Andrew Lampi, of the Research and Accountability Office, explained that Star is administered three times a year for district benchmarking, with additional testing for students receiving interventions. He also cited research showing that assessments can improve learning when teachers review the results with students, help them understand what they got right and wrong, and use that information to guide instruction. He’s right, and it raises an important question: is that happening?

For years, families have asked for access to the results of the online assessments their children take throughout the year, including Star Reading, Star Math, and district common assessments. The issue has been raised repeatedly at CPPAC, where families have been told the district is working on it, but as of today the only way to get your student’s assessments is to request reports from your child’s school or, for Star, to sign up in advance to have them emailed after each assessment, (but this doesn’t give you access to past scores). Even then, the reports can be difficult to interpret. Check out the reports below. On one the reading domain is marked “secure,” but the overall score is only “meeting expectations.” On the other the student is “exceeding expectations” overall in math while multiple domains are still marked “developing.”

As a parent, you’re left wondering: What does this actually tell me? What skills should we practice at home? What misconceptions does my child have? Those are the kinds of questions a traditional classroom assessment often answered naturally because students brought their work home, teachers provided written feedback, and families could see exactly where learning broke down. With these digital assessments, that feedback isn’t readily available. Instead, I have to know my child took the assessment, request the report, and then follow up with the teacher to understand what it means. Most families aren’t going to navigate that process, and teachers simply don’t have the time to hold individual data conferences after every benchmark or common assessment. If the value of an assessment is the feedback it provides, then that feedback should be easy for students and families to access, not something they have to work to obtain.

Teachers have always assessed students by creating quizzes, reading student writing, listening to classroom discussions, and adjusting instruction based on what they observed. Those assessments were immediate, personal, and directly connected to classroom learning. Today’s standardized digital assessments are designed to produce comparable data across classrooms, schools, and the district. Data that can be valuable for identifying trends, evaluating curriculum, monitoring interventions, and measuring district progress. But if students, particularly those receiving interventions, spend hours each year taking these assessments only to receive little meaningful feedback, it’s fair to ask who benefits most from the data being collected. I don’t think the question is whether Star or the common assessments are “good” or “bad.” The question is whether they provide better feedback than the assessments teachers already create and use every day, and whether the additional instructional time devoted to district benchmarking produces enough educational value to justify it.

Assessment should serve students first. Districts need data, and schools need ways to measure progress. But if students and families can’t understand the results, if the feedback isn’t meaningful enough to improve learning, or if the primary value lies in district dashboards rather than classroom conversations, then it’s worth asking whether we’ve shifted from assessment for learning to assessment about learning.

Air Conditioning and Facilities.
This wasn’t on the School Committee agenda, but after the early dismissal for heat at the end of the school year, I heard from a lot of frustrated parents asking the same question: why don’t all Worcester schools have air conditioning?

The short answer is that many of our school buildings are old, and only 12 schools have air conditioning throughout the entire building. As temperatures continue to climb in June and September, heat-related early dismissals have become increasingly common. Trust me when I say these buildings can get hot.

What often gets left out of the conversation is why. For decades, Worcester and other high-needs districts were underfunded by the state and federal government. Faced with difficult budget decisions, districts prioritized keeping teachers in classrooms and protecting student programs, while major building maintenance and upgrades were deferred year after year. Our school buildings didn’t get this way overnight, and they won’t be fixed overnight either.

Upcoming Dates.

All school committee meetings have virtual options with Spanish translation, see the school committee site for more information.

• School Committee Meeting, August 13, 4pm

• Operations and Governance, August 18, 3pm

Also.
West Tatnuck students will now have sidewalks adjacent to the school! A happy update to the February story where Public Works committee members then-councilor Mero-Carlson and then-councilor Russell voted against the sidewalks. There’s three new members (Fresolo, Economou, and Mitra) and all three voted in favor. (ICYMI: Snowbanks, no sidewalks make it tough to walk to this Worcester elementary school: If you have children in WPS, I caution you before you watch the video from the meeting. Seeing why they originally voted down installing sidewalks-that the city is willing to pay for-adjacent to an elementary school will infuriate you!)

Thanks for reading. See you in August.

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I’ll be going live on the Worcester Sucks Instagram to capture the community org press conference in front of, or in, city hall (looks like rain). Worcester Sucks Instagram. That’s scheduled to start at 5:30.

Update: watch the whole thing here

The meeting will be on the city’s YouTube page starting at about 6 p.m. I’ll be inside, but won’t be streaming.

Meeting starts at 6, at which point I’ll do my best to get time stamped notes up on here.

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4:10 p.m. — Second HRC member resigns. Drew Schnoebelen follows Jacqueline Yang out the door in the wake of Batista’s CRB decision.

Unfortunately, I have not observed a healthy, functioning, and effective commission, especially over the last 12 months. I personally feel that over the course of my tenure, city leadership has consistently and purposefully manufactured roadblocks and barriers that constrict the Commission in a way that simply cannot be overcome without major systemic change.

Full resignation letter is on my Bluesky.

9:22 p.m. — Back from council. After two hours of public comment, overwhelmingly in support of a civilian review board, to a packed chamber applauding almost every speaker, Councilor Khrystian King held the item under privilege, pushing it to the next meeting. One of the last speakers, former District 5 Councilor Etel Haxhiaj, said there’d be more people at the next meeting. By my count, about 100 people showed up for this one. Several dozen spoke in favor of a civilian review board. Only one speaker, a man who said he worked in some capacity at Worcester District Court some time in the past, spoke against.

Summer schedule in effect, it won’t be until August 18. For the next month, the question of how the council will vote remains an open one.

More notes up as I transcribe tonight!

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And please show up to city hall 5:30 p.m. tomorrow (Tuesday) if you can! The city council meeting will be actually interesting for the first time in a while: the big promise made in the wake of the DOJ report has at long last been made an empty one. On Friday, City Manager Eric Batista announced that he’s not going to move forward with the civilian review board recommendation after all. It comes as no surprise and heads to a city council that would, at best, vote down a real civilian review board proposal by a 7-4 margin.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not infuriating. Just the opposite. This is a major moment in this city’s dramatic slide to the right since the DOJ report was released in December, 2024. A 38-page report explaining the decision stands as an intellectually insulting document, one that will surely be celebrated by the majority of the city council on Tuesday night. Because it’s intellectually insulting, mind you, not despite it being that way.

I’ve been an out-and-out doomer about our city government since the last election. But this is a meeting to show up for, to speak at, if only for the sake of letting these people know we see them. Understand what they’re doing. That they can’t just lie to us like this. That the recommendations in this report are not a suitable replacement. They’re nothing.

Toward that end, there’s a press conference happening at city hall tomorrow at 5:30 p.m., organized by a dozen or so community groups.

The council meeting starts at 6:00 p.m. (Here’s the agenda.) It’d be nice to see you there! Ideally at both.

You can read the statement in full here.

Here’s my favorite part.

The City Manager’s decision ignores the mountains of advice and evidence as well as the lived reality of his constituents. His suggestion—that body-worn cameras and a diversity officer can solve the deeply rooted problems identified by the DOJ and the report he himself commissioned—is void of all reason. By ignoring the evidence and refusing to recommend a civilian review board, the city manager has effectively said that he is willing to shield a small minority of bad cops from accountability.

That right there is exactly what he’s effectively said! The only question left is whether he won’t hold the cops accountable or he can’t. It’s about the last question you’re bound to hear answered, at least honestly. It’s in the best interest of the manager, the chief of police and the police unions, in different yet complementary ways, to have the real contours of the power dynamic remain hidden from view. But an interesting thought experiment: is the alternate timeline Batista, who does in this moment what he said he’d do—presents a CRB proposal to the council, in accordance with the recommendations of both the Worcester Regional Research Bureau and the Human Rights Commission—is that Batista on his way to getting run off the third floor? Is he already gone?

Back when the DOJ report was released, in 2024 (approximately a decade ago) I started presenting the question of whether the police control the city. Reading this report over the weekend, reflecting back on the last two years, I think I can safely answer that question: yes. The Civilian Review Board proposal really died last November, when the police achieved (or, perhaps, restored?) a comfortably secure regulatory capture of the city council. The manager’s recommendation merely formalizes the position of absolute political fealty that comes with an eight-vote majority of councilors who are unambiguously, and, for the most part, proudly, beholden to the police unions.

In the report, Batista (and, Kevin Lovaincy, the city’s chief diversity officer and Batista’s appointed cabinet member, who technically gets the byline on the main document) spend a lot of time articulating things they’ve done in lieu of a civilian review board, and much less time articulating why they can’t or shouldn’t do a civilian review board as well. Both arguments are light on specifics, and throughout, the circular language of bureaucracy stands in the place where some concrete facts should be. For instance, “administrative costs” were cited as a reason a civilian review board can’t happen, but the report doesn’t include even a ballpark estimate, either by position numbers or annual budget. That it doesn’t include such information suggests they did not get far enough in the process to put together a few hypotheticals. If you’re arguing it’s too expensive, why not chuck a round number into the discourse?

Of all the insults in Batista’s withering explanation, the worst is its reliance on the Human Rights Commission as a suitable alternative to a civilian review board.

From the report:

Within Worcester’ s existing accountability framework, the HRC serves as an important avenue for community participation and engagement. One of HRC’ s foundational responsibilities includes oversight and review of issues involving WPD. Over time, this relationship has continued to develop through increased communication, collaboration, and structured opportunities for dialogue.

This is the same Human Rights Commission that Batista battled with and ultimately neutered for their insistence on doing police accountability work against his recommendation that they drop the subject. This is the same Human Rights Commission he appointed the Police Chaplain to after letting go two of its most talented and hard working members, in a transparent sop to the Thin Blue Line set.

Let’s play the hits: In November, 2023, Batista refused to provide the HRC with records they requested about incidents of officer misconduct. A month later, Batista pulled the catty move of skipping a planned meeting with the HRC after they voted to continue their police oversight work against his request that they stop.

In December, 2024, around the time the DOJ report was released, Batista refused to post HRC minutes with attached supporting documents for two meetings, which happened to take up the matter of police oversight. But in his report Friday, he wrote…

Additionally, HRC meetings are conducted in accordance with Massachusetts Open Meeting Law requirements, providing public access to meeting discussions and opportunities for public comment. This ensures that residents have the ability to observe these conversations, remain informed about accountability discussions, and provide feedback on issues affecting the community.

May 2025, Batista refused to reappoint then-chairperson Ellen Shemitz and Elizabeth O’Callahan, two of the commission’s members most doggedly pursuing its police oversight responsibility. As a replacement, he appointed Father Jonathan Slavinskas, the literal chaplain of the Worcester Police Department and a close friend, others have said, to Anthony Petrone, the police union official and shadow city councilor and also landlord of several 4-8 unit rental properties that may or may not have sprinkler systems.

This past March, Chairperson Guillermo Creamer Jr. announced he was stepping down. A few months earlier, Creamer brought the HRC to vote on recommending the city manager craft a proposal for a civilian review board. The vote passed 5-1. Creamer didn’t publicly say why he chose to step away.

In Batista’s report, he writes that the HRC “represents an existing mechanism for community participation and accountability by creating a structured opportunity for appointed community representatives to review information, ask questions, and engage directly with police leadership.”

Of course that’s what the HRC is in theory. But in practice? The only member who’d likely agree with him is Slavinskas.

For instance, a late breaking story from the Brad Petrishen over at the Telegram: One of the longest serving members of the Human Rights Commission, Jacqueline Yang, resigned today due to the manager’s decision.

“This is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” longtime Human Rights Commissioner Jacqueline Yang told the Telegram & Gazette, adding she’s been extremely frustrated since Batista last May declined to reappoint two members who’d pushed for police accountability.

Yang confirmed she resigned July 20, and used an expletive to describe any suggestion that the Human Rights Commission plays a serious role in police oversight.

Any guesses which expletive? Here’s mine.

Brad: Do you believe the HRC plays a serious role in police oversight?

Jacqueline: Fuck no.

I think we have the HRC pretty well covered. On to the WRRB.

Back in October, the Research Bureau put out the report, that Batista himself had requested, on civilian review boards. The organization’s findings were more definitive than usual. Headline? All caps. “OVERDUE FOR CIVILIAN OVERSIGHT” they wrote (I’m summarizing) not only is it imperative Worcester adopts a civilian review board, it’s weird that it hasn’t yet. It stands—and will stand, now, for god knows how long—as the only city in the area of any substantial size that lacks one.

The second graf is unambiguous:

Today, Worcester stands as the 114th largest city in the United States and the second largest in New England, yet it remains one of the few major cities in the nation without a civilian review board or comparable oversight structure. More than half of the 200 largest U.S. cities have adopted such mechanisms, and within the region, Boston, Providence, Cambridge, Hartford, and New Haven all operate oversight entities. Worcester’s absence is striking in this context—and even more so in light of the December 2024 U.S. Department of Justice findings report, which identified systemic weaknesses in the city’s internal accountability systems.

It goes on to list 14 bare minimum requirements for such a board to be effective, including full powers to access data and subpoena for records, a sufficient and sustained budget, and a mandate for the police department to take some sort of action on its disciplinary recommendations.

So it’s jarring to read Batista write that the WRRB’s report was the “foundation” on which he built his report, about doing the exact opposite of what the WRRB recommended.

Batista’s report details at length an investigation process apparently in place in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, wherein staff investigate complaints of discrimination alongside the police’s internal Bureau of Professional Services. But it’s carefully worded. While it details a dozen or so investigations the DEI office undertook from 2022-2025, it doesn’t make it clear whether these investigations yielded results that were any different from what BOPS would have administered. The investigations themselves can only ever end in recommendations to the police department, and there’s no formal mechanism compelling the police to listen. None of it occurs in public, nor is it reported out to a public entity. Right there, in that short summary, are at least five of the deficiencies the WRRB argued the city must solve.

In the introduction, Batista writes that the WRRB “provided valuable insights into strengthening transparency, accountability, and collaboration within the municipality’s oversight framework. In fact, the WRRB’ s findings serve as the foundation for the Executive Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ s ( EODEI) own report.”

Tomorrow, we’ll get to see how the council reacts to this report. Expect a lot of lauding, a lot of talk about how the new chief has done such a good job, a lot of “that’s in the past now.” All of it will amount to a show of fealty.

See you at 5:30 p.m. sharp tomorrow!

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That’s all for me today. More later in the week. Hopefully I’ll be sharing the essay on my recent jury duty experience in ‘ol Worcester District Court I was going to publish over the weekend, before Batista dropped the big news. It’s very related.

As always please consider supporting this outlet. It’s not an easy way to make a living, which feels at times like it’s by design. But politely asking for a little money every time I post has worked out well so for, so I’ll keep at it.

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Oh one thing I forgot to mention: Also on the agenda tomorrow, Candy Mero-Carlson getting appointed to the Worcester Redevelopment Authority. Lol.

Good reporting in BINJ by man about town Chris Faraone about the way Boston hoovered up all the world cup money. Worcester’s mentioned a few times.

The initial February solicitation stated an intent to fund “up to five watch parties at no more than $400,000 each” in geographically diverse areas. In practice, the program funded at least nine separate watch party projects in round one alone (Easthampton, Everett, Greenfield, Worcester, Lowell, Burlington, Lexington, Weymouth, and the Haitian Community series). Instead of a few large grants, most were small allocations ranging from $10,000 to $120,000.

Keep on keepin’ on, folks. Oh, I’m going to see Twisted Teens at the Stone Church in Brattleboro on Wednesday. Beyond stoked. This track right here has a line that drops my jaw.

and every now and then i think about what tommy said
that we’re chained to the world, and we all gotta pull

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Dear Shaun,

Is it even worth it to boycott certain companies? Is my lack of purchases at Amazon, Target, BP, etc. really making a difference? It has been proven that giant companies will get bailed out by the government if they crash. So is Jeff Bezos really feeling the impact of me not using his store to get my laundry detergent? Should I go the extra step to continue to buy local? It feels like I am not even making a dent in the grand scheme of late-stage capitalism.

-Frustrated Finances

Dear Frustrated Finances,

Recently, at 39 years old, my body has blessed me with a new ailment that I will now seemingly struggle with the rest of my life. I run a mile five days a week, I play basketball for two hours every Sunday and walk my dogs for a mile twice a day. I try and eat healthy and fresh as often and possible and, sure, I drink alcohol, but I am by no means a binge drinker. However! I have now twice suffered the King’s Ailment that is known as gout.

Gout occurs typically in the great toe joint. It is unfiltered uric acid that builds up in those joints and then outputs tiny crystallized shards of that built up uric acid. I know gout has a harmless name and it is tied to those who overindulge in drinking, red meat and seafood but I must tell you that it is a pain I have never experienced in my life. I have woken up in the middle of my wisdom teeth extraction. I have woken up in the middle of two different root canals. I have been broken up with the same week I was shopping for a wedding ring. I have experienced pain. This hits different. Mothers who has given birth excluded, this pain is the most excruciating.

It hurts to the touch, it hurts not to the touch, it kept me awake all night once because the attack was so severe. In the past two weeks I have been able to stably walk on both feet for a total of two days. My wife is currently 39 weeks pregnant and she had to take care of me instead. While the pain of my toes were unbearable it paled in comparison to the pain of watching your waddling wife go up and down stairs to get your water, food and ice packs. Her feet are so swollen and she had to use those plump pedis to serve me! Stab me in the heart.

My doctor said that my kidney looked good and that my uric acid levels were not alarming and atypical to gout sufferers. Which means my body has just decided that it no longer wants to process that acid. My body gave up on me. My body said “hey you’re doing a pretty good job staying in shape, maybe too good. So we wanted to stop functioning in one key area to really give you a challenge, pussy.” Woah so toxic body! Why would my body use such language? I’m sorry about my body everyone. Not cool.

As far as boycotting goes, keep boycotting. But buy shares in these companies so you too can profit off their evil. If you can’t beat them, join them. Bad advice folks!

NEWS

My baby’s birth is imminent. I am a psycho and still will be writing. See you next week!

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Catching up on the dog days of summer, breaking down yet another round of know-nothing reactionary townie opposition to a mundane road project aimed at our uniquely horrible track record when it comes to drivers hitting pedestrians with cars. In particular we focus on Moe Bergman’s insane Facebook comment, in which he tells on himself in both the ‘basic literacy’ and ‘raw contempt for his constituency’ departments.

It’s the same conversation I pulled out toward the bottom of my written post from yesterday.

From there we zoom out, talk about press freedom, bad faith lawsuits and the situation Channel 5 and Andrew Callaghan are dealing with—one that has no local analogs whatsoever of course.

Channel Five is being sued to the edge of existence.

As always please consider helping this outlet stay afloat. We’re down on subscribers recently and could really use a few of the free tier folks stepping up.

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Outro music: REM - Star 69

Intro music by Bill Shaner 7.13.26

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Stay cool everyone.

Back from a much needed vacation and I’ve been “in the shit” all week—cramming two weeks worth of shit into one shit sandwich—which I’m now serving to you hot and fresh.

Today’s post will focus on the manager’s annual non-review last week, not so much his score or anything, as that would imply it meant something, but rather the reality that the city council has gone through a tremendous brain drain from last November to now, in a way the evaluation made especially apparent.

Also, I like where it arrives in the body of the post but I should quickly add up here at the top a stunning fact I discovered in raw federal data that hasn’t been reported locally yet, far as I’ve seen: Worcester’s homeless population spiked dramatically in the most recent point-in-time count data. Almost 50 percent year-over-year, from just under 2,000 homeless people countywide to just under 3,000. Children make up both the largest percentage by age category and the most dramatic increase. Almost 400 more homeless children were reported in the 2026 data (which works off a January 2025 point-in-time count) than in 2025 (same one year lag.) The adult unsheltered population—whom most people, especially cranks, refer to exclusively when talking about the issue—was, as ever, only a tiny sliver of the total number, and it increased only slightly.

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First, a few lighter news items. And of course the customary asking nicely for a little bit of money so I can keep putting in the hours upon hours it takes to write these posts.

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Shouts out to the reader in a purple tie-die shirt who said hey to me as he was crossing the street in front of Katie and I on Park Ave by WPI. I think you said something about the newsletter but I could just barely hear you over “Boys of Summer.” You look like a man who understands that when Boys of Summer comes on it stays on. Also when I finally get my act back together on the merch front I’m thinking a run of custom tie-die long sleeves.

Also we were on our way back from both of our first times going to Cool Licks. That place is bananas! Absolute crime against god (complement) the amount of soft serve flavors they offer. Most places got three tops, Cool Licks rocking a baker’s dozen all day.

Summer schedule is well upon us and things are slow at city hall.

Coming up this week, a Central Mass Planning meeting on the 15th, which includes the potentially interesting agenda item:

Planning Board on the 16th. Nothing jumping out at me.

School Committee on the 17th. Aislinn’s got you covered on that over in the WPS In Brief department: “Agenda Preview: July 16 School Committee Meeting”

I have jury duty on Wednesday. Super hoping I get picked to be honest. The sort of insights to be pulled from that experience… plus a better look at the supposed random number selection machine at the clerk’s desk for dismissing the alternate juror… for those careful readers who remember my coverage of the Haxhiaj and Spring trials. Does it exist? Who knows.

Last but not least, the trailer for BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE is out, you can watch below, and I am so stoked to see this thing. It premieres August 6 at the Hanover Theater. See you there?

For background on this project check the interview we did with producer John Keough a few months back. “Episode 59: Burnin’ Down The House”

Ok let’s start with a few quick hits.

“My god, it’s repulsive“

Well the past week’s #1 story was definitely also the dumbest. Former Framingham cop and one-time, perhaps current, purveyor of certain controlled substances Kyle Pursell’s project to disgrace the former Dive Bar reached a new zenith previously thought impossible. He commissioned a local artist (who’s definitely exactly the artist that this guy would commission ) to replace the iconic Dragon / Snake / Snake-Dragon mural on the side of the building with uh… this…….

Now, we here at Worcester Sucks would never disgrace the image of Smiley Ball in such a way. Sure we might write a Marxist economic history of the symbol for Playboy Magazine and sure there might be some slight, totally incidental in a legal sense, similarities between it and our OG logo. But we didn’t do that.

I first noticed it on the Worcester sub-Reddit, in a post delightfully slugged “My god, it’s repulsive.”

On Friday I saw it IRL and man pictures do not do the repulsiveness justice. It’s just… come on man it’s not even funny. It just sucks. It’s sad. The only cool part about it is there’s apparently video of the artist falling off a ladder while painting it lol. Happy hunting, I’m too busy.

Shouts out to Travis Duda for executing so well on the little idea I sent over: “old mural mauling new mural.”

Now in case you thought I was committing out-and-out slander with the first graf of this section, let’s take a quick look at the legacy Pursell left in Framingham. Luckily friend of the newsletter Andrew Quemere was all over this story.

Pursell was one of two officers in that department busted for cocaine-related activities that remain vaguely stated but, given what we generally know about police officers, would have had to have been a step or two above a quick trip to the bathroom if you catch my drift. The other officer was fired but Pursell pulled the classic move of resigning before the investigation concluded. Quemere got his hands on the resignation letter, which is an interesting read. “I have decided to move in a different direction in my career and pursue new opportunities.” That was in January of this year, meaning the new opportunity was very much a reference to his current desecration of Dive Bar.

Quemere, in his newsletter, “The Mass Dump,” wrote:

According to the Brady records, the police department found on February 6 that both Black and Pursell violated policies against criminal conduct, controlled substances, association with known criminals, and conduct unbecoming an officer or employee.

The department found that Pursell violated two additional policies when “his taser was not properly secured in his department-issued vehicle” and “he used his department-issued vehicle for personal transportation and transported civilian passengers,” the records say.

The department also determined earlier, on September 17, that Pursell violated two policies when he “failed to cooperate with an investigation into his alleged drug-related activities” and “failed to report to the police station at a specific date and time as ordered by a superior,” the records say.

That Dive Bar is turning into Cop Dive Bar is already, on its own, a poetically insulting development. Now we wait and see whether the city or the team will take any action to get the thing taken down. Seems to me under normal circumstances they would, but the fact we’re dealing with a member of the “law enforcement community,” however temporarily embarrassed he may be, changes that equation. In order to get the mural down, they’ll have to tell a cop what to do.

City settles with brutalized demonstrators

Though light on the details a settlement has been tentatively reached between the city and 12 of the people the police department brutalized at a BLM rally in June 2020.

The lawsuit was filed in June, 2023 and last week a federal judge dismissed it, initiating a 60-day period for the two parties to arrive at a number, it seems like.

After force marching, beating, intimidating, and firing the kitchen sink of ‘less lethal’ munitions at a small group of mostly young people on Main Street the night of June 1, 2020—pulling out all their fancy military grade toys to administer a punishment for the crime being too mad about police murdering people to leave the large rally earlier when everyone else did, the police arrested 19 of them.

The arrest reports were literally copy-pasted in some cases. They arrested people who weren’t even demonstrating. It was a mess. Charges were quietly dropped by DA Joe Early the following March, citing “insufficient evidence to continue prosecuting.” But in the weeks following the incident, the power elite of the city cast the situation as a riot that by the grace of god the police were there to stop… exactly the same thing they did after Eureka Street, by the way.

As I’ve written and spoken about a million times by now, this was the inciting incident of the whole newsletter you’re reading. I was there. It was awful and eye opening… a moment I’ll never forget. I went into it dimly aware that the cops were not what they seemed and came out knowing exactly what they were, and how the whole apparatus of city government conspired to kick the brush back over the trap door the cops had momentarily opened.

Not gunna do ‘the whole thing’ here. If you want to read more about that night and the fine points of this lawsuit, I did a whole big thing a few years ago: “Overwhelming force and garish brutality.”

As detailed in the 100-page complaint, the cops that night were expecting a fight, they created the circumstances for a fight, they instigated a fight, they fought with overwhelming force and garish brutality. A few dozen young people looking for an outlet to express their anger at a violent and oppressive institution, met with the full and terrifying force of it. After, all of the city’s political class rallied behind a narrative which lionized the cops and made a feral boogeyman of the kids. Thank god for the WPD they said. If the cops weren’t there, something bad could have happened.

Now, we wait to see how much the settlement is going to pay out. From Brad Petrishen’s piece:

City spokesman Thomas Matthews said the two sides were still working to finalize paperwork on the settlement, which won’t be official until signed.

The judge’s order notes that either side can petition to reopen the case if a resolution is not “consummated” within 60 days.

Hopefully the resolution is consummated to the great personal enrichment of those 12 people the cops abused senselessly, whipped as they were into a reactionary panic that they showed us on May 8, 2025 to be more of a default state than any aberration the more generous among us may have been willing to give June 1, 2020.

Pyscho-Geographic Brain Drain

Dork that I am, I was watching a Youtube review of a book I want to check out on the situationists, “Leaving the Twentieth Century” by McKenzie Wark, and the Youtuber, Shannon Kim, spent some time on the situationist principle of psycho-geography.

And I was reminded of an essay I’d read earlier this year in Harpers by Hari Kunzru exploring the psycho-geography of London.

In the first issue of the publication Internationale Situationniste, “psychogeography” is defined as “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” This might sound bloodless, but for the Situationists it was part of a utopian revolutionary program. The small band of café radicals sought to overthrow not just a government but the entire global system, which relied on what they called the “organization of appearances,” or simply “the Spectacle.”

This was earlier in the week, and I had just freshly pulled the following clip of Tony Economou’s “evaluation” of the city manager.

“I think our park system in this city is tremendous. Where other city can you go, move into a neighborhood and walk to a park. You can’t, only in Worcester, and I’m thankful for that.”

His earnest-appearing amazement at the fact Worcester has parks and his belief that this is somehow exceptional suggests there’s a psycho-geographical effect at play in this city, a sort of ambient diminishment of possibility.

You don’t need me telling you this, but find a city that doesn’t have neighborhood parks.

Toronto, for instance, last time I was there, Katie and I sat in a delightful and well-used little neighborhood park, eating cheeseburgers from Matty Matheson’s little burger shop that was right across the street and watching a schlocky little neighborhood jam session, about as many people playing as people watching. The weird little drum thing you sit on and slap right under your crotch. There were people all around us sitting in the three inch grass, in small groups and by themselves, and considering Tony’s comments I’d be shocked if any one of them drove there.

Closer to home, Southbridge, Leominster, Fitchburg… they all have parks in neighborhoods. I mean, come on. You would be hard pressed to find a city on the east coast of the United States without neighborhood parks.

It should be prohibitive that someone nominally in charge of our city can show, without shame or compunction, that he’s never been to a real neighborhood in another city, has no conception of what they look like, but is nevertheless convinced that Worcester as good as it can get. A true dimness of the overall imagination, let alone the specifically political variety—one that is the rule among old guard councilors, who now hold an 8 or 9 vote majority, not the exception. Off screen, as Economou’s saying one of the most embarrassing things I’ve heard a councilor say, I’m sure more than a few were nodding along.

Of course, it’s the electoral realities of Worcester that produces this outcome. Ours is a system that manifestly rewards reactionary townies who want for nothing but their place on the nice side of the tracks, and maybe, if they’re lucky, a little cut of the action. The fact Economou is in that seat is the sterling example. He eeked out a win against someone obviously more passionate, competent, creative and forward thinking—more representative of the demographic Worcester’s economic development strategy depends on, and who any smart Democratic City Committee person would be looking at as Grade A bench material.

We don’t have smart Democratic City Committee people. We have cronies enmeshed in a network of favors, antagonisms and mutual animosities. Keith Linhares was boxed out of the club immediately, probably because he spoke on the Gaza resolution and the DOJ report. And so we have Economou, who chalked the whole thing up to “words on paper” at the one candidate forum ahead of the election, and for that he was applauded and then, ultimately, elected, by about 7 percent of the fine people of shrubby District 1.

Gotta love it though. The above-board corruption capital of the state, made that way by the psycho-geographic wall between it and the outside world. Lurie’s Dome, by another name.

Now on to another guy who’s spiritually “been there forever” but is a first time councilor, Dr. Moneybags himself. Satya Mitra. Not going to spend much time psychoanalyzing this quote. It’s perfect just the way it is. (I was going to include clips but Substack will not cooperate with me.)

“Those days, if I had to listen to Frank Sinatra, I would use the turntable to put the plate and run the music. Now, if I ask to listen to Frank Sinatra, my son says, use the cell phone. So that has been the major difference.”

Moment #3 comes courtesy Kate Toomey, who offered a new riff on her recurring conspiratorial theme of other towns dropping off their needle drug users in Worcester.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the recent stabbing incident on the common and it should have been addressed I think in a more decisive and timely manner. The increase in our Worcester’s unhoused population has been linked to correlate with the decrease in Boston’s unhoused population. And I’ve heard this anecdotally from people who are out in the street dealing with these folks. These are not people that have been in our community for years. These are a lot younger group of people. They’re more aggressive and more challenging to work with. And so we have more of them. We’re doing an awful lot of things to help our unhoused. There’s no question. But we’ve got a different type of population and it’s impacting our community. We need an all hands on deck with this issue.

Sniffing bullshit, I went to the source: HUD’s Point In Time counts. The latest numbers, from a count taken last January, shows Boston’s overall homeless population did decrease by about 350, from 5,898 in 2024 to 5,540 in 2025. Worcester’s increased by just shy of 1,000. Which is crazy. 1,927 in 2024 to 2,864 in 2025. A 48 percent year-over increase.

I think I am the first person locally reporting that fact by the way, not that it’s some crazy scoop, the numbers are out there. No one else has bothered to look. You can check my work with this data set I pulled out of the raw data from HUD (PIT, housing inventory).

The data shows the most dramatic increase from 2024 to 2025 is in the “homeless children” category. Worcester added 387 more homeless children over its 718 in 2024. Children are, by nature of the state’s right to shelter law, rarely seen on the street. The “adult unsheltered” population is what Toomey’s talking about. Across all the adult age categories there’s no increase as significant as the jump taken in homeless children.

Let that fact settle in: Worcester’s meteoric rise in homelessness is animated mostly by a wave of homeless children.

Is that the data Toomey said she saw? That implies a Boston shipped out a “different type of population.” It’s worth revisiting this line from Toomey.

“These are a lot younger group of people. They’re more aggressive and more challenging to work with.”

Age 18-24 only increased by 5, 132 to 137. So who does she mean? That is, taking at her word she means anyone, and is not just regurgitating the rhetoric of whatever cop spoke to her last.

The type of unhoused person Toomey’s obviously talking about is what they call the “unsheltered chronically homeless.” When you’re talking about homelessness as a blight, these are the people you are talking about. Those, like Toomey and Bergman, who only ever talk about homelessness in these terms, give themselves away. The issue, for them, is a property issue. Not a human issue.

Unlike the uptick in homeless children–almost none of them “on the street”–Worcester’s chronic unsheltered population increased by a mere 26, from 72 to 98. Meanwhile its sheltered chronic homeless population decreased from 235 to 132, a 103 person drop that likely accounts for at least some of the 26 now marked as “unsheltered.”

Meanwhile, Boston’s reduction in homelessness is likely due to the fact they’ve built a lot of supportive housing.

Since Mayor Wu took office, Boston has created 668 permanent supportive housing units to help residents transitioning out of homelessness access stable housing paired with supportive services. These investments, alongside expanded shelter-to-housing initiatives and coordinated outreach efforts, have contributed to continued declines in homelessness even as many communities nationwide continue to face housing affordability.

Goes to show the way you end homelessness is giving people homes. In Worcester, our 160 or so shelter beds have not been accompanied by a significant increase in supportive housing, as projects like Oriole Drive are waylaid by neighbors, often with the willful support of city councilors (cough Candy Mero-Carlson cough), as these same officials trip over themselves to celebrate a day resource center and four (4) tiny home supportive housing units for homeless seniors.

The closing of CHL has and will continute to exacerbate the problem and there is no one in city hall going out of their way to sound the alarm, while there are plenty who, like Toomey, are sifting around in the dark for any way they can stomach to scapegoat the unhoused individuals themselves. When Toomey used the term “a different population” that’s what she was doing.

Thank you to Khrystian King, the only one on the council to speak to the issue plainly during the review, holding the city manager to do better.

I have significant concerns, Mr. Chairman, this past term regarding the lack of shelter, reduction in shelter beds for our homeless. We had a situation and we didn’t plan. Now the city manager reacted to that, advocated, and was able to move
and establish a level in cooperation with the private sector, but there was no plan.

One thing Gary Rosen and Moe Bergman both signaled during the evaluation was that a road redesign for Chandler and May is going to becoem “an issue.” Already, you may notice driving around that area, the cranks are gearing up for yet another reactionary piss baby tantrum.

Nothing worse than a dumb person who thinks they’re smarter than everyone else. It’s a strain of narcissism I find acutely annoying, not the least because I recognize something about myself in it... To confront in the wild of the adult world this rare breed, a dumbass so self-assured of his cunning, surrounded by contemptible intellectual weaklings who can’t even see it... It elicits flashbacks to the uglier moments of my middle and high school experience, before the malaise of real life disabused me of the notion I was in possession of some intelligence otherwise unknown, some higher purpose, some innate superiority. Before the difficult and depressing and ultimately edifying process of unlearning that boyish fantasy and re-engaging with the world out of real curiosity. For me it happened in my early 20s. For some I’m sure it happens much earlier. But, far as I’ve observed, most boys so afflicted by self-assured dumbassery shed the trait by the time they’re fully grown men. Not Moe Bergman.

Bergman displayed the character flaw in a recent Facebook exchange between a resident, who clearly cares enough to learn about the subject matter at hand, and Moe Bergman, who either can’t or won’t, and shows he has no plans of changing that. He did so with an overt and unabashed flare that’s rare to see in an adult man.

Let’s walk through it, as it’s useful for getting your head around why the “double rotary at Chandler and May” drama is on its way to being front page material for the foreseeable future, despite it being an obvious non-issue to those among us who are at least partially well adjusted.

I want to highlight the line in the last graf—”a conscious choice to maintain a dangerous status quo”—as this is incidentally or intentionally the best way of describing Bergman’s approach to politics I’ve ever read. His two main things are “cars go fast” and “more cops,” both of which are conscious choices to maintain and/or exacerbate the dangerous status quo of life in this city.

Otherwise we see here a perfectly well articulated critique, backed by fact, and put to a public official for the purpose of real accountability. Now let’s look at how said public official responded.

First of all, accidental Dril tweet. Seriously, the syntax and grammar are worrying to see from someone holding both a law degree and public office. Secondly, and more to the point, look at how “location” is highlighted in the screenshot Bergman took. It seems to me he tried to “click” on “location” and it didn’t work. So his galaxy brain rendered the conclusion that there’s “no supporting data” and thus the image becomes “meaningless.” Check and mate. Then consider that Bergman is apparently dumb enough to think MassDOT would go to the lengths of faking a data visualization to justify a road redesign project. The world’s most boring and pointless conspiracy. That little thing he did with the crash data map right there is the archetype of self-assured dumbass in a nutshell. And he put it out there for the world to see. Insane.

As Piazza mentions in his reply, the data is readily available.

Soooooo much data is readily available. I’m no wiz kid but 20 minutes on the MassDOT data portal is more than enough to see the problem.

For instance here’s five fatal pedestrian accidents in the area of May and Chandler in the past 10 years.

As Etel Haxhiaj pointed out in a post on Instagram, there have already in the first six months of the year been three pedestrian deaths.

Bergman really invoked “trust but verify” and did neither. None of this will reach him, he will never be convinced of the fact his position is a losing one, morally, intellectually, pragmatically. Like Economou he’s subsumed to the psycho-geographical diminishment Worcester’s geography produces, sitting in traffic at the Newton Square rotary thinking Worcester must be the only city in the world it’s hard to drive a car around in at peak hours.

Odds and ends

Maybe it was shaking off the vacation vibe and getting back to reality but this post really took it out of me. Subscriptions are also down to 725 paid which is not ideal! Please consider helping this outlet survive in a world that is very difficult for little outlets like us.

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Maureen Binienda’s interim superintendent gig racket continues apace.

State retirement laws prohibit Binienda from accepting a permanent, full-time position as a superintendent in Massachusetts without seeking a state waiver. However, she pointed out that she is licensed in Rhode Island and could opt to seek full-time permanent employment in that neighboring state.

Relatedly, Bishop McManus will soon be out of public life insh’allah.

Raphael Warnock is coming to the DCU in September. If you have a spare $130 lying around you can go see him speak lol.

This post from Birchtree scared the shit out me and a lot of people reading the comments it looks like. If it was meant to, nice work.

“Florida Water Blues” by Twisted Teens. What a track. What a music video. God bless Swamp Massachusetts.

Looks like they’re playing the Sinclair in a couple weeks. July 23. Perhaps I will be taking a trip to the city. Ok talk soon!

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The next school committee meeting is scheduled for July 16, with Executive Session at 4 p.m. and open session scheduled to start at 4:30 p.m. See the full agenda here. You can watch it via zoom or Youtube Live. Spanish translation is available on zoom. Currently, there are no standing committee meetings scheduled for July.

Here’s my preview:

Superintendent’s Evaluation.
The Superintendent will report on his 2025-2026 school year goals, which include:

You can read up on these goals in more detail in last September’s brief. Allen also wrote a self-assessment, which reflects a first year focused on turning “Vision to Action” by strengthening district systems rather than launching a wave of new initiatives. He reports significant progress toward his student learning goal, with Star reading and math scores improving to 35% of students meeting the benchmark. It’s just shy of the 36% target, but represents the largest percentage since the district began using the test. He also exceeded his professional practice goal, with 78% of schools implementing the district’s “collaborative teaming structures with fidelity.”

The bulk of the self-assessment centers on instructional leadership: curriculum renewal, implementation of high-quality instructional materials, classroom walkthroughs, support for multilingual learners, the Vision of a Learner initiative, and expanded partnerships with local colleges and universities. Allen also notes that he visited schools 120 times during his first year and emphasizes data-informed decision making and collaborative leadership throughout the report.

From my lens as a parent, Allen has been one of Worcester’s stronger Superintendents. But one thing that stood out to me was how little attention the self-evaluation gives to relationships with families. Family engagement is mentioned as part of Allen’s entry plan and the district’s strategic framework, particularly around communication, but there are few concrete examples of work with families or measures of parent engagement, communication, or trust. Family & Community Engagement is one of the four standards used to evaluate Massachusetts superintendents, so it will be interesting to see whether the school committee views this as an area of strength or one where they’d like to see more evidence.

While the Superintendent will give a presentation about his goals on Thursday, the committee will formally evaluate the Superintendent at an August or September meeting, which is a requirement of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE).

Other Items.
Not a ton else on the agenda other than some procedural items and grants, but a few items worth noting:

• A request for an update on the Safe Schools LGBTQIA training/programming (a response from the February 2025 LGBTQIA+ resolution fiasco

• A request for an update on the WPS Homework Policy (which was implemented in June 2025).

• A request for a minimum four-month lead time for curriculum, contracts, or policy changes needing approval from the School Committee. (This harkens back to when Jermaine Johnson said he felt “our knees got cut off underneath us as a committee”).

• Approval of a three-year software license and services contract with Renaissance Learning, which the district uses for Star assessments and Renaissance DnA common assessments. No contract or cost is included in the agenda materials. The current student privacy agreement also does not specify what WPS student data is collected (only which fields are required or optional) and does not appear to be signed by a WPS representative. All WPS student privacy agreements with ed tech companies can be found here.

That’s it, have a great week!

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July Horrorscopes

Cancer- The stars request that you send you resubmit your resume. The position you sought in this universe has been filled. However, after a recent merger, some similar positions have opened up that the star feel you might be a great fit for. Please allow 7-10 business days for a response. Thank you.

Leo- We just got a bidet and now I’m a freak for it. Get you a bidet if you don’t already. We should all wash our ass properly.

Virgo- July 1st was the day that the New York Mets pay former player Bobby Bonilla $1.19 million. The owners were in the middle of getting had by Bernie Madoff and didn’t have the money to buy out Bonilla so they came up with this payment system instead starting in 2011. Bonilla retired in 2001. He will continue to get paid until 2035. Find your Bonilla scheme.

Libra- July 1st was also Canada Day, a celebration of the day Canada decided to not pay Bobby Bonilla $1.19 million from 2011 to 2035. O Canada, indeed!

Scorpio- The United States Men’s Soccer team made it to the 16th round of the World Cup before losing to Belgium last night. The United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, and only we can twist ourselves in such a pretzel to make it seem like it was an underdog story. Sure we don’t put as many resources in our soccer program as every other country, comparatively, but that is the same with out education system. Should the principal at high school graduation say, “do you believe in miracles?!” as each kid walks across the stage as well? Reminder: you’re a miracle.

Sagittarius- Sure it is too hot outside. Soon enough it will be too cold. (Editor’s note: prophetic submission, given Shaun wrote this when it was hot last week, and it’s now cold.) Then, just when you think the temperature is good enough to go out, it will rain (see above). Then, when the rain stops that wind will blow. All I’m saying is Al Gore didn’t invent the internet, but he was right about one thing.

Capricorn- EVER DRINK TOO MUCH COFFEE? YEAH ME NEITHER.

Aquarius- Jupiter and Mars saw you from across the universe and really like your vibe. They were wondering if you wanted to go some place quieter to get to know each other better?

Pisces- To celebrate America’s 250th birthday go sit in your neighbor’s backyard and gaslight them. Tell them that this is your fire pit and your family needs it or your kids will die.

Aries- Want some updog?

Taurus- I got Aries so bad.

Gemini- There is a dead raccoon that has yet to be picked up by DPW. It is on Newton St. The 311 Mobile App for Worcester has been blowing up with posts about it. You are the raccoon. Sure you’re ignored now, but someone cares about you and eventually you will be picked up. Couldn’t say the same for the snake someone reported the other day.

NEWS

I’m taking July off because the entrance of baby number 2 is imminent. I will still be hosting the Live Forever Open Mic at Ralph’s Rock Diner every Tuesday at 8 p.m. until she comes. That’s tonight!

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Also I edited the audio in the passenger seat of Katie’s car so… our usually pristine—some are saying This American Life-level, if not better—production fidelity is probably a bit lacking. I can’t tell myself because highways it turns out are pretty loud.

Please support this outlet! As all of our revenue comes from readers and/or listeners it is literally up to you to make sure we still exist. Today’s the last day to take me up on the 50 percent deal I’ve been running for the six year anniversary!

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Some links from the discussion

My piece on the rent control ballot question from yesterday

Meet the Sir Vival, the safest car that never was

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Ok I’m actually on vacation now, unlike when I said that yesterday.

Welcome to the June 2026 issue of WPS in Brief. This month covers key topics from two school committee meetings, two budget meetings, and three standing committee meetings.

Before we get started, I want to say thank you.

Last week’s agenda preview included a personal note about the Worcester Elementary School Library Coalition and our goal of helping the district open seven elementary school libraries this fall. I was genuinely blown away by the response. So many WPS in Brief readers donated, shared the fundraiser, reached out with words of encouragement, or offered to volunteer. Thank you. Your support means more than you know, and it’s a reminder of just how much this community cares about our students.

If you missed last week’s post, we’re in the middle of a community-wide effort to help launch libraries in seven Worcester elementary schools before students return in August. The biggest need we have right now is books. We’re hoping every child walks into a library that feels exciting and welcoming, with the kinds of books kids are eager to pick up.

If you’d like to help, we’re still looking for donors, volunteers, and people willing to spread the word. Every contribution, whether it’s a donation, sharing the campaign with a friend, or connecting us with someone who may want to support the effort, helps bring us one step closer. Thank you for being part of it.

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Ok, let’s dive into what happened this month:

The 2026-2027 School Year Budget.
The FY27 budget was approved largely as presented (see last month’s budget preview for a deeper breakdown), with one notable change.

Member Jermaine Johnson (District F) proposed transferring $225,000 from the Miscellaneous Education – Instructional Technology account, moving $200,000 to the elementary teacher salary line and $25,000 to instructional materials. Johnson said his intent was to fund two full-time assistant principal positions at two schools that do not have them: May Street and Heard Street, while the instructional materials funding would be used for library books for the elementary schools opening libraries this fall.

Over the past school year, the district used free cash from the city to add an assistant principal at May Street after the assistant principal from Nelson Place was transferred there. Funding to maintain that position was not built into the FY27 budget. Also, it’s important to understand that elementary assistant principals are budgeted under the teacher salary line rather than school-based administration, where the secondary assistant principals salaries live. Superintendent Brian Allen explained that this dates back decades, when most elementary assistant principals were “teaching assistant principals” who maintained their own classroom while taking on administrative responsibilities when the principal was absent. The budget classification has remained even though the role has changed.

The discussion raised some interesting points. Member Sue Mailman (at-large) offered a substitute motion directing the entire $225,000 toward library books instead, arguing that adding permanent positions could put the district in a more difficult position next year as Worcester faces projected budget deficits. Johnson argued that elementary assistant principals play an important role supporting students with IEPs and 504 plans while allowing principals to focus on overall building operations. Vanessa Alvarez (district B) questioned why Woodland Academy, a significantly larger school with higher student needs, is going into its second year without a principal (the Claremont principal has been split between the two schools). In response to Alvarez’s question, Superintendent Allen said, “I’ll come forward with a recommendation [about Woodland] at some point in the future.”

Johnson’s motion ultimately passed 7-2, with Mailman and Alvarez voting no. The district noted that, with these additions, Wawecus will be the only elementary school without a full-time, non-teaching assistant principal.

The rest of the budget conversation included questions about transportation overtime (staff absences were an issue) and custodial overtime (the tough winter and the repeated freeze-thaw cycle played a big part). As well as building substitute staffing (which is increasing to 24 positions), and the role of positive youth development paraprofessionals (the district felt the need was in a different place, so those positions were reallocated).

My Take.
After watching budget deliberations for years, I walked away this year with a familiar sinking feeling. Worcester isn’t debating whether to fund “nice to have” programs. We’re debating whether students get consistent special education services because there are enough building substitutes. Whether teachers get common planning time because there are enough paraprofessionals to cover classrooms. Whether we can open elementary school libraries AND sustain middle school athletics. Whether we can expand full-day preschool while maintaining everything else our students need. These aren’t choices any district should have to make.

Six years into the Student Opportunity Act, Worcester is unquestionably in a better place than we would have been otherwise. The $22 million reduction two years ago would have been a bloodbath of $38 million without that funding. But it also hasn’t been the panacea many of us hoped for. We are still making impossible choices because the underlying resources don’t match the needs of our students.

Here’s what else happened this month:

District Boundary Realignment.
A representative from Dillinger Research and Applied Data provided a short presentation of the current status of the district realignment process, which will eventually redraw school boundaries and feeder patterns across WPS. Since the spring, the district has analyzed enrollment and building capacity data, formed an advisory working group (of which I am a member), and held community meetings that generated more than 300 survey responses. Initial boundary scenarios are expected to be presented in August, followed by public hearings this fall, with a final School Committee vote anticipated in December and implementation scheduled for the 2027-28 school year. (For a more detailed background on the topic, check out what I wrote back in March, also highly recommend this interview on Unity.)

Key areas I want to highlight that I think families and students will be happy about: the district is looking at expanding transportation options, creating more compact boundaries that could allow more students to attend schools closer to home, and making adjustments to middle school bell schedules. They’re also exploring opportunities to expand full-day preschool as the district moves away from half-day programs, and increasing access to after-school care through community partnerships. While there are still a lot of details to work out, these are all issues that came up repeatedly during community meetings and have the potential to make a big impact for students and families.

The administration is also proposing several school name changes to better align school designations with current programming. The proposal would remove the “Community School” designation from Belmont, Elm Park, Quinsigamond, and South, arguing that all Worcester schools should function as community schools. It would also remove the “Magnet” designation from Canterbury, Jacob Hiatt, and Tatnuck, saying these schools no longer operate distinct citywide magnet programs. Jacob Hiatt, in particular, would be intentionally redesigned as a neighborhood school under the proposal. These recommendations will be considered alongside broader redistricting proposals this fall, with public feedback opportunities before a final School Committee vote expected in December.

Limiting individual device use in PreK through Grade Two.

Kate Johnson, Lakeview Elementary parent whose youngest child will graduate from high school in 2042, speaks during public comment.

At the June 25 meeting public comment was dominated by parents advocating for a petition filed by Worcester for Safe Student Technology (of which I am a member), asking for limits on individual internet-connected device use in Pre-K through second grade classrooms and for policies that prioritize hands-on, teacher-led, screen-limited learning. The petition, which has gathered 468 signatures from members of 51 schools across the district, includes exemptions for students who require assistive technology and for technology enrichment classes. Public comment pointed to growing national concerns about screen time in schools, including recent action by the Los Angeles Unified School District and parents argued that young children benefit most from direct interaction, play, movement, and hands-on learning.

Relatedly, in response to a report request from Sue Mailman (at-large), the administration is recommending a shift to a 3:1 student-to-iPad ratio in pre-K through first grade (which I think is a typo, because first graders in the district get Chromebooks). While modest, it is one of the first tangible changes to emerge from ongoing parent advocacy around technology use in the early grades and freed up $100,000 in the budget.

Bullying Policy.
At the June 25 meeting the School Committee approved a revised Bullying Prevention and Intervention Plan (BPIP), a document that must be updated every two years for the district to remain in compliance with state law.

During earlier public comment, several parents asked that the item be held in order to update other areas of concern in the policy. Sue Mailman made the same request, but Deputy Superintendent Marie Morse explained that the BPIP is the implementation plan that supports the policy, and that the district needed to approve it that evening to remain in compliance with the state. Morse added that the School Committee could separately request a review of the policy.

This is where I got confused.

The agenda item they were discussing read:

“To review and update, if necessary, Policy JICFB (Bullying Prevention), in accordance with M.G.L. c. 71, § 37O), requiring biennial review of such.”

That language appears to open the policy for review.

To address both concerns, Mailman then made a separate motion to refer the bullying policy to subcommittee as soon as possible. Vice Chair Molly McCullough (district A) raised a point of order, saying there was already a bullying item pending in committee, which meant another referral couldn’t be made.

There was some discussion over whether an existing bullying item was already pending in TLSS or Operations & Governance, with McCullough stating it was in TLSS. After the meeting, I reviewed both committees’ outstanding item lists, updated June 26. The only bullying-related item I found was a request, made during discussion of wellness rooms, for “a report on the collaboration of bullying mitigation and wellness rooms.”

That appears to be a different issue than Mailman’s request to re-examine district’s bullying policy, and it would also go to Operations & Governance, so I’m not sure why it prevented the motion from moving forward.

Here’s the video.

Public bodies only work well when everyone is operating from the same information and decisions are made through a transparent process. When facts become unclear, tempers get shorter, and disagreements start feeling personal instead of procedural, it’s much harder for the committee to move its work forward.

I’ve watched hundreds of hours of School Committee meetings over the years, and the June 25 one felt different. There was far more visible frustration: eye rolling, sighing, head shaking, curt responses, expressions of disbelief, and side conversations behind covered mouths. Patience seemed to be in much shorter supply.

And I just keep coming back to the question that I think should anchor every difficult decision: What is the best choice for students, even if it’s the harder choice for the adults?

I’ll leave you with that.

Upcoming Dates.
All meetings have virtual options, see the school committee site for more information.

• School Committee Meeting on July 16, 4 p.m. at City hall

• Subcommittees have no scheduled meetings until August.

Happy summer vacation! Lots of new families are joining WPS this fall. If you find WPS in Brief valuable, please share it with them! Last day to get the half off for a year subscription deal. Please support our work! See you in July.

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Thank you to everyone who has newly subscribed or resubscribed in the past couple weeks—the disaster scenario I articulated in my state of the newsletter report has blissfully not come to pass and we’re going to be okay knock on wood for at least another year it looks like.

While I’m on the subject let me just say it’s fascinating at times to be a landscaper, to be crawling around like a bug in dirt that is not yours and never will be—a fact made especially plain in the private community off Salisbury Street we spent the day in yesterday, where you are reminded by several signs in succession that the video surveillance cameras are running, that there is no outlet, that you need a reason to be there, and as you drive, weaving around massive concrete planters in the middle of the road seemingly designed to make it difficult for the work trucks coming in to maintain the HOA’s standards, you pass stately homes on rolling hills overlooking a green valley. The only indication to be found you are within city limits comes via the far-off whistles of CSX trains. It is otherwise serenely quiet. The chirping of the birds punctuated briefly by the chatter and plopping footsteps of homeowners walking their dogs. You smile as they pass, nod and/or wave, and they nod back, satisfied by the demonstration you are not a threat to them. And you think about all the social dynamics built into that interaction, the polite decorum of the ritual but also the expectation that the ritual occurs, all of which exist here but do not exist where you live. You think about that for a fleeting moment and drop it. There’s work to do. You re-mulch the bed under a gorgeous weeping hemlock tree, its thick mesh of bright green nettles cascading down to the curb, its canopy otherwise high, and on the interior intricately defined, an igloo-like geometry, and you do the best job you can making the mulch around that tree beautiful, because you respect that tree and decide it deserves the best of your abilities. So you sculpt the edges of the bed and the way the mulch falls down the hill, between its roots and how it catches naturally on the rock below it, keeping it upright. For an hour or so you do this. And when you’re done you look at your work with pride, that’s some nice looking mulch right there, and then you leave, knowing you are not allowed near that beautiful weeping hemlock again, not without a contract to point to—that this is a world in your city that is entirely off limits to you the second you are no longer a servant to it.

The Worcester Sucks promise is that there will be writing in here an AI not only couldn’t but wouldn’t bother to write. See above. Summarize that, Grok. You coward.

Today’s main piece is one I’ve been plugging away at for the better part of a week. It was difficult to put together and is perhaps “not ready” but feeling like a piece is ~ready~ is a luxury the present circumstances do not afford! Big whoop.

Before we get to it, a few things you should be aware of:

Council is reviewing the city manager tomorrow, an annual ritual only slightly less pointless than the budget review. It’s still a waste of time don’t get me wrong. The city manager review will begin to matter when and (big) if the city council sets any benchmarks or even expectations against which to evaluate Batista’s performance. So long as we hire city managers the fundamentally corrupt way that we do the review process, such as there is one, will also happen in a fundamentally corrupted way. In both circumstances it will not be the process that exists on paper i.e. the city council does it openly and democratically by a transparent and carefully defined process. But there’s palace intrigue to be spotted around the edges, as I wrote about last time I wrote to you, in a way I think was pretty good in retrospect. And don’t much feel like repeating right now.

The most important thing to watch for is how hard the old guard councilors are willing to “go after him.” And, then, how enthusiastically the mayor “stands by his guy.” There’s a certain point, one that will be subtle and hard to notice, where the mayor recognizes he has to drop his current guy and go searching for a new guy. None of that will occur in the way it’s supposed to, but rather with public winks and nods to what’s always going on just off screen, usually in the conveniently located back rooms of the third floor, where councilors have been seen slipping quietly in groups small and, at times, large, to have their “real” conversations.

Anyway here’s the agenda. You’ll notice the evaluation is the only item. And here’s the city manager’s self evaluation, itself worth a read. I will remain blissfully unaware of all of it until next Monday.

Ok now to what the freakin fuck happened with rent control.

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The Frontier Meets the Unforced Error

The frontier and the unforced error—two uniquely American themes, the former derived from our uniquely bloody and direct inversion on the tactics of European colonialism… a gift that keeps on giving… and the latter from the sport that defined America until America couldn’t be slaked by it, turned instead to a more instantly gratifying and violent spectacle. I’m talking about baseball and football by the way. Baseball gave us the unforced error, a specific mechanic among mechanics in the byzantine rulebook of the sport, now a part of the American lexicon due to how accurately it captures “failing at a simple task for a stupid reason.” The Billy Buckner example being the most famous, and fittingly happening in Boston.

This is what the authors of the rent control bill did when they wrote in a very specific and pointless religious exemption.

Neil Smith’s theory of gentrification as a continuation of the American “frontier” is perhaps another context in which you haven’t read someone frame the battle over rent control in this state, now comi-tragically concluded by way of a Supreme Judicial Court ruling on a ridiculous lawsuit. Allow me to change that.

First, the news in case you haven’t heard by now: the state’s Supreme Judicial Court tossed the rent control ballot initiative off the ballot by unanimous vote, answering in the affirmative, by a unanimous vote, to a complaint that the question violates an archaic state law about putting religious questions up for public vote. The complaint was made by the opposition campaign, a collection of developers, landlords, and lobbyists for developers and landlords. The rent control ballot measure has nothing to do with religion. It’s about capping rent increases at 5 percent annually or the annual increase in the consumer price index. Secular stuff, I think we can all agree. But there is one clause of one sentence in the proposed bill in which the term “religious organizations” appears in a list of other organizations that would be exempted. The SJC judges all agreed that hey it has the word “religious,” so…

While the main opinion of the court takes great pains to speak legal circles around the immutable fact of their position being ridiculous, a secondary opinion authored by Justice Kafker, takes the “you fuckin idiots would have been fine if you didn’t use the specific word religion” approach.

Although most of the initiative, which proposes to limit residential rent increases for large for-profit landlords, clearly has nothing to do with religion or religious institutions, its exemption for “[d]welling units in facilities operated solely for . . . religious . . . purposes” requires application of a test based on religion (emphasis added). This religious test also invites an intrusive review of religious beliefs and practices proscribed by art. 48 of the Amendments to the Massachusetts Constitution, as the test whether a rental unit is being operated “solely for . . . religious . . . purposes” requires an inquiry into the internal affairs of, and even the motives and purposes of, a religious institution, as well as its finances. That, in my opinion, is prohibited by art. 48.

Which is where I’m at as well. A generational opportunity tossed on an easily avoidable technicality. The campaign shot itself in the foot so hard I can’t help but wonder if it was somehow on purpose. Who was this carveout for? What religious organizations are raising rents on tenants more than five percent a year? And, adding all those holy rollers up, are they of a size or influence that losing them breaks the coalition?

It was very dumb to include that language. Perhaps too dumb. Given the amount of attorneys who worked on this, up to and including the state’s attorney general, it becomes difficult to see the inclusion of that language as a little whoopsies and comparatively easy to see it as an act of sabotage. A poison pill laid early on. Not that I have any proof or would even make such an accusation I’m just saying it stretches credulity that no one flagged the religion thing, given the “no religious ballot questions” law apparently on the books, and the mind wanders to conspiratorial places. How I would love to get a good look at the version history of that bill, ideally in Google Doc style with names attached to updated text. Never will, but a boy can dream.

So yeah, rent control is dead in the near future. The proponents may bring it back for 2028 but we’ll just have to wait and see on that.

But the real estate lobby has been pretty clear about the negotiating period being over post-SJC decision. Which is obvious, intuitively. The ballot questions was where the leverage started and ended. The CEO of NAIOP Massachusetts, one of the real estate lobbyists heading the campaign against rent control, minced no words in an interview with WBUR late last week. “Because there is no question appearing on the ballot, there is no compromise to be reached,” said Tamara Small, the CEO.

Meanwhile, in New York...

The rent control ballot question, tepid as it was, would allow voters to decide on a fundamentally important question: should the state government use its authority to make an intervention--just one!--in the real estate market on behalf of its citizens. The significance of this question comes from the grim reality that people my age or younger have never not once even seen that happen. Rent control wasn’t made illegal in a vacuum. That small moment in 1994 was part of a larger decades-long shift away from regulating and toward “facilitating” the financial engines of real estate. The ballot initiative had the potential to serve as a popular referendum on that very fundamental piece of how our state is currently run, how it ran itself straight into this housing crisis, gleefully and unrepentantly. That is, to my mind, the reason why the real estate lobby pulled out every last trick in the book. It’s pathetic, frankly, that this is the trick that worked.

The generational talent of the Democratic Party is down in New York freezing rents to extreme popular support. If people up here in Mass are allowed express the same sentiment in a quantifiable way, such as with a yes or no question put to all voters, the real estate lobby could stand to lose its total regulatory capture of state and local government.

They looked out at their little field mice scurrying around their silly little Statehouse and they were struck by a vision of what would happen if someone else were to swoop in and give one of them a cookie.

It’s interesting to note the spirit of the law used in bad faith to kill this ballot question. Referred to as Article 48, the SJC pulled out a few specific lines in their decision: “The people for their own protection have provided that the initiative shall not be employed with respect to certain matters” because “[s]ome matters are naturally unsuitable for popular lawmaking.”

There is a way of reading this passage, looking at how it was just applied, as an attempt to define housing writ large as such an “unsuitable”matter. Like a religion, the free market cannot be put to the test of popular support. For our own protection, the argument follows.

But how does all this relate to the frontier?

Smith writes:

Whereas the myth of the frontier is an invention that rationalizes the violence of gentrification and displacement, the everyday frontier on which the myth is hung is the stark product of entrepreneurial exploitation. Thus whatever its visceral social and cultural reality, the frontier language camouflages a raw economic reality. Areas that were once sharply redlined by banks and other financial institutions were sharply “greenlined” in the 1980s.

The frontier was, and remains, a construct for prying open new financial markets. Like everything else it has simply become more abstract, as an idea, as a financial instrument, as a set of settler colonial practices. But its logic, its goals, its outcomes remain the same. Westward expansion never stopped, it just stopped moving west, stopped moving in one concise direction at all, and instead it felt around for the many micro-frontiers in the interior. The “free real estate” of manifest destiny became the “cheap real estate” of the “inner city.” The frontiersman became the free market fundamentalist. The pioneer became the landlord. The Indian became the drug dealer, the thug, the inner city youth, the welfare queen, the criminal, the drug user, the unhoused person. The cowboy, the cop. The trail of tears to mass incarceration. The reform schools to the school-to-prison pipeline.

This new and abstracted frontier is one that the financial elite can open and close at will, loading up new frontiers like fresh maps in The Sims.

The perverse rationality of real estate capitalism means that building owners and developers garner a double reward for milking properties and destroying buildings. First, they pocket the money that should have gone to repairs and upkeep; second, having effectively destroyed the building and established a rent gap, they have produced for themselves the conditions and opportunity for a whole new round of capital reinvestment.

This is what city officials mean when they gloat about Worcester being “on the map.” The only reason it’s “on the map” is because it was left off the map for enough time to create the undervalued property needed to extract value from putting it on the map. It was through no fault of its own that Worcester was taken off the map, and it is likewise on the map again for reasons that have nothing to do with the city’s power elite or the decisions they’ve made, other than their total submission to the logic of gentrification, which is entirely unremarkable–the stock standard approach to municipal government for the last few decades at least. The process is overseen, managed, and executed elsewhere, by people for whom there is almost no democratic accountability. They can be sued, and they have in recent memory, but that’s about it. Truly remarkable city leadership, on the other hand, would be shown if local leaders spoke plainly about how the thing works, first of all, and second of all used the new “on the map” reality as leverage to negotiate more revenue and workforce housing.

Instead, we operate nearly exclusively on the premise that if we don’t fully bend over backward we’ll scare the capital off. This is good for the real estate industry, and good for the city officials who leave government to work in the real estate industry, like the two city managers before Eric Batista have. (Where do we think he’ll end up? Webster Five? Trinity Financial? Should we get a pool going?!)

At the time Smith wrote his book, gentrification was a nascent phenomenon, hitting neighborhoods like New York’s Lower East Side and its analog in other global cities, places that are now the almost thoroughly sanitized and effectively gated domains of an elite caste: where they park their capital and, for a time, their children. In the two decades since Smith wrote the book, the theory has borne out. Cities like Worcester have patiently waited their turn, quietly greasing the rails with “opportunity zones” and other such deregulatory schemes, and now the frontier pried open in the 90s in the first tier cities is fully “civilized,” the second tier cities of the 2000s have just about reached full extraction (Boston), and now it’s the third and fourth tier cities like Worcester who are next, either being put on the map or desperately scratching for position. Provincial backwaters neglected by capital for so many decades, they happily roll over at the prospect of “attracting” it, and fear, desperately, the thought of turning it away.

Joe Petty’s uncharacteristically hard and public stance against rent control is a sterling example of this: how he seemed to hardly bother concealing his relationship with the real estate lobby’s opposition campaign, allowing them to put their words directly into his mouth and under his byline in the newspaper. How he happily laundered their logic as common sense... the only available choice.

The lawsuit that led to rent control ouster from the ballot was filed in February, by four plaintiffs handpicked by the real estate lobby, as is made clear by the reams of “amicus briefs” (the legal equivalent of a “letter of support” type document) submitted by a rogues gallery of real estate industry organizations. The Pioneer New England Legal Foundation,

MassLandlords, Inc, Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Realtors, the good old fashion U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc etc. even the California apartment association had to weigh in. had to check whether they were a landlord group or tenant group, very much a landlord group. Sheesh

Scrolling through the list, on the hunt as always for the “Worcester connection,” one of these documents caught my eye: “amicus brief filed for Millbury National Bank by attorney Kevin J. Powers.”

And boy oh boy am I glad I took the time to read it. It was what we like to call a “good pull.” There’s one section in particular that ties the whole proverbial room together. But we need a bit of setup to understand why.

Number one: Millbury National was the only bank to directly file their own brief. Not a stretch to think banking executives had a hand in crafting other briefs. But it is a noteworthy fact that this one small bank has its own brief in this case.

Number two noteworthy fact: Millbury National Bank’s brief was prepared and paid for by Mass Landlords, INC., an organization that also filed their own brief. “This brief is funded wholly by MassLandlords, Inc., which has also submitted a separate amicus curiae brief in its own name.” The reason for filing their own, rather than including their input in the MassLandlords brief, is chalked up to a scheduling issue. But, they note, “Millbury National Bank would not have been able to promptly retain counsel without the financial assistance of MassLandlords, Inc.” A worrying thing to hear a bank say, no matter how small.

The overall argument presented by Mass Landlords via and/or on behalf of Millbury National in the 42-page document is that small community banks need small community landlords to demonstrate they will increase rents over time in order to write mortgages for them. This is also a notable and rather grim fact, if true. Big “if.” But still, it’s worth flagging for the underlying point that the banks control the landlords in many cases, and in ways that are little known outside the industry.

Millbury National’s financial future depends on the outcome of 9 this case. Rent control would have devastating effects on Millbury National, its ability to continue to service loans, its borrowers, and its borrowers’ ability to be successful landlords.

So now, with all that in mind, let’s read one of the anecdotes included in the brief to illustrate the bank’s hardship in a theoretical world where renters have some protections.

The Petition jeopardizes loans predicated upon renters leaving and rents increasing between tenants. Millbury National has issued a loan secured by twelve rental units—in the form of three four-family Worcester properties—the rents of which must increase as tenants leave. The borrower is a Worcester police officer. The units are now renting well below market rates, and the borrower plans to increase rents for those units, but will maintain below-market rents for long-term tenants who 18 remain in their units. Millbury National’s loan was not made on the basis of current rents alone; instead, Millbury National entered into the agreement on the assumption that the borrower will be able to quickly raise the rent to market rate as each legacy tenant departs. (”The net cash after debt on these twelve units total $30,000, pro

A police officer who owns three four-unit rental properties? Sounds a lot like our old friend Anthony Petrone!

More interestingly, it isn’t. Petrone financed his four-unit rentals through Unibank or some other one (I suffer from Bank Blindness). That means there’s another Worcester police officer who owns at least three rentals of the four-unit variety, which are decidedly less common than three units.

It’s theoretically possible to figure out who this other officer is, but it would be annoying and time consuming and it’s beside the point.

The point is the loans written to this police officer are contingent on their ability to “quickly raise the rents” once legacy tenants move out. What happens if legacy tenants have no plans of moving out goes unstated. But do we really need to state it?

Up to and including a no-fault eviction order, landlords have a swiss army knife of tactics to annoy, cajole, force a renter out of their unit. Police officers are uniquely suited to this work. Indeed, for the financiers of the microfrontiers of urban gentrification, the “cop who is also a landlord” is the ideal frontiersman. Who better to carry out the dirty work of displacement than those who already do it, in slightly different ways, as an occupation. Not only do they have the ability to threaten and intimidate with more oomf than your average mon-n-pop, they are deeply enmeshed in the byzantine world of city workers, sheriff’s deputies, cops, and housing court staff that carry out evictions. They are among the most likely people to be let in on the “tricks of the trade” as it were. And the least likely people to be kept in check by what authorities there are watching out for abusive landlords–if there are any at all, an open question in my opinion.

Of course the city council could and should be that authority, but remember that Kate Toomey was able to get the entire city to change course on a mundane sprinkler ordinance that would have affected landlords of four to eight unit buildings like Anthony Petrone, who happens to be one of her police union handlers. She did so without being able to explain why publicly–it was all winks and nods and wrapped up in the overall project of dicking down on progressives. The most cartoonish surfacing I can remember of the sort of low-grade corruption that we can trust to be humming along at all times in the background.

While outside the scope of this particular post, it would be worthwhile–perhaps a future project for a slow week–to cross reference a few databases to suss out how many Worcester police officers are landlords. Far as police officers go, Petrone’s a rare breed. More of a politician than a cop, savvy enough to secure the most powerful and least democratic political position in the city, as head of one of the three police unions.

That there’s another officer out there who’s vested in what the suits would call our “naturally occurring affordable housing”–the polite way to say this is
“being a slumlord”–raises the possibility that more cops than you think are spending those six digit overtime earnings on down payments.

Writing this I returned to the images scarred in my brain from “Blood Meridian,” the most accurate (I would know) fictional portrayal of westward expansion in how thoroughly dismal and disgusting it is. And there’s a line from it that sends chills down my spine and especially so because the real life man Cormac McCarthy based the book on is buried in Worcester and I want to leave it here to chew on as we think about the way the American frontier has cycled through history, iteratively and abstractly, but has never gone anywhere, in fact has only come in closer to home.

“You can find meanies in the least of creatures, but when God made man the Devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

Odds and Ends

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Related to the main post today, there’s a Worcester mention in a really good Boston Globe Spotlight investigation into MassDevelopment that came out a few days ago. The piece documents how a few landlords and an official at MassDevelopment seemingly conspired to bilk the state for work they never did, mostly on low income rental properties. Like so:

Jenkins, who lives on the second floor of the three-family in Worcester, said his unit has hardly been improved. While the first- and third-floor units are in better shape, the only occupants in the last three years have been squatters, Jenkins said.

Worcester officials had given Acquah a separate grant of $134,750 to fix up the triple-decker. The city now wants its money back because of his failures; the building was sold at a foreclosure auction in late March.

“It is definitely disappointing seeing the units not come to fruition, and seeing that opportunity not delivered to Worcester families that need affordable housing,” said Peter Dunn, the city’s chief development officer.

In both Pittsfield and Worcester, officials expressed concerns late in the process about whether the apartments will be able to be rented to people with Section 8 vouchers because of their condition, a frustrating outcome for a program that aims to help low-income residents.

A little something special for the musical dessert this week. Sturgil Simpson put out a record a few weeks ago, under the moniker Johnny Blue Sky & The Dark Clouds, called Mutiny After Midnight, and he took the remarkable step of pulling all of it from streaming. So of course I bought a cassette and of course, audio geek that I am, I took a recording of the cassette and made an Mp3 version for playing it on my upcoming trip to Virginia. Here’s the first track. It absolutely rips. It’s called “Make America Fuck Again” how could it not rip?! Paid subscribers can find the whole record here via the same password I used for the merch discount code. And if you’re not a paid subscriber well buddy here’s a little deal.

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This is a gift for friends by the way in case anyone from Warner Brothers’ legal department is reading. All Subscribers Are Friends (ASAB). Everyone else reading this let’s just keep it between us ok? The ASAB Compact.

Have a good week everyone see you when I get back!

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Dear Shaun,

I miss the Tartan Army. Should I move to Scotland?

-Tartan in Tatters

Dear Tartan in Tatters,

I feel you, that crew is amazing. Yes, the chants and the bagpipes and the traffic cones on statues’ heads were great. They are a gregarious bunch who won over Boston. One of my favorite parts of the whole experience was Boston, which thinks it’s a drinking town, was just triple-lapped by the Scots. Sam Adams, the flagship brewery in the city, RAN OUT OF BEER. Someone from Hennessey’s in Haymarket Square was quoted as saying that one visit from them was like St. Patrick’s Day times three. St. Patrick’s Day in Boston is the day that Beantown is at its sloppiest and that was a random Wednesday. And they were polite and clean, didn’t fight anyone in the middle of street. Take notes Boston, the only people you should be fighting are the yuppies from BC who are leaning on your friend when they talk about their summer plans on Nantucket.

I learned an interesting fact about part of the reason we fell in love with the Tartan Army. A while back, Scottish fans were hooligans like the a lot of the U.K. fandom. Wherever they played they would terrorize and destroy the towns they played in. Then they realized, “why would we act like the English? We hate the English.” They then decided to be the most genial and fun-loving group that they could be and kill everyone with kindness and stick to the Royals. I love these Scots the more I learn about them. Most recently a newly elected Member of Parliament for the Scottish government crossed her fingers as she was sworn in and supposed to pledge allegiance to the King and vowed to serve the people of Scotland first. This country rules!

Moving there could be tough, you’ll have to get a visa to work there or have family there already. I know these football fans felt like family, but legally, you’r just drinking buddies. Here is my suggestion: learn the bagpipes. Your neighbors will love it. Order some Irn-Bru, prepare a spice bag (local bars take notice on this one), and have your own backyard Highlands. They brought a bit of Scotland to us, you can keep a bit of Scotland right here right now.

I know wearing a kilt, as an American, is very much Hot Topic-kid coded. But you can also just own it. You don’t need to go away from your home to enjoy the energy of Scotland, you can eat stuffed sheep hearts and livers anywhere. It is even available in a can!

Please, definitely go visit. Just remember that the honeymoon period may be over by the time you get there. Not every place you visit is Disneyland, and not every visit from others will be like that first time. I have been on plenty of first dates that were magical, but for some of them I can’t even remember their name now. Don’t get burned by the love bomb from the Scots. Give it time to breathe. Breathe circularly, into a tartan-designed sheep stomach with pipes attached in your backyard, for all of your neighborhood to hear.

NEWS

I am hosting the all-gender swimsuit competition at the Ralph’s Rock Diner Beach Party tonight. A very cool and very good surf-rock band, The Deep Ones, from Providence are playing as well.

With my baby due in 5 weeks I will not be performing anymore until after she starts to sleep better. But if you do want to see me still I will be hosting the Live Forever Open Mic at Ralph’s every Tuesday at 8PM.

Thanks to everyone who came out on Saturday it was a nice little time! What follows is what I’d planned on delivering as a speech, before realizing there’s no way I’d be able to get through the whole thing with our self-appointed DJ on the third floor of a nearby triple decker playing DMX from his porch at a volume you simply wouldn’t believe.

As I said in the short tease of this report last post, survival, for a local journalism outfit such as this one—in this Internet 4.0 hellscape, this economy, this world—is success. We here at Worcester Sucks have survived and will survive. For a long time if we play our cards right. And even if we don’t—because who really ever does? We’re not going anywhere any time soon. Much to the chagrin of the haters and the losers.

Survival in local journalism is not only success, it’s bucking the trend, beating the odds. This world is one that despises the local journalist. A local journalist who takes the mandate of afflicting the comfortable seriously? Even worse. This world wants all local journalists gone but especially the ones who don’t dutifully rewrite the press releases, slot themselves into the public relations machine informally before making it formal, inevitably leaving the profession for an overt public relations gig, usually after a few short years ‘in the shit,’ having done essentially that very thing their entire time as a reporter.

This world doesn’t even want those journalists, but it especially does not want the journalists who resist the public relations current, who try to do good work with the time and energy they have to do it, who get off on the negative reinforcement of a power elite who despise them, who approach the work with an actual analysis, and respect that analysis enough to be honest about it, who will not compromise on the matter of the truth, will not be made to say ‘uncle.’

The opportunity I and my growing team have had over the past five years, heading into our sixth, is a rare and beautiful gift and it is thanks to the hundreds of you who’ve chipped in to make it happen.

Times are tough right now and I can’t blame any of you for dropping off. Here’s a deal to get some new people over into the light.

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Consider this: The 2026 Local Journalist Index from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News found that there’s been an 81 percent decline in working local journalists across the country since 2002.

Where there were five local journalists, there is now one. Across the board. And in many places it’s worse, Worcester being one of them. Correlation does not imply causation in most cases but the totality of the evidence here shows local news to be a clear victim of the the War On Terror and its redefining of American life over the past twenty five years. The polar opposite of what it did for the local police departments…Really makes you go hmmm if you sit with it for a few minutes. Perhaps we’ve been headed down the road we’ve all just suddenly realized we’re on for quite some time actually.

The decline in local news is often regrettably cast as a rural problem. Big non-profit programs like Report For America are likely to blame for the misconception. The study found urban and suburban counties to be just as lacking. “The local reporting capacity was nearly universal.” Approximately 70 percent of counties fall below a national average of 7.8 LJE per 100,000, an average they described as “already anemic.” Worcester is one of those counties, sitting at a shoddy 6.8 per 100,000 working local journalists. Back of the napkin math, Worcester as a city would appear to be lower still. The national average, applied to Worcester’s population, would mean 16 local journalists.

Telegram: 5

Masslive: 3

Worcester Sucks: 2 (me and all the part timers put together)

The Worcester Guardian: 1

This Week In Worcester: 2

Worcester Business Journal: 1***** (updated at 9 p.m. Monday I knew I was missing someone. My b Eric.)

Total: 13

They use the term “local journalist equivalents” as a catch-all for the many new forms reporting has taken in recent years. The term encompasses your traditional print reporters, online outfits like MassLive, local TV stations, local radio stations, newsletters like ours, podcasts like ours. From the study:

The new study puts that at 7.8 Local Journalist Equivalents per 100,000 residents, an 81% decline since 2002, when there were about 40 journalists per 100,000. Last year, we found 8.2 LJEs per 100,000.

More obvious: states with fewer local journalists suffered from higher costs of municipal borrowing. According to the report, this dynamic in the data reaffirms studies showing that news deserts raise such costs by at least $1.1 billion across the U.S. annually. As was made clear though never overtly stated during the budget hearings of the past few months, Worcester City Hall has basically maxed out its credit lines. Two or three city officials made two or three passing references to the “negative impact on our bond rating” that any more borrowing, now or in the future, would have.

While I don’t know much about it, there’s something called a “civic participation index.” The study shows that counties with higher concentrations of local journalists core better, which is intuitive.

This is the core of our work. The philosophy underpinning the newsletter since I started it is that the community suffers from a lack of substantive reporting: work that gives readers a way in to the byzantine world of the municipality, that illustrates reality versus possibility. One of my calling card lines over the years, only having gotten more true, is that the municipality is the last arena in which “democracy” as an ideal could conceivably exist. The job, then, becomes illustrating how it currently doesn’t, and I think my coverage of the city council’s budget review process did a good job of that.

The “reporter reduction,” nationwide, is hardest felt in the area of education…

In our sweep of websites, nearly 77% of U.S. counties produced zero education articles mentioning a local community during those three months. Some 76% had no local articles about health.

This underscores the perhaps little understood significance of what Aislinn Doyle does with WPS In Brief, a fantastic and necessary addition to the newsletter, one I have been grateful to edit, written by someone who has really emerged as a true talent—the genuine article of a local education reporter, despite, or because of, her insistence on saying she isn’t that, a reporter.

Conversely coverage of “crime”—as isolated incidents, usually in the form of cosmetically altered press releases, and not of the workings of the criminal justice system as a whole, as we try to do—has increased.

…it appears that counties with less local news put even more emphasis on crime than on other civically important topics.

Stuff like “Worcester woman reported yelling in Leominster arrested on warrant, charged with possessing heroin & crack,” a story up recently from News Link Live, as opposed to our recent work on the county sheriff’s scheme to use a non-profit shell corporation to tuck away fees collected from various types of process serving including evictions. The former, I can say from my years of doing them, took the reporter a half hour or so. The latter, I can say because I did it, took a few full days.

This is bad bad bad for community. It has the “Law and Order” effect: scaring people to death about the world, their neighbors, their communities. Isolating them via a warped perception of dangerousness.

This narrativization of fear then fuels the swings of property values needed by the real estate industry to create the “economically depressed” areas they can then “revitalize.” It’s in the best interest of the massive hedge funds carrying out most of the development around the country that local news spits out as many crime stories as possible, creating the perception of a “hard scrabble” area that the developers can then “put on the map.” The “on the map” stories, it just so happens, are about as easy to write as the crime stories. Good reporting, on the other hand, makes this real estate game harder. A conspiracy theorist would do well to look into how vested media companies like Gannett are in real estate interests. Could it be the companies that buy up local news outlets in bulk, then systematically lay off its staffers, starting with the ones who have the most institutional knowledge—your veteran reporters, assignment editors and copy desks—have an interest in creating the conditions where a newsroom can really only churn out press release rewrites, be it from the cops or the local chamber of commerce?

Other areas of coverage that suffer: health, environmental issues, and transportation.

Like reporting on the criminal justice system versus “crime,” these are subjects that take a certain expertise to report on with clarity—both over the subject matter and in the craft of local reporting. It is one thing to know a subject like, say, traffic calming, and another thing entirely to reach people who do not, to illustrate the hinge points and contested terrain and the stakes, the problem with the reality and the possible solution, the barriers to getting there, and, most importantly and most often neglected, what people can do to help—how they can slot themselves into actual participation, and in that way reclaim a sense of citizenry—of selfhood in a community wider than immediate family or workplace—in a world that would otherwise have you isolated and atomized actors in a world that appears before you as a spectacle to consume rather than a reality to shape. The project of awakening a broad consciousness of the spectacle as a broad and diffuse panopticon, disabusing people of their agency before they even know it, is in my opinion the struggle of our time. Real life, real community, versus the spectacle. The municipality is perhaps the best-suited arena for engaging in this struggle, because it’s inseparable from “the city,” a polity older and stronger and more durable than anything the spectacle has produced, and also frankly because it’s fuckin pretty boring most of the time. The spectacle has a hard time with “boring.” That the spectacle can’t find much in the municipality to extract and feed a consumptive audience the way it can in the nation’s capital is our greatest strength. What the spectacle finds too difficult to turn into a mass consumer product is the same thing that ties real community around real political agency. There is nothing salacious about pedestrian safety improvements or updating the city’s zoning map. They are, however, things that directly improve life in a city, and require sustained pressure from an engaged local citizenry to coerce a municipality into moving on them.

To demonstrate that a city can beat back the spectacle and awaken its people out of a consumerist spell is a profoundly radical and important act. Every time we try, even if it looks like we failed, as is the case with the last election, we get closer.

With all that in mind, there’s a factoid I found very interesting: the study makes a direct link between low rates of LJEs and high rates of loneliness, especially in rural counties.

It’s worth thinking very hard, I think, about loneliness and local journalism. It’s not something you hear every day and may make most people scratch their heads. But what I’ve found in my decade or so doing it is that local journalism done right can fan the fire of a community awakening to itself, that in some rare and magic moments it can be the thing that lights it.

A small and admittedly self serving example was right on the patio of Steel & Wire Saturday night. A group of people that would have otherwise been total strangers if not for their reading, listening, interacting with my silly little blog. And who are now aware of Free Press Action and the great work they’re doing in Massachusetts, courtesy Sarah Stone, an organizer with the organization working on a campaign to replicate the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium here, with the help of the state legislature. She spoke a little bit, hung out, met some good people in Worcester to know… the more connected Worcester media is with world outside the shadow of The Dome the better. That’s what I say.

Ok so now with the appropriate context, let’s look at a scary graph:

Yoikes! This makes me panicky to the point I look around the room while my Substack dashboard is loading so I can skip to a different menu without actually looking at it.

This is the year on the whole for “gross annualized revenue,” meaning how much you’d make in a year if your subscribers stayed static to that point in time. Last June, that figure was about $52,500. This June, it has dropped to $50,200.

Paid subscribers are down from a high of 786 to where they currently are, 727, and I have it in my head that if the number hits 600, I have to get my ass on LinkedIn. Not to say the newsletter will disappear or anything, but there will reach a time if this trend continues that I can no longer treat it as a “full time job.” I think we’ve got at least a year of runway, though, before I’m really there.

And it could very well turn around. Hope it does! But I’m not naive enough to get by on faith. It could well be that the “Substack moment” reached its zenith a few years ago and is now headed to the dustbin of history like so many Internet trends before it. Remember Medium? Remember Blogspot? Remember the confessional essay moment around outlets like “Thought Catalog”?

My goal is to cement Worcester Sucks into a durable institution, and that means being clear-eyed about the lifespan of media trends, and how they relate to the “see what sticks” economics of venture capital in Sillicon Valley, where the runway of seed capital often surreptitiously dries and everyone involved in a given project quickly jumps to some other ship, letting the current one sink. This could happen to Substack tomorrow.

Let’s look at a less scary graph. The “all time” view, 2020 to present, of the same “gross annualized revenue” figure.

On this graph we can see the current moment more clearly as a natural dip in an overall pattern of stead growth. And I’d love to believe that. I just can’t help but be scared about the Graph 1 interpretation, that the thing is in a tailspin, soon to crash.

One thing we can take from both graphs I think is that we’re not in a boom time, and that the peak I hit last November of 780 paid subscribers is where the newsletter plateaus. The limit of the subscription model for the type of newsletter I run in a media market the size of Worcester.

I don’t make a big deal of this fact because I don’t consider it an accomplishment, but Worcestrer Sucks is in the top 100—I think we hit 67 at one point but don’t quote me—of Substacks in the news category.Globally. Of all the newsletters on Substack that do “news,” not even “local news,” there are only 50-100 at any given time that do better than Worcester Sucks financially.

Now, on the one hand, feather in the cap, sure. I’ll take it as an affirmation we have something uniquely special on our hands with this institution.

On the other hand, though, that fuckin’ sucks, man! To be honest with you, $50,000 is really not a lot of money. I am grateful for it, obviously, and proud of it. But in the grand scheme of things it is a low salary for one person. It is not the foundation on which to build the real newsroom in my heart and in my imagination. The conclusion I’ve arrived at is there’s nowhere further Substack could take Worcester Sucks, that it’s time to part ways and try something different.

That I am among the top earners in the world for news reporters and I struggle to make rent means I serve as a living example of an industry that is not being saved, as Substack executives will say, but rather systematically gigified. Really, it’s a continuation of the slash-and-burn model of Gannett and Alden Global Capital. “Disrupting” the industry really means “destroying” it. It is taking the career path, the labor category, eventually the public memory, of “local news” out of play. Into the dustbin of history.

The direct contribution model has worked for me, will continue to work for me, but it’s in the outlet’s best interest to try and disentangle it from the valences of “tech disruption.” To be clear-eyed about what it is they actually offer and what they actually take.

That’s where we are right now. And I want to talk about what comes next. But first, let’s look at some metrics that have nothing to do with money and are, as far as the journalism itself is concerned, the most important.

Average of all posts since this time last June

Reads: 3,138

Open rate: 42 percent

Monthly web traffic has been steadily growing year over year. In 2025, we hit an average of 65,588 views a month. Up from 56,0173 in 2024 and almost four times better than 2022’s 16,902 average monthly views.

The increase in traffic is due to readership growth and retention, as well as an increase in the volume of posts.

This outlet started as one post a week give or take from me, now we have 1 post a week from me, 1 podcast a week from Chris and I, a post a week from Shaun, about three posts a month from Aislinn, as well as monthly posts from Dani, via Worcester Speaks and Gillian, with their new How Did We Get Here column, and you may hear about it soon but we’ve got a new one in the works as well!

Here are the top posts of the past year, June 2025-June 2026, ranked by views.

Firsts this year: First live podcast, back in May. New people on board: Dani Killay, Gillian Ganesan, Greg Opperman.

Gillian and Greg’s work on campaign finance data ahead of the election made a huge splash. That work was born out of conversations had at the first Election Squad event last summer, proving that those live events, loosey goosey affairs that didn’t serve much purpose besides getting people the same room, were useful and worthwhile—a novel approach to the sort of community building I talked about earlier, yielding tangible results.

The Instagram is under new management as well. Kelly Cashman has brought a unified aesthetic and consistent posting schedule, turning it into our most important social platform. It has more followers than the newsletter has subscribers and our posts get a lot of reach there. Every time we post a reel it does very well, so I’m trying to build that into my workflow, but no promises. While the Instagram meets people where they are, it doesn’t in and of itself generate revenue.

Oh yeah and I got a piece placed in Playboy about the Smiley Face haha. Pursuing more freelance opportunities like this is good for the newsletter as it increases the reach of the brand.

Now, as mentioned, what to do about the audience plateau the data suggests?

Well, I’d be open to any suggestions anyone here might have first of all.

Leave a comment

Second of all I think it’s time to move to a better and cheaper and less Silicon Valley-derived and shareholder-beholden hosting service: Ghost.

Ghost is one of two main competitors to Substack in the general “independent newsletter” game. Where Substack aims to provide a social media landscape, akin to something like a mashup of Bluesky, Youtube and Patreon, with a writerly aesthetic and an unaddressed Nazi problem, Ghost has no such ambitions. They are coders who offer well-built, highly customizable and open source software. The main drawback is its lack of a social media-style ecosystem, but our newsletter, given its audience is tied more to a real life place than an Internet “space,” never got much from the Substack ecosystem anyway. By leaving the app, we stand to lose 109 subscribers, six of which are paid. A drop in the bucket.

Here are some websites I like that are hosted by Ghost: Welcome To Hell World, Forever Wars, The Mass Dump.

The difference in the deal is ridiculous. Substack takes 10 percent of every subscription. Ghost charges a flat fee that increases over several tiers as the audience increases. For us it would be about $200 a month.

That means going from $5000 to $1200 in costs annual platform costs, which in turn leaves me $3,800 more to put back into paying local writers for their local stories. A no brainer on that front.

The trade off is there’s no app, and if we want a chat function we’d have to rebuild it elsewhere. The most widely used option is Discord, but man there’s just something about that site that irks me. I just won’t do it.

There are some lingering tech questions I have that have so far delayed the move. The biggest one is how to migrate the podcast without losing the RSS feed. If there’s anyone reading this who knows RSS hosting inside and out please reach out to me I have some very specific questions. Billshaner at substack dot com.

I also want to get people’s feelings on whether we should think about a print product, launching and distributing it through Kickstarter. It could be a nice little revenue source and a way to think about taking on limited local advertising.

The live podcast was well attended and a good time. There is potentially a revenue source in doing more of those events.

And then there’s merch, which I’ve been slacking on lately but is a decent revenue source. Last year it was a few thousand in profit I don’t have the number in front of me. Scaling that part of the operation up slightly is possible, but the prospect of getting it to make even $10,000 a year is pretty slim, and even then it’d be a whole other pretty-much-full-time hustle, either taking my time away from doing journalism or taking all the money it makes and putting it into a “merch guy” type position. So either way there are limits to scale and it’s probably best thought of as a neat little side hustle. On the matter, I’m in the market for a few new designs and I have a few loose ideas. So any artists out there reading this who’d like to draw up a shirt, hit me up!

Otherwise, it’s just about staying the course. Continuing to do what we do with the time and energy afforded by our paid subscribers—that’s you! Or it could be you! For the low low price of $34 for a year if you take me up on the sweet sweet deal I’m offering until July!

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Thanks for reading, anyway. If you believe in what we’re doing find a way to share our work with new people who you think might also get something from it. That’s the one weird trick to this whole thing: what the suits call “word-of-mouth advertising” and what I call giving em somethin’ to talk about.

A quick personal note before we begin:
If you’ve been reading WPS in Brief for a while, you’ve probably noticed that I spend a lot of time trying to help the community understand what’s happening in Worcester Public Schools. I do that because I believe knowledge is power, and informed families and strong public schools make for a stronger Worcester.

Today, I’d like to ask you to help me pay it forward.

The Worcester Elementary School Library Coalition is a volunteer effort to give every WPS elementary student library access by 2030. In partnership with Worcester Public Schools, school principals, and the Worcester Public Library, we are working this summer to help launch or strengthen libraries at six elementary schools: Belmont Street, Flagg Street, Gates Lane, Nelson Place, Norrback and Quinsigamond. Our biggest challenge right now is getting books on the shelves before students return in August.

If WPS in Brief has been helpful to you, I hope you’ll consider making a donation to help put books directly into the hands of Worcester students. Every gift, large or small, moves us closer to opening these libraries with the collections students deserve.

Support School Libraries

Thank you, as always, for reading, supporting, and caring about Worcester’s schools.

Here’s the agenda preview:

June 18 School Committee Meeting

The next school committee meeting is scheduled for Thursday, June 25, a very late in the month rescheduled date due to middle school graduations and the City Manager’s State of the City address. The budget hearing starts at 4 p.m., executive session starts at 6 p.m. and the regular meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. For this meeting last year they held executive session at the end of the regular meeting, which was nice because it makes the timing of public comment more predictable, and allows people who might want to participate to plan accordingly. Not sure why they didn’t do that again. Also, there’s no guarantee that they’ll get through the rest of the budget in two hours. See the agenda here. You can watch it via zoom or Youtube Live. Spanish translation is available on zoom.

Here’s what’s on the agenda:

Budget Hearing.
The school committee will continue discussing each budget line of the general fund at 4 p.m. Last meeting they got all the way through to the facilities non-salary capital line, and will probably start from administrative salaries and move down. The budget hearing will last about two hours and this meeting is typically when members present motions to move money between accounts (unlike city council, the school committee has the power to do that.) There is no public comment before the budget hearing. If you want to see what’s in the proposed budget read the May Brief.

Limiting individual device use in PreK through Grade Two.
Worcester for Safe Student Technology (WSST), a parent, caregiver, and educator advocacy group (of which I am a member), has a public petition calling for limits on individual internet-connected device use in Pre-K through grade two classrooms and for policies that prioritize hands-on, teacher-led, screen-limited learning. The petition, which has gathered 447 signatures from members of 51 schools across the district, includes exemptions for students who require assistive technology and for technology enrichment classes. The group points to growing national concerns about screen time in schools, including recent action by the Los Angeles Unified School District, and argues that young children benefit most from direct interaction, play, movement, and hands-on learning. If you are supportive of this, email school committee members and let them know.

So what will happen to the $100K?
Relatedly, in response to a report request from Sue Mailman (at-large), the administration is recommending a shift to a 3:1 student-to-iPad ratio in Pre-K through grade one. While modest, it is one of the first tangible changes to emerge from ongoing parent advocacy around technology use in the early grades. That change would save at least $100,000 in the FY27 budget.

The larger budget question is where those savings should go. Worcester for Safe Student Technology has suggested that the district consider investing those funds in books for new elementary school libraries as Worcester works to improve literacy outcomes.

The discussion also comes as instructional technology is one of the fastest-growing areas of the budget. Technology spending increases 65 percent next year, driven largely by new device leases, as Chromebooks and MacBooks purchased during the pandemic reach the end of their useful life. At the same time, the instructional materials line, which helps schools purchase classroom supplies, classroom furniture, art materials, recess equipment, and other essentials, is decreasing.

As the district transitions to a long-term device leasing model and faces projected budget shortfalls and potential layoffs over the next three years, the School Committee will need to decide how best to use any savings generated by reducing device use in the elementary grades. Unlike technology leases or adding administrative positions, which create recurring annual obligations, investments in school library books are largely one-time purchases that continue benefiting students for years without adding to future budget pressures. It also raises a question I’ve been wondering about for some time: can the district honestly afford a one-to-one device model anymore in K-6? With technology lease costs rising as the district faces significant budget cuts over the next three years, that’s a conversation worth having.

Redistricting updates.
The administration is providing an update on the School Boundary and Quadrant Alignment Project, which will eventually redraw school boundaries and feeder patterns across the district. Since the spring, the district has analyzed enrollment and building capacity data, formed an advisory working group (of which I am a member), and held community meetings that generated more than 300 survey responses. Initial boundary scenarios are expected to be presented in August, followed by public hearings this fall, with a final School Committee vote anticipated in December and implementation scheduled for the 2027-28 school year. (For a more detailed background on the topic, check out what I wrote back in March.)

Key areas I want to highlight that I think families and students will be happy about: the district is looking at expanding transportation options, creating more compact boundaries that could allow more students to attend schools closer to home, and making adjustments to middle school bell schedules. They’re also exploring opportunities to expand full-day preschool as the district moves away from half-day programs, and increasing access to after-school care through community partnerships. While there are still a lot of details to work out, these are all issues that came up repeatedly during community meetings and have the potential to make a big impact for students and families.

The administration is also proposing several school name changes to better align school designations with current programming. The proposal would remove the “Community School” designation from Belmont, Elm Park, Quinsigamond, and South, arguing that all Worcester schools should function as community schools. It would also remove the “Magnet” designation from Canterbury, Jacob Hiatt, and Tatnuck, saying these schools no longer operate distinct citywide magnet programs. Jacob Hiatt, in particular, would be intentionally redesigned as a neighborhood school under the proposal. These recommendations will be considered alongside broader redistricting proposals this fall, with public feedback opportunities before a final School Committee vote expected in December.

School Calendar Changes.
The Calendar Committee is recommending several changes to future school calendars after meeting throughout the spring to review scheduling practices and develop a more consistent approach. One proposed change is moving the January professional development (PD) day to October, reducing the risk that it would need to be canceled due to snow like it was this year. The calendar committee is also recommending that the November and March PD days be moved to Fridays, creating a more predictable districtwide schedule for staff and families. But the calendars in the backup maintain the November professional development day on election day, which is a Tuesday. So that’s confusing.

Those November and March PD days were originally scheduled on election days after concerns were raised by then-School Committee member Laura Clancy about student safety in schools that serve as polling locations.

Other Items.
Here’s some other items on the agenda:

• The committee will take a final vote on the bullying preventionand intervention plan.

• A report showing line item improvements for Worcester Technical High School from pre-SOA (Student Opportunity Act) until the end of SOA.

• The district plans to hire a district-wide guidance counselor.

• A report on the projected students for enrollment for the next few years. Which shows that elementary school enrollment is projected to increase each year, despite concerns of declining birthrates.

• A report on the current custodial and grounds staffing at Foley Stadium.

• Data on enrollment and participation of Hispanic/Latinx students in AP coursework.

• Report on the closing of the alternative programs as requested by two parents in a public petition.

That’s it. Have a great week. If you have feedback you can always get in touch: aislinn.doyle@me.com

We’re in front of YWCA, led by their CEO, a Black woman, Black leader, Debbie Hall. And we’re not across the way at City Hall. And that resonates with me for a couple of reasons.

Juneteenth is about education and civic engagement. You think about it, the message had to get out. It was an executive order, but it had to be enforced by military action. And it was to educate. It was to be civically engaged over the last two, three years over here at City Hall. We’ve reduced access. We’ve limited civic engagement. So I encourage everyone here today to get involved, use your voices, show up and show out.

The newsletter turns six years old today. Wow. [Grateful Dead in four-part harmony voice] What a loooooooo—

That the anniversary is on Juneteenth is an accident of timing don’t worry I’m not uhhhh laying any claim, let’s say. Speaking of, never forget...

Lol.

On the matter of this newsletter turning six whole years old: On June 19th, 2020, I emailed my resignation to the Telegram‘s then editor-in-chief, who had, in the weekly leading up to that email, unceremoniously and wordlessly censured two of my columns on the matter of police brutality and city government’s covering for it. The events of June 1, 2020, the WPD busting out the riot gear, going full IDF mode on a group of kids, the pop of less lethal weapons and the smell of sickly chemical smoke, the clear plastic riot shields smudged with skin oil, the terrified eyes of a certain few police officers, faces otherwise obscured by kit, the dead eyes of others, ‘move back move back move back.’ Still vivid as a photograph in my mind. That, and the censuring of my ability to describe it to the readership I’d cultivated at Worcester Magazine, by an editor who didn’t hire me, who was forced to take me on by an equity firm that extracts profit from laying off local journalists, who didn’t have any reason at all to care about the editorial independence of the one-time alt weekly I wrote my columns for—at that point only nominally... when I filed those columns then came to find the next morning that they did not appear in the issue, it was the last straw. I was either leaving journalism entirely or pulling one last big move. Chose the latter, obviously, and here we are. From those early ‘fuck it’ days the realization that I could lose this thing—that there is indeed a “thing” that exists and it’s up to me and my choices to keep it that way—has seeped in through so many cracks in the drywall to the point I can now say the ‘fuck it’ era is over and the ‘tightrope walking’ era has begun.

How to keep a subscription-based publication alive in an altogether different time than the halcyon days of 2020, when everyone seemed to have a cozy bit of walking around money. Now everyone is getting juiced, squeezed, juiced again by an America that’s out of ideas save for looting the company store. Subscriptions are dropping off in a way that suggests a budding trend. Scary. I’m doing fine at the moment but you usually want to see ‘line go up’ versus ‘line go down.’

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This newsletter, really any homegrown local news outlet, offers something that has no one weird trick, no ground floor to get in on, no promise of salvation from being slotted into the category of excess population and thus further immiserated. By the grace of God, who is perhaps peeking, every once in a while, past the edges of Lurie’s Dome, Worcester Sucks is surviving. It can be hard to keep centered the plain fact that survival is success in the world of local journalism. That I’m able to say the thing turned six years old today is in and of itself a great accomplishment.

This fact was made stark by a recent report from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News, updating the Local Journalism Index the two organizations launched last year.

Last year, Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News teamed up to explore a crucial question: How many local journalists are there?
The effort entailed crawling 52,000 outlets in the United States to identify what we called Local Journalist Equivalents, akin to the full-time equivalents (FTEs) you may know from your workplace. This includes many types of journalists – TV, radio, digital only, newspaper, podcasters and Substackers, full-timers and part-timers, as long as they published their work online.

The results last year were jarring. They indicated a 75% decline in the number of local journalist equivalents since 2002. And contrary to what many assumed, the shortage was not primarily a rural problem. When measured against population, many suburban and urban counties proved just as stressed as small rural ones. The local reporting capacity crisis was nearly universal.

This year, we enlarged the study, looking both at the number of Local Journalist Equivalents and the content of their work. We reviewed the headlines and available text of 4.2 million articles published from January through March of 2026 to identify the local stories and the topics they covered.

In the below screenshot, we see Worcester County’s 6.38 per 100,000 working local journalists as well below the national average.

I am going to save further discussion of this report for a different post, one that will be going up on Sunday morning, that will be dedicated to a sort of “State of the Newsletter” report. I’ll be sharing particulars about finances, readership, growth, etc, and offering a direction for the future. Today, there’s too much local news I haven’t gotten to yet.

Tomorrow, those who attend the little soirée I’m throwing for Worcester Sucks at Steel and Wire (7 p.m., free and open to the public), will get a live in person version of that report! So make sure you show up! It would be nice to get a good little crowd out, like the one we had for the first Election Squad event last summer. (Feels like two years ago at least doesn’t it?)

Again that’s tomorrow, Saturday June 20, at Steel & Wire, formerly Nick’s, 7 p.m.

If it’s nice we’ll take over the back patio, which is about as lovely a spot to hang out as exists in the whole city.

That’s enough navel gazing for today, you’ll get plenty of that on Sunday. Now let’s turn to those aforementioned barriers between the Worcester we have and the Worcester we want.

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More time on bike lanes than the budget

As I predicted, the council voted through the city manager’s budget “proposal” after agonizing months of midnight budget “review” sessions without a single alteration. Not that it was a difficult or risky prediction. This is what happens every year.

Unlike years past, however, there was a significant discussion of the council’s uselessness in the process on Tuesday night, ahead of what was ultimately a unanimous vote of approval with no motions made to alter the $1.01 billion budget in any way. Well, no motions allowed. Freshman councilor Satya Mitra tried to motion for an additional $20 million loan order for road reconstruction projects. Mayor Joe Petty ruled the motion out of order, saying councilors can’t add to the budget, only subtract—wild but true. It’s explicitly written that way in the city charter. The only way a council could add to the budget, per the charter, is by voting down the city manager’s and then writing their own—at least, that’s one creative interpretation of the second paragraph on page 24.

Since the council shares only two or three staffers, versus the city manager’s comparatively vast bureaucracy of spreadsheet people and number crunchers, that scenario is so implausible I’ve never heard anyone ever suggest it. It occurs to me in my writing this that the ‘writing their own budget’ provision of the charter has no rules against copy and pasting. So it’s conceivable they could, to use Mitra’s motion as an example, vote down the manager’s budget, Ctrl+A Ctrl+C Ctrl+V, stick in a line about a 20 million loan order and vote it through. That would take political acumen and willingness to lead, two realities that disqualify the current council pretty much automatically—before even considering how many of them would find the concept of select all-copy-paste bewildering. [George Russell voice: ‘Paste? Like the tamata sauce in the little cans?’]

Mitra’s motion and Petty’s shooting it down prompted a roughly hour-long discussion on what it is the council is there for, as it relates to the budget. While still a decidedly fruitless conversation, it was better than nothing. And we’ll get to the particulars in a bit. First, though, it’s worthwhile to compare how much time they spent Tuesday night on the budget—their first or second most important job, in theory—against how much time they spent on another matter: bike lanes.

Time spent peppering Department of Transportation and Mobility (DTM) Chairman Steve Rolle and DPW Director John Westerling with inane questions: One hour, 10 minutes.

Time spent discussing the whole ass city budget: One hour, zero minutes.

While the dumbest question award goes to Kate Toomey (’Do electric car users charge their cars for free off city solar panels?’ Paraphrasing but not kidding. Check the reel I made about it for the Worcester Sucks Instagram.), the runner up in the stupid department and the clear winner in the “getting intellectually destroyed” category was Moe Bergman, who tried to pin Rolle down, yet again, on the Mill Street bike lanes.

“Do you really believe, because you said this a minute ago, I wrote that down, that the bicycle lanes are better for everyone,” said Bergman. “Do you really, truly believe that?”

Rolle responded, plainly and quietly, denying Bergman the conceit that the topic’s worth any dramatics.

“So bicycle lanes are shown time and time again when employed in effective manner to help control vehicle speeds, help provide a safe place for bicyclists which gets them out of the travel lane and better segregates the different modes, gets them off the sidewalk. So yeah, it’s an important component of a comprehensive street system.”

Bergman, sifting around for an edge, brought up the one (1) death that has occurred on Mill Street since the 2023 redesign, when, early on, a 90-year-old man rammed his car into a parked car, killing himself in the process. Lying, Bergman said “I hate, and I really am going to use this word literally, hate to go back to the discussion of Mill Street.” If you hate to bring it up, my brother, why bring it up? Apropos nothing? Toward no end? “One person dead, one person paraplegic after the bicycle lanes were installed. So again, do you truly believe that bicycle lanes are better for everyone?”

The dozens of pedestrian that have been killed by drivers in this city since that one elderly gentleman rammed his car into what was by the grace of God an inanimate object and not a pedestrian—killing himself by his own 10-and-2 hands—never seem to come up when Bergman does this to Rolle. (This being the third or fourth time I can remember.) I’ll let you, dear reader, hypothesize on why it is Bergman is hung up on this one death—an incident he can vaguely pin to a road redesign if his audience doesn’t think too critically about the particulars—and doesn’t ever invoke the dozens of dead pedestrians resulting from the fact our entire city’s road infrastructure is designed to facilitate driving as fast as one can through densely populated areas.

Incidentally or intentionally, Bergman is making a blunt expression of who he thinks counts and who doesn’t. It makes my blood boil. In a sane world he’d be run out on a rail for it. But this is freakin’ Worcester Mass, baby... How do you think we let things get this bad in the first place? A million tiny decisions over dozens of years.... all of them expressions of who counts and who doesn’t. The Ford Super Duty establishing itself in the process as the apex predator of city youth.

The conversation continued...

ROLLE: I’m not going to debate the merits of individual crashes that occurred on that corridor. I can tell you that we have seen crashes decrease significantly in the years since that was installed. The post-crash rate is quite a bit lower than the pre-crash rate, and I do think over time we will see that that will continue.

BERGMAN: And how about the businesses that are impacted through the chair by the bicycle lanes? Is it better for that?

ROLLE: Most research shows that bicycle lanes tend to result in improved economic activity.

Luckily Bergman only has the power to piss and moan about it otherwise we’d have seen him do something besides piss and moan by now. He cross examined Rolle to arrive at the same conclusion he always does: he asked the DTM to focus more on cars than pedestrians. All that fire and brimstone to arrive at a petulant suggestion that’s weightless in the real politik sense. Easily ignored. Memory-holed as soon as his speaking time runs out. (Steve if you are reading this please do not quit because Moe Bergman is annoying. Hang in there. We’re 36 votes away from never thinking about him again.)

Rob Bilotta, new District 2 councilor who unseated Bergman’s thought leader Candy Mero-Carlson in the last election, offered a refreshing rejoinder to Moe’s usual bullshit.

Big fan of history. So we’ll do a little history lesson. I-290 blew through the city. Didn’t go west of Park Ave. It didn’t go through Holy Cross. It went through the east side and it went through Polish and Lithuanian and Black communities and wiped out whole neighborhoods because they were deemed disposable, just like many of the big transportation policies in the mid 20th century. And that was done to ... have a highway, going through the middle of District 2, separating a park and a school from a neighborhood. That is very problematic and very challenging. I know this work is going to take some time, but all of these policies that were done over the last 60, 70 years were done to move traffic fast and efficiently at the expense of everyone in the neighborhood. So it’s going to take a lot to do this.

It’s especially refreshing to hear a councilor say he’s a fan of history, as Bergman is often quick to do, and then actually know some history. Not just use “history” as a synonym for “war monuments,” as is the case with Bergman.

But anyway.

Kicking and screaming, kicking and screaming...

By the by, any other outlet would have reported the above in the stylistic fashions of objectivity, necessarily legitimizing the “issue” on which there are at least “two sides.” Bergman and the rest of the cranks benefit tremendously from this journalistic tradition. I can and often do deny legitimacy to obviously illegitimate positions like “bike lanes are bad,” and I can and do explain why I do that. It’s about twice as honest to readers as pretending for the sake of “balance” that bike lane haters need to be heard out. So there’s a reason right there to subscribe to this outlet.

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This is what I meant, as well, when I got in a Facebook fight with Moe Bergman (breaking my own rule about going on Townie Facebook) and told him I don’t call him for comment because I don’t respect him. Haha. Whoops! We discussed this at the beginning of the last podcast episode if you missed it.

Back to the budget, Mitra’s out-of-order motion created an opening for Khrystian King to pursue a line of questioning that I consider the only worthwhile line as it relates to the budget and why we bother to review it.

King asked the manager if the budget review process over the past several months has resulted in any adjustments to the budget. “And if so, what were they?”

As he’s want to do, Batista answered circuitously but after a few minutes of preamble got to the part where he said “no.” The only thing that would cause an alteration, he said, is “a vote or motion in which the entire council body as a whole” makes a specific cut (remember: they can’t add, unless on the advice of the manger.) “Then that’s something that we would immediately have to take into consideration for potential adjustments.” Outside of that, he said, councilors make their individual requests on their pet priorities throughout the year and those requests get factored into future budgets in some way he didn’t really explain.

King made a motion to have the manager’s office put together some information on a special act the Boston City Council passed to give it more discretionary powers in the budget process. “The ability for the council to engage a little bit more, have some more influence on this process Is necessary and appropriate,” King said. That motion was ultimately the one concrete action the council took on its nominal role in crafting the budget. A small step toward maybe one day having a real say in things, as the expression of the public will. Until then, if there’s a then, the budget will remain the polar opposite of participatory.

This line of inquiry dovetailed neatly into Kate Toomey’s extremely goofy order—obviously made in reaction to my recent post about the sheriff’s shenanigans, which spent some time detailing the bizarre fact that Toomey, an employee of the sheriff, has chaired the public safety subcommittee for about a decade straight.

Toomey’s order read...

Of course, the code of silence around saying mine or the newsletter’s name in city hall prevented Toomey from articulating a clear reason for the order. So instead she said...

It’s been mentioned before there’s different people, different organizations have different ideas of what we’re all the aforementioned is supposed to do. I think over the years there’s been misinterpretation. And I think it’s time... very timely right now to make sure that we have an updated lexicon, really of, of all of the above.

Gary Rosen, maverick that he is, used Toomey’s vague argument as an opportunity to steer the conversation in a concrete direction: charter change. If we want to discuss the roles of councilors and committee chairs, he said, there’s always the idea of reviewing the charter.

“I don’t think that the city solicitor is going to give us any different definitions of our jobs other than what is listed in the present City charter,” he said. “So I just can’t support this I just don’t think it’s necessary.”

The trouble with asking the city lawyer for definitions of roles is you’re going to get the most undemocratic interpretation possible—the lawyer works for the manager, who benefits from diminishing the oversight capabilities of the council, a natural check on his power, by the design of the charter, but open, always, to creative interpretation.

Opposing the order, King said the prior city solicitor, Mike Traynor, issued a few opinions that sought to significantly curtail the council’s authority. He’s worried, he said, this order could lead to more of that.

That is of course what Kate Toomey wants. She wants someone to tell her she doesn’t have the power to hold the police department accountable because she has no interest in doing that. “I know what my role is,” she said. “I know what I’m supposed to do.” Yeah, Kate, it’s pretty obvious, and it’s obvious who tells you what you’re supposed to do. I for one do not think the police unions should have regulatory capture of the public safety subcommittee without at least paying for it. They have accomplished the remarkable feat of neutering the subcommittee for free, simply by making its longest serving members, Toomey and Bergman, feel like they’re part of the law enforcement family. In the deal they got not just a captured entity but a reliable stream of free advertising. You do not under any circumstances have to hand it to them, but... pretty slick.

The role, as Toomey sees it, is just that: how she sees it. In different hands, the subcommittee could be put to different uses. This is what I mean when I call the standing committee on public safety the closest thing the city has to a police oversight board. It is the committee through which certain public safety proposals must travel for approval. It is the committee the police chief meets with publicly the most regularly. It is a forum for more substantive conversations on surveillance technology, the particulars of “community policing,” the department’s internal discipline mechanisms and their efficacy, the homelessness and mental health response strategies, etc etc.

Kate Toomey does not use her authority as chair to take up any of those issues. She uses it as a propagandist would, inviting the chief in to recite the official line while lavishing praise.

When Khrystian King a few months ago called Toomey’s leadership of the committee “impotent,” that’s also what meant.

I went back and carefully reviewed the charter and found, to my surprise, there’s no language at all about subcommittees. This underscores my point: the role of committees is built culturally rather than structurally. Kate Toomey is asking for a formal definition that doesn’t exist—that she would know doesn’t exist if she just read the charter—because she wants a way to say her hands are tied. It is easier to say, to critics or just out loud, “my hands are tied” than “I like my hands right where they are, doing what they want to be doing.” The city solicitor is compelled, by nature of who she works for (the city manager) and who she doesn’t (the city council), to give Toomey what she wants. I’m sure she’ll find a way.

The vote was a split one, but it broke in Toomey’s favor. With King, Rosen, Bilotta and Ojeda in opposition, it passed 7-4. I imagine the solicitor will find herself able to turn this particular order around rather quickly.

Evaluation Time for Batista

The city manager put on his state of the city address on Wednesday. It was pretty dry. If you like ship and storm metaphors buddy you are in luck. I don’t know that I have much to say about it. Same stuff we always hear. Notable reduction in pomp and circumstance over years past. Everyone kept their comments brief. The black curtain and stage lights of the JMAC subbed for the wood paneling of the Levi Lincoln Room’s little-used podium. Suits in folding chairs applauding at the agreed upon moments. There was no dance number. No protesters, far as I could tell.

More importantly, the manager filed his written self evaluation with the city council this week. Later this month, they will evaluate him publicly. There’s no rubric, metrics, benchmarks, or any structure other than “everyone says something.” This process is almost as fake and useless as the budget review, but considerably less so. The most important thing to watch for is how hard the old guard councilors are willing to “go after him.” And, then, how enthusiastically the mayor “stands by his guy.” There’s a certain point, one that will be subtle and hard to notice, where the mayor recognizes he has to drop his current guy and go searching for a new guy. None of that will occur in the way it’s supposed to, but rather with public winks and nods to what’s always going on just off screen, usually in the conveniently located back rooms of the third floor, where councilors have been seen slipping quietly in groups small and, at times, large, to have their “real” conversations. To the untrained eye these convenings in the mayor’s office directly adjacent the council chambers, or the city council chambers down the hall, are almost impossible to spot. councilors can float in and out of public, on and off camera, to destinations that the viewing public, either in the gallery or at home, would be hard-pressed to discern. The very architecture of the building encourages this movement. Makes it all the more seamless. Almost as if the floor plan was laid out however long ago to serve that one purpose specifically.

Odds and Ends

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And reminder: Party tomorrow, state of the newsletter delivered live and in person, then written state of the newsletter on Sunday.

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For the podcast heads out there, might I suggest checking out a new show called HEX LINE, written and recorded by my friend Sam Halen, it takes on matters of the occult in New England and especially Rhode Island (Sorry to say it, but the most occult New England state—Providence is scary in a way Salem could never ever ever.) I did the theme song, which I’m quite proud of, and the mastering work, which sounds half decent! And some other bleeps and bloops found throughout the episodes. It’s on Spotify and Apple currently, will be on others soon. Check it out! Hex Line Podcast.

An academic paper with an impossibly cool title and also premise I found courtesy 404 Media: “If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II“

The Dynamy John S. Laws Youth Academy is getting shut down and there’s a Change.Org petition to correct that. From a reader:

This program is getting shut down unexpectedly, and it does amazing work with housing-insecure and immigrant students. If we lose this, along with the NCC closure, our neediest students are going to be left out in the cold.

A recent piece in Propublica reader Brian Keaney sent along on the failures of the low income housing tax credit program explains a lot about the absolutely broken nature of our housing system and how it got that way. A good thing to be versed on as the rent control debate tumbles into the “inscrutable micro dramas” category.

Ok that’s good for now I think! Much much more on Sunday. And see you tomorrow!

On Wednesday I learned that my great friend John Rosenberger had died. John was the best of all of us. I have never met a kinder, more sincere person. We met over Zoom as you do in the pandemic. He hosted a Zoom record release that I did with Will Abeles. But our friendship didn’t spark until he reached out about doing a show at Nick’s Bar in Worcester with Allie Rose. The night of the show there was such a terrible storm Bryan O’Donnell and I were very worried there wasn’t even going to be a show. It was a Wednesday before Labor Day weekend, 2021, and we were still kind of roiling with COVID. There were about 30 people in that side room, packed in and laughing. Allie and John crushed and then they drove in an even worst part of the storm to John’s families home in West Stockbridge.

There isn’t some significant portion of that story. We’ve had better crowds, we’ve had better weather, but the company was impeccable. John could hang. Sure, part of it was he knew how to knock a couple back, and cigarette smoking can make one even more social. But it was more than that, he asked about you and he had stories for days. The metaphor I will shove into this is that doing comedy can feel like a storm on a random Wednesday: wind whipping around you, it feels sort of dangerous, you can feel very alone and as you stand in it the world can feel so cruel. But in that cozy bar there was John looking you in the eye and telling you how much fun he had and how impressed he was with Bryan and I and our ability to put on shows.

During a particularly hard time not too long ago, I posted something about how I was having a hard time and John wrote back to me:

I’m sorry I didn’t respond to you earlier but I not only think you’re a pretty good dad but I think you’re a stellar comedian and more importantly you’re a great lynchpin of a great scene. You are an amazing ambassador and the hard work you’ve done to make Worcester a welcoming place for comedians does not go unnoticed. Any time I talk to comedians about Boston I always bring up Worcester and you in particular and anyone who has met you has nothing but the most glowing things to say. You made Allison and I feel very at home and showed us a good time in the middle of a monsoon. You will always be appreciated.

John had the ability to distill you down to your best attributes. He still saw you, with all your flaws, but he knew why he wanted to be around you. John said in that message that whenever I come up people have nice things to say, but that really is him more so than me. Fucking Johnny Rose was loved by everybody. You point at a comedian in NYC and they will tell you that John is the best and they’ll have a story about a specific nice thing he did.

Yesterday as I was numb and doom scrolling on my phone I found solace in the outpouring of posts about him. Everyone had nearly the same thing to say about him. The amount of times it was people saying that John was their first friend when they moved to NY. Or that they would be so anxious going to mics and shows when they first moved and then they would see John’s face and feel at ease about being there. John made an effort. His input was love and his output was love.

The first thing I thought about was his cats. He had Grandpa, his cat in his apartment, but he also kept so many cats in Alphabet City alive. He cared and fed for these tiny nearly defenseless creatures. Us comedians were also his cats. John led a life of herding cats. It is near impossible to do so, and yet he did it. He nurtured all us ornery, angry, smelly, difficult strays. He listened to your album, he watched your special, he read your manuscript, and showed up to your taping. John tended to all us outdoor cats with compassion.

Selfishly I am going to miss him because I’m going to miss having such a big fan in my corner. When I got the call from Joel Walkowski (pre-order your copy of Honolulu Blues now) he said he called me, because “John was your biggest fan and was always talking about you.” I hope he knew that we were all his biggest fan too.

John at Vincent’s after wrestling an inflatable hotdog at George’s Coney Island in 2025.

No plug this week. Heart goes out to Shaun and everyone else in John’s life. Sounds like a man I’d have liked to meet. If you have a memory of John you’d like to share, feel free to do so in the comments. —Bill

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The first 10 minutes or so were pure field audio, off the built-in mics of my trusty little Sony Dictaphone, walking around the lovely little garden patches, up there on the top of the hill next to the municipal golf course we have for some reason, that at one point was probably sold as something that would pay for itself and/or usher in a Renaissance, and now does neither. A grand Worcester tradition.

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Burnin Down The House tickets are live! We interviewed John Keogh about this on Episode 59

Is there a childcare center opening up at the old Riviera strip club?

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I didn’t plan to focus on the sheriff when I started putting together this post, but what I thought was a throw-away Bleet “did numbers” so there’s more interest in ‘ol Lew’s domain than I might have thought?

Or Bluesky has a bot problem.

Freshly back from a wedding this past weekend, which was lovely but delayed the posting of this here post. Luckily, things are starting to move slow, as they do in the summer, and so you and I didn’t miss a whole lot from Friday to now.

Also for what it’s worth, I believe I am the first Worcester reporter to write about the sheriff’s office report in question, despite it being out for more than a week now... For instance, just to check, I ran a search on the Telegram site, and found their last article on the sheriff was about how they’re “partnering with Amazon” to combat “porch piracy” (Again, side note: whyyyyy is the sheriff involved in low level property crime at all?). The Worcester Guardian’s last two sheriff stories are, I shit you not, “Deadline Nears For Senior Picnic” and “14 Deputies to Graduate.” Sheesh!

The lack of attention to this report is a weird, almost sketchy omission on behalf of the rest of the local press I’m happy to be correcting. A great time to add the subscriber plug. Right here, what you have open on your device right now, is Worcester news you literally cannot get anywhere else.

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Subscriptions have been down off late, a fact that makes me real nervous as the time of “a lot of annual renewals all at once” approaches. I’m going to start my customary half-off-for-a-year deal early.

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I’ve been down on this whole newsletter thing and my ability to do it well the past couple days, feeling as though I’ve “lost the sauce” or am in danger of doing so. That feeling was temporarily assuaged when a mailman careening past me on my little walk to the store tooted his horn and told me to “keep giving em hell.” Then Shaun Connolly brought it right back with his Horrorscopes entry for Gemini (yes I’m one of those) this afternoon...

Gemini- There is a whole different galaxy that is requesting your presence. The current stars and planets are encouraging you to go and explore new space. They are sort of sick of you.

Utterly devastating.

The lead up to the anniversary is always a busy busy time for “back end” work [Cue Rodney Dangerfield wife joke]. This year especially, as we are still on track to complete a transfer from Substack to Ghost either by or shortly after the anniversary. Don’t forget to mark your calendars for the party on the 20th! It’s the same day as the Heavy Metal Parking Lot at Ralph’s in the afternoon. So go to that then come unwind at Steel & Wire with the Worcester Sucks crew. Sounds like a nice as hell Worcester day! Details via the Instagram, which you should follow if you aren’t already.

Some other stuff coming up...

In the “fun and cool” category we have the “Make. It. Werk.” drag competition by Love Your Labels on Thursday night.

In the opposite category, city manager’s state of the city next week, June 17, the day after my birthday, so I’ll be good and hung over for it.

Burncoat High “visioning” session on the 16th. Will for sure be skipping that.

Tonight the city council was expected to vote on the $1 billion budget “proposal” from the city manager, ending the two-month charade of a review. But right at the beginning of the meeting, which started at 5 p.m., Petty tried to ram through a quick vote on the budget. King held the items, pushing the vote to next week. Tony Economou then motioned to start the meeting next week at 4 p.m., over the objection of King, who said he has work til 5. This all but ensures, as was obviously Economou’s design, that the budget will be voted through without King present. King’s the most likely councilor to try to move some money around, making Economou’s motion even smarmier. But if my Motions on the budget tend to be made at the last meeting of the budget review process, if they’re made at all. They usually fail, and they are usually put on the table by people who know they’ll fail, but want to make a point, like Konnie Lukes did with her motion to cut the horsey cop unit way back in like 2018—still among the coolest moves I’ve seen a councilor pull. It of course failed, but so did the mounted patrol, shuttered as it was by the police department just a few years later, so...

Here’s a link to a hosted version of the agenda, a dead simple thing to do that for some reason the city can’t or won’t do anymore, creating cluttered messes of the download folders of anyone who tries to pay attention. I have a public drive folder for Worcester Sucks supporting documents now, which is a good practice for a journalist to get in the habit of, so thanks, PrimeGov.

The meeting started at 5 p.m. to accommodate the insane backlog of items from last week’s meeting, which went to midnight without getting to even half of the business. So on top of the budget, there are basically two meeting’s worth of items that will invariably get short-shrifted or pushed off to the next one. Such is life with Joe Petty as chair. The agenda is an insane 40 page document with an arcane system of highlighting that explains how the June 2 and June 9 meetings will be combined I think. I cannot bring myself to sort through it at the moment.

More on the council’s endless shenanigans next post. For now, let’s head down the street to the Worcester County Sheriff’s Office.

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“It’s Time For The Chaos To Stop”

In season six of the Sopranos Tony’s just gotten out of a coma to find he’s no longer the nominal employee of a waste management consultancy company where he’d been an employee on paper for the entirety of the series up until that point. “I need that W-2,” he says. A throwaway line, perhaps, but one that stuck with for the way it implies a criminality both baked into and obscured by formal bureaucracies. Barron Waste Management Consultants is only over winked at throughout the show, leaving the viewer to assume, but never fully know, it’s a mostly fake formal bureaucratic structure there to lend cover to Tony and everyone under him—a way to move the money made in the “real” business to and from the formal world.

In another moment, earlier in the show, Season 1 I think, Tony flashes his membership card to the local police union at a cop who’d pulled him over for speeding. He is incensed when the move doesn’t work, and he uses his informal power in the law enforcement community to get the cop fired.

Another smart bit of writing, showing rather telling, a provocative yet subtle glimpse at the porous relationship between legal and illegal institutions. You’re left to wonder how he got that union card, and who else has one. Same goes for the W-2.

It occurred to me, digging into a new report from the inspector general about the sketchy accounting practices of sheriff’s offices across the state—Worcester being a noted standout—that I know just as little about what a sheriff’s deputy actually does as I do a waste management consultant. And the more I learned about it, in the process of putting this piece together, the more it looked like good old fashion shaking people down comprises a lot of “the work.” Something to think about as we dig into the specifics.

In the June 1 summary letter of the report, titled “Final Report on Sheriffs’
Budgets and Expenditures,” Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro writes:

How we got to this point no longer matters. Sheriffs’ offices have been Commonwealth agencies for more than 25 years. It is time for the chaos to stop.

Right off the bat this report confirms my long-held belief that no one knows what exact a sheriff is. People can point to specific things that a sheriff’s office does, but ask why it is that the sheriff does that thing, rather than some other seemingly more suited, previously existing agency, and it starts to get messy.

At the heart of the chaos is the lack of a common understanding of the role of the sheriffs’ offices. That understanding varies from sheriff to sheriff and legislator to legislator. What is abundantly clear is that their role is not as narrow as some legislative leaders expect, nor as expansive as some sheriffs believe.

Not even the sheriffs are entirely sure of what it is they do! All of them, it turns out, do it a bit different. In each of their sheriff’s hearts they hold their bespoke sheriff’s dreams. This, naturally, leads to a rogues gallery of overreach and corruption, which is perhaps the point. A way for the diffuse “law enforcement community” populating the exurbs and frequenting the dealerships to spread out from municipal police departments, court security and corrections into new terrains. Sheriff’s offices as we known them in Massachusetts are younger than many, probably most, of the people reading this. The Worcester County Sheriff is a bit of an exception. It’s actually the oldest law enforcement agency in the country, stretching back to the 1700s, a fact which lends it a certain Eldritch quality I think. It was primarily responsible for keeping the jail going. But in 1998, a new state law abolishing county government formations (mistake) turned the WCSO into a state agency, rather than a county authority, untethering it, subtly, from its original mandate. For some reason, or set of reasons, all of which I’m sure were totally above board, the office was kept an elected position, not by statewide vote but by the same county precincts and wards that kept sheriffs in office prior. Keeping it an elected position all but preserved the political reality of the sheriff as a county authority, but its new designation as a state agency also gave it additional wiggle room to explore new revenue streams. Cherry meets Sundae.

For as long as I’ve been aware of a Worcester Sheriff, Lew Evangelidis has been him. Lew is a powerful Republican overseeing a large patronage network, and he’s tall, two facts that, when combined, make him a shoe-in for governor if and when he tries. He lives in Holden, giving him the built in narrative of fighting “overreach” (forcing rich towns to allow apartments). He’s also the most serious threat to Joe Early’s dominion over the District Attorney’s Office, another definitely-not-county-wide-authority, a political reality which reliably keeps the DA more “tough on crime” than he should or has to be. Conveniently, that means a reliably full house of corrections for Lew. Running the West Boylston jail is the primary job of our sheriff. But that’s not what the inspector general’s report focuses on. Instead, it turns, where it turns to Worcester in its 190-or-so pages, to the civil processing arm—what we usually call “serving papers” and the uniquely corrupt way that the WCSO goes about it.

Lew’s office is the only sheriff’s office in the state, per the report, to do this one weird trick: form a non-profit corporation for a specific function of your agency that happens to collect fees for service, name it the exact same thing as the sub-department responsible for collecting those fees, staff the non-profit with the same people already in the sub-department, put that fee money into the financial structure of the non-profit, where it becomes a much more loosey-goosey pile of cash. Spend that money on a vague bulk line item every year titled “entitlement programs” which could be anything, really. And that’s how you get The Worcester County Sheriff Civil Process Division, Inc.

Per the inspector general, $42 million sits in private bank accounts held by sheriff’s offices across the state. Of that, the WCSO accounts for $2.7 million. A state law requires that 50 percent of civil process fees collected be remitted to the general fund. In FY 25, the WCSO collected $1.2 million and remitted precisely zero dollars.

In a sub-section dedicated to this practice, unique to Worcester, the inspector general is rather direct in his assessment.

It is the position of the OIG that it is wholly inappropriate for a state agency to establish a shadow private entity to perform its statutory responsibilities and collect revenue owed to the state. In addition to being legally questionable, it blurs the line between public and private funds

One of the recommendations for immediate resolution is dissolving this non-profit entirely.

Logistically, this arrangement is unnecessarily confusing, reduces transparency, and creates unnecessary risk of fraud, waste, and abuse of funds that would not be present if the agency simply performed these duties with its own staff and retained revenue in its normal operating accounts

This next paragraph is worth a careful read.

Worcester County Sheriff Civil Process Division, Inc., was incorporated in 2011 “to operate in accordance with Chapter 262 of the General Laws of the Commonwealth regarding the serving of summons, warrants, subpoenas, and other legal procedures requiring legal notification.” The articles of organization demonstrate a purpose beyond merely fulfilling this statutory duty, stating “the corporation shall serve as a supporting organization for the Worcester County House of Correction and it shall create, sponsor, promote, and conduct partnerships and programs in the areas of law enforcement and public safety in Worcester County as well as providing resources to support such programs and all other charitable, educational, and community purposes.”

Interesting!

Worcester County Sheriff accounted for $3 million of the $43 million in revenues and expenditures found to be off the books.

Can’t make this stuff up: the expenditures were labeled “entitlement programs.”

Entitlement programs could mean many things but here are some of the things they might mean for people who work for the sheriff, from the office’s employee benefit page: an “Annual Education Stipend” from $1,000 for an associates degree to $2,500 for a master’s; sick time buyback; quarterly bonus personal days; and my favorite, a perk just called “longevity,” like it’s a Magic The Gathering card, “After five years of service will receive additional longevity bi-weekly payment.” A reward for good soldiers in the “Tony Soprano” sense, perhaps.

And, just like ICE, the office offers student loan forgiveness.

The civil process work is the handling of any civil suit paper, be it against an individual or a company, but also a ton of other things, including eviction notices and repossessions.

On their dedicated website for civil process, the sheriff makes it pretty clear what people are paying for...

... big gun.

The office—or rather, the non-profit?—charges a fee for each document served. You have to call to get a quote, there are no prices listed on the website. But you can imagine, with all the eviction proceedings going on amid our housing crisis, that the fees start to add up quick. There’s the initial letter, then the 48 hour notice, etc etc.

I’d bet money the office that suggested the following quote is the Worcester office...

Of concern, one office suggested to the OIG that typical controls need not apply because funds derived from civil process revenue are “not taxpayer money.”

They also provide a boutique “capias” service, which seems to mean physical arrests of debtors, ordered and paid for by whoever fills out the form. I’ve never heard the term before and I’m honestly not too sure about how that works. But a fee for service is one of four things people need to provide to order a “capias.” This is somehow not the top line item but rather a footnote in mafia-like behavior of the sheriff’s department.

Another factoid of note from the report—totally unrelated to the previously mentioned fact the sheriff’s non-profit funds partnerships and programs with other law enforcement—the WCSO participates in some way in the WPD’s gang unit, one of two plainclothes units basically solely responsible for the DOJ’s decision to investigate the WPD. I would never allege the two facts—that the sheriff hides money from the state in a non-profit that supports law enforcement partnerships and the WSCO partners with the WPD’s gang unit—are related and so I cannot be sued. There is no formal memorandum of understanding outlining the scope of that collaboration, a fact which troubles the inspector general.

Operating without an MOU puts sheriffs’ offices at risk of liability in the event that one of their officers or a member of the public is injured or in the event of property damage. Proper MOUs should outline liability responsibility, time reporting compliance, equipment or vehicle usage restrictions, recordkeeping responsibilities, and any fees or reimbursements associated with the activity.

So I guess we’ll never know for sure! Must have been a clerical error, that lack of MOU...

A third totally unrelated fact: WCSO made two transfers from its public account June 2024 and April 2025 totaling $3.5 million, both labeled “Entitlement Programs.” This information is included in the report to support the conclusion that sheriffs operate their public accounts on a deficit, using them for their biggest expenses, like payroll, while using their private accounts for other uhhhh programs they may feel entitled to. * A neat accounting trick.

In other instances, transferred funds are spent on discretionary activities. Without a record of when and why funds are transferred from payroll, the deficit appears as solely a payroll problem, without identifying the true deficit drivers.

A fourth completely and totally unrelated fact: a WCSO employee sits on the city council, and, moreover, serves as chairwoman of the Standing Committee on Public Safety, the primary vehicle for police oversight in the city’s government structure, though it isn’t, under Chairwoman Kate Toomey, used that way. Under Toomey, the Standing Committee on Public Safety has taken the official stance it can’t actually oversee the police department, thus exempting an examination into, say, Sheriff’s Office money forked over to the gang unit without an MOU. That’s outside their purview, they’d say, they being Toomey and her longtime colleague Moe Bergman, who control the three-seat board with their two votes, and who are both vocally on record as against a civilian review board. Toomey is a reentry specialist in Lew Evangelidis’ sheriff department, where she has both a unique position title and pay grade, according to a spreadsheet of 2025 payroll data posted by MassLive. A $3200 stipend in the “other pay” category brings her $75,000 base salary to $78,000, a figure $10,000 more than any other reentry councilor or reintegration specialist. She’s worked there since February, 2022. She was chairwoman of the standing committee on public safety when she started and has remained there ever since.

Toomey just tonight supported Tony Economou’s motion to start the next meeting and, we can infer, vote through the budget, an hour before Khrystian King can attend. Bravely and in a self-sacrificing fashion, Toomey announced, unprompted, that she also has work next Tuesday as well, but she, unlike King, will “take the time off.”

Is that really taking time off for Toomey? Getting to the city council meeting that starts early so the one police critic on the board cannot make any motions to alter the budget before the council votes it through?

Kate, the sheriff should be paying you time and a half for that.

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Odds and Ends

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Congratulations to Bryan O’Donnell, the newest member of the Power 100 Club. This, I know from experience, means Bryan will promptly receive a vague invitation to attend a soirée of sorts in the basement of the Worcester Club, where, as a doctor, he’ll be called upon to assist the drug-addled concubine of a wealthy benefactor. From there, questions will beget more questions, masks will go missing, he will be followed, he will read things in the newspaper he cannot fully explain, his wife will become a worrying amount of horny, he will be drawn ever back to the basement… he’ll find out the real ending, how much it has to do with pee… and this will cause him to switch allegiances from director to studio c-suite—say to himself, Yeah, no, that was a good cut actually. They were right to do that.

Love this answer Bryan gave the WBJ on the questionnaire:

Why do you do business in Central Mass.? Growing up in the honest, if baffling, weirdness of Worcester makes everywhere else seem phony. No other city will do.

While we’re talking about power players, anyone know what News Talk New England’s whole deal is? The header picture makes me think AI.

And I came upon it via a strange story that feels like it was written by AI. However, on further investigation, there’s a few videos on the Facebook page that also feel like AI but they just can’t be, right? You can’t have an AI man-on-the-street interview with Worcester Housing Authority CEO Alex Corrales. That is too weird and specific.

…Right?

Ok that’s enough from me. There’s plenty of other stuff to report on, including the WHA’s new “affordable” development partnership with Trinity Financial. But we’ll save that for later in the week.

Two quick plugs for good stuff:

“Margo’s Got Money Troubles” on Apple TV is hilarious and well written and well performed. Bravo.

Marisa Anderson is a guitar player’s guitar player’s guitar player you feel me?

Horrorscopes

Gemini- There is a whole different galaxy that is requesting your presence. The current stars and planets are encouraging you to go and explore new space. They are sort of sick of you.

Cancer- The meteor that crashed wasn’t a meteor but a multilevel media ad campaign for Steven Speilberg’s “Disclosure Day.” You were duped. Soon a recent college theater major graduate will be dressed like an alien in your backyard.

Leo- Wake up early once a week and watch the sunrise. Also blare Van Halen on your back porch so everyone else wakes up and see the majesty that is the signal of the beginning of the day.

Virgo- It’s Pride Month, don’t forget to pander to the nearest queer person.

Libra- Stop asking about other pride months. It used to be fun to be contrary but now it smells of bow-ties and white nationalism. I acknowledge that you think it is smart to want to have a human-pride month. But our future AI Overlords will use that against us in the coming Robot Wars.

Scorpio- Congrats on participating in No Mow May, where you didn’t mow your lawn for the entire month. No please follow that up with No Jerk June. Interpret that however you’d like you sickos.

Sagittarius- June is the month for Father’s Day. Keep your eyes peeled in July when Dads are all half off at your local CVS.

Capricorn- Movies are back! Two low-budget horror movies are at the top earnings list. Go make a movie, it looks wicked easy.

Aquarius- I think a cowboy hat will suit you.

Pisces- Start a cult based on the meteor that crashed last week. Yeah I know I told Cancer it was a multilevel media ad campaign, but use that to sow doubt! Your followers need to believe you and only you!

Aries- Don’t forget sunscreen this summer. If anything it will mask your B.O.

Taurus- Just pick your nose. Give into your urges!

NEWS

It is ALS Awareness Month. A dear friend of mine has been diagnosed with ALS. She is married with two kids and her loving community held a fundraiser to help support her family during her struggle with this evil disease and for post-care for the family as well. The fundraiser was at Seven Saws in Holden. There were bands playing and there were a ton of raffle and silent auction items. I’ll was the MC for the day. I’m guessing a thousand people showed. If you missed it, here is the GoFundMe link.

On Sunday I was out in Great Barrington telling jokes at another fundraiser that is ALS related. This one was a fundraiser for folks with ALS to go to a Red Sox game and have full accessibility throughout the experience.

My dad died three years ago from ALS and was able to go to one of those Red Sox games. He got to see the greatest player of our generation, Shohei Ohtani, play before he passed and he loved every minute of it. ALS is so fucked up. Please consider these causes this and every month. The organization Compassionate Care ALS is doing this event and so much more for those with ALS. Please consider donating to them in general. They helped my dad, and have helped so many more. Here is more info on them.

Selfishly! On Thursday I am at Koto in Salem where Bryan O’Donnell and I are hosting our bonkers show Hot Dog! It is at 8PM and it is completely FREE.

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Karin Valentine Goins and the Grassroots Fight for a Walkable Worcester

By Dani Killay

Karin Valentine Goins does not have a budget. She does not have a board. What she has is fifteen years of showing up and the kind of stubborn clarity that comes from watching a city slowly, fitfully, begin to believe its own plans.

WalkBike Worcester is entirely grassroots. No one clocks in. What exists instead is a constellation of annual rituals—the Week Without Driving each fall, the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims each November—and a woman who has refused to stop asking a very simple question: What if we all drove less? The question, it turns out, baffles too many of us. Earlier this month, the city department principally responsible for making roads safer for walking and biking was asked by sitting city councilors why it doesn’t prioritize car travel. So Karin has learned to soften the ask: not a week, just a day. One trip. Part of a trip.

She is an incrementalist in a culture that demands transformation overnight. The city has plans now—a master plan, a mobility action plan, a Vision Zero commitment—and she has watched each one get clawed into existence. The Complete Streets policy of 2017 meant that state funding for roadway work would finally prioritize safety over asphalt tonnage. On Mill Street, paint and bollards arrived first, with a $2 million design grant waiting. Newton Square, that seven-way confusion of stop signs and bus stops, is slated to become a proper roundabout. These are not victories yet, given the years (or decades) it can take to move from concept to implementation . But they are what victory looks like when you are playing the long game.

Karin doesn’t see the benefit in pointing fingers, but admits that our city council is a mixed bag. Some members have been genuine partners. Others have spread misinformation—most persistently, the claim that no one rides a bicycle here. She once stood before them and noted that if elected officials are not seeing cyclists, that fact is itself frightening. The moral architecture of her work refuses to blame individuals for systemic failures. The person complaining about losing a lane of traffic is not a villain but someone who has been told, their whole life, that the car is the only answer. The work is to outlast. To keep offering alternatives. To keep holding open the possibility that a city designed for people rather than machines might also be a city where kids roam again and public life thrives.

She names gentrification as the shadow side of active transportation progress. She does not want to see the people already here displaced. She owns a minivan. She is not asking anyone to give up their car. She is asking for something smaller and possibly more radical: leaving it home sometimes. Trying something else. Paying attention to what the world feels like when it is not mediated by a windshield.

May is Bike Month. A loose affiliation called the Bike Alliance meets on the third Thursday of each month at New Tradition Co. (5 Harris Court). Anyone is welcome. This is how change happens in Worcester. Not through grand pronouncements. Through bike breakfasts and block parties. Through showing up again and again with the patience of someone who understands that infrastructure moves at the speed of funding cycles. Through refusing the reflexive answer—you can’t, nobody does—and substituting another. The city has a long way to go, a reality Goines was recently made to feel acutely. This past mothers day after a walk in the neighborhood, Karin’s husband (John Goins) was struck by a pickup truck whose driver reportedly did not stop for the pair as they were trying to cross June St. from Nevada St. John was hospitalized for three days and is now recovering from injuries to his chest and head. What happened to John happens too often in this city. A man was killed on Hope Ave in early May, and last week, a teenager was seriously injured by a pick up truck driver in Kelley Square. While an especially deadly summer of pedestrian accidents in 2024 prompted the city to take more aggressive action, severe pedestrian crashes remain routine news events. One could be forgiven for thinking the city will never get safer for walking or biking. But cynicism, Karin believes, is a luxury the work cannot afford, and she isn’t about to let the bumps in the road change her path now.

Dani: You are in the organization WalkBike Worcester. How is it organized? Is it a fully volunteer group? Are you in a leadership position? What’s your history there with WalkBike?

Karin: Sure. So WalkBike Worcester has been around awhile. We are an entirely grassroots, no-budget organization. We started in 2011, although my advocacy on these same issues goes back farther than that. And so we have had different eras in our existence. Early work focused more on working with agencies and departments. We had a long period where we were more public facing and had active members who planned community rides and walks. And we had, I think, our biggest community ride, with like 65 people. And then things like the ballpark planning happened in Kelly Square, and then the pandemic, which sort of shifted some of our focus and some of our ways of operating. My co-founder is a fellow named Jerry Powers, who I still miss. He left the area. He was somewhat older. I think he’s in his mid-80s now. But he was my partner in crime for a long time. I would say, post-pandemic, the city itself is in a really different place than when I started doing this work. We have a Department of Transportation and Mobility. We have, in addition, the Worcester Now Next Master Plan, first one in 40 years, which then led to the Mobility Action Plan, which is the city’s first ever long-range transportation plan. And then flowing from that, the Vision Zero plan. And Vision Zero is the concept that humans make mistakes, but nobody should die on the road, that it is possible to prevent deaths and serious injuries on our roadways. So as an organization, I continue to be the lead. I don’t know what to call myself, because we don’t have a formal board or leadership group per se, so our work is in collaboration with others, organizing.

There have been several issues in the last couple of years where we partnered with others to bring people, whether it was contacting councilors, testifying, doing more public facing remarks like that. We also have two signature events each year (Week Without Driving and World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims). There’s now more bike-focused groups than there ever were in the past and bike month (May) has a number of events.

Tell me more about the staple events you mentioned.

The National Week Without Driving in is the beginning of October. It challenges community members and policy makers to experience the barriers of going carless. And then, our other signature event is the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims, and that’s the third Sunday in November. Each year we’ve gotten a little bit bigger with that, to get more people to participate.

So Week Without Driving was started a few years ago. There’s a woman with low vision in Washington state who began that, I think she worked for Disability Rights of Washington. It’s a challenge. And now, there are people in all 50 states and actually internationally that participate. And the idea is challenging yourself to travel differently. Of course, she puts it out as Week Without Driving, which when you say that to people in Worcester, they get very frightened. So what we have said, starting last year, we really emphasized, like can you do one day? Could you do one trip? Could you do part of a trip? Could you just take, you know, the bus for a few blocks and see what it feels like, and it’s traveling in some other way than a personal vehicle, and then share that experience, you know, with your friends and family, but also on social media. What were the challenges? What were the joys? You know, a lot of people are finding even in our challenging conditions we have in the city, that getting on a bicycle is a form of freedom they may not have felt since they were kids.

Could you expound on the challenges that you feel are not necessarily specific to Worcester only, but that Worcester is facing when it comes to reducing dependency on individual cars?

So I think that we can think in terms of two buckets, right? One is infrastructure itself… or maybe three buckets. One is social norms and expectations, which is linked to infrastructure and policy mindset. Vision Zero is a concept that started in, this is taking one thread, pulling one thread, started in a European country. We’ve made progress on this side of the pond with people committing to Vision Zero, but with very rare exceptions hasn’t translated into a lot of change. You know, Americans have been in love with the automobile for over 100 years. And I think the part that people are maybe expressing a little bit more now is that the auto industry was a huge and powerful lobby that did everything from ripping up streetcar rails to convincing people that cars were freedom. Now, 150 years later, we’re learning the problems with that.

So here in Worcester, for a variety of reasons, the roadways we have are enormously wide empty roadways and yet people will tell you there’s no space for protected spaces. This is sort of a global mindset, the idea that we just can’t change that. So I’m an incrementalist. I’m not the sort of someone who comes in and expects everything has to change immediately. I’m happy about the changes that are happening slowly, but we still have resistance to the idea of taking part of our enormous roadways to set aside for people to travel differently. And so it becomes self-fulfilling that I push back against people all the time who say, “well, you can’t.” You can’t walk in Worcester. You can’t bike in Worcester. Well, I do. What does that say about me? I don’t know. It’s this acceptance that how things already are is how things should be. Recently there was pushback at a public meeting about making Newton Square rotary into a roundabout, which is a controlled way of vehicles entering and exiting, and in fact it won’t really affect the number of cars going through; but it will make traffic through the roundabout safer for all.

As someone who uses that rotary literally multiple times a day, I welcome it. There’s a stop sign at that rotary. There’s a lot going on there.

I worry they don’t even know what they were saying. That is a heavily traveled route by school children of all ages. There’s literally a bus stop in the middle of the rotary, but they would say that all their statements were about the convenience of drivers and they wanted to preserve the ability for people to pass in the rotary. So I think there’s a lot about mindset, which is where I’m still interested in the technical changes, but our role is about supporting the good things that are planned in the city and that are done and pushing for elected officials and other people in positions of influence to embrace the changes, to support the changes and building up people’s individual capacity to demand it because we know they want it.

The positive changes. What are some wins, some highlights, some things the city has done that are moving in this direction?

So I think having plans is really important. I mean, I think everybody knows that if you have a plan that just sits on a shelf, it doesn’t change the world. But doing things willy-nilly is not helpful either. It all needs to be flowing from the plans. And the city has done a reasonable job at getting public input on what and where things should be happening, the issues that are most important. In 2017 the city passed a Complete Streets Policy. The impetus for that was that the state has a funding program that, if you go through the process of creating a policy that meets their criteria, helps cities.

Complete Streets allow travel by all users and it usually refers to a process of building from the outside in, leaving just enough room for what’s warranted for the vehicles to travel. So sidewalks accommodating walkers, walkers who use mobility devices, people on bicycles, e-bikes and scooters and other inventive sorts. So when you create the policy, then you create a prioritization plan, which basically puts what it’s in the title, right? It’s the locations that have the highest priority for work to be done because of people’s access to services, because of safety problems and other issues. So then from that, based on that plan, they can apply for funding. But that’s a set amount of money, in a sense. It’s a smaller amount of money. But by creating those rules, then all the work in the city has to be done according to those rules. Every year the state provides each city and town with a certain amount of money on a per capita basis that is specifically for roadway work. And for many, many years, when the DPW was responsible for all infrastructure, we got lots and lots of asphalt. Now all work that’s done, that’s called Chapter 90 is the funding, all work gets the lens of what safety improvements could we make. So for example, Mill Street, the changes on Mill Street received a heavy amount of criticism. Now the city could have done, and they’ve learned from it, they could have done a better job with the upfront communication. But the bottom line is they changed the configuration of space with just paint and bollards and signs. Moving the curb, that’s expensive, that’s changing drainage and everything. And they have a design grant for that now, I think it’s $2 million for just the design of that whole same stretch. And every time they’re gonna do something like that, they’re getting public input. So it’s incremental change, it will map out, they have a a proposed bike network, they’ll continue to add to it to make it more logical to people and not just stop/start.

And not to get you in any trouble here, so we’ll focus on the positive. I will not ask if you feel like you have opponents in city council, but do you feel like you have proponents? Do you feel like you have people in the halls of power, so to speak, that are very open to these changes? Or does it feel like you’re running up against a wall all the time?

So we worked closely with Councilor Etel Haxhiaj when she was a district councilor. She was the first elected official who really worked in the trenches with us, I would say, on these kinds of changes. And that was a real loss that she is no longer there. There are a few councilors that have some principles, I guess I would say, in alignment with what we’re interested in. There are a number who are opposed, have been vocal opponents to the changes that we are demanding and expecting.

Would you feel comfortable naming any of them? I think people know who they are. Or would you rather stay out? I mean, I had a couple come straight to mind.

Exactly. And I guess there are people who have put out misinformation and disinformation, and I think that is very harmful on a lot of levels. And the general vibe of this council to wall off themselves from the public is even more discouraging. And that’s why I think of our most important work being helping people. There’s a lot of what they call latent demand in this city, you expressed it when we started talking. Folks who would probably keep their car, but want to travel less with it. And I think that it’s helping people understand that we can have nicer things and that they deserve to have a voice in that and speak up. So it’s a certain amount of community education and community organizing, which, honestly, is good for the soul. The other thing I want to say is that there’s a lot of, again, misinformation and disinformation. And what I hope is that we can help people navigate that.

What do you feel is something that you are continuously seeing and it irks you that you’re like, that’s misinformation?

This is being put out there: That nobody rides a bike. Okay. That is said over and over and over again. So I stood in front of council and said, if you’re not seeing us, that’s frightening and it’s untrue and it’s frightening. There’s a law in Worcester against riding on the sidewalk. I will never hold it against anyone. That is a call for help. You know, that’s someone who wants to ride and they feel unsafe in the places you have given to them. And so that is an example. People in positions of power exaggerate the demand for cars. So are you familiar with the Worcester Now Next Plan? That’s the master plan?

Only by name. I don’t know a lot of details.

So when they were doing the public outreach for that, a survey, and they kept it up there for a long time. And when, at the end of the day, there were about 1,400 responses, 1,300 people said, we want safe streets, we want choice, safety and choice. 100 people said, no, it should be all cars. But all those people don’t always vote. They’re not always paying attention on the local level.

So with the Worcester Now Next, what is next? What would you want to see in those incremental changes? What is something that you would like to see changed that is very accessible to Worcester to change?

So, there’s different ways to answer that. I mean, are you looking for policy or practice change?

I would say both. I would say where would you like to see the city make changes and where would you like to see the people make changes?

Sure, so the city does street and sidewalk work every year, a certain amount of it. There’s a certain budget. There’s the chapter 90 money, but there are also many other communities around the country that have done a specific bond, like a five-year program for streets and sidewalks. I think that would be a really big step forward too. And it will snowball. When people see more, they’ll do more outside of cars. And so I guess that’s what I would like to see. And I know it’s not going to be next year, but I think that that’s something that this community’s very capable of organizing to push for. On the public side, and I feel we’re starting to see this around the country, is for people to understand that it’s not creating space for other people who are not driving cars. It’s not a zero-sum game. It improves a community, it’s quality of life for everyone. It actually makes it safer for drivers. There is less chance of a crash, less chance drivers or a passengers are going to be injured. And I think people are beginning to talk more about our obvious child and adolescent mental health crisis. The loss of mobility from my generation to my daughter’s generation has been huge. And we’re beginning to see effects that could be ascribed somewhat to that. You know, I raised my kids to walk and bike, not all the time, but a lot, and they still do. They’re careful users of all modes. They also do drive a car. I have nieces and nephews who don’t even drive. But for people to understand that, you know, greater green giving more over to green, whether it’s trees or bushes or small, pocket parks is good for everyone. Another thing that’s talked about nationally, I have a public health background and that’s what I work in now, is... there’s the social connection that’s been lost by people driving around in their metal boxes. Its something we need to rebuild. It has contributed to the political problems and the social problems we have. There is nothing that is not improved by providing opportunity for people to get around without a car.

Getting around without a car in Worcester this winter I feel like was specifically very difficult. As an able-bodied person I found it very difficult. What, if anything, is being done on the advocacy front specific to individuals with mobility assistive devices, wheelchairs, mobility challenges? Are there folks that are specifically voicing those concerns in council about making sure that our city is bare minimum accessible so that people can live their lives and survive?

So there’s a few, you know, positive things recently. Rob Bilotta, councilor for District 2, is an incredible advocate. Having him on the council is such an important lens. The city has its first, what’s called an ADA transition plan, which is about how to make the public spaces accessible for people with disabilities, so that’s an important step. Again, it’s going to have to be incremental. I know that what used to be called the Center for Living and Working is active, Access Advocates, I think, is active, and this is all why I talk a lot about partnering with groups, because I’m not going to speak for someone, but I can help give them an opportunity to tie what they’re focused on to some of the issues that I work on. And, you know, we’ve also partnered with someone like Liz Myska who uses blindfolds to educate students and officials. She’ll have them walk blindfolded or with a white cane and with a guide to see what it feels like to actually do that. Like a kind of walk audit.

Tell me a little bit about a walk audit.

Sure. So audits sound scary and formal and, you know, like something you do for your taxes, but it just means really using a loosely structured process to pick a space and to carefully, for good and bad, make records –whether it’s writing notes, taking pictures, doing videos–of your experience and then sharing the results with the public and with people who have the kind of decision-making power and resources that could make the needed changes.

Walk Audits is that something Worcester does as an organization or is it something that individuals can do in assistance to WalkBike Worcester?

So I mean audits can run the gamut. AARP has tons of forms people can download and they can actually do something entirely on their own. We collaborate a lot with an organization called Walk Massachusetts which is the oldest pedestrian advocacy organization in the country, used to be Walk Boston, now Walk Mass. They’ve done audits that we’ve assisted with out here, five audits or something like that. And it stretches all the way to these really intense research-based ones, where they collect a ton of data, half of which they never use. The team I’m part of, I work at UMass Chan Medical School in the Prevention Research Center, we have a study called Neighborhood Connect. The premise of that is getting people comfortable doing their own audits, whether it’s a walk audit, bike, park and green space, unsafe space, or unused spaces. We provide some simple prompts that people can use and guidance about how to organize it. It does not need to be experts being paid money to lead you on an audit. It’s a simple process.

So in a perfect world where we could continue making incremental changes and end up in a more ideal city, what do you think that would look like? If we were able to eliminate some of the congestion, eliminate obstacles for pedestrians, danger to cyclists, less need for space for vehicles, what do you feel Worcester might look like?

I think it would look a lot more green because we could give over some of that space. I think you’d see more actual people, instead of people traveling in the metal boxes. I think you’d see people out moving. I think you’d see, I want to add something here, because we also need to make sure that as those changes are made that we’re linking it to other issues that are really important. I want to call out housing here, because in most if not all the places you might look around the United States that have made strides in what you can call active transportation infrastructure, you’ve seen gentrification. And that’s something that, if you are making conscious efforts to link what you can call built environment improvements with things like housing affordability, that you’re going to simply displace the people who are there. And I guess that’s what I would say is that yes, we can welcome new people. Of course, we always want to welcome new people. But I do not want to see a replacement of people who are here. I want to see people be able to enjoy the place where they have live. But I think that that’s what I would say. We would, first of all, see less cars. You wouldn’t need as much parking. So you could use that, whether it’s outdoor dining or parks. Or you would see, I’m going to sort of leave aside the question of how kids get to school, for example, because Worcester has a pretty complicated way of assigning people and a fair amount of busing. But you’d see more children. People talk about children as an indicator species. You’d see kids out on their own. That’s another thing I’ll mention is there’s a concept called third spaces. Worcester would have more third spaces, which are places you can go and gather and people watch and do all those fun things without spending money.

I’m a mom. Three of my kids are teenagers. And I think a lot about how different things are now. I was a teenager in the nineties. I was almost never home. I was out, I was about, I was, you know, making gains, making mistakes, learning lessons, becoming an adult that can think critically and figure out situations and navigate the world. And I feel like that experience has been stripped away from the modern teenager. They have to be concerned about physical dangers or they have to be concerned that they’ll draw attention and someone will call the police because there’s no place to be anymore.

Yes, I think that it is kind of a moment in terms of recognizing the harm that we’ve done to young people.

And as you said before, it would get so many more people out. When you have a city and no one’s out in it, you just have a ghost town. There’s no foot traffic for shops, or for public safety.

I think people are, or I hope they are, thinking about… do you know the term weak ties?

No.

So that is the idea that we all have close relationships with some people, and people of a variable number. But what has been lost a lot, particularly in the United States, are these weak ties. So my neighborhood, I think our lots technically wouldn’t be legal now. They’re small. We have a mix of housing. We get to interact. Hello. How you doing? How’s your mom? How’s your kids, you know? Wow, I can’t believe they’re getting married or something And the same with shops, you know, I shop at the small places around the corner from me on June Street. I don’t know them all well, but you pop in and out. You see people. I can’t wait till Cordell’s is open again. [Karin and I both smile and sigh in wistful agreement.] It’s those weak ties, that’s what builds a community.

What are some avenues where folks could make an impact? Whether it’s individual or joining up with a group, what kind of things can they do to make inroads into being part of the positive changes? Part of that community building?

Well of course I’ll put in a pitch for getting on our list so that when we put out information about engagement opportunities. And there is the research study that we are involved in with Neighborhood Connect. That is an opportunity, in multiple areas of the city, for people to be part of. I would say having conversations with your neighbors about conditions in your neighborhood. Go for a walk and see what you like or don’t like. And people have different relationships to different neighborhoods. They might live there, but also maybe it’s a neighborhood your church is in, or your kid goes to school in? There’s all kinds of different ways to care about a neighborhood. I encourage people, I know I’m a nerd, on some of this stuff, but I think it’s a civic responsibility to be familiar with what the plans are in your community. And they are on the city’s website. We have a nascent transportation coalition of groups that are all interested, from different directions,in transportation. Find one that resonates. And I would say just to participate. There’s different ways: you can attend a public meeting. There’s usually an opportunity to provide written input, and then just keep talking to people. Also, be brave. Try something new. There are several groups around. There’s a small but growing number of opportunities to learn to ride safely for folks who have really never ridden on urban streets. And they’re really concerned about that. You don’t have to go it alone. We collaborate with MassBike. Worcester Earn-A-Bike makes it possible to build a bike for yourself. Again, I’m not a purist. I owned a minivan for a lot of years. I raised two children in the city and getting them to enrichment activities would have been tough without a vehicle. So I’m not gonna say don’t own one, just leave it home sometimes and be willing to try to do that more often.

Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you kind of hoped I would, something that you want people to know?

That the city has a long way to go, but don’t be cynical about that and be willing to try things and to share your perceptions and your observations, but please don’t immediately say, people shouldn’t ride, you can’t ride. Let the first answer be, ‘how are we going to do that?’

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