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.

Get 50% off for 1 year

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.

Also tips and merch orders are great!

Tip jar

Merch store

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.

Share

“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.

Leave a comment

Odds and Ends

I am once again asking you consider helping keep this outlet alive!

Get 50% off for 1 year

Tip jar

Merch store

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.

Subscribe / Tips / Merch Store

Subscribe now

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?’

Share

Leave a comment

ADU or ADA clip

Bergman doing the Bergmanian Switcheroo

Weather Star 4000

Worcester or Providence Reddit post

Mark your calendars folks: Saturday, June 20 at Steel & Wire, celebrating the first SIX years of Worcester Sucks! Free and fun good time!! See you there.

And as always please consider supporting this outlet! Subscriptions are a little down right now and it’s a source of anxiety to be quite honest because I’m prone to enter the End Is Nigh Mindset. Nighmaxxing if you will.

Subscribe / Tips / Merch Store

Subscribe now

dAnd help us spread the word!

Share

Leave a comment

Outro: Warren Zevon “Down In The Mall”

Intro: Bill Shaner 6.2.26

Here’s what’s on the agenda:

Budget.
If you haven’t already dug into the details of the FY27 budget, check out my May WPS in Brief, where I broke down the big picture and what it means for the district.

Transitions Program Relocation.
The Committee will receive an update on plans to move the Transitions Program for students ages 18–22 from the Fanning Building to the Dr. James Caradonio [New Citizen] Center on Main Street beginning next school year. District leaders say the new location will provide improved accessibility, dedicated school space, better transportation accommodations, and expanded opportunities for community-based instruction and vocational training.

Scheduling Change: June 17 Meeting.
There will be a vote to reschedule the June 17 school committee meeting to June 25 to avoid overlapping with the City Manager’s State of the City address.

Digital Hall Pass Pilot Expansion.
Another item asks the district to explore the cost and feasibility of expanding a digital hall pass system across all secondary schools, similar to the pilot currently running at Worcester Tech. As with any student-monitoring system, the questions will likely go beyond cost, especially around implementation consistency and student privacy.

Two proposed policy updates.
The recommendation is to refer both to the Operations and Governance subcommittee for review.

• Physical Restraint of Students: The district is looking to align this policy with updated state regulations.

• Bullying Prevention: This is the required biennial review of the district’s bullying prevention policy under Massachusetts law.

  ---

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

June is a special month for Worcester Sucks. Six years ago on June 18-19 I launched this thing. Six years. Eternally grateful I’ve gotten six years now out of what was initially a desperation move. I was so sick of working under the slash-and-burn edict of Gannet I was about to quit. And now look at me, running an outlet that gets better and better all the time, entirely funded by the people who read it. We’ve been able to ride it this far, been able to weather what storms have come, been able to build what is, if you account for resources spent, hands down the best newsroom in the city. And it’s not even a newsroom yet—not until I can afford to take on at least one more full timer, and we’re a ways off from that still. But hey, you gotta keep trying, and that’s exactly what we do here all day every day.

For instance, Aislinn Doyle just had a great op-ed run in Commonwealth Beacon: “Dual language immersion programs are a huge asset to our schools. The state should stop treating them as an afterthought.”

Every Spring, Massachusetts celebrates bilingualism, at least in theory. In May each year, the state proudly awards thousands of graduating high school students the Seal of Biliteracy, recognizing proficiency in two or more languages.

But look closely at who earns those seals. In many cases, it isn’t because schools taught students a second language particularly well — or at all. More often, it is because families did.

Across Massachusetts, many of the students receiving the seal speak another language at home and learned it from their parents or grandparents. The state celebrates the outcome while failing to build the dual language programs that would make bilingualism truly accessible to far more students.

Research is clear: High-quality dual-language immersion is not only the most effective educational model for English learners, it is one of the best models for all students. Two-way dual-language programs are “additive,” developing two languages simultaneously. Students in dual-language programs outperform peers in English-only programs on literacy and long-term academic achievement, while also showing benefits in problem-solving, attention, and memory.

So to celebrate, me and the gang are putting on a little thing on Saturday June 20th at our favorite place to put on little things, Steel and Wire. Real pita heads of Worcester will know! George’s syrian bread is simply the best pita you can buy. My dad requests it often, as he can’t get it out his way. And if you’re about to come at me with “Syrian bread and pita are dif—” Shhhhhh. It’s okay. Everything’s fine.

Incredible new piece of Worcester Sucks ephemera right there, courtesy the lovely and talented Katie Nowicki, who used the assignment the other night to level up in photoshop. Anything she can’t do?! Let me know when you find out.

I think I’ll order some shirts of this... maybe tote bags? What do you think?

Leave a comment

Anyway, to business. Today we’re talking about housing—what else? A new Worcester Regional Research Bureau report about the state of the problem, a glimpse at City Hall’s inability to do much about it via some choice moments from the Finance Committee, the most fake and useless iteration of the City Council save perhaps the Standing Committee on Public Safety.

It’s industry briefs all the way down

The report, titled “Raising Housing: Understanding the Affordable Housing Crisis in Worcester” was released earlier this week. It is a capable summary of the available data diagnosing the problem. It leans on the work of MassInc and its Gateway Cities Housing Monitor report and the National Low Income Coalition’s Out of Reach report—both great resources I’ve cited in past editions.

The WRRB report takes appropriate time to break down the failures baked into the term “affordability” to truly capture the state of affairs. I appreciated that, as it’s confusing and little understood. The AMI, or Area Median Income, as the WRRB explains, is based on an area that is not Worcester, but Worcester and the wealthier communities around it, in a “metropolitan area” defined by the Office of Housing and Urban Development, that changes seemingly at random and is difficult to find good information about. But the point is that the area median income is the metric used to set thresholds of “affordability”—80 percent, 60 percent, 50 percent, 30 percent, etc.

For a place like Worcester, this muddies the conversation before it even gets going.

The WRRB explains:

A central challenge in understanding Worcester’s housing crisis is the disconnect between how “affordability” is defined in policy and how residents experience the housing market. Much of this stems from the way Area Median Income (AMI) is calculated: AMI reflects the median income of a broad HUD-defined region that includes many higher-income suburban communities, not Worcester alone. As a result, the official AMI for Worcester—$117,300 for a family of four in 2024—is significantly higher than what many Worcester households actually earn. According to the Census Bureau’s 2024 estimate, the median household income for a family of four in the city was $96,366. This represents a gap of $20,934, meaning the typical Worcester family earns nearly 18 percent less than the income level that underpins the region’s definition of “affordable” housing.

Any math wiz reading this will be able to suss out from the above passage that Worcester’s AMI is organically 82 percent of the AMI used to set affordability! What the WRRB could have made a lot clearer is that many of the city’s affordability efforts, most importantly its inclusionary zoning policy, are tied to the 80 percent AMI threshold. And that for Worcester purposes, that’s entirely fake: 80 percent of the AMI is actually just two percent lower than the city’s AMI. The city is counting units tethered to a figure two percent less than the median income as affordable. How many of the affordable units the city is supposedly producing are tied to 80 percent, as opposed to 60 percent (still expensive) or what we actually need, housing in the 30-50 percent AMI area?

The WRRB provides half an answer here:

This imperfect definition of affordability compounds Worcester’s severe shortage of deeply affordable housing: the HPP identifies a deficit of more than 8,500 units for households earning below 30% of AMI, leaving thousands of families paying far more than they can afford, doubling up, or facing displacement.

But, bewilderingly, this analysis is included in support of an “all housing matters” argument. To say, this is why we need more high end housing, actually. The report goes, indeed with the very next line, to say...

At the same time, Worcester lacks enough moderate- and higher-income units, meaning middleand upper-income households compete for older “middle” housing stock that would otherwise be attainable for working families. This “filtering up” dynamic—shortages at both the bottom and the top of the market—helps explain why affordability pressures now touch nearly every income group, and why even AMI -based programs often fall short for the residents who need help most.

And the WRRB supports this claim with a graph I found stunningly misleading.

It appears in the report to demonstrate the legitimacy of the argument that both high end and low end housing are needed. But while the low end is obvious—and obviously the issue, as families risk displacement, thus creating homelessness and labor shortages and shredded community support systems—the high end “need” is hard to swallow. Who are these residents making 20 percent more than the area median income who are having trouble finding an apartment, and are they really “squeezed”? Or are they exercising their consumer choice to not move into the many still-vacant units in our newly constructed luxury boxes? Or are those newly constructed luxury boxes manufacturing scarcity by keeping a certain number of units empty, as alleged in a price fixing suit filed by the DOJ that implicates several of the local developers city hall tells us we need to incentivize further?

Questions that of course go un-posed in this report. And again, this supposed “need” at 120 percent AMI is a figure generated by RKG Associates, the real estate industry consultancy firm that wrote the city’s Housing Production Plan. How they arrived on this assessment of demand is not made all that clear in the Housing Production Plan itself. May I direct you to three bullet points on page 97 of the 197 page report, where the methodology is discussed.

▪The Household Model starts with forward-looking population projections obtained from the UMass Donahue Institute. It also uses the 2017 to 2022 persons per household and tenure distribution change rates from the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates and extrapolates change through 2033.

Ok nothing too worrying there. On to point 2...

▪ In addition to the Donahue Institute population projections, the Household Model also considers changes in employment in the city and the percentage of future employees who may choose to live in Worcester and need housing. RKG factored in future employment changes using Lightcast employment data and their own proprietary employment projections.

Ohhhh the real estate industry consultant is using Lightcast, a tech company generating labor market data for large corporate employers and those tasked with “economic development,” and how they arrive on their projections is “proprietary” and thus a secret. Shhhhh. While their fiduciary responsibility, not a secret, is happy customers. Surely we’ll turn it around in point 3.

▪ Lastly, RKG projected induced population growth from residential construction activity over the next five years from CoStar’s development pipeline. The Household Model uses these inputs together to project the number of renter and owner households per year between 2023 and 2033 that serve as the basis for the Housing Demand Model.

CoStar? The company that was just this week hit with three anti-trust lawsuits claiming it’s an unaccountable monopoly?

This is the entire basis of the Housing Production Plan’s assessment of need, which leads necessarily to the conclusion that high end construction is just as important as low end. The whole thing is obscured in the proprietary business practices of Lightcast and CoStar, tech companies that service the large development corporations that ultimately decide what gets built where, and when, and who have no reason to care, particularly, about the individual communities in which they secure the land to do their business.

I think you can excuse me, then, for calling this Reaganist supply side argument what it is: a crock of shit.

That crock of shit is where the WRRB eventually arrives, in its conclusion, reverting to an endorsement of the trickle-down theory baked into the HPP,. While it argues in favor of zoning reform to foster density (something we’d have done yesterday if the city really wanted this problem solved), it doesn’t push for much more than that. Convenient for the powers at be! Almost like there was some coordination on the finer points... not that I’d suggest such a thing. Rent control, for instance, is nowhere to be found.

Like the rest of the vague apparatus of power around City Hall, the WRRB takes for a fact that the Housing Production Plan is what it sounds like, rather than exploring what it really is.

As we’ve been over before, HPPs as they’re called are dry compliance documents invented for the benefit of towns that demanded a way to wiggle out of state requirements for affordable housing construction. It is a bureaucratic expression of saying you’re trying when you’re not really trying. The HPP, by design, lends cover to the towns that, like Marblehead—as made famous by that awesome guy at Town Meeting—are “just being dicks,” siting their “available land” for affordable housing on golf courses, in their case, and in nearby Holden, on family farms and shuttered quarries. Intentionally putting together “plans” around thoughtfully useless hypothetical. Worcester’s plan is the genesis of the line often repeated that we need 12,000 or so more units by 2030, a line that is almost always invoked to say why we can’t afford to regulate the real estate market, can’t impose too stringent protections on affordability, in the case of our vaunted mayor Joe Petty to say how rent control will be a disaster for the city’s budget. Petty’s assessment and the HPP’s conclusion, it turns out, are sourced to the same intellectual spring: Real estate industry consultants wrote the “housing demand forecast” part of the HPP and also basically wrote Joe Petty’s messaging. (If you’ll remember, he, or whoever wrote the op-ed under his name, literally copy-pasted from anti-rent control campaign literature in a letter to the Telegram.)

All of this together makes a news item like $3,700 two bedroom apartments in Main South a feature rather than a bug. This is the outcome city hall wants. Whatever lip service they pay to struggling renters or displaced communities they are handmaidens to the machine that creates those things. And they like it that way.

Before we turn to the council, a quick plug...

Please support this outlet if you can!

Please support this outlet! The weeks ahead of the anniversary and a glut of annual subscription renewals (insh’allah, please don’t unsubscribe ha ha) are always very very slow far as income is concerned. Ya boy is pinching pennies.

There are three great ways to keep Worcester Sucks going.

Subscribe / Tips / Merch Store

Just a random thought about writing while I’ve the lens turned inward.

Much too much psychology involved in a self-ascribed deadline. Editor mad at me (?) is a clean psychological force getting the writing from “the fun part” to “filed.” Editor will yell at me is a similar motivator for making it good. When you, the writer, is also the editor, you can’t be mad at you or yell at you like a good old fashion “other person who is your boss.” And since you set the deadline, you also know how arbitrary it is. This is bad for you, the writer, and worse for you, the editor. For all of the grand history of journalism up until like five years ago writers and editors performed this delicate dance of the deadline, including such advanced moves as the writer sussing out through clever conversational tactics just how arbitrary a deadline is. Is it really and truly necessary this piece be filed by noon? A question you can’t ask directly, blocked from doing so by Editor will scold me. You can only dance around the subject, sending cryptic missives. Just stuck on this one part ha aha. Will get it over ASAP. in most cases you, the writer, never gets to know how arbitrary the deadline really is. Unless the writer is also the editor, and you thusly holds the secret knowledge that the only thing that isn’t arbitrary about the deadline is the power it holds over the writer—to actually get their shit done, to not move on to something more interesting after “the fun part” has concluded, leaving nothing serviceable to show for it. When the editor and the writer are the same person this bit of theater, crucial to the process of “getting it out there,” loses its magic. The vague pressures of a content schedule are a sorry substitute for the human being enforcing said schedule, who can’t be argued with about the shape and pace of said schedule, who has little patience for probing questions about why the schedule is the way it is, who can make the writer feel like a pestering little kid for going there. Not so when this all happens in your mind, waking up on a quiet sunny Sunday morning with the dull dread of “it’s not done,” manifesting in your pacing around the apartment going “all right all right all right.” Doing Karate moves to psych yourself up to sit down at that desk. The delicate dance of the publication process done now in the dark recesses of the subconscious.

In conclusion we need to Bring Back This Guy.

Mea Coopa

Picking up where we left off there were two moments from the FinCom earlier this week that highlight the city’s willful-or-incompetence-based failure to address the housing crisis.

First moment is Councilor Kate Toomey’s inquiry into the state of accessory dwelling units.

First off, the way she says “Mea Coopa on that,” meaning, I think, mea culpa, is chef’s kiss. (2:17 in the above video)

But that’s not why I pulled it.

Toomey opens by saying accessory dwelling units are something that “of course you know I’ve advocated for for a long time here.”

Toomey in December 2023 voted for an incredibly restrictive version of an ADU policy, put forward by George Russell, which failed 5-6. Then voted again for a slightly less restrictive version, put forward as a classic “compromise position” by then-councilor Sean Rose. . The two dissenting votes were then-Councilors Etel Haxhiaj and Thu Nguyen, who both argued for the full, by-right policy, with no owner occupancy restriction. That was, at the time, too “progressive,” so councilors like Toomey, having no political imagination of their own and operating most of the time on a reflexive opposition to anything activisty, opposed it. Sean Rose, as one of his last acts as a councilor, put forward the compromise policy Toomey et al voted in, likely to spare the mayor from having to take a clear position.

As I wrote at the time...

Then the council voted against a more restrictive version proposed by George Russell. His version would have required owner occupancy and a special permit process to approve ADU construction in single-family zoned areas (read: the “nice neighborhoods”). The council rejected that version by a 5-6 vote. Rose, Nguyen, Haxhiaj, and King were joined by Mayor Joe Petty and Councilor Sarai Rivera in opposition.

This is the part that really bugs me. That 5-6 vote against Russell’s extra-restrictive ordinance could have easily been a 6-5 vote to pass the restriction-free version! The one endorsed by the city administration and the planning board and the standing committee on economic development! The one in line with best practices around the state and entirely innocuous.

Then the state overrode that “compromise” policy in 2024, with a statewide ADU policy that eliminated many of the regulations, chief among them the owner occupancy restriction. Awful rich to hear her now, at saying stuff like this (4:30 mark)...

“One of the things that they’re saying’s been difficult in other communities are the regulations, which, clearly, I think we’ve gone beyond that and probably are far... [nods head]... much further ahead, with that.”

Lady, the state got rid of the regulations you voted for. The ones that make it harder in other communities and in this one, as evidenced by the fact there have only been several dozen ADU projects in the three years since they were allowed. She quotes from an article she read showing that Worcester is very much middle of the pack, asks Peter Dunn about why there are conflicting numbers, because she confused ADA compliance upgrades with ADU construction, then tries to ask Dunn a leading question about how much better Worcester is doing ADUs than other communities. Brain dead politics right there. Later in the meeting, she would repeat the claim that Worcester is “taking in” all the homeless people from “the towns,” an assessment based similarly on vibes, and similarly inaccurate, as her position that Worcester has a better regulatory framework for ADU construction than other communities. Brain dead.

Moment #2 shows new district 4 Councilor Jose Rivera operating on the same low frequency psychic wavelength as Toomey.

“Not to bring up a sore subject,” he begins, using the classic Bergmanian device of beginning remarks by saying you’re not doing exactly what you’re doing, he asks Dunn about whether affordable housing is getting built now that the specialized stretch code got eliminated. Dunn spends about three minutes saying “no” in the most confusing way he can.

Turns out the specialized stretch code was not the inhibitor to development activity that Tim Murray et al said it was in order to get it repealed.

Just some scenes from “The Brain Death Of The City Council.”

A few other ones I don’t have time to set up and contextualize:

Odds and Ends

One more pitch for the road. What they don’t tell you in Substack school is what you actually need is a steady stream of new subscribers to really keep making money.

Subscribe / Tips / Merch Store

Few more odds and ends…

This story out of Rutland has it all in terms of the law enforcement community being a bunch of petulant babies. “Group seeks probe into Rutland July 4th cancellation”

Councilor Kate Toomey put out a statement on the common stabbing promising an increased law enforcement presence. Everyone, she said, deserves to feel safe. But as far as I know, no one has put out a statement about this: “Teen hit by pickup truck in Worcester.” Crazy the way violence is tolerated when it’s a car that’s the weapon.

Nice story about a nice person: Worcester teacher honored as she inspires students while battling ALS

Is New England gerrymandered?

From WGBH: Interesting story about Worcester on Worcester UK soccer matches of the past.

Porter said, during the war, Arthur Carlton — the then-mayor of Worcester, England — promoted the idea of towns and cities in England adopting communities in the United States in what later became known as “twinning.” Carlton hoped that, as U.S. troops passed through England on their way to the war’s frontlines, the soldiers would stop in the English cities that had relationships with their American hometowns.ed to watch

And the academic paper that prompted it can be found here.

Here’s a nice fitting Cesaire quote to go out on.

We must resign ourselves to the inevitable and say to ourselves, once and for all, that the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous; that it is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which there flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is a universal law that, before it disappears, every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.

From Discourse on Colonialism, a 1955 essay that may never stop making sense.

For the music this week, here’s a truly cursed song about the smiley face someone dropped in the chat! God I love the smiley and the mundane spectacle of its evil.

Subscribe now

Tip jar

Also if you are new here, Worcester Sucks has a bunch of regular columns, this one included, and on the settings page you can pick and choose which you receive in your inbox. —Bill

Dear Shaun,

The World Cup is fast approaching and I really want to go to a match. I am a huge soccer fan, I am originally from Portugal and cannot wait to root for them. They are playing in Houston and I don’t think I could afford a plane ticket and a hotel room and a ticket to the actual game. If you add on food and a beer or two I’d be financially ruined. But I could watch Scotland or Ghana play here in Foxborough. Sure, train tickets are astronomical and driving and parking could be an all-day affair, but I really want to experience a World Cup game in my backyard! It is still expensive, but not as much as getting down to Houston. Should I go for it?

-Futebol Frenzied

Dear Futebol Frenzied,

You have to go. Of course you have to go. As a soccer fan (yes, soccer) you have already blurred or even deleted your morals. Owners of the club teams help support human trafficking, enslavement, wage gouging, terrorism, and tax evasion. Sure, these aren’t club teams, these are countries but these countries have also committed atrocities (America, ahem, ahem). Then there is the whole FIFA of it all. We don’t have to delve into the graft, corruption, and racketeering that goes on in the world federation organizing this event you so desperately want to give your hard earned money to, but FIFA ain’t exactly hitting their mission statement “…touch, unite, and inspire the world.” Touch and unite sure, you can’t escape FIFA and World Cup ads, unite as well, collectively the entire globe hates their guts.

I just checked the resale site at FIFA and the cheapest tickets in Boston are going for $609 dollars. That is 609 items at The Dollar Store. That’s 609 scratch tickets. That’s 609 coffees at Cumberland Farms. Of course that is a lot of money and all of those things I just mentioned may give you pause on shelling out for Iraq v. Norway. But think about all of the stupid rich people you can be rude to there. All of the morons who are drunk and not actual soccer fans. All of those assholes who are there to just take a picture for social media. You could be there too, watching the beautiful game, and “accidentally” bumping into trust fund and crypto bros. Make sure, no matter where your seats are, to sit near the country supporters. Sit with the Iraqis or Norwegians, they are there for the love of it and not for the internet clout. Grab a vuvuzela. Wave that country’s flag.

As far as being able to pay for it? Just Klarna it. Pay for this over time. And if you start to miss the payments? Who cares! The economy is going to tank soon. Your mere hundreds of dollars ain’t close to the billions that are going to crater large financial systems. I truly believe that when we go into another depression, Klarna’s reps will be in jail and the bank CEOs head’s will be on spikes. So yeah, your $609 to watch an incredible global sporting experience and bully rich chuds are just a drop in the vast financial expanse.

So blow your horn, paint your face, and chant “ole” to your heart’s desire. Even better convince everyone outside at the “Fan Zone” to storm the place. It will just be Foxborough cops who are so mad that, in their words, “Soccer queers” are playing on Tom Brady’s field. They’re going to be on their phones either fighting with their wives or ignoring their kids. So go in and take over the stadium, you won’t owe them anything.

NEWS

This Saturday is going to a blast. We have a multimedia story show at Hunchback Gallery. Comedians will be telling stories and using a PowerPoint presentation to send the message home in a very funny way. The show is free and you really aren’t going to want to miss it.

Thursday I’ll be at FreePlay doing a live D and D show. It is called Let’s Not Die and it starts at 8PM. You can buy tickets here!

Welcome to the May issue of WPS in Brief. This month covers key topics from the FY27 budget (yes, I read all 398 pages so you don’t have to), two school committee meetings and three standing committee meetings. The format is a little different because the big focus this month is on the budget. This time of the year is a grind, but hang in there it’s almost summer!

Before we get to the budget it’s important to have a basic understanding of how funding for Worcester Public Schools works and why we don’t have a deficit (or a big increase) this year. If you haven’t read my quick budget primer I’d recommend it as a starting point before moving on.

TL;DR: Despite budget cuts facing dozens of districts this year (even the rich ones), Worcester is okay budget-wise. But buckle-up because starting in 2027-2028 we’re looking at some serious deficits, and the exhausting cycles of budget cuts will continue for a few years.

Share

Ok, let’s dive in:

The Proposed 2026-2027 Budget.

The WPS budget office released the proposed FY27 budget book, and as usual they do an excellent job laying out where the money comes from, where it is going, and how that connects to the district’s strategic plan. What I write about here is proposed, meaning this is what the district administration is suggesting. The School Committee will now deliberate on the proposal before taking a final vote (hopefully) by June 30.

Unlike the City Council, the School Committee has the power to move money between accounts. In past budget meetings the committee has typically discussed each account line one by one, often asking clarifying questions of the administration. In some cases members must recuse themselves from the discussion on certain accounts due to conflict of interest laws. After the committee goes through each account (which usually takes hours over two meetings) members can make motions on moving money between accounts. Now is your chance to voice your thoughts and priorities by emailing school committee members or attending the Public Budget Hearing, where you can speak for two minutes to the committee. It’s on Thursday, May 28 at 6 p.m. at the Durkin Administration Building.

Here’s a broad overview of key aspects of the budget, as well as some interesting tidbits:

This year’s budget feels very different from last year’s. Last year the conversation centered around restoring positions after a tough $22 million cut in 2024-2025. This year the biggest story is that the district is openly projecting double digit deficits over the next three fiscal years (FY28, FY29, and FY30). That looming financial picture hangs over almost every section of the budget book.

The FY27 budget is $31.6 million higher than last year’s adopted budget. But according to the district, $29.1 million of that increase is needed simply to maintain existing services due to inflationary costs and contractual obligations. That leaves only $2.5 million in actual new spending capacity.

A major reason for this is that many costs continue to rise faster than revenue. There is also a broader structural issue here: the district has relatively little flexibility in where cuts can even be made. Sixty-six percent of the budget goes to salaries, health insurance costs are increasing by 10 percent, and retired employee health insurance costs the district $17.4 million annually. These are not areas where the district has much flexibility to cut. (I also wish more local leaders were paying attention to what it means for Worcester’s economy that its two largest employers–UMass Memorial and WPS–are in sectors facing significant strain.)

These necessary cost increases create one of the most confusing realities in the budget: even though the budget is increasing overall, the district is still reducing positions.

Staffing.
One of the clearest tensions in the budget is that the district says it is using available new funding to increase teacher and instructional support positions, while at the same time the overall number of positions declines by 40. Both statements are technically true, which is part of what makes the budget complicated to follow.

At the elementary level, the district is adding 19 teacher positions, with seven of those being classroom teachers. At the secondary level, the total number of teacher positions remains flat at 877, though enrollment shifts mean the district is adding some positions while reducing others. New positions include Chapter 74 vocational teachers, an innovation pathways coordinator, and some English, math, social studies, and art positions, while nine “core content positions” are being reduced.

There are also reductions in several support areas: special education teacher positions are decreasing by 14, student support service positions are decreasing by three, and paraeducator positions are decreasing by 26. Multilingual learner teacher positions, meanwhile, are increasing by two.

The district is also continuing to expand its use of building substitutes, adding five new positions for a total of 24 building substitutes alongside 50 day-to-day substitutes.

The district appears to be strategically preserving certain priorities, like elementary classroom staffing, multilingual learner services, vocational programming, and building substitutes, while quietly reducing staffing in other areas. That balancing act becomes especially visible in the reductions to paraeducators and special education positions.

Administration and reorganization.
One of the most confusing parts of the budget this year is trying to follow the district’s new organizational chart. I felt like I was solving a Murdle puzzle.

The Positive Youth Development Office has been renamed the Student Support and Engagement Office, to be headed by Thomas Toney. That office, which previously had four employees, will now oversee the Family and Community Engagement (FACE) office and Nursing. FACE was previously under the Personnel, Engagement and Equity division, while Nursing had previously operated as its own department.

At the same time, principals have been moved out of schools into newly created district-level positions, including “Principal on Assignment” and “Manager of Student Support and Engagement.” Yet Woodland Academy, a school where 95.7% of its students are high needs, will spend another year without a principal. The Claremont Academy principal will oversee both schools again next year.

The Director of Equity & Cultivation position has been downgraded to an assistant director role. Translation services are being moved from the FACE office into the communications division. Student Placement & Enrollment, the staff who work at the Parent Information Center, has also been moved from the Personnel, Engagement and Equity Division to School Compliance & Improvement. Have I lost you yet?

Some of these changes may ultimately make sense operationally. But from the outside, it is not always clear what problems the reorganizations are intended to solve, whether they are connected to cost-saving measures, or how families are supposed to navigate systems that keep moving around administratively. The lack of principal at Woodland Academy especially stands out because it reflects a broader pattern of temporary arrangements quietly becoming longer-term realities. What was initially framed as a short-term leadership solution is now extending into another school year.

At the same time, the district continues to emphasize that administration spending remains below the School Committee’s self-imposed cap of 1.5 percent of the general fund budget. That creates an interesting tension in the public conversation, because debates around administration are often less about total spending and more about transparency, organizational clarity, and favoritism.

Technology.
One of the largest percentage increases in the budget is instructional technology, which increases by 65 percent, from $2.6 million to $4.0 million. CFO Sara Consalvo said at the most recent school committee meeting that $1.1 million of that increase is leases for replacement devices.

In 2022, using the Emergency Connectivity Fund, the district purchased 23,000 chromebooks. Those Chromebooks are reaching their end of life, as are staff Macbooks. The district has a transition plan toward leasing student devices because it cannot afford another large one-time purchase. The district is already leasing approximately 6,000 Chromebooks used at the middle school level at $582,000 a year. The budget includes adding 1,000 more Macbooks and 6,000 more Chromebooks through an additional five-year lease. The Macbooks will be $300,000 a year, and the Chromebooks will be $730,000 a year. The Chromebook lease has increased 23% from last year, due to tariffs. The price per Chromebook went up from $97 to $122, a total increase of $750,000 over five years.

By 2030, the district is projected to spend approximately $5.2 million annually on technology leases for Chromebooks, MacBook Airs, and iPads. At the May 21 school committee meeting, Sue Mailman (at-large) requested a report on cost savings for eliminating one to one devices at the pre-K through second grades, which many districts are doing recently (see LA, Cambridge, Pennsylvania).

At the same time, instructional materials funding appears to be decreasing. Traditionally this line has funded things principals buy directly for schools and classrooms, like paper, furniture, art supplies, recess equipment, and similar materials. The district says it is maintaining $75 per pupil for instructional materials, but because schools received $100 per pupil last year, this effectively represents a reduction. The instructional materials line item itself decreases by 9 percent.

Transportation and operations.
The district continues to budget for a new electronic bus pass system that would allow families to track when students get on and off buses, and an updated bus tracker that actually works. This is now the third consecutive year the system has appeared in the budget, but it still has not been implemented. According to the administration, the contract continues to be tied up in negotiations between the city law department and the vendor. Perhaps this is why the budget includes new funding for a designated assistant solicitor from the city law department assigned specifically to the schools.

The budget also notes that the district is reorganizing building maintenance into a quadrant-based support model, though there is not much detail yet publicly available on how that will work.

Other budget odds and ends.

Library Services: The district is supporting library services at the elementary level for the first time in decades through a new circulation management system for seven elementary schools.

Expanding Dual Language: The district is expanding two-way dual language in Spanish/English by adding 7th and 8th grade to Worcester Dual Language Magnet School. As you might remember from my road map to improving literacy, longitudinal research over decades has shown that dual language programs have an “astounding effectiveness” for ALL students, especially students with disabilities and monolingual students of low socioeconomic status, not just English learners.

Community: There is $35,000 allocated to the Worcester Education Development Foundation for “public relations and alumni services” and another $105,000 is budgeted for adult education services provided by the Latino Education Institute. (It confuses me that these services don’t have to go out to bid?)

Athletics: The district is adding unified basketball and unified track, as well as freshman volleyball and additional indoor and outdoor track teams.

That’s the broad overview of the proposed FY27 budget. More questions will likely emerge as the School Committee begins deliberations over the next several weeks. But the clearest takeaway from this year’s budget is that even as the district continues trying to preserve and improve services, the projected deficits looming over the next three years are going to shape nearly every financial decision moving forward.

Bits and Bobs.
What happened at the May School Committee Meetings and Standing Committee Meetings:

Public Comment.
There was about an hour of public comment at the May 21 meeting, with frustration expressed about the closing of Worcester’s alternative schools as well as parents and students requesting more accountability around the district’s bullying prevention and intervention plan.

2026-2027 Student Handbook.
Many policies in the district are changed through the student handbook updates, and the handbook for next year has some changes approved by the school committee at the May 7 meeting. Some quick highlights:

• The voluntary transfer policy (the way students living in Worcester request to attend a school outside their boundary zone) was updated to remove a part that allows students who change residences in, or the summer leading up to, 6, 8 or 12 grade to remain in their current school with principal’s permission.

• The student dress code policy changed to a more generic policy, removing many of the specific descriptions such as undergarments must be covered, no backless shirts, no hats or bandanas, while also removing explicitly allowed items such as durags and religious and cultural headwear.

• There is a new item added to the network unacceptable use policy: “Creating, altering, or distributing digitally manipulated content, including images, audio, or video (including content generated through artificial intelligence or other technologies), that impersonates, misrepresents, humiliates, intimidates, or harms another student, staff member, or member of the school community.”

• A change in language for exemption from the sexual health curriculum requires that caregivers exempt their child from all the lessons of the curriculum, rather than particular portions.

• Grades for academic eligibility for athletics will now be official on the next school day following the date on which the faculty are required to have submitted grades into the Student Information System. Previously it was when report cards were issued.

  ---

Turf Fields.
The School Committee revisited the ongoing discussion around the use of turf athletic fields in Worcester Public Schools, a conversation that carries added significance as the district looks ahead to the eventual replacement of Foley Stadium and the construction of a new Burncoat High School. Sue Mailman (at-large), who requested the original report, made three motions requesting all environmental reports used by the Turf Field Committee, the installation of thermometers on playing fields, and a report on field temperatures. The Committee voted 5-3 to hold the item along with Mailman’s motions for further review, with Biancheria, Roy and Guardiola voting no, and Mayor Petty absent from the vote (he’s been absent for a lot of meetings lately…). The discussion reflected continued concern from some members about student safety, environmental impacts, and long-term planning for athletic facilities across the district. As Worcester prepares for major future capital projects, questions around the type, cost, and safety of playing surfaces are likely to remain part of the broader facilities conversation.

Multilingual Learners.

At the May 21 meeting, the Multilingual Education department shared encouraging data showing that English learners are exiting language support programs at higher rates than they were five years ago. This year, 966 of 7,266 tested English learner students exited the program — a 13.3% exit rate compared to 9.3% in 2019. Worcester currently has about 7,740 English learner students, representing roughly 31% of the district, but the district also monitors about 2,000 recently exited students, meaning around 41% of students are being served by the office in some capacity. Students in Worcester speak more than 70 languages, with Spanish being the most common.

Director of Multilingual Education Jessica Mandes said the progress comes from a focus on rigorous instruction, educator support, and recruitment and retention efforts. The office has embedded multilingual learner strategies into curriculum maps across grade levels, strengthened collaboration with special education to better support dually identified students, and expanded partnerships and training opportunities for educators. Looking ahead, the office plans to strengthen the dual language program at the high school level, continue professional development around the new ESL curriculum, and support newcomer programs as the New Citizen Center closes at the end of this school year.

College and Career Highlights.

Dr. Emily Lehman, Administrative Director of College and Career Readiness, and Dan St. Louis, Director of Early College, presented a report on College and Career opportunities in Worcester Public Schools, highlighting growth in both Early College and Advanced Placement (AP) programs. The report outlined six Early College pathways available to students and noted that 1,362 participants have earned a combined 7,696 college credits, with 160 students earning more than 12 credits each. Over seven AP subject areas, WPS students completed 2,820 AP exams in 2025, with 51% earning qualifying scores, a percentage that has steadily increased since 2022.

The presentation also highlighted the continued expansion of Worcester Night Life, which now offers more than 80 in-person workforce development classes annually, and the Worcester Adult Learning Center, which provides no-cost education opportunities including high school equivalency, CNA certification, and English language learning courses, with priority enrollment for WPS parents.

Upcoming Dates.
All school committee meetings have virtual options with Spanish translation. See the school committee site for more information.

• Public Budget Hearing is May 28, 5:00 p.m. at DAB

• Teaching, Learning and Student Supports is May 28, 5:00 p.m.

• School Committee Meetings to discuss the budget are June 4 and June 17, 4:00 p.m.

• Operations and Governance is June 8, 5:00 p.m.

• Teaching, Learning and Student Supports is June 11, 5:00 p.m.

That’s it. Have a great end to the school year! And please consider a paid subscription to Worcester Sucks and a tip to support my work.

Subscribe now

And to everyone else, my work appeared in Playboy! I wrote a piece about the smiley face, examining Worcester’s crown jewel as a culchurul expaw’t, in a sort of macro-economic historical context. My approach was to view the symbol as an expression of the initial intent, and to see that intent, in the abstract of the historical record, to be a plain old corporate humiliation ritual.

The timing of this ritual and the obvious resonance, manifest in how the smiley spread around the globe organically and memetically as a piece of pop culture ephemera, makes the smiley, and the humiliation ritual laden in its intent, a harbinger and then perhaps the defining avatar of a new world order. One in which a free market fundamentalism that spilled out from a few economics departments, would capture the necessary levers of state power, and from the 1970s to present, it would slowly dismantle the social contract between the state and its people, sharpening the part pries open new markets while selling off the rest for parts. In this way the smiley face is an endlessly fascinating cultural totem, I think. It gets even more interesting when you start to understand how important H. Ladd Plumley was to the advancement of that budding free market fundamentalism, and how the smiley face was a direct product of his innovations in the “consolidation” space. All that and more over on Playboy Dot Com. I suggest you stop right here, click on over to there, and read it before continuing on here (click it two or three times, even, so I look good in their metrics and they’ll let me write for them again. Just kidding... Sorta.)

“The Dark History of the Smiley Face”

A month after JFK was shot dead in Dallas, the Smiley Face was birthed into the world. Within a decade it would become one of the most iconic and recognizable pieces of pop culture ephemera to exist. Everyone knows it, and in multiple forms: “Forrest Gump,” Walmart, Nirvana, “Watchmen,” the emoji keyboard. It’s on billboards and T-shirts and bumper stickers and plastic bags snagged on storm drain grates. Its resonance is such that it hits equally as an affirmation and as a critique. Culture and counter-culture.

The people who invented the smiley face didn’t have such lofty goals for it, of course. The common telling is that the management of the Massachusets-based insurance company, Worcester Mutual Fire Insurance, wanted to bring cheer to their workplace, so they commissioned an artist to draw that happiness into being. But perhaps the reason the smiley face can be taken as both an expression of content and contempt is because its origin was filled with both those things. The smiley face was intended to bring cheer, but if you look at the totality of the record, the goal seems more sinister. In effect, the smiley face became a plain old corporate humiliation ritual.

Read the rest here.

[watching to see whether you open a new tab]

Great, now that you’re back, here’s a passage that didn’t make the cut on the draft that Playboy ran but a more local audience would find interesting.

The fact it was a humiliation ritual at all has been remarkably obscured, perhaps because the only people invested in articulating this niche origin story have in some way sought to benefit economically. The city of Worcester has used it as marketing material, thrust as they are into the neoliberal model of inter-city competition for outside investment. They found willing partners in Ball and his son, Charles, who started a foundation and attempted to make World Smiley Day happen, to limited success outside city limits.

In 2002, the boosters of the smiley tried their biggest stunt yet: a human smiley face, made of hundreds of people dressed in yellow or black, carefully arranged for an aerial camera of some sort. There are two copies of the photo in the public library’s archive. It doesn’t appear to exist anywhere else.

A 2014 celebration suggests the enthusiasm had tapered off. On the front page of the next day’s paper, a frumpy Smiley mascot slouches, hands on its hips, as it stares down a boy apparently laughing at it, as an adult struggles behind a podium to coax him into reading his lines.

Now’s a good time to say: the story was edited by Brittney McNamara, one of people behind the project of Making Teen Vogue Cool Again, who, after that outlet was gutted by a Plumley-style consolidation (RIP), followed EIC Phillip Picardi over to Playboy. Brittney, who I’ve worked with in the past on a few stories for Teen Vogue, did a fantastic job pulling out what worked and getting rid of what didn’t in this admittedly weird, sprawling story. Thank you Brittney!

Last note on this: my research folder on this is five gigabytes. There’s so much more to tell and I think I have “a book in me” on this subject. For instance, this is what the secretarial desk looked like, where people would go to get a handful of “those smile buttons,” planting the early seeds of its proto-virality. Lookin’ like Adrian Veidt’s lair!

So if any lit agents or friends of lit agents are reading this… billshaner@substack.com! I am ready and able to “query” the hell out of this thing.

Please think about supporting this little alt weekly that could!

Ok now back to the usual bullshit. But first, my ability to take on freelance work like this is due in large part to the paid subscribers that allow me to pursue the craft of writing about this city full time. I hope you agree with me that in the six years I’ve been running this thing, we’ve honed in the craft quite a bit. Imagine where we’ll be after the next six!

Subscribe / Tip Jar / Merch Store

Subscribe now

Tip Jar!

Spreading the word is also great!

Share

“Doing drugs, having sex, and peeing”

The other morning the weekday host on WICN said, with a heavy Worcester accent, “let’s get the day started with a little culture, and I’m not talking Sauerkraut,” and it was basically my “Cellar Door.” I’d never heard a more perfectly distilled expression of our perverse little regional dialect—at least since the George Russell years, may as well have been a decade ago now. The way she said “culcha” running through my head like a catchy hook all week, up until I finally watched this week’s city council meeting last night and a new turn of phrase replaced it.

“We have also had people parking at the end of the street, doing drugs, having sex, and peeing,” said a woman, calling in by phone, to voice her opinion on a private street conversion that turned out to be the single most important thing the city council did this week—spending some two hours to take a vote on making one of our 80 or so private streets... remain a private street. The most intense, highest stakes debate of the night was over one single, small side street. I don’t even remember which one. Not looking it back up. Who cares.

The city makes residents of a street pay for the conversion cost. In this case it would have apparently tacked on some $40,000 per home to tax bills. With a policy like that it’s no wonder we have, as city solicitor Alexandra Kalkounis told the council, one the highest densities of private streets in the region.

You can see how it happens. The council doesn’t address the obvious fact that the policy of making affected homeowners pay for the public way conversion roadwork directly—where in every other instance it’s a socialized public work, because that’s literally the point of paying taxes, the point of the municipality as an entity—creates a situation where private streets will stay private forever. No one says “let’s instruct the manager to change this policy so we can be done with the private street mess.” Because that would be actually governing.

So if and when a conversion proposal crops up, as was the case Tuesday, you have residents making the obvious decision that dealing with a crappy road is better than taking out $40,000 in debt for a slightly less crappy road, and they show up to the council all pissed off, all how dare you, and the council, reactionary body that it is, sees all that homeowner anger out in the gallery and decides, on those grounds alone, that the issue is Very Important, thus necessitating Lots Of Debate. And the debate becomes confined to the one street in question and weighing the opinions of a handful of people who live on it. In a city of 200,000 our primary executive governing body is taking up matters that affect maybe a dozen people. Nodding along, the concerned & benevolent city patriarchs, as the woman tells them how bad it is that people are in their cars taking drugs or having sex or gasp peeing, due to the legal status of the road. Embarrassing, man. Stupid people governing stupidly.

Meanwhile there’s not a chance in hell the following video, captured at Dan’s Rockin Cafe right next to the courthouse on Monday afternoon, will get due litigation in the hallowed Esther Howland Chambers.

ICE agents hovering around the courthouse, two blocks from City Hall, like vultures, going into small locally owned businesses to whisk someone away for god knows what reason, the point being the performative violence, using city sidewalks, city roads, city data, city pension funds, the police department’s holding cells and the man hours of those who work down there, and who man the computers feeding the fusion centers that then feed local databases up the chain, the culture of cooperation and mutual aid found in the law enforcement community, from ICE to the DA to the police, back scratching and scratching back, the city officials helpless but to lie on their behalf about “no cooperation.” The council happy to deem it anything but a “local issue.” Happy, you’ll remember Eureka Street a year ago, to blame anyone who finds a little courage in their hearts to make a stand. To cast them as threats to “public safety,” knowing full well they’re not talking about safety and they’re not talking about the public.

In Cambridge, the city council just recently voted to terminate its Shotspotter contract. There’s not a chance in hell Worcester will follow suit. In the following, from the Harvard Crimson, longtime readers may observe the similarity in the rhetoric deployed by the police chief in support of the surveillance system. But you’ll also notice that the councilors quoted aren’t reflexively parroting the chief.

Councilor Ayah A. Al-Zubi ’23, the lead sponsor of the policy order, said the city should evaluate surveillance technologies against “measurable standards” — including accuracy, cost, or resident input, before adopting them.

“It’s got a higher false positive rate in our city and cities across the U.S., in which case I believe the benefit does not outweigh the risks of situations where our police department might be misled,” she said.

Acting Police Commissioner Pauline E. Wells urged councilors to keep the system in place, arguing that ShotSpotter gives police a tool to respond to gunfire when residents do not call 911.

“There have been at least 11 times when ShotSpotter detected gunfire in our city, and not a single 911 call came in — not one. That means 11 moments when no one reached for the phone, 11 moments when officers would have no direction, 11 moments when seconds were slipping away, and ShotSpotter was the only reason help was there at all,” Wells said.

Councilor Jivan G. Sobrinho-Wheeler argued the city should prioritize accurate technology, even if it means changing devices to avoid an ineffective system.

“Let’s actually use proven technologies for all of the things, and let’s tell that to our community, rather than doing some security theater and telling them we’re deploying a thing that’s not actually helping,” he said.

Here’s a representative sample of the sort of review Shotspotter is getting in Worcester, from a Standing Committee on Public Safety meeting earlier this month. The subject of the following is “Resource Router,” an AI dispatching tool that portends to forecast crime. It’s the other product Worcester purchases from the Shotspotter company alongside the network of “gun detection” microphones. (Couple old posts that get into it: “What is ResourceRouter?” “A streamlining solution for crime manufacturers”)

TOOMEY: I mean, clearly, numbers tell a story. And I think that what’s interesting to me is that I think that some of the things that we’re using now also help some of the data. What are you calling it now? The program that has people, the officers getting out and what is that?

SAUCIER: Yeah, resource Router.

TOOMEY: Resource router, thank you. I’ll have to put that into the memory bank. Resource router. Is that, does that have any bearing on the numbers?

SAUCIER:Every single shift officers are given a, it’s basically a box of where likely the most activity is going to be. And they spend time in those areas. But again, call load for 911 calls and whatnot. That could be different. These are more, that’s used mostly for deterrence of crime. Which is our ultimate goal. We don’t want people to become victims. So we try to be out there visible so they’re not become one.

TOOMEY: But a lot of that is also based on past historical events and things like that.

SAUCIER: To the chair, it’s based on a lot of different factors. But the most important one is it’s based on people that call into the police, not police initiated activity.

TOOMEY: Right. Okay. Thank you. And again, I think the numbers certainly tell a story.

Just leading questions setting the chief up to repeat the marketing material. No more, no less.

All told our Shotspotter contracts cost the city about a million annually. The budget currently being reviewed has no new positions scheduled for DPW road crews. How many pothole fillers can you get with $1 million going to a shitty tech company?

With Toomey chairing Public Safety, the question is moot.

Leave a comment

Share

Odds and ends

One more pitch for some love!

Subscribe / Tip Jar / Merch Store

Pretty busy news week all told. Here are some things I couldn’t get to today…

Brad Petrishen’s write-up on the now-suspended boxing program at the State Police Academy is worth a read. The quote from Brian Williams, SPAM president, says it all.

“We hope this report leads to the additional resources and incentives necessary to support their continued success in training and developing some of the finest troopers in the nation.”

So we killed someone, that means we get more money, right?

Steve Earl coming to Groton Music Center, which I hear is beautiful - Steve Earle - 51 Years of Songs and Stories - Groton Hill Music Center

Mom can we get a morally correct prosecutor? Mom: we have a morally correct prosecutor at home: [Pic of Steven Gagne and Thomas Duffy holding hands]

— Nelson Place School Principal on Leave after Opposition

— Worcester plaintiffs part of Massachusetts school segregation lawsuit

John Keough with a banger of a poem in his “Writing Stuff Down” newsletter. A man of many talents! Towering Figures - by John Edward Keough

the colorful villains always escape

and always kill again

and always kill again

and always kill again

I made my first very rudimentary VCO last night. More on that once I’ve fully built my own synth, lol. But for now, if you want to go down this rabbit hole with me, this guy’s videos kick ass. Heady stuff.

Ok talk soon!

Subscribe now

Tip jar

Dear Shaun,

This heat wave is killing me. I know that it is not always this hot, but I am strongly considering getting a pool. Do you think that is a good idea? I just think it would be nice to have a place to cool off, when I am really suffering in this uncomfortable heat. Am I missing something?

-Serious Swimmer

Dear Serious Swimmer,

The moment you drive a car off the lot, it has dropped in value. Sure you have a $540,000 Lamborghini, but you can only sell it back for half. That is not great in my opinion. Also, I assume none of you have a car of that value and if you do: Nice car, dork.

A pool is also depreciating in monetary value, not from the first time you pee in it, but when you stand over it and say, “wow I have a pool now.” It is not only a pit or giant bucket (depending on if you have an in-ground pool or above ground one) to fill with water and chlorine but it is also something to continue to throw money into. Your insurance will go up because you just put possible death in your backyard. Maintenance cost will get you in the hundreds per month. Weather could cause any number of damages. Late stage capitalism also plays a factor here, with the enshitification of products. Nothing lasts anymore and pool filters or pumps are no exception. Those are going to break and you are going to need to keep buying those. Plus with a pool there are going to be more opportunities for you to be pressured into hosting a party. And sure, you can ask people to BYOB and make a dish, but you’re buying your own food and drink in case your guests are lazy or horrible cooks. So that’s even more money you weren’t factoring in.

All that said, you gotta get a pool. I can see you now, cannonballing into it. Having a pool is the ultimate status symbol. You become a necessary thread in the fabric of your urban, suburban, or exurban community. Pools bring sports teams, dance troupes, and church cliques together. Some of the lamest kids I knew growing up had a pool, and that became their identity. They were suddenly tolerated in the group or at the lunch table because you wanted to go swim in their pool. They were absolute drips to hang with, but you turned a blind eye to their lack of personality as you slowly drip-dried in their kitchen, waiting for a snack after playing Marco Polo for an hour.

Do you lack a personality? Are you afraid of a public pool? Are you grossed out but weeds at the bottom of pond or lake? Is a sprinkler not enough for you? Do you not know anyone with ALS, so therefore you can’t dump a bucket of ice on your head? Do you not have AC? Do you not want to solve a puzzle in the air conditioned Public Library? If you answered “yes” to all of these you may be entitled to a pool in your backyard that you spend thousands to install and maintain.

You should, without a shred of doubt, get a pool. Invite me over and I too can ignore your story about how there were two yolks in one of the eggs you cracked to make brownies for this party. It won’t look rude though, I’ll just be having too much fun running in circles making a whirlpool.

NEWS

This Friday is the best show in Worcester: Hot Dog! It’s at the historic George’s Coney Island Hotdogs in Worcester and it is FREE. It is also at 8PM. We’ve got some great comics and great surprises ahead for this one.

I also want to point out a brand new show we’re putting together at Hunchback Gallery. Local comedian Adam Swanson approached us about having a storytelling comedy show where we can use photos, graphs and other visuals to highlight the story. It is also FREE and it is going to be a hoot. Poster below.

Again that’s “John Cashman Needs A Liver.”

As far as the show’s concerned: a loose round up of the activities engaged in by our fair city’s collection of gross little guys. We go over Joe Petty’s op-ed, the Sturbridge man who runs the public market trying to run for Mary Keefe’s State Rep seat despite not living in the district in a very proveable way, Ray Mariano’s little baby brain, his childlike wonder, his rose-colored glasses, the ongoing insult to the profession it remains that the Telegram lets him “write” a “column” while they have “no other actual columnist.”

Local journalism is a hell of a way to try and earn a living, and we’ve got a rare thing going here where we get to do it exactly how we please to the best of our ability. I’ll stress again that is rare. And it’s all due to the people who chip in a few bucks a month to make it happen.

Subscribe / Tips / Merch Store

Subscribe now

Tip jar

“A Sturbridge resident is trying to run for a Worcester state rep seat”

Ray Mariano: “Things I Miss Most In Today’s Politics”

FIFA may fuck up the US World Cup for fans in even more ways than we could’ve imagined. Will Worcester even have our scheduled viewing parties?

This podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Pocket Casts others via this RSS link.

Leave a comment

Share

Here’s what’s on the agenda:

¡Public Petitions!
The fact that there are five public petitions on the agenda, the most I’ve seen in my 150+ hours of watching meetings, says something important about the current moment. When community members feel heard and included in decision-making, they usually don’t need to turn to public petitions to have their concerns acknowledged. The irony is, a year ago the school committee approved new core values for the district, which were developed after extensive surveys and conversations with students, families and community. I tried to find them on the WPS website, but a search for “core values” did not turn them up, so I’ll just leave them here:

As Brian Allen said in his first message as Superintendent, “Our work will remain grounded in the core values that define us: belonging, respect, inclusivity, collaboration, and equity. These aren’t just words — they are principles that guide our actions and shape our culture.” The public petitions serve as a reminder that many community members are still looking to see those values reflected in practice

The petitions are in reference to:

Alternative Schools.
Three petitions refer to the closing of Worcester’s alternative schools: the Academic Center for Transition (grades K-6) and Worcester Alternative (grades 9-12). Students attending those schools will be offered a spot at the Central Massachusetts Collaborative.

Bullying.
Another petition asks for accountability around the district’s bullying prevention and intervention plan. There has been an uptick of items about bullying on the school committee agenda this year.

Voluntary transfer policy.
One petition refers to clarification on the voluntary transfer policy. Voluntary transfer is the process families use to request that their child attend a different WPS school than the one they are assigned to. Students are accepted on a “case-by-case” basis, and transportation is only provided if a student receives specialized transportation as a related service through an IEP or 504. As happens each year in May, voluntary transfers are denied and rescinded and people get frustrated by the black box that is the voluntary transfer process. While not explicitly stated in the policy, which can be found on page 5 of the student handbook, families are told in practice that voluntary transfer can be rescinded for “lack of seats, attendance, or other issues.”

That kind of case-by-case decision making, combined with the ability to rescind a placement for essentially any reason, means there is no real transparency around how many seats are available at different schools and how the decision is made about who gets them. As part of the school realignment process, data was released on the percentage of students attending schools on voluntary transfer, and it’s bonkers: 38% of students attending Roosevelt live outside its zone, as do 25% of students attending Doherty, and 20% of students attending Flagg Street.

There’s been cases of families feeling that their child’s voluntary transfer was rescinded as retaliation for advocating for their students. And I have heard stories of favoritism in the voluntary transfer process, including seats being held for gifted athletes, district employees’ kids, students that school committee members advocate for, or for certain arts magnet students. But it is hard to verify these stories because the process itself is not transparent. And that is a problem: when there is no clear system for who gets access and why, families are left to rely on rumors, relationships, and luck.

Report of the Superintendent.
This meeting’s Report of the Superintendent is on Multilingual Learners. As demonstrated by the chart above, the majority of English learners in WPS are Spanish speakers, although that percentage has dropped in the last six years. (40% of the district’s Hispanic students are English learners, and 35% of elementary students are English learners, down from 49% last year).

One-to-One Device Lease.
The district is requesting approval to enter a five year lease for Chromebook replacement to remain a one student to one device district. According to this somewhat confusing chart, and discussion from previous school committee meetings, I think the district is already leasing 6,000 chromebooks for $2.9 million over the next five years (these are solely used at the middle school level). This request is to lease an additional 6,000 chromebooks at a cost of $3.6 million over five years. If approved, by 2030 the district will be paying $5.2 million a year in technology leases for 30,000 chromebooks, 5,000 Macbook Airs, and 4,000 ipads.

School Bus Ticketing.
Alex Guardiola (District D) has an item on the agenda requesting “an update on the status of school bus stop-arm camera enforcement technology for Worcester Public Schools, including whether the City of Worcester and Worcester Public Schools have opted into the Commonwealth’s recently authorized school bus camera enforcement program, the timeline for implementation, projected costs and revenues, vendor selection process, and how the program would improve student safety.”

It has now been a year and a half since Governor Maura Healey signed a bill into law allowing municipalities and school districts to install bus-mounted cameras and issue tickets to drivers who illegally pass stopped school buses. Both the Worcester City Council and School Committee voted to opt into the program in January 2025. At a November 10, 2025 Finance, Operations, and Governance Subcommittee meeting, Director of Transportation Mike Freeman said that a vendor bid was out and that implementation would come at no cost to the district, since expenses would be covered through ticket revenue. After asking for updates every few months, my understanding is that implementation is largely outside the district’s control. Police departments across Massachusetts appear to still be working through questions about how third-party vendors can issue violations using Massachusetts Uniform Citations, even when those citations are reviewed and approved by a certified officer. This is due to the “No Fix Law” which mandates strict procedures for issuing motor vehicle citations. Chicopee, for example, is the only municipality to install cameras so far, but has not yet begun issuing fines.

Even knowing that a 12-year-old child was hit by a landscape van while getting off a school bus in 2021, I was still shocked by how many drivers ignored stop signs at my kids bus stop on Pleasant Street when my oldest started kindergarten. Every single week for the last four years, I have watched cars speed through bus stop signs, or accelerate to try to beat the flashing yellow lights, which is exactly the behavior this law is meant to address. As Sergeant James Foley explained in a Worcester school bus safety video: “What we have been seeing throughout the city of Worcester is a lot of people are picking up their speed when they see the yellow lights thinking that they don’t have to slow down or come to a full stop. That is not the case.” PLEASE SLOW DOWN AND STOP FOR BUSES!

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

According to the Worcester County Registry of Deeds, Mercurio’s last recorded declaration of homestead, from 2023, makes his official domicile about 20 miles away from the 15th Worcester District, where he has to live, legally, to run for the seat.

Here have a look for yourself. (Redacted the exact address because there’s no reason to be like that about it).

May I direct you to point #1 of the above document wherein it reads “our principal residence.” And how that principal residence is in Sturbridge. Lmao. The 15th Worcester District is entirely in the city of Worcester, stretching from Main South, up Vernon Hill, and into the shrubby suburban territory Grafton and Shrewsbury will lay equal claim to once Worcester is mercifully Balkanized. None of that happens to be in the town of Sturbridge, where Mercurio lives.

On his campaign filings in OCPF and elsewhere the Worcester Public Market’s address is the address given. He is a manager there and owns a business there. Some sort of wine bar. And that’s all wonderful but you do have to live in a district to run for the right to represent it in state government. That’s one of the top criteria, in fact, of the position of state representative. First, you have to be a living human being and probably an adult one of a certain threshold though I’m not sure of the specific language on that. Second, you have to live in the district you seek to represent. You can be many other things besides that, and state reps often are, but you do have to be alive and reside in the district.

On Mercurio’s campaign website, knowing what we know now, it’s funny to read his opening line: “I grew up right here. In this district. On these streets.” ...then I moved, he didn’t say. He then has the balls to say Mary Keefe, who lives in the district, has not been “present enough” in it. Whereas he—a commuter from the town built around a fake pilgrim village, conveniently located just off the Mass Pike, halfway between New York and Plymouth Rock—would be much more present. Surely. Also, in his bio he speaks about having served as a legislative aide on Beacon Hill back in the 90s. Someone like that should know about the residency requirement. Hard to decide which is more disqualifying, his knowing or his not knowing.

It’s hard to tell how serious Mercurio is. He has $28,000 in his campaign fund, which looks like a lot until you realize it’s all one personal loan from candidate to campaign. He’s spent all of three dollars, on a deposit fee from TD Bank. The website is an obvious template from some or another Act Blue-adjacent enterprise.

Mary Keefe doesn’t deserve this. She is one of the rare good ones and does as much as we can hope for a state rep to do in this state, where the reps can’t do very much at all. I wonder who put him up to this? I’d say Tim Murray but Tim’s already put another poor sucker up to it: Ron Waddell, a nice enough guy from what I can tell, who has also decided to try to unseat Mary Keefe for reasons that will never be clearly articulated but are nevertheless pretty obvious.

Here’s a bit from the platform section of Waddell’s website that may as well be straight from the Chamber Exchange.

Third, our small businesses are the heart of Worcester’s economy. From neighborhood shops to local entrepreneurs, these businesses create jobs, strengthen communities, and help Worcester grow. That’s why Ron believes supporting small businesses means reducing barriers, encouraging innovation, and making sure local entrepreneurs have the resources they need to succeed. Because a thriving local economy benefits everyone.

His fourth priority is government transparency. “Government should work with the people, not behind closed doors.” But nowhere on his website is there any mention of the power broker he’s partnered with in this endeavor, who very much runs city hall and does so behind a series of successive closed doors, designed to slam shut when the one in front of it opens, like the locks of a canal. Don’t forget about Economic Development Council, folks! Especially when we get to our next segment.

As always the truth is in the bank reports. Among Waddell’s first donors are Tim Murray, Vincent Pedone, Paul Giorgio, and their shared attack dog, Steve Quist. To read the March report makes it plain to see: Waddell’s campaign is just the next front in Murray’s weird little war on progressives. Encouraged by his ability to get a real-life Geodude elected over Etel Haxhiaj in City Council District 5, Murray now sends his troops deeper into the Eastern Front.

I suppose this is my first dispatch on the 2026 campaign trail, such as it is. While city races are a “big deal” for this newsletter and its mandate, statewide races are a little less so. For instance there’s no real practical difference between Governor Healey and any Serious Republican that poses a threat, though that doesn’t appear to be the case this year, as the Mass GOP nominated a penis-looking gentleman from the MAGA set.

The rent control ballot question is a different animal. That will likely be my focus as we move to November. Great op-ed in the Telegram on that front from Keith Linhares, per usual.

And oh yeah actually my first dispatch from the campaign trail was actually the post about Joe Petty’s opposition to rent control a few weeks ago. And, would you look at that, as of press time it appears the man is at it again: “Opinion/Guest column: Rent control not the fix for housing crisis.” In this op-ed, published today, Petty retreads many of the points made in the real estate industry orchestrated “you’ll never believe what these 13 mayors think about rent control” article in the Globe, the subject of my last post. He asserts it would be catastrophic to the city’s budget, but doesn’t explain how. He again presents the city’s housing production plan, a compliance document for towns that want to avoid building affordable housing, to give an air of responsibility to his inherently Reaganist, supply-side argument against what is a tepid regulation of the real estate market. If you know how Joe Petty speaks you’ll know he didn’t write this. And down to the phrasing, it’s got real estate lobby all over it. For example, these two sentences in Petty’s op-ed...

Rent control has been shown to disincentivize investment and new construction starts desperately needed to address our housing crisis. St. Paul, Minnesota, saw a 79% decrease in new apartment construction permits after adopting rent control in 2022. Montgomery County, Maryland, saw new multifamily permits decrease from 2,093 to only 54 between 2024 and 2025 after adopting rent control.

...are straight up copy-pasted from a fact sheet crafted by the real estate lobby’s opposition campaign, cynically named “Housing for Massachusetts.”

God, what an asshole.

Good a time as ever to move to the briefest possible council coverage. But first....

Please Support This Outlet!

Time for the plug! The thing I always write last because it’s a chore. Today (Saturday) I picked up a landscaping shift and I’m so sore from pushing wheelbarrows of mulch up a hill that just typing is giving me grief. So today, extra chore.

But I really do love writing this newsletter and editing its growing roster of other writers and recording a podcast every week and doing a live podcast for the first time and speaking at four different classes at Claremont Academy about journalism and advancing all the various other special projects. The time and freedom to do these things is due 100 percent to the paid subscribers. For $5 a month you basically will this thing into being. I haven’t worked a shift at another job before today in quite some time. And the exhaustion I’m feeling right now underscores that none of the many facets of this enterprise get done if I’m working even part time somewhere else. Blessed I’ve been able to give it my all for so long and I promise to continue to do so as long as you keep giving me $5 a month.

Subscribe now

Tip Jar

Also be sure to check out the live podcast if you haven’t yet! We raised $450 for LUCE off the ticket sales and the recording is pretty special I think.

Also two our esteemed guests for that program, Etel Haxhiaj and Jillian Phillips of LUCE were honored with the Center for Nonviolent Solutions’ 2025 Peacemaker Award earlier this week.

“At a time when immigrants around the country are being subjected to violent raids and violation of their rights, the Center is proud to honor two people who have stood up for them at great personal cost,” said Center Program Director Claire Schaeffer-Duffy. “As community organizer, Jillian has advocated tirelessly for immigrants while Etel has embodied the courageous compassion needed to counter their dehumanization.”

Very nice!

Council hits new level of uselessness in almost eight hour meeting

The council spent 7.5 hours to take four meaningless votes of support on four department budgets. Those 7.5 hours were, as I predicted in my last post, filled with a lot of complaining and comparatively little analyzing of the budget. The four departments were, in order, the DPW, Transportation and Mobility, Emergency Services, and the WPD, which was naturally afforded the courtesy of the last time slot, when it was “getting late,” a reality councilors used to launder their lack of scrutiny as a courtesy. For instance, Moe Bergman opened his comments on the police budget this way...

I feel guilty asking too many questions. So I’ll be very brief. It is that time of the night, or morning.

But earlier in the day, Bergman had lots of questions, and did not appear the least bit guilty, as we’ll get to in a bit.

First, I want to put a fine point on how remarkable it was that the council spent basically an entire workday for a normal person doing... whatever it is they do at these budget hearings. A visual breakdown is helpful here, courtesy Davinci Resolve, the video editing program I do my council reporting on. (Should do a “process” video in case anyone’s interested. It rocks.)

The bar in the middle, under Kate Toomey thanking the police chief one of the several times she did, is the full tape, which I cut and color coded by department. In case it’s hard to read on your device, it’s three hours complaining to the DPW (orange), two hours complaining to Traffic and Mobility (yellow), a little shy of an hour complaining to emergency services about the 311 service (green), an hour and a half on police (blue).

Somewhere in the middle, Joe Petty made the executive decision to let other departments go home, saying police would be last. It was a strategic decision if the goal is limiting police oversight. The council always has a hard stop at midnight, meaning the last department to be reviewed is the only one with a finite amount of time in which to do it. Here’s the timeline laid out roughly along the 4 p.m. start time of the meeting.

They finally get to police at 10:15 p.m., with less than two hours of available time. Versus the seemingly infinite time spent on the DPW and Traffic and Mobility, which is a small department, in many ways a DPW appendage. Five hours of very serious and often insulting questioning of public works. Less than two hours of very unserious questioning of the police, with the exception of Khrystian King.

Moe Bergman’s approach to the DPW and Transportation and Mobility, versus the police, is worth examining for a moment. Remember when he said he’d “feel guilty” asking too many questions of the police chief. This is how he opened his comments to Steve Rolle, head of Transportation and Mobility...

I’m going to start off by saying it’s a little bit like a spelling bee. The questions are going to get a little bit harder.In both cases, he was antagonistic and highly critical.

First of all: Oooo we got a tough guy. Second of all his questions weren’t hard: they all boiled down to “why do we fund pedestrian improvements when most people drive?” An easy question, Moe. It’s because everyone driving everywhere in perpetuity as the city grows is unsustainable and irresponsible. Trying to keep it so you can drive across town in 20 minutes, sacrificing consideration for every other form of mobility, allowing them to be legitimately deadly in a routine way, is what we were doing here from 1960 to 2020. This approach produced a reality in which you cannot get across the city in 20 minutes, but you nevertheless expect to, there being no other alternative....

Everyone driving at a given time experiences this disconnect between what they want and what they got, inching along in frustrating spurts, shielded from society and its social expectations in their expensive steel boxes, irritated and angry, surrounded by other anonymous contextless people in their own boxes of steel, who could at any moment do something unexpected that would kill you... and yet you inch closer to the rear bumper of the car ahead of you, you start and stop more dramatically, you attempt increasingly dangerous maneuvers... driving in heavy traffic is a strange liminal space we’ve come to accept as a fact of life. It can and often does resemble a mass psychosis event. People who’ve learned to forget themselves once behind the wheel drive to die or to kill. And so they often do. It is crazy making and it is cooking the earth and any investment in relieving “congestion” by expanding accommodations for cars produces more cars and thus more congestion.

Phew got a little carried away there. All’s to say it is insane that these councilors like Bergman have a politics built 90 percent on roadway inconvenience grievances and yet they kick and scream at every attempt to correct the horrible transportation policies that produced, continue to produce, our horrible roads. Baby brain behavior. Petulant and visionless.

I pulled the entire exchange between Bergman and DTM Commissioner Steve Rolle referenced above because it really is something that needs to be seen to be believed.

I think Etel Haxhiaj hit the nail on the head with a recent post putting Bergman’s comments up next to horrifying recent stories of gruesome pedestrian crashes.

I shared the trial court community service van today (day 5/10) with a young man who had been hit by a car while crossing the street. Left with impaired mobility on his arms and legs.

Roughly same area where a Worcester resident was recently killed. In the most recent budget hearing, councilor Bergman demanded to know (with a lot of righteous indignation) why why City staff don’t prioritize cars moving fast from point A to B.

This while at least two people (one this year and one last year) were killed while crossing the street. This doesn’t take into account pedestrians who’ve been severely injured while crossing.

I didn’t expect to think about road fatalities today during the 5th day of “giving back to my community”, though I’ve been so angry at learning my friend’s husband ( you will hear from her soon) was severely injured while crossing the street recently.

When he wasn’t simply complaining about things, Bergman positioned himself in his comments as someone who needed to be convinced in order for the DPW or Transportation and Mobility to get their funding. Such as in this comment directed at DPW Commissioner John Westerling.

I’m certainly supportive of the fact that money is often needed when it comes to equipment and personnel. We get that, nothing’s for free and if you want things to get better, oftentimes money is a solution.

I’m not convinced it’s the only solution and I’m not convinced throwing more money at problems all the time when the problems haven’t been fully identified, fixes the problem. Certainly going to be supportive of the budget, but let me just say I’m going to be very much like Harry Truman was. I’m going to be the show me guy because I really need to see how this plays out.

But that’s just not the case. Even in the way it’s supposed to work, one unhappy councilor can’t do much but make motions to cut individual line items, and those motions would fail. But in the way it actually works, it’s even more ridiculous. Because councilors rarely make any motions to alter the budget. What authority they could assert does not get asserted. Bergman’s claim to “needing” his grievances satisfied is an empty one. Pure theater, whether or not he knows it.

To put a fine point on it, Bergman, after talking about what he “needs to see,” voted to support both department budgets with the rest of the council, who do so out of habit, as a way to move on to the next part of the ritual. Both votes were 10-0-1. King abstained, rightly pointing out it’s silly to approve individual department budgets before the ultimate, legally binding vote on the whole budget at the end of the process. Automatically undercutting your own leverage, you could say.

Khrystian King, was, as always, the outlier, not only on these department-level votes but across the whole process. He tried to ask useful budget questions and provide real oversight. In doing so, he pried open a few good lines of inquiry. The lack of formal complaints filed about the mold problem we’re told animates the need for a new roof at the police station, the amount spent on new equipment for the DPW while new positions are few and far between, the 30 percent deficit in engineers in the department, and some new information from the police chief about co-response with mental health professionals that seems to contradict past statements made (something I’m interested in and will write about, but need more time to parse). The city is actively trying to get out of the body camera stipend commitment made to patrolman’s union, which still costs the city a half a million annually. Thomas Duffy and the rest of the union leadership have been stubborn on the point they should be paid for body cameras. Batista said as much answering a question from King, and he didn’t sound overly optimistic of the city’s success.

All’s to say King was the only one, for the most part, really digging into the budget. At these supposed budget hearings, you’d think there’d be more of it. But he was the outlier. Bergman was the best example of the normative behavior, using his time to air reactionary grievances, framing them in a way that projects the appearance of authority. Department heads, receiving his peppering gotcha questions, politely answer in overly slow cadences, as if placating an insolent child who isn’t there’s to discipline.

Before we move on, I should stress that it doesn’t need to be this way. The nature of these “hearings” are arrived at culturally. They are as much a ritual or tradition as they are a process of government, perhaps moreso. It falls on Joe Petty, ultimately. A different chairperson could shape a different process. It’s easy to forget that in this city. Joe Petty has presided over the council and school committee for longer than most of us have been paying attention, myself included. Something to keep in mind.

Odds and Ends

Please subscribe if you can swing it! We work very hard to make Worcester’s local media landscape a little bit brighter. It is at best Sisyphean but here we are.

Subscribe now

Tip jar

Great piece in Hell World from a real local journalism compatriot down in Pittsburg by the name of Jordana Rosenfeld. “We don’t want them feeling at home and comfortable we want them removed.”The following passage should ring familiar to longtime readers of this newsletter.

Official strategies included a systematic sweep of homeless encampments coupled with the thorough relocation of social services, including shelter beds, to locations that were less desirable and more far-flung. There was a modest investment in “street outreach” and case management ostensibly intended to help people get into housing (whether or not that worked is a different story) and an indeterminate, hotly disputed number of affordable units were added to the market (the only thing clear about how many new units got added is that it wasn’t near enough).

This part may as well have been written about the Downtown Business Improvement District (BID), and the snitch patrol they employ to “beautify” the area—the mobile trash collection kit next to them mostly for appearances, the real tool being the walkie talkie, and the threat of further routine police harassment it implies to an Undesirable. You have to imagine they just have to touch it, like a cowboy’s hand to sling in a Western movie, to show they mean business, to show they have the power and the person who needs to “move along” does not.

More interestingly, however, with some Downtown stakeholders desperate to “do something” about homelessness, others desperate to appear to be doing something, and everyone willing to settle for the homeless people simply going somewhere else, unofficial strategies to clean up Downtown were quietly executed without any public acknowledgement. City and county officials, business leaders, and major nonprofits created parallel and overlapping systems of surveillance, obsessively tracking the presence of unhoused people and tents and maximizing police engagement to harass, arrest, and otherwise induce those people to go elsewhere.

A few of my pieces appear in a roundup Luke included at the end, of a bunch of great stories on homelessness Hell World has published.

This one, from last year, about Healey’s war on family shelters.

And this one, in 2021 about the large encampment demolition behind the Walmart, at the behest of Walmart.

Rosenfeld’s reporting had me thinking about a passage I read in a short new book of political analysis AK Press put out, called “Naming the Moment” by an anonymous as far as I can tell group of writers going by The Emergency Break Collective.

Between the growth of surplus populations arising from automation, offshoring production, and the decreasing reliability of the main labor market regulation strategies established during the late-twentieth century, we now find ourselves in a crisis in which regulation has taken on increasingly fascistic characteristics. Consider, for instance, how the criminalization of immigrants and the hardening of national borders have coincided with explicit efforts to regulate gender, sexuality, and reproductive autonomy in the interest of increasing American (read: white) birth-rates. Such efforts are labor market regulation strategies played out at the level of the population. From this per spective, legislative and street-level attacks on trans people must be viewed as being of a piece with the concurrent growth of fascist pronatalism and anti-immigrant violence.

The concept of “surplus populations” seems to be of ever increasing use, and yet we don’t hear about it much. Is it because the profit motive of AI relies on the generation of new surplus populations, thus tying the technology into a wider fascistic project? After all, something like 92 percent of all growth in American GDP in 2025 was data centers. Hm! Could be people with their hands on the public discourse till would stand to lose some money if the public at large were to connect a certain few dots.

Lastly “drum machine country” is a subgenre I didn’t know existed before NTS put out a stellar playlist of it recently (love NTS, best reliable source for stuff that perks my ears up). But it so happens I’ve been slowly and quietly plugging away at a demo tape that’s right in this pocket. While most of the music I share here or make for the podcast is silly electronic riffing, these songs are rootsy and earnest and my babies and perhaps a real statement. And I think one or two are “actually good,” though it’s the listener that gets to decide that ultimately. Freeing to realize it’s out of your hands. With any sort of art or writing or performance, really. Since you don’t get to decide, it means you don’t have to decide. You just make what you make to your own taste, then you put it out in the world mostly for the purposes of moving to the next tasty thing. That’s a free artist lesson right there don’t say I never did nothing for ya. Next one’s gunna cost you, though. Anyway, I’ll have to call the songs done at some point soon—will share on here of course, then you all, my dear readers, get to be the Deciders of Worth. Prepare your thumbs for the up-or-down.

Ok talk soon!

This two hour recording has been left unedited for content (while heavily edited for sound quality, due to the band practicing on the floor below us, hence the delay in getting it up) because we feel it’s worth it to have the entire thing preserved. It is, as Etel put it in a text shortly after we all packed up and left, the first oral history of this event—one I feel will be looked back on as one of the most significant hinge points in the city’s history.

Through the course of the show, we move loosely from past to present, starting with a pre-written local political context, up to what people can and should be doing now, as the deportation machine becomes more streamlined, more efficient, more eerily quiet.

From ticket sales, we raised $450 for LUCE’s direct support fund in Worcester, which has a specific name that is escaping me right now, but can be found here if you’d like to make a direct donation yourself. The “big check” discussed in the episode is currently being commissioned! Updates to come. Thank you to everyone who purchased a ticket, especially those who bought the extra generous tier, which ended up being almost half.

For a first live show, it went better than we could have hoped. That’s not to say it went perfect and the flubs and hiccups are left in the tape so that the next time we do a live show, you can marvel at how much better we got at it.

Have an idea for the next Outdoor Cats event? Drop it in the comments.

Leave a comment

And please consider a paid subscription. Outdoor Cats episodes getting put up on a weekly basis is one thing, but this live event? There is no conceivable way I could have booked this event, promoted it, ripped apart my recording desk, schlepped it all to an art gallery, rebuilt it for the purposes of recording and a live mix, ran sound for the event, ran the event, did the podcast, packed up my recording desk, brought it home, rebuilt it, mixed and mastered the recording of the event, which took several days in this case, then wrote this post… there’s no conceivable way any of that happens if this newsletter does not support at least one full time position. So, given our only source of revenue is reader contributions, the question becomes whether you, the reader and/or listener, appreciate having this outlet in your city? Is that appreciation worth the equivalent of a beer a month to you?

Subscribe / Tips / Merch Store

Something to think about! I can promise you I’ll keep doing this with gusto so long as I’m able. The event was a ton of work, but it was soul restoring in a way I didn’t know how much I needed. I know I’m not the only one.

If you feel the same, share this episode far and wide! That helps too!

Share

This podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Pocket Casts others via this RSS link.

Intro music by Bill Shaner 5.10.26

Outro music: Orgone “Lay Your Life Down”

Subscribe now

Tip jar

Dear Shaun,

I think it is now safer than ever to hitchhike. I want to start doing it, but my loved ones are pleading with me to not take the risk. They all say that I should just call them if I need a ride. But in the age of the screen, I think this would be a very fun way to meet new people! Please tell me I can start hitchhiking!

-Hitchhike Hero

Dear Hitchhike Hero,

Of course you need to hitchhike. This column is called “Bad Advice,” if anyone is going to tell you to put your thumb or leg out to request a ride, it has got to be me. Not only should you do this, but I think the whole world has got to go back to this form of transportation. I mean what is the City of Worcester’s bus system but a very large, and very late, version of hitchhiking? Could be just as safe to be picked up by a soccer mom or a lonely man running errands. Sure it gets tricky when you need to get to Boston or Providence. That takes luck. But if you’re just trying to get around town it’s got to be pretty good.

My dad grew up in Pittsfield, MA and would hitchhike to basketball practice. He hitchhiked to go meet his date for prom. His brother once hitchhiked after a drinking party in the woods and got picked up by an older couple. After driving a ways, the woman asked where he went to school, he said St. Joseph’s. She responded, “Oh our grandsons go there!” And he says, “yeah gram it’s me!” So that could happen to you too! Get picked up by your grandma without her even recognizing you!

My father went to Assumption here in Worcester. And he would hitchhike back to Pittsfield for winter and summer break. I’m convinced the reason he decided to stay and work in Worcester is because he didn’t have a ride back to the Berkshires. Hitchhiking was very much a part of the culture right into the 70s. Then Reagan, Bush and Clinton had to start going on and on about “super predators” and take all the fun out of another way of transportation. Between those barely whistled racist terms and the 24-hour news cycle it does just seem inevitable that we would get rid of thumbing for a ride.

Speaking of the 24-hour news cycle, I just read Ted Turner’s obituary and he used to sing Nazi songs outside of Jewish fraternities and post KKK material on black students’ dorms at Brown University. He did not get kicked out of school for either of those acts. He got kicked out for having a woman in his dorm. Man, fuck Ivy Leagues.

Anyways, yes. Please hitchhike. Driving apps are just giving more money to the tech idiots who are trying to kill us with AI. (Yes, we understand Substack is part of that problem too, more on that soon.) Of course you could call a cab, but that costs money. Yes, the bus is free and is actually pretty great for the most part, but sometimes you’re standing up because there is piss on a seat or you’re stuck at an unofficial stop because someone is having mental health crisis. What’s the worst that could happen with hitchhiking? You die? Yeah, we’re all spiraling towards that anyway. You might just as easily die crossing the street in Webster Square or living in an old apartment that has asbestos. Plus, you could meet some cool people asking for a ride on the side of the road.

There are only two types of folks who pick up hitchhikers: lonely interesting people and lonely psychos. Fifty/fifty odds are a pretty good bet. Go ahead and hike up that skirt or stick out that thumb. Go meet your neighbors from their back seat!

Share

Leave a comment

NEWS

This week we have two shows. The first is on Saturday at Wachusett BrewYard in the Worcester Public Market. Tickets can be bought here. It has two amazing comedians from New York, Casey James Salengo and Courtney Maginnis. Check out Casey’s Special here. Check out Courtney’s here.

Then on Sunday American Flatbread is doing an Industry Night. There will be bowling and then at 7:30 we’ll have a nice little showcase for you. It is FREE and will be a very good time.

We love a slow-speed pursuit. But a slow speed pursuit of a front-end loader? Jeesé Louisé. The phonetics alone.

Stuff coming up….

First Outdoor Cats Live show Friday night at Hunchback Gallery! It’s going to be a very good and hopefully soul restoring series of conversations. We got Etel Haxhiaj, Maydee Morales, Ashley Spring all confirmed and more to come! And we want to hear from you as well! Call into our new tip line—508-205-9520—with any thoughts or observations you have on how Eureka Street went down and what it says about the city. Or send us a voice memo at outdoorcats@sudomail.com. You can send something written there as well but that’s not as fun now is it?

This Thursday to Sunday Cinema Worcester is showing Steal This Story, Please!” the new documentary I’ve been itching to see about Democracy Now and Amy Goodman and how they built such a durable and fiercely independent outlet. The screenings take place in the WCUW Front Room, which I’m ashamed to say I haven’t been to yet. See you there, probably on Saturday.

While we’re on the subject, independent means something in journalism. It really does! Which makes the way the Worcester Guardian uses it some really insulting theatre of the absurd. Made a little video about that on a whim the other night.

Please subscribe to this actually independent outlet. Every reader contribution advances us along the path to cementing ourselves as Worcester’s own little Democracy Now!

Subscribe / Tip Jar (BuyMeACoffee) / Merch Store

Real quick, putting a recent statement from Worcester Earn A Bike on your radar. It’s about the Wheelie Kids and the WPD’s crazy treatment of them lately.

We are deeply troubled by accounts of the police response to the recent 508 bikelife rideout on Saturday, April 18th in Worcester. Young cyclists

reported being followed, detained, and tackled simply for riding their bicycles. They described being racially profiled and insulted by officers. This is unacceptable. Young people and young adults in Worcester deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, not treated like criminals.

I don’t think we need video to know what’s going on here. Same thing going on with Toomey and the chicken ordinance if you think about it. Same thing going on in online comments like this one someone left on Earn A Bike’s Facebook post.

While not on the matter of 508 Bike Life specifically, we went all the way down that rabbit hole on yesterday’s episode of the podcast.

The budget approval process is an obvious sham

The city council tonight will begin to pore over the proposed $1 billion budget the city manager submitted on Friday. While it’s the first proposal to cross the 10-digit threshold, at a total of $100.1 billion, it’s all but certain to be the latest in a long long line, going back farther than my time covering the city, of proposals the city council approves without a single alteration. You’d be right to ask why they bother calling it a “proposal” at all. Rather than the nuts and bolts of the budget proposal itself, today I’m focusing on the autocratic nature of its production and approval.

The annual budget approval process is where we find city council in its most useless form, and it happens to be one of two assignments that are, in theory, the most critical “work” the council is charged with doing. The budget and the hiring of the city manager. Today, the council begins “working” on the budget.

Via a series of “finance committee” hearings, they’ll go department by department, bringing in the heads of each for a round of questioning that often has little to nothing to do with the budget. In the case of the police department, it’s a groveling show of fealty. In the case of every other department, especially the DPW, it’s grievance-airing session. After that month-long process, they will pass the manager’s budget without changing anything about it. If we had local Polymarket I’d put $1,000 on it. In my years of covering the council, I’ve only seen a budget change proposed a small handful of times. George Russell proposed cutting Discover Central Mass funding. Konnie Lukes, broken clock that she was, tried to defund the police department’s short-lived mounted patrol unit. I’m sure there are a few others not springing to mind at the moment. Regardless, I’ve never seen one of these proposals actually go through.

The city council has, on this among many things, rendered itself useless over the years. It can only vote to veto certain specific line items, or move money around within a department, per the rules outlined in the charter. What happens when a line item is wholesale vetoed? Does the manager come back with a different budget or do the services and programs in the vetoed line item just get auto eliminated for one year? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. There’s some language in the charter but who knows how it’d be interpreted in practice? Because no one’s ever done it. The city manger uses this like a bluff he knows the city council is afraid to call. And it works.

Forward-thinking cities across the country are implementing, exploring, or refining participatory budgeting processes, using them as a way to increase resident engagement and civic pride. Boston, Cambridge, New York, and Chicago to name a few. Though the programs are different in style and scope, the through line is simple: injecting direct democracy into the process of assembling an annual budget. It’s the core decision making process of the municipality, and the end result stands as the root moral document of the city.

Worcester’s process is the mirror opposite. The process for public involvement we have on paper, already a few steps removed from any direct democracy, isn’t even the one that happens in real life. The city council do not exercise the powers that they have. Like so many functions, they’ve quietly forfeited it to the city manager, while they privately and individually lobby him for their own little pet projects. And yet, they still vote on the budget, because they legally have to. But they do so having dipped only a toe at most in the process of generating it.

None of this is ever said aloud. The controlling majority of the council share the same basic self interest: an inflated sense of their own importance, due to their “being in” city government, rather than doing any governance. Calling the budget process what it is would require admitting out loud they’re not as important as they’ve been saying. So no one does that, and almost all of them can be relied upon not to do so in the future. (Gary Rosen, though... do it, Gary!).

Within the cultural milieu of the “old guard,” saying something like “the budget process is a sham and we are essentially strong armed into voting on something we can’t functionally alter” would be a faux pas. It would, in the manner of a high school clique, get people talking. There would be whispers that so-and-so turned “activist,” and since the whole social world of the political class is negatively polarized against an “activist” out group, it would be social death.

So what we’re looking at is a budget process that’s actively anti-democratic, kept that way by the normative behavior of a small group of people who have been there forever and rely on being there for their self worth. The unacknowledged gulf between theory and practice, shrouds the autocratic nature of the budget process in a cloud of plausible deniability. Anyone with the power to change this process, or even meaningfully challenge the validity of it in the public discourse, would banish themselves in the process. Those, like myself, who possess the freedom to say true things out loud, but by nature of doing so lack the legitimacy of membership to the in group, are easily written off as “naysayers” and ignored in perpetuity.

That’s a reality that cannot be changed by removing a few of the councilors. It’s not Joe Petty’s fault or Kate Toomey’s. They’re avatars of a social order—what we sometimes call the “inner circle”—the people who “know how things work around here.” Who see nothing wrong with it, who have no politics outside of it, no vision but to maintain their place in it. A gang mentality, and one that has proven politically impenetrable over the time I’ve spent trying to figure it out. It can’t be changed from the outside, can’t be brought to reason. It can only be rendered politically irrelevant by a larger and stronger social order. Our best efforts have only shown the thing for what it is more clearly. We haven’t gotten remotely close, and last November we got knocked back a step or two. But that’s not to say it hasn’t been worth it. Every attempt makes the real architecture of the political reality more visible. If you want to smash it you have to make sure you can see it first.

Friend of the newsletter Jeuji Diamondstone passed along a good essay on this topic in Jacobin, using Zohran Mamdani to explore the shadow power structure of the New York City Police Department, one which, like Worcester’s, exacts untold influence over the municipality in ways that are carefully concealed from the public.

Zohran Mamdani and the Contradiction of Democratic Socialism

New York, like virtually all major US cities, has in essence two governments: the civilian bureaucracy overseen by the mayor, and the New York Police Department. As Stuart Schrader explains in his recently released Blue Power, police, through their unions, have “built a political movement that made cops untouchable,” able to “strong-arm local leaders and nullify attempts at public oversight.” And these police departments are reliable allies of the forces of urban capital, especially finance and real estate, which prefer them to the more democratically accountable parts of the state.

In an introductory summary provided to the city council Batista confirms the prevailing opinion among the old guard councilors and their voters that the job of a councilor is to complain or to relay the complaints of others.

“I have heard loudly and clearly this City Council’s push for cleaner neighborhoods and maintained streets and sidewalks.”

He does so in service of justifying a staggering $43 million capital loan, almost double the previous year’s total. As if it were a pat on the head. You’re so good at complaining you can take credit for this loan.

The loan will go toward good things, mind you. Most of it is for road infrastructure improvements. Worryingly, there’s no new positions in the DPW to carry out these improvements. But what do I know. Second on the list is a new fire station for South Division. Third is a $10 million chunk for a new Burncoat High School and repairs at Belmont Street Community School and Rice Square School.

The $5 million expenditure on a new roof for the police department is the answer we’re apparently getting to the lobbying campaign for a new police station, humming in the background over the past few months, in which councilors and the local press have been enlisted, likely by the police union brass, to talk loudly and often about the supposedly poor state of the building. The sometimes leaky roof was one of the few specifics on offer in any of the comments made or the news articles written after exclusive tours of the building. In one Telegram article, Thomas Duffy captures the stupid nature of the discourse

“Not only does the current building need to be improved, it must be improved,” Duffy said.

What do we think “need” and “must” mean in Duffy’s imagination? What’s the difference to him? There’s one way to read it in which “must” is followed by a tacit “or else.” Of course that’s just one way.

All’s to say this “proposal” from Batista is just the budget. Simple as. Investing time or effort in the council’s approval process is time or effort wasted.

Tip Jar!

Subscribe now

Tom Marino continues to do great work reporting on the city council, honing in on the essential uselessness of the institution in a series of articles. In the most recent, headlined “Worcester Council Holds Fewest Meetings in 20 Years in 2025,” he breaks down the meeting schedule in detail.

It seems like a decade ago that Thu Nguyen decided, rightfully, to stop showing up to a council that treated them like shit, personally and politically. The council majority, happy to have a new thing to be reactionary about, slid into a rhetoric of “do-your-job” fascism, it being one of our state’s real cultural contributions of the past few decades. As Marino points out, the “gotta show up” messaging read hollow from these people who don’t really do anything but show up. But what’s worse, they were actively showing up less and less over 2025 into 2026. Having defeated the progressive movement on a wave of right wing backlash in 2026, it appears the city council is showing us what “getting back to business” really meant: getting back to doing absolutely nothing but complaining at the city manager about the mundane aggravations of living in a society.

Marino also breaks down, with data, one of my favorite bullshit moves these jokers pull: scheduling their subcommittee meetings for an hour before the full city council meeting, thereby ensuring they won’t be able to do anything but chat for a few minutes with the police chief—for Kate Toomey especially and to a lesser extent moe bergman, the hanging out with the police element of the job is the prime motivator.

The standing committee on public safety, led by Councilor At-Large Kate Toomey, has long met on Tuesdays at 5 PM, with the city council meeting scheduled that same day for 6:30 PM. Councilor Bergman serves as a member of this committee, along with Councilor Tony Economou.

When then-District 3 Councilor George Russel led that Standing Committee on Public Works in 2025, five of its 11 meetings took place on a Tuesday at 5 PM. The others took place on another day.

This year, the public works committee met twice thus far. Weather caused the cancellation of its February meeting. Now led by Councilor Economou, the committee met on Jan. 27 and March 24. Its next meeting is scheduled for April 28, which are all Tuesdays that a scheduled city council meeting opens at 6:30 PM.

The standing committee on municipal operations met seven times in 2025, with Councilor Bergman as the chairperson. Only its first two meetings were held at 5 PM on the day of a city council meeting. With Councilor At-Large Satya Mitra as its chairperson in 2026, that committee has met twice, both at 5 PM on the day of a council meeting.

Just so happens the Committee on Public Safety is pulling this exact move as I post this, meeting at 5 p.m. before a 6:30 p.m. city council, with about eight different police reports on the agenda, ensuring none of them get the significant attention they deserve, and only just enough time for the chief to get through his prepared remarks on each, with some friendly color commentary from Moe and Kate.

This is a subcommittee designed to be useless, stuffed with useless people. Actively anti-democratic in just about every way. In keeping with the theme, I suppose.

Share

Leave a comment

Odds and Ends

One more subscriber pitch for the road! I gotta do it. If you already a paid subscriber you’re the best and I love you. If you’re a free subscriber that’s cool too but, like, it would be cooler if you did, you know?

Subscribe now

All right all right all right.

Ever wondered how much a sheriff makes?

Worcester Sheriff’s Dept. payroll: See how much employees made in 2025 - masslive.com

The president of Community Health Link was uhhh lying? About the services they’re cutting moving to other agencies? Apparently Open Sky told the Telegram as much in an email, saying they have no plans to inherit the programs that Community Health Link President Gordon Benson promised in the internal memo we leaked a few weeks ago. Color me shocked.

The ICE agent who tried to strangle a man in Fitchburg to death unsuccessfully now has a name, despite the federal government’s attempts to prevent it from getting out.

The name of a federal immigration officer accused of strangling a man in Fitchburg during an immigration arrest has been revealed in court, despite the federal government’s attempts to keep his identity a secret.

The officer’s name is David Jackson, an acting supervisory detention and deportation officer, according to court documents.

An IDF-level fake job title right there. “Acting Supervisory.” Ok, guy.

Further reading on a situation we’d do well to prepare ourselves for in this, our warehouse-laden city: ICE Bought a Warehouse in a Conservative New Jersey Town. Locals Are Now Fighting Back. - Bolts

I like what some of my counterparts in the independent media game are doing down in New York with the Independent Labor Club, something I’d like to replicate here if I can get a critical mass of people behind it.

A good post on the little known and misunderstood fusion centers that we’ve long ago forfeited our civil liberties to… entities that are around the area, state, country, and make our city’s Augustus-era surveillance ordinance, as well as the idea WPD doesn’t collaborate with ICE, all the more laughable. “What is BRIC?”

Lastly, a video which asks “Is Ralph’s a Seger Bar?”

I maintain—and this is a sign of my reaching middle age I think—that Seger’s “Against The Wind” can be held up to any song of the 20th century. Any damn song.

Well, those drifter's days are past me now
I've got so much more to think about
Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in, what to leave out

This newsletter? This is a Seger Newsletter. Talk soon! See you Friday also.

Subscribe / Tips / Merch Store

And still a few tickets left for the live Outdoor Cats event at Hunchback Gallery on Friday night! Our first live show and you never know possibly the last, so… tickets here. —Bill

Horrorscopes

Taurus- The moon just had four visitors and just can’t right now. So, like, I don’t know just go, like, talk to Orion or Venus or someone. The moon’s social battery is low and just needs to recharge. Come see them next month and maybe they can go on a walk or grab a drink or something. Thanks for understanding.

Gemini- The stars are not aligned, they are scattered. This is what happens when you don’t take care of your stuff. You’re missing one? See, what did I tell you. This wouldn’t have happened if you just picked up your stars before bed like I told you.

Cancer- Next time you’re at a party, bring cue cards. It will really liven up some conversations for some people.

Leo- Food noise is real. Those burgers are talking to you. They are gabbing. They want to be eaten. Give them what they want.

Virgo- Looking for a side gig? ASMR influencer. There are ears that need to listen to your wet mouth next to an expensive microphone.

Libra- There is a saying that some aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. But some tools aren’t meant to be sharp. A hammer is blunt and so are you. It is okay to tell your niece that purple is not a good color on her.

Scorpio- Not all who wander are lost. Except for you. That was three rights in a row, you’re back where you started, bro. Just please use GPS, it is okay to ask for help!

Sagittarius- This isn’t fun for me to report but you have to be the one to defend billionaires. I know, it isn’t what you wanted to hear. But the stars think that there needs to be more accessible villains than the Musks and Thiels of the world. You are the new target. Embrace the heel turn.

Capricorn- The planets are embarrassed to say they have come to the conclusion that it is okay to, in fact, Live, Laugh, and Love.

Aquarius- I have another child coming this summer. Please give her a chance and help the future be a livable place? I don’t care if it is revolution or just like voting in the midterms. Just be good? For her?

Pisces- If you run over one more squirrel, something awful is going to happen to you and your family.

Aries- You know how your mom or friend’s mom was just like an [insert cute animal] mom? Like I had a friend whose mom just had pigs everywhere. Whether you are a mom or not, it is imperative you begin to collect tchotchkes of an animal of your choosing. It can’t be tigers, you’re not a weird weed dealer from 2003.

NEWS

This week, May 7th, we are back at Boland’s Irish Pub. Chris Post is the headliner and he is a damned delight. That show is free and it starts at 8 p.m.

May 16th we are starting up a new show at Wachusett Brew Yard in the Worcester Public Market. You can get tickets here.

May 17th we are also doing a show at American Flatbread. That one is free and it should be a great time.

Don’t forget to grab your tickets for Friday Friday Friday first Outdoor Cats Live show! It’s going to be a very good and hopefully soul restoring series of conversations. And we want to hear from you as well! Call into our new tip line—508-205-9520—with any thoughts or observations you have on how Eureka Street went down and what it says about the city. Or send us a voice memo at outdoorcats@sudomail.com

See you there! So excited.

Some relevant links for the discussion…

Kate Toomey’s equity argument

When a Correction Becomes An Accusation

My story on sex ed from 2019 with the Mary Mullaney quote

Former School Committee member Mary Mullaney, one of the key figures involved, is among those with both political influence and a moral opposition to comprehensive sex education. In an email to Binienda last September, Mullaney diagnosed what she saw as the real problem with what she called “urban kids.”

“Five years from now the situation will be the same or worse because what is lacking here is strong families, good moral upbringing, fathers in homes, faith in a higher power. We put bandaids on huge problems and feel good that we are ‘trying,’” Mullaney wrote to Binienda. “You know better than anyone in Worcester — because you are the REAL thing when it comes to urban kids — that these children are spiritually and psychologically impoverished, neglected, abused. They need love, guidance, support, alternatives to the crap they see around them. Condoms will not save their souls. I am not sure if they will even help their bodies as they are too young to use them well, but I know for sure that condoms will not heal their soul or solve the loneliness in their hearts.”

Mummies in MA

As always please consider throwing us a couple bucks so we can put in the massive amount of time and energy recording and producing a podcast and editing a newsletter’s worth of contributors and coming up with a weekly column that’s good and worth reading and booking and promoting a live show and etc etc etc. None of that happens if this newsletter can’t fund the one full time position it currently does!!

Subscribe now

Tip Jar

Subscribe / Tips / Merch Store

This podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Pocket Casts others via this RSS link.

Help us spread the word, especially if you’re one of the readers / listeners from outside the city! Be our little evangelists in your hopefully better community.

Share

Also if that’s you say hey. Love hearing from “out of towners” and why they read or listen.

Leave a comment

Outro: Oh for no particular reason, definitely not because it’s related in a million ways to the “we’re governed by stupidest, racist, most colonialist, and most self-assured people you went to high school with, who peaked in said high school” vibe of this episode, here’s “Liar’s Tale” by KNEECAP, whose new album dropped on May Day.

“Do they not understand who we are/ You were popular way back when/ people did whatever they want/ nobody stood in their way/ Ats colonial cringe/ now we’re lookin back paid/ We want everything back/ The six counties/ And the artifacts/ we’ll be takin all that/ Look mate, the paddies are back/ And your kingdom’s finished/ And that’s a fact”

Intro by Bill Shaner 5.3.26

Also, Worcester for Safe Student Technology has a petition requesting limited individual screen use for Pre-K to second grade students. Read the letter and sign it here.

Subscribe now

Here’s the agenda preview:

May 7 School Committee Meeting
The next school committee meeting is scheduled for Thursday, May 7. Executive session starts at 5pm and the regular meeting is scheduled to start at 6pm. The actual start time depends on how long the executive session takes. See the agenda here. You can watch it via zoom or Youtube Live. Spanish translation is available on zoom.

Report of the Superintendent.
This meeting’s Report of the Superintendent is on “College and Career Highlights” Giving the report will be Director of Early College, Dan St. Louis, and Administrative Director of College and Career Readiness, Dr. Emily Lehman (who, as it happens, is also a member of the West Boylston school committee). The presentation slides touch on Early College, Advanced Placement, Worcester Nightlife, and the Worcester Adult Learning Center.

North High Dedication.
Mayor Petty is requesting a plaque at North High School in memory of Linda Bergstrom, a longtime Worcester Public Schools teacher of over 35 years. Per the dedication policy, “all proposals must begin with consultation at the school level and include staff, students, and families” and then proposals must be reviewed by the Operations and Governance subcommittee, referred to a naming committee, and then come to the full school committee for a vote.

New Special Education Curriculum and Supplemental Resource.
Up for approval is the Unique Learning System (ULS) which the backup says “serves as a core, evidence-based curriculum resource within Worcester Public Schools for students with significant cognitive disabilities who require highly individualized, standards-based instruction in both English Language Arts and Mathematics.” The cost is $96,349.44.

Also up for approval is Number Worlds, a math intervention system by McGraw Hill, for use in SAIL students. To authorize the Administration to purchase the Number Worlds Curriculum. The cost not to exceed $450,893.26.

Other Items.

Up for approval are:

• an extension of an existing Parent Square contract for three (3) years, at a cost of $350,078.80.

• an extension of an existing Custom Computers (Infinite Campus aka Woo Edu) contract for three (3) years, not to exceed $1,358,134.10.

There is also a report back on Special Education Transportation.

And that’s it for the agenda. The proposed budget in full is released May 8, so more from me next week! If you have feedback you can always get in touch: aislinn.doyle@me.com

Share

Subscribe now

Tip Jar!

How Did We Get Here #2: Have you heard about Emma Goldman’s ice cream shop?

“At the International Socialist Congress held in Paris in 1889 the decision had been made to turn the first of May into a world-wide holiday of labour. The idea caught the imagination of the progressive workers in every land. The birth of spring was to mark the reawakening of the masses.” —Emma Goldman, Living My Life

Did you know that famous anarchist Emma Goldman ran an ice cream shop in Worcester? I hear it mentioned all the time, so for this May Day edition of How Did We Get Here, I thought I might write a piece in her honor.

In 1897, a young Emma Goldman immigrated from Russia to New York City. At just 20 years old, already an awakened anarchist, she worked as a seamstress while organizing for worldwide revolution with others in her primarily Russian Jewish community. Living in New York City was tough at the end of the 19th century, and it began to wear her down. She toiled grueling, 18-hour days alongside her romantic partner, Alexander Berkman. When their friend Modest Stein (also Goldman’s lover) found stable photography work in Springfield she gladly took the chance to join him in Massachusetts. In time, they decided to strike out on their own and found a place in Worcester. Berkman soon left New York to meet them there.

Independence was rough going. Their dreams of opening a photography studio seemed impossible; in the city no one came into their shop. When they ventured out to the surrounding towns, they found the farmers of New England very different from the peasant farmers they knew in Eastern Europe.

“The [Russian peasant] seldom had enough for himself to eat, yet he would never fail to offer the stranger bread and kvass (cider). The German peasants also, as I remembered from my schooldays, would invite us to their “best room,” put milk and butter on the table, and urge us to partake. But here, in free America, where the farmers owned acres of land and much cattle, we were lucky to be admitted at all or be given a glass of water” (Goldman, Living my Life).

In Europe, with the exception of Great Britain, the birthplace of evil¹, the land existed more like a public resource; peasants subsisted on it in exchange for the extraction of tithes and a portion of their product by the monarchy. They did not own the land they tilled, and they paid dearly to use it. Here, they realized, the farmer was (is) the private owner of their property. Anyone with the money to purchase land was really a capitalist, and held little in common with the proletariat farmers that Goldman and her cohort knew from back home. That, at least, is what they chalked it up to at the time.

As their business floundered, and the farmers remained incorrigible, Goldman and company grew desperate to find a new source of income, if only to pay rent. For months, their landlord had been urging them to open a cafe or an ice cream parlor; at last they relented. They began operations that spring in a little shop in the Canal District, where Bocado now lives, and within months started turning a profit.

Almost as soon as it began, their business venture came to an abrupt end. Just one year later, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, Andrew Carnegie’s goon Henry Clay Frick promised striking steel workers that he would rather see them dead than concede to their demands. The nation was in uproar, and it seemed like violence could only follow. Emma Goldman read the headlines over a customer’s shoulder, reacting so dramatically to the news that the man was worried for her health. She, Berkman, and Stein packed up shop that night to join the struggle, believing fervently that this was “the awakening of the American worker, the long-awaited day of his resurrection.”

They planned to distribute anarchist propaganda to the strikers, working feverishly to develop and print it in New York before taking the train up to Homestead. Before they could properly begin, a new headline swept the nation: Pinkerton agents had gunned down steel workers on the shores of the Monongahela River. Frick had followed through on his threat. A month after leaving Worcester, once Goldman, Stein, and he had sufficiently planned the deed, Alexander Berkman snuck his way into Henry Clay Frick’s office. With a cheap pistol, hurriedly purchased en route, he shot Frick three times and stabbed him with a poison dagger to avenge the workers. He was unsuccessful in his assassination attempt, but the act set the stage for the rest of the trio’s lives.

Berkman went to prison, Stein went into hiding, and Emma Goldman—now age 23—refused to sink into obscurity. She continued speaking, writing, and acting for the cause of revolutionary anarchism. After Berkman finished his prison term, serving 14 years of his 21-year sentence, they rejoined their partnership, though not romantically. She was arrested and imprisoned several times before her eventual deportation in 1919, during the first Red Scare, though never for the conspiracy to assassinate Henry Clay Frick—until her memoir, printed post-deportation, prosecutors lacked sufficient evidence to convict her or Modest Stein.

Emma Goldman was Jewish, and spent much of her time in America living and working in the New York Russian Jewish community, where there already existed an anarchist stronghold. Her immigrant community introduced her to some of the most influential people in her life and shaped her understanding of anarchism. This foundation was something she shared with many of the anarchist thinkers of her day, and it’s impossible to fathom the extent to which her Judaism informed her life and her choices. However, Goldman differed from her notable contemporaries in one major way: she was a woman. She took anarchist thought leaps and bounds forward through this lens, spearheading many of what we now consider to be foundational feminist ideas.

Unlike the suffragists of her day, who sought equal participation in the existing system, Emma Goldman insisted on a radical politics of women’s liberation; some of her views remain boundary pushing. As early as 1911, she was writing and speaking about the plight of sex workers, the abolition of marriage, and naming the various mechanisms through which women are forced into physical bondage whether inside or outside of marriage. She advocated a scientific compassion for those suffering from sexually transmitted diseases, and directly challenged narratives around sin and punishment that were prevalent around this time. Goldman openly discussed abortion as a dangerous, frequently deadly horror that was symptomatic of the larger bodily and sexual slavery of women as a class. Before Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman was loudly advocating for and smuggling contraception into the country. She was arrested several times for it. Beyond and encompassing her feminist ideas were her stances against Christianity, Zionism, militarism, prison, the state, and for sexual freedom, the radical potential of theater, and the liberation of children.

Women in history are stripped of their humanity when we turn them into fun facts. Emma Goldman ran an ice cream shop in Worcester, so we get to claim her. But if we are to do so we had better understand her.

Reading Emma Goldman’s work, listening to her speak (in the above video, at 00:22 and again at 02:18), she was precise, forthright, and direct. She disdained vagueness and refused to shroud her meaning in allusion. She saw this as cowardly—a tool for hypocrites. Those were the people she hated most of all. Once, she snuck into a speaking engagement of Johann Most, a former-comrade-turned-nemesis, whom she believed had betrayed the anarchist movement. She sprinted to the stage, and before anyone could stop her, pulled out a horse whip and beat him with it mid-lecture. Goldman broke the whip over her knee and threw the pieces in his face before narrowly escaping the angry crowd on the shoulders of Modest Stein.

She was a force that basically no man, nation, law, or prison could contain. She also was a midwife, a nurse, a confidante for sex workers, and a wonderful cook. She engaged in regular correspondence with too many influential figures to count—Upton Sinclair, Herbert Read, Alfred Knopf, Rev. John Hayes Holmes, Roger Baldwin, Vladimir Lenin, to name a few. An honest, dangerous, principled and compassionate woman with a golden pen and seemingly no fear.

There isn’t room in my little column to do her full story justice, so I would encourage anyone who is interested in her life and her ideas to read her, and hear her speak in her own words. However, if I had to sum up Emma Goldman, anarchist and iconoclast, in one, I would defer to one of the true divas of all time, Little Edie:

I’ll leave it here, with a clipping from one of her last essays, published in Harper’s Magazine, entitled “Was My Life Worth Living?”

“The belief in freedom assumes that human beings can co-operate. They do it even now to a surprising extent, or organized society would be impossible. If the devices by which men can harm one another, such as private property, are removed and if the worship of authority can be discarded, co-operation will be spontaneous and inevitable, and the individual will find it his highest calling to contribute to the enrichment of social well-being …

I think my life and my work have been successful. What is generally regarded as success—acquisition of wealth, the capture of power or social prestige—I consider the most dismal failures. I hold when it is said of a man that he has arrived, it means that he is finished—his development has stopped at that point. I have always striven to remain in a state of flux and continued growth, and not to petrify in a niche of self-satisfaction. If I had my life to live over again, like anyone else, I should wish to alter minor details. But in any of my more important actions and attitudes I would repeat my life as I have lived it. Certainly I should work for Anarchism with the same devotion and confidence in its ultimate triumph.”

¹ Capitalism

Share

Leave a comment