A glorified homeowners' association
Sprinklers, breakdown of the precinct-level data from the preliminary and other thoughts
Hello hello! Tonight’s going to be fun—Kate Toomey’s sprinkler ordinance meltdown coming to a head in the first meeting back after a 10 percent turnout preliminary that has the cranks doing a premature victory lap. Dumping the Gatorade on the coach at the end of a preseason game, the stands empty save for the diehards. They love it, of course. Moe Bergman’s so caught up in the moment he’s thinking ’bout running for mayor. Which I would hate so much and would be so triggering for me, a lib. More on that later on.
Tonight we have a Kate Toomey doubleheader. She has her 5 p,m. public safety standing committee meeting—last item: the sprinkler ordinance she held at the last meeting for like the sixth time. Then she’ll be kicking off the city council meeting at 6:30 p.m. by calling the thing to a vote. Or trying to. It’s a mess, procedurally. I won’t bore you. However, we will be streaming over on Twitch, you better believe it. (Probably just the council meeting but who knows, maybe we’ll start early. I haven’t checked my phone yet and this post needs to be out the door by noon.)
I have no idea what her play is here. Has she changed her mind? Or does she think it’ll go over well, her standing out hard against an ordinance that could save the lives of firefighters—as the public safety chair, two months out from the election she’s guaranteed to win for reasons unknown. Is she that negatively polarized that she thinks she plays protagonist here? Does she think the entire city operates on the same “Squash Etel” edict?
And I thought maybe it was because I’ve been in election data/census data spreadsheet hell (more on that later as well) and there’s something key to this that I’ve missed. But I was heartened to hear the good lads on This Week in Worcester were just as baffled in their most recent Sunday podcast episode.
For the uninitiated (and anyone else who needs a catch-up on this bizarre drama), here’s the one-sentence version: In a wantonly obvious display of local government corruption, Kate Toomey has used the power given to her by Mayor Joe Petty to tie up a mundane but potentially lifesaving sprinkler ordinance at the alleged and also rumored behest of a police union official/landlord.
The slightly longer version: Councilor Etel Haxhiaj put this idea on the table like, two years ago now. The vast majority of municipalities in the state have adopted it without incident. The manager supports this ordinance, the fire department wants it, the majority of the council ranges from agnostic to enthusiastic. Toomey’s held it for months and months and months and months. Sometimes on her own, sometimes at the request of Candy Mero-Carlson whispering in her ear.
Kate Toomey and Candy Mero-Carlson have a shared ummmm handler in the police union world named Anthony Petrone who happens to own several rental properties that would be affected by the rule change. Not that Kate Toomey has ever been told directly by the police unions to do things before. Not that she’s faithfully followed their directives. That would be far, far, far out, man.
Last week or so, as she is prone to doing, Toomey had a public late-night meltdown, posting a statement to social media filled with bizarre inaccuracies and carrying a highly accusatory tone. I hear the Facebook page was popping off before she deleted it. Bummed to have missed that. (I’m all the way off Facebook for good. Fuck that place.) She then went on a sympathetic radio station the next morning and kept complaining.
One way of reading this is as the behavior of a well-trained dog who has been told to sit but desperately needs to go pee. The owner just out of frame, unbothered, having forgotten the command shortly after issuing it.
Tonight, we’ll see how this story ends. Buckle up. And Kate, don’t forget to have a pop and then one more before the big show tonight. It’ll help, trust me.
Further reading: TWIW Council preview does a nice job catching up.
Jul 19, 2025: Johanna Mulhane for this outlet, Why hasn’t Worcester opted in to the Fire Sprinkler Ordinance?
193 other cities in towns in Massachusetts have already opted in. The Fire Chief and City Manager have gone on record urging the council to opt in. So have neighborhood association leaders, the State Fire Marshal, the president of the National Sprinkler Association, rank and file firefighters and other experts. But it has not come to the floor for a vote. Why?
Then me in the same post: Petrone’s Properties
Toomey and Mero-Carlson both pretty much work for Petrone, albeit in slightly different capacities. Petrone, being who he is, can generally expect the city councilors under his control to do what he wants. He has six of them, though Toomey and Mero-Carlson are let’s just say direct reports in a way the other four aren’t. So it would make sense they’d be holding the uncomfortable bag here.
A few more from me...
Jul 13, 2025: All the fun a wicked god must be having with us
Kate Toomey, chairwoman of public safety, has an order on the agenda that appears to weigh the interests of the business community over and above the public and its safety (11a). She’s asking for “a report concerning the economic impact property owners may feel should the city adopt [the state law that] mandates the installation of automatic fire sprinkler systems in residential buildings with four or more dwelling units.”
In case you were worried Toomey understood “public safety” as anything other than a euphemism for her chosen family, “the police.”
Jan 05, 2025: To Hold The Mirror of Moral Clarity
In a guest op-ed to The Telegram, Councilor Etel Haxhiaj writes about the need for the city to opt in to a state law requiring multi-family buildings to have sprinklers. A no brainer, given all the deadly and otherwise tragic fires we see in our old, crumbling, poorly maintained multi-family housing stock. Nothing’s a no brainer in Worcester, though. For the crime of suggesting a sensible public safety policy, a townie on Facebook by the name of Ed Ryan called her Adolf Haxiaj (sic) and took it upon himself to twist her words: She was trying to ban all smoking within city limits, actually. Just like Hitler.
This law’s been on the books since the 1990s and Worcester has yet to “opt in,” as it were. Haxhiaj writes: “Worcester's elected leaders have never debated the cost-benefits of adopting this law, but we can do so now.” Worcester’s also full of Ed Ryans. Coincidence? I think not. Sad truth about it is this city would benefit from a few traditional re-education camps. Mr. Jinping, we are ready when you are. In the meantime the state legislature needs to cease with this “let the towns decide” bull. Make State Laws State Law Again.
Stuff Coming Up
On September 13, the Election Squad crew is hosting an after-party for the rent control campaign kickoff—go out and get those signatures, folks!
September 14 — Famed karaoke restaurant Cafe Neo is hosting a debate between Ted Kostas and Luis Ojeda. Amazing. See you there!!!
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Don’t think the heavy stuff’s coming down for quite some time now
Welp, did everyone have fun surviving a legitimately scary weather event?
For me, the experience was eerie noises vibrating down from clouds humming with electricity. No visibility. I stared across the street, past the trees swaying in a way I’d never seen them sway before, and pictured the tornado—how it would emerge from the thick haze of heavy rain, how long between my seeing it and my being sucked up by it.
A good reminder of how small I am. Anyone else have a moment like that?
I had the police and fire scanner going and it was crazy for a second there. Nonstop calls for fire alarms and downed wires and other such things. The Midtown Mall fire sparked an especially all-hands-on-deck tone in the chatter. Luckily, firefighters got it down quick. Another scary thing to think about. Phew; time for a deep breath.
A tornado did touch down in Holden. I looked at the path on my phone and then I looked out my front window in its direction. We were out on the porch for all of five seconds before Katie heard something that spooked her and she hustled back inside.
When you’re in the middle of a biblical storm, the distinction between the Apocalyptic Act of God and the Freak Severe Weather Event is academic at best. A matter of who’s pretending to be in charge at the time of the incident.
The climate apocalypse we all know to be coming won’t come in like a concussion grenade as in the Jesus Freaks’ fantasy. It will ride in—is already riding in—one freak weather event at a time.
Society is a lot more fragile than the human body. It’ll break under the strain of weather event after weather event, even if our bodies are still able to eat, breathe and sleep enough to keep doing those things.
A resilient local community becomes especially important when you zoom out. It’s the only thing we have, will have, have ever had. For the past 100 years, we’ve taken a posture of indignance on the issue. But we’ll have to unlearn rugged individualism as our circumstances become actually rugged. As we all learn, there are no bootstraps, actually.
No better time than now, I say. No better question than what you would do for your neighbor, and whether you can rely on them to do the same. And if the answer to those questions are “nothing” and “no,” as I expect they might be, how do you change that? Local politics is the best vehicle we have for that reimagining. That’s where all my loathing for the Worcester power elite stems from. They’re not simply unimaginative, they’re averse to the whole concept. When someone with imagination comes around, they do their best to beat it out of them—with a high success rate. It’s also very obviously the reason for low turnout elections like the one on Tuesday. The system functions as it should. People for whom the system is working just fine are the only ones who show up to vote (hold that thought for the next section). Most everyone else has had the idea of change bludgeoned out of them. They take imagination as naïveté and tune out. A complex wall of algorithms prevents any potentially reengaging information from reaching them.
With nothing to do but to make sure they do nothing, entrenched candidates construct fictions around their various narcissisms. Some do so cynically: Joe Petty taking personal credit for the construction of high schools, despite having played no real part in the process. Others are genuine: Kate Toomey’s zealous belief that she is, as a city councilor, in “the law enforcement family.” But the cynics and the genuine narcissists are aligned on the matter of imagination: What, they both say, you think you’re better than me?
Consider Candy Mero-Carlson’s campaign slogan: “Back to our regularly scheduled programming.” What she’s promising is to snuff out the most recent round of imaginative demands on the system from which she and her husband benefit immensely.
So I guess now’s a good time to transition to some analysis of the results, haha.
A Glorified Homeowners’ Association
If you need a catch-up: Top-line takeaways on who won and who lost here: Charles lacked Luster (and other preliminary outcomes).
I’m more interested in where people voted and where they didn’t. That’s the focus today.
Would you believe it: The top 10 highest-voting precincts in the preliminary election last week were also the top 10 highest median household incomes and the highest rates of homeownership. Would you believe that the top voting district, 1-4, also has the highest median income, at $147,679, and is just a point or two off the highest rate of homeownership, at 78.2.
Would you also believe that the lowest-voting districts were the poorest, with the lowest rates of home ownership? Coming in first in that regard was the statistical aberration of 6-4. The precinct and census tract are just the Holy Cross campus, and so the median income is $6,000, the average age is 20, etc., etc. In this election, held the day after Labor Day, 23 people in this precinct voted.
Following that anomaly, the rest of the bottom 10 are precincts where homeownership is a mirror reversal of the top 10, hovering in the high teens and low twenties. Income ranges from below the poverty line (the lowest is $27,113) to the gross income of this newsletter ($52,000). They are all within the containment zone.
Here’s the best illustration I can pull off with the time and skills I have at the moment. (Be nice to me!!)
It’s actually stunning how much this turnout map looks like the redlining map from the 1930s.
… and the Shotspotter map, and every other map for that matter.
Since the preliminary election last week, I’ve been plugging away at a detailed spreadsheet of the results on the precinct level, next to some demographic information about each precinct from the corresponding census tract. I delayed this post a few days hoping I could share the whole thing, but it’s not quite ready yet. The city’s data management makes doing an analysis like this prohibitively difficult, as I complained about at length in the most recent podcast episode.
They don’t neatly overlap at all, but precincts and census tracts are similarly sized geographic carveouts.
What this gives us is a richer understanding of the types of people who vote and those who don’t—a necessary and often missing part of the conversation.
Worcester is a city with very segregated voter patterns in local elections, both economically and racially, a fact that must be understood as a feature of the current system, not a bug. It must also be understood that incumbents are incumbents because of this feature, and they have no material incentive to change it. Incumbents cater to their voters, who, by nature of their property holdings, are vested in the running real estate scheme of “incentivization” that the incumbents facilitate. When the electorate looks a lot like a homeowners’ association, incumbents have very little incentive to put checks on real estate speculation for the sake of those who are harmed by it via rent inflation. Instead, they complain about having to see the worst of its victims on the street. They make up myths about how they must be coming from somewhere else, like a zombie horde.
It’s one thing to say the game is rigged, it’s another to show it. This cross-examination I’ve been plugging away at, combined with the campaign finance data analysis Greg and Gillian have been busting ass on, gets us closer than ever before to showing how.
In this election, 16 of 60 precincts accounted for more than half of the turnout. Ten of the 16 came from three wards—1, 2, and 9. The three are in a row along the western and northern border of the city, from Tatnuck to Burncoat.
What are we to do with the reality that a few neighborhoods have a majority stake? When I first said the city council is a glorified homeowners’ association, it was a joke, but the case gets stronger every time I go down the rabbit hole. And it fetched a hearty laugh from some people who understand Worcester politics deeply, I remember. Sometimes that’s the best signal of the truth in an observation. In any case, it’s clear the system needs to be broken or changed in one way or another, and in the meantime, we shouldn’t go on pretending it’s all that representative or democratic.
I need more people who are better at spreadsheets and GIS to get this analysis over the finish line. Please send me a line at billshaner at substack dot com. Next post, God willing, we’ll have a neat little presentation. Maybe even an update to WorcesterElection.com.
Moe for Mayor?
I know at least a few of you got the same survey I did via text on Friday. There’s no way I could find to verify who sent it, but the inclusion of Moe Bergman in this question ...
… heavily suggests the presence of Moe Bergman. Who would you vote for—the two publicly known mayoral candidates... or this third other guy on the list for an unstated reason?
And then, accepting that Bergman wrote it, this question ...
… reads like a tortured way of asking are you mad at me???
Which, no, actually. Please run for mayor, Moe. I’m sick of the center holding. You can be the one to undo it for good!
A three-way race between King, Bergman, and Petty would allow us to map the city’s electorate on the D&D alignment axes. And that’s just plain fun. I’ll get us started...
Group project time! Use this template to make your own, with as many candidate heads as you can copy and paste from everyone’s favorite new website: WorcesterElection.com.
I’ll share a few in the next post and it’ll prompt a nice, productive discussion. Speaking of chaotic evil, while I’m just riffing here—Kate Toomey may or may not keep a sandwich bag of tissues at her council desk for reuse.
WCT3k Commenters Union FTW yet again.
Odds and ends
Ok, I do have to run though. I really put myself behind working on that spreadsheet.
I’ll spare the niceties and just leave a cache of links. Please subscribe! I have to ask...
Worcester Housing Project Gets $2M In State Funding
Hilarious Reddit Thread: Tell me about Dr. Satya Mitra: r/WorcesterMA
Good stuff from New Bedford: Like Water for Traffic
Insult to injury from Gannett Media
Worcester Working Families statement on anti-abortion money going to Kathy Roy’s campaign
Talk soon! You can thank Robarge for the song suggestion today...
Wasn’t there some talk about conflict of interest for any of the landlords on council voting on something like this?
Um, after that song, I feel like I just took out the sleazy mayor of a rambshackle town, and that me and a bombshell are in caddy covertible driving down the highway, and she just let her shear scarf go and it flies into the desert as we crest the horizon. Not to get too specific.