Hello!!
Today, Katie and I will be boothing with some custom made Worcester Sucks merch at an event called WOOSTOCK at Off The Rails. Our very own Bad Advice Columnist Shaun Connolly will be MCing the event, and the fact we’re also there is totally unrelated to that, not at all an example of incestuous Worcester nepotism.
It runs from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. So come on down! We’ll have shirts, trinkets, whatnots, etceteras… whatever we don’t move will go up on the merch store after.
The shirts by the way are so freakin’ sick
Also the LGBT Asylum Task Force Gala is tonight, should be a good time!
Okay, now to me for the news.
Optiline taking city to court
Thanks, me.
The Carpenters Union is taking a victory lap after news broke that Optiline, a New Hampshire-based contractor with a long, sordid history of abusing workers, is suing the city after weeks of pleading to be let back on a Franklin Street development job.
“It is outrageous and frustrating that Optiline has operated for years with an illegal business model and has not been held accountable. This week that changes. The City of Worcester is clearly stepping up in a big way to challenge rampant crime in construction. This is a clear message that there should be no taxpayer monies for contractors that cheat the system,” said David Minasian, District Manager, Carpenters Local 336.
The city banned, unbanned, then, due to the advocacy of the Carpenters, re-banned Optiline from working on projects that get city money.
Per Eric Casey over at WBJ, the decision to re-ban came on the day that the Carpenters took to city hall to protest the un-banning of Optiline. A letter from the city attorney filed shortly before the meeting on Sept. 22.
“The City of Worcester hereby reaffirms its June 2025 decision and finds the citation issued to Optiline in December 2024 violates the City’s Responsible Development Ordinance, rendering Optiline ineligible to work on tax relief projects in the city,” the letter reads.
In 2024, Optiline employees filed a class action wage theft lawsuit against the company and a judge found that Optiline made “threatening and intimidating statements, including some related to immigration status, to coerce the employees into dropping the lawsuit,” per a release from the Carpenters Union, who assisted with the lawsuit.
The company was then cited by the state Attorney General’s Office for taking retaliatory action against an employee who filed a complaint, resulting in a $15,000 fine (the highest, apparently, that state law allows, which is a joke). In 2025, the city acted on its Responsible Developer Ordinance and barred the company from working on projects with municipal funding.
Now the city’s Responsible Developer Ordinance faces a challenge in Suffolk Superior Court. Here’s the complaint filed by Optiline. The first line reads:
“This is an action to enjoin the City from weaponizing its Responsible Development Ordinance (”RDO”) to unlawfully blacklist Optiline…”
Weaponization! Brother, the ordinance is a weapon, being used as intended. When you shoot a gun, you are not weaponizing the gun.
Threatening to call ICE to squash a labor action, on the other hand, is textbook weaponization… albeit a specific weaponization that is pretty obviously the reason ICE exists, despite never being stated as such officially. But point stands: Optiline used ICE as the Christmas Adventurers intended when they dreamed the agency up.
Here’s hoping this lawsuit, like most civil suits, drags for years.
Yes on 2, The Interview
In case you missed it, or you’re not a podcast person and thusly missed it on purpose, we had a great guest on Outdoor Cats to discuss perhaps the most obscure of the nine ballot questions you’ll be asked to answer in November. Question 2 concerns the right of public defenders to unionize, and it’s an obvious “yes” vote. The reasons why they can’t unionize, despite being state employees, is considerably less obvious. Nathan Wong, a Worcester based public defender active in the Yes on 2 campaign came on to help explain it to us. After our conversation, I still only half understand the roadblock, but very much understand why it’s in place.
Episode 75: Defense Wins Championships (Ft. Nathan Wong)
Public defenders are a crucial stopgap in our legal system’s ability to administer its quiet class war. A check on power, much like local journalism when done correctly, and as it happens both professions suffer from the same malaise: low pay and long hours, high turnover, an impossible student loan debt-to-career prospects ratio. (Please subscribe ha ha.)
And so really what happened is that people would stay for maybe two years and would want to stay longer, but obviously people want to have families, right? People want to be able to buy a home and not work two jobs and sort of save for a better life. And that was just impossible. So most people... Like around that time, the attrition rate was pretty high.After about two years, two or three years, people just sort of left and turned over. And so what you had happened was not just a people drain, but you had an intellectual sort of brain. Like you would have all this great institutional knowledge sort of leave the agency and go into private practice or do other sorts of things. And also, too, the job is stressful. The job is really, really hard. $36,000 at that time wasn’t a lot. I mean, it’s certainly the starting salary is much, much, much better now.
In my last post, I spent some time illustrating the existing defacto criminalization of homelessness, a complex process in which the district court plays a leading role. Public defenders are sometimes the only people in the corner of an unhoused person put through the byzantine ringer of trespassing charges and default warrants and weeks- or months-long pre-trial bids in the House of Correction. I was happy I got the opportunity to ask him about it. This is what he said:
I mean, so if you’re precariously housed and the police arrest you and they put a bail on you that you cannot post and you’re held for 30 or 60 days, where are all your belongings?
Are they still in that place you’re couch surfing, your wallet, your ID, your birth certificate, all the sorts of things that we all take for granted and can use to access the banking system, employment, like all that stuff is gone. And like, where does it leave them? I mean, I think there is a direct role.
I mean, if you’re in district court, you will see that day in and day out.
And on the matter of the proposed $25-a-day fine that is now (fingers crossed) squashed, Wong said: “I would assume that the public defenders would file motions to dismiss fine, and that it’s also unconstitutional. To fine someone for being unhoused is preposterous and I think is anti-American. It’s not what we do. We don’t jail people who are homeless. At least not in the country that I want to live in.”
You can listen to the rest here.
“I Think She’s Drunk”
It came out recently the WPD amended its body camera policy as a direct result of the liberal use of the mute button during the Great Toomey Car Crash of 2026. Before the wreck heard round the world (sorry, I’ll stop now) the policy read that officers can use the mute button “when sensitive conversations are taking place, but the incident is still ongoing.” Now, after GTCC26, per the Telegram, it reads that an officer “shall state on the record the reason for the mute,” but, so they have an out, the language is softened with “whenever practicable.” Love to see a word like that, which could mean anything to anyone at a given time, thrown into department policy for the police, an institution that gets more benefit-of-the-doubt rope than it knows what to do with, and it knows a lot about what to do with it.
Body cameras were always and continue to be faux accountability—a withering technocratic initiative to lie to the public and expand the dragnet at the same time. But I’ve made my case on that matter a few times over.
In 2023...
“Special considerations for plain-clothes personnel”
And in 2020...
No need to rehash it. They’re not going anywhere.
Also Sam Turken over at GBH had a good one laying out the 911 tape and some witness interviews.
During the call, the woman told the 911 dispatcher that Toomey had several Worcester Police Department stickers on her car. When the caller asked about any injuries, the woman said Toomey said she was not hurt. The caller added that the left side and rear end of her own car were “completely ruined.”
“She kept slamming on her gas to get out, to get away, and I opened the door,” the caller said. “I don’t even think she knows what she’s doing. I think she’s drunk.”
I for one cannot wait for this internal investigation to come out. What’s 90 days from the crash? Need to mark my calendar.
“Porta-Potties Don’t Have A Great Reputation”
At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, business opened with a request for a reconsideration of an especially messy and stupid vote taken the week prior, at the Sept. 29 meeting.
The vote on Sept. 29 was against (sort of) a public bathroom proposal in the Canal District, akin to measures recently rolled out across New York City and in downtown Miami. It was introduced by District 2 Councilor Rob Bilotta and Councilor Khrystian King.
Both made good points about it.
Bilotta spoke about models in other cities Worcester would do well to emulate.
I know in Miami, they actually hired someone who was formerly unhoused and had some peer experience with the community that they were providing bathrooms to, and it was an overwhelming success, and it translated to public bathrooms for the broader community as well, which is equally important.
King stressed the urgent and obvious need to deal with the problem.
There is a basic contradiction when we’re complaining about human waste, public urination, etcetera, and fail to provide an adequate place for folks to use a bathroom.
Moe Bergman on the other hand tried to amend it, softening the language so as to give the manager more wiggle room to not do it, or so his thinking seemed to go. Ever the cunning legal mind, he motioned to change all instances of “...request the manager...” to “...request the manager consider...” a meaningless alteration, as orders are by default requests that the manager then considers. The council cannot mandate anything of the manager, really, and that’s not even what the order was trying to do. “Orders” are an inaccurate term for this feature of our city government. They are suggestions, generated by individual or sometimes groups of councilors, voted on, and thereby sent to the manager, who then considers what to do with them—usually nothing. And for that recurring default consideration the council has no recourse.
Put another way, all orders are requests to consider by default, making Bergman’s quibble a moot point if not for his intentions.
The fracas ended in two unanimous votes for the manager to put together a public bathroom plan, which could and would have happened in all of five minutes last week if Moe Bergman simply resisted the urge to be a sniveling little baby about it. But, like every other time there’s an order on having to do with homelessness, Bergman couldn’t resist.
Bergman cited, in his smarmy way, the concerns of “the business community,” which, as we’ll get to, is itself a euphemism.
I can’t imagine that there are business owners out there that are gonna have no opinion on whether or not you place porta-potties and permanent bathrooms in front of the business.
King refused to accept what was obviously a bad faith amendment meant to derail the proposal. He amended it himself to include language about consulting businesses.
King’s amended order failed by a 5-6 vote. The six against will read familiar: Bergman, Rivera, Toomey, Mitra, Economou, Fresolo.
The board then moved to consider Bergman’s amended version, which would have likely passed by the same breakdown in reverse, but King held it after a squabble we’ll get into in a little bit.
This particular vote came at about 11 p.m., deep into the meeting last week—a meeting that felt like a return, after a few weeks of the Toomey Show, to the mundane ritual of petty grievance and cruelty that’s been the norm since January. This week is set to be a continuation, as this weird fracas over public bathrooms spills over into a second meeting.
When I finally finished watching it, I felt myself lulled into an ambient dread… a dull depressive state filling in the silence after the last strike of the gavel, unable to think about what I’d just watched hard enough to figure out what was wrong with it.
This is, of course, the goal: the ideal rendered state of a city council viewer, a tithe on the psyche, a weekly dose of punishment for caring.
The end.
Just kidding!
I love my job haha please subscribe.
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The nothing drama over the bathroom proposal moment in question concerns public bathrooms in the canal district, in an effort to combat the very real problem of human pee and poo everywhere.
it came after more technically serious and significant matters, such as...
How do we hire more cops?
What do we have to sacrifice to pay for the construction of a new Burncoat High and Middle School, with “East Middle” taking suspicious foreground in the otherwise vague conversation. “We’re going to have to make tough choices,” said District 1 Councilor Tony Economou, without saying what exactly the choices will be between.
After King flagged East Middle’s inclusion in the report, CFO Tim McGourthy said he was the one who included it, “as an example, simply because I know this council has discussed the need to redevelop Worcester East Middle.
“And my concern is, unless we manage the finances of this project correctly, it could preclude other projects from occurring around the city.”
Later, Batista said it as well. “There’s real concerns about the availability of funds that we would have in the future to be able to redevelop a school like East Middle and redevelop it and build it brand new.”
In the next breath, he brought up the need to build a new police station. So…
Then came the public bathrooms ordeal.
This particular meltdown is worth explaining because it to demonstrates, in an anthropological sort of way, the structural powerlessness of the council, and the weird little games old guard councilors cook up to pass the time while being otherwise comfortably and contentedly useless.
Back to Round 1 of this inane drama.
Bergman wrapped up his spiel on a fittingly ridiculous line.
“Um, unfortunately,” he said, all self serious and dignified, in pursuit of such noble inquiries befitting a Councilor-At-Large in this, the 76th year of our city government so composed, serving his seventh consecutive term, “porta potties don’t have a great reputation.”
Couldn’t ask for a better line to encapsulate the dearth of self-awareness required to be a crank councilor. You’re up there in front of the cable access network and the youtubes and dozens of viewers at home, and you’re talking about the reputation of porta-potties like it’s Serious Official Business.
King responded: People have been pushing for this since at least 2019, and they’ve consulted business owners. And then, more directly to Bergman, he said, “to present this as this is some sort of rushed and inconsiderate act towards businesses... Yes, in fact, there are businesses who are open to this. There’s businesses that are willing to support it.”
A frustrated Bergman then showed his hand…
And quite frankly, I go to every Shrewsbury Street Business Neighborhood Association meeting I can go to, and I’ve gone to several in a row now, and the conversations I have, at least in private, with many of the business owners are totally inconsistent with what this order is asking.
Remember when, just a few lines up, Bergman was coyly presenting his concerns as “business owners might be concerned,” now he’s letting slip that he’s talked to specific business owners, making his initial framing disingenuous.
It’s worth noting that the Shrewsbury Street Business Association is an organization headed up by John Piccolo, the restaurateur who did the spray paint thing and, more recently, (allegedly according to many others but not me), let Councilor Kate Toomey leave his establishment in such a state as to ram into a parked car on her drive home, struggle to spell her name for the responding officers, and publicly embarrass herself and everyone associated with her in more spectacular a fashion than we’ve seen in recent memory.
In case you were under the impression the cranks represent anything more than an incestuously small perceived “in group,” of fellow townies.
Bergman was joined by his fellow members of the crank in group in voting the proposal down.
Then, they were about to vote on Bergman’s amended order—which was the exact same thing with a word change to make the expected action, already a suggestion to the manager, less definitive—when King got frustrated with the whole ruse.
It went like this:
Petty reads Bergman’s amended order, which sounds exactly the same. He stumbles through it. “Did I get that right?”
King: “Mr Chairman I would object. That’s the same order.”
“No,” Bergman said to Petty. “But A for effort.”
Bergman begins reading his amended order, and he too struggles.
King: “What are you talking about, it’s the same thing.”
Bergman: “Basically every time there’s request, I’m asking consider....”
King requests a ruling from the clerk. “That is the exact same thing as my motion just with different words. He’s filing this exact same thing Mr. Chairman.”
Petty: “This is important, so lets stop this...”
King: “It’s a personality issue that’s going on. This is the same order.”
“What are we doing here?”
Petty: “He’s asking to...’
King: “This is nothig more than a personality issue.”
You can watch the moment play out here:
Bergman’s amendment apparently, according to Mayor Joe Petty, did not constitute a new item, so he made the council vote on whether to hold the initial item, which they had just voted down, again. So the council voted something down, then also voted to put it on the next agenda. Utter nonsense. And all because Bergman cannot pass up the opportunity to poo-poo an effort to make the unhoused any less miserable, and do so on behalf of the “business owners,” a euphemism, when you look close enough, for “John Piccolo.”
But that was only the first half of the story.
Another round of petty little split votes on process opened the second week of this charade. Eventually, the stage was sent. Bergman opened.
Mr. Chairman, I mean, I spoke at length about it last week and all I wasn’t happy about the hold. It’s my colleague’s right to do so, but it certainly gave me an opportunity to reach out to key members of the District 2 business communities, including the Shusbury Street Business Association, the Canal Street Business Alliance. And I’m going to tell you, they were quite surprised.
Translation: Bergman talked to Piccolo and another guy, gave them whatever bad faith version–”they’re gonna put a portapotty right in front of your door”–and they were mad, either because they wanted something to be mad about or Bergman was mad and so they felt they should be too.
Asking two people you know is not a way to administer public policy. Luckily, the city council doesn’t do that. Imagine Bergman, skulking around all the last week, calling all the business owners he knows personally, wrapped up in the fiction he’s doing politics, indulged by people who don’t know or particularly care whether he is, actually, and all the while he’s cooking up how the Facebook post is going to read–the real prize of it all.
King understands the uselessness of his position and is trying to make it not so useless, a task for which he is bludgeoned weekly. He said he’s been talking to Health and Human Service’s Homeless Outreach Division since the summer to craft the proposal. And in those discussions, they decided it would require communication, community feedback, business feedback. Now, the drama on the council floor is much to do about nothing, he said.
“We’re parsing words here,” King said. “This is an important issue. And we certainly shouldn’t have let personalities get in the way of that. This is for the greater good.”
Joe Petty, ever the leader, tried to settle the matter by saying “we’re all on the same page,” despite Bergman showing he obviously was not.
Rob Bilotta took Bergman’s smarmy antics to task directly. “So I think I do take issue with inferring that this was done in a fast track or any way to cut out input. That’s disingenuous at best.”
“The several meetings that I’ve attended on Shewsbury Street with the Shewsbury” Street Neighborhood Association, which the exception of Councilor King and Councillor Toomey, I’ve been the only councilor there.”
Petty called for a vote, and Bergman insisted that they vote on his amendment rather than King’s, despite them being the same thing. A small quibble ensues, a repeat of last week. “It’s the same thing anyway,” King interjects. Petty gets mad. “You don’t have the floor.”
Bergman: “No, it’s just my request through the chair, procedurally, it’s agreed upon that we take 17C...”
Petty sighs. King interjects again. “Chairman can I withdraw my motion? I just withdraw it,” he said. “Let’s give Councilor Bergman his motion. It’s the same dang thing. It is the same thing. Whatever. “
Petty cuts him off. “Your time is up.”
Bergman: “I’m not the one that spends a lot of time at the microphone here.” Despite this being the second straight week of his forcing the council to spend an hour on his little quibble. The dude loves to say he doesn’t talk a lot, especially when he’s actively talking a lot. “So if I thought it was the same thing, I would...”
Petty cuts him off. “Okay, he’s withdrawing 17b, we’re gonna vote on 17c.” He rushed through “all those in favor opposed so ordered” in the special way he does. And with that, the drama was over.
Like you would a petulant toddler, King and Petty both placated Bergman, letting him think he was having his way so he’d shut up about it, and the proposal went through to the manager with no mandate he do anything differently than when it first appeared on the agenda last week.
Sheesh!
As is often the case, Bergman’s motivations run counter here to his stated motivations. A fact he let slip, in a moment of frustration, saying the business owners he talks to don’t want public bathrooms.
So, if we carry the zero, we can safely assume he wanted business owner input because the business owners he would arrange to give said input are against it. This whole act, then, becomes a weasel-worded way of opposing an order while saying otherwise. A low-rent move that appeases exactly no one, in other words, The Bergman Special.
This moment is worth zooming in on for two reasons. Number one: it’s pathetic. Number two, relatedly: it’s a neat little window into the way the city council works. Via thousands of little acts of sabotage like this one, the crank majority works to make what is already a feckless body all the more inert and useless. They do their best to torpedo any progressive idea, while bringing no ideas of their own, the net effect being a reflexive hostility to the idea of ideas. More than preserve a status quo, the city council actively fossilizes the municipality, keeping it stuck in an arbitrary past, the “back in the day,” when we “did things our way” which for most councilors means the late 80s to the early 90s. And brother believe me it shows. One way of looking at it is in our especially bad problem with pedestrian deaths: it can be seen as a brutal convergence of 90s road design with 2020s vehicle size, speed and volume.
Think of Mill Street, and how Bergman factored so heavily into the reactionary backlash to that entirely mundane road redesign. It’s what he thinks he’s there to do: to seize on and stoke reactionary hostility to a new thing as it arises. What the thing is matters less than the fact it’s there: Mill Street bike lanes, roundabouts on May Street, bathrooms downtown, the WRTA... in general, any changes to zoning whatsoever, any attempt to reign in the absolute power of the police. Whatever it may be, Bergman reliably stokes the grievances and petty resentments, and that’s all he hopes to do. While Bergman is particularly transparent about it, he’s not doing anything the other cranks aren’t also doing. This is their project—how they imagine politics in the absence of having any real political power. It only serves to make real city modernization efforts prohibitively annoying, and so a lot of stuff that could happen doesn’t. And the whole city is worse for it.
Odds And Ends
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Human Rights Commission meeting from Sept. 28 is still not online. What is going on with that?
The wonderful John Keough is throwing a Halloween show type deal at which I’ll be performing a few songs.
Interesting Michael Moore bit in MASSterlist.
Millbury Sen. Michael Moore, a Democrat whose last contested election was a decade ago, recently announced a $50,000 media campaign targeting his Worcester-area district. The blitz, according to Moore’s campaign, includes billboards with the slogan “Less Talk. Moore Delivers,” and a video that will run on TV, streaming services and social platforms.
Moore says it’s “about showing up” and making sure voters “hear directly from me about the work we’re doing, the results we’re delivering for our communities and where we’re headed next.”
Fun new database to poke around in, compiling state ethics disclosures, courtesy the Boston Institute of Non-Profit Journalism. A quick search of “Worcester” yielded some interesting ones! Will have to spend some more time spelunking.
Josh Homer is leaving his post at the WPL to become the Book Czar of Big Bizaro Worcester, sometimes called “Baltimore.”
As we mark three years of genocide in Gaza, gotta give props to Zach Bryan. Not my cup of tea far as country music goes but this is a kid who reaches exactly the kind of people who need to be reached to move the generational needle on Israel. Zach Bryan sets Gillette attendance record after ‘Free Palestine’ message
Finished “The Crying of Lot 49” the other day. Man, what an ending. Crazy-making and unsettling. Now onto “End Times Fascism” which is... crazy-making and unsettling.
Main St. Complete Street Visioning Workshop coming up. Wednesday, Oct. 14, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. YMCA, 766 Main Street.
The City of Worcester is seeking input on creating a safer and more accessible corridor for all roadway users on Main Street between Chandler St. and May St. Join us to discuss your transportation vision, goals, and needs for this segment of Main Street.
Saw PIL at Big Night Live the other day. Gotta say it, Big Night Live? Big thumbs down. Terrible venue. Hostile in design, intent and execution.
This is the best Public Image song I think. Ask me again tomorrow, it’ll be different.
Ok bye bye!