A town full of babies

Binienda stinks, I need a drink!

Jul 21, 2024

Hello everyone! What a week. The weeks just keep getting more ‘what a week’ by the week if you ask me.

Jim McGovern dropped a little national politics clue for us locals on Talk of the Commonwealth Thursday.

“I’ve been part of these family discussions within the democratic party. They’re still ongoing. But it seems to me there are indications that President Biden may in fact decide to forgo the nomination. I don’t know that for certain but it appears to be the direction all the chatter is moving in.”

Hope so! Though after watching the thoroughly Righteous Gemstones-coded spectacle of the Republican National Convention Thursday night I do have to say I believe the Democrats are doomed either way here. Which is terrible but so is... just look around.

Anyway we’ll hear more from McGovern later in the post.

Real quick plug—the Tom Petty cover band I play in with a bunch of my longest and dearest friends will be playing Ralph’s in a few weeks! Aug. 3, come hang.

Plug over. Second plug commence: For $5 a month you can help sustain the city’s only truly independent and unabashedly scrappy local news outlet!! We’re only here because the people want us to be.

In today’s post:

A town full of babies—Binienda stinks, I need a drink!—Bergman vs pedestrians—fealty to developers at 204 Main Street—Kate Toomey’s systemic racism—Community Food Assessment—on being young in this world—Canal District Crime Lab—odds and ends

A town full of babies

Shout out to Lydia on Twitter for sharing this perfect header image with me

As a little prologue here’s a line from a 1971 Lester Bangs dispatch titled “James Taylor Marked for Death.”

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it’s serious. I could even be an asshole here and say that “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” which is true as a matter of fact, but people might get the wrong idea. What’s truest is that you cannot enslave a fool. No way to regiment the heebie jeebies or make ‘em walk a straight line. And nothing better to do from here on out, now that we got cybernation and all such like, but just go to the Party and STAY THERE.

What we have here on the esteemed Worcester City Council—at least the majority, nine of the 11 I’d say—is a collection of unserious people convinced of their seriousness. Same applies to the Three Horsemen (Binienda, Biancheria, Roy) of the veritable Worcester School Committee. And there’s no way to make ‘em walk in a straight line, as Bangs writes. So we’re left mostly to just marvel. Every Tuesday/Thursday night is just some weird party we get to watch from the critical distance of a live stream courtesy the local cable access.

A town full of babies, and the loudest, crankiest of them are shipped to the thunderdome arena of the Esther Howland Chamber. Here’s four examples—one from school committee Thursday and three from city council Tuesday.

1. Binienda stinks, I need a drink!

Worcester collectively owes Superintendent Rachel Monárrez one big apology for Maureen Binienda, who continues to behave like a feral ghoul at school committee meetings.

On Thursday, piping in on Zoom (camera off) from Sint Maarten, Binienda subjected Monárrez to a cartoonish cross examination after the superintendent delivered a remarkably thorough and professional self-evaluation.

The substance of Binienda’s various attacks are too obscure to get into, but it was another riff on the theme of “trying to out-superintendent the superintendent”—basically asking “do you know about this thing I know about?” over and over. And it came after a public comment period in which community member after community member spoke about how much more equitable and more responsive the district leadership has been since Monárrez took over.

Heather Prunier, who you should know by now, said:

“This administration has treated me and everyone involved in this incredibly differently than when I was a child and the way I was treated by the previous administration, who didn’t have time to respond to how I felt unsafe in the schools.
So I would just like to say that I think that this administration is doing an incredible job listening to parents, listening to students, listening to teachers. I think it’s unfortunate there are some members of the school committee who are incredibly petty and trying to bring up every single thing that they can think of to make an already difficult job more difficult.”

Following Heather was Dina Tedeschi, who commented on the difference in suspension rates under Binienda and Monárrez:

“The decrease in the number of suspensions in an elementary school setting is staggering. With 576 in school year ‘19 and only about 92 in school year ‘24. That first number is like an entire large elementary school plus being absent on any given day.”

If the Sint Maarten reference confused you, I’d highly suggest reading Neal McNamara’s recent story on Binienda headlined “How Worcester's Ex-Superintendent Earns More In Retirement Under State Waiver Program.” It’s about how Binienda collects her pension from Worcester while also working as superintendent in East Hampton—more than $300k combined, before adding in her school committee stipend.

"I'm not ready to retire," she said during an Aug. 15, 2022, meeting, according to the Worcester Telegram.
But at the time of the interview, Binienda was literally retired. She began collecting a nearly $175,000 annual pension on June 30, 2022, according to the State and Teachers Retirement Benefits database. The Quaboag school committee members would go on to hire Binienda, paying her $141,000 to serve as interim superintendent for 10 months — a salary that came on top of her pension.

The best part of the article is Binienda’s comment.

"Business people retire and work for consulting, and they're not taking their salary? It’s not different. You're still working a full-time job," she said this week, speaking while on vacation in St. Maarten.

The story came out on Wednesday. Since Binienda’s camera was off during the meeting Thursday night, we’re left to assume she was piping in from a poolside cabana at some Sint Maarten resort, waving down a pool boy for another tiki drink—looking sort of like this…

…as she blasted Monárrez for not doing things the way she used to do them.

The story has been widely shared, clearly striking a chord with a community getting fed up with Binienda’s BS. But at least one person didn’t like it. Public comment regular Fred Nathan called it an act of “political witchcraft,” heavily implying that McNamara has some sort of shadowy puppet master (video here). Yowza! Huge if true.

Everyone should be treating Binienda like a baby (a good example of that) in a town full of babies.

2. Bergman holds things up out of spite

In case you missed it somehow, a 13-year-old girl was hit and killed by a driver on Belmont Street recently. Her name was Gianna Rose Simoncini and she was the 35th pedestrian death in nine years. It was a social murder, as Greg Opperman wrote for this outlet recently.

On Tuesday, for no other reason besides his loathing for Etel Haxhiaj, Moe Bergman delayed a request of hers to declare a public health and safety emergency for vulnerable road users in the wake of this tragedy.

The delay was a poorly concealed attempt at sticking it to Etel over his embarrassing attempt to relitigate Mill Street, as we’ll get to, and the net result is just poor optics: EXTRA EXTRA The City Council Is Content To Wait Another Month After Tragic Death To Declare Emergency.

Technically, Bergman pulled a “held under privilege” move—-a rule that desperately needs to be axed. It allows any councilor to hold up any item until the next meeting without any sort of vote. And, since it’s a summer schedule, the next meeting is in August. He did so, he said, because he wants a legal opinion on how such a state of emergency might strip the council of its authority (like it has any to begin with).

But when you look at his full comments, it sure seems like that wasn’t really the concern.

“All of our hearts have to go out to children who are killed, just like they go out to elderly people who are killed and anybody in between. We don't want deaths in the city.”

Ding ding ding! A vague overture to the 90-year-old man who crashed his car into a parked car on Mill Street. Absolutely grotesque to make a 1-1 comparison between a driver who died at the hands of an inanimate object and a pedestrian who died at the hands of a driver. To make that 1-1 for snarky political reasons jumps the Shark of Grotesquery.

Bergman continued: “I just question whether or not the city of Worcester making that declaration is in our best interest if what’s happening in Worcester is no different than any other city in Massachusetts.”

A classic bad faith argument.

During the speech he also takes credit for trying to make roads safer, against all evidence he did a good job, because a few years ago the council talked about speed humps, which he called a “rather original idea which is not so original.” (?)

“So I and my colleagues I just mentioned have been part and parcel in trying to come up with ways to prevent injury and death.”

But he isn’t of course. Mill Street is an example of a modern attempt at traffic calming infrastructure and design. Over and above speed humps. There’s a lot more to it, and the city’s traffic engineers have patiently explained this to Bergman et al. dozens of times, and still it seems the message has not resonated one single bit. Evidence of that in this next line, which is the best.

“I do wish under 10e that ‘vulnerable road users’ would have also included motorists,” he said.

My dude, ‘vulnerable road users’ are the ones that aren’t in the two-ton steel boxes. That’s what makes them vulnerable. That’s what makes the definition useful. Just so deeply unserious. Painful to articulate such a baseline point.

After Bergman concluded, Khrystian King asked the city lawyer Mike Traynor directly if the declaration presented any of the legal trouble Bergman was concerned about. Traynor said no in blunt fashion:

“A local declaration by the city manager does not bring with it any extraordinary powers,” Traynor said. “You declare it to bring awareness to it and then the manager makes directives to his administration to do certain things.”

So why are we holding this again?

Then Haxhiaj read the state definition of vulnerable road users, which she said with some delightful snark that she’d happily send to Bergman.

“All I’m asking for tonight is a symbolic gesture to say that that traffic violence is an issue in our city.”

The city of Boston did it, she said.

“I really don't understand the hesitation and all this anxiety around the city manager publicly saying we are in a state of emergency ... for our residents”

She pointed out that the city lawyer just said there’s no issue, and that she’d change it to a resolution as opposed to a declaration “if it comforts your feelings.”

Bergman didn’t respond to that, and the item was held for the next meeting in August.

The kicker of this whole shebang is that Bergman, as well as George Russell, vaguely referenced a “time in the past” when declaring a public health emergency “presented questions” about whether it “shifted the authority” of the council, as Bergman put it.

Neither said exactly what they were talking about, so King introduced it to the record.

“That declaration was that racism was a public health issue,” he said. “That’s a fact. It was and it is. It is and it was. There’s no controversy about that fact.”

Holding up the traffic violence declaration because you didn’t like the racism declaration! Unserious people convinced of their seriousness. In other words, cranky babies.

3. “The ask is the absolute bare minimum”

At another point in the meeting, Haxhiaj made a motion to have the city manager ask a developer (receiving a hefty local subsidy) to add one more ‘affordable’ unit, bringing the total up to three. The simple request caused all hell to break loose. A panic ensued.

But first, a look at this development. The Menkiti Group plans to renovate 204 Main Street from office space to 20 units of housing: four studios, 10 one-bed, six two-beds. This is the building, which is currently mostly empty, except for the Garden Fresh Courthouse Cafe, which is staying, at least that’s the plan right now.

The rents are crazy: Studios for $1,963, one-beds for $2,228, two-beds for $2,758.

Two of the 20 units—one a studio and the other a one-bed, will be set at ‘affordable’ rents along the “60 percent area median income” standard. ‘Affordable’ doesn’t mean cheap. These units are still quite expensive. The “60 percent area median income” standard they’re set to is a $51,375 salary for one person, $58,688 for two. The “fair market rent” for those making that amount of money is $1,284 for a studio and $1,292 for a one bed.

The two ~affordable~ units in this development will be a tad higher than that. Per the report, the studio rent is $1360 and the one-bed is $1,371.

$1,300 is not affordable by any normal person’s definition. But when you hear city government types talking about the affordable housing they “create,” this is what they mean.

All Haxhiaj did on Tuesday night, mind you, is ask about one more unit set at $1,300 not $2,000. That’s it!

With that in mind, let's turn to the financing, which is worth digging into. The $12.5 million project is getting $11 million in local state and federal subsidies.

In a report attached to the agenda (page 56 in this version), the development costs, loans, and projected earnings are laid out in great detail.

In the “project costs” there’s a $904,879 “developer fee,” which is wild. And there’s also a line item that reads “real estate taxes: 0.” That’s right, folks, this developer is paying zero taxes somehow.

That “somehow” lies in the nebulous web of subsidies they’ve gotten:

The net result being they can complete the project while taking close to a million cash as a fee and pay no real estate taxes somehow.

Meanwhile, the “net operating income” is $458,659 and the annual loan payment is $382,216. So on top of the $900,000 ‘fee’ off the bat, it generates ~$80,000 a year straight profit.

Haxhiaj’s request was for one more unit being back of the napkin $500 less expensive—a $6,000 cost to the developer’s bottom line. From $80,000 to $74,000 in the pure profit column.

As part of the deal, the city is sacrificing $185,000 in property taxes the development would have generated over 10 years. (Instead of $656,000, we’ll get $470,000.) That’s the “TIE deal.”

Haxhiaj suggested that the deal gives us some leverage to ask for a bit more for our struggling residents: “Since we’re giving $11 million in subsidies, we should do everything in our power to leverage that and increase the amount of units we can glean.”

“The ask is the absolute bare minimum,” she said.

This set off a goofy and revealing half-hour conversation.

Candy Mero-Carlson, naturally, was first to rise. She called up Peter Dunn to give a “summary” of the report she should have read (as outlined above) but clearly did not.

Dunn made a point to say the line that all sober and rational adults need to nod along to in these trying times.

“Due to the current environment of construction costs and interest rates, it’s really challenging to get these projects to be financed, both equity and debt.”

Translation: We can’t ask for too much. If their profit goes down a few thousand dollars for the community’s benefit they might walk and then you’re stuck with an empty building. It’s hard to take seriously when you look at the numbers in depth as we did earlier.

Anyway. Carlson then got on her soap box: “We’ve all worked tirelessly to make sure our friends in organized labor and our friends in Worcester reap the benefits of these projects in Worcester.”

And then...

“It’s not about giving away the store by any means, it’s about putting housing downtown.” She “has no problem asking the developer” but left it at that. She didn’t say they should add another one. Just that they’ll ask.

It would become a theme.

Joe Petty said, “These are complicated cases. This building has been empty for years. We have someone who’s finally going to develop it. And they wouldn’t develop it if we didn’t have all these incentives”

Eric Batista said, “This is the complexity. Developers are looking for more incentives and opportunities. It’s more and more difficult to get these deals done.”

The motion to ask passed unanimously, but it’s almost certainly going nowhere. As a rule, the city doesn’t apply any leverage to developers at all. If the developer says no, which they invariably will, then that’s that. Of course the council could withhold the TIE deal, putting the developer in the position of making no money by walking or making a little less a year but still millions by accepting the city’s terms. But that would be unthinkable.

Why is it unthinkable? I’ll turn it over to David A. Banks and his great 2023 book The City Authentic.

The structural speculators at the helm of the growth machine are largely concerned with how well the city acts as a tradeable commodity (exchange value) and less interested in how it performs as a place to live (use value).
This is understandably an unpopular position, so those in power work hard to "de-emphasize the connection between growth and exchange values and to reinforce the link between growth goals and better lives for the majority." They focus on the jobs that new development will supposedly create or the amenities it will provide. These are often vastly overestimated or redound to the benefit of far fewer people than advertised.

The more I dig into this the more I realize how absolutely rotten the development world is. A cartel that government officials are in on.

This all speaks to the complete powerlessness—perceived and material—of the city council in addressing this housing crisis. Most seem to not even want to acknowledge the power, let alone exercise it.

Those with actual power, like Batista and Dunn, hide behind the supposed difficulty of negotiations we’re not allowed to see, let alone take part in.

The council is left to launder decisions already made behind closed doors.

Petty’s comments are the best example of this reality:

“It’s not lost on this entire council that we have a housing crisis,” he said. “The more we build the more inventory we’ll have.”

We gotta do what we gotta do. And sure yeah we’ll ask about another unit but if they say no, that’s that. If the council as a body has leverage, we haven’t seen them use it.

Meanwhile deals like this are made by a nebulous group of people shrouded in secrecy. Remember, the city manager maintains an Economic Development Coordinating Council which meets weekly and doesn’t post agendas or keep minutes. Did they have a hand in brokering this deal? We have no idea. All we can do is ask nicely that the manager press for a little more from the developer. And we have no recourse if he doesn’t. This is not a democracy, it is a machine. A growth machine.

The lip service paid to affordability on the council floor is only that—lips moving. The real constituency gets what it wants. In order to launder that reality, we’re sold a Reagan-era myth: market-rate housing needs to be built and the government needs to heavily subsidize it. One day there will be a trickle down effect, they promise. It will alleviate pressure. But they don’t mean it, and they know that. For them, the juicing of property value is the main goal, and displacement is unavoidable collateral damage.

A city government oriented around the quality of housing for its residents would look dramatically different. It’s just not what we have.

We’re not remarkable in that regard. Worcester behaves like pretty much every city in America—stuck in the mindset of competition against neighboring municipalities for the resources dangled by the private sector. If we don’t jump on this New Bedford will. And so the entire thing is co-opted. There’s no planning except for the next big prize. The effects are irrelevant. City halls are merely good soldiers in a real estate cartel that’s bigger than we can really comprehend.

We’re left to perceive the uneven terrain like weather. Some cities are ‘in decline’ others are ‘hot’ or ‘on the map.’ And it goes that way in cycles as this cartel extracts from all of it.

To buck the trend—refuse to court developers but rather extract concessions—is heresy. Especially for a city like Worcester, so historically ‘in decline.’ But what does it really mean to be ‘hot’ for people like you and me? Is it good for our lives? I don’t think so. I’d rather Worcester be cold if ‘hot’ means I can’t continue living here. But none of us are allowed to democratically decide whether the city is hot or cold. It’s a ridiculous notion—like voting on whether it should rain on a given day. But it only seems ridiculous because of the baseline assumptions we tolerate. The different reality we can’t see.

What if this city became agnostic to ‘growth’? What if we decided the course of things by a different metric? We’d be at odds with most of the world. And we’d suffer for it. The carrot we’ve seen in the recent ‘boom times’ has its attendant stick. To balk at growth for the benefit of residents is a luxury afforded only to the affluent places. In a city like Worcester, we’d be punished by an array of funding formulas and algorithms. The schools would suffer the most.

But to pursue growth means to cannibalize the fabric of your city. To displace the people that make it what it is, and allow market-based migratory patterns to trigger a rebirth. And what if that transformation leaves us worse off as a people? Soulless? Transient? Cost of doing business for the people who run the city. That’s not a practical concern.

What really happened in this moment I described earlier was a gut reaction to Haxhiaj’s assertion that the people who live here now are, in fact, a practical concern. The gut reaction manifested as flailing apologetic responses, typical a city government that feels compelled to lie about that being a practical concern, but finds it difficult.

The central contradiction they can’t reconcile is that the housing crisis is not a crisis at all for the growth machine. It’s great for everyone powerful enough to benefit from it. There’s no downside for a Batista or Augustus or Petty, except for the rare instances they have to rhetorically answer for those chewed up and spit out by it.

They go out of their way to avoid having to address the violence of a system that relies on uneven development. Made to confront it directly, they squirm.

At this moment, all we can really do is make them squirm. Make them say the quiet part out loud: that your health is less important than the market’s. Make them scrounge for a response that placates the people, like Biden just did with his fake rent control proposal.

When Worcester was cheap, Worcester had a personality. This city was special when it was nothing. Now, that personality is withering. It’s nearly gone. What we sacrifice when we crest a rising wave on the sea of uneven development cannot be measured. What we gain is only felt by the relative few, and it's fleeting. Worcester is pricing out its very soul, and the people in charge are claiming victory, unaware of the loss.

It's one thing to lament a hollowing out in a place like Brooklyn, which has a Queens next door. Where are people priced out of Worcester supposed to go? We’re ringed by guarded suburbs. When we lose people, we lose them for good. And the market won’t feel the cost of that until it’s too late.

Our pursuit of growth in terms of property value while constraining growth in terms of a metropol will prove a death sentence. Where is this new class of well-off hip ‘creative class’ Worcesterite supposed to spend their weekend money when no restaurant can keep a dishwasher? No club a bouncer? No local entrepreneur who can put up capital for a downtown storefront? And wasn’t all that the promise luxury developers made to their new and transient clientele? Weren’t they promised an all inclusive ‘‘urban lifestyle’ that justifies the exorbitant rents? Won’t they leave when they don’t find that experience?

Even accepting the bullshit goal of making Worcester ‘nicer’ and ‘more attractive,’ the city is setting itself up to fail here. In fact if you think about it, the long arc of Worcester history is defined by the power elite refusing to realize it’s the poor people in the dense neighborhoods who make the city tick. From our roads to our zoning to our schools, the city has always been antagonistic to that central premise. The long legacy of shooting ourselves in the foot continues. And we can barely bring ourselves to ask for one more ‘affordable’ apartment from one developer.

City governed by babies.

4. Toomey squirms around “systemic racism”

Let’s rewind real quick to May 14, when the city council met to go over an agenda that contained a petition from the public:

“Gordon Davis requests City Council request Standing Committee on Public Safety investigate the issue of systemic racism and public safety with public hearings included.”

It’s a good idea! The Standing Committee on Public Safety is, on paper, the primary vehicle for oversight of the police department. We just had an equity audit done which showed massive disparities in arrest rates and also a lot of evidence of internal racial strife. Oh and the WPD is actively under investigation by the DOJ for racial bias.

But we don’t have the public safety committee we’re supposed to, because Mayor Joe Petty gives the chairmanship to Kate Toomey, the councilor most obviously in the tank for not only the police department but also the police unions. I’ve written about this often1 so I’ll leave it at that today.

Toomey motioned to file it (read: throw it in the trash). Her rationale:

“We’re actually going to be having a public safety committee meeting at the end of this month. Wednesday, May 29. And the crime statistics are going to be discussed at that point. Therefore I’m going to be filing this petition.”

The petition was about systemic racism, not crime statistics? Those are two different things? So A very very very stupid rationale from Kate here even if she was being honest (she wasn’t).

Thu Nguyen called for a vote on Toomey’s motion to trash it. The vote didn’t go Toomey’s way, failing by a 4-6 margin (only Bergman, Colorio, and Mero-Carlson voted with her). Petty tried to move on but several councilors were like hey wait a minute we didn’t do anything with this petition.

Toomey re-explained herself:

“Excuse me Mr. Chair, part of the reason why I filed it is we are addressing the crime statistics and the issues that are brought up here. But part of the other reason why I wanted to file it is there’s inaccuracies on here. We can discuss all these—and we should be discussing issues related to crime statistics and uh the impact on our community um and uh the potential... the issue of systemic racism [inaudible] public safety. We should be discussing that all the time. But there are inaccuracies on this, which is why I wanted to file this.”

That’s her full unabridged comment. Watch for yourself.

What inaccuracies? She doesn’t say. The full text of Davis’ petition, which only appears in the agenda attachments, reads:

“Whereas the Disparities in Arrests Report shows a disproportionate number of Black and Latino people arrested in Worcester. The police chief has said that this systemic racism harms Black and Latino people.
Whereas the statement by the Worcester Police Chief is evidence of a clear and present danger.
We ask the City Council to assign to the Public Safety Committee the task of investigating the issue of systemic racism and public safety. The investigation should include public hearings.

Try to guess which part she thinks is inaccurate!

The report does show that and the chief did say that (remarkably). The clear and present danger presented a person of color when interacting with a police officer is uh... well, just read the news on any given day.

The clerk said you have to do something with it since the motion to file failed. You could table it, he suggested. And that’s what Toomey did. It’s been on the table ever since, appearing at the bottom of every agenda with a hodgepodge of other long forgotten ideas.

On Tuesday, Gordon Davis showed up to be like hey what gives. He alleged the council is violating the rules by leaving it there on the table, which isn’t technically true. But it’s still poor form to leave such an item on the table when your police department is being investigated by the DOJ.

“I think it’s time this council stop embarrassing itself,” he said.

Frequent public commenter Idella Hazard backed Davis up.

“This is about systematic racism,” she said. “It seems to just say... it makes it... I don't even want to say the words...”

(I’ll say ‘em: it makes you look racist.)

“It looks bad.”

This all took place in the first half hour of a four-hour meeting. After politely hearing them out without a response the city council moved on, as is tradition.

By the 4:15 mark, just past 10 p.m., everyone, myself included, had forgotten about it. But not Toomey! Right before the mayor banged the “meeting over” gavel, Toomey said the following, while reading off her iPad:

“I just wanted to make a statement on a comment that was made earlier. On March 26, 2024, I filed an item that the city manager is hereby requested to request the police chief to provide the council with a report concerning any updated information that was not included in the racial equity audit report on the Worcester police department including information relative to efforts that have already been enacted since the report.”

Oh ok that clears it up.

Then the kicker line: “So, continued discussion.”

She delivered it with a somber little nod as if to say ‘see Gordon Davis was wrong and I’m right and also I’m on top of it.’ Of course she very clearly isn’t.

Another unserious person fully convinced of their seriousness. A baby amid a city of babies.

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Everything we need except the political will

Members of an array of local food-related organizations gathered at a downtown conference room Tuesday morning to go over the newly-released Worcester Community Food Assessment, a survey of local hunger and inequity and barriers.

Congressman Jim McGovern was the keynote speaker. I was there for it, and found he starts sounding refreshingly radical when it comes to the arena of hunger. We live in the richest country in the world, he said, and yet 44 million Americans are food insecure or hungry. “I’m ashamed of that.”

I liked his comments on political will:

“Because hunger, when all is said and done, is a political condition, right? We have the money, we have the food, we have the infrastructure. We have everything we need to do to end it except the political will.”

And especially appreciated an all-too-rare connection made between domestic social ills and the military industrial complex:

“Yet we have boundless advocacy and success in funding weapon systems we don't even need, yet when it comes to putting food on the table for people, it's always a fight. It's always a fight. And we have to change that mindset.”

In that room, McGovern was preaching to the choir. The Worcester Community Food Assessment is a collaboration among a bunch of groups, including Worcester County Food Bank, the Greater Worcester Community Foundation, the Prevention Research Center at UMass Medical School, and city hall. (Interesting that it was not on the council agenda Tuesday, but that would require the council addressing actual problems from time to time.)

The survey results are bound in a big ol book that looks like this...

...and it's a synthesis of past research on the subject, policy review, site visits, and, most importantly, surveys of community members. You can read the whole thing here.

Key points: Food insecurity is bad in Worcester, and needs range wildly within the urban geography. Assistance programs are underutilized and under-advertised. There’s a need for more funding, better communication, better transportation, and more access to services.

I found a map in the report particularly interesting. Originally produced by the Worcester Regional Research Bureau, it measures SNAP usage and social vulnerability by census tract.

You may notice this map looks similar to the heat island map and the income map and the ShotSpotter map!

Another edition in ‘maps of social problems that are the same map.’ It’s almost like there’s some sort of social stratification going on here which is by design. Hmmmmm. Who can say.

Also of note were the survey results regarding the community fridges. Almost half of the survey respondents were aware of the community fridges and about 25 percent have used them. As Casey Burns, executive director of Healthy Greater Worcester, noted: “This is a higher percentage than some of the state and federal programs we looked at—that people knew about what they were and what they provided.”

It struck me as significant that this project—purely the product of well-meaning locals engaged in a simple, clear and effective mutual aid concept—could outperform programs with much more financing and bureaucratic infrastructure. What could Woo Fridge do if they had the sort of money a program like Meals on Wheels? Seems to me to be a model that would scale quite easily and naturally.

Anyway I’m not an expert on this stuff and don’t have much of any use to contribute. But the report is a good read for those interested.

Undercurrent of fear

Earlier this week I was invited to talk to a group of high schoolers as part of the Audre Lorde Transformative Arts School (ALTAS) program at Clark University. It was supposed to be a presentation about local journalism but it quickly evolved into an informal chat about what it was like for them to go through COVID as middle schoolers and what it’s like living with the constant looming specter of school shooters.

All of the students were in fifth or sixth grade when the lockdown came. One described that period as “bed rotting.” Another described losing a close friend in the process. More than a few talked about the mayhem of returning. A throughline: Those are crucial years that were robbed from them. A lingering effect is they no longer have proper snow days—more like Zoom days now—which is small potatoes, I suppose, but the kids have been through enough, I think. Let them have a good old fashioned snow day.

We talked about that for a while and when I turned back to gun violence I could feel the trauma in the room—everyone got serious, kids shifted in their seats, a pause of uncertainty but once they started talking they couldn’t stop.

Students threaten school shootings, one of them said. They follow a trend. “School shooters become popular,” one student said, like it was an obvious fact and it is.

One shared a story: Some kid posted a picture with a gun and bullets and a hit list on Discord and the cops came and it was a huge deal at school. Discord, man. Always Discord.

One student talked about the Worcester carnival shooting and how it ruined an event they really look forward to.

Another recounted the time she cried to her teacher after going through an ALICE training in the fourth grade. If you don’t know what that is, it’s fucked. Cops essentially fake a school shooting like a live military drill and encourage the kids to fight back. One girl told me why would we think fighting back is any better than running and also school shooters are usually students so it sorta shows them what to do and what to expect.

One time there was a TikTok rumor about a day when all the school shootings were going to happen and it caused a panic and shut down schools, a student told me. “It was very confusing but also I was just so scared.”

An undercurrent of fear is how I’d describe the mood of the room.

Having left, back in the car, the radio came on. They were talking about the “would be assassin” and about his gun and how he shot it and got shot. The “security failure” of it all. The “unknowable aims” of the shooter, now dead.

We know enough, though. From the New York Times:

But in the aftermath, when the F.B.I. was able to finally access Mr. Crooks’s cellphones and other electronic devices, agents could see that he had searched for images of Mr. Trump as well as President Biden, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and even F.B.I. Director Christopher A. Wray.
Mr. Crooks also typed in “major depressive disorder” and searched for dates and places for appearances for both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.
One of Mr. Trump’s planned appearances happened to be about 50 miles from Mr. Crooks’s house in Bethel Park, Pa.

And I drove off, back to a life where I don’t have to walk into a building every day where such “security failures” are common, expected even. One day, some day. Some person who is depressed and doesn’t care about living anymore and wants to die making the news.

Canal District Crime Lab

A parking lot across the street from Polar Park may soon become the sort of exciting new development any up and coming city would love to have! A... state police crime lab...

The state is considering a spot on Green Island Boulevard, next to a parking garage, for a building that would house a laboratory, evidence storage, office space, and meeting space for the State Police—an institution famously judicious and careful with evidence. Per the Telegram:

Denis Dowdle of Madison Properties confirmed Monday that a bid was submitted for a parcel in front of the Green Island Boulevard Garage.
"We believe we put together a very viable proposal," Dowdle said. "I just think it will be a great thing for Worcester."

Eric Batista loves it:

Thomas Matthews, a spokesperson for the city, said the city was aware of the bid and supportive of it.
"The City of Worcester is aware of and in support of Madison Properties’ submission to the state’s Request for Proposals for the State Police Crime Lab," (a city spokesman) said. "The master plan for the area along Green Island Boulevard has always included a vision for a laboratory-type use and this opportunity would fit that vision well."

Tim Murray loves it:

"You're talking about a major investment that would be facilitated by a state lease in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood," Murray said. "You'd have a state-of-the-art environmental building in terms of fuel efficiency."

Absolutely nowhere is it mentioned this is completely at odds with the intent to build a neighborhood around Polar Park, which the city and Madison Properties sold us on. In fact it’s actively hostile to that idea. Unless…

Odds and ends

All right that’s it folks. Another dispatch from yours truly. I worked hard on it all week, hope you liked it. If you did, consider throwing me some dough so I can keep doing it.

Worcester Sucks and I Love It

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