"Bigger than all of us in government"
Or at least that's what we'd like you to believe
Very busy week for me! Hence the late posting. I was shooting for this morning as has been the case lately. In general, Sunday morning is the best time for me and that’s been the schedule lately.
But yesterday and this morning my body imposed a “no more creative work” cap on my brain and I shut down completely. That ever happen to anyone? The very specific type of anxiety that reliably precipitates these shutdowns is captured in the following video, in hilarious fashion. Cracks me up every time.
Worcester Sucks is the pet lizard in case you didn’t get that.
Katie has been away on a much deserved impromptu trip to Disney, which means it’s been just me and Gus in the apartment. She wants me to get this post done more than anyone in the world, even me. Here’s some video evidence of the protestations I have to deal with when I’m at the writing desk for too long.
Anyway I was the San Fran local NPR on Friday! Very cool! Check it out! I spoke with Rose Aguilar on Your Call for about 15 minutes about the death of local journalism, as I covered in the Columbia Journalism Review.
It was a really nice conversation and I’m glad to have had it! Thank you Rose and Malihe and everyone else at Your Call.
On Thursday I hosted the first Open Newsroom event for the Worcester Community Media Foundation! Big success. More on that later in the post.
Oh yeah and on Tuesday someone called into city council under my name to talk about “the Jews” prompting Mayor Joe Petty to issue a weird statement in which I am “someone that (he) believed to know,” lol.
More on that whole thing also later in the post.
This’ll be a short(er) one on account of the fact it was a pretty dry week and I have no gas in the tank. Need a day off that’s conscious and not forced on me by a system override.
A few notes from the Council, a look at the week ahead, a quick tease of a new cool thing we’re starting (!!) and some other stuff.
Please send some money my way if you can.
“Bigger than all of us in government”
In the last post I laid out the argument that the city manager is intentionally obscuring the homeless sweeps performed by a team of cops and other city employees called the Quality of Life team. I argued that he omitted that information from his report because it’s a bad look to say this stuff out loud, and increasingly so. I further argued the majority of the city council is perfectly fine with him doing so.
This week, that same council majority became complicit in the effort to obscure the true purpose of the QOL. By a 6-4 vote, they spiked a request made by Councilor Thu Nguyen to provide the information that was absent.
The “interacting with the unhoused population” is the thing that was, by Batista’s own admission, taken out of the report last week. This request would give the public a better sense of how much time the QOL spends sweeping encampments. Considering the legality of these sweeps is in front of the Supreme Court, it seems like something the public should know.
One after another, councilors rose to speak out against this request going on to the manager. They were the same councilors who took it personally last week when members of the public, including unhoused people, criticized the endless sweeps.
District 3 Councilor George Russell went first. He asked if the report had any information that wouldn’t be in the budget document. Then he said, spuriously, that he has “no problem with this report” if that’s not the case. Batista said the breakdown of the hours spent on various tasks isn’t in the budget report. He listed some of the tasks, but not the homelessness response, which was interesting. He looked like he was about to say it, but instead just trailed off mid sentence.
Russell asked if the breakdown of hours spent on specific tasks was “something that you have access to.” Batista said “we have access to all that data.” Which... duh. Of course they do. This report wouldn’t be hard to compile, and Russell should know that.
Colorio followed Russell.
“We just had a comprehensive presentation last week and this item is redundant.”
But it wasn’t comprehensive. Batista said out loud, in public, that he omitted the homelessness work from the presentation. Colorio motioned to “file” the request, meaning the city manager wouldn’t have to respond to it.
District 2 Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson agreed it should be filed, suggesting the request is “micromanaging.” At-Large Councilor Moe Bergman said that if the request wasn’t filed, he would ask for more funding for the team to “comply with some of these requests.” Bergman, a lawyer, shouldn’t be of the understanding that the QOL team members would be the ones compiling this data. I’m sure he knows better, and was just arguing in bad faith. Usually the case.
Nguyen then explained the order was requested by residents who wanted to learn more after watching the presentation last week. I have the same questions! The presentation did not answer them. “I think we should honor the residents,” Nguyen said. A simple commitment to transparency for the sake of the public.
Honor the residents they did not.
Colorio’s motion to file passed, with four councilors opposed - Nguyen, Haxhiaj, Ojeda, Pacillo (King absent, but likely with them, making it 6-5.) Everyone else, including Mayor Joe Petty, made it clear they’re fine with hiding this information.
During the same meeting, the council discussed a deeply unserious order on homelessness from Councilor Kate Toomey. Where Nguyen’s order would have helped us understand something real and useful, Toomey’s order was of the “just spitballing here” variety.
Have the colleges do… something? Toomey didn’t provide a better explanation on the floor.
“Certainly it’s an issue that’s bigger than all of us in government,” she said. “I think that it’s important to include those in our institutions of higher learning to the table. They have, uh, they might have, uh, some opportunities on their own campuses, to be able to assist. They may have, um, some, ah, students do some work and research.”
Just spitballing. Keep in mind Toomey voted to file Nguyen’s order for actually useful information. Like I said—unserious. Where Nguyen’s order was spiked, Toomey’s passed unanimously.
Councilor Haxhiaj pushed back, thankfully. She said we know what the solutions are already and there is plenty of research backing them up.
“Not to throw shade on colleges and universities, they certainly have research capabilities. But there’s a ton of research out there that outlines exactly what the solutions are.
What I would like to ask is whether we have the political will and the funding necessary to actually implement and actualize those resources?”
The problem is very obviously the political will, and in this meeting we saw that manifest quite clearly. The majority of the city council voted to spike a request for more information on how we actually address homelessness in real life. But they voted in favor of a request that amounted to “maybe ask the colleges nicely if they want to do something?”
Under the benign, “just a suggestion” appearance of Toomey’s order is a malicious framework, though maybe a subconscious one. When Toomey said homelessness is “bigger than all of us in government” it amounted to a concession. The problem is not bigger than government, it is government. Homelessness is a product of the way we govern. It’s bigger than Worcester City Hall, sure. But that doesn’t excuse waving your hands in the air and saying there’s no solution. There are things the city could do right fuckin now, and they all start with reevaluating the current response. There is an irrefutable body of evidence that the routine sweeps that the QOL carries out make the problem worse. At the same time that Toomey is throwing up her hands and saying it’s bigger than government, she is voting against making the true nature of the sweeps public. That is political will.
This is exactly what Etel was railing against in this clip I pulled from last week (it’s been picking up some traction lately).
It’s not that we don’t know what to do, it’s that we don’t want to do it.
Introducing a Worcester Sucks cartoon strip?
Check out this amazing cartoon strip Katie made me for Valentines Day!
Given the fact that Sunday seems like the day for my posts going forward, we’ll have to try and game out a storyline for y’all.
More cops in City Hall
A favorite move of our local crank community, from City Council to School Committee to the Facebook groups I’m banned from, is fearmongering about safety.
City Councilor Moe Bergman did that on Tuesday, promting a week of “discourse” that got us nowhere. “Is City Hall safe enough?!” the local punditry asked all week. During his tirade, he brought up the “incident” of nazis calling into the council (using my name) as a reason why we need more of said safety.
Despite the obvious fact that cops can do nothing about zoom calls so long as the whole “protected speech” thing exists, this line of inquiry plays directly into what said Nazis want.
To understand what I mean by that, I’d suggest reading my recent piece on said Nazis—”Oh no! It’s the City Council Derp Squad!”—to understand that they are just fuckin losers online, then also listen to Molly Conger’s recent episode of It Could Happen Here on said City Council Derp Squad. In it, she provides a good sense of what it is these Nazis actually want and surprise surprise they like it when city governments become more restrictive because of them. We shouldn’t be doing that! It’s, unfortunately, exactly what Moe Bergman seems to want and also what Joe Petty offered in the above-referenced statement. Requiring callers to use their full phone numbers is not going to stop any Nazi with a Google account.
“Shut up, Kate”
For years, Toomey has been in her own personal la-la land, suggesting over and over the way out of the housing crisis is sprinkling the city with tiny homes.
This has been one of my go-to examples for how deeply unserious the old guard crank councilors are. This is about the third time maybe the fourth that Toomey has brought up the idea. Just like her unserious order on the unhoused, this was quietly passed over to the City Manager’s Office, where it will languish for years untouched.
It was however the scene laid for a funny Zoom moment. As we see below, someone on the Zoom forgot to mute themselves and said “shut up, Kate” as she continued to go on and on about tiny homes. Amazing.
Whoever that was, I owe you a beer!
The first Open Newsroom was a hit!
On Thursday, we held our first Open Newsroom event and it went very well! Got about a dozen people out and workshopped some very interesting stories that people brought to the table. Great stuff! We're definitely going to make that a monthly event.
The concept for the open newsroom is a standard pitch meeting, just like the ones that happen in newsrooms, but with anyone who shows up. The fancy words for this approach are “democratizing” and “decentralizing.” But really it’s just fun and interesting.
While we all agreed that anything shared at the meeting was off the record, I can say that I came away from it with a lot of good ideas and reporting leads and interesting observations. It went better than expected! I can see this event growing into a real institution.
This coming Thursday, I’m going to run the same Open Newsroom program on Twitch! Excited to see how that goes. Follow the Worcestery Council Theatre 3000 Twitch channel for updates on that. Tentatively, it starts at 6 p.m. and will run for a few hours. Hopefully we’ll have a call-in line running. I’ll be sure to post another update here next week with more solid information.
On a related note...
Worcester Book Club! Worcester Book Club!
We’re starting a book club! It’s an idea we’ve bounced around for a while but it came together in a big way this week.
On Tuesday, we’ll launch a sign up form to get the ball rolling, and we hope to start in the next couple months. The meetings will be in person at the video store and on Twitch at the same time, which is neat. The first book we’re doing is Eight Hours For What We Will—crucial reading for any Worcester person who wants to understand the city more deeply.
Good stuff! More soon!
Please consider becoming a member of the Rewind Video Club to support stuff like this :-)
Odds and ends
I didn’t get this one copy edited so if you see any typos no you didn’t.
Please consider throwing some bones my way!
Over the weekend I watched a lot of Kyla Scanlon’s video essays, which are fantastic, leading me down a rabbit hole all the way to watching all of Adam Curtis’ The Century of Self for the first time, which is mind blowing and perfect.
This one in particular would be of interest to my readers I think.
It’s very refreshing to hear someone talk about economics in an accessible way without losing sight of the fact human beings are more important! I’d love to give video essays like this a try sometime soon. We’ll see!
Ok that’s enough for now. Bye bye!
I’ve been Adam Curtis-pilled ever since he went on Chapo Trap House and delivered that eloquent but soul-killing monologue re: real political change (https://youtu.be/mlaPZ-xMPGY).