“Creating a perpetual cycle of despair”
Are we putting our time and energy to good use here?
Good morning! Big piece today hope you like it! I left it all on the field.
Please consider supporting this outlet :-)
Also quick plug: I’ll be doing the roast of Worcester again! It’s on Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the White Room. It’s always a fun time, and it’s free. Come hang!
“Creating a perpetual cycle of despair”
A week ago, about 30-40 people participated in a “sleep out” demonstration outside City Hall. The action was organized by unhoused people, and others joined them in solidarity. The night was miserably cold and rain-soaked. It was a cry for the city to do better. To stop making the situation worse for people. I couldn’t make it unfortunately as I was traveling, but this is a good writeup.
Then, on Tuesday night, they took that activism to the council floor, rallying around a public petition filed by Sam Olney, an unhoused resident and organizer of HALO Worcester, which led the sleep out. The petition called for a sanctioned encampment site as an alternative to the city’s policy of de facto sweeps as encampments are reported by property owners.
In an almost cartoonishly on-the-nose illustration of the homelessness discourse in this city, the petition appeared on the agenda directly below another on the matter that dripped with the shitty cruelty we’ve come to expect from people around here.
Fortunately, no one showed up to speak in favor of Michael Grandone’s “we should find some data to back up our scapegoating” petition. (Too much to get into in this post, but this item is the product of a pervasive bad-faith narrative about “the towns.” I explained it here.)
But a lot of people showed up to speak in favor of Olney’s idea. Twelve of the 31 overall commenters on Tuesday night spoke in support of the petition. The agenda was packed, and this one petition received almost half the public’s attention.
They pleaded for the council to take seriously the idea that a sanctioned encampment would help mitigate the increasingly dire homelessness crisis in this city. The council, of course, did not take it seriously. In keeping with a long tradition, they patiently waited, then callously disregarded it.
As someone who’s observed the council for a long time, it went exactly as I’d expect it to. Everyone “in the know” understands that public petitions like this one simply do not matter. What’s designed to be a process for public involvement has the practical effect of discouraging it. This particular moment put the futility on garish display. So, while there were bigger stories this week, I decided to make this one the focus. I put it under the classic Worcester Sucks microscope, and spent most of the week looking at the universal themes floating around in this one tiny petri dish.
This isn’t a piece I would be allowed to write at a legacy outlet. It’s too long and too weird and much too outwardly subjective. My hope is it leaves you with a few very big questions I’ve been asking myself lately. The sort of questions a legacy outlet has a fiduciary responsibility to avoid presenting. These aren’t questions that often enter the public discourse. They’re uncomfortable. I don’t have the answers. What follows starts narrow, with a detailed play-by-play of this one moment, and ends wide: on our time and energy and willingness to care, and whether we’ve been set up to squander those resources.
The Narrow
The council rejected Olney’s petition—”filed” it, technically—by a 6-5 vote. Mayor Joe Petty was the deciding “yes” to file it. If the vote had gone the other way, the idea would have merely been sent to a subcommittee for further discussion. It wasn’t a vote to implement a sanctioned site, it was a vote to entertain the thought that it might be worthwhile. Petty couldn’t bring himself to do even that. He sided with the cranks—Kate Toomey, Donna Colorio, Candy Mero-Carlson, Moe Bergman, and sometimes-crank George Russell—over a surprisingly aligned center/progressive group lf Etel Haxhiaj, Thu Nguyen, Khrystian King, Jenny Pacillo, and Luis Ojeda.
In this vote, new councilors Pacillo and Ojeda showed they’re willing to be a cut above the reflexive hostility to good ideas we’ve come to expect from Petty and the cranks. Petty could have done the same. He chose not to. The six vote majority maintaining a cruel and ineffective homelessness strategy remains firmly in place. Depressing.
They sided against twelve well-meaning and passionate speakers, and opted to go with the one person who spoke against it, I think, but in such an unintelligible way it’s up in the air. Watch for yourself.
Such is the state of the discourse here in Worcester. This is the guy who wins, reliably.
Let’s compare Fred Nathan’s argument to Sam Olney’s. As in the past, Olney spoke clearly and passionately, offering the council a rare glimpse into the experience of people they’d rather ignore. Here’s a section I found very affecting:
The current approach of conducting sweeps not only fails to address the root causes of homelessness but it also causes irreparable damage and harm to the very people it’s supposed to be helping. It is evident that the current policy, including the handling of personal belongings, and the involvement of law enforcement with a history of strained relations with the unhoused is not achieving the intended outcomes.
The strategy of displacing people from one area only shifts the problem to another property owner, creating a perpetual cycle of despair.
With inadequate rooms in shelters and lack of essential services, those forcibly displaced find themselves without a viable alternative
Across the country, sanctioned encampments have presented a viable and humane alternative to sweeps.
Apparently, some members of the council were visibly not listening to her. Watching the meeting online, as I did, you don’t see that. But when you’re in the room, as I have been many times, it’s pretty obvious. It’s not unusual that councilors will simply text and whisper through public comment. Noah, the speaker who followed Olney, took them to task for that.
“Before I begin, I invite Eric, Joe, Niko, Donna, Candy, and Moe to formally apologize to Sam for not listening to her during that.”
Good on Noah for pointing out the disrespect. Donna, Candy, and Moe all voted against Olney’s petition. Absolutely none of what she said registered with them. They didn’t care.
Noah was one of several speakers who attended the sleep out demonstration Saturday. Chris Robarge, a contributor to this newsletter, was another. Robarge described it well.
It was a very cold, windy, rainy, miserable night. People were out and trying to take care of each other as best they could. It was a really beautiful thing to see.
When people find themselves in homelessness, the net result of that is we as a society and we as a city have failed those people. That failure could happen to any of us.
Within that failure, now we have people who are trying to do the best that they can to survive and to get themselves in a place where they can have a decent and dignified life. And for many of them, that has resulted in them camping in wooded areas, including public parks. What our city is doing right now is pushing those people around, periodically moving them from one place to another, destroying all their belongings, ripping down all their tents, taking down all their things, and pushing them to a new place, to a new place, to a new place, and it just goes on and on and never ends. And that is not a solution.
What is being asked for is the floor. It is the bare minimum of what we should be providing to people. It is an area where they can at least be safe.
It is the bare minimum. It is the floor. It is not the ceiling.
After comments like that, it came time to vote on the petition. Donna Colorio immediately and brusquely motioned to file it, as if none of that public comment had happened. If you found any of the above testimony affecting, it’s worth chewing on the plain fact that Donna Colorio didn’t. In motioning to file as soon as she could, without explaining why, she put on display a certain callous apathy that most councilors have toward public input. Public petitions like this one are almost always reflexively filed, no matter how many members of the public show up to speak in favor, no matter how strong an argument they present. We saw that unspoken norm with special clarity in this moment.
Petitions are, in theory, a method for direct public participation in city government. In practice, they’re the opposite: a method for the city to make it clear that the public is not allowed to participate, without ever having to say so out loud. The disconnect between theory and practice is a feature, not a bug. They offer something that looks like a process, and let people find out one by one that it isn’t. Discouragement is the goal, and they’re good at achieving it.
That’s how the old guard sees it, at least. There is a progressive minority bloc that sees it differently. We also saw that with clarity when King stepped in to make sure it didn’t go straight to a vote to file, as it usually would. He pushed for the council to take it seriously. He asked the city manager a number of questions, which the manager sort of answered. In asking the questions he put Batista in a position to make a defense of reflexively dismissing the idea. That, unfortunately, is progress. Batista doesn’t usually have to do that.
As part of Batista’s defense, he invoked another event that took place Saturday: the annual landlord summit at the DCU Center, which the city sponsors and makes free for property owners. He put on display the bleak satire of these two events happening on the same day. Walked right into it. He said when he spoke at the summit, he asked landlords to step up and help voluntarily by offering empty units to unhoused people with housing vouchers.
“If you do have a unit, please let us know” he told the council he asked the landlords.
This is laughable for a few reasons. Reason number one is there are no units. We have the lowest rental vacancy rate in the country. Reason number two: there are insane, years-long waitlists for people to use their housing vouchers if they’re lucky enough to get one. Number three: landlords are simply not going to voluntarily do anything benevolent.
Aside from asking landlords nicely, the only concrete action Batista outlined in his remarks was attempting to extend the emergency RMV shelter to a June close instead of May. Just one more month of service at a temporary emergency shelter with a capacity that doesn’t come close to meeting demand.
Otherwise, he just spoke about various difficulties absent a plan to overcome them. A big shrug. He said “There’s a lot of efforts happening in the city” but didn’t elaborate. He didn’t give an opinion on the idea of a sanctioned encampment, despite it being the matter at hand. (In the past, he’s invoked “skid row” when made to comment on the idea.)
Batista pretty clearly does not want to humor the sanctioned site idea, nor really anything the city is not already doing. The majority of the council has his back on that. Batista gets to throw up hands to a council which pats him on the back for saying it’s a difficult issue.
Regardless, King pressed for a vote to send the petition to committee. “I think that’s the very least we can do here as a body,” King said.
They didn’t do the very least they could, however! Filed! Before the vote, Petty spoke briefly. He made vague overtures to “working groups” that exist on the issue. Then he voted to file it. And that was that.
Yet again, the city council showed its immunity to best practices—something they repeated later in the night with a 9-2 vote for a “pause” on protected bike lanes—in mundanely know-nothing fashion. No one bothered to say why they didn’t want the idea to go to committee. No one offered a rebuke to King’s assessment that it’s worth considering. Everyone who showed up to speak in favor of it was told, without a word, to kick rocks. Classic bit of punishment for caring, which is this city’s specialty.
As we discussed recently in the case of Chattanooga’s remarkable work on homelessness, sanctioned sites can be very effective when done correctly:
Amid this national surge and increasingly hostile rhetoric, there’s one city which stands as a remarkable exception. Chattanooga, Tennessee, a city roughly the size of Worcester at 182,113 people, saw a 49 percent drop in its homeless population from 2022 to present. That’s crazy!
How the city accomplished that drop will sound familiar to those who’ve paid attention to local demands from progressives. The three-pronged approach is permanent supportive housing, prevention, and an impact response that includes a temporary sanctioned homeless encampment, increased emergency shelter capacity, and public restrooms.
Chattanooga uses a sanctioned site as part of a comprehensive strategy and it’s working so well they’re a national standout. It makes me furious we don’t have the political will here to even consider the things they’re doing with success.
Instead, without so much as explaining why, the council chose to reaffirm that the city’s cruel and ineffective policy of endless sweeps is not going to change.
Can you imagine being Etel Haxhiaj, a literal national policy expert on housing and homelessness, and you show up every Tuesday to confront the fact that the best practices you intimately understand will never get approved? Because you are outweighed by six fundamentally simple, petty people? Who use you to play to their base of even dumber and more petty people as the avatar of the “radical left”? Because you just want the city to do the successful things that other cities do? Nightmarish. We don’t deserve Etel, and anyone like her in the future will be similarly punished.
The Wide
Before the election last November I was optimistic that this political culture could be smashed by an electoral shift. You may have noticed the absence of that narrative lately. I don’t see the lane anymore. The rug will always be pulled, in some new way we can’t foresee.
The futility of petitions outlined above is a transferable futility. The public will is simply irrelevant, on every level. “Democracy” is a diversionary tactic. It obfuscates power from the powerless. It works because powerless people are happy to be assured that they have power. From the ability to file a petition to a local city council to the ability to vote for president, there’s an agency on offer. Make Your Voice Heard. But I’m beginning to embrace the idea that the agency was never really there, even as a possibility. That it was always a mirage, a sales pitch, a reality show.
Another narrative thread I used to embrace was that the municipality was the last bastion of real democracy, or at least the prospect of it. Where state and federal governments are beyond influence, the municipality is small enough and weak enough that it can be remade. I don’t believe that anymore either. The election last November exposed a few novel fail-safe measures, like the Chamber of Commerce throwing $50,000 into the mix at the last minute, and we saw that because we got a little too close for the comfort of the powerful. The Chamber wouldn’t have pulled that trigger if they weren’t worried. But we didn’t really get all that close at all. There are, I’m sure, stronger fail-safe measures they’re saving for a more potent threat in the future.
Time, energy, and enthusiasm are finite resources. They are also our most valuable resources. It’s time to ask whether spending them on the “democratic” process, even on the local level, is wasteful. A dead end. On Tuesday night, we saw those valuable resources expended, and rendered futile. It was an eerily similar repeat of so many moments in the past. The people who cared got punished. The small handful of councilors who care also got punished. The people who don’t care were rewarded. They got to use their power to punish. Affirm their relative superiority.
It’s time, I think, to radically reconsider how we use these resources. It’s deflating to lose over and over. And there’s no prospect of real change on the horizon–not in this arena. Might there be some other channeling which is more productive? Which fuels instead of bludgeons? Some engagement of the public which is real and rewarding, and not a mirage? Which pulls in the (rightfully) disengaged?
I don’t have an answer, but I know it’s a hell of a stronger question than “will the council file my petition”? Because of course they will. Petitions exist to be filed. It’s a better question than “will the next election be different?” I don’t think it will be. I can’t think of one argument to the contrary I even tepidly believe, to be honest.
If we consider the city government to be a lost cause, and abandon it entirely, is there a more viable lane to achieving something like Olney’s petition for a sanctioned site? Could we just do it, in non-naive fashion, and meaningfully contest city hall’s ability to stop it? What would that entail?
This, to my mind, is a productive question. On Tuesday night, we saw what happens when you pose such a question to the people who know better than you or I that the “democracy” they offer doesn’t exist. They ignored your good ideas, and then they voted to ensure they could continue doing so.
It’s time to start asking whether we’ve been lied to about how power actually works. It’s time to stop pretending we have any, and start thinking about how to get some. If city hall cannot be remade, can it be challenged from the outside? What could that outside challenge look like? How would it work? Could we actually build it? Is trying and failing to build the new thing any less productive than the decades-long cycle of trying and failing we’re currently stuck in? Who knows!
I do know, however, that it is bad for the soul to keep doing what we’re doing. It gnaws at the spirit.
So the question of whether local electoral politics is a dead end is one that deserves a real conversation. It is not a radical or cynical or anti-democratic concern. It’s the opposite! There’s a rare and beautiful community of well meaning people in this city that formed around local politics and continues to grow and makes life here better. It is a joy to be a part of. It has real people power and real solidarity. If there was a general consensus among this community that the city council is a lost cause and we ceased engaging with it, and we presented a clear argument for doing so, we wouldn’t forfeit local politics. We wouldn’t be “giving up.” It would be the opposite! We’d have the freedom to reimagine what “local politics” means. And, at the same time, we’d make it harder for an obviously anti-democratic city hall to maintain the veneer.
I don’t know how many more times I can see what I saw on Tuesday. I don’t know how Etel and Thu and Khrystian can stand it. I don’t know how anyone who shows up to speak or files petitions can stand it. I don’t think it’s healthy or productive to keep beating our heads against this wall. Something has to change.
Support Worcester Sucks!
I put a lot of time and energy into essays like this. Please consider sending me a small amount of money every month or year so I can continue to do so.
I try to provide a brand of local reporting that is unique and fearless and valuable. I hope you think I’m doing a good job! Tips are always nice.
There are a few more things to get to, but I’m going to be as brief as possible in covering them.
Interrupted
The main piece today was a gloomy one, I understand. So let’s cleanse the palate with a “hell yeah” courtesy of demonstrators at Worcester State who interrupted a presentation by an IDF soldier on Wednesday:
Head over to This Week In Worcester for more on that.
Spectrum Sucks
Another hell yeah, also via This Week In Worcester:
The Cable Television Advisory Committee held a vote during its meeting on Tuesday, March 12, to recommend City Manager Eric Batista not renew the city’s cable television contract with Spectrum. All five members present at the meeting voted to approve the recommendation.
The committee also voted to submit its written recommendations to Batista.
The work of the committee, and its monthly meetings, are now suspended until Batista accepts or rejects the committee’s recommendation. Batista makes the final decision on renewing the contract.
Whether or not Batista will listen to the commission is a very open question. Remember when he shot down municipal broadband? The Spectrum lobbyists are probably very nice to him.
But it is encouraging to see this board acknowledge what we all know: Spectrum sucks. Would be great to get rid of it.
RIP Bike Lanes
I don’t have the time or energy to dig into the council’s Mill Street vote the way I did the unsheltered petition. But it was in keeping with the same theme.
By a 9-2 margin, the council voted to throw a wrench into the works of making our streets safer. Based purely on vibes, and using the death of a 90-year-old man to fear monger, they voted to put a hold on protected bike lane projects like Mill Street citywide. Per the Patch:
Bergman's order to pause Mill Street-like designs elsewhere passed 9-2. At-Large Councilor Khrystian King also suggested the city should allow drivers to park up against the curb in the bike lane until new changes can be made along the road.
They did so on purely reactionary grounds. As Neal McNamara pointed out, there’s no data backing up the councilors’ claims that the street is more dangerous now. It’s just vibes. And bad faith ones at that. Nevertheless, the newspaper ran with it.
It’s unclear whether this vote will accomplish the stated purpose. Really, road design is not under the council’s purview. Nor should it be. Meanwhile, Mill Street got a good chunk of federal change to keep making improvements. Also via the Patch:
Worcester will get $2 million from the federal government for a "complete streets" redesign of Mill Street — a plan that officials have said is the ultimate goal for a notorious road known as "the speedway."
Over the summer, the city's new Department of Transportation and Mobility began work on a unique redesign of Mill Street. The city re-striped the road to reduce vehicle lanes from two on each side to one on each side. The city also drew bike lanes next to curbs with parking separating the bike lane from moving traffic.
Working with someone on a piece for a future post that digs into this stuff more deeply. It’s very frustrating that we are so backwards about our road infrastructure.
“Privacy Concerns”
Good government groups are blasting the city’s recent decision to hide its online check register from the public. From a joint statement:
On behalf of the ACLU of Massachusetts, Common Cause, Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, MassPIRG, and New England First Amendment Coalition, we write to raise serious concerns about your decision to end the City of Worcester’s Open Checkbook program and ask you to reverse course and restore the program as soon as practicable.
Fiscal transparency is a hallmark of open government. Taxpayers, journalists, and civil society organizations must have access to information about government expenditures to ensure government is functioning appropriately, without corruption or mismanagement.
While cybersecurity is a serious issue and should be prioritized by government at every level, there is nothing about Open Checkbook data that poses a unique cybersecurity threat. In fact, the records accessible in Open Checkbook are public under state law and other municipalities and the state government continue to use their own portals.
Last week, Batista announced the decision. Per the Telegram:
The city’s online vendor check register — which has been offline for more than a year, with a message saying it will return — will not be brought back online, City Manager Eric D. Batista said in response to a query from the Telegram & Gazette.
The register, which allowed the public to see checks written to vendors like insurance companies and infrastructure contractors, and included sortable data like court judgments, is too much of a liability for fraud, Batista said.
“Posting city vendor payments creates significant cybersecurity and privacy concerns,” the manager wrote. “With the mass collection of data globally and increasing cyber risk, there has been a shift toward more privacy orientation and concern around data governance.”
Awful timing, if anything, to do this around Sunshine Week time. The coalition made that point as well.
This is Sunshine Week, a time when the journalism, civic, education, government and private sectors collaborate to shine a light on the importance of open government. It does not reflect well on Worcester, and it does a disservice to its residents, to plunge the city’s finances into darkness. Cutting off access to basic information about how residents’ tax dollars are spent is unwarranted and unwise, and we urge you to promptly restore public access to this vital information.
Doing a disservice to its residents. If that isn’t the theme of today’s post, I don’t know what is.
Odds and ends
Thank you for reading! If you made it this far you probably enjoyed it! Please consider supporting the work.
Kudos to Tom Marino at This Week In Worcester for following up on my post from last week about John Monfredo being allowed to read to children. It’s good.
Remember when they tore down the Notre Dame church downtown and the lot sat empty for years? Get ready for more of those years! “Developer behind two Worcester projects, including at former Notre Dame site, trying to sell downtown property.”
The proposed apartment building in the heart of Worcester’s downtown CitySquare project area appears to be off the table, as the property has been re-listed for sale and the City of Worcester has filed a municipal lien on two parcels owned by the proposed developer of the property for unpaid property taxes and other financial obligations.
Another one bites the dust!
That’s ok though because the state decided to invest a whopping one million dollars into a statewide program to convert office buildings to apartment buildings. It’s one banana, Michael.
And once again: the Roast of Worcester is on Friday! Send me some jokes pls I only have two so far but they’re both pretty good I think. Gunna be fun.
Oh also! The book club is moving along nicely! Read up on it here and sign up if you want in!
"Can you imagine being Etel Haxhiaj, a literal national policy expert on housing and homelessness, and you show up every Tuesday to confront the fact that the best practices you intimately understand will never get approved?"
I mean, look at Tracy O'Connell Novick. She's a consummate school policy wonk, yet we failed to re-elect her to the School Committee. Why would we listen to a housing policy expert on housing matters?
Good piece 👏