Jim McGovern calls for an end to Israeli aid

Let's hope he means it!

Here’s a fun fact I learned yesterday: Montgomery County, Maryland’s municipal government operates an agency that functions as a housing developer with no mandate to make a profit. It’s called the Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery. With a $100 million fund, it invests in “luxury” housing projects, such as the kind that came (and went?) in downtown Worcester over the period we’ve come to call the Renaissance. Those big boxes remain the only sort of new construction that anyone can figure out how to build these days, but the difference here is that Montgomery is the hedge fund backing them, and, unlike every other hedge fund, they don’t require windfall profits. 

So they create these complexes, then they rent control the shit out of them. In one project, called the Laureate, they built something that looks pretty much exactly like 145 Front Street, with all the amenities and the boxy size, but check this, per they NYT:

While for-profit developers built it, the controlling owner is a government agency, the Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County. Because H.O.C. has a 70 percent stake, the Laureate sets aside 30 percent of its 268 units for affordable housing. Ms. Sylla, who makes $48,000 a year as an administrator at a biotech company, pays $1,700 for a one-bedroom apartment, compared with a market rent around $2,200. Depending on their income, other residents pay as little as half the advertised rate.

Worcester would never! It’s not like we have a redevelopment authority of anything like that. It’s not like we have the exact bones of such an agency already that only manages the ballpark and the train station and does eminent domain. It’s not like we got way more than $100 million from the federal government a couple years ago and still can’t figure out how to spend it. 

I came across the Montgomery County example by way of Kyla Scanlon’s great YouTube videos on economics and philosophy and poetry and big ideas. They’re great. This is the one in question. 

Meanwhile, in our little political backwater, all the for-profit developers we took such pains to make sure we didn’t regulate or compete with in any way are all... backing out? Because it is no longer free to borrow money? And the whole housing strategy of the city, state and most of the country for that matter is built on hedge funds having free access to capital forever but they don’t anymore?

The most recent withdrawal is a 200-something Luxury Box on Shrewsbury Street where the DCU is now. From the Patch: “Commercial Real Estate Woes Hit Shrewsbury Street Apartment Project.”

"Lundgren has been forced to delay commencement of work associated with the project due to challenges with respect to labor and supply chain issues and access to financing and capital related to the rise of inflation and interest rates, instability of the banking system and an overall slowdown in the commercial real estate market," attorney Joshua Lee Smith wrote.

From City Manager Eric Batista to Housing Secretary Ed Augustus to Governor Maura Healey, we always hear the way we solve the housing crisis is increasing supply. That line, combined with the tacit unwillingness to do anything else—like invest in public housing or do rent control or regulate housing developers or get rid of single family zoning—amounts to wishing and praying that the developers keep building. 

But uhhhh now they’re not? In a bad way? 

Link

And the rents aren’t going down? Listicles like this are mostly bullshit but it is significant that Worcester was City #1 on FinanceBuzz’s “15 Cities You Won't Be Able to Afford in 5 Years” list from last week. 

We need to be doing a lot more than what we’re currently doing. The developers are not our friends and they are not going to save us. 

---

Please support Worcester Sucks!

Anywhooo time for the normal intro. Please consider a paid subscription! It’s my sole source of income! All of the work you read here and all the contributor pieces come courtesy of the 715 people who have paid subscriptions. Local news is hard to fund! And I am very grateful. 

Merch orders should all be in the mail by tomorrow at noon time. So if you want merch real fast now’s the time to strike. 

---

Checking in with Jim 

On Thursday, our U.S. Congressman Jim McGovern made some refreshingly spicy comments vis-a-vis Biden and Israel on the Talk of the Commonwealth program:

“I think Benjamin Netanyahu is a disaster for Israel. He’s undermining Israel’s security. He’s undermining Israel's standing in the world. He’s holding onto power because he’s afraid if he’s no longer in power he might end up in jail. So he’s like the worst possible leader for Israel at this moment. 

But I hope the president not only expresses his profound disappointment and horror at the latest incident where seven aid workers working for World Central Kitchen, run by my friend Jose Andres, were killed. I mean they coordinated their humanitarian relief effort with the Israeli military. If you see the pictures, World Central Kitchen was written on the roof of the trucks that were carrying food. And as a result, World Central Kitchen has ceased operations in Gaza. Other humanitarian organizations have ceased operations because they don’t believe it’s safe. We’re not supporting the UN agency that normally delivers food to people in Gaza. So the starvation and the famine will get worse.  

I just hope the president is not only tough with him in terms of words but says there is a consequence here. And we have a law. We have a law on the books that says if a country is frustrating the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid to struggling people and they receive U.S. military assistance, then we freeze that military assistance. I think that’s what needs to happen. We need to freeze all military sales and deliveries until in fact there’s a cease fire. Until we can get the hostages released. Until we can humanitarian aid at scale to the people of Gaza. And we need to have a plan for what happens after that. How we get to a two state solution. 

Words are no longer enough. I mean I saw the president’s words, that he was heartbroken by what happened. And I’m sure he is. But this is not the first incident. It’s been going on and on and on. Clearly there is not a regard for civilians and clearly there is not a regard for humanitarian aid workers and so the president needs to do something stronger than express his disappointment and horror. 

Arrested Development-style narrator voice: The president did not do something stronger. He did, however, send some more bombs. 

From the Washington Post: “U.S. approved more bombs to Israel on day of World Central Kitchen strikes.” It reads:

The State Department approved the transfer of more than 1,000 MK 82 500-pound bombs, more than 1,000 small-diameter bombs, and fuses for MK80 bombs, all from authorizations granted by Congress several years before the latest hostilities between Israel and Hamas began, said the U.S. officials, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive arms deals.

The article goes on to report the U.S. government has the authority to suspend arms packages any time prior to delivery, but in this case it hasn’t. Asked why, a Biden spokesman declined to comment. Another interesting note: it’s an open question what sort of bomb hit the aid truck, but it could well be an American-supplied munition. 

The Thursday phone call between Biden and Netanyahu that McGovern referenced on Talk of the Commonwealth—saying there should be real consequences, not just talk—appears to have been “just talk.” Per the same WaPo piece:

After a phone call between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested there would be consequences if Israel did not heed U.S. demands on protecting civilians and admitting more humanitarian aid.

“If we don’t see the changes we need to see, there will be changes in our policy,” Blinken said.

A vague threat of some vague “changes” sometime in the vague future. That’s “just talk.” In a long, long tradition of such “talk.” 

McGovern’s comments on Talk of The Commonwealth are also “just talk” but they do signify an important shift. By the standards of Congress McGovern is a lefty, to be sure, but not a radical. He’s an “establishment Dem'' through and through, and his comments reflect that Israel ‘s long standing grip on the Democratic Party may be weakening slightly. The ongoing atrocities are finally starting to make the fealty difficult, at least for people like McGovern. 

While telling in all sorts of ways—orientalism racism center-periphery blah blah—that it’s this particular atrocity forcing such a moment, it’s still long overdue. It’s a welcome development. But we don’t know yet whether it’s a real moment that will lead to real change or one of those things we’ll talk about for a week then forget entirely. My money is unfortunately on the latter. 

To his credit, though, McGovern is actively involved in a push by progressives in congress to hold up military spending on Israel. He and several others are circulating a draft letter that they probably wouldn’t if their celebrity chef friend wasn’t involved but we have to take what we can get at this point. Per Politico:

“In light of this incident, we strongly urge you to reconsider your recent decision to authorize the transfer of a new arms package to Israel, and to withhold this and any future offensive arms transfers until a full investigation into the airstrike is completed," write Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

And McGovern is among a growing number of House Dems opposed to an $18 billion arms package currently on the table.   

I don’t have any useful insights on D.C. machinations. But I do think it’s worth noting that our congressman appears to be among the good ones on this issue, however low a bar that may be. Given McGovern’s outsized role in this current political moment, the local political pressure and the local discourse are significant. While his seat is cartoonishly safe no matter what he does with it, he’s still a political animal. The way his actions are perceived by his constituency matters. We need to assure him that opposition to the ongoing genocide is popular. That what he’s doing is good, but it’s also not enough.   

Recently, demonstrators have staged protests at McGovern events in Worcester and Northampton, demanding he call for a cease fire. Both actions were in March, and now, in early April, he’s doing just that. These actions matter, and they should continue. He should not be “let off the hook” because he has a better stance than most. Precisely the opposite. Where almost everyone in Washington is completely beholden to the Israel lobby and immune to external pressure, we have someone who isn’t. And he’s got a lot of political capital to spend and a lot of pull and absolutely no electoral vulnerability. He has his hand on a meaningful lever of power via the Rules Committee. His public persona is deeply tied to a perceived moral clarity. 

In other words, he’s uniquely positioned to lead a charge that desperately needs leading. Israel’s ability to prosecute this genocide depends entirely on U.S. support. McGovern has a unique and increasingly realistic opportunity to block that support. It would be an objectively heroic act. A legacy-defining one! Something that makes the history books. But only if he and his fellow progressives in Congress actually do the thing. They actually tie the money up until the slaughter stops. They pinch the hose which has never been pinched. 

---

Permanent supportive housing!

In other McGovern news he hooked up $1.6 million in federal money for a desperately needed permanent supportive housing project at the old Quality Inn on Oriol Drive. It’s 90 units of housing which could make real differences for our unhoused neighbors. No one tell Candy Mero Carlson or Ray Mariano!! The less the cranks know about these projects the better, and Candy Mero-Carlson and Ray Mariano have been the worst on this one. 

Pulled an excerpt from an old Worcester Sucks post about both of them, from May 2023, the last time Ray Mariano wrote about the project in question. Unsurprisingly, Candy was the protagonist and the unhoused people the villains. From “Under Batista, the sweeps will never end”:

Ray Mariano used his Telegram column to illustrate this ghoulish mentality quite ghoulishly. In a piece published Friday, titled “Working-class neighborhood struggles to have voice heard,” he offers a description of the unhoused which would work just as well for literal zombies. He presents a vision of a helpless neighborhood of good, hard-working Americans overwhelmed by some invasion of some wretched horde—“people sleeping on the lawn and lost souls screaming at passing cars and harassing anyone who walked by,” he writes. 

Lost souls. Like drowned sailors. Like ghosts. The Walking Dead. This is the way Mariano describes living Worcester residents. Lost souls. Not human beings any longer just souls.     

No one would listen to the helpless cries of these poor forgotten single-family homeowners, he writes. Except for Candy Mero-Carlson, of course. The one protagonist in Mariano’s troubling tale.

Yet again, the disconnect between McGovern and our local party apparatchiks is stunning.

Glad this project is moving forward. We need a lot more of this sort of housing. As illustrated in this little snippet of a city report from last September, we’re six years into a plan that is not even close to complete. 

Report link

---

Devil’s in the detail work

As is the case every year, the top municipal earners in 2023 were almost all cops. 

Unlike past years, the top earner was not a police officer. This year, it was City Manager Eric Batista, making $313,723 in gross pay. Batista was followed by Superintendent Rachel Monarrez ($294,402), and then former Police Chief Steven Sargent ($276,693) and current acting Police Chief Paul Saucier ($254,828).

Here’s the report. 

Still, Eighty four of the top 100 earners were police officers! They dominate the 100-200 range, as well as the 200-300. It isn’t until the 400-500 range that the list stops being mostly cops.

Link

What do you make of this reality? If, year after year, police officers suck up an outsized portion of city resources while seemingly everything else lacks funding? 

The cops getting what they want is a recurring theme here. Some past essays in which I explore the idea that it’s the cops who control city hall and not the other way around, as we’re led to believe.

March 3, 2024 | A streamlining solution for crime manufacturers

May 5, 2023 | Who controls who?

March 10, 2021 | The Cops Get What They Want

Digging into payroll data, we see that it’s the extras which keep most cops in their high-ranking position. 

For instance, the fifth-highest paid municipal worker, Police Captain Christopher Curtis, earned $254,668 overall. But his base pay was only $159,290. His detail pay was $95,378, which is more than most teachers and librarians make total. Police Officer Joseph Vigliotti, the eighth highest paid, made 126,570 in detail pay. And on and on. By a quick count, at least 12 cops made over $100,000 in detail pay.  

Think about the common trope, for instance, that teachers are expected and in fact lionized for the amount of work they do for which they do not get paid. Cops on the other hand get paid quite handsomely for the extra work they do.  And there’s not much in the way of accountability for what “extra work” actually happens. 

In that light, it’s interesting to consider a few recent details from the ongoing overtime fraud case involving former (?) WPD Officer Colby Turner. In 2022, Turner was charged with collecting some 50,000 in fraudulent overtime pay. 

Now, his lawyers are trying to subpoena for overtime records department-wide, suggesting that the detail process is “basically full of nepotism,” as the Telegram’s Brad Petrishen recently reported. 

Turner’s lawyer, Hank Brennan, argued that grand jury minutes and other materials he has received related to the investigation suggest the city had an “archaic” paper-based system of assigning and tracking detail pay that made understanding the process impossible.

Turner is arguing he “may have been framed,” and that in order to properly defend himself, he needs a “better understanding of the overtime system and its potential accountability pitfalls.” His lawyer said the system is “confusing, maybe on purpose.”

At issue is a nuanced category of police overtime work called “private details.” Unlike other types of detail work, officers are allowed to act as “liaisons” to businesses, and can deal with them directly, as opposed to going through the department’s detail office. Seems to me a system that’s ripe for the “nepotism” that Colby’s team alleges!

When Colby was charged, it was quite a remarkable development, I remember. It’s not every day a police officer faces criminal charges from his own department. Even when cops kill people, that doesn’t always happen. Colby is the only WPD officer, at least in recent memory, to catch a charge for overtime fraud. But it’s hard to imagine that Colby was the only officer to ever abuse this archaic and perhaps purposely confusing system. It’s very worth noting, especially with the recent racial equity and overtime audits, that Colby is Black. His defense is doing so, for instance.  

Brennan said he does not believe others accused of impropriety were immediately criminally charged — instead facing internal affairs probes — and suggested that could be evidence of discrimination against Turner, who is Black.

Hmmmmmmm. 

While it didn’t get a lot of press compared to the racial equity audit, the city administration released an audit of police overtime practices in mid-March (I put the doc on Drive if you want to read it). 

In a summary of the audit, City Manager Eric Batista painted Colby’s case as an isolated incident:

“One of the biggest and most important takeaways from the audit, which is attached for your review, is that aside from the alleged criminal activity of one officer, CLA found no incidents of intentional fraud or malicious intentional activity.”

You sure about that? Batista conceded that the audit and Colby’s case “did make it clear that the system the department had in effect in July 2022 was susceptible to fraud.” It feels hard to reconcile the two ideas. Here we have a system susceptible to fraud, and only one case of fraud, which we are very careful to say was the only one.

Took it on myself to read this overtime audit document again, in light of the accusations made by Colby’s defense. Billed as a “forensic investigation,” prepared by CliftonLarsonAllen LLP, the 15-page document is the product of a policy/record review, a walkthrough, and several interviews. Nice work if you can get it!

I found this little bit to be ummmm sketchy! To say the least.

WPD did note that not all jobs are filled this way and with the same process; some of the off-duty jobs are run and organized by the officers themselves and not run through the Detail Office for scheduling, although WD Policy & Procedure #60 specifically prohibits detail management processed outside the official system.

Hmmmm officers organizing their own details, what could go wrong? The report goes on to say that officers who organize these “private details” simply let the Detail Office know the time and hours of the detail and “almost always without exception it will be approved.”

When this happens, there is not a WPD written policy behind it but each officer, regardless of ranking, can take on and run a private detail. Each officer can either work the detail themselves or they can assign others to the detail.

The report cites Price Chopper as an example of this arrangement. At the Cambridge Street and Park Ave locations, the company contracts the same officers for regularly set hours, and they don’t go through the Detail Office. 

If an officer needs to leave the detail early, it was stated that they typically know the asset protection manager at the store so they would text them to work it out.

Hmmmmm. The report says this practice “is a risk,” lol. 

Another interesting tidbit. Overnight details at Union Station are scheduled “without onsite sign offs.” Three officers doing overnight details every night and no one checks if they’re there! The report reads:

Since the WPD is performing details per the agreement with the Worcester Redevelopment Authority, the presumption is that WPD ensures that officers and hours worked is correct.

At Phoenix Communications, which apparently needs regular police details (?), no company employee “verifies that the officer scheduled to work was the one working that day.” “Phoenix Communications just assumes that the officer listed on the invoice was the one working,” the report reads. 

In its conclusion, the firm says that various “mistakes' were uncovered, but “no incidents of intentional fraud or malicious intentional activity, besides Turner. But it did say that the WPD needs to implement a system for disciplining shoddy off-duty time slips. 

Of 50 slips they sampled, 15 of them didn’t have a sign off from a vendor. Ummmmm. Who’s to say?

All these little tidbits sort of suggest that they weren’t looking very hard for “incidents of intentional fraud.” Can’t find what you don’t look for!

So now we have Colby’s defense team trying to do its own audit of the WPD system and guess what? They’re being barred from d

Doing so, it looks like! Calling it a “fishing expedition,” the state is fighting the request, per Petrishen’s story. It’s just as bad for the District Attorney as it is for the police department if people start looking too hard into how the detail money is doled out. Best not have that. 

Here’s a glimpse at what officers do to deserve all that detail pay, courtesy the department’s own Facebook page.

Just out here pressing charges against the will of the people they’re supposed to be protecting and serving. 

---

Binienda at it again

The school committee meeting Thursday had some fireworks courtesy Maureen Binienda’s inability to stop trying to shuffle more resources toward the school where her daughter works. If you missed it, here’s my write up on the first time she did this, about a month ago: “Did Maureen Binienda break the law last night?.”

Without disclosing that her daughter works as a teacher in the district’s alternative school program, Binienda asked an awful lot of pointed questions about decisions made in regard to said program. She called for more financial investment in it! Even veered into conspiratorial territory, taking to task the decision to switch from 45-minute classes to two-hour classes at the Gerald Creamer Center evening program. 

“I just think we need to look at the two-hour classes. And I was actually told, by somebody, that it was financial, because of the teacher contract and the hourly rate... it would be very expensive for the district to have it run five days a week, or four days a week,” she said. “And that was why that change was made. I hope that’s not true. I think it needs to be looked at again.”

This past Thursday, she yet again called for more financial investment in her daughter’s place of employment. Without disclosing her daughter works there, she advocated for a bigger, nicer building for the program.

“We should be doing something about looking for a bigger building for them,” she said.

She also advocated for more phys ed teachers at her daughter’s program. 

“I would really like to really advocate, if all is all, that there is a PE teacher that is added to the Gerald Creamer evening program.

That happens around the 2:30:00 mark here in case anyone feels motivated to submit a complaint to the State Ethics Commission. 

And it didn’t stop at her daughter. Binienda blasted the committee for not naming the alternative school building after her friend Mike O’Neil and former underling fast enough. 

“How long does it take to make a decision on Mike O’Neil,” she said. 

Binienda was also ruled out of order for trying to talk about an open teachers union grievance on the School Committee floor, which is not only illegal but really damaging for the school district’s position. 

Great job!

---

Odds and Ends

Thanks for reading! If you made it this far it’s safe to say you liked (or deeply hated) what you read. Either way consider helping to sustain this experiment in truly independent local journalism! It’s free to read but not free to create. 

If you saw any typos in this post no you didn’t. Liz, my copyeditor, is out of town and I can’t wait to post because I’m going to see Jagged Little Pill at the Hanover tonight with Katie and I’m stoked!!

City Manager Eric Batista is, understandably, starting to get frustrated with the whole Rental Registry thing. It’s very stupid he’s in this position and I feel bad for him.

State Sen. Mike Moore’s recent comments on the idea of a safe injection site in Worcester, as detailed by MassLive, are remarkably shitty.

State Sen. Michael Moore, D-2nd Worcester, told MassLive he is unsure if he can support a safe injection site being built in his district, arguing that there needs to be public hearings from the City Council and the Legislature.

Moore shared his concerns about a scenario where the safe injection site becomes overcrowded, as it would be the only one in Massachusetts.

Additionally, he wanted to see studies about how safe injection sites affect surrounding towns such as Shrewsbury.

“I only heard about it just recently,” Moore said. “I think I want to learn more about it before I say I can or can’t vote for it.”

Last but not least can we get a big hell yeah for the Hurricane Betty’s Beer?]

Would you drink the Betty’s slime?