Hello! We got a look at the rental registry today as well as some other stuff.
Please help support the cause if you can!
Also it’s my birthday weekend (June 16) which means as soon as I hit publish on this I am in birthday mode. Send me a present!
Speaking of which...
WORCESTER SUCKS PARTY TONIGHT
Tonight’s the night! We got Robarge DJing, an open newsroom portion, we got some knit hats from the KNITTY COUNCIL on offer by way of a raffle...
...and yes we will have the Cs playing. Worst party timing ever, I know. But see you at 6?
All donations taken at the door are going to the newly created Worcester Disaster Relief Fund, for victims of recent fires.
This is also the start to my birthday weekend baby.
Saturday, it's Ralphspocalypse all day baby.
Big ups to Mike Hsu at 100 FM THE PIKE for having some of the homies on to talk about this event.
Sunday, my actual birthday, it’s fortnite all day baby me and Katie no one else allowed. Except Gus of course.
“Of which that I had read earlier to the public”
Hoo boy did Candy Mero-Carlson’s economic development subcommittee pull a fast and/or dumb one on Monday night.
Long story short a dramatically weakened version of the rental registry program is heading to the full council next Tuesday for a vote after being introduced by the administration literally after the meeting started Monday night. We’ll get to how it was introduced in a bit. First, what is it:
The new version
For those coming to the issue cold: the city council unanimously voted to implement a rental registry in 2022. City Manager Eric Batista introduced it in 2024. Landlords got mad and complained to city councilors. Those city councilors then got mad at the city manager for doing what they wanted. And now, for the past couple months, council meetings have been dominated by complaints about this registry from city councilors who have seemingly still not read the ordinance they voted on.
For those unfamiliar with rental registries, it’s a lot more simple and innocuous than people are making it out to seem. Landlords pay a small fee for a system which allows the city to keep better track of and inspect rental units. In April, I wrote a big, comprehensive story on the registry and the subsequent fracas: “Is city council just a weird reality TV show?”.
But back to Monday night, the most dramatic change introduced have to do with owner-occupied units.
In the revised version of the registry actually on the agenda, introduced in April, owner-occupied buildings were given some light concessions.
In the new version we got this week, owner-occupied buildings are effectively taken out of the registry all together. They do not have to register the properties, nor do they have to be routinely inspected.
To a tenant, what’s the difference? In terms of fire safety, what’s the difference? This is a compromise which benefits no one but a select group of landlords.
For the registry to work, it has to be comprehensive. Automatically precluding an entire section of the rental market gives it no shot at ever becoming comprehensive. It makes the whole thing a waste of time. It’s just bad policy, enacted in an effort to appease people who can’t be appeased. Why even bother?
We had District 5 Councilor Etel Haxhiaj on the stream Tuesday and she put it best. She said the amendment that scares her the most is the owner occupancy carve out.
“We have about 4,000 triple deckers. I don't know how many are owner occupied. You know why? Because we don’t have a registry.”
If the registry gets amended in this way, we’ll never know. So this was a massive change. One which could render the whole program useless. And it was snuck in at the very last minute, in a dubious way.
How it was introduced
On Monday, the law department handed the three members of the subcommittee the weakened version after the meeting started. It wasn’t on the agenda, or advertised in any other way—meaning there was precisely zero opportunity for public comment or even review. Someone reading the agenda would have no way of knowing there were added amendments at stake. The public was completely cut out.
Nevertheless, the three members of the subcommittee voted unanimously to send it along, about an hour after it hit their desks. When they did, they were the only people outside the city manager’s office or law department to have even seen it.
It was maybe the most obvious open meeting law violation I’ve ever seen. The proper thing to do here would have been to get the actual revisions on the agenda 48 hours ahead of the meeting. That’s what the open meeting law required. Making the vote was illegal.
Mero-Carlson didn’t even explain what was happening.
“We also have Alexandra Kalkounis, the deputy city solicitor. She’s over here putting some documents together.”
Mero-Carlson doesn’t say what documents.
She doesn’t say there are new documents. While she’s actively not explaining that fact, you can see Kalkounis pass the documents to the clerk, who then passes them to the councilors.
Mero-Carlson opens public comment without an explanation of what it is they just received.
Fast forward forty minutes, and the changes finally get mentioned for the first time.
Councilor George Russell said “I haven’t seen the draft.”
Kalkounis responded: “that’s why we were a little late today. We walked in some changes supported by the administration that will be exempting owner occupied single family, two family and three family.”
Confused, as he often is, Councilor George Russell asked for another clarification a few minutes later. Then he said...
“If there’s new information coming in, it needs to be vetted. I think we should have learned the lesson with this back a couple years ago. That it needs to be put in the public and it needs to be discussed.”
What’s that saying about broken clocks?
It was then—and only then—that Chairwoman Candy Mero Carlson read bits and pieces of the revision off the paper on her desk. Mero-Carlson explained, as if it mattered, that they were made in response to chairman's orders she’d made previously.
The fact the public had no opportunity to review these changes before they passed subcommittee was not mentioned by anyone in the room.
A half hour later, when it came time to vote, Mero Carlson said...
“It would be my recommendation on 3b to make a recommendation of approval of the accompanying proposed ordinance with the following amendments of which that I had read earlier to the public.”
To the public.
Jenny Pacillo and Kate Toomey voted with her.
It’ll probably get at least eight votes at council Tuesday. The fact it passed subcommittee unanimously will be taken as justification. It will hold the implication of a fair and democratic public process, but there wasn’t one.
I know this stuff is deep in the weeds, and it’s hard to explain, but it’s so indicative of the corrupted nature of this body. They simply do not do things right. What are supposed to be public, democratic processes are the opposite.
As I was watching the meeting the day after, I couldn’t find a version of what it is they actually voted on anywhere on the city’s website. I sent some texts and emails. No one else had either. I had to reach out to city hall to get the revised ordinances. I put them on Drive, set to public (here and here) Those versions may still be the only which are publicly available.
This council is like a cheese grater for good ideas. They are a reactionary force, working at the behest of a small group of reactionary residents.
That group of residents was well represented Monday. Six or seven members of the public spoke—all landlords, all against the registry, all harboring wildly incorrect and dramatic notions of what the registry is and does.
One of them worked himself up into such a fit he accidentally made a case for the registry.
“The city needs to get up to date and have one system that all the departments have access to,” said Andy Serrato, a landlord. “Because they have my information but I have to run around and fix something on one simple change of address.”
My guy... the registry is that system.
These are the people who most councilors mean when they say “their constituents.” They reliably do not understand why they are angry.
The worst of them on Monday night was Michael Madulka—not so much for what he said, which was boilerplate, but for who he is.
For one, he’s a campaign donor to Candy Mero Carlson and George Russell and Joe Early.
Two, Madulka was the person who pulled the building permit for the roof at 267 Mill Street, which collapsed in 2022—a disaster which displaced more than a hundred residents and played a key role in bringing the registry to fruition. Madulka’s company, RescueREO, took out the permit for the work in 2021, meaning it collapsed after a year or less. The company specializes in contract work in the service of flipping foreclosure properties, according to the website.
This is the type of person the council feels they need to capitulate to. The Mill Street redesign is the same story. So was accessory dwelling units and inclusionary zoning. On and on every time you have people like Madulka keeping Worcester back.
While they likely fashion themselves as the “silent majority” in the Reagan tradition, they are very much the opposite: a loud minority, one which cannot be reasoned with or placated, and one which feels entitled to the ear of the city council.
How do we change that? It might be as simple as drowning them out. A pure numbers game. More normal people have to engage with city hall.
We saw it just last week, with Moe Bergman’s regressive Mill Street order. He was absolutely bludgeoned by reasonable members of the public who saw through what he was trying to do. It must have been embarrassing, to sit there for two hours and take that. I’m sure he’ll think twice about trying again.
For City Manager Eric Batista, the only one with a real say in what goes on, it changes the whole political calculus when the cranks are obviously outnumbered and making unpopular demands.
Next Tuesday, the council is going to vote on this shadily augmented rental registry. They need to know that people understand the change is a bad one, and the way it was introduced was sketchy. If the same amount of people who turned out for Mill Street show up again and tack on the registry, we could deny the cranks these harmful concessions. Shatter that entitlement keeping Worcester in a stranglehold yet again. In a small way. But the small wins stack up.
Evaluate your city manager!
Ahead of the city manager’s city council evaluation on June 25 (always a waste of time, considering they don’t really hire or set goals for the manager), councilor Thu Nguyen has democratized the process in a neat way.
If you fill out this form, you can basically do the same exact evaluation as the city councilors
(laughable as it is—literally the five-point rubric you might remember from middle school.
You have til June 23rd to get your evals in. Let it rip!
The Sandwich Police
For a good time, head on over to this WPD Facebook post and read the comments.
Your honor it was a fine sandwich thank you for asking!!!
Folks are bringing the heat. I was chuckling all afternoon. Here’s a quick highlight reel.
Definitely don’t go leave some more helpful comments on this post!!
Odds and ends
Thank you for reading!
If you read one (other) thing this weekend, make sure it’s “On Delivery: The overdose crisis as a logistics problem” by Mitchell Morgan Johnson in N+1. “The necessary hope is that this counts for something.” Line hit me like a bus.
Hmmmm wonder what Sheriff Lew Evangelidis is up to these days wonder if he’s being evil? Ah yup: “Worcester County sheriff urges lawmakers to pull plug on inmates' free phone calls.”
Evangelidis says prisoners are spending a large amount of time on the phone and incessantly calling families to the point of harassment. He said the new program is costing the taxpayers a lot of money and it needs to be revisited.
Corny to talk about but I’ve always been a big Bourdain guy. Kitchen Confidential is one of my favorite books yada yada you get it. Recently I rewatched his Parts Unknown episode in Jerusalem (Season 2, ep 1) and it was crazy how well it holds up. It remains maybe the only media depiction of people in Gaza I’ve ever seen that had nothing to do with killing or being killed.
I came across this clip of him accepting an award for it—equally affecting.
“It is a measure I guess of how twisted and shallow our depiction of a people is that these images come as a shock to so many.”
And lastly here’s a good tweet.
Ok birthday weekend commence! See you tonight!