Per tradition, call for ARPA reform hits stormwall of the city council
Mayor says “maybe next time” to BIPOC-led orgs
Hello my lovely Worcester Sucksters! Much to talk about today. First I have to ask for paid subscriptions because my ability to do these posts depends on them! No ads, no Russian oligarchs cutting shadowy checks, just direct reader support!
So let’s get to it.
Boogie 4 Boobies—ARPA demands hit stormwall—the I-190 situation—Bergman gets weird about the buses (again)—odds and ends
Saturday night!!
Right off the top I’d love to get a packed house out for Katie’s breast cancer fundraiser dance night BOOGIE 4 BOOBIES on Saturday night.
If you can make it out, you won’t be disappointed. The Glitter Boys put on a dance night the likes of which you’ve never seen. They use real LPs on real turntables and they have serious taste in both music and wardrobe and they get the crowd fired up. It’s gunna rock. Tickets here. All proceeds going to breast cancer research.
But wait there’s more...
Katie made a stained glass rendition of the “(NO) TIME TO FUCK” neon sign that famously sits behind the upstairs bar at Ralph’s. A ticket enters you into a raffle to win it Saturday night, but we’ll also be selling additional raffle (Ralphle) tickets at the show.
And Ryan Pitz down at Negative Press in Providence printed us a limited run of very sick shirts which will be available at the event and will sell fast I assume so show up early. Design was a collab between Katie and our good pal Dan Anderson.
I have a ridiculous outfit prepared, and would encourage you to do the same. See you Saturday!
Per tradition, call for ARPA reform hits the stormwall of the city council
Jermoh Kamara took to the podium Tuesday night representing the Massachusetts Organization of African Descendants. The group was passed over in the latest round of ARPA grant funding, which saw large sums go to the Hanover Theater, the Ecotarium, and Mechanics Hall, among other white-led cultural institutions.
“I am asking on behalf of everybody that this committee and this city goes above and beyond to allocate the $44.3 million dollars and not give pocket change—$20,000—to organizations,” said the former school committee member (ousted last election as the result of a poorly implemented committee restructuring that paved the way for a reactionary townie backlash to the most progressive school committee in recent memory). “With the balance that is here, and I am urging and advocating that the city consider more dollars to organizations that have not received, so that we can go on and do our business.”
She paused, looking around the room at each councilor with some serious shade, then concluded with a pointed “thank you.”

Kamara was one of dozens of speakers who came in support of a public petition from Maydee Morales...
Maydee Morales request City Council request City Manager consider directly designating the balance of the remaining $44,348,367.00 of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, after current pending contracts are completed, to BIPOC led organizations who directly provide services and resources to those who were most affected by the pandemic.
...all members of the 17 organizations that signed onto an open letter protesting the misuse of ARPA funds. They all made the same demand: that city hall needs to correct the inequities in ARPA spending with the $44 million it has left to spend.
Afterwards, city officials explained in painful detail why they aren’t going to do so.
First, Mayor Joe Petty and City Manager Eric Batista teamed up to explain how there’s not really $44 million left to spend.
In what appeared to be a loosely choreographed question and answer session, the pair made it clear that much of that unspent money is already spoken for. Most of the $44 million is “awarded but not contracted,” Batista explained. But hey, who knows, some of it might free up. If there’s any money leftover, “I’m definitely moving it,” Batista said. But he didn’t say he’d move it to any of the organizations in question.
It’s a little difficult to suss it out, but the city’s ARPA dashboard allows you to see where this “awarded but not contracted” money is promised. Almost all of it is committed one way or another, it turns out.
The largest sum of promised-but-unspent funds is in the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, at $11.1 million. The second largest is a fund for accessibility improvements in the schools, at $8.2 million. There’s $3.2 million in parks improvements; $3.9 in the vague category of “additional community based projects”; $2.8 million in “administrative overhead”; $1.4 million in “water/sewer infrastructure.”
Looking at money already spent, there are some... interesting... uses. A $1.5 million line item for “marketing” given to Discover Central Mass and Massport, for one. $15.8 million for “revenue recovery,” essentially back pay for city hall. $2 million for “premium pay” for city employees who worked outside during the pandemic (mostly to cops, probably). $10 million for a new HR system at city hall. $1.9 million for electrical upgrades at the DCU Center.
A lot, if not most, of this money already out the door has little if anything to do with equity. The recipients were city hall, the DCU Center, and the Chamber of Commerce via Discover Central Mass. They had no problem accessing and spending the funding quickly.
When the ARPA COVID relief package was announced, the Biden administration promised “to deliver the most equitable recovery in U.S. history.” The funding packages handed over to state and municipal governments were “explicitly designed to respond to the disproportionate negative impacts of the pandemic on underserved communities.” The communities hit hardest by the pandemic—people of color, immigrants, the poor—were going to receive new support via ARPA, the Biden administration promised. The infusion of cash to cities and states was in service of “reimagining societal structures and institutions to help the nation build a more equitable society.” Lofty rhetoric! Now, a few years later, the December 2024 deadline for spending that money approaches. And Worcester’s allocation of its $146 million ARPA infusion is a great little example of the failure of those high-minded promises to translate to reality.
The main point of contention for the organizations that showed up on Tuesday was a relatively small line item: the $3 million reserved for “creative/cultural organizations and facilities.” Announced in August, the list of recipients made BIPOC organizations understandably upset, and made the equity issues in Worcester’s ARPA allocation glaring. The largest and most well-heeled cultural organizations in the city got the lion’s share of the money. They’re all white-led, as well. Smaller organizations, led more often by people of color, received far less comparatively. And many were passed over entirely, like Kamara’s. While a small sliver of the overall ARPA pie, it throws the lack of equity into stark relief. In past meetings, officials explained that funding amounts were tied to the organization’s existing budgets and capacities. If you were larger, you got more. By any reasonable definition, it’s a patently inequitable way to divide a pool of money.
During public comment, Jennifer Gaskin of the Worcester Caribbean American Carnival Association spoke directly to the inequity of the process.
“Our struggles have been overlooked by the city,” Gaskin said. “We weren’t worth as much as the others, because our budget did not match theirs.”
The WCACA is “not the Hanover Theater or the Ecotarium,” she said. As white-led organizations, it stands to reason they’d have larger budgets than the WCACA, given historical inequities.
“I do not understand how that equates to a greater need,” she said, “but that is the answer from the city.”
Looking at the list provided by the city, you can see the Ecotarium and Hanover Theatre at the top and WCACA toward the bottom.
Only a small handful of organizations, the majority of which are also led by people of color, received less than WCACA.
“The ARPA funds represented a beacon of hope,” Gaskin said. “A chance to not only revive our traditions and operations but to also build a resilient and sustainable organization, capable of weathering future crises. These funds could have empowered us to educate future generations, secure our financial stability, and truly fulfill our mission. Instead we received more of the same, missing a transformative opportunity to ensure the longevity and vitality of this community’s cultural legacy.”
City officials tried to explain the disparity away as a symptom of strict federal reporting requirements. After taking pains to say “we can do better,” Petty lamented that some smaller organizations don’t have the “back office” staff to comply with the regulations. Placing the onus on the organizations, he spoke of the need to help them “get to the next level.” It’s their fault for not being big enough to handle the mountains of paperwork, basically. The fact that more grant funding would allow them to build more capacity for reporting went unmentioned.
He asked the city manager if the city was being “too strict” on reporting requirements. Batista said they were just strict enough. Any less stringent reporting burdens would leave the city without data, he said, which the city needs so “we can come back to the council and the public with how these moneys were impacted. Who they served, census tracts, neighborhoods. We want to be able to have that data and information.”
Translation: In the pursuit of data that looks good, small organizations that do good work were passed over because they didn’t have the capacity to deliver the city data. It’s a wild thing to say to a room full of people the city snubbed. Telling them, essentially, that the data is more important than the work. The need to confidently brag about money well spent with all manner of citations and data analytics produced a reality in which the money wasn’t well spent at all. The desire to claim ‘inequities remedied’ reinforced said inequities. Crazy!
The ability to deliver good data is itself an obvious equity issue. But that was explained away by Batista and Chief Economic Development Officer Peter Dunn as a regulatory necessity. Dunn went as far as to argue the city puts itself at risk of an audit if it waived certain reporting requirements for smaller organizations.
Long story short, we see here how money provided to correct inequities ends up reinforcing them. The Hanover Theater gets a pile of cash it doesn’t need, and the orgs that need money get peanuts or they get nothing. The bureaucracy ties its own hands and then with a shrug tells the community its hands are tied.
Councilor Thu Nguyen homed their comments on this strange idea. They said they’d rather know that the money was put to good use than see the analytics after the fact.
“I want to trust people and trust the community and I think that’s what we need to lead with,” Nguyen said.
The way the funding has been spent runs counter to the concept of equity, Nguyen said.
“I think we’re mistaking what equity means. This is a co-option of equity when we’re saying that large orgs get more money and small orgs do not. I don’t believe that is equity.”
Continuing, Nguyen argued it’s cruel to make it look like the money is there for these small organizations, make them apply, then make it prohibitively difficult to actually get it.
“We shouldn't have grants where we’re dangling money in front of BIPOC orgs and saying, ‘here, try to access them.’”
But, of course, Nguyen’s position was at odds with the majority of the council. Most chose to keep quiet, allowing Petty to speak for them with a vague closing note of “maybe next time.” Per tradition, a couple reports were requested, sympathies were extended, issues acknowledged. But the council gave the manager no real mandate to change course. On to other business they went.
Across the chamber, a community that entered it with clear demands to remedy an obvious problem packed up and left. Out of city hall they went—back to their communities, with no solution on offer and no reason to expect one in the future. Empty-handed and punished for trying. Per tradition.
As the crowd filed out, the council began a long discussion about how fire hydrants work, despite having no authority or responsibility in the matter.
The fire chief told them Worcester’s water pressure is enviable across the nation, actually. Believe it or not it’s better than Chicago’s. They’re getting 60 PSI on a good day and we’re pushing 80. “All right, thank you,” said District 4 Councilor Luis Ojeda, before sharing his take on the matter. “When you have to connect to something else there’s an opportunity for something to happen, something not to go the right way,” he told a 21-year veteran of the fire department, who, off screen, was likely nodding along, face impassive, patiently waiting for the stupid questions and unsolicited advice to stop coming. Eventually, it did.
The fire hydrant issue properly redressed, the meeting hit the two-and-a-half hour mark when the manager began a presentation on his new five-year master plan for the city.
A slide titled “Community Engagement” splashed on the big screen, the room now emptied save for a handful of city staffers.
“The mission is to deliver exceptional public service and municipal operations that are rooted in equity, innovation, and integrity, and centered on people,” said Batista.
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The I-190 Incident
As police officers surrounded him with guns trained, several rounds already spent, a man turned his gun on himself, lying on the pavement of I-190 southbound in a sea of idling cars, and pulled the trigger. TMZ has the video, though I’d advise taking a moment to consider whether it’s worth watching.
The police later issued a vaguely worded press release:
In response to the imminent threat posed by the male, a Worcester Police officer and a Massachusetts State Trooper discharged their firearms during the incident. The man being pursued turned his firearm on himself and shot himself. The man was transported by ambulance to the hospital, where he was pronounced deceased.
The release leaves it unclear whether the two officers hit the unnamed man when they opened fire. In the video, it's also ambiguous. But what is clear is that the cops had already shot at the man when, in his final moment, he decided to kill himself.
Catching word of an officer-involved shooting, I went to the scene Wednesday afternoon, looking out from the West Mountain Street bridge at the dozens of police cruisers huddled together on an otherwise empty highway, the whole of the four lanes roped off with police tape and a line of officers, evenly spaced, walking down the highway, presumably in search of evidence.
As far as we know, this unnamed man had, a few hours earlier, shot and killed another unnamed man in a nearby neighborhood, then took off through the woods to I-190. He walked onto the highway on foot, stopping traffic, and within a few minutes he was on the pavement, surrounded by cops, his gun trained on his own skull.
On the bridge, I spoke to a man who said he saw the shooter earlier, presumably on Ararat Street:
“I passed by him, pointing with the gun. He pointed at me. Everybody stopped. The guy in front of me, in a truck, he pushed the gas, and he passed by him. So I do the same thing and he pointed the gun like that,” the man said, imitating a gun held up to a window.
With the prime suspect dead, the case of the other shooting is closed. We’ll likely never know why the first shooting happened, why the man took off through the woods, whether the police actually shot him—or, if they didn’t, what their bullets hit—and whether anything could have happened differently to prevent this violence from spilling over onto a crowded highway.
We’ll also never know how the cops opening fire factored into the man’s decision to kill himself. But we can guess.
“Now the full answer is out”
Last week, I wrote a short section about Moe Bergman’s goofy inquiry into the service provided by the WRTA.
This week, late into the city council meeting, there was a short moment that proved this little throwaway story struck a nerve.
During the approval of routine finance items that rarely receive any discussion, City Manager Eric Batista told the mayor he had something to say:
“I just wanted to clarify that because I got up and mentioned that we do not contribute to the WRTA,” Batista said. “We do not contribute directly but indirectly there is a contribution similar to how the schools and the education system works. There’s an assessment that comes to us and then we send the dollars to those entities.”
That’s a weird and tortured way of saying “we don’t contribute to the WRTA,” exactly what he said last time. The $4.1 million he’s referencing is state money that the city is legally obligated to give to the WRTA. It’s akin to claiming that the Chapter 70 money the public schools get from the state are a “contribution” from the city. It’s nonsense, and you have to imagine Batista knows that. So why make this “clarification” that doesn’t clarify, and instead muddies the situation?
When Bergman responded, I think we got our answer. He very obviously asked the manager to do so.
“I appreciate the clarification,” Bergman began. “I noticed some people had some questions and asked me about it. And I wanted to make sure that the accurate information came out.”
Again, it’s less accurate information than the manager provided last week, when he said the city makes no contribution. Bergman identified the source of these “questions” he “noticed”:
“I know some posts on social media ran with it as if that was some sort of an oddball question that I asked. That I should have known the answer to.”
The absolute refusal to say the name of this newsletter out loud. I love it so much.
“So now the full answer is out and I appreciate the information and look forward to getting more information on my order from last week,” Bergman said.
Of course it doesn’t clear anything up. It’s not the “full answer.” It’s not even a partially correct answer. But the kicker is that the question of city funding was the one question Bergman asked that wasn’t goofy. He also asked if there’s any way to tell what the ridership numbers are (there was a full, detailed report out on the matter at the time). He asserted that his anecdotal observation that some buses were empty at certain times was cause for intervention from the city council to “make it more efficient.” Now that is goofy. And that is not the question the city manager answered Tuesday night. Nevertheless, Bergman claimed that “now the full answer is out.” He’s right, and “social media” is wrong. Case closed. Vindicated.
Here we see Bergman more interested in the appearance of having cleared things up, for the sake of his reputation, than in actually understanding the issue, for the sake of being a good city councilor. If it were the other way around, he wouldn’t have asked the city manager to tell a strange little lie on his behalf.
Odds and ends
Thanks for reading another post I really appreciate it. One more pitch for ~1.5 Dunkies a month for my continued work on here.
Another reminder: Only two Outdoor Cat dad hats left in the merch store!
The “full body scanners at city hall” item filed by George Russell and Moe Bergman has been delayed yet again to next week’s council meeting. Russell is teasing that the manager has some sort of “safety plan” to announce, and the way he’s talking about it suggests scanners are part of it. We’ll see.
Big ups to the Worcester Guardian for pulling off the difficult feat of quoting not a single Black person in their write-up of the ARPA discussion on Tuesday. Impressive.
The state is investigating Tenet, the ghoulish company that owns St. Vincent Hospital. Will dig deeper into this for the Sunday post.
The driver who hit Ayuen Leet, putting the 13-year-old girl into a coma, has voluntarily given up their drivers license.
Apparently the local brewery that put out a run of adorable Hurricane Betty’s beers took so much social media flak they had to delete their post about it. Everyone, relax.
I haven’t watched it yet but if you’re a masochist Tim Murray and EAW president Melissa Verdier had a debate on the MCAS ballot question. Don’t have to watch it to know that Murray is wrong and Verdier is right. Yes on 2 all the way. (I’ll be putting together a full election guide next week). Jim McGovern is also Yes on 2 if that matters to you.
And lastly I’d invite you all to check out Bop Spotter, an adorable ShotSpotter parody meant to catch vibes, not criminals, out of San Francisco.
The last song Bop Spotter captured as of my looking at it does indeed have a vibe.
Someone’s gotta do a Worcester version of this.
Ok cya Sunday!