Is it good when the gales of November come early? Ha ha.
No?
Welp. Fellas, it’s been good to know ya.
Lots to get to in today’s post. Then right after I post this I’m giving the next WPS In Brief a read, then we’re getting that up. The fun never ever stops. Please think about keeping this outlet in business. If you don’t, no one will.
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Ok straight to it.
Release The Files
Heather Prunier spoke at council last week, demanding the city release the full report into its investigation of John Monfredo. You may recall last year we had Heather on the podcast (Episode 43: That Is My File) to go over a sliver of the report that was provided. Though only a handful of pages, it made the serious concerns about the integrity of the investigation all the more serious. There are, as Heather told the council, 78 pages in that file, and she’s only received 22.
“Not only that, it is my belief that I am not the only victim known to the police. This man is a predator who had easy access to some of the most vulnerable children in this city for decades. The statistical likelihood that there are even more victims yet to come forward is astronomical. Who enabled John Monfredo and silenced his victims? How can we hold anyone accountable or fix what’s broken without answering these questions? How do we know our kids are safe within the same system that left them in the care of a monster? Worcester has its own Epstein class that prioritizes its own comfort and privilege over the safety of our kids.
And, if you’re new here, please take the time to read the story we published in 2023 in which Heather comes forward for the first time, publicly, to describe what John Monfredo did to her as a child: “John Monfredo’s “teen-age accuser” takes her power back.”
Watch the rest of Heather’s comments here. Powerful stuff.
The Marino Dossier
Tom Marino, editor of This Week In Worcester, filed a 30 page document he wrote outlining how the Trump administration abandoned the pattern and practice investigation into WPD before it even really got going–a fact city officials know well and pretend they don’t. “It’s a four-stage process which was at a second stage when the Trump administration came in and abandoned the process,” Marino said.
Here’s the report he submitted to the council, which I pulled out of the middle of a 400+ page council “meeting packet” so you didn’t have to. Don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya.
Toomey ‘apologizes’
You may have missed it, tucked as it behind a paywall that’s been especially difficult to get around the past few weeks (throw tips and tricks in the comments if you got em), but City Councilor Kate “Call The Chief?” Toomey issued a short apology statement to our paper of record last week.
Toomey, in the four-paragraph statement sent to the T&G, admits she was wrong to “invoke the names of the Chief [Paul B. Saucier] and Sgt. [Anthony] Petrone. Regardless of my intent, I understand that doing so created the appearance that I was seeking special treatment because of my position and relationships.
“As a city councilor, I should’ve exercised better judgment. My position does not entitle me to different treatment, and I regret placing the chief, Sgt. Petrone and the responding officers in an uncomfortable position that may have raised questions about their professionalism and integrity,” she wrote.
“I am truly sorry for the distraction my actions caused and for putting the officers in this position. I hope they, and the people of Worcester, will accept my apology,” Toomey wrote.
There’s one glaring omission in this apology: the woman whose car she hit.
Some of you may recall in the HBO documentary about Woodstock ‘99 that came out last (?) year, there’s a clip of Fred Durst getting interviewed about the destruction and chaos their set unleashed and he petulantly insists “it’s not my fuckin’ fault” with his little soul patch and scowl and the hat on in the Durstian manner. The camera then cuts to him surfing over the crowd on a large plywood board, freshly ripped off a nearby frame, the garbage can fires in the background and he’s screaming “give me something to break.” (Legit a top 10 moment in rock and roll history if we can put on our big boy pants and admit that good performances need not be morally or ethically good.) That’s what I think of when I think of Kate Toomey’s insistance on blaming the “illegally parked” car. An East Side girl, she should know—in fact I’d wager she does know—that passenger side tire up on the sidewalk is the way everyone parks on every side street in that neighborhood, and that it makes your car less likely to get side swiped on the East Side’s often narrow side streets. (Though Harrington is wider than most.)
Put yourself in this woman’s shoes, reading in the papers that it was your fault actually that a city councilor wrecked hers and your car, waking you up just after midnight on a weekday with the loud pop and all the headache to follow, Toomey telling the officers she was on her way back from “a restaurant.”
Toomey apologizes to the police, but not to this person. And that says all you need to know about whether she’s sincerely reckoned with her actions.
The most recent Bad Advice covers this generally territory nicely.
We are still in metaphor mode here, but you realize in this whole hullaballoo that you may actually get in trouble. But then the police do not ask you to get out of the car, they do not ask you to perform a field sobriety test, they do not ask to check your ABV, they treat you like you’ve always been treated. I mean you didn’t kill anyone right? Your car is too damaged to drive and you are offered a ride home from the same folks who are not putting you to task. You got away with it again. And that whole scenario kind of perfectly encapsulates your situation. The norms you’ve created for yourself are protecting you from receiving any real consequence.
A nice little win
The council on Tuesday voted to “recommit” the manager’s camping ordinance—a little used feature of our wonderful municipality in which the council essentially makes the manager do a rewrite. A second draft, if you will. Which, speaking as a writer with some experience getting second drafted—brutal. Publicly second drafted? I’d disappear, same day.
A surprising amount of them bristled at the $25 fine, and most said they wouldn’t vote for any future proposal with such a component. Exceptions aside [cough Moe Bergman cough] councilors were brought by public pressure into a position they couldn’t morally abide, at least publicly. That’s a win! And with wins rare to come by these days, it’s worth putting a fine point on it.
It occurs to me I haven’t taken the time to lay out what exactly was in this proposal. It takes the form of a roughly 20 page report filed on the Sept. 15 Council agenda outlining a proposed initiative called “Disrupting The Cycle.” It was authored by the city’s new Commissioner of Health and Human Services, Seema Dixit. Hired earlier this year to replace Mattie Castiel, Dixit spent most of her career in the Rhode Island Department of Health, in a variety of roles that skew toward the medical side of things: disease prevention, healthcare disparities, nutrition, and the like. Where Castiel was an expert on the homelessness side of things, Dixit’s focus lies elsewhere. Nevertheless, Batista requested her office generate a report on how to execute what he called, in his summary memo, an “all-hands-on-deck strategy that aligns with my administration’s three-pronged approach to public health crises: prevention, intervention, and suppression.”
The first two prongs are then described with the usual buzzy terms, “superior service delivery” and “supportive transition to more permanent housing options,” that mean whatever the reader wants. The third prong, however, is quite specific, and the only component with an action item for the council, by way of an attached ordinance for the body’s approval. Batista described it thusly:
Institute a suppression mechanism through the proposed camping ordinance that would ensure public health, safety, and equitable engagement with unhoused residents.
A choice example of the freefall into meaninglessness the term “equitable” has experienced over the past two or three years. I for one love it when my suppression mechanisms ensure equitable engagement. I know what that means first of all and second I think it makes me sound like the good guy. Not at all like a fritzing droid in the background of a scene set in a Tatooine police station.
Robot voice: Protocols Set 2: SUPPRESSQUITY.
Two sentences later, we see the phrase “efficacious path forward” and then, after that, the grand finale: “trauma-informed response.” Not to get too ‘Old man shakes fist at cloud’ about it but words mean things—like, each word... every one of them, folks! ...carries its own discrete and generally agreed upon meaning, the core distinction between “word” and “sound made with mouth”—and it is not a coincidence that the most outright evil thing Batista has proposed comes to us gift-wrapped in language so vague and bizarre that the words revert to mouth sounds.
Batista and Dixit both tried to cast the outrage about the fine proposal as taking one small part of a comprehensive plan and blowing it out of proportion.
But the camping ordinance is the only part of the report that seems to mean anything at all. Other facets include “Reaching a community outreach agreement to establish a commitment to outreach efforts and hold community partners accountable.” Anyone’s guess!
A glaring omission: nowhere in the report is there talk of “building more supportive housing units.” The authors dance around the obvious reality that homelessness is a state produced by the lack of a home. A short section on the matter trades in hypotheticals and possibilities. “Based on historical data, increasing the number of beds would help to stabilize the shelter system, reduce chronic overcapacity, and ensure adequate coverage during extreme weather events and emergencies.” But there is no concrete goal or path toward it. Only a list of “potential funding sources.”
I’ve been covering this city a long time. I was around in 2018 when the city did put together a concrete goal to move from reliance on temporary shelter to a permanent supportive housing model. It was about 100 units in all. In the intervening eight years I’ve watched the quiet process of moving the goal posts, away from those 100 units, having only built 20 or so, to away from permanent supportive housing as an idea, a process that this report would have completed had the council not remitted it.
Now, it’s “we might add shelter capacity, but we will increase the punishment doled out to those without shelter.”
The manager basically said as much on Tuesday night, letting it slip that consultants recently suggested that the city really needs 150 units of permanent supportive housing, and has about 60.
“The challenge with this is that it requires millions and millions of dollars from city, state, and federal dollars to be able to get permanent supportive housing,” he said.
During public comment, Rhiannon Snide, a staff attorney at Central West Justice Center, put it well.
“The city’s goal to expand shelter capacity for unhoused people in the future does not meaningfully respond to or address the current need. The city reports that over 1,100 homeless individuals live in Worcester, but only 197 shelter beds currently exist. The ordinance provides no genuine offer of shelters to individual before criminal penalties are imposed, and there is no requirement that resources be available before these criminal penalties take effect. The proposed ordinance may state that being unhoused is not a crime, yet section E3 authorizes quote, “enforcement by criminal processes.” And section F imposes a $25 daily fine for noncompliance. People will be punished simply because there’s nowhere to go.”
Such is the rightward drift in action. What was, in 2018, reasonably attainable is, in 2026, unmentionable. “Off the table,” as they say.
Kudos to Jonathan Morales of the Worcester Affordable Housing Coalition for illustrating the fundamental insanity of the moment in a single line.
“We should be asking how we can make sure that more Worcester residents have a place to call home rather than asking how we can more effectively remove people who do not.”
Meanwhile, as the report indicates, shelter capacity is routinely over-full, especially during the winter months, and evidence of unsheltered homelessness accounts for a whopping 70 percent of all complaints lodged in the city’s 311 system.
Those complaints, anecdotally, are almost always requests for removal. The 311 app was designed for potholes, illegally dumped trash, roadkill and other blight. It is not designed to get people into housing. It is designed to report the trash and make it go away. And 70 percent of the complaints on the trash app are about human beings.
This mentality, that the city should be first focused on removal, was neatly illustrated by the goon the Chamber of Commerce dispatched to the meeting, to ultimately get booed out of the room, which was nice to see. But before that, the Chamber’s representative, a guy named Mike something-or-other, the one with civil war physiognomy, said “Treating public spaces as informal shelter alternatives serves neither this population or the community at large.”
But the plan doesn’t add any shelter space! And the space we have is at capacity, and is often poorly run, dangerous, and overly restrictive. To frame public space as an “alternative” to shelter space implies a consumer choice that does not exist. But it does help the Chamber’s various mouthpieces, both on and off the council, advance the rhetorical framework that there’s help available and people are choosing not to avail themselves of it. I.e, Gain’s next line: “We support the city manager of prioritizing this challenge and taking action.”
And, later in the meeting, another such mouthpiece, District 1 Councilor Tony Economou, put a finer point on it: “Some people just don’t want help.”
Say what you will about the man, Economou has a knack for expressing the most evil crank positions with panache. Gotta put “Some people just don’t want help” right up there with “Just words on paper.”
I don’t think anyone expected the outcome we got on Tuesday. After two hours of public testimony, almost all of it moral condemnations of the proposal to fine people for sleeping outside, Councilor Gary Rosen was first to speak, and also made the motion to recommit the manager’s proposal. That was all well and good, slightly better than expected but expected. It wasn’t until Mayor Joe Petty spoke, directly after him, that the 7-4 vote I was personally anticipating suddenly broke the other way.
Super duper inside baseball but it is rare for Petty to speak second. He likes to wait til the end when it’s an “around the horn” situation. And this was perhaps an on-the-fly change on his part. Perhaps he was expecting Rosen to go the other way, and, realizing he was a “no,” did some back of the napkin math... let’s see, Toomey recused for DUI-adjacent activities, Rosen a no, that leaves Rivera, Bergman, Economou, me... four out of 10.... sorry Eric. We’ll never know for sure but you have to imagine Petty would have let Eric walk it back ahead of time if he went into the meeting knowing he was going to vote no? Considering it’s his guy and all.
And the three hours of deliberation that followed were basically a public humiliation ritual for the city manager. Which rocks. If you put something so transparently evil as he did on the proverbial table, you deserve to be laid upon said table yourself, spatchcocked, basted and braised in a simmering wine sauce whilst resting on a bed of root vegetables, an apple in the mouth, etc. Which is what happened to one Eric Batista, by the way, and we all watched it in real time, gleefully.
The vote itself was a confusing mess and it would be counter-productive to try to explain it. Bergman was the only councilor who advocated out loud for the fines. Economou dabbled in it, by way of “other towns do it” rhetoric. Rivera was Geodude. Toomey put herself in speaking jail. Everyone else said they couldn’t support the fines. So I guess we could call it a 6-1-3 vote if we needed to. Which we don’t. The item has been recommitted, and so it’s on the manager to give it another shot. If he wants to. Which, after Tuesday, he might not. That is the real win in this situation. The manager got his shit shoved in a little bit in trying to steer our already draconian homeless policy further down Gulag Road.
We’re still on that road we just aren’t moving down it. How to get on a different road? Well, we’d need a whole new council at the bare minimum.
But for now? A win is a win is a win. We know we won by how poorly Bergman’s prepared spiel slotted into the reality this wasn’t going to pass
How he said “this might offend some people” then proceeded to say nothing at all, let alone something offensive.
“This isn’t about me being comfortable seeing somebody that’s unhoused. It’s about the person that’s unhoused, risking danger to themselves and others by not realizing that the encampment shouldn’t be their first choice to go. “
First choice! If only they realized, like I, a superior mind and thinker, realize all the other choices on offer!
What an asshole. Luckily, he was way way in the minority.
We got the council to go against the manager on his new homelessness response strategy proposal, the marquee feature being the $25-a-night fines for sleeping outside. And that is a win! One that was 100 percent due to the sustained public pressure that this council, the most right wing in recent memory, broke with the manager.
But in many of the comments, the framing was that this proposal would criminalize homelessness, as if it wasn’t already. I want to try to explain the myriad ways that homelessness is already de facto criminalized.
In a previous post I wrote that the $25 a day sleeping fine would just be a cherry on top of the already existing “fuck you” Sundae, but I didn’t really explain what I meant. So I’m going to take some time to lay out the way that homelessness is already criminalized. How the district attorney, the police, the sheriff, the business community and city hall form a nexus that administers criminal punishment for homelessness every day, and that, once you see it, you start to see this nexus as the primary engine of homelessness, an outcome running counter to the stated goals of all three institutions, and for which all each retain plausible deniability: where officials can say they’re “doing all we can” and at times can even mean it. Meanwhile, the bureacratic rube goldberg machine of “quality of life” complaints, 311 tickets, “community engagement” patrols, trespassing charges, default warrants, encampment sweeps, pre-trial detentions, neighborhood meetings, parole conditions, the ongoing deficit in shelter space and transitional housing, the gutting of social service providers, etc. etc. etc., ends in a big cartoon hammer coming down and bonking people in the head, one at a time, the same group of people, over and over. No one does it on purpose and no one has to.
Take for instance the situation described by Keith Linhares on Facebook the other day...
Ran into Worcester’s Finest patrolling Newton Hill this morning.
“What are you doing up here?” I asked.
“Looking for homeless in tents,” the officer replied.
“Oh.”
“You seen any tents up here?”
“Nope. What happens to the people living up here?”
A quick shoulder shrug. “We’ve got outreach services. I just do what I’m told. We’ve got Doherty High doing cross-country up here. Can’t have kids tripping on tents”.
No malice in his voice. Just the flat, bureaucratic shrug of someone executing an order designed to make a complex, intractable crisis disappear for the fall high school athletic schedule.
Structural failure gets kicked down to law enforcement. Use of law enforcement is justified by high school athletics and the 311 complaints of West Siders walking their dogs. And the people surviving in the woods become reduced to an awkward trail hazard on a 5k course. Just some clutter to be cleared away.
Somewhere out there, on paper, there are “outreach services.” But out on the hill, the “fix” is much simpler: sweep the problem out of sight before school lets out and the cross country team arrives.
Out of sight, out of mind. For now.
If the police ran into anyone, they’d have “engaged,” a process which sometimes results in “running their name.” This is a recurring fear among the unhoused people I’ve interviewed over the years: getting their name run presents the possibility of a default warrant, leading to their immediate arrest. Default warrants are generated automatically by the district court for missed court dates or parole violations or falling behind on some payments. Unhoused people have an especially difficult time, for obvious reasons, keeping track of court dates, or receiving notification of any kind that such a date has been scheduled. A trespassing charge leads to a failure to appear leads to a default warrant leads to an arrest and bam: square zero yet again. At any given time, they could have default warrants they don’t know about, so the threat of “running names” is a good one. Police can get people to effectively self-banish by simply suggesting they might run names. The “criminal consequences” promised in the manager’s draft proposal would probably take the form of default warrants issued for non-payment, though I’m not an attorney and can’t say that for sure. But, if so, it would be another entry point for the misdemeanor charge-default warrant spiral. Another way to criminalize homelessness via the existing method, not, as some suggested, homelessness suddenly turned criminal.
This reality also puts a fine point on the basic conceit of the manager’s framing. In his introduction, he wrote, “We must act, but at the same time, I want to be clear that being unhoused, is not a crime and will not be treated as such.”
Sit in district court for a morning session on any given day. Just one day. And it’ll be enough to see that homelessness is in fact a crime and has been treated as such.
One speaker during Tuesday night’s public comment, who identified himself as Peter from DSA, put the whole ruse well.
Why does homelessness exist? Why will it always exist under the current system? Why is the solution always to sick the police on unhoused people and push them somewhere else? And why, as union carpenters in the room will tell you, do cities like Worcester hand incentives to developers that steal their employees’ wages and threaten them with deportation? It’s because we’re told to rely on private capital to build housing, employ people, and run society. And so those things will only happen on terms that are good for the capitalist class.
He also mentioned a social housing platform that the Worcester DSA is putting up to voters in the Sixth Worcester District (Southbridge area). Pretty interesting stuff.
Central Mass & Worcester DSA has proposed a policy question which will appear on the ballot in the sixth Worcester State House district that instructs the district’s representative to support a measure using a tax on vacant properties and wealth and inheritances over $5 million to fund a robust, union-constructed, universal social housing program that “eliminates the role of landlords,” caps rent at 10% of household income, and places housing under tenants’ democratic management.
Capping his remarks, Peter said, “The free market has been unleashed on us for long enough.”
I have a lot more to say about the myriad ways homelessness is already criminalized, and show with data, annecdotes and public records, Too much for this post. But flagging for a post in the future on thed.
A few of my past pieces on the matter if you’re looking for that sort of thing:
We use our garbage police to police homeless people
Under Batista, the sweeps will never end - by Bill Shaner
“I wish I had a magic wand and I could find you an apartment”
If cruelty’s the goal, we’re doing a damn good job
Before Adam was dead, Adam was blight - by Bill Shaner
Some other good reading on the subject...
John Keough in This Week In Worcester: Worcester City Manager’s Homeless Strategy: Lock ‘Em Up
SOS Worcester Instagram post on the contradictions this council action put on display.
Coming up
HRC Meeting tonight, dealing with the CRB and, in particular, Kevin Lovaincy’s report about why the city doesn’t need one.
In my piece from a week ago, I began a timeline of Worcester chaos with a short scene from the last HRC meeting , in late August, detailing the chairman of the board asking the staff liaison to please attach a statement about the CRB to the next agenda…..
Like every other time, the staff liaison, Patricia LaFore, acted like Feldman’s request was a big inconvenience. “Yeah. It can be.” Feldman: “Okay, could we please have that attached to the minutes for the next meeting?” LaFore: “Sure.”
Take a look at the agenda. You see a statement? No? Hm. Neither do I.
At Council tomorrow, nothing too exciting. There’s an E-bike report, a few reports from the police department, and that’s basically it.
Tomorrow, there’s a “listening session” about the drastic cuts and rearranging of services in the Balkanization of Community Health Link.
Odds and Ends
Thanks for reading I really do appreciate so much that I get to do this for a living, even when it sorta sucks ass to do (no way out of the Dream Job Paradox). I need a certain number of people to voluntarily give me a small amount of money so I can continue having this job and not another one that would likely disallow me from writing about Worcester the way I do.
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Must watch: Doug Stanhope becomes the mayor.
Cooking dinner Friday night, had WCUW on the radio. Dr Gonzo’s “Turtleboy” was played. My ears perked up. It really was a song about Turtleboy, and a lewd one to boot.
So of course I made a note and went on WCUW’s website to look it up and luckily they host all previous sessions on their site.
If you go to this link, and punch in 6:45 for the time, you’ll hear half of Government Cheese then maybe the best Worcester song of all time
Oh turtle boy please just let him go
You gotta know when no means no
The Covid-Conscious Western Mass Lesbian Bar story is really that good.
A good read from Commonwealth Beacon via the Telegram (via a hilarious Japanese website that [redacted] the [redacted] more efficiently than the rest of them right now) on voter turnout in gateway cities like Worcester.
【魚拓】Voter turnout is lower in Worcester. Why is that?
This song bangs, huh?
Ok talk soon!