The council begins its very fake budget review

The deal's already sealed folks

First of all thank this man for his service.

We love a slow-speed pursuit. But a slow speed pursuit of a front-end loader? Jeesé Louisé. The phonetics alone.

Stuff coming up….

First Outdoor Cats Live show Friday night at Hunchback Gallery! It’s going to be a very good and hopefully soul restoring series of conversations. We got Etel Haxhiaj, Maydee Morales, Ashley Spring all confirmed and more to come! And we want to hear from you as well! Call into our new tip line—508-205-9520—with any thoughts or observations you have on how Eureka Street went down and what it says about the city. Or send us a voice memo at outdoorcats@sudomail.com. You can send something written there as well but that’s not as fun now is it?

This Thursday to Sunday Cinema Worcester is showing Steal This Story, Please!” the new documentary I’ve been itching to see about Democracy Now and Amy Goodman and how they built such a durable and fiercely independent outlet. The screenings take place in the WCUW Front Room, which I’m ashamed to say I haven’t been to yet. See you there, probably on Saturday.

While we’re on the subject, independent means something in journalism. It really does! Which makes the way the Worcester Guardian uses it some really insulting theatre of the absurd. Made a little video about that on a whim the other night.

Please subscribe to this actually independent outlet. Every reader contribution advances us along the path to cementing ourselves as Worcester’s own little Democracy Now!

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Real quick, putting a recent statement from Worcester Earn A Bike on your radar. It’s about the Wheelie Kids and the WPD’s crazy treatment of them lately.

We are deeply troubled by accounts of the police response to the recent 508 bikelife rideout on Saturday, April 18th in Worcester. Young cyclists

reported being followed, detained, and tackled simply for riding their bicycles. They described being racially profiled and insulted by officers. This is unacceptable. Young people and young adults in Worcester deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, not treated like criminals.

I don’t think we need video to know what’s going on here. Same thing going on with Toomey and the chicken ordinance if you think about it. Same thing going on in online comments like this one someone left on Earn A Bike’s Facebook post.

While not on the matter of 508 Bike Life specifically, we went all the way down that rabbit hole on yesterday’s episode of the podcast.

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The budget approval process is an obvious sham

The city council tonight will begin to pore over the proposed $1 billion budget the city manager submitted on Friday. While it’s the first proposal to cross the 10-digit threshold, at a total of $100.1 billion, it’s all but certain to be the latest in a long long line, going back farther than my time covering the city, of proposals the city council approves without a single alteration. You’d be right to ask why they bother calling it a “proposal” at all. Rather than the nuts and bolts of the budget proposal itself, today I’m focusing on the autocratic nature of its production and approval.

The annual budget approval process is where we find city council in its most useless form, and it happens to be one of two assignments that are, in theory, the most critical “work” the council is charged with doing. The budget and the hiring of the city manager. Today, the council begins “working” on the budget.

Via a series of “finance committee” hearings, they’ll go department by department, bringing in the heads of each for a round of questioning that often has little to nothing to do with the budget. In the case of the police department, it’s a groveling show of fealty. In the case of every other department, especially the DPW, it’s grievance-airing session. After that month-long process, they will pass the manager’s budget without changing anything about it. If we had local Polymarket I’d put $1,000 on it. In my years of covering the council, I’ve only seen a budget change proposed a small handful of times. George Russell proposed cutting Discover Central Mass funding. Konnie Lukes, broken clock that she was, tried to defund the police department’s short-lived mounted patrol unit. I’m sure there are a few others not springing to mind at the moment. Regardless, I’ve never seen one of these proposals actually go through.

The city council has, on this among many things, rendered itself useless over the years. It can only vote to veto certain specific line items, or move money around within a department, per the rules outlined in the charter. What happens when a line item is wholesale vetoed? Does the manager come back with a different budget or do the services and programs in the vetoed line item just get auto eliminated for one year? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. There’s some language in the charter but who knows how it’d be interpreted in practice? Because no one’s ever done it. The city manger uses this like a bluff he knows the city council is afraid to call. And it works.

Forward-thinking cities across the country are implementing, exploring, or refining participatory budgeting processes, using them as a way to increase resident engagement and civic pride. Boston, Cambridge, New York, and Chicago to name a few. Though the programs are different in style and scope, the through line is simple: injecting direct democracy into the process of assembling an annual budget. It’s the core decision making process of the municipality, and the end result stands as the root moral document of the city.

Worcester’s process is the mirror opposite. The process for public involvement we have on paper, already a few steps removed from any direct democracy, isn’t even the one that happens in real life. The city council do not exercise the powers that they have. Like so many functions, they’ve quietly forfeited it to the city manager, while they privately and individually lobby him for their own little pet projects. And yet, they still vote on the budget, because they legally have to. But they do so having dipped only a toe at most in the process of generating it.

None of this is ever said aloud. The controlling majority of the council share the same basic self interest: an inflated sense of their own importance, due to their “being in” city government, rather than doing any governance. Calling the budget process what it is would require admitting out loud they’re not as important as they’ve been saying. So no one does that, and almost all of them can be relied upon not to do so in the future. (Gary Rosen, though... do it, Gary!).

Within the cultural milieu of the “old guard,” saying something like “the budget process is a sham and we are essentially strong armed into voting on something we can’t functionally alter” would be a faux pas. It would, in the manner of a high school clique, get people talking. There would be whispers that so-and-so turned “activist,” and since the whole social world of the political class is negatively polarized against an “activist” out group, it would be social death.

So what we’re looking at is a budget process that’s actively anti-democratic, kept that way by the normative behavior of a small group of people who have been there forever and rely on being there for their self worth. The unacknowledged gulf between theory and practice, shrouds the autocratic nature of the budget process in a cloud of plausible deniability. Anyone with the power to change this process, or even meaningfully challenge the validity of it in the public discourse, would banish themselves in the process. Those, like myself, who possess the freedom to say true things out loud, but by nature of doing so lack the legitimacy of membership to the in group, are easily written off as “naysayers” and ignored in perpetuity.

That’s a reality that cannot be changed by removing a few of the councilors. It’s not Joe Petty’s fault or Kate Toomey’s. They’re avatars of a social order—what we sometimes call the “inner circle”—the people who “know how things work around here.” Who see nothing wrong with it, who have no politics outside of it, no vision but to maintain their place in it. A gang mentality, and one that has proven politically impenetrable over the time I’ve spent trying to figure it out. It can’t be changed from the outside, can’t be brought to reason. It can only be rendered politically irrelevant by a larger and stronger social order. Our best efforts have only shown the thing for what it is more clearly. We haven’t gotten remotely close, and last November we got knocked back a step or two. But that’s not to say it hasn’t been worth it. Every attempt makes the real architecture of the political reality more visible. If you want to smash it you have to make sure you can see it first.

Friend of the newsletter Jeuji Diamondstone passed along a good essay on this topic in Jacobin, using Zohran Mamdani to explore the shadow power structure of the New York City Police Department, one which, like Worcester’s, exacts untold influence over the municipality in ways that are carefully concealed from the public.

Zohran Mamdani and the Contradiction of Democratic Socialism

New York, like virtually all major US cities, has in essence two governments: the civilian bureaucracy overseen by the mayor, and the New York Police Department. As Stuart Schrader explains in his recently released Blue Power, police, through their unions, have “built a political movement that made cops untouchable,” able to “strong-arm local leaders and nullify attempts at public oversight.” And these police departments are reliable allies of the forces of urban capital, especially finance and real estate, which prefer them to the more democratically accountable parts of the state.

In an introductory summary provided to the city council Batista confirms the prevailing opinion among the old guard councilors and their voters that the job of a councilor is to complain or to relay the complaints of others.

“I have heard loudly and clearly this City Council’s push for cleaner neighborhoods and maintained streets and sidewalks.”

He does so in service of justifying a staggering $43 million capital loan, almost double the previous year’s total. As if it were a pat on the head. You’re so good at complaining you can take credit for this loan.

The loan will go toward good things, mind you. Most of it is for road infrastructure improvements. Worryingly, there’s no new positions in the DPW to carry out these improvements. But what do I know. Second on the list is a new fire station for South Division. Third is a $10 million chunk for a new Burncoat High School and repairs at Belmont Street Community School and Rice Square School.

The $5 million expenditure on a new roof for the police department is the answer we’re apparently getting to the lobbying campaign for a new police station, humming in the background over the past few months, in which councilors and the local press have been enlisted, likely by the police union brass, to talk loudly and often about the supposedly poor state of the building. The sometimes leaky roof was one of the few specifics on offer in any of the comments made or the news articles written after exclusive tours of the building. In one Telegram article, Thomas Duffy captures the stupid nature of the discourse

“Not only does the current building need to be improved, it must be improved,” Duffy said.

What do we think “need” and “must” mean in Duffy’s imagination? What’s the difference to him? There’s one way to read it in which “must” is followed by a tacit “or else.” Of course that’s just one way.

All’s to say this “proposal” from Batista is just the budget. Simple as. Investing time or effort in the council’s approval process is time or effort wasted.

Tom Marino continues to do great work reporting on the city council, honing in on the essential uselessness of the institution in a series of articles. In the most recent, headlined “Worcester Council Holds Fewest Meetings in 20 Years in 2025,” he breaks down the meeting schedule in detail.

It seems like a decade ago that Thu Nguyen decided, rightfully, to stop showing up to a council that treated them like shit, personally and politically. The council majority, happy to have a new thing to be reactionary about, slid into a rhetoric of “do-your-job” fascism, it being one of our state’s real cultural contributions of the past few decades. As Marino points out, the “gotta show up” messaging read hollow from these people who don’t really do anything but show up. But what’s worse, they were actively showing up less and less over 2025 into 2026. Having defeated the progressive movement on a wave of right wing backlash in 2026, it appears the city council is showing us what “getting back to business” really meant: getting back to doing absolutely nothing but complaining at the city manager about the mundane aggravations of living in a society.

Marino also breaks down, with data, one of my favorite bullshit moves these jokers pull: scheduling their subcommittee meetings for an hour before the full city council meeting, thereby ensuring they won’t be able to do anything but chat for a few minutes with the police chief—for Kate Toomey especially and to a lesser extent moe bergman, the hanging out with the police element of the job is the prime motivator.

The standing committee on public safety, led by Councilor At-Large Kate Toomey, has long met on Tuesdays at 5 PM, with the city council meeting scheduled that same day for 6:30 PM. Councilor Bergman serves as a member of this committee, along with Councilor Tony Economou.

When then-District 3 Councilor George Russel led that Standing Committee on Public Works in 2025, five of its 11 meetings took place on a Tuesday at 5 PM. The others took place on another day.

This year, the public works committee met twice thus far. Weather caused the cancellation of its February meeting. Now led by Councilor Economou, the committee met on Jan. 27 and March 24. Its next meeting is scheduled for April 28, which are all Tuesdays that a scheduled city council meeting opens at 6:30 PM.

The standing committee on municipal operations met seven times in 2025, with Councilor Bergman as the chairperson. Only its first two meetings were held at 5 PM on the day of a city council meeting. With Councilor At-Large Satya Mitra as its chairperson in 2026, that committee has met twice, both at 5 PM on the day of a council meeting.

Just so happens the Committee on Public Safety is pulling this exact move as I post this, meeting at 5 p.m. before a 6:30 p.m. city council, with about eight different police reports on the agenda, ensuring none of them get the significant attention they deserve, and only just enough time for the chief to get through his prepared remarks on each, with some friendly color commentary from Moe and Kate.

This is a subcommittee designed to be useless, stuffed with useless people. Actively anti-democratic in just about every way. In keeping with the theme, I suppose.

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Odds and Ends

One more subscriber pitch for the road! I gotta do it. If you already a paid subscriber you’re the best and I love you. If you’re a free subscriber that’s cool too but, like, it would be cooler if you did, you know?

All right all right all right.

Ever wondered how much a sheriff makes?

Worcester Sheriff’s Dept. payroll: See how much employees made in 2025 - masslive.com

The president of Community Health Link was uhhh lying? About the services they’re cutting moving to other agencies? Apparently Open Sky told the Telegram as much in an email, saying they have no plans to inherit the programs that Community Health Link President Gordon Benson promised in the internal memo we leaked a few weeks ago. Color me shocked.

The ICE agent who tried to strangle a man in Fitchburg to death unsuccessfully now has a name, despite the federal government’s attempts to prevent it from getting out.

The name of a federal immigration officer accused of strangling a man in Fitchburg during an immigration arrest has been revealed in court, despite the federal government’s attempts to keep his identity a secret.

The officer’s name is David Jackson, an acting supervisory detention and deportation officer, according to court documents.

An IDF-level fake job title right there. “Acting Supervisory.” Ok, guy.

Further reading on a situation we’d do well to prepare ourselves for in this, our warehouse-laden city: ICE Bought a Warehouse in a Conservative New Jersey Town. Locals Are Now Fighting Back. - Bolts

I like what some of my counterparts in the independent media game are doing down in New York with the Independent Labor Club, something I’d like to replicate here if I can get a critical mass of people behind it.

A good post on the little known and misunderstood fusion centers that we’ve long ago forfeited our civil liberties to… entities that are around the area, state, country, and make our city’s Augustus-era surveillance ordinance, as well as the idea WPD doesn’t collaborate with ICE, all the more laughable. “What is BRIC?”

Lastly, a video which asks “Is Ralph’s a Seger Bar?”

I maintain—and this is a sign of my reaching middle age I think—that Seger’s “Against The Wind” can be held up to any song of the 20th century. Any damn song.

Well, those drifter's days are past me now
I've got so much more to think about
Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in, what to leave out

This newsletter? This is a Seger Newsletter. Talk soon! See you Friday also.