The sewage runs downstream
What would Walter Benjamin have to say about the existence of Holden?
This afternoon I’ll be at the library for a panel on satire in journalism, a device I’ve never used in my reporting—not once your honor. Honestly, I don’t even know why I was asked… but the bill is stacked: Me (most importantly), Giselle Rivera Flores (cool, hilarious), Matt Shearer (cool, hilarious, jealous of his beat and ‘whole thing’) and Brad Petrishen who would be brutal if the Telegram let him. Idk what we’re going to talk about but it will be good. The moderator is the man with the whole ass name and host of the GBH Curiosity Desk, Edgar B Herwick III. Starts at 2 p.m. at the main branch of the WPL, the “Banx Room” I’m told. More event details here: ‘How Journalism Works’ Panel No. 6: ‘Journalism, Activism, Satire ... What’s the Difference?’
In case you missed it, we’ve been putting out bangers: Dani Killay has a new Worcester Speaks up with the homies Jess Curtin and Travis Duda, it’s really good Dani is a natural magazine writer. Gillian Ganesan debuted a very interesting a cool new history column called How Did We Get Here? It’s better than anything I’ve done in a good long while.
I am a proud editor of late. Always trying to do the best, coolest, most interesting local journalism we can. Your help would be appreciated. Here’s a little deal for those on the fence. I know everyone has too many subscriptions and not enough money right now in this definitely-not-a-recession best economy we’ve ever seen.
And I’m trying to clear out some stock in the merch store, so here’s a link to a coupon for paid subscribers for HALF OFF ANYTHING THAT’S IN THERE. It expires this time next week so [engag echo and sub octave effects] ACT NOW.
I love business. A big business baby that’s what they call me. BBB.
As proud as I’ve been in the editor role the writer role has been extreme frustration. Just… blehhhh. No gas in the tank. The piece I have for you today is something of a return to form for me, I think it’s good actually. Refreshing. It’s also short which I know most of you will appreciate.
Do let me know if you agree, or disagree (I <3 negative reinforcement).
Enough dilly dallying. Let’s get to it.
The sewage runs downstream
In the abstract it’s got an absurdist character: Worcester got sued by Holden some 13 years ago over a fee structure for taking their peepee and poopoo and processing it in our sewer facilities. Now we owe Holden more than the annual budget of our DPW—$35 million. This is a town that is so new and fake it has no capacity to handle its own wastewater, and now we’re paying them for that while continuing to take their peepee and poopoo. This is a town that’s so enmeshed in and reliant on Massachusetts’ singular brand of social segregation it’s one of the small handful of holdouts to conforming to the MBTA Liveable Communities Act, a state measure which mandates municipalities zone tiny pockets for multi-family development in the neighborhood of public transit. It’s an already tepid intervention in the housing crisis, and towns like Holden have, for a cocktail of sinister reasons left unstated, fought the thing like John Dutton fights Native American casinos... showing us in the process exactly why we have a housing crisis in the first place. And they’ll now be using our money to do that.
Holden is a post-war invention, remember. From 1950 to 1960 the town’s population climbed by almost 70 percent. As a place, it barely exists. For most of its history it was a neighborhood in Worcester. The “North Half,” it was called. It was sparsely populated, just farms and few textile mills, right up until we saved Private Ryan. Now, it is 87 percent white with 2 percent poverty and its zoning map is a few blips of commercial and industrial land engulfed in a sea of single family residential. It is a bedroom community for people like Sheriff Lew Evangelidis, the man presiding over the poverty factory that is the Worcester House of Corrections. I don’t want to know how many of our police officers live there but.... yeah. It is an Isengaard-style subterranean factory for McMansions. The agrarian roots of the place exist now as brochure material—a twee historical context providing the contours of spatial identity for those who purchased an otherwise hollow and displaced exurban existence. In other words, the Volkish bonafides.
In the year 2000, There was some sort of state level environmental regulation-related change in the year 2000 that ‘produced the conditions’ as they say for our most obnoxious and easy to hate suburb to feel they were getting bilked as it relates to the tidy removal of pee and poo. They filed a lawsuit for damages. The city of Worcester—or, more accurately, Eyes Wide Shut-style master of the city Mike Angelini and a coterie of lawyers in his orbit—fought it every step of the way, and every step of the way they lost, and with every loss the tab increased significantly. What started as a $14 million judgement has more than doubled due to this “never surrender” legal strategy.
Foot hits same rake over and over.
It donks us on the forehead and we go god damn it the rake shouldn’t still be there, in our opinion and we look around, seeing no one, least of all someone willing to bend over and move it, and so we leave the rake right where it is and start walking in a circle. Someone should move that rake, we say over our shoulder.
The situation is such that City Manager Eric Batista, freshly donked by rake for the first time in an official capacity, is employing “they need to come to the table” rhetoric. In Worcester, you hear “come to the table” and you can safely assume whoever’s saying that has already lost. In a recent interview with Mike Hsu of 100.7 The Pike, Batista said:
“So the judgment was $14.6 (million), there’s about over $11 million dollars of interest. What we’re trying to do is say, ‘Holden, come to the table and let’s figure out a solution outside of this interest, you got to come off the interest so that we can have a discussion about a settlement,’ and that’s where we’re where we’re at.”
I hate to break it to you and hopefully not Batista as he should know better but Holden is not coming to any table… There is no table. There has never been and will never be a table. My brother, Holden is the rake. Stop trying to appeal to the moral sensibilities of a rake.
While Batista tries to bargain without leverage, Holden has filed formal paperwork to collect on the settlement and the interest. A “writ of execution on the judgement” is what it’s called, according to Brad Petrishen’s reporting, and it was filed on Feb. 23. It’s a term I’ve not personally encountered since my time in the Morag Tong, casting the yoke of imperial oppression off of my beloved Vivec City by way of righteous violence and related subterfuge. When someone’s got a writ with your name on it, in my experience that means you’re cooked.
We’ve exhausted every avenue of appeal. We are on the hook for that $35 million. And I’m not using “we” as a stand-in for Worcester City Hall here. City Hall isn’t on the hook for this. “We” are the city residents, who pay taxes and rely on services, unlike most of the lawyers in the city’s employ, and we will be paying that tab one way or another—and those ways will be obscured behind so many smokescreens of budget reports and contingency funds and “free cash” and public statements and other such posturing. It will be hard to say definitively, we can’t do X because we owe Holden Y, but it will be easy to see the schools without air conditioners, the maintenance backlogs, the parks in disrepair, the roads always on the cusp of failing to meet the basic requirements of the definition, the librarians made to pull double duty as outreach workers, the actual outreach workers faced with impossible caseloads. Like the sewage, it all flows downstream.
No one with a hand in advancing the city’s legal strategy will feel the effects of its failures. Most of the people that will feel the effects won’t draw a connection. They have rightly decided to pay no mind at all to what the city government does or doesn’t do, understanding better than those of us who try to be “involved” that it’s not an institution that makes any room for the public’s input. Exhibit A: Jermoh Kamara recently on Facebook put up a long post detailing her stonewalled efforts to get on a somewhat new (?) Advisory Commission on African American and Black Affairs. Couldn’t think of a person more suited for that kind of role. But apparently… well I’ll let her say it.
I have now discovered that the Commission has been moving forward without a word to those of us who applied and interviewed. Today, I recently saw a post that signaled that they are looking for people to join the advisory committee ?
Why are residents being sidelined when they want to be involved in matters of their own human rights? Joining a board or commission is a right of residency and a vital part of our democratic process. We know that recruitment for these roles is often difficult; why, then, is the city suppressing the participation of those who are ready and willing to serve?
This last question from Kamara has a skeleton key-type character to it. If you get an honest answer to it god bless you you’ve cracked the code. I know I never will (it’s why I don’t bother asking). But I have my guesses. On most days I’m inclined to say that city hall under Eric Batista behaves like an institution that is merely annoyed by having to pretend it’s democratic. It would prefer not to. And you could say oh my god that’s terrible but how much worse is it than the appearance of democracy upkept with a front facing enthusiasm and a back facing cynicism? That is, by the way, how we ended up with all these boards. Not a one of them moves any needle and when they do it’s a fluke that gets ‘taken care of’ swiftly (See: Ellen Shemitz’ Human Rights Commission).
Anyway…
Of the 10 percent of the population who pay any attention at all, about six percent can be safely placated by ensuring no funding cuts come at the expense of the police.
And so we’ll be engaged in a slow, boring wealth transfer over the next however many years, from the urban core to the town created in the first place by white flight away from it.
Now, the kicker: the town of Holden is going to use all of Worcester’s money to maintain the very policy of social exclusion on which it was founded. They’re going to war with the state over a mandate to a tiny amount of multi-family housing development.
Earlier this week, about 500 Holden residents town meeting willfully stepped into a lawsuit with the state, using the $35 million they’re taking from us to make the housing crisis worse. The Town Meeting attendees, per Petrishen’s report, “sent a message to state Attorney General Andrea Campbell. Bring on the lawsuit.”
The vote was overwhelming, at 257 for to 520 against, and it came after just an hour or so of deliberation. For those of you lucky enough to have never experienced the weird Massachusetts ritual that is Town Meeting (not a town meeting or the town meeting but Town Meeting), an hour is nothing. Especially for a decision of such consequence.
Technically, the thing they voted down was an update to the town’s zoning ordinance to add two small corridors for multi-family housing.
This is what the map currently looks like...
There’s three flecks of orange, you’ll notice. Those are the only places where multi-family housing can currently be built in this town that directly borders the second largest city in New England. The rest of it, minus a few small tracts of business and industrial land, is single-family only.
The debate on the floor centered around .... a farm and a quarry that, people seemed to think, would face some vague repercussions. So, the thinking went, we need to stick up for our old-timey pastoral Volk by voting this thing down.
(Farm owner Ryan) MacKay, speaking passionately about the five generations of his family who have tilled Holden land, said he was concerned a pasture his farm relies upon near the quarry would be difficult or prohibitively expensive to insure if the quarry ended up hosting development.
The owner of the quarry had a statement read in which he said while it didn’t intend to sell the land, it was concerned the state – possibly by eminent domain, or political pressure – could ensure something was built there.
What’s missing in that is, of course, that town officials picked those places to offer up to the state as satisfying the Safe Communities mandate. They did so because it was unlikely any developer would want to build on them. They said that out loud.
Officials said they specifically chose the two sites – Holden Trap Rock Quarry, located at 2077 Main St.; and Halstead Apartments on Newbury Drive – because it was “extremely unlikely” they would actually be built upon.
Saying m’yes m-m-m-governor we’ll comply we’re sawwy so sawwwwy, while offering a compliance plan that sucks on purpose. A sniveling move to begin with—but for everyone to conveniently forget that and feign concern about one farm and one quarry facing some uhhh future insurance trouble.... maybe? That’s just intellectual debasement. The best question to be asking is not whether anyone in this situation is right or wrong, but whether this obvious intellectual debasement is accidental or intentional.
Architectural critic Kate Wagner had a great post up the other day on Flaming Hydra about the aesthetics of fascism, first in a series of essays on the matter. She opens where anyone should, with the Walter Benjamin idea that aestheticization of politics is the core animating principle of fascism. The number one key aesthetic motif, then and now, is anti-intellectualism, she writes. “Superficially, the fascist is anti-intellectual in order to maintain his Volkish bona fides.”
Our small business quarry-men are under attack, cries the Town of Holden, as it votes to maintain its socioeconomic purity at the cost of a protracted legal battle with its own state.
When we did the “Eight Hours For What We Will” bookclub Gillian Ganesan distilled their overall takeaway into a meme so perfect I’ve thought about at least once a week ever since.
Now Holden heads into a lawsuit they will lose, and likely spend down a good portion of the $35 million in pee & poo payback from Worcester in the process. When I say Holden will lose, I’m looking at what happened to Milton and seeing no difference. State Attorney General Andrea Campbell, a day after the Holden vote, confirmed that she’ll be serving the town a lawsuit like the one that made Milton say uncle.
When they lose, they’ll lose the right to pick where the new multi-unit tracts go. The state will pick somewhere that makes sense, like the center of town. Somewhere naturally suited for smart density and growth.
For those concerned about the town’s “character” nothing could be worse. The center of town is where the Talbots is, after all. And the non-chain seasonal ice cream place. That’s like 2/3 of the brochure, right there. And you expect our women and children to get their blouses and sundaes amidst apartment people?
There will be another uproar, but if he’s still around, Town Manager Peter Lukes (son of Konnie), can play to the crowd, demonize the state for “overreach,” and parlay that momentum into some sort of bid for higher office.
For now, though, everyone involved seems content to play in the rhetorical sandbox of “what about our poor farmers and quarry owners?”
Convenient center to coalesce around on this issue which is otherwise transparently one of social exclusion and class separation. As is always the case in Massachusetts, the racism and classism was baked into the context—the unspoken source of all panic and ire, held in the hearts of some 520 well educated and property owning and pedigree cultivating “concerned citizens” who all knew better than to say what they meant, who learned somewhere along the way that winks and nods are all you need when everyone is on the level. That you can hold the impolite thoughts in your heart you just can’t say them out loud. And you can easily find other rhetorical vessels for those anxieties in the nexus of weird/boring/obscure that no one will call you on and are widely available in municipal politics. So—whammy!—what about the quarry guy? emerges. It’s pure aesthetic, cynical aesthetic, presented as politics. Just like ‘ol Mr. Benjamin warned us about. And this aestheticization will be directly subsidized by us, thanks to Mike Angelini, the head of the Worcester Redevelopment Authority and an architect of the Polar Park deal and Ed Augustus’ personal attorney, at least at one time.
To make the situation more gross, this same Town Meeting cohort will be voting in a few months on a Proposition 2.5 override proposal, in which the town manager has put the library and senior center on the chopping block (nice analysis from user @heusesthemforholden on the Worcester subreddit). Lukes, the town manager, is the same guy so eager to jump into the costly legal battle with the state.
The shit, remember, it flows downstream.
Odds and ends
I gotta get ready for the event at the library so I’ll be real quick. Don’t forget about those deals I put in at the top.
“A coupon for paid subscribers for HALF OFF ANYTHING THAT’S IN THERE. It expires this time next week so [engag echo and sub octave effects] ACT NOW.”
There’s also a tip jar!
—An odd and captivating short story on the Worcester subreddit about Cordellas
—Nice photos of the anti war demonstration outside city hall the other day
—I love watching the Philippines volcano livestream. Peasantmaxxing at my desk like a boss.
—Meeting coming up on proposed changes to Beacon Street: Beacon Street Safety Project | City of Worcester
—I stand by my assertion that the rocket was a net negative invention for humanity and celebrating it in the early days of a rocket-based WWIII is wack. Should have canceled for real. The new display at the airport being the most garish, I think: Worcester Airport unveils tribute to ‘Father of Rocketry’
—Good work from This Week In Worcester: Significantly Disabled Grafton Man Scheduled for Eviction
—Chip Norton’s house of cards continues to fall. Now being sued for $1 million by the fake-sounding X-Caliber Rural Capital LLC, whom I’m sure did nothing wrong themselves.
—“Lake kids in central Massachusetts are not fucking around.” The Chris Flemming special on HBO is out of control. Pride of Massachusetts right there. The funniest person we’ve ever produced.
—The Worcester Guardian is yet again eagerly being the fool to do WPD dirty work. Pure propaganda right here. Here’s a neat page with better information about how many cops we have and how many cops we need: Police Scorecard: Worcester, MA
—Soundtrack this morning was Ceremony’s “L Shaped Man,” a perfect record.
Ok gotta run. Talk soon!
There is no end to the enjoyment of the top tier snarkery in this article. Frankly, this deserves an award (and I mean that with all sincerity). Bravo sir.
What John Edward Keough said. A superb bit of writing that lays bare the true motivations of Holden's actions in defiance of state law. Elitist, racist, disingenuous, and, ultimately, illuminated by your writing, transparent! Well done Bill!