The View From Prospect Hill for the week of July 12

Skip Schloming is Somerville’s very own Simon Legree. The head of the
Small Property Owners Association wants to expose your child to lead
paint and carbon monoxide. He wants to victimize tenants, distort facts
and abolish legal representation for the poor.
    That is what City Hall‚Äôs pr machine would like you to believe
anyway. The inconvenient truth for the tenants of 93 Highland Ave.
however is that none of that is true.
The fact is, Skip Schloming and the Small Property Owners Association
(SPOA) have done more to stimulate community conversation and debate in
this city than any organization in years.

  When Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone first proposed an ordinance to limit condominium conversions, public debate was sparse, public meetings were poorly attended and only one side of the issue was represented. Then, Schloming and SPOA sent a mailing to the homeowners of Somerville, alerting them to the issue.
  At the next public hearing, City Hall was packed with a standing room only crowd. The mayor derided Schloming and SPOA and its mailing as ‚Äúextremist.‚Äù One Somerville resident, sitting in the crowd yelled, ‚ÄúAt least it got us here,‚Äù to loud applause.
  And that‚Äôs exactly the point. SPOA‚Äôs mailing was certainly full of catch phrases, most notably ‚Äúback door rent control,‚Äù but those phrases got hundreds of people to care about an important issue in the city and give both sides of the debate representation.
  So why has the mayor and his staff worked so hard to dismiss Schloming and SPOA? Why have they urged citizens not to take SPOA‚Äôs stance ‚Äútoo seriously?‚Äù
  ‚ÄúIt seems to me that the mayor has lost his temper and hasn‚Äôt cooled down,‚Äù Schloming said.
The people at the Somerville Community Corporation and Cambridge/Somerville Legal Services are experts in their field. They provide spirited and excellent advocacy for the rights of tenants. But why is that the only voice represented in this debate?
  ‚ÄúWe‚Äôre the experts on one side of the issue, why exclude us? Is the mayor going to allow us to express our views or is he just going to continue to smear us?‚Äù asked Schloming.
City Hall must allow an open, public debate on the issue of condo conversions and their effect in Somerville. And the only way to do that is to include Schloming and the SPOA.