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By Chris Dwan

The City Council met behind locked doors last Thursday night.

I know because I was there in person. When the council went into executive session around 8:40pm to discuss the property at the former Matignon School, I took the opportunity to step outside for some fresh air. When I tried to get back in, I was surprised to find the door locked. I’ve been attending council meetings on and off since 2017, and this was a first for me.

The lights at the front entrance of City Hall are all either burned out or turned off.

None other than Mayor Katjana Ballantyne showed up a few minutes later, leaving work around 9:00 p.m. After thanking her for letting me in I asked if we could get the door unlocked. Her response as she hurried off to catch her bus was that, “we can’t just leave things unlocked.”

To be fair, there was minimal practical impact. The city clerk asked staff to unlock the door, the meeting was streamed live on the internet, broadcast on community access television, and a recording is available on the city’s website. Still, under Open Meeting Law, this is very much not supposed to happen.

Later in the meeting, we heard that the administration had declined Ward 1 Councilor Matt McLaughlin’s request that “the new Police sub-station in East Somerville [be] easily accessible to the public and [include] public restrooms,” citing safety concerns by the staff. McLaughlin noted that a police station is among the safest possible places to locate a public bathroom and also that, “the one constituent in the audience tonight got locked out when he stepped outside for a moment. Beyond being a violation of open meeting law, do we live in a castle here?”

The meeting was disappointing on other fronts as well.

I had submitted a petition, along with 50+ of my neighbors, asking for traffic calming on our street. At-Large Councilor Jake Wilson dismissed it with a chuckle, saying that petitions – despite being the “officially recommended recourse,” are basically a waste of time. He asked, “how long would you estimate you spent on that?”

Wilson pointed out that he had submitted a request to the administration in September 2022, asking that they “provide documentation of the current process for determining the locations of traffic calming measures, and communicate this information to the public via the website.” That request remains un-answered in committee, more than fourteen months later.

I didn’t ask how long he had spent on it.

In the report from Licenses and Permits, we learned that there is no penalty for developers who work ahead of their permits. Two weeks prior, Comcast had requested a routine “grant of location” to dig a trench across the sidewalk on Beacon Street. These requests are usually approved on the spot, but this one was sent to committee after Ward 2 Councilor JT Scott pointed out that the trench had already been dug.

A pedestrian pushes a walker in the street to get around un-permitted sidewalk work

In the committee meeting the developer shared that they had dug the trench ahead of the permit in the hopes of speeding up the project. He was starting to rant about fines the city had imposed on him for killing street trees when Council President Ben Ewen-Campen cut him off with a motion to approve the permit.

At the Council meeting, Councilor Ewen-Campen said that we would need an ordinance specifying fines and penalties in order to be able to take action when developers flaunt this particular law.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom though. The council introduced a home rule petition (a request to the state legislature) asking that the city be allowed to cap rent increases at 5% year over year – except on owner-occupied buildings with three or fewer units, along with six other exemptions to make sure that the interests of property owners are properly respected.

Getting the rents under control is a good idea and sorely needed, but it seems likely that this particular home rule petition will join an illustrious company of others languishing, dead on arrival, on Beacon Hill – even given that we are sending it pre-gutted. Even if it passes, the city has yet to implement the registries of rental and vacant properties that we already require by ordinance, so enforcement seems like a distant hope.

Under conditions like these, I can see the logic in locking the doors.