(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

By Chris Dwan

A casual observer of Somerville politics, dropping in on a meeting or two, might get the impression that the city is overcommitted. It’s actually much worse than it appears at a first glance. The city’s backlog of projects, commitments, and crises is long enough that it is difficult to even list them all — let along meaningfully address them.

A crane lifts an I-beam to begin repairs to the clock tower at City Hall.— photo taken from a city update email

The first hour of the City Council’s November 14 meeting was a painful example of this. The first speaker asked after a stalled playground redesign at the Kennedy School (funded in 2019). The director of Arts at the Armory gave a bleak update on long-term leases and re-iterated her organization’s intention to relocate if the city can’t get its act together. Finally, a parade of veterans demanded to know where the war memorials formerly displayed on Central Hill are being kept and when they might be restored. The memorials were moved in 2018 during the construction of the High School. According to one of the speakers, they have been outdoors “in a DPW lot in Inner Belt,” ever since. As veteran after veteran rose from a packed room to approach the microphone, acting Council President Pineda Neufeld eventually broke in to ask how many speakers there were going to be. The council settled on allowing “two more,” though many more than that were ready and willing to stand up and hold the city to account.

The fiasco at the Armory is really something: The city council took the building by eminent domain in May of 2021 with the express purpose of keeping the current tenants in place. In the ensuing three and a half years, we have failed to offer them long-term leases. We did use the building as an ad-hoc warming center last winter, which came with a raft of entirely predictable challenges. Shortly after the brutal council meeting described above, the administration released a “master plan” for the building. At a glance, that plan seems to kick the work of creating a plan (not authoring leases, but formulating a framework under which leases might be offered) to a notional committee that has yet to be named, much less seated.

At that same November meeting — with overnight temperatures already dipping into the teens — the Mayor requested $388k to fund this year’s warming center at the Cummings School on Central Hill. We somehow didn’t account for this at budget time just five months ago, nor did we get a head start on the long-deferred maintenance required to make the space safe. Because of that, the city is now in a time crunch and is renting heated bathroom trailers since the indoor facilities are not up to the task. The intended usage also seems to have snuck up on the Department of Public Works (DPW), who are scrambling to move stuff that they had been warehousing there.

Speaking of toilets — it’s been nearly two years since the city allocated nearly a million dollars to build “Portland Loos” in Davis, Union, and lower Broadway. Several have been installed in Cambridge during that time, but Somerville’s efforts have lagged. While not a panacea, public restrooms sure would help with our ongoing issues of public defecation. As Councilor Ewen-Campen said back in September of 2021: “Access to bathrooms is not a niche or a special-interest issue.”

Our effort to establish civilian oversight of the police is another example. In June of 2020, responding to the social upheaval triggered by George Floyd’s on-camera murder by a Minneapolis Police Officer, then-Mayor Curtatone proposed a million dollar budget to establish a program and fund for “Racial and Social Justice” (RSJ). Three quarters of those funds came from the Police Department’s operating budget. This is part of the “defunding” that, according to multiple statements from former Chief of Police Femino, have demoralized and reduced the effectiveness of the force. Four years later, we do not have civilian oversight, nor have we “re-imagined” policing in any substantive way. We did receive a long-awaited Police Department Staffing and Operations Report more than a year ago, but I am not aware of any follow up to either adopt or refute its recommendations. This leaves the department in the position of trying to deliver on an ambiguous mission with reduced staff and a feeling that the city has turned against them — for a fifth year running.

A slide from Mayor Curtatone’s FY21 budget presentation in June of 2020, outlining the goals of the new Racial and Social Justice Project.

I submitted a public records request in September asking for “reports, presentations, memoranda, and summaries prepared by [RSJ] that convey results or updates on the effort to ‘re-imagine’ policing, establish civilian oversight of the police, establish an alternative emergency response program, and encourage ‘public safety for all.’” The response included ~80 documents — nearly half of which were formulaic opening slides for meetings that exhorted the participants to, among other things, “expect and accept non-closure.” The slides also included non-disclosure and photo release agreements that task force members were required to sign as a condition of their participation.

The results did include the staffing study mentioned above and the results of a survey on “Public Safety for All,” both delivered more than a year ago. As of this fall, we have a new chief of police and a new director of RSJ. I wish them every success, and I can only imagine that they will need some time to settle in and learn the lay of the land before making any substantial changes. In response to a direct question about when we might see further updates from RSJ, the city’s public records officer told me today that the long-awaited December update will consist of a “save-the-date” for an update to be delivered in January or February.

The negotiations over a community benefits agreement between the Union Square Neighborhood Council (USNC) and Rafi Properties, owners of the “Somernova” project, are similarly opaque. USNC’s last public update on the process is from June, unless you count a blistering public communication from the co-chairs in the minutes of the most recent city council meeting. The participants in the negotiating process are bound by confidentiality agreements, though they have promised a still-to-be-scheduled “mid-point update” sometime early in 2025.

Whether it’s charter reform, an updated plan for 90 Washington Street, contracts for the majority of the city’s union workers, any motion at all on the former home of the Somerville Media Center — or any of a dozen other supposed priorities, the story always seems to be the same.

To be clear: I do not blame city staff for this situation. It is staff — union staff in particular — who got the schools open on time after the collapse at the Winter Hill School last summer, delivered the recent streetscape updates to Washington Ave, paved Highland Ave, seem on track to put a bow on Spring Hill in time for winter and who are currently repairing the clock tower at City Hall. This is not a matter of anybody doing a bad job or failing to show up. Rather, the city is trying to do too many things without clear, unambiguous, public priorities and strong accountability. We need leadership who will tell us the trade-offs. We deserve to know, in clear terms, what’s not going to happen. We need an administration who will own delays and slipped deadlines for what they are rather than letting the council take the heat while adjusting the goalposts.

We also need to staff up, which means finalizing those union contracts so we can attract and retain workers. The city’s jobs portal has more than 100 open positions right now — a substantial fraction of the city’s total budgeted staff. Pushing things off to contractors and consultants is both more expensive and long-term less effective than building in-house capacity.

There’s an old saying: “No means no to one thing, yes means no to many things.” When we say no, we specify what is being set aside. When we say yes, we usually have no idea what other priorities have quietly slipped off the front page. We’ve said “yes” and “maybe” to too many things for too many years. There is no possible way to deliver on all of them. Under these circumstances, we wind up kicking the can down the road and complaining to the city council while letting the years slide past.