The Somerville City Council had another exhausting meeting last week, accepting $130 million in bonding to manage flooding, sending body-worn cameras back to committee and seeing one of two developers drop out of bidding for a mixed-use project at 90 Washington St.
It started Thursday evening and stretched into the early minutes of Friday – a total of more than five grueling hours. Towards the end, the proceedings edged toward chaos, with councilors talking over each other, disagreeing as much about parliamentary procedure as the substance of the votes they were taking.
A new neighborhood council
The first substantial topic before the council was a set of agenda items about the Davis Square Neighborhood Council. Somerville’s neighborhood councils are not created or run by the city. Instead, residents create nonprofits that must meet certain benchmarks of scale, representation and transparency to be “recognized” by the council. Davis would join the Union Square Neighborhood Council and Gilman Square Neighborhood Council.
Recognition grants a privileged position to hold neighborhood meetings and negotiate community benefits agreements with developers. For the DSNC, that will put them out in front of conversations about Copper Mill’s proposed 26-story tower at Elm and Grove streets – from The Burren to Dragon Pizza. While it’s nowhere near the scale of the ongoing 20-acre redevelopment of Union Square, the 10 acres at Brickbottom or even the 7.4 acres of Somernova, the tower has already generated a lot of conversation – as well as some occasionally mystifying stickers on local light posts and signs.
Neighborhood councils have two major challenges: They struggle, rightly so, to avoid being labeled as obstructionists. They are also structurally challenged to demonstrate their legitimacy as the neighborhood’s representative and negotiating body.
On obstructionism: Getting a large development approved by the city is already time consuming. Putting a third party into the mix inevitably slows and complicates the conversation. Anybody with the nerve to question the details or (heavens) push for changes on any development these days opens themselves to accusations of Nimbyism and worse. To be effective negotiators, these councils need to be willing to walk away from bad deals without also making those accusations true. Bringing enough benefit to the community to make the extra time and effort worthwhile is a challenge. USNC’s hard fought community benefits agreement with Somernova is a great example of what a neighborhood council can accomplish – though the neighborhood is still repairing relationships damaged through 18 months of name-calling and flyering.
On legitimacy: The people with the time, energy and resources to spend hours at community meetings tend to skew along predictable demographic lines. That makes it easy (and usually valid) to lob accusations that neighborhood councils are just a bunch of mostly white, mostly affluent busybodies who somehow mange to simultaneously oppose development while accelerating displacement and gentrification. Neighborhood councils therefore need to commit a huge amount of energy to outreach and community engagement. That’s the genius of GSNC centering their mission on an an annual arts and music festival.
The conversation about DSNC was mostly celebratory. It has been operating for two years and claims more than 600 members. While it did not get a vote of recognition on Thursday, it seems very likely happen in the fall after a visit to the council’s Legislative Matters Committee.
Nurses strike
The next major item before the council was a resolution in support of the nurses of Mass General Brigham. They are on strike seeking better workplace conditions, more humane hours, cost-of-living pay increases and more affordable health insurance. Councillors were, of course, enthusiastic in support, with several speaking about how they had joined the nurses on the picket line at Assembly row that day.
Councilor Jesse Clingan recalled how when Partner’s Health Care merged with Mass General Brigham, it told the nurses that there would be no bonuses that year, offering them cookies and other treats instead. He said MGB must have spent millions of dollars on updating signage, stationary and other branding – but somehow couldn’t find spare money to do better than some plates of cookies for the staff.
Disability Pride
The council took up a resolution proclaiming July to be Disability Pride Month. Mayor Jake Wilson made brief remarks before passing the microphone to Holly Simione, co-chair of the Somerville Commission for Persons with Disabilities. Simione’s remarks were powerful, and the usual murmur of side conversations in the chamber fell silent as she spoke.
While she supports the idea of a pride month, Simione told the council, not every disabled person is or has to be proud of their status. “What we need is for disabled kids to know that they are fully supported. Once somebody is an adult, they can make up their own mind.” She told the council about Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 expose on the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. Rivera cut through a chainlink fence to film institutionalized patients in abysmal, horrifying conditions. While some of the patients had severe mental illness, others had been locked away for what might today be identified as attention deficit disorder, autism or just social difficulty. That reporting was part of years of activism that led to the Olmstead decision, currently under threat by the Trump administration, which requires state medical care to offer an in-home option if possible.
Simione told the council about the “capitol crawl,” a 1990 disability rights protest in which activists left their mobility aids at the base of the U.S. Capitol and dragged themselves up the steps of the building. She paused before going on to say that doing disability work in Somerville often feels like dragging herself up those steps. The friction between SCPD and the city staff assigned to support them has boiled over in several recent council meetings, and the Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator role – tasked to receive complaints about accessibility – is vacant.
Simione asked the council if it had noticed that closed captioning was not working for the early part of the meeting. “I wear bilateral hearing aids. Even with the microphones it can be hard. If the microphones had gone out, would you have stopped the meeting?” She tapped her hands on the podium where she stood. “This podium doesn’t adjust in height. If someone were to be in a wheelchair, how would they address you?” She concluded her remarks: “I’m not here to make anybody feel bad. You don’t know what it is like to be us. That’s why you have a state-mandated commission for persons with disabilities. That’s why you need to give us a seat at the table.”
A $130 million loan
With all of that talking and resolving, the council was a full two hours into its meetings by the time it turned to a request by the administration approve a bond of $130 million – about a third of the city’s annual operating budget – that very night. The proposed work would place a “box culvert” underneath the entire length of Morrison Avenue. Director of infrastructure Rich Raiche described it as taking the flooding that happens on the street surface and moving it underground.
Usually this sort of request would be sent off to committee, but the funds are available under a program started by the Biden administration that has been canceled by the Trump administration. Somerville’s application was in process, and seemingly all were surprised when it was accepted. The terms are great: It’s a 30-year loan at 2 percent interest with the possibility that a significant portion will be forgiven. The deadline to accept was June 30, but the city was granted an extension to July 15.
Of course the council said “yes,” but not without a lot of questions.
90 Washington St.
A little before 10 p.m., the council heard about a revised proposal for 90 Washington St., former site of the abandoned Cobble Hill mall. The city took the property in 2019 intending to use it for a public safety building. After substantial resistance, that plan was abandoned. Since then, a lawsuit from former owners that brought the full cost of the parcel to $35.3 million, the city has solicited proposals for a mixed-use development. There were only two bids, and on Thursday the council heard that one of those has been withdrawn.
The remaining proposal met with mixed reviews from the council. Ward 2 councilor JT Scott said that the project was “fantastic for Dedham, or perhaps Norwood.” He pointed out that the site is close to green and orange MBTA lines, and that just across the train tracks a proposed project is 15 stories tall rather than the five in this proposal. Ward 1 councilor Matt McLaughlin questioned the removal of the grassy berm and stand of trees that separates the development from the Cobble Hill residences. He said that it didn’t make sense to him to remove the only remaining green space on the street, especially since it would be replaced by an access road to serve a parking garage.
The council went into a closed-door session to hear about the financial details, emerging at 11:30 p.m.
Body-worn cameras and other topics
That’s how it came to be that the council finally started their regular order of business a full four and a half hours into the meeting. A few audience members were still in the chambers hoping to hear the fate of a state grant to buy body-worn cameras for the police department. The finance committee voted 4–1 on Tuesday against accepting the $231,000 grant, citing the half-million-dollar annual operating cost that acceptance would obligate the city to pay. At the mayor’s urging, tired councilors struggled with the procedural niceties of separating the agenda item from the committee report so that they could take it up for further debate.
The back and forth became fractious. Scott said that he was ready to vote immediately, while Ward 3 councilor Ben Ewen-Campen, acknowledging that if he was pressed to vote that evening he would vote “no,” said that he would prefer to return the item to committee to leave space for more conversation. McLaughlin chimed in to opine that he was in favor of whatever would avoid another half-hour of speeches at 11:30 p.m.
After sending the grant back to committee, the council took up an item on the same topic. Before any new public-facing camera or sensing system is deployed, the council must approve a Surveillance Technology Impact Report detailing how the data will be collected and stored. The Stir on body-worn cameras has been in the Legislative Matters Committee for weeks. The mayor submitted an updated version Thursday, requesting that it be left “on the table” for a special meeting still to be scheduled. The council instead sent it to committee, which seems likely to push the question out to September.
All of that left the council, grouchy and occasionally confused about what they were voting on, to pass several minor laws, approve block parties and acknowledge public comment on everything from off-leash dogs to the proposed bus network redesign. Councillors finally adjourned about 20 minutes after midnight.
Reach out via cdwan@csindie.com.
About The Author
