Taxpayers footing bill for mayor’s newsletter
By JOSH RESNEK
A slick, full-color newsletter being delivered citywide monthly by the mayor and funded by taxpayers features the mayor, mainly, when it pretends to be an informational about what’s going on in the city.
“Far too often, the news and media are dominated by negative stories, by the eye-grabbing headlines, and by sensationalized accounts of events,” the mayor writes in the first edition.
He goes on to say that the monthly newsletter, cum political advertising piece, is being published at city expense to bring to light the hard work going on that may sometimes go unnoticed.
“This newsletter is to show, Everett Matters,” the mayor wrote.
On one page of the newsletter, there is a poignant, puffy piece about the great work the city’s director of Planning and Development Tony Sousa is doing.
Alas, the Leader Herald reported last week that Sousa is leaving the administration to seek other interests.
Sousa has apparently told confidants he could not take the mayor’s leadership style any longer and that he was done with it.
In another piece in the newsletter, there is a story about girl’s softball and the Everett Girls Softball League and its fight to stay alive during the time of COVID.
There is a lovely photograph of the mayor and his daughter – but the mayor is not wearing a mask while all the other girls are wearing masks.
If the newsletter is intended as a campaign tool, the mayor appears to be skirting the issue that everyone, including him, especially should be wearing a mask whenever out in public.
Perhaps he has joined the president and his anti-mask effort, which has ultimately led to the president’s staff and friends as well as himself coming down with the virus.
While the mayor has insisted the newsletter is to inform those of stories not carried in the local press, he included a small feature advertising the opening of a new “pop up” business, Koffee N’Box across from the Everett Central Fire Station.
All three Everett newspapers published features on this new business, so there is some uncertainty as to why this business, above all others struggling to stay alive in the COVID-19 era, has received such a free spread.
The newsletter mentions the mayor at least ten times.
Also, it mentions and details the mayor’s Facebook address, the mayor’s Twitter address, and two additional online accounts related directly to the mayor.
Everett Matters would be better named, “Carlo Matters.”