By JOSH RESNEK
The mayor revealed a series of new hires for his corner office in city hall last week.
Through a series of costly shifts and reassignments of key personnel, the mayor was able to make three new key hires as he attempts to stay within the $1.1 million office budget voted for him by the city council.
The way the mayor spends taxpayer dollars, he will be hard-pressed to stay within the $1.1 million.
The mayor is gearing up for his re-election bid. So what does that require?
He shifts his loyalists around while keeping them on the public payroll to do his bidding.
There is a nearly invisible line of separation supposed to exist between city work and campaign work performed by city employees.
That invisible line does not exist at all when it comes to black and brown hires because, frankly, there have been very, very few of those hires to the mayor’s team.
The mayor shuffles personnel in his evolving creation, the Everett City Hall version of “three-card monte” trying to keep the good people of Everett from figuring out what he is doing. But many of the people of Everett are smarter than that. They see through his charade. Many are too reticent to make a public comment. Many others complain but only to friends as retribution from the corner office often follows loose lips. Many others have been turned off by Everett political economics and are now uninvolved, standing by the sidelines to keep from getting themselves dirty on the city playing field.
The mayor has shown a proven inability to successfully run even the most modest of businesses given to him. His management of three donut shops has been an utter and nearly complete economic failure. He lives off his rents from his two investment properties in the city – but those properties are heavily mortgaged.
The mayor needs his income from his job. He needs a full staff of capable and expensive bodies to do his bidding because he can’t afford to do it nor does he have the desire to work hard on his own and to use his own money to pay for his effort to get himself re-elected again.
The cost of the Everett mayor running his office at $1.1 million give or take another $100,000 in hidden costs is more than Chelsea and Revere combined with a total of about 110,000 residents to serve.
His donut shops were unable to sustain his management. He drove his donut shops into the ground. With almost unlimited taxpayer funds given to him by the acquiescent city council, the mayor can play a better bluff game without running the city into the ground but not without making a great effort to do so just the same.
The first new hire is Erin Devaney.
She worked for the City of Everett some years ago. She is to be the mayor’s chief of staff – the de facto mayor of the city of Everett. She is an attorney. Those who claim to know her regard her highly and say she is extremely capable despite a bump at the Massachusetts Registry which she headed.
At $120,000 a year, she is an expensive hire. Between health insurance and retirement and vacation, her total salary package is closer to $150,000.
The mayor also hired Michelle Doucette, a Suffolk educated MBA as his new Communications Specialist. She officially replaces Tom Philbin who is now heading another department at city hall in what city hall refers to as “re-allocation.”
Her salary is believed to be in the $100,000 range all told.
Her duty will be to become a facsimile of the mayor’s propaganda chief.
As the mayor has pointed out in his new city printed, city mailed, city paid for feel-good Carlo DeMaria for mayor brochure is that the word about all of the “good work” that the mayor is allegedly doing must get to all the residents of the city.
He also hired Vanessa Alvarado as the City’s new Public Information Officer. She speaks Spanish. She comes from a diverse background. Her presence adds at least one more voice to a city hall without any Spanish speaking employees to speak of with a large Spanish speaking population here.