Backlash, criticism, many opposed to his effort to be named a voting member
By JOSH RESNEK
The mayor thought he had the votes and well wishes of the City Council and the School Committee to get himself named a voting member of the School Committee.
After a contentious week for the mayor and those opposed to such a thing, he has ordered the City Council to table the matter.
In the world I live in, this is called a defeat, followed by a retreat.
Mind you, it isn’t the end of the world.
The mayor, we can be certain will be back with a renewed City Council eager and bending over on his behalf to do his business for him.
Last week’s comedy of errors during the public speaking period before the meeting began revealed the mayor had obviously put up a dozen or so people to read from a script about how important it was for the city to name him a voting member.
A true act of transparency for the mayor, that is, lining up people to read from scripts about how he should be appointed.
One after another the pro-mayor people, after the fashion of pro-Trump people, pleaded that he be appointed a voting member to increase transparency!
Can you imagine!
The last two callers were in-audible.
One said he got a job from the mayor therefore he should be on the School Committee.
The other said the mayor gave his family free food. He wanted to know when he could get more free food. He kept asking if he was on the air!
This wasn’t the public expressing itself.
It was the mayor’s public doing his bidding for him.
We all should wonder…for what?
The mayor said last week he didn’t put his name forward, that he knew nothing about it, rather, that it came forward to the City Council magically, like a miracle of politics with his name all over the initiative which he later claimed he knew nothing about.
If you can believe that, you can believe anything.
Then the mayor tried to pin the move on Councilor at Large Wayne Matewsky.
The mayor believed Matewsky added it to their charter change initiative for the way ward councilors are voted for in city elections. He and Matewsky are running that bit of legislation.
“I had nothing whatsoever to do with the bit about the may- or becoming a voting member of the School Committee,” Matewsky told the Leader Herald last week.
“I will have nothing to do with that,” he added.
Superintendent of Schools Priya Tahiliani, not exactly a shrinking rose or wallflower to toy with, rejected the initiative out of hand.
“I don’t believe it is a good idea. I don’t like the way this is being done,” she said during last week’s School Committee meeting.
Tahiliani challenging the mayor caused quite an uproar, I have been told by people who claim to know.
Had Tahiliani been a city employee, rather than a School Department employee, the mayor would certainly have fired her the next day.
Not only would he have fired her, but he would have taken deep satisfaction in exercising his well-developed misogynistic tendencies.
He can’t fire Tahiliani.
He can’t fire school employees.
He can’t hire school employees.
He shouldn’t be asking school employees for campaign contributions – but he is.
He has a campaign fundraiser scheduled at the Encore for December.
It will be a difficult event for him to have if the hotel remains closed, unless he has it inside the casino, maybe in a quiet corner of the largely empty gaming rooms.
He would feel very comfortable there.
The mayor tabling, for now, his School Committee bid, is not the triumph he had been planning for.
Not everyone was willing to buy into this latest hustle.
That’s the sign of a growing problem for the mayor.