Was in Caribbean as pandemic rages
By JOSH RESNEK
The mayor took about 70-90 days of vacation in 2019.
That’s nearly three months of vacation.
When questioned about it he was quoted as saying: “I deserve it for all that I do for the city.”
His other excuse is that he works 24/7 and has no vacation days allotted to him. He has said he can run the city from his cellphone either while vacationing in Italy, Aruba, Arizona, or Las Vegas.
He grabbed in 2019 an extra $12,500 for a car stipend but never used it for a car. He threatened the city council to appropriate the money for him or he’d make things bad for the city council.
“You’re fooling around with me over $12,500 after everything I do for this city!” He ended up giving back the car stipend this year.
He was riding high, money coming in at every turn of his shoulder.
The casino opened. The hotel was glamorous. The $30 million a year paid by Encore to the city was looking like a bottomless oil well-gushing gold for the city treasury.
That was 2019.
That was then. This is now.
The hotel has been closed for months. The casino is limping. About 4,000 employees, many of them local, have been laid off. The mayor hasn’t revealed if the city has been paid by the casino or whether or not the casino is wanting to renegotiate the Everett Host City Agreement.
The city is reeling from the effects of the virus.
Thousands of cases have been reported here and many deaths. In the last two weeks, during the time the mayor was on the beach in Aruba, the city reported the largest number of infections yet.
In an ironic Sunday night message to the city offered on the mayor’s Facebook site (CarloDeMariafacebook.com), he suggested that he had sacrificed a lot.
“Good Evening Everett ! The past week has been tough with high numbers in the hundreds. It seems like this virus is never ending. We have all sacrificed so much. Family time, birthdays, giving proper burial services to loved ones, weddings, and so much more. It has been 9 months of our worlds being turned upside down!” the mayor wrote on his Facebook site.
He might have ended with this: “Next month in Aruba!”
You can’t be making sense giving lip service to Everett residents about how much has been sacrificed when you just spent two weeks seated on a beach in Aruba, staying in a $1000 a night room, sipping exotic drinks, and maybe smoking a nice stogie.
The mayor is a sneak.
Like Trump enjoying watching the chaos at the Capitol in his White House residence, the mayor pretended to be in Everett but still found the time and the pleasure to denounce Superintendent Priya Tahiliani for overspending $1 million when it was, he who removed the $1 million from the School Department account without telling her.
We know the mayor well. He loved being in his hotel room and attending the Zoom School Committee hearing from Aruba.
He thought he was scamming everyone with that stunt.