Not telling anyone he was going to Aruba for two weeks during a city emergency is one thing.
Turning up on a Zoom School Committee meeting from his vacation room in Aruba last Monday is another.
The mayor’s ruse was to attend the meeting as though he was inside his mansion on Abbott Avenue.
It was very important for him to make it like he was here when he was far, far away during a difficult time in the city’s modern history.
The mayor, we are told, made every effort to keep his trip to Aruba a secret, lest the little people he depends on to vote for him got wind of it and didn’t know how to react, or worse, reacted negatively to the news.
A two week trip to Aruba is easily an $18,000 expense for the mayor at minimum. Fourteen days at $1,000 a night just for the hotel is $14,000. Airline tickets for the mayor and others are several thousand dollars more. Pocket change is needed for food and drink, entertainment, et cetera.
In keeping with transparency, and the mayor has pledged himself to transparency, it would be nice to see receipts indicating who paid for the airline tickets and for the rooms at the Aruba Ritz Carlton where he stayed.
These are small matters.
It would be nice to know who paid.