Vigilance keeps Leader Herald out of City Hall newstands
By JOSH RESNEK
Every Wednesday, I deliver the store copies of the Leader Herald.
I drive around the city to about 60 locations getting into and out of my car delivering stacks of newspapers.
On many other streets throughout Everett, the paper is delivered to homes.
That I am a newspaper delivery man at my age tells you what a big shot I am.
The first stop from week to week is Everett City Hall.
Some might consider it a hostile stop.
The mayor doesn’t like the Leader Herald. We refuse to print his party line. More than three years ago the mayor stopped by the office on Church Street to tell me he was going to put the paper out of business in four weeks.
He obviously failed at that but not for a lack of trying.
Before the pandemic, I delivered the Leader Herald from office to office at city hall.
I’d drop a bunch of the newspapers inside the mayor’s office where I have to admit, I was never treated with disrespect.
Then came the closure of city hall.
From that moment on, I dropped the Leader Heralds at the newspaper rack at the entrance to city hall. Several other newsletters are delivered there.
Each time I delivered the papers for a long time, the city hall janitor removed them and threw them away as fast as possible.
I came to know him. He’s actually a nice guy – just doing as he’s told to keep his job – even though he is near retirement.
From week to week, the Leader Heralds are “stolen”, “removed,” and or trashed ASAP after they are discovered there.
I have come to understand how difficult it must be for the mayor to allow the Leader Herald to be delivered to the city hall. The mayor believes he owns city hall, that it is his.
If he doesn’t want a newspaper in the rack, he can have them thrown out.
The major problem with this kind of thinking is that the mayor does not own city hall. He does not own the news rack at the entrance and certainly doesn’t have the right to suspend the First Amendment of the US Constitution by throwing away the Leader Herald and leaving the other newsletters because they are kinder to him out of economic necessity.
OK. No big deal. The mayor has my newspapers thrown away each time they are delivered to the rack at the entrance.
Last week, however, the theft and expulsion of the Leader Herald reached a new low, or at least it appears this way.
After they were delivered last Wednesday about 11:30 a.m., they were removed.
I received this call from a city hall employee:
“Hey Josh, Deanna Deveney just took the Leader Heralds and made them disappear. Can you bring more?”
I assume the city hall employee was telling me the truth and that Deanna Deveney removed the Leader Heralds.
I came back to city hall and dumped another load of Leader Heralds on the rack.
But I kept wondering about Deanna Deveney, Esq. stealing the Leader Herald for the boss. If she did this, I know she did it for the boss because when I returned with another stack, I saw that the Leader Heralds had been replaced by the mayor’s re-election brochure which is distributed around the city.
I’ve never met Deanna.
She lists herself as the Director of Communications and Intergovernmental Affairs for the city of Everett.
She needs to add to this, “newspaper thief for the boss.”
Can you imagine the Director of Communications for the city of Everett removing a newspaper and throwing them away or hiding them because the boss doesn’t want them available to the public?
This news comes against the backdrop of Deanna now being involved in the effort to save the mayor’s job now that two candidates are running against him.
I am wondering if she will find the time to steal the Leader Herald from its spot on the rack at the entrance to Everett city hall?