By STEPHEN PINTO
When you think the mayor and his administration can’t sink any lower than the gutter, they prove you wrong.
There is no bottom to the pit where the city now resides under their leadership and this is magnified by the mayor’s recent effort to rid the city of property and homeowners living across the casino and to use eminent domain, if necessary, to accomplish the task.
The mayor wants to basically steal by eminent domain houses on lower Broadway.
He wants to steal homes of hard-working Everett property owners and taxpayers, residents, and lovers not only of their properties but the city.
Some people do not want to be bought out of their homes and properties by the city so the casino can do as it likes.
Employing eminent domain is a cowardly and despicable act; not the act of a man with a spine, or a leader, but a cowardly, money-hungry grubber who serves many masters, the casino primary among them.
This is the type of gangster leader using gangster tactics you would expect to see in communist China or Russia, not Everett.
Many residents are not as wealthy as our mayor is or pretends to be. And they don’t care to be wealthy with what some people might call dirty money. They just want to live their lives in the homes they own and care about and to be left alone.
The mayor wants to make Encore wealthier so he can squeeze more and more tax money from them.
The mayor’s administration is about incredible waste.
There are a lot of high salaries, no show jobs, and hack jobs in the city that need to be funded.
Yet, we haven’t built a new school in over ten years. The police headquarters is basically a dump. Many streets and sidewalks are crumbling and dangerous for elderly people to walk on.
Everett streets are not safe to walk at night. Ugly orange barriers erected for outdoor dining looks more like unfinished construction zones rather than dining
areas.
And as always, at least as for the past 14 years, it seems affordable housing is at the bottom of everyone’s list.
Everett traffic is once again at a crawl. This will only get worse as will crime once all the apartments come online. We already have our fair share of crime with the addition of the casino.
We have a city hall that is closed on Friday. A city council that is taking two months off, a school committee, and a mayor who will not stand up to do the right thing when the kids are endangered by employees that ought to be fired.
And what about the mayor?
He is on a perpetual vacation and laughing at us all the way to the bank.
Everett is no longer the community it once was. It’s now run by a very mean-spirited mayor and his administration that is willing to steal homes so others can become wealthy.
What happened to Everett?
The city lost its personal touch when the casino opened. The casino gives us more tax money and jobs but its presence has done nothing to improve the quality of life. ABC (Anyone but Carlo).
Steve Pinto is a longtime Everett resident and commentator about the local scene.