All – Everett Leader Herald

What’s the deal with the Jewish holiday during the next ten days?

By Josh Resnek

The Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana began Saturday evening at sunset.

It is the Jewish New Year – a holiday celebrated by Jews all over the world for about 3,000 years.

At the onset of the New Year, according to Jewish law, a ten day period of penitence begins at the same time God opens the Book of Life.

During this ten day period of penitence, Jews need to look back at the past year and try to make things right for wrongdoing they might have done. In other words, this is a period of repentance for Jews. It is a time to let God know that you are sorry for whatever wrongs you have committed. The full array of wrongs runs the gamut from breaking any of the Ten Commandments, to committing crimes, to harboring hatred for a neighbor, to mistreating family members and friends, and even those you do not know.

Repenting is different from apologizing.

Repenting means you’ve straightened yourself out and made yourself proper in the eyes of God for the coming year.

You must prove to him you are worthy of another year of life.

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Planning Board in spotlight with huge development proposal

By Josh Resnek

One of the largest and most ambitious real estate developments in the city’s history is taking shape and form as the Planning Board goes about it’s business to rule on the project – or at least to begin to guide it wherever it is heading

A Planning Board meeting last week at city hall heard a presentation from John Tocco and Ricky Beliveau and a group of their professional development experts about the project.

The project as laid out by Tocco’s team calls for the redevelopment of a 25-acre site in the city’s Riverfront overlay district – one of the choice remaining parcels of developable land in the city.

Curiously, or not so curiously, the mayor is on record as opposing the project which calls for three mid-rise residential buildings with 830,000 square feet of residential real estate space with 591 units, 585 parking spaces, and a 14-acre public riverfront path and park.

By comparison, the Encore Boston Harbor and Hotel is about 3 million square feet for the casino, the hotel and the grounds.

That development cost about $2.3 billion to build out.

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— Eye on Everett —

The Blue Suit and Josh Resnek have become good friends and confidantes over the past few years. They have shared everything about themselves with each other – their secrets, their fears, their hopes, their triumphs and their failures. Again and again, I, Josh Resnek, editor of the Leader Herald, want our readers to know how intimate the relationship is between me and the favorite Blue Suit of the most powerful man in the city of Everett.

There are those who claim the Blue Suit is a figment of my imagination – and he is, always has been, and always will be. Then there is the Blue Suit himself, arguing with me, and with others, that he has all the attributes of a living, breathing, snorting, eating, sweating, human being even though he is an off the rack, machine made, blue cloth suit. That’s hard to take for some people, and I am told that many others believe the Blue Suit is as real as say, President Biden or former President Donald Trump, and that he speaks with authority, and that he knows public policy, and that he could probably run for office in Everett as a write-in and win.

So in one respect the Blue Suit is a fiction, made up and all about unreality.

On the other hand, he is as real as you and me and he has a certain lifelike appeal to many of our readers.

How many people read the Blue Suit?

This is impossible to know.

There are questions about the Blue Suit that I have been asked about which I do not know.

For instance, one of his admirers asked me recently where the Blue Suit banks.

“I really don’t know. I’ll ask him,” I told that person, a woman reader of the Leader Herald who claims she enjoys the Blue Suit’s personality.

So I asked him: “Where do you bank your money? And also, how much money do you have? And how do you keep your money?”

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Inflation

Nearly all of us who are part of the American economy are right now suffering from the worst inflationary spiral in many, many years.

The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates consistently for the past year, and there is the belief interest rates could go even higher. By raising the cost for money, the tendency is to rely on less money being borrowed, fewer homes being built and sold, fewer automobiles, and fewer everything being bought and money spent by consumers.

Raising interest rates also causes the job market to contract, rather than to expand. This is also perceived as a policy by the Fed to bring down inflation – that is – the cost for goods and everything else we spend and or buy.

In the post pandemic world that has gone back to work, the expansion of world economies happened so fast and so powerfully that inflation got its hold on nearly all the major and minor economies on the globe.

That expansion was at first a welcome sign that we could come back from the pandemic in a big way and expand our economies and survive.

Inflation, however, is like poison to struggling people dealing with getting by.

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Running out of open space

The proposed Rivergreen development project spread over many acres and intended to produce almost 600 new units of residential living spaces, is, on its face, an incredible project that most cities we believe would welcome.

However, Everett suffers from a lack of open space.

This is a very crowded city.

The Rivegreen property – about 25 acres – is one of the last sprawling open spaces in Everett where multiple acres are available, presumably, for a variety of developments.

The mayor has written to the Planning Board that he is against this project – not because he is against projects like this, rather, because this project would take away open space where he envisions a new high school might possibly be built.

How that new high school can come to be is problematic as it will likely cost $500 million and will take at least a decade to get off the ground.

What to do in the meantime?

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