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‘Progressive’ City Council abuses vulnerable persons—and free speech
Schuster: prepare kids for the long term
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Poor table manners: Chronicle burps in mayor’s face
Would Cambridge be much better off if Mayor Ken Reeves packed his lunchbox with peanut butter sandwiches like the rest of us?
Cambridge’s weekly newspaper of record seems to think so. The Chronicle practically specializes in page-one exposés of the imperious mayor’s travel and dining expenses. “Mayor still not revealing dinner guests” takes up the entire top half of its October 11 front page.
Now, suppose we did find out who Mayor Reeves is treating to fish dinners at city expense.
If it is a homeless person, or somebody else without power or influence in the political economy, the tab will probably be considered a ripoff of the honest taxpayers’ money.
If it is a real estate developer with business in the city, or some other big shot, the meal would be a legitimate business expense for any mayor of Cambridge!
While the Chronicle's writers indignantly audit the thousands of tax dollars politicians spend feeding their faces, they ignore hundreds of millions being blown out the other end.
Take the new police station in East Cambridge—please. The city council unanimously approved a sweetheart deal to buy 130 Bent Street from politically connected owners for a 100 percent return on a few years’ investment. They knew that residents wanted police headquarters to remain in Central Square and never consulted people in East Cambridge about moving it there. There wasn’t even a study or report to justify the project.
Cost so far: $65 million plus lost property taxes.
The new central library. This project was pushed ahead—by Reeves, among others—as a virtually cost-free boon to the city: a State grant would pick up most of the tab. The need for a vast new facility was not so much examined as assumed.
Cost so far: $75 million—triple the original estimate. State contribution: $10 million.
Stories like these don’t make headlines in the Pulitzer-prize-winning Chronicle.
Instead we have this:
August 20— “Police arrested Neil McCabe, the 41-year-old editor of The Alewife, a monthly neighborhood newsletter that covers North Cambridge, this morning at 1:40 a.m. for driving on a revoked license… a habitual traffic offender.”
This is the kind of story that small-town weeklies run on page seventeen. The Cambridge Chronicle runs it up front. The writer “reports” that The Alewife is not a real newspaper and that its editor, McCabe, is not a real journalist!
Back in the day when the Chronicle was a real newspaper, readers knew where to find stories like this. We turned to “crime watch,” a column written by the cops which still appears in the Chronicle.
Now, they pick out one of these stories nearly every week for page one treatment.
Is this a “world-class city” or what?
more about how silly the Chronicle is:
www.bridgenews.org/bridge_news/issue8backup/lopez/
www.bridgenews.org/bridge_news/0207/fiddlefart
more about the police station deal:
www.bridgenews.org/documents/Bridge6.pdf
more about Ken Reeves and the real estate biz:
www.bridgenews.org/bridge_news/022006/reevesrealestate
MRGRA meeting