City Manager Mike O’Brien

By Rosalie Tirella

… all our kiddies sign up for the city’s Wheels to Water program. The City of Worcester and the Friendly House, as well as some great social service agencies, have come up with a great schedule. Convenient - and kids can even take swimming lessons!

It is important to note that, once again, our colleges have disappointed us. WPI was the only city college to offer their facilities/swimming pool to the kids of Worcester (most of them inner city). Kudos to WPI! Shame on: Assumption College, Becker, Clark University, Holy Cross and Qunisigamond Community College.

Holy Cross is smack dab in the middle of South Worcester! Becker is in the heart of the Elm Park/Piedmont neighborhood. Clark U is in Main South. And state school, Quinsig, well, it gets a ton of taxpayer money - it’s the PEOPLE’S college. QCC should have been obligated to open its heart/swimming pool.

Next year, life will get better (aquatically speaking): The new super duper Crompton Park municipal swimming pool will be open and  CSX is bribing the hell out of the city - which includes earmarking/donating $2 million to repair/reopen two East Side municipal swimming pools (Holmes Field and East Park).  Plus: City Manager Mike O’Brien is hoping to make the Wheels to Water program year ’round. So next summer, with the two state pools open and a spray park here and there, plus our great city beaches, our kids will be … ready for the Olympics. 

Hooray for all the great folks who “pooled” their resources to create Wheels to Water!

“Your comment feature never really was legitimate given the tendency to censor. But the gloves off approach regarding O’Brien appears like you’ve been bought off by Haller.”
- “Worcester Guy”

Rosalie responds:

Not so, Worcester Guy. I am still livid about all the SKY-HIGH salaries that our municipal workers make. My newspaper (ICTimes) has been running all the City of Worcester wage earners. You see line after line of cops, fireman, lawyers making over $140,000. Our WPS grammer school principals make $120,000! Freakin’ crazy!

In the old days, Worcester’s cops actually lived in our blue collar neighborhoods because they were paid blue collar wages! And they were great! My mom still remembers this Irish cop in Green Island (in the 1930s) who used to chat with the kids and give them airplane rides. Everyone knew him and trusted him! (and loved him) Now that was real community policing!

Working for the city or state used to mean two things: lifetime security and good benefits (heath insurance, etc). It did not mean a $120,000 paycheck! It usually meant a slightly below average paycheck. Something is so wrong with the system. O’Brien raises taxes and the money seems to go to pay for … city worker paychecks or the cops’ rising heath insurance costs or more (now that the state has opted out) freaking Quinn Bill payments to the WPD officers. Click to continue »

By Rosalie Tirella

Well, here it is: crisis time again. Last week the Worcester City Council and School Committee met to discuss finances. Next fiscal year’s municipal budget looks grim, with a $26-million gap projected for the Worcester Public School system.

Right off the bat, City Manager Mike O’Brien needs to: CONVINCE THE WPS TEACHERS’ UNION TO EMBRACE REALITY!!!! Embrace reality and join the majority of working Americans and our other municipal unions and start paying (immediately) 25% of their health insurance premiums. Plus higher co-pays.

Teachers! This simple step - paying 25% of your health insurance premium - will save the City of Worcester $3 million! Like I said, the 25% contribution is something that’s been accepted by workers in the private sector for a while now, and the City of Worcester’s clerks and other groups have joined the rest of America. Click to continue »

By Rosalie Tirella

Is it the end of an era? Due to Worcester’s budget woes and DPW never ever repairing our crumbling neighborhood swimming pools - even during boom times (because most were in the inner-city and enjoyed by poor people?) - it’s bye bye, neighborhood swimming pools! So long, Crystal Park pool! Toodle-oo, Holmes Field pool! We’ll miss ya, Tacoma Pool in Great Brook Valley!

While we approve of City Manager’s Mike O’Brien’s recently proposed aquatic plan, which calls for a new and excellent family pool at Crompton Park (for next year) and the eventual building of a few other city swimming pools (to complement the two state pools and Crompton’s pool), along with a couple of spray parks, I still feel sad about the demise of the pool-for-every-neighborhood concept (especially for our inner-city neighborhoods). So here goes:

Goodbye, you old Crompton Park pool! I knew you well! As a pudgy kid from Green Island, I spent countless hours during the 1970s doing summersaults and cannonballs into your lovely blue, hyper-chlorinated water! Click to continue »

By Rosalie Tirella

How typically Worcester! How stupidly Worcester! Here we go again! Shooting ourselves in the foot (and ankle, knee cap, hip joint, rib cage, etc, etc) - AGAIN! This is why our downtown is a freaking wasteland! This is why most people in the state think we’re a joke! This is why the young leave our seven hills in droves! The brohaha over the proposed swimming pool for Crompton Park has all the earmarks of a classic Worcester shit-storm: Yes, we want a pool at Crompton Park! No, we don’t want a pool in Crompton Park! Shove it up your tight butthole! NO! You shove it up your even tighter butthole! Worcester City Counilors (except for Barbara Haller) not doing their jobs (they had more than two years to decide what to do with our decrepit city pools!), then Worcester City Councilors grandstanding and bitching that they weren’t allowed to do their jobs! Well meaning community folks (mostly from the inner city) who have been disenfranchised for so long that they are totally inflexible on the issue just so they can feel like they matter to City Hall. Yup! Let’s all bite our noses to spite our faces!

And in the meantime, while our shitstorm blinds us, the $2.5 million that Worcester City Manager Mike O’Brien has set aside for the building of a cool, cool new pool at Crompton Park in Green Island - the digging and construction was supposed to begin THIS FALL/MAYBE EVEN THIS MONTH, if we weren’t so busy attacking each other! - could disappear. The $2.5 million could go to pay for other things … like the $150,000+ salaries of regular ol’ Worcester cops (don’t get me started - just see our Top 150 Municipal Wage Earners of Worcester, to the left.) Now that would be a tragedy. Click to continue »

I agree with Taco on one important point: the same folks keep getting recyled through Worcester’s political system. Let’s all take a big gulp of Milk of Magnesia and purge ourselves of folks like City Councilor Mike Germain, a guy who knows nothing about pretty much everything. We need to get these guys the hell outa city hall.

Sad but true: Awhile ago I was told that Worcester City Manager Mike O’Brien and L.G. Tim Murray (maybe before he was L.G.) went to someone’s house - together, paid this person a personal visit - to ask this person to run for a seat on the Worcester City Council. How’s that for trying to control the system? When would Tim Murray come to my home and ask me to run for city council or school committee? Like Taco said, these guys want to fill the council with council-bots - people who will rubber stamp their programs/agendas. They, in turn, will support the council-bots with their considerable political muscle ($$, volunteers, endorsements, important contributor lists, etc). I am not saying all their programs are merit-less. I AM saying their way of doing politics sucks.

- Rosalie Tirella

By Rosalie Tirella

Let’s see: the city is cash strapped, the state is cash strapped (until the new MA state sales tax kicks in!) and the country is searching for the bootstraps it needs to pull itself out of this financial hell hole. What better time for Worcester City Clerk David Rushford to add as much as $95,000 to his base salary of $131,000!

Meet David Rushford - Worcester’s Marrying Man. This Sunday we learned that Rushford, who is already closing the Worcester City Clerk’s office a couple of hours earlier than 5 p.m (creating banking hours for himself and his staff while still collecting the same pay check) has been making some serious side money ON CITY TIME and CITY PROPERTY marrying people.  He won’t say how much he charges, but thanks to yet another whacky Massachusetts law, Rushford, or any city/town clerk in Massachusetts can charge $50 - $95 every time he/she officially marries a couple.

You would think that the fee would go to the city or town. After all, the momentous event is happening in a city or town hall. It is being performed by a city/town clerk who is working at his city/town job in a city/town hall (thus collecting his/her city/town pay check). You would think with all the whining David Rushford has done about losing a few city clerks and not being able to perform all his work with the staff he’s got, that he would be tickled pink if marrying people meant more moeny for the City of Worcester. Maybe then City Manager Mike O’Brien could rehire some of Rushford’s city clerks he laid off earlier. 

Nope. The dough goes to the city/town clerk doing the marrying.

Last year, Rushford married 950 couples. Do the math: 950  x $100 = $95,000!

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS STATE?! HOW NUTTY CAN WE GO? WE (City of Worcester) LAY OFF CITY NURSES AND TEACHERS AND PARKS PEOPLE AND STILL ALLOW RUSHFORD TO MAKE AS MUCH AS $95,000. WHY DON’T THE MOVERS AND SHAKERS IN WORCESTER GET RIGHTEOUSLY PISSED AND WORK TO HAVE THIS ARCANE STATE LAW CHANGED SO THAT THE MONEY GOES TO THE CITY OF WORCESTER? Not our city clerk who lives in an amazingly huge mansion on Mass Ave - for being little more than a glorified secretary.

Insane!

Here’s hoping city councilors do something productive during their two summer meetings. Let’s have them petition the state to rescind the law or at least pass some local ordinance that allows the City of Worcester to collect - and KEEP - the fee.

$95,000 could go to Worcester’s parks, city pools - city kids. It could go towards public health, AIDS awareness.

It amazes me to see how Blow Mag and many city pols just seem to enable/excuse this bad behavior. Why? Because they know Rushford. Because they are all in the same boys club, standing in the same swill.

Pathetic.

By Rosalie Tirella

Why is it that we have a plethora of yahoos on the Worcester City Council? First there is City Councilor at Large Frederick “Ric” Rushton, whose trials and tribulations I chronicle in “Dope-o-rama” - ’cause he’s so dopey. Whether Rushton’s talking about the “vortex” in his brain or browbeating his council mates with a half-baked version of some historical event, Rushton never seems to get anything right.

Then there’s City Councilor Joff Smith, who, when recently complaining about the Asian Long-Horned Beetle in sentences cobbled together with thumb tacks and dangling participles galore, took his moron-ness to an even higher level: During a recent city council meeting Smith said that some of his conversations with officials reminded him of “episodes of Scooby Doo.” Scooby Doo?!

For the uninitiated, Scooby Doo was a 1960s Saturday morning cartoon - the star of which was a goofy Great Dane named Scooby Doo. Scooby had all these silly adventures with four 20-something kids (they’re Joff’s age) - one of whom always yelled: “Scooby Doo, where are YOU?!” Click to continue »

By Sue Moynagh

On Saturday, April 18, 2009, the City Manager’s “Keep Worcester Clean Team,” in a joint effort with Oak Hill CDC, held a clean up of the Vernon Hill neighborhood. Numerous volunteers from area colleges, Worcester Academy and other sections of the city joined area residents in this effort. People began to gather at the Worcester Senior Center on Providence Street by 8:30 A M. and picked up bags, gloves and T- shirts. Teams were formed and sent out into the Union and Vernon Hill streets and sidewalks, collecting approximately 3, 640 pounds of trash by 11:00 A.M. It was great seeing so many people pitching in to help clean up all the trash that has accumulated over the winter and early spring! Unfortunately, some private lots remain litter- filled, but the Department of Public Works compiled a list of “nuisance properties” that will be dealt with in the near future. Click to continue »