Janey draws ire with latest mass & cass plan
Acting Hub mayor doubles down with Revere hotel ploy
Boston Acting Mayor Kim Janey and Revere Mayor Brian Arrigo escalated their sudden feud over Janey’s plans to rent out hotel rooms in Revere to Methadone Mile homeless, with each side doubling down and blaming the other of being misleading.
“Standing against this proposal means standing against 30 people having a place to call home. It means denying 30 people the health care they deserve at a time they need it most,” Janey’s office said in a lengthy statement it blasted out to the media on Wednesday evening. “Municipal leaders who say that we need to do this work as a region but who fail to take responsibility in their own city or town may be making a good sound bite. But, it does not solve the problem.”
That’s a clear swipe at Revere Mayor Brian Arrigo, who wrote a blistering letter to the Boston Public Health Commission this week, fuming about the city’s decision to rent out the rooms in a Quality Inn there in a three-month pilot program that hasn’t started yet.
“I am deeply concerned about the chaotic nature of dis-information and have lost all confidence in the Boston Public Health Commission to thoughtfully execute on an issue of such regional public importance,” Arrigo wrote in the letter addressed to BPHC Executive Director Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, a missive first reported by The Boston Globe.
Arrigo wrote that he first heard about the proposal from a voicemail from Eliot Community Human Services, the city’s partner in the pilot program.
“With no prior notice whatsoever, we were taken aback by the message’s announcement that the Quality Inn would begin operating imminently as a homeless transitional center with over 150 beds,” Arrigo said, also noting that he’s heard varying numbers from 30 to 160 beds and calling the level of “disorganization” at the BPHC “appalling.”
Janey’s office, which cited the commonly used stat that 60% of the people on Methadone Mile come from outside of Boston, says that’s bunk.
“For the last three weeks, staff from the Boston Public Health Commission and Eliot Community Human Services have met with Mayor Arrigo and his team. They have reviewed plans and followed up on requests,” Janey said in the Wednesday statement.
Arrigo’s office fired back Wednesday night in a statement in response to Janey, saying of those meetings, “simply put, they did not happen.”
“The first time we spoke was today, and in that conversation, she was unable to identify a single additional regional partner they are working with to help address this problem.”
Arrigo continued, “What we will not accept is our much larger and more wellresourced neighbor deciding to shift their political and PR issue to another city and hoping it goes away.”
Arrigo’s concerns echo the complaints of community members around the troubled Methadone Mile, or Mass and Cass, area of the South End, from over the summer, involving a different hotel plan. Then, the city and a different recovery organization made plans to take control entirely of the “Roxbury Roundhouse” Best Western Hotel in the heart of the mile. The city insisted the plan was just to house a couple dozen people there who’d been living on the streets nearby, but locals feared that the city planned to jam the 200-room Roundhouse full of people in an ad-hoc homeless shelter. In the face of widespread community opposition, the addiction-services provider backed out, bringing the roundhouse saga to an end last month.