‘LACK OF LEADERSHIP’
Boston still plans to rent rooms for Methadone Mile homeless
Boston is forging ahead with its plan to move homeless from Methadone Mile into a Revere hotel as the smaller city’s mayor continues to blast the initiative and compare it to the “Roundhouse” hotel chaos from over the summer.
A spokeswoman for Acting Mayor Kim Janey said the plan remains to rent out 30 rooms at the Quality Inn in Revere next month and move that many people from the streets of the troubled South End area known as Mass and Cass or Methadone Mile out to the North Shore city.
This plan has caused a firefight between the two cities’ mayors, as both Janey and Revere Mayor Brian Arrigo essentially accused each other of misleading the public and looking to score political points on Wednesday.
Arrigo told the Herald on Thursday that amid the exchanges of tersely worded dueling press releases throughout the previous day, Janey gave him a call. He said they talked for less than 10 minutes, during which he hoped to get more information about what’s happening. But Janey, he said, told him that she didn’t have much “in the weeds” detail about the plans — and he said he found Janey’s answer “shocking.”
“Mayors have to live within the weeds,” Arrigo said, adding that of Boston under Janey, “there’s lack of leadership over there.”
Arrigo, who began the interview with the Herald with “I’m not looking to pick a fight,” continued to nuke the Janey administration on Thursday in the interview and then on GBH News radio, where he, alongside Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone, said the North Shore mayors are the ones “ready to roll up our sleeves.”
“Simply moving a political problem from one city to another is not a regional collaboration — not a regional solution,” he told the Herald.
Asked Thursday about Arrigo’s statements, Janey’s administration referred back to the statements she issued Wednesday, and insisted that the city had been clearer than Arrigo suggested. Boston officials first reached out to Revere on Aug. 31, a Janey spokeswoman said, and then Arrigo personally was on a call in which Boston officials presented the plan to him, and he had the chance to ask questions.
“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,” Janey said in the Wednesday statement. “But, it does not solve the problem.”
Arrigo’s concerns echo the complaints of community members around Mass and Cass, who took issue with city-involved plans to take control of the “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 adhoc homeless shelter.
In the face of widespread community opposition, the addiction-services provider backed out, bringing the roundhouse saga to an end a month ago.
“That should have been a lesson learned,” Arrigo said. “But there was more of a ‘where can we go next and try to do this, somewhere else.’ You know, for a very well resourced and big city to think that they can just roll through a perceivably weaker community, neighboring them is really not not OK in my book.”
Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins — one of only a handful of countywide officials in Suffolk, which includes both Boston and Revere — said of Arrigo that he understands “where he’s coming from,” but encouraged him to “dive in and be part of the solution.”
“Now that he knows, I’d love if kind of a collective of people could come together and try to do something positive,” Tompkins, who’s a vocal advocate around Mass and Cass, where his offices are, told the Herald.