Is anybody home?
Flynn tells councilors: Open your doors
Open up.
That’s the message that Boston’s city council president recently sent to the rest of the councilors, asking them to make sure to have their City Hall offices open and accessible to the public after what he described as people telling him they came to City Hall to bend a councilor’s ear — only to find a closed door.
“I am writing today following conversations I’ve had in recent weeks with neighbors, constituents, and civic groups regarding concerns from our constituents on access to basic city services,” Flynn wrote to the other 12 councilors in a Friday “Dear colleagues” email obtained by the Herald.
“Some have described difficulty in connecting with someone to help them try to address and resolve a constituent service issue,” he wrote. “Others have expressed that upon coming to City Hall and seeking to have City Councilors advocate on their behalf, they have found the door closed during normal business hours, without a note advising that staff have gone to lunch or an ongoing team meeting.”
All 13 councilors — the nine district and four atlarge ones — have offices on the 5th floor of City Hall. There’s two wings of council offices; a majority, including Flynn’s, are tucked behind a friendly office manager, though it’s easy for members of the public to wander back to the door they’re looking for. On the other side, there’s not even any layer of gatekeeping in front of the doors, so people can just walk up.
Whoever’s the council president ends up with the largest office in the back corner of the larger wing, while the rest of the offices are assigned by the council president — and therefore can be a bargaining chip when the biannual race for the presidency is going on before a new term.
“With us now coming up on nearly three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and medical advancements in terms of vaccines, boosters, treatments and antiviral medications, I am respectfully requesting that each City Council office make every effort to ensure that their door is open during regular business hours,” Flynn wrote.
He added that he’s not trying to tell people how to run their office otherwise, and recognizes that the combo of post-COVID remote work, unforeseen events and the demands of the district cause them all to “juggle on the fly.”
But, “a closed door without any information may be interpreted as an office not being open for business, and viewed as less than inviting to the people we serve,” Flynn wrote.
When asked about the email, which didn’t call out any councilors by name, Flynn declined to comment further.
This comes as the council continues to figure out how it wants this year to go after a deeply fractious 2022 that saw various councilors from different voting blocs yelling at each other, racial divisions on the council becoming as clear as ever in recent years, the president suspending the government operations chair amid a scandal in the district attorney’s race and a lot of plain and simple interpersonal anger and distrust between members.
Flynn, a member of the more centrist cohort of the body, has sought to exert move control over the ways in which members do business this year. For instance, he told his colleagues they have to stick to the previously largely unheeded rule about how debate and discussion are for issue-specific hearings rather than at the full meetings, when items are introduced and votes happen.
This comes as the progressives on the body — and, somewhat separately, across the hall in Mayor Michelle Wu — are aiming for votes in the near future on multiple ambitious items including moving to an elected school committee, advancing rent control and exercising more control over the budget.