In Everett, Time For A Big Decision In The City's 2021 Mayoral Race

Описание: On September 21, Everett voters will get to have their say in the city’s preliminary election. As in Boston, where the prelim will be held one week earlier, the top two finishers will advance to November’s final.

Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria, who's seeking a sixth term, compares himself to a legend of Massachusetts politics: Tom Menino.

“[What] most people want is their trash picked up, is their sidewalks fixed, is their pothole taken care of, their streets plowed during the winter,” DeMaria said.

But DeMaria’s re-election bid involves a hurdle Menino never had to clear: an ongoing, citywide reckoning with the politics of race.

Gerly Adrien, one of DeMaria’s two challengers, is the first Black woman on Everett’s city council. She’s accused several colleagues of a sustained, hostile response since her election in 2019, when she topped the at-large ticket.

“Before I got inaugurated… one of my council colleagues told me that if I didn’t change my behavior, they were going to make my journey on the council miserable,” Adrien said.

Tensions came to a head in October 2020, during a council session in which Adrien — who had successfully pushed for a remote-meeting option during COVID-19 — encountered technical difficulties as she tried to participate.

“During the breaks, they were talking about me in a really bad manner, and I heard them — they didn’t know I could hear them — and I said, ‘That’s not how it should be,’” Adrien said. “We started the council meeting, and then four of my colleagues asked me to resign. I thought it was a joke.”

Adrien also describes a fraught relationship with DeMaria. In February 2021, after the mayor said Adrien was behaving disruptively during a Zoom meeting, she wrote a Boston Globe opinion piece titled “As a Black woman in politics, I belong here.”

According to Adrien, those experiences ultimately drove her to run for mayor herself.

“Our mayor has not had a challenger since 2013 — in eight years,” she said. “Our city demographically has changed so much. We’re a majority people of color now… I truly believe that people are going to come out and say, ‘We’ve had enough, and we want change.’”

Recent U.S. Census data shows that Everett's demographics changed radically between 2010 and 2020, with white residents dropping from 54 to 34 percent of the population.

The third candidate in the race is Fred Capone, a city councilor with two separate stints in city government totaling nearly two decades. Capone accuses DeMaria of taking an imperial approach to governance, saying he makes big, expensive decisions without getting buy-in from the public.

“Often times on the city council, I don’t know when we have a new hire [or] there’s a new program happening until I read it in the newspaper or until I see it on Facebook,” Capone said.

“If I, as an elected official, am not involved in the process, think about what the average resident’s involvement with the process is,” he added. “And that’s just wrong. That’s not good government."