City Council Blotter…
…er, agenda, but it sure seems appropriate
The Wednesday meeting at City Hall traditionally begins with the clerk saying, “The Council will come to order.”
The way things have been going lately, a more appropriate start to the Council meeting might be with these words:
“Will the defendants please rise?”
The preliminary elections in Boston are less than three weeks away now. At the candidates’ nights, the moderator usually admonishes candidates to “try to answer the questions within the time limits.”
Now, the more appropriate warning to the incumbents might be: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”
State-run media has been whining of late about a lack of “civility” on the fifth floor at Boston City Hall. Actually, what’s in short supply is not “civility,” it’s “law and order.”
Consider the crime wave that has engulfed 1 City Hall Square.
The “Mr. Big” of the lawless mob is “Ricky” Ricardo Arroyo, the district councilor from Hyde Park. He is “embattled,” to use the old newspaper cliché. That means he’s in photo finishes with multiple law-enforcement agencies.
He was recently caught by the feds conniving with disgraced US attorney Rachael Rollins to fix the 2022 Suffolk County district attorney’s race.
Ricky’s also been fined by the State Ethics Commission for improperly defending his equally dodgy brother, Felix “Third Rail” Arroyo, on sexual harassment charges at City Hall.
The Board of Bar Overseers may be probing his application to the bar, and whether he came clean, so to speak, on sexual-assault charges against him as a teenager, after which he disappeared from his high school.
Most recently, Arroyo (and a couple of his fellow Council wokesters) have been accused of bullying a city attorney.
Ricky Ricardo smells so bad now that even his old comrade Michelle Wu has thrown him under the bus, following in the footsteps of such ethical titans as the fake Indian and Ayanna Pressley.
This litany of legal woes has been a real crimp is the Arrroyo family’s dreams of reclaiming the recent $174,000-a-year hack job vacated by the clan patriarch, the extinguished statesman known as “No Show” Arroyo.
Then there’s District Councilor Kendra Lara. Her quote of the year so far: “Not guilty Your Honor.”
The former “Director of Radical Philanthropy” is facing charges of driving without a license and operating an unlicensed, uninsured, uninspected, unregistered vehicle.
Another resume enhancer!
She’s also been the subject of a 51A order after her son named Zaire was injured in the crash. She’s also had a problem with her last name on the ballot – is it Hicks or Lara? She blamed her surname woes on a messy divorce, although the records of said split seem scanty, shall we say, at the Registry of Probate.
Lara’s (or is it Hicks’?) big accomplishment this year: the Boston Elections Commission recently dismissed a complaint that she was not even a resident of the city of Boston.
Kendra Lara posts on social media, but I can’t share with you what her after-hours interests are. This is a family newspaper, after all.
All these city councilors are big on social media. Consider at-large (in more ways than one) Councilor Julia Mejia. On Youtube, she has issued a memorable statement to her constituents:
“For those who are wondering if I am using drugs, answer is absolutely not.”
Julia is favored to top the ticket in the at-large race. That should tell you all you need to know about the City of Boston in 2023. But then, Mejia has a lot of intangibles, like the fact that her mother was “undocumented.”
But wait, Roxbury district councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson can top that. She brags about being the first (former) illegal alien Muslim from Africa ever elected to the City Council.
Among her other accomplishments, she has filed an online petition seeking a new trial for a convicted murderer named Tanzerious Anderson, who shot a legal alien from Lebanon in cold blood after robbing him.
Anderson (Tania, not Tanzerious) tries to check all the boxes. She even brags that she was raised in Africa by an uncle who was, you guessed it, “a closeted gay man.”
She is a single mom. Her two sons are named Louis Roca and Shak Muhammad.
Despite not becoming a US citizen until 2019, the councilor has prospered in all the traditional types of “jobs” (as opposed to work) favored by modern urban Democrats.
Among the stateswoman’s career stops since flopping into the US: peer team leader, service provider, counselor, career advocate, community outreach manager and producer of community diversity programs.
Anderson can make other boasts as well. Ricky Ricardo Arroyo was fined a mere $3,000 by the State Ethics Commission. Tania took a $5,000 hit from the Commission for hiring both her sister and one of her sons on her office staff.
I guess she cut citizenship class the day they taught the illegals about the anti-nepotism laws we have here in the Great Satan.
A few traditional Boston types remain on the Council. Lameduck district councilor Frank Baker of Dorchester is often described as the “most conservative” member of the body. This is perhaps because Baker has only been convicted of marijuana possession once.
Baker’s best-known recent comment came when he denounced the Council redistricting, claiming it was “an all-out assault on Catholic life in Boston.”
Then he blamed it on the Irish-born district councilor from Brighton, Liz Breadon – “a Protestant from Fermangh.”
Who knew? Liz never ran for office as a Protestant. Her qualification was in addition to being from a different hemisphere is that she’s a lesbian. She has a wife named Mary. This is the important stuff in Boston now, you know.
The Globe must be very happy. They’ve finally gotten the government they always dreamed of, a council that looks like the population – at least the population on Mass & Cass.
How bad is it? The rumor is that three local political titans the Globe has long slobbered over – Monica Cannon-Grant, Rachael Rollins and bra-stuffing Dianne Wilkerson – are drafting a letter to address the crumbling calamity that is Boston City Hall.
Either that, or all three of them are planning to jump in as write-in candidates for the Council next month.
Hey, it couldn’t get any worse, could it? Unless maybe Tanzerious Anderson gets into the fight.
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