The rest of the story

There was a column in yesterday’s paper about the public meeting regarding the Worcester Youth Center’s executive director using the n-word when dealing with youths.

The author mentions that Youth Center board of directors president Allen Fletcher rambled on about race for awhile, alienating many of those present, and then left.

What the author doesn’t mention is that, immediately before walking out of the meeting, Mr. Fletcher got into an argument with another person about what he (Mr. Fletcher) considered a racist (anti-white) incident at the Youth Center. (I got the impression there was a lot of background here, none of which I am privy to.) So it was even more dramatic than the column describes.

Also, to be fair to the members of the board who spoke after Mr. Fletcher, I had the impression that they leapt to his defense in spite of his comments, not because they necessarily agreed with what he said.

In any case, while this incident was the most memorable part of the night, it wasn’t the most important. It’s disappointing that the columnist gives two sentences to the comments of the non-board members at the meeting. Because that was what touched my heart. I am proud to live in the same city as these folks.

You don’t need me to tell you what they think. You can watch the uncut video of some interviews taped after the meeting. Bits of this were also part of the latest Worcester Indymedia news video.

Lest this post be too negative, here are three nice things: Drupal 5 is out, I started a page on playing with Worcester’s webcams, and my roommate insists I link to Faith Browser. So there you go.

Items

A couple updates from the Christmas T&G.

Cirignano hearing Feb 20:

Larry Cirignano, the Catholic Citizenship executive director who pushed a protester to the ground during a Dec. 16 anti-gay marriage rally here, will appear before a clerk magistrate on Feb. 20 on a charge of assault and battery.

Also, there’s a settlement of the lawsuit against the Library for its lending policy towards the homeless. For more info, see our podcast with all the background you’d ever want.

I’m not sure how a couple of legal stories end up in Monday’s paper. Wouldn’t these announcements have come out on Friday?

Catholic Worcester and Larry Cirignano

Kevin at Indymedia claims that Worcester’s Catholics by-and-large avoided Saturday’s marriage rally:

None of Worcester’s well known Catholic faces attended the “Rally for Democracy” and there were not any parish priests or sisters in the audience.

One of the organizers explains:

The Bishop was already committed to several events because of Christmas. Father Roy of Sacred Heart in Webster was on the agenda, but ended up doing a funeral on Saturday and couldn’t make it into Worcester until late afternoon.

If you haven’t worked much with bishops or priests, know that this is a typical problem. These men are busy, and can cancel at the last minute if something more important comes up.

Of the Catholics I know in Worcester, most of them don’t like gay marriage. I wonder if the tone of the anti-gay-marriage campaign hasn’t turned them off from being more involved.

If there really were no Worcester priests, nuns, or notable laity, that’s a bad sign for this campaign. It’s already a bad sign there weren’t enough of them there that their presence was obvious.

More from Indymedia:

Present though among this mix was a reporter/photographer from the Catholic Free Press. He interviewed and recorded Sarah Loy after she gave her statement to Worcester police officers. When he finished interviewing Ms Loy, I asked him if he thought the Catholic Free Press’s Editor Margaret Russell would use the interview. He said he didn’t know, but she’s the one that had assigned coverage of the rally.

So the “mainstream” Catholic media was present, has photographs and an interview regarding the assault, the question is will the Free Press and Diocese further distance itself from Larry Cirignano by publishing the full story or will it kill the story?

I’d be surprised if the Free Press covered this controversy. But they’ve surprised me before.

Another flaw in Research Bureau report

Research Bureau’s cable report:

Bay City, MI ran its public access channel with $30,000 in 2005.

Not exactly. Looks like there is no public access channel in Bay City. Telegram & Gazette:

The Research Bureau used data about the Bay City, Mich., station in its public access cost comparison as it advocated a major funding cut for WCCA amounting to roughly two-thirds of its $650,000 budget.

Bay 3 TV is a local channel funded by the city, county and local schools. Unlike WCCA and the many stations across the country like it, Bay 3 TV does not allow public access to its equipment. In its report, The Research Bureau compared Bay City’s zero funding for public, education and government channels to Worcester’s $1.1 million, money provided by Charter Communications to the city as a franchise fee.

So they’re just flat wrong. Their response:

Research Bureau Director Roberta R. Schaefer defended the inclusion of Bay City in the report. “We did not manufacture a station,” she said. “There’s a station there. It’s just a different combination of things.”

This report is like Swiss cheese.

“This report gets more erroneous and irritating by the minute,” [WCCA-hired] consultant Bunnie Riedel said in an e-mail to [WCCA director] Mr. DePasquale. “These people should stick to their lane in the road and not try to tackle a subject they know nothing about.”

Ms. Schaefer said cable subscribers might question whether WCCA should be spending its money on a consultant hired to promote its work.

Oh, that’s rich. If the City wants honest data about issues in the future, maybe it should hire more consultants and start throwing away Research Bureau reports as soon as they hit the mail room.

More on Cirignano incident

Worcester police interview Larry CirignanoKevin Ksen at Indymedia talked with Cirignano after he shoved a woman to the ground:

I spoke with Cirignano after the rally and asked him his side of what happened, “That lady came up to the podium and I escorted her back into the audience.” Given what had transpired, I followed-up to make sure I heard correctly, “Escorted?”, “Yes, escorted”, he replied. Asked if he felt he assaulted her he shot back without hesitation, “Hell, no!” adding, “She’s an actress, she’s a professional actress.”

Immediately after the assault took place Loy and others turned to the Worcester Police Officers present at the rally. And while the officers quickly took Loy’s complaint, they responded that since they had not seen the assault happen they couldn’t put Mr. Cirignano under arrest. In fact it was only after the intervention of Ron Madnick, Executive Director of the Worcester ACLU Chapter that officers agreed to take statements from witnesses who had stepped forward. At first officers said they didn’t need to take statements, but faced with Madnick’s and witnesses’ persistence they did. It did not appear though that they spoke with any of the people that videotaped the assault.

The rally continued uninterrupted as Police took Cirignano off to the side to question him. He was unfazed and non-apologetic as he was interviewed and charged.

Rollbiz at BlueMassGroup gives his own account:

It wasn’t a bump or a jostle. Cirignano took her by the shoulders, with both hands, and shoved her to the ground. I saw it, and I don’t think there was any misinterpreting his intent. He meant to hurt her.

Ryan Adams and Live, Love, and Learn are others who’ve blogged about this.

Assault at marriage rally

The Telegram & Gazette reports that my friend Sarah Loy was assaulted (shoved to the ground) by Larry Cirignano, executive director of CatholicVote.org, at an anti-gay-marriage rally in Worcester yesterday. Sarah was part of the pro-gay-marriage contingent.

Sarah Loy, 27, of Worcester was holding a sign in defense of same-sex marriage amid a sea of green “Let the People Vote” signs when Larry Cirignano of Canton, who heads the Catholic Citizenship group, ran into the crowd, grabbed her by both shoulders and told her, “You need to get out. You need to get out of here right now.” Mr. Cirignano then pushed her to the ground, her head slamming against the concrete sidewalk.

Updates:

  • The Worcester Republican blog tries to spin this as being Sarah’s fault. Way to throw ethics out the window, guys. If you have a problem with someone at a demonstration, and there are cops about, you can first talk with the person, then refer it to the police.
  • Photos posted at Indymedia.
  • Mass ResistanceWatch also chimes in.
  • Michael Ball has a good late-afternoon wrapup.

This is one of those one-in-a-hundred posts where I wish I had a Jay Rosen-type format, so updates to the original post could be handled elegantly.

Worcester police interview Larry Cirignano
Worcester police interview Cirignano. Indymedia photo.

Worcester police interview Sarah Loy
Worcester police interview Ms. Loy. Indymedia photo.

(There’s a blank wiki page for Cirignano here.)

Ray Flynn, Cardinal O'Malley, Larry Cirignano
Ray Flynn, Sean Cardinal O’Malley, and Larry Cirignano. Photo from Archdiocese of Boston.

More info on Research Bureau’s iffy stats

Richard Nangle adds a new detail with his article in today’s paper:

“We didn’t just speak to the access people; we also spoke to the city regulators,” [WCCA’s] Mr. DePasquale said. For example, he said, The Research Bureau reported what Fort Worth received in a grant from its cable operator for capital and equipment and left out about $1 million in operating funding from the city.

[The Research Bureau’s] Ms. Schaefer responded, “We did not include capital grants in ours and he included capital grants in his chart.”

I asked them this yesterday: did your report oversimplify the funding picture? Now Ms. Schaefer is admitting that yes, there are aspects of funding that they didn’t report on.

If WCCA’s numbers are right, in some cases the Research Bureau oversimplified to the tune of $1,000,000.

(Not just capital grants, but also operating funds.)

Research Bureau: wrong cable numbers?

WCCA double-checked the figures in the Research Bureau’s cable report, and found serious errors in the figures for public, educational, and government channel (PEG) funding:

Grand Rapids numbers were underreported by over one million dollars.

The most interesting tidbit is in a footnote. WCCA contacted the Cable Services Manager for the city of Fort Worth, TX, which the Research Bureau listed as spending $744K on PEG:

Mr. Westerman said he had tried to tell the Research Bureau that the $744,000 was only for capital and equipment, but he felt they didn’t understand. Fort Worth also receives an additional $1,000,000 for operations.

Continue reading “Research Bureau: wrong cable numbers?”

City council agenda items (late)

Anonymous Reader, our weekly source of City Council Agenda highlights, is now pseudonymous reader “John.”

C. Request City Council’s Review, Consideration and Adoption of an Ordinance Concerning the Compensation of the Cultural Development Officer.

“Among the organization’s many accomplishments are the Cultural Calendar, Detours, Weekends in Worcester, Worcester: Creating a Home for the Arts, and the www.worcestermass.org web site. ”
Continue reading “City council agenda items (late)”

Reader comment

A reader comments on the Research Bureau’s cable report:

That report is a joke. If this were a Clark project and I was grading it, I’d give it a D. The background research seems okay, but it’s nothing new. There’s no justification of the conclusions and no attempt to analyze the results of the suggested policy. Smart people shouldn’t even pretend to take this seriously.

The question is, are city councilors able to understand that? Or, will they just see a way to get another $400,000 for the general fund? More cynically, do forces with power in local government want WCCA to continue?