Sign up to receive Ward and political newsletters by email here.
It has been a very busy week for the City Council with our fall session back in swing after a relatively quiet summer. I took a break between many rounds of meetings on what Newton could be doing to promote affordable housing, as well as a recent Mothers Out Front rally against gas leaks in Newton, so that I could write this newsletter update in some depth on a few Council matters I think will be of interest to many Ward 5 residents.
Reminder - Bike Lanes Meeting Tonight
As a reminder from last week’s newsletter: Tonight Thursday (9/17) at 7 PM, the Traffic Council will be holding an official public hearing virtually about the proposed bike lane striping for Beacon St semi-continuously from Washington St to Newton Centre. Comments may also be submitted by email to the Traffic Council if you cannot attend the meeting. There was some discussion at the Waban Area Council last week about specific points people had questions, concerns, or suggestions about, and I’m sure the Traffic Council and Planning Department would love to hear those and get everything ironed out to the extent possible.
*As always, city meetings (with Zoom links available) are noted in the weekly Friday Packet to City Councilors, either in the specific meeting agenda document or in the weekly calendar uploaded with the packet.*
The Upper Falls Area Council monthly meeting has been pushed back by one week to next Thursday in order for all your Ward 5 Councilors to attend the Traffic Council bike lanes meeting this week and to attend the Area Council’s rescheduled meeting with the Northland development team for a progress report (I think!) on their preparations for demolition and construction at the project approved by voters in March of this year.
The hot-button items of the week
For the rest of this week’s newsletter, I will be focusing on the content of the Programs & Services Committee meeting held this week and our work on two issues that have sparked great public interest. The first is a resolution that would locally replace the label “Columbus Day” with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” as many other Massachusetts municipalities and quite a few state governments have done. The second item is our ongoing work on reforming leaf blower controls that remain a source of public frustration and confusion.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day
We held a long committee discussion on the resolution docket item mentioned above and we heard from two representatives of conservative Italian-American Newtonians opposed to the change as well as from two representatives of Newtonians who support the change (one Italian-American and one indigenous Taino resident). The discussion was carried live on NewTV and other residents also watched the Zoom meeting and posted comments in the chat. We have also received dozens of emails on the issue. The vote was 7-0-1 to advance it to the full City Council next week with a recommendation to vote in favor.
The item and co-docketers are as follows: #351-20 Resolution to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day: COUNCILORS NORTON (Ward 2), AUCHINCLOSS (2), BOWMAN (6), GROSSMAN (7), HUMPHREY (5), KRINTZMAN (4), NOEL (6), AND RYAN (8) requesting a Resolution to the Mayor and School Committee to require City and School Departments to change all references on City and School documents and calendars from “Columbus Day” to “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
I am a co-docketer of this item to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and I wanted to share my main speech to the committee with you all in this newsletter.
###
Firstly, this is about recognizing that we have an overlooked indigenous community still here in Newton and in Massachusetts, which many non-indigenous people are not even aware of, despite all the indigenous place names around us. They deserve to be recognized and honored annually – and frankly they deserve much more than that. [An indigenous woman spoke more directly on this point before me, with firsthand perspective, so I moved on without further elaboration.]
My second point: Columbus himself. True, there remains some debate about his legacy among historians with the latest research available. It is tempting for many to write this legacy off as the actions of a man who was simply enacting what any of his peers would have done. But there is a growing body of evidence that his own personality and individual decisions set policy trends with regard to native peoples of the Americas and that these were considered extreme and beyond the pale, even by his contemporaries, not just in hindsight today.
Columbus defied explicit orders not to enslave the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, but drawing on his background as a Genoese merchant and their role in the Mediterranean slave trade, he imposed a brutal forced-labor adaptation of European feudalism that came to be known as the encomienda system of the Spanish Empire and he himself brought people back to Europe in chains.
My third point: Is this about Italian-American heritage? I have a great deal of respect for the Italian-American community that contributed so much to Newton and to Massachusetts. There are hundreds, even thousands, of Italian-Americans and historic Italians who are incredibly admirable and inspiring figures, from the history of culture, politics, and organized labor.
But Columbus is not an icon of all Italian-Americans. The modern conservative focus on Columbus and the insistence that Columbus is synonymous with Italian-American heritage overshadows all the Italian-Americans who were not involved with slavery and genocide, many of whom promoted a vision of world peace and traditions of communal cooperation that they brought from their cities and rural villages of Italy.
Historical figures such as early 20th century left-wing labor organizer Arturo Giovannitti and early 19th century revolutionary musical composer Filippo Traetta both have ties to Massachusetts and US history without the baggage of the nationalist reimagining of Columbus.
The Mazzini Society to resist fascism in 1930s Italy was established right here in Massachusetts. One of the most popular people in the mid-19th century United States, among liberal people of all ethnicities, was Giuseppe Garibaldi, the unifier of Italy.
All of this is completely obscured by the looming figure of Christopher Columbus and his cruel legacy. Removing a holiday honoring Columbus is not an attack on Italian-American heritage but an invitation for us to dig deeper and honor a broad spectrum of amazing Italians.
It’s time to move past Columbus and get serious about the full range of the historical human experience in the United States, including those of Italian immigrants and those of the indigenous peoples who were already living here.
###
Additionally, I raised in committee discussions the historical observation that the Columbus Day federal holiday itself is tied to right-wing fascists in the 1930s United States, as explored in an article in Commonwealth Magazine earlier this year. One of Mussolini's biggest US-based Italian propagandists before the start of World War II, newspaper publisher Generoso Pope, based in New York City, was the chief lobbyist to Franklin D. Roosevelt on the Columbus Day idea. Many Italian-Americans, Italian exiles, and Italians who remained in the motherland risked or gave their lives to resist Mussolini’s fascism and the Nazi occupation of northern Italy during World War II. We should respect and honor their memories by turning away from the fascist propaganda surrounding the federal holiday.
I also observed in committee that the flattening of all Italian identity to one Genoan from the 15th century did not respect the vast array of cultural traditions from the Italian peninsula and the Italian islands of the Mediterranean Sea. I think it’s interesting that Columbus advocates typically downplay the many left-wing Italian activists in US history, many of whom are heroes to me and are figures I talk about frequently on my political history radio program. So many of those left-wing Italian-Americans moved here from very left-wing regions or cities in Italy and brought specific local traditions with them!
Arturo Giovannitti, while successfully defending himself on trial in Massachusetts on false charges, explained the humanitarian mission of the Italian left in his first major English-language speech: “this mighty army of the working class of the world…which out of the shadows and the darkness of the past is striving towards the destined goal which is the emancipation of humankind, which is the establishment of love & brotherhood & justice for every man and every woman in this earth.”
I think he would probably agree that replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day to remind European-descended residents that the native peoples of the Americas are still with us despite the aftermath of the Columbian Exchange of 1492 is consistent with those goals. The next step, he would doubtless remind us, would be to put further meaningful liberatory action and justice behind this symbolic change.
I believe having an annual holiday will keep us honest and remind us what remains to be done.
Leaf Blower Reform
In a meeting earlier this summer, the Programs & Services Committee along with Councilor Leary (Ward 1) took up the controversial and borderline non-functional ordinances regulating the use of leaf blowers in an effort to try to figure out how to make it actually work.
At the moment, the ordinance (technically a special part of the noise ordinance) is overly complicated, rarely enforced, and not really working to anyone’s satisfaction, from city staff to constituents to landscaping companies, and so on. Gas blowers are restricted to certain times of year but not banned completely, decibel levels are regulated but hard to check, and sometimes violators are gone before anyone arrives to check on a report. Police are reluctant to get involved and offenses are tracked to specific workers rather than to homeowners or the company.
Three key areas were identified by the committee this summer for review, via straw votes:
Regulation of devices (what is involved in that),
Who enforces violations (currently mostly police but also Inspectional Services),
Who gets enforced upon (currently the individual worker using one)
This week the committee held a discussion about (but did not vote on) the ongoing legislative work and what progress had been made so far by Councilor Baker and a city attorney on addressing those points. We made progress on the first point and third point, but we do not yet have language dealing with the second point (who do we want enforcing any leaf blower ordinance). Given the recent discussions on what roles are appropriate for Newton Police to be handling, many committee members feel it is an appropriate time to reconsider enforcement assignments for this and other ordinances on low-level issues.
So, what progress have we made so far? The draft changes to the leaf blower ordinance propose to share the responsibility for violations between the landowner/property manager and the contracted company, not the worker. This would be an important change I've advocated for, to protect workers in Newton from being fined heavily for leaf blower violations that are actually the responsibility of the companies that hire them (and by extension the homeowners hiring the companies). Part of our hope with putting some accountability on homeowners is that they will take the first warning of a violation and intervene with the company (or find a different company) to make sure there are no further violations, so that the ordinance can become more self-regulating and require less interventionist enforcement. Additionally, putting more responsibility on homeowners would bring this into closer alignment with the snow shoveling ordinance, which is logically similar.
(After a first warning, fines start to be applied with an escalating value per offense. One councilor did raise the concern about how to space out flagging any violations so that homeowners have time to react and talk to the landscaper; if the warning takes too long to arrive by mail, a second violation might happen before the first warning was received. So, there are still some things to iron out in these drafts.)
There would also be a city registration process for landscapers, as in Brookline, under the most recent draft. The registration process would require signing an agreement with the city acknowledging an understanding of the ordinance and what blower types are allowed (and when). Individual leaf blowers already need to have manufacturers' labels on them under current city ordinances, so that they can be identified as in compliance (or not) with decibel requirements and power restrictions.
All the draft language we reviewed in committee this week can be found toward the end of this PDF of our meeting agenda: http://www.newtonma.gov/civicax/filebank/documents/106101/09-16-20%20%20Programs%20&%20Services%20Agenda.pdf
The committee members pointed out some relatively minor changes to the wording to make things clearer, but otherwise these draft revisions will now start to be reviewed with city staff, the Mayor’s Administration, and the Newton Police Department.
Meanwhile, we will continue as a committee to work on the point that is not yet addressed in the drafts, as well as any other longer-term changes that some people might want to debate, such as phaseouts over time of gas-powered blowers. (And I’m sure some residents would love to get rid of leaf blowers altogether!)
We will also continue to welcome feedback and suggestions from the public to try to make sure we don’t miss something by accident!