BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, THE WEEKEND EDITION, MAY 20-22, 2016) – Mayor Tyer, you wanted it. Well, sister, you got it. You got to be mayor. You said you were ready. You campaigned for the corner office with crime one of your major platform planks. So tell THE PLANET and our readers: Did you construct that dais out of rotten wood? We ask, because since you’ve been in office, crime has broken out of prison and is now terrorizing Pittsfield’s mean streets like never before. Yes, Linda, it’s gotten worse.

You took office, and you kept Michael Wynn as police chief (acting). Is it because he’s done such a great job? Is it because he cuts a good figure and says the right thing? Is it because he’s a minority, and that looks good for a city that obviously has problems with people of color? Is it because he’s the main squeeze of the communications director of your campaign, the woman you put on the PEDA board despite her near-total lack of qualifications for an economic development enterprise?

Gunfire Erupts … and What Happened with PHS Students?

Within a 24-hour period this week (ending Thursday) there were four incidents involving gunfire on city streets. That’s just the beginning of it. The domestic violence, routine drug incidents (ODs, transactions), stabbings, and other fights never make the paper and never draw a cop. They are “settled” privately, if you get our drift.

On the campaign trail, Madame Mayor, didn’t you say that the out-of-control crime wave was “unacceptable?” Will “unacceptable” now be your equivalent of Sara Hathaway‘s “aberration?” Didn’t you promise change? Didn’t you speak of a plan? All the good, decent citizens who are not under siege in their own homes would like to see it?

And while were asking questions, couldn’t you have done better than post a lame statement on Facebook, of all places, after this recent wave of shootings? This is what you, the mayor of Pittsfield, wrote on Facebook:

This is hard. Really hard. I know how upsetting the ongoing gang and gun violence is to all of you. I’m distressed, too. Please be assured that every available resource is being deployed and a great deal of advance planning is constantly taking place to proactively engage in these very serious circumstances. I understand that you’d like to have the details about police strategy. Unfortunately, when we release that kind of information to the public it also becomes available to those we pursue. I’m determined to get this under control and I need your help. See something, know something, say something. And I’ll say this, too, even before I became mayor I had a great deal of respect for our police department. Since taking office my respect and admiration for their diligence, strategy, and commitment to keeping us safe has grown immensely. Without their persistence our situation would be much worse. Let’s be on their side.

‘Distressed?” We Bet You Are

This doesn’t cut it. This is President Bill Clinton “feeling your pain.” This is President Muffley in Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove on the phone with the Soviet premier. Muffley has just told the premier that there has been an inadvertent launch of a hydrogen bomb attack on Russia. After hearing the Soveit honcho express his dismay, Muffley says, “Well how do you think I feel? … I’m just as sorry about it as you are.”  This is taking the easy way out. Issue a statement well hidden from the streets, telling the besieged, overtaxed citizens that you’re “distressed, too.”

Yes. We bet you are, Mayor Tyer. Could it be your distressed for political reasons? Not that you would make politics out of so serious an issue, eh? Could it be you see political support (and votes) slipping away? We recall during the campaign, how you appeared at a rally at the Christian Center on Linden Street after the 4th of July massacre — which, by the way, just vanished. No one has been caught or held accountable. It just — well, for some extremely odd and suspicious reason, it “just didn’t happen” (wink, wink).

THE PLANET, you will recall, Madame Mayor, was there too. We criticized the mayor for not getting out in front of the press and public, in a news conference, to make a statement and take questions. You agreed. You promised THE PLANET that if you were in the same spot as mayor, you would do just that. You would call a press conference, at which, by the way, THE PLANET would be expressly invited, and speak to We The People. You said you wouldn’t read a canned, prepared statement but speak from the heart. You would then take “any and all questions.” More importantly, you promised you were be open and “share everything we knew.”

Right.

“Every available resource is being deployed?” How can that be true, when in the few blocks of torn-up North Street up to Maplewood Avenue, there are 58 city cops and sheriff’s deputies getting fat, raking in $40 an hour (or whatever the fee is these days), ignoring traffic, drinking coffee, and surfing the web on their smart phones?

“Every available resource?” Have you called in the state police?

“Every available resource?” Have you cut the over-bloated school department budget to put more dollars into public safety?

Of course, even that wouldn’t be the answer. You are now reaping the rewards of 30 years of allowing the city’s economny to “go native.” You were a part of that as a member of WHEN, a city councilor, and now as mayor. GE left, and after that, instead of rebuilding, local politicians and officials circled the wagons and began to set up the cliques and “Members Only” clubs that rewarded those who played ball (and kept their mouths shut) with big-pay, little-show jobs — virtually all the PSD administration, for example, and people like PEDA chief exec Corydon Thurston, who gets, what, $75 grand and bennies for NOT BEING THERE and running his businesses in North Adams … Corydon Thurston who let Nuclea skip town owing the public money.

“Every Available Resource” When Your Clamping Down on Information?

“Every available resource” when you are personally championing five more years of tax relief for the Beacon Cinema? After more than $20 million of public money and nine years, The Beacon is failing, and you want to extend the tax breaks? Surely, you jest! Is this the price of being handed the corner office by The Suits? Are you making good on a private campaign pledge to Someone or a bunch of Someones? What else could it be? Five more years of throwing good money after bad will not save this failing enterprise. We’re talking 14 years of taxbreaks for a multimillionaire developer who hasn’t earned a penny of it?

Why not tax break for Pasquale at the Highland Restaurant, which has been in business since the early 1930s? Why not 14 years of tax easements for the Rasers, who have managed to keep Carr Hardware not just alive but thriving through good, old-fashioned customer service. Why not Mark Papa at the fabulous Lantern? He’s carried on for his dad, and they are decades, mayor, DECADES, into making this city a better place by their presence. For that matter, why not repay Jim Shulman and his wife the $73,000+ they’ve coughed up in taxes for nine year on an empty lot, soon to be home of the Carousel. That project, by the way, didn’t ask for a dime in public money. It was raised privately and the work done by more than 200 volunteers. But no, you wouldn’t want to help out one of the Good Guys.

Why? Help us out. We don’t get it.

Would you not agree that after nine years and $20 mill in free money, that enterprise ought to be able to put on its “Big Boy” pants and make it on its merits?

All available resources, when you have shilled for a $200 million new high school the city doesn’t need and can’t afford? You’ve gotta be shitting the good people of Pittsfield, Madame Mayor.

In your Facebook statement (“Facebook? FACEBOOK??), you offered a pathetic excuse for not informing the public about these horrible events. You wrote: “I understand that you’d like to have the details about police strategy. Unfortunately, when we release that kind of information to the public it also becomes available to those we pursue.” That’s a line of wet crap, and you know it, Madame Mayor. The human scum that’s infected this town and is living rent-free in public housing, Sec. 8 space, and other enabling domiciles for vermin and riffraff won’t learn anything from such information that they don’t know already … or how is it that they are always light years ahead of the police?

After telling us why you can’t share information, in the next sentence, you ask ordinary citizens, at the risk of their lives, to speak up and rat. Isn’t that a tad hypocritical?

And jeezus, your fawning kiss-up to the police department provides the fitting capper to your Facebook profile in cowardice. You “have a great deal of respect for the PPD?” You have to tell us that? Why? Something’s off about such hollow praise.

You end with the greatest insult of all: “Let’s be on their side.”

Earth to The Lovely Linda: You are addressing the good, law-abiding citizens of Pittsfield with that statement. Obviously, you’re not talking to the human dross that need to be exterminated (maybe we should bring back some dictatorial justice; one of the underused city parks might make a good place for a concentration camp where we would throw the gang-bangers; the drug dealers; the fat, white cows they impregnate so they can get all the freebies — you get the idea. We won’t draw you a map).

You have blundered badly now on the Beacon request and your mishandling of an out-of-control crime wave. You seem to have that “deer-caught-in-the-headlights” look. You appear tenuous and weak. Tell us why we should believe that you are not over your head? THE PLANET is open anytime for your comments — by e-mail, on TV, here, over privately, over java.

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THE COMMENT LINE IS NOW OPEN. Have a great weekend, everybody.

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“The worst crime is faking it.” — Kurt Cobain

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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