The Everett City Council spent much of Tuesday night doing Everett government in miniature: a nice recognition up front, a clean fire promotion, a stack of unanimous reappointments, a couple million here and a couple million there in borrowing, an Encore license discussion full of requests for better follow-through, an Everett Square presentation built around grant deadlines, and then — because apparently this city cannot help itself — another round of fighting over a hypothetical data center nobody has proposed.
Start with the simple part.
Joe and Jesse Polson were recognized for the kind of actual civic work that people can see without needing a policy memo to explain it. Councilor Holly Garcia and Council President Stephanie Smith cited their work through The Well Coffee House, Metro North Church, soccer nights, baseball nights, youth programs, and support for families around the city.
Smith put it plainly: “Anytime anyone needs anything in the community, you guys are the first ones to raise your hands to donate, to be there for the kids, and for the community.”
Ceremonial items are usually harmless throat-clearing. This one at least attached the praise to concrete things.
Jesse Polson, who said his family moved to Everett seven years ago, kept his remarks brief: “This is a wonderful city. Thank you for these past seven years accepting us and letting us feel like this was truly home.”
After that, the council suspended the rules to take the fire promotion out of order and moved quickly to confirm Lieutenant Eric Keller as captain in the Everett Fire Department.
Anthony DiPierro moved favorable action. Garcia seconded. The vote was 10-0. Keller was then sworn in. No drama. Government can still do a straightforward thing once in a while.
The same was true for the reappointments later in the meeting.
Edmond Michelin and Eleanor Gayhot were reappointed to the Library Board of Trustees, and Carol Dello Russo and Josephine Navarra were reappointed to the Council on Aging. All four were confirmed unanimously, 10-0.
Garcia noted some of the appointees were in the room. Smith thanked them for attending. Clerk Sergio Cornelio reminded them to schedule with his office to take the oath again. Routine business, handled routinely. No fake suspense required.
Then came the money.
The council took up two borrowing orders together and passed them 9-1: $4 million for modernization of the Everett Public Schools network infrastructure and $2 million for the MSBA high school feasibility study project.
That is $6 million in borrowing, and while neither item has the emotional pull of a ribbon-cutting, both matter more than half the ceremonial stuff the city likes to spend time on. School networks are not glamorous until they fail. Feasibility studies are not glamorous either, but that is how you get to actual school construction money. Nobody loves borrowing. But pretending you can run a school system on vibes and outdated infrastructure is cheaper only in Facebook comments.
On Encore, councilors mostly used the annual license discussion to ask an obvious question in several different ways: are you actually reaching Everett people directly, or are you talking to the same set of already-connected people and calling it outreach?
Councilor Stephanie Martins was the clearest on that point. She said the city has many diverse businesses that are not part of the Chamber, “because of cultural barriers of understanding the benefits of being a part of a bigger business body.” She asked Encore to let the council know about vendor fairs so those businesses can be reached directly.
That is a real issue. If your outreach only reaches the people already in the room, it is not much of an outreach program.
Martins also pressed Encore on transportation, saying residents missed the old shuttle “with the air conditioning,” and asked for details on whether the current route still serves places like Market Basket and Everett Square. Encore representative McAnneny said Market Basket is included but admitted, “I don’t know all of the stops, but I can get that route for you.”
Fair enough, but this is the kind of answer that keeps coming up in Everett. We can get that. We can follow up. We can send that later. At some point, just bring the route.
On hiring, McAnneny said Encore employs 567 Everett residents, “about 17% of our total workforce,” with 76 in supervisory or management positions. Martins pushed for support for resume-building and citizenship application assistance so more Everett residents can move into those jobs. Again, practical stuff, not slogan stuff.
The Everett Square redesign update had the usual ingredients: benches, trees, pavers, traffic concerns, parking worries, and a grant clock hanging over everyone’s head.
Garcia asked the basic procedural question people at home were probably asking too: “just a presentation, we’re not voting on anything right now?” Smith answered, “Correct.”
The revised design added bench swings, changed paving patterns to better distinguish where cars go versus where pedestrians go, and adjusted the holiday tree setup so the city can install one without dragging in a concrete block every winter.
The administration also made the urgency argument. Planning Director Matt Lamboy said the project is now around $4 million, with about $3 million in grant money. If the city does not move forward, it risks losing roughly $1.5 million in grant funds, with the deadline discussed as December 31.
That may be true. But grant deadline pressure is still deadline pressure. Everett has seen plenty of “we must act now” presentations over the years. The public should read those the same way they read every other sales pitch: what exactly are we approving, by when, and what happens if assumptions change?
And then the council returned to the city’s favorite made-up emergency: data centers.
The discussion made clear, again, that this ordinance fight is still being driven more by fear of what might happen than by any actual filed data center proposal. One speaker said the point was to “limit the use and the type of uses in the area” so that if Everett ever gets a data center, “it has to look a certain way where it’s not harmful.”
That is already a retreat from the earlier posture, which was sold as absolute urgency. First it was ban them. Then it became maybe allow them in a limited form, more like a “server room,” not the primary use of a building. Funny how emergency legislation always gets more negotiable once people start reading it.
The same speaker claimed Everett should not be “an industrial background for other cities” and argued the master plan showed mixed-use glass buildings, not more industrial uses. Fine. But the council still has not answered the basic question from this whole saga: why was there such a rush to legislate against a hypothetical data center while real industrial-scale uses elsewhere somehow inspired less theatrical alarm?
Anthony Pietrantonio, to his credit, sounded like one of the few people in the room who understood that the ordinance still needs work. “I’m not an expert on data centers,” he said, which already put him ahead of many of the people talking about them. He said both sides “make good points,” commended Councilor Katy Rogers for her work, and moved to send the matter back to committee so the new administration could “sit down with them and look at it again. Maybe we can make it tighter.”
That was the right move.
Because if the city is going to regulate a use no one has actually proposed on land tied up in major redevelopment planning, it should at least stop pretending rushed, activist-shaped language is the same thing as careful zoning. Everett has enough real problems without inventing new ones and calling that vigilance.