Category: Uncategorized

We have a beach of a problem here in Gloucester, it seems. Last week the Gloucester Daily Times [paywall, kinda] informed us we’re paying $45 bucks an hour for firefighters to help on the beaches because we don’t have enough city lifeguarding staff after some students left to go back to school. 

Seems wasteful, right? I mean, it’s not the “Outrage! School spends ten percent more on non-toxic chalk!” kind of thing we’re used to from the shouty set, but it’s garnering a bit of attention. (Also, we’re totally kidding about the chalk. Of course teachers have to buy their own classroom supplies, not have them paid for by the town like this is communist Russia.)

Following this revelation, the mayor posted a press release to Good Morning Gloucester letting us know that it was NOT about the insanely low pay our lifeguards get, somewhere around 11 bucks an hour on average. The logic was a little hard to follow:

Gloucester,  as well as other communities, faced a shortage of certified lifeguards for summer 2015 and wages was not the issue. This was recognized very early in the preparation for beach season. We advertised aggressively, but  simply could not attract a large enough pool of guards.

How was it that low pay was ruled out as a factor for the low rate of applicants? Did prospects email with: “I’m on my university swim team and certified in water rescue, but I just don’t want to be a lifeguard because the idea of hostessing at a restaurant calls to me like the daughters of Achelous…”?

Over at the GDT they talked to a bunch of officials last week who assured readers everything is fine, move right along:

But DPW officials say the $45-an-hour cost for an off-duty firefighter on a detail — compared with the lifeguards’ average $11 hourly wages — isn’t sinking that department’s recreation budget. And fire Chief Eric Smith said the added outside work isn’t affecting fire coverage or other services within his department, which is still short-handed due to a run of firefighter injuries.

Great. So no problem there. Supplementing an eleven dollar an hour position with a worker that bills four times that, from an already short-staffed critical public safety office. Seems like a perfectly sensible use of resources.

Case closed.

I’m sure someone talked to the actual lifeguards to get their perspective. I mean, if someone were to do an actual journalism it would obviously merit an interview with the lifeguards to get the full story, or at least that’s what we remember from the one journalism class we took in college but it was at, like, 8am so we were kind of drowsy most of  the time (We still got an A because “journalism class.”)

Wait… hang on a second. Why are lifeguards emailing your beloved The Clam as if we were giving away free zinc oxide cream and aviator-style sunglasses? They seem sort of aggravated. As if they’ve been trying to call attention to this and other problems all along, and had a plan to solve the issue that has been and continues to be roundly ignored. It’s almost like the GDT didn’t even talk to the lifeguards to find out why the city couldn’t get those positions filled. Weird.

But by golly if this ain’t the truth! As it turns out a bunch of lifeguards, who are fairly in-tune with lifeguard-related issues, have been trying to solve this problem all along and have been pretty responsible (that’s kind of their gig, I guess) about it.

Basically Gloucester pays its guards a couple of dollars less per hour than all of the surrounding communities and the beaches on Cape Cod (except Beverly, which is weird). Pay is, as it turns out, an issue.

Starting per-hour wage for lifeguards(in most cases there is a .25-.50 increase per hour with every year’s experience).

• Gloucester      $10
• Manchester     $12.35
• Beverly             $9.50 [WTF Beverly?]
• Rockport          $12.34
• Barnstable       $12
• Mashpee          $13

In the hour or so we spent Googling this we found other communities having similar, but not as acute, issues with staffing, especially on Cape Cod, and the issue is wages. Everyone gets short staffed in the last few weeks, but they are all also having trouble getting applicants for the entire summer. In places where there are beaches there are restaurants and shops and other tourist economy opportunities. College is expensive.

The lifeguards will officially be making minimum wage when Jan 1 rolls around, and that’s for someone who can OPERATE AN AED and DELIVER A BABY. Minimum wage, for training exercises like linking arms together and doing a sweeping walk down the beach in the surf to recover a missing person who is under the water.

WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AWAY WE PAY NEARLY MINIMUM WAGE COME BACK SIR

The lifeguards we spoke to have some more things to say about the matter. Since they didn’t get a voice anywhere else, we let them have their say here, at The Clam’s Home For Wayward Journalism. Here, listen to them, before they tear their hair out:

– At the beginning of June (before the fiscal year of the city’s budget on July 1st thus giving plenty of time for changes to be made), a head lifeguard put together a new budget that the DPW could use to give the lifeguards pay raises that would be more in line with other cities and the DCR, who hires lifeguards at more than $13 an hour. This, by all accounts, would have made the applicant pool a little deeper than Plum Cove at low tide.  Mark Cole, the assistant director of the DPW, encouraged that head lifeguard over the course of several weeks to continue their research, giving off the impression that a change would indeed be made. The plan would cost the city an additional $26,000. The plan was apparently barely recognized by city employees and was immediately shot down. However, the hiring of the EMTs/Paramedics costs the city $35,000.

-The majority of these EMTs are not waterfront certified to any capacity. So despite the fact that they are being used as a bandaid to supplement the lifeguard staff, they are completely free of responsibility for any incidents that occur in the water. Additionally, it is now the tentative plan of the city to add MORE EMTs/Paramedics to the beaches in the upcoming weeks because even more lifeguards are going back to school, fall jobs, etc. so the original $35,000 cost for them is going to increase.

-In the upcoming week, there will be no more than 4 lifeguards per beach. On Thursday September 3rd, there will be 4 lifeguards on Wingaersheek and 3 lifeguards on Good Harbor. On Friday September 4th, there will be 2 lifeguards on Wingaersheek beach (on a day that is dominated by low tide) and 3 lifeguards on Good Harbor beach, when school is not in session here in Gloucester. During the normal season, we have no less than 6 lifeguards per beach, and even those numbers are still tight when there are over four thousand patrons on the beach.

Our head lifeguard who wants to remain anonymous continues:

“We have been ordered to work under these conditions with no choice despite the fact that it GREATLY increases the liability placed on each guard. On Friday at Wingaersheek, for instance, one guard will be personally responsible for approximately 2,500 people. We will receive no extra compensation of any kind for these days. We have children go missing [ed note: on land] every single day that it is busy on the beach, and it can take upwards of 20 minutes to find these kids with a full staff.  I don’t want to imagine what it will be like with 2-3 guards instead. I want to stress the fact that this numbers of guards is COMPLETELY unsafe under ANY conditions on the beaches, and this week has been forecasted as 85 degrees and sunny. The people are going to be rolling in. Additionally, strong riptides and other extreme currents have been, and will continue to be present due to the offshore tropical storms.  I have lifeguarded for the city for nearly a decade. This has been, without a doubt, the busiest beach season I have ever seen. We would like it to be known that this issue is the sole responsibility of upper management at the DPW; those in charge of the budget.  The direct managers of the lifeguard staff, Debbie Kapetanopolous and Joe Lucido, have done everything they can to help the lifeguard staff throughout the summer.”

Because of the staffing problems, many lifeguards worked 6 and 7 days a week out of fear that if they left the beaches understaffed, something tragic would happen. Because there were so few applicants, nearly everyone who applied was given the job regardless of skill level or dedication. They are in charge of thousands of people’s lives and need to make split-second decisions. They are responsible for our kids’ safety. Let’s think about that for a second.

These lifeguards rightly believe they’re being taken advantage of by city administrators, and they’re pissed – and they should be. The Clam humbly suggests we actually listen to them, and not just because those whistles are terrifying, but because these people are smart and dedicated to their jobs, which require them to put their own life at risk for what will soon, by state law, be minimum wage.

The insistence wages aren’t an, if not “the” issue not only denies the fundamental laws of economics, but sidesteps any responsibility for the problems we’re having right now. How many more talented long-time staffers do we need to lose before we get their point?

Or will someone have to die on our beaches to finally hammer it in?

Remember when the collective of people who think the sky is falling in at the slightest whiff of change in the air totally shit their bermuda shorts at the thought of a windowless green building being erected in the spot where the putrid hulking corpse of Cameron’s is?

I’ve had a handful of people come up to me at various bars, sidewalk bazaars, and downtown block parties to say “those posts were great. I’m glad someone is calling people out on their concern trolling and NIMBYism.” This actually happened. I had thought since we were crazy busy with Snotbot and took some time off that people had perhaps forgotten your beloved the Clam existed, but I guess you people had longer attention spans than we thought. Weird. 

Well, tonight is the next community meeting about the space (spoiler alert: the building has fucking windows and won’t look like a sad space station). While there are reasonable people attending who have reasonable concerns and questions and want to be part of a collaborative conversation to move the project forward in a favorable manner, there are some who aren’t so reasonable. And you, as Clam readers, should show up to outnumber them. Why support this thing? Well, here:

• Residences on Main Street aren’t a bad thing. There have been a lot of comments that housing should be kept off Main Street. I’m not sure why – while we have a great thriving Main Street, something other towns aren’t as lucky to have, we have more retail space than businesses wanting to fill it, and that problem is exacerbated with the recent closing of businesses like Palazola’s, Island Art and Hobby, La Trattoria, etc. When housing units are added to Main Street, businesses have more local clients, and local workers. There is already a good amount of housing stock on Main Street as it is – I have friends who live there, I almost rented an apartment above Stones (but felt my liver wouldn’t survive the year-long lease). We don’t have an excess of housing stock – in fact, it’s incredibly hard to find a reasonably priced apartment in this town, because so many places are summer rentals.

• Thinly-veiled classism couched in faux-concern for residents is rampant already with this project. “How can kids live downtown without a yard?” Uh, ask every family in Manhattan or any other urban area of which our country has many. Turns out kids survive just fine if they have to undertake a short walk to the nearest playground, and the YMCA is around the corner. “How will they park?” Newsflash, middle-class hand-wringers: not everyone has a car, and the developers have made sure there’s parking for each unit.

• There’s also just outright selfish judgement about the project. “People from scary Lynn could move here!” “It’s a tax on the school system!” “Low-income housing might lower my property values!” “Wow, a brand new downtown residence? How come I don’t get one and THOSE PEOPLE do?” And more I can’t even really repeat because it’s gross and I don’t feel like barfing right now. There are people who literally think these bullshit reasons should preclude other humans from having a needed downtown living space.

What downtown Gloucester will look like, apparently.

Low-income residents aren’t garbage people. They’re not. They’re our neighbors, sons, daughters, mothers, grandparents, best friends. We have to stop treating them like weird aliens that have come to destroy our idyllic city with their crime and their terrible work ethic. Newsfuckingflash: It’s hard to get low-income housing but incredibly easy to have a low income in 2015. Section 8 is a slog of a process with an interminably long waiting list during which time a lot of people lose whatever savings they had. Why are we making it harder for people to survive? Why is that the America some people want?

Go to the meeting. It’s at 6 PM at the Rose Baker Senior Center. Bring your questions and your reasonable brains.

Today and tomorrow mark the last hours of our Snotbot project. And we still really need your help.

You should support this, and back us, for a ton of reasons. We’re awesome, this was a Clam project (that, up there, is your Clameditor Jim annoying Sir Patrick Stewart), and all that. And don’t worry, your The Clam will be back in full swing after this week. But beyond this local blog, this changes the world for the better. We take drone technology that was developed by the military and turn it to saving our oceans, whales, and the planet. We take 3d printing technology and do the same. We can solve mysteries like why the f*ck do whales keep getting stranded in Alaska and focus on why are we allowing f*cking Arctic drilling when the acoustics are almost guaranteed to be hurting whales and other animals.

Perrin Ireland from NRDC made this wonderful thing that explains it better than I can.

And this is all happening in Gloucester, your Gloucester.  Without funding, this stuff doesn’t happen, and whales don’t get cool drones flying above them to test how stressed they are, whether they’re infected, pregnant, who they are, and so much more that’s really crucial to learning about how the changing ocean is affecting these animals.

I can’t explain enough how much we really need this fish.

I mean money.

God,  I have to stop watching Wicked Tuna.

(To donate, please click here.)

For the record I am a strict adherent to the corollary to Goodwin’s Law stating anyone who brings Nazis into an argument automatically loses. With that in mind, the following has to be said:

Current GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, the guy who your asshole buddy at work says, “What harm could he really do?” owes his current leading position in the GOP primaries to his repeated calls to round up 11 million undocumented workers in the United States and deport them. He’s said it literally dozens of times. 11 million civilians, many of them children, would be taken unwillingly by force and sent out of the country. He has 25% support among Republicans right now.

I’m not going to get into an argument about the bullshit term “illegals” and how they are breaking laws and all that. There are obviously reasonable arguments about how laws must be adhered to (otherwise what’s the point of having them in the first place?) and so on. There are salient positions regarding the shape and nature of the American workforce, against profiteering by companies who exploit cheap labor (like Trump’s) and an unsafe, untaxed underground economy. There is plenty of room for normal discussion and which workable strategies might be deployed to correct this problem.

But I want to ask Mr. Trump, where are you housing these 11 million people once you round them up in large groups? Are they going right on buses heading south with sack lunches and chaperons? How are you preventing them from walking back out into the street, it’s not like you can put them in our already overcrowded jails.

Camps, motherfuckers.

The only way to do this would be with camps. Camps with guards and barbed wire. It’s the only (final?) solution for moving 11 million people against their will. To logistically execute Donald Trump’s plan it would mean putting all the undocumented immigrants in situations where they would be…oh…what’s the word I’m looking for here? That word for when you get a lot of something in one place? Rhymes with “vaccination” (which Trump, btw, says is a cause of Autism)?  These would be what kinds of camps? Help me out here?

Let me spell it out: Donald Trump and his 25% support in the GOP are suggesting a course of action that would necessitate the construction and maintenance of Internment or “concentration” camps in the United States of America.

Sort of like this, right?

There is no other way around the statement above. Nothing else would work, what are you going to do, put up them in hotels and lock the doors from the outside? There are only 5 million hotel rooms total in the US anyway. So Donald Trump is running and winning on a proposal entirely dependent on rounding up civilians and placing them in guarded camps and lot of people, some of them people you know, support him in this.

Laugh away, late night talk show hosts. Call him Fuckwit Von Clownstick or whatever. I certainly have done my share. But I’m starting to get that same feeling I did when I pulled that piece of sheathing away from my porch and watched all the ants come scurrying out. All at once I saw how much rot there was underneath, in the dark places where I sort of had been avoiding looking up till that point.

You start to ask yourself: “Yeah, the structure is still standing. But how deep does the rot go?”

We here at The Clam have been watching with interest the proposals for affordable housing at the Cameron’s site. More specifically, we’ve been watching the reactions to the proposal with interest. The project is, as you may have guessed, meeting a lot of resistance from local residents.

Recently, images emerged which represent the basic layout and shape of the proposed structure. They literally made the drawing lime green and orange, and included exactly zero architectural features which would define this as a building. It’s essentially a representation of the mass and spatial occupation of the proposed building.

Seriously, there are no windows or doors. It’s just a shape. A green and orange shape.

People thought this was real.

The beauty of the local dissension is twofold, really. First, a lot of people apparently cannot fathom that this big green and orange windowless, doorless shape in the pictures is not actually how the building will look. It’s delightful.

Secondly, there’s a big dose of ugly classism being disguised as concern for the logistical soundness of the plan. This is less delightful, though not entirely surprising to be honest.

Below are actual comments from your fellow townspeople, lifted from the internet, with helpful translation as to what they really mean.

” Is “Affordable” a fancy word for Section 8?” – Translation -“Keep the poors out of downtown. Also I’m probably a little bit racist.”

“Why is it so ugly? And where are the windows?” – Translation – “I’m dumb “

“Keep housing off Main Street !”  Translation – “The new housing I mean. All those people who live there already are obviously not scary poor folks, they’re Gloucester locals. “

“No more section 8 in Gloucester” Translation – “I dislike poors in general. Also I’m kind of racist. No I’m a lot racist.”

“awful design! No windows. Lime green and orange!! No charm, In a charming city. Please don’t build this!!” Translation – “I actually believe this is a design which would be built, this actual green and orange box is something I think could come to fruition.”

” how can this even meet code…no windows. ..what if there is a fire..how do you get out…how does it get vented other than thru the roof…are the architect’s crazy. ..or just dumb..A kindergarten could do better” Translation – “I think I’m being clever in pointing out building code violations.”

” Ugly. Just plain ugly. And, although they might be well intentions, to bring affordable housing, these things usually don’t end up well. Check out Red Road flats in Scotland, Divis flats in Ireland, and the Projects in Southie.” Translation – “Poor people just don’t know how to behave.” 

“Kids need green space and elderly do not need to inhale toxic fumes. Downtown is not the right spot for housing!” Translation – “WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?” 

“Not to mention that fire code requires windows and fire escapes on anything two or more floors…at least in NYC’ Translation – “I don’t know how you bumpkins do it, but us city folk have things like windows on our buildings.”

“My Mother was born in Gloucester. I wish I could have a say in this.”   Translation – “Native born Gloucester people are more important than transplants.” 

We thought some of these folks may want to make counter proposals, as you do when something is so important to you.  We’re helpfully providing some examples which we think they’ll find to be much more suitable for Affordable Housing, so that they can make a nice presentation for City Hall. Obviously these should be nowhere near Downtown. Maybe Dogtown or West Gloucester. You’re welcome!

At least this one has windows. They should be thankful.

A tidy way to round up all the poor people into one spot so they can fend for themselves.

West Gloucester does have a ton of room.