Both Boston mayoral candidates say they’re the one to tackle the crisis at Mass and Cass as they weigh in on the hot-button issues around it and Annissa Essaibi-George releases an updated plan.
Essaibi-George and Michelle Wu, in interviews with the Herald, both said their particular skills — rather than their opponent’s — are crucial to tackle the dire situation in the dangerous open-air drug market and homeless encampment in the South End.
“Building on the relationships that I have that Michelle does not have with service providers of community members, with those that are struggling and suffering, with those on the streets … we can get this done and I’m committed to that work,” Essaibi-George said, citing her city council efforts on opioids and mental health. “I’ve done that work — Michelle has not.”
But Wu countered that by saying her relationships allow her to effect much broader and more significant change than her fellow at-large city councilor and mayoral hopeful.
“This is about building coalitions to deliver results. That is what I’ve been doing over many years on the city council and in City Hall,” Wu said, citing her broader array of endorsers, including people in state government.
Essaibi-George is going to look to continue to further her point on Sunday, when she has an event right smack dab in the middle of Mass and Cass in which she’ll announce some new endorsements and roll out updates to the Mass and Cass plan she put out last spring.
The updates, shared with the Herald, focus heavily on declaring a “public health emergency zone” in a one-mile radius around the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard.
Essaibi-George said the creation of such a zone would allow the city more flexibility in taking action in the area, and in creating area-specific responders, rather than having the part of town chopped up into different police precincts, for example.
Further, she’d use $30 million of the federal American Rescue Plan money the city received this year to implement a “public health surge” aimed at connecting the people suffering from addiction and mental-health issues with services.
She also said she’d reconvene the Mass and Cass Task Force that she’s sat on that recently has ground to a halt, put a mental-health clinician in all of the city’s homeless shelters, and is creating a “Harm Reduction Working Group” that would look at options including creating safe-injection sites — which a couple of years ago she said she opposed.
Both of the candidates — of whom one will be the mayor in just one month, Nov. 16 — align somewhat on the latest hot-button Mass and Cass issues.
On the topic of whether the hundreds of tents that have sprung up over the past few months have to stay, “The tents have got to go,” Essaibi-George said, saying the city has “a tent protocol in place that we have to utilize.”
Wu said, “The tents are not a sustainable safe or health solution,” and that people need housing.
On the topic of Suffolk County Sheriff Steve Tompkins’ plan to house homeless in a vacant building in his jail complex, both candidates said they need a plan that doesn’t “criminalize” addiction and mental-health issues.
But Essaibi-George said she’s “very much open to it” as long as it’s overseen by a health care operation rather than jailers. Wu was a bit less direct when asked about it, saying repurposing unused buildings is “a conversation worth having with every single one of our partners across the region,” but not talking about her supporter Tompkins’ plan specifically.
Wu, talking to the Herald, cited the Boston Hope field hospital erected in the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in the depths of the coronavirus as a guiding light for the type of effort the city needs to do right off the bat. She said she doesn’t mean that it would be in the BCEC or just one big structure, but that under her the city would marshal a similar effort to crank up supportive housing in the opening weeks of her mayorship.
