Gareth Saunders

A councilor is without honor in his own land

by Yvonne Abraham

"What are you waiting for?"

City Councilor Gareth Saunders arrives late at a groundbreaking on Maple Street, in Dorchester. Other officials are already lined up in front of the crowd, basking in the anticipatory glow of a new HUD scheme to do up broken-down foreclosed apartments and hand them over to locals. Saunders hangs back for a few minutes, which frustrates Barry Lawton, his forceful campaign aide. "Get up there!" Lawton hisses.

Saunders admits he has trouble selling himself. "I'm a humble elected official," he says. "Those two don't usually go together." If that's true, the councilor will have to get over it pretty quickly: he has four challengers this year for his District Seven (Roxbury and the South End) seat -- former state rep Althea Garrison, neighborhood organizer Robert Terrell, activist Roy Owens, and former councilor Anthony Crayton, who narrowly lost the seat to Saunders in 1993 and wants it back. And this district is especially tough on politicians.

Still, Saunders is not exactly a shrinking violet. He took a vehement stand against the appointed school committee and, in June, conspired against council president James Kelly's majority in the chamber over the city's operating budget (see "Civics lesson"). "I won't cuss you out," he says, "But I speak my mind, especially when I believe in something."

After more of Lawton's prodding, Saunders finally steps up to the front of the crowd. The councilor, 38, is dressed in a short-sleeved print shirt and baggy blue trousers. He has heavy-lidded eyes, a wide smile, and a small gap in his teeth. His hair is cut close to his head, the way it must have been when he was an Air Force lieutenant in the early '80s.

When the speeches are done, Saunders poses for group photographs, and then shakes hands. He congratulates Annie Jones, a tenant activist who helped bring about the Maple Street project. Jones, a plump, direct woman in a canary-yellow dress with a hot-pink flower pinned to her collar, is not concerned with kudos right now, though. She's more interested in the city-owned vacant lot next door. "What's happening with that?" she asks the councilor, moving close to him. Saunders, after all, is the city's face on Maple Street. "We want it made into a tot-lot, but we don't know what's going on."

"Okay," says Saunders, taking a tiny step back, arms folded. "I'm just not aware of this. I'll find out about it. Tell me what the residents envision for this tot-lot." Jones fires off her list of needs, and Saunders promises to try to do something about them. He may think of himself as the retiring type, but in this neighborhood, that doesn't stop folks from getting in his face.

He walks over to take a look at the vacant lot. It is mowed bald in some places, overgrown in others, and strewn with junk all over. Four disheveled men sit at a beat-up table. A scrappy six-year-old with a big black mark under his left eye tosses up a filthy, deflated orange ball over and over. Saunders shakes his head.

"Who owns this land?" someone asks.

Saunders laughs, struck by the absurdity, embarrassed. "The city," he says, sheepishly. "They're gonna spend millions of dollars rehabbing this building, and right next door, there's this? We're gonna get this turned into a tot-lot. Maybe I can put something into the capital budget for this."

The boy's mother comes over to talk to Saunders. "As you see," she says, "my son Hakim is just playin' with a dead ball."

"That's the magic of kids," Saunders says. "They will make fun out of any situation."

"Yeah," says the woman. "But we got a million kids out here and there's no place for 'em to go, and I'm looking for a job. You got any jobs? I can do data entry, Lotus 1-2-3, I can do electoral representative."

Saunders hands the woman his card, tells her to check with the City Hall human-resources department and to come by his office sometime. And he knows she will. His electorate demands a lot, he says. Sometimes too much.

"Sometimes in this political world," he says, "you make an effort to get something done and it doesn't happen. I'm in a deliberative body where the majority rules. People don't understand that."

He knows that if something isn't done with that land on Maple Street, Annie Jones and her neighbors will blame him. The electorate could turn on him the way it turned on Tony Crayton four years ago when he seemed to have lost touch with his district. Voters here get angry when they think their representatives are becoming part of the downtown political machinery instead of working to change it.

Because there isn't a strong political tradition in the neighborhoods he represents, Saunders says, his constituents have even more trouble grasping the process than do voters in more politically savvy areas. "They feel that if they voted you in and set you there," he says, "you have to do it all."

Back in 1993, Tony Crayton may have felt exactly the same way.