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[This Just In]

CITY HALL
Charles in charge

BY DORIE CLARK

Boston City Council president Charles Yancey had a rocky start. His tenure began in January, when former council president Jimmy Kelly of South Boston, who had held the post for seven years, couldn’t muster a majority among his colleagues and threw his votes to Yancey. Soon after, the new president publicly embarrassed the council with an election-year call for pay raises. And he has gotten into floor scuffles because he sometimes assigns bills to committee differently from the way Kelly did, taking councilors’ pet projects away from them.

But the North Dorchester councilor was the voice of reason last Wednesday, in a three-hour council meeting that was anything but reasonable. Councilor Chuck Turner of Roxbury — who last fall presented an energy-policy bill inspired by fringe politician Lyndon LaRouche, among other political miscalculations — introduced a resolution that turned into an hour-long melee. The bill called for the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate charges of abuse at the Nashua Street Jail and the Suffolk County House of Correction. The resolution seemed simple enough, but it turns out that Suffolk County sheriff Richard Rouse, who’s in charge of the prisons, has a lot of friends on the council. As Turner notes, “Mr. Rouse is very well liked among the Boston political community — liked and respected. So people felt it was a personal attack on him and reacted partially because of that.”

“This resolution asks us to cast aspersions on someone who I think is an exceptional public servant — Richard Rouse,” protested Kelly loudly. He went on to read a phrase aloud from Turner’s resolution — “the Suffolk County Sheriff is accountable” — to bolster his case that the bill laid unfair blame on Rouse. Of course, he was only reading a fraction of the sentence, which actually said that “there is no Suffolk County governing body to which the chief administrator of Nashua Street Jail and Suffolk House of Correction, the Suffolk County Sheriff, is accountable.”

Councilor Maureen Feeney of Dorchester, a Kelly ally, became even more worked up. “This resolution is so accusatory, the tone is so negative,” she said. “For us to take this punitive, finger-pointing stance, ‘Shame on you, Richard Rouse’ — I will not allow this body to be dragged to where this resolution goes.” Then there was at-large councilor Mickey Roache’s bizarre monologue: he literally screamed in the council chambers, comparing Rouse’s trials to his own as Boston’s police commissioner in the 1970s. In short, the meeting was a comedy of political errors.

But Yancey was calm and authoritative, noting correctly that “the councilor from Roxbury did not suggest for a minute that this was an inquiry into Sheriff Rouse’s character.” (Turner’s resolution didn’t even mention Rouse by name.) And despite Feeney’s entreaties to bring the measure up for a vote (for fear that the council would appear to be endorsing criticism of Rouse by following the usual custom of sending the matter to committee), Yancey made the more difficult decision to stand up for free speech. “I understand some of the emotion,” he said, “but the appropriate place for this kind of discussion is in committee.” He said it would be a serious mistake to set a precedent for the notion that any matter sent to committee must first be cleansed of controversy.

In the end, Turner caucused with Kelly and rewrote the resolution, calling for a hearing on the jails’ management rather than a special prosecutor. The matter was referred to the Committee on Public Safety, and Turner says he’s satisfied: “What’s important is that we have a hearing.... However we get the hearing is fine with us.” Through it all, both Turner and Kelly ended up reverting to stereotype: Turner as the outside rabble-rouser, and Kelly as an almost-blind champion of friendship and loyalty. But Yancey showed something new: leadership.

Issue Date: June 14 - 21, 2001