Category: Worcester

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A couple updates from the Christmas T&G.

Cirignano hearing Feb 20:

Larry Cirignano, the Catholic Citizenship executive director who pushed a protester to the ground during a Dec. 16 anti-gay marriage rally here, will appear before a clerk magistrate on Feb. 20 on a charge of assault and battery.

Also, there’s a settlement of the lawsuit against the Library for its lending policy towards the homeless. For more info, see our podcast with all the background you’d ever want.

I’m not sure how a couple of legal stories end up in Monday’s paper. Wouldn’t these announcements have come out on Friday?

Catholic Worcester and Larry Cirignano

Kevin at Indymedia claims that Worcester’s Catholics by-and-large avoided Saturday’s marriage rally:

None of Worcester’s well known Catholic faces attended the “Rally for Democracy” and there were not any parish priests or sisters in the audience.

One of the organizers explains:

The Bishop was already committed to several events because of Christmas. Father Roy of Sacred Heart in Webster was on the agenda, but ended up doing a funeral on Saturday and couldn’t make it into Worcester until late afternoon.

If you haven’t worked much with bishops or priests, know that this is a typical problem. These men are busy, and can cancel at the last minute if something more important comes up.

Of the Catholics I know in Worcester, most of them don’t like gay marriage. I wonder if the tone of the anti-gay-marriage campaign hasn’t turned them off from being more involved.

If there really were no Worcester priests, nuns, or notable laity, that’s a bad sign for this campaign. It’s already a bad sign there weren’t enough of them there that their presence was obvious.

More from Indymedia:

Present though among this mix was a reporter/photographer from the Catholic Free Press. He interviewed and recorded Sarah Loy after she gave her statement to Worcester police officers. When he finished interviewing Ms Loy, I asked him if he thought the Catholic Free Press’s Editor Margaret Russell would use the interview. He said he didn’t know, but she’s the one that had assigned coverage of the rally.

So the “mainstream” Catholic media was present, has photographs and an interview regarding the assault, the question is will the Free Press and Diocese further distance itself from Larry Cirignano by publishing the full story or will it kill the story?

I’d be surprised if the Free Press covered this controversy. But they’ve surprised me before.

Another flaw in Research Bureau report

Research Bureau’s cable report:

Bay City, MI ran its public access channel with $30,000 in 2005.

Not exactly. Looks like there is no public access channel in Bay City. Telegram & Gazette:

The Research Bureau used data about the Bay City, Mich., station in its public access cost comparison as it advocated a major funding cut for WCCA amounting to roughly two-thirds of its $650,000 budget.

Bay 3 TV is a local channel funded by the city, county and local schools. Unlike WCCA and the many stations across the country like it, Bay 3 TV does not allow public access to its equipment. In its report, The Research Bureau compared Bay City’s zero funding for public, education and government channels to Worcester’s $1.1 million, money provided by Charter Communications to the city as a franchise fee.

So they’re just flat wrong. Their response:

Research Bureau Director Roberta R. Schaefer defended the inclusion of Bay City in the report. “We did not manufacture a station,” she said. “There’s a station there. It’s just a different combination of things.”

This report is like Swiss cheese.

“This report gets more erroneous and irritating by the minute,” [WCCA-hired] consultant Bunnie Riedel said in an e-mail to [WCCA director] Mr. DePasquale. “These people should stick to their lane in the road and not try to tackle a subject they know nothing about.”

Ms. Schaefer said cable subscribers might question whether WCCA should be spending its money on a consultant hired to promote its work.

Oh, that’s rich. If the City wants honest data about issues in the future, maybe it should hire more consultants and start throwing away Research Bureau reports as soon as they hit the mail room.

More on Cirignano incident

Worcester police interview Larry CirignanoKevin Ksen at Indymedia talked with Cirignano after he shoved a woman to the ground:

I spoke with Cirignano after the rally and asked him his side of what happened, “That lady came up to the podium and I escorted her back into the audience.” Given what had transpired, I followed-up to make sure I heard correctly, “Escorted?”, “Yes, escorted”, he replied. Asked if he felt he assaulted her he shot back without hesitation, “Hell, no!” adding, “She’s an actress, she’s a professional actress.”

Immediately after the assault took place Loy and others turned to the Worcester Police Officers present at the rally. And while the officers quickly took Loy’s complaint, they responded that since they had not seen the assault happen they couldn’t put Mr. Cirignano under arrest. In fact it was only after the intervention of Ron Madnick, Executive Director of the Worcester ACLU Chapter that officers agreed to take statements from witnesses who had stepped forward. At first officers said they didn’t need to take statements, but faced with Madnick’s and witnesses’ persistence they did. It did not appear though that they spoke with any of the people that videotaped the assault.

The rally continued uninterrupted as Police took Cirignano off to the side to question him. He was unfazed and non-apologetic as he was interviewed and charged.

Rollbiz at BlueMassGroup gives his own account:

It wasn’t a bump or a jostle. Cirignano took her by the shoulders, with both hands, and shoved her to the ground. I saw it, and I don’t think there was any misinterpreting his intent. He meant to hurt her.

Ryan Adams and Live, Love, and Learn are others who’ve blogged about this.

Assault at marriage rally

The Telegram & Gazette reports that my friend Sarah Loy was assaulted (shoved to the ground) by Larry Cirignano, executive director of CatholicVote.org, at an anti-gay-marriage rally in Worcester yesterday. Sarah was part of the pro-gay-marriage contingent.

Sarah Loy, 27, of Worcester was holding a sign in defense of same-sex marriage amid a sea of green “Let the People Vote” signs when Larry Cirignano of Canton, who heads the Catholic Citizenship group, ran into the crowd, grabbed her by both shoulders and told her, “You need to get out. You need to get out of here right now.” Mr. Cirignano then pushed her to the ground, her head slamming against the concrete sidewalk.

Updates:

  • The Worcester Republican blog tries to spin this as being Sarah’s fault. Way to throw ethics out the window, guys. If you have a problem with someone at a demonstration, and there are cops about, you can first talk with the person, then refer it to the police.
  • Photos posted at Indymedia.
  • Mass ResistanceWatch also chimes in.
  • Michael Ball has a good late-afternoon wrapup.

This is one of those one-in-a-hundred posts where I wish I had a Jay Rosen-type format, so updates to the original post could be handled elegantly.

Worcester police interview Larry Cirignano
Worcester police interview Cirignano. Indymedia photo.

Worcester police interview Sarah Loy
Worcester police interview Ms. Loy. Indymedia photo.

(There’s a blank wiki page for Cirignano here.)

Ray Flynn, Cardinal O'Malley, Larry Cirignano
Ray Flynn, Sean Cardinal O’Malley, and Larry Cirignano. Photo from Archdiocese of Boston.

More info on Research Bureau’s iffy stats

Richard Nangle adds a new detail with his article in today’s paper:

“We didn’t just speak to the access people; we also spoke to the city regulators,” [WCCA’s] Mr. DePasquale said. For example, he said, The Research Bureau reported what Fort Worth received in a grant from its cable operator for capital and equipment and left out about $1 million in operating funding from the city.

[The Research Bureau’s] Ms. Schaefer responded, “We did not include capital grants in ours and he included capital grants in his chart.”

I asked them this yesterday: did your report oversimplify the funding picture? Now Ms. Schaefer is admitting that yes, there are aspects of funding that they didn’t report on.

If WCCA’s numbers are right, in some cases the Research Bureau oversimplified to the tune of $1,000,000.

(Not just capital grants, but also operating funds.)

Research Bureau: wrong cable numbers?

WCCA double-checked the figures in the Research Bureau’s cable report, and found serious errors in the figures for public, educational, and government channel (PEG) funding:

Grand Rapids numbers were underreported by over one million dollars.

The most interesting tidbit is in a footnote. WCCA contacted the Cable Services Manager for the city of Fort Worth, TX, which the Research Bureau listed as spending $744K on PEG:

Mr. Westerman said he had tried to tell the Research Bureau that the $744,000 was only for capital and equipment, but he felt they didn’t understand. Fort Worth also receives an additional $1,000,000 for operations.

Continue reading “Research Bureau: wrong cable numbers?”

City council agenda items (late)

Anonymous Reader, our weekly source of City Council Agenda highlights, is now pseudonymous reader “John.”

C. Request City Council’s Review, Consideration and Adoption of an Ordinance Concerning the Compensation of the Cultural Development Officer.

“Among the organization’s many accomplishments are the Cultural Calendar, Detours, Weekends in Worcester, Worcester: Creating a Home for the Arts, and the www.worcestermass.org web site. ”
Continue reading “City council agenda items (late)”

Reader comment

A reader comments on the Research Bureau’s cable report:

That report is a joke. If this were a Clark project and I was grading it, I’d give it a D. The background research seems okay, but it’s nothing new. There’s no justification of the conclusions and no attempt to analyze the results of the suggested policy. Smart people shouldn’t even pretend to take this seriously.

The question is, are city councilors able to understand that? Or, will they just see a way to get another $400,000 for the general fund? More cynically, do forces with power in local government want WCCA to continue?

Research Bureau: many numbers, few clues

It’s time for the city to renegotiate the cable monopoly, and the Worcester Regional Research Bureau has released a report in which it tries to make sense of the situation.

Among the more controversial recommendations, it wants the city to slash funding for the public access station WCCA TV13 by 2/3.

As a former WCCA employee, current volunteer, and general community media enthusiast, I’ll have some comments later. But a paragraph in today’s T&G story does a nice job highlighting the cluelessness of the WRRB researchers:

“The city should specify clearly in its contract with WCCA that public access funding be used for production and training — those activities related to providing public access,” the Research Bureau said. “Services that WCCA currently provides, such as a community computer lab, may be deemed by the city as an unnecessary expense for the public access studio and not a suitable public access service.” Mr. DePasquale said the computer lab is made up of donated equipment and that the only cost to the station is the electricity needed to run the computers.

Yes, the WRRB thinks the city should ditch four public computers in order to save the electricity costs. Penny wise and pound foolish.

According to an assessment WCCA had conducted earlier this year:

“From a brief look at the community survey, it looks like WCCA is enjoying a seventy-five percent approval rating from the community,” said Riedel.