Easthampton committee and commission vexations are once again making headlines, underscoring a recurrent pattern of discord between the City Council and other municipal bodies.
At a regular meeting of the City Council on Wednesday night, councilors, city commissioners, members of the School Committee, and the public brought forward a wide range of concerns of repeated incidents of misconduct, harassment, misogyny, bullying, and calls to law enforcement, as well as procedure and rule breaking by some council members.
At-large Councilor Owen Zaret has found himself in the spotlight, once again, this time relating to his interactions with members of the Easthampton School Committee, who submitted a letter of censure to the full City Council. The letter and the circumstances leading up to it, were discussed in detail during the meeting, and were attached to the council agenda on the city’s website in the days prior to the meeting. The letter said that Zaret’s behavior “escalated to incidents of clearly unprofessional and unacceptable conduct” over the past year. Zaret, for his part, has said that his intentions were to collaboratively address “extreme concern and urgency” he had about school curriculum and the safety of Jewish students in the district.
It’s not the first time that city officials have accused Zaret of unprofessional behavior. What’s more, it’s a pattern that some residents say other city councilors have followed, too.
On Wednesday, members of the public, School Committee, and City Council raised concerns and personal accounts of negative interactions with Zaret.
Councilor Koni Denham said that in April, Zaret contacted the Easthampton Police Department alleging that she had been belligerent, menacing, and may cause him personal harm after she had sent him an email which documented his behavior towards her and asked him to stop. Former councilor Lindsey Rothschild also said she believed Zaret had reported her to the FBI. When The Shoestring followed up with Rothschild, she did not provide any additional information about the FBI allegation.
Rothschild previously raised concerns about Zaret during a 2023 City Council meeting, when she said her resignation from the council was a result of Zaret’s “constant need for attention and admiration, the pressure he applies to defend him and credit him, the victimization that he employs to avoid accountability and to blame shift.”
Along with Zaret, former city councilors and members of the public also accused current councilors Brad Riley, Thomas Peake, and City Council President Salem Derby of silencing women on the council and in municipal bodies.
This follows a string of recent City Council meetings in which members of the council and the public have called out what they described as misogyny across the council and concerns of gender bias. Derby defended himself and the council against the allegations in a prepared statement during a Dec. 18 City Council meeting.
Derby expressed his “profound disappointment and concern” about Deham’s “assertion that because men have expressed interest in being mayor, we want to raise the salary” for that position. Mayor Nicole LaChapelle ultimately vetoed a 5-3 City Council vote to boost the mayor’s pay up to a ceiling of $120,000.
“I must take strong exception to the implication that I or others on the council would support or condone such discrimination,” Derby said. “The councilor’s remarks insinuate that gender bias has influenced the decision not to adjust the mayor’s salary sooner.”
“My personal experiences bear witness to these values,” Derby said. “I was raised in a household where my mother was the breadwinner and my father was a stay-home parent. This dynamic instilled in me a deep respect for women’s competence, strength, and leadership.”
At a Jan. 8 City Council meeting, Erin Sullivan spoke to councilors in order to “address” some “disappointing defensiveness from counselors during the last two meetings while discussing gender inequality related to the proposed increase to the mayoral salary.”
“It’s never easy to hear that you may have unintentionally supported a system that disenfranchises certain groups,” Sullivan said. “But it’s your responsibility when presented with this information to listen and use this knowledge to do better moving forward. I would encourage counselors to not hear critiques of systems as personal attacks and instead view them as invitations to work together; that’s the type of culture that’s going to get you more diverse members.”
During Wednesday’s meeting, the chair of the Easthampton Democratic City Committee, Nathan Markee, local activist Jean Frances, and other meeting attendees called for women leadership in the City Council.
Frances suggested Derby should “move over.”
“We need women to speak,” said Frances, who has also been publicly calling for Zaret to resign since 2020. Frances has also been active in the Easthampton social justice organization led by women of color, A Knee Is Not Enough (AKINE).
(Disclosure: The author of this article, Shelby Lee, was also a member of AKINE and has spoken at City Council meetings as part of the group.)
Affordable and Fair Housing Partnership member Kiam Jamrog-McQuaid also called out councilors’ behavior.
“It’s not a secret that there’s a cultural problem on City Council,” Jamrog-McQuaid said. “That women don’t feel safe, that people have left because of the culture.”
Derby was not the only one being asked to step down during Wednesday’s meeting. Parks and Recreation Commissioner Eric Poulin also asked Tamara Smith and Riley to resign.
Earlier, in December, Poulin faced a City Council vote to reject his reappointment to the volunteer committee despite Parks and Recreation Department Director John Mason recommending him for the position and LaChapelle nominating him for re-appointment. Riley, who sits on the city’s Appointment Committee along with Smith, brought forward anonymous concerns of Poulin creating “an intimidating environment” on the Parks and Recreation Committee into a full City Council meeting during a vote on his reappointment to the committee. Poulin has called those allegations into question and accused the councilors of callousness in what he categorized as defamation and using their position of power to “ruin the professional reputations of people who simply offer to volunteer their time in an unpaid capacity to help the city.”
During that Dec. 18 meeting, Smith said she “reviewed evidence of four separate concerns” at the previous appointment committee with Riley. Riley stated during that same meeting that he had “received complaints” about Poulin’s re-appointment from “petitioners, appointees of the city, staff of the city, and members of the public.”
However, a Dec. 23 records request by The Shoestring revealed that Smith “did not receive any copy of the complaints.” Smith said she “only heard about them verbally from councilor Riley.” Riley, meanwhile, said he has no records of the complaints and that he “was certain to have conversations in person to respect people’s anonymity.”
This move by Riley and Smith likely violated open meeting law, something which Riley has denied both in a Jan. 21 interview with The Shoestring and during Wednesday night’s City Council meeting. Smith, however, acknowledged the “misstep” and stated that she was informed after the fact that she violated the state’s open meeting law in doing so. In a phone interview ahead of the Wednesday night meeting, LaChapelle also told The Shoestring that, based on her understanding of open meeting law, the inclusion of the anonymous statements during the meeting broke that law.
When asked about the councilors’ conduct in bringing the anonymous accusations into the City Council meeting, LaChapelle said, “I think it was completely inappropriate and I think it suppresses the very intent of having volunteer committees.”
“Do I really want to apply to be in a volunteer committee if somebody in power can sit there and say, anonymously, ‘I heard XYZ, therefore no?’” she said.
LaChapelle emphasized her point by comparing those volunteer positions with the qualifications necessary to serve as an elected official.
“The requirement to be a city councilor or mayor is you’re 18 and you can vote,” she said. “So I don’t know, to be grilling volunteers who want to be reviewing affordable housing applications, yeah, that is kind of funny to me.”
LaChapelle said she was “disappointed” in Riley as the subcommittee chair related to this incident. “He’s very much about policy and procedure. He’s consistent about it.” She said with this appointment however, he was not. “All of the sudden he doesn’t do it with Eric.” LaChappelle said the typical procedure would have involved reaching out to the candidate, the department head or committee chair, and verification of complaints in the subcommittee.
Riley told The Shoestring that he followed procedures of the Appointment Committee.
“I want to make everything right so as for what you’ve heard tonight,” Riley said at Wednesday’s meeting. He said he did his “due diligence to ensure what the facts actually were” and that he stood by his decision to advance the anonymous complaints because of his personal “morals and ethics.”
During the Dec. 18 meeting, no councilors aside from Jason “JT” Tirrell questioned the allegations against Poulin. Three councilors abstained from voting on the matter, which ultimately kept Poulin on the committee. However, in yet another error, the outcome of the vote was originally announced incorrectly.
In response to The Shoestring’s public records request, Riley also withheld text messages between himself and Smith about the reappointment of Poulin. Smith, however, provided a summary of three messages. In these messages, which Riley claimed not to have, Smith said she texted Riley “I hope that was okay,” to which he responded: “Ty. I hate how I feel. But it was the right thing.”
The Shoestring also obtained records from Riley’s emails that revealed city councilors writing to each other with the entire body copied on the emails. Those kinds of all-member communications violate open meeting law because they essentially mean the body is deliberating, with a quorum, away from the public’s view.
When The Shoestring asked Riley questions about the appointment process in general, and if councilors could ask questions directly to appointees during the full council meeting, Riley said they could. However, according to Riley, as a “rule” councilors generally did not ask questions as it was former council president Homar Gomez’s “philosophy” to accept the recommendations of the subcommittee.
When reached for comment via email, Gomez, who left the council after he ran unopposed for a seat in the state House of Representatives in November, said Riley’s statement was inaccurate.
“I am unsure of Councilor Riley’s intentions, but their statement is inaccurate,” Gomez said. “Councilors routinely ask questions, and the established process accommodates this. Whenever a motion received a proper second, I always invited further discussion, and all appointments followed this procedure.”
Gomez also apologized for originally announcing the results of Poulin’s reappointment commission vote incorrectly in December.
Near the conclusion of Wednesday night’s meeting, Peake said that he knew the commission appointment vote outcome was misrepresented, but didn’t say anything. Next time, however, Peake said he will speak up.
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These recent events are just the top of a growing iceberg of similar instances across municipal committees and commissions, some of which are entirely composed of volunteers.
The School Committee is currently asking for the censure of Zaret due to his high volume of repeated contact to the School Committee and some members individually, requesting to participate in input and conversation related to school curriculum — something that state law and local policies reserve for people in very specific roles.
School Committee member Sam Hunter highlighted in emails to The Shoestring some of the initial challenges in collectively addressing and becoming aware of all the conduct of Zaret because of open meeting laws and communication restriction between committee members.
This incident shares some similarities with a 2021 incident involving Zaret and the volunteer-filled Easthampton Commission on Disability.
At the time, LaChapelle had to intervene in unproductive and repeated communications between Zaret and the chair of the Commission on Disability. Zaret was involved at the time in creating a city ordinance around single use plastic, including straws, and was repeatedly contacting the commission to assert his opposing position to the feedback the commission provided about the plastic straws included in the proposed ordinance.
Plastic straws are a commonly raised disability accessibility issue in conversations and proposals about eliminating or limiting single use plastic, and how this seems at odds with the American with Disabilities Act.
“Straws was a real focus for him,” LaChapelle said of Zaret. She said that when the Commission on Disability recognized his well meaning intentions but raised concerns about the limitations of available alternatives to plastic straws, they were met with a volley of communications from Zaret.
“The tone of the emails — and I don’t know, maybe he was hearing it but maybe not — the tone was basically: ‘I know, you don’t, and this is why I know,’” LaChappelle said. “And he just wouldn’t let go.”
“It was a real campaign to educate, or re-educate or update, the Commission on Disability’s understanding of their own community,” she added.
Zaret has previously described allegations of “harassment” from fellow city councilors as “professional disagreements.” When asked by The Shoestring why he thought these similar allegations around him keep occurring, and if he believed he needed to change anything about his approach to communications with other members of elected bodies, he replied that a “framework” to “resolve disagreements” was needed.
“When I have encountered disagreements or concerns about my conduct or behavior, or witnessed it in others, my first step is to always request a process to get all parties talking to each other,” he said.
As for what should happen when a disagreement can’t be resolved, Zaret said he would “defer to someone with skills in that area.”
“I do feel that sitting down together, as hard as it may be, is an important first step,” he said.
During Wednesday’s meeting, former councilor Margaret “Peg” Conniff also raised concerns leading back to her time as City Council president in 2020 and 2021.
“At any point, if asked a question or for clarification on something from Owen Zaret, I would be demeaned, insulted, harassed, and bullied regularly,” she said. “I have the receipts.”
Her criticism wasn’t aimed at Zaret alone: “I look to a lot of the people on this council, who were at the council at that time, who did nothing.”
Conniff said other councilors told her Zaret “was a good guy” and that “it’ll be fine.”
“But when he’s not a good guy, he’s a very bad guy,” Conniff added.
Zaret was also involved in a previous push to prevent the reappointment of Poulin to the Parks and Recreation Committee in 2021, related to two comments Poulin made on social media.
Parks and Recreation Director John Mason, who also acts as a liaison between the public and the commission, said he had not been contacted by Riley or Zaret about concerns regarding Poulin’s “conduct or service.” Mason also said he hadn’t received anything verbally or in writing about Poulin from commissioners or the commission chair either.
“In my 15 years as Director this is the one and only re-appointment from the Mayor that has been an issue for [the City Council],” Mason said in an email to The Shoestring. “I would certainly support Eric’s reappointment. Eric has extensive knowledge and is passionate about the Parks within our City.”
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This may be an unusual situation regarding a committee reappointment, but some who have submitted committee applications in Easthampton say they have faced inappropriate interrogations from city councilors.
When Louise Jacob submitted an interest in appointment to the School Committee in March of 2023 after two vacancies opened due to resignations, Jacob received an email from Riley stating that he had hesitations about her despite her “impressive qualifications.” Riley said Jacob had recently “implied” he was racist and that he was “troubled” by her public comments and involvement with AKINE, the social justice organization.
“There are in fact serious issues of racism that our school needs to tackle, but we need to be exact in calling it out for what it is, and not just tossing the word around,” Riley wrote. “It both loses its seriousness when it is improperly overused, and it harms effective dialogue.”
Riley then offered Jacob the option “instead of a public question” of submitting to him “a few paragraphs” explaining how to bridge divides in the community, hire a superintendent, and thoughts on creating microaggression training for public officials.
“The reason we’re in this process right now is because public officials weren’t aware of how their words affected others, and public officials didn’t know how to appropriately respond to those actions,” Riley concluded.
The Community Relations Committee, or CRC, is another Easthampton body whose work has been hampered by issues with the City Council.
In September 2020, Gaby Martinez-Stevenson was questioned for 35 minutes by city councilors during an appointment committee meeting when joining the CRC. During that time, Gomez questioned Martinez-Stevenson about her personal Facebook use and Kwiecinski said it was “very disturbing” that she did not return Zaret’s phone calls and instead requested he ask his questions in a public forum.
Martinez-Stevenson stated that this was because she had safety concerns about engaging with Zaret one on one, and said the council should be concerned that Zaret made constituents feel that way.
During a full City Council meeting the following day, Peake said the appointment process felt like it had become a process of “litigating candidates’ personal character in a public forum for volunteer positions.” He said that the council needed to “rethink” the process “because it sucks.”
The CRC was born out of a City SPIRIT (City-Site Problem Identification & Resolution of Issues Together) Report produced in collaboration with city leaders and the U.S. Department of Justice Community Relations Service. That report underscored significant problems within the city including issues of racism, anti-immigrant sentiments, resistance to change, socioeconomic inequity, and lack of awareness among municipal leaders, among other issues.
The CRC was originally designated to have 11 members and was tasked with “the prioritization and implementation of several solutions developed by the community leaders during the City-SPIRIT.”
The CRC currently has only two members and five vacancies, according to the city’s website. The membership of the CRC was reduced in April 2023 due to vacancies and lack of interest, causing the remaining members to be unable to create the quorum required to hold meetings. During the April 2023 City Council meeting in which the membership was reduced, members of the public and Denham pointed to City Council conduct and failure to support the committee as the cause for the dwindling participation.
Other councilors argued that reducing membership would allow the CRC to operate and gain new membership, then come back to the council to increase the total number of members. Councilors from the current council who were on the council at the time — Zaret, Derby, Riley, Peake, and Kwiecinski — voted for the cut. Denham was the only vote against.
Liz Perry, who spoke at the meeting, raised the concern that cuts to the vacant positions might further dissuade diverse voices from joining the committee and harm the growth of the committee. Perry was also a member of AKINE.
At the time of that meeting, the CRC had five members and was appointing a sixth.
When asked about this experience, Martinez-Stevenson, who is married to Poulin and was an AKINE organizer, told The Shoestring in an email that the appointment process was “toxic” and that it “not only showcased the institutional failures of the Easthampton city council, but also the councilors themselves.”
“Not only did I have to go through an individual interview, but myself and another applicant were blindsided by a lengthy, inappropriate interrogation during the appointment subcommittee meeting,” Martinez-Stevenson said.
She added that another candidate who wasn’t at the meeting was approved without question. Then, when her appointment moved to the City Council, she said she had to sit through “councilors clearly out of their depth, discussing the blatant harassment myself and the other candidate (two women of color) went through.”
“While they approved us both, they failed to adequately address the inappropriateness of the appointment committee, censure the councilors responsible for the harassment, or provide the community with any sincere indication that they were going to investigate or address the deeper, underlying issues of the council and their appointment process,” she said. “Issues that clearly continue to this day.”
The Shoestring recently attended an Easthampton Appointment Committee meeting on Jan. 21. This meeting lasted 15 minutes. During this meeting, two people were appointed to significant roles in the city: building commissioner and tax collector.
Each of the candidates was asked just a few questions about their experience directly related to the positions they were interested in. Both were told by the only members of the committee, Smith and Riley, that since they knew them already, they didn’t have that many questions.
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Tommy Lee is a writer, investigative journalist, and audio video producer for community television based in Western Massachusetts.
