The Everett City Council unanimously voted no confidence in Mayor Carlo DeMaria after a Massachusetts Inspector General report found that the city had overpaid him $180,000 and leveled claims of impropriety by DeMaria and his administration regarding the payments.
On Monday, the Everett City Council moved to vote first on the vote of no confidence, which was sponsored by seven of the 11 council members.
The resolution, number 23, was to find a “vote of no confidence in the Mayor & CFO,” according to the agenda. The text of the resolution, which was a summary of Massachusetts Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro’s Feb. 27 letter to the council sharing the conclusions of his three-year investigation, was read aloud ahead of the vote.
In short, Shapiro found that the city of Everett had overpaid the mayor $180,000 in “longevity” payments. Such payments were enacted by a resolution passed by the council on Oct. 11, 2016, in which the city would pay the mayor $10,000 for each completed term and $10,000 for each completed term before the ordinance was in effect.
Shapiro found that the city paid DeMaria $30,000 in retroactive longevity payments before the ordinance was enacted and improperly advanced an unauthorized $1,700 payment to DeMaria for non-union department head longevity. It also found, as summarized in the clerk’s reading of the ordinance, “his administration concealed the longevity payments from the city, City Council, and the public.”
The vote was the first item of Monday night’s meeting following public comment. The last speaker of the comment period was resident Paula Sterite, who expressed unhappiness with the mayor’s alleged ethics violations and compared the situation unfavorably to that of Boston City Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson, who is facing federal fraud charges for her own payment scandal.
“What is really baffling is that a Boston City Councilor is arrested at her home for $7,500, but here in Everett we’re talking about over $180,000 and now we have to ask the mayor to pay it back,” Sterite said.
“If all of this was above board and legit, then the one question I have is why wasn’t it listed under the mayor’s longevity line item in the budget and it was buried in the buybacks where nobody would be looking for it?” she added, before saying that she hopes the council puts the mayor, the city’s chief financial officer and anyone else in the report on administrative leave until an audit can be concluded.
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