Ahhhh...yuh!

Mayor's tour of Fall River
neighborhoods stops at
Watuppa Heights

Mayor Will Flanagan, left, and neighborhood outreach coordinator
 Perry Long walk through an empty courtyard at the nearly vacant
 Watuppa Heights.
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By Grant Welker
Herald News Staff  Propagandist Reporter
Posted Jun 28, 2010 @ 09:25 PM
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FALL RIVER — Mayor Will Flanagan walked through the nearly empty Watuppa Heights housing complex, talked with nearby store owners and listened to a neighborhood group’s concerns while spending an hour Monday morning touring Niagara.

It was the latest stop on the mayor’s plan to tour every neighborhood of the city during his first year in office. Some issues raised Monday echo those heard during other tours, like crime or absentee landlords.

The Niagara neighborhood also includes one of Flanagan’s top priorities in the demolition and redevelopment of Watuppa Heights, a complex of 100 units in 28 two-story buildings, most of which are boarded up. Flanagan walked through the empty courtyard with Perry Long, the city’s neighborhood outreach coordinator.

“It’s like a war zone,” Flanagan said. Around him, windows were covered with plywood. There were no signs of anyone living at the complex, though about a handful of families remain there.

“This is something I need to put on the fast track,” Flanagan said, referring to plans for razing the complex and developing the site with new housing. It is important, he said, that whatever is built at the site doesn’t simply include more low-income housing.

Neighbors of Watuppa Heights, which is at the intersection of Rodman and Warren streets, “deserve something better,” Flanagan said.

Across Rodman Street, next to an abandoned laundromat, an environmentally friendly home is under construction in a partnership with YouthBuild.

Flanagan and Long were led on the tour by Niagara Neighborhood Association members Dino Bissaro and Helen Rego. Walking across Dover Street, Rego pointed out where the pavement was stained from some kind of spill. “This is where we need the street sweepers,” she said.

At Foster and Niagara streets, Bissaro and Rego pointed out a backyard where a neighbor routinely leaves household junk and another where a resident wants to add a garage, despite tightly bordering other homes.

“They pass out (building) permits like candy bars,” Rego said of the city.


The major also stopped by unannounced to a few neighborhood markets and later said he found it “remarkable” that the mom-and-pop stores were able to survive with much larger supermarkets close by.

The owner of one market told Flanagan that she was concerned about “drug activity,” that the store has been tagged with graffiti and that someone had recently broken into cars in the neighborhood.

“We’ve been robbed so many times,” she said, giving a few examples of brazen thefts.


Flanagan and Long said they would pass her concerns on to the right people within the police department. “Hang in there, OK?” Flanagan said, shaking hands before leaving.

E-mail Grant Welker at gwelker@heraldnews.com.

By all means, please "Hang in there, OK?". That's because you've most likely gotten your one and only chance to communicate with Willy Stark Willy Flanagan in your lifetime. Just like the character in the novel "All The King's Men", here's an elected official who tried to be "the people's" man, and turned out to be  the citizen's worst nightmare, making his office an open bazaar to ensure himself a shot at further elective office down the road, all with YOUR money and YOUR votes. And to think, he was barely able to speak a word of truth while doing so.

Is this guy serious about not knowing what Watuppa Heights has looked like the whole time he was running for Mayor? Are you kidding me? I think this character is pouring it on a bit thick, don't you? Nobody who claims to know Fall River as well as he said he did while running for Mayor could possibly be THAT out of touch and stu.....On second thought, I'll let you be the judge.

Watuppa Heights -  Optical illusion or just a vicious rumor? Neither. Rather, it is a well reported on story and controversy for many years in Fall River. I'd call this story by the HN just that, a manufactured puff piece, complete with sympathetic "art" (staged picture) of two lone Argonauts sailing on the roiling seas of urban desolation. They even manage to slip in there a well placed quote reflecting widely held popular sentiment "that whatever is built at the site doesn’t simply include more low-income housing". Good lord, could a situation comedy on TV be any more contrived? I doubt it.

Is this article for real ? I'm afraid so. You couldn't scrape up more dog mess from the gutters of Calcutta than what's being printed in the pages of the HN these days.  And frankly, the dog mess would stink less. That odor is the smell of rancid propaganda, of bald faced favoritism. There is absolutely no coincidence that the editor's boyfriend was on the Mayor's transition team. That's just about the only transparent thing in the Flanagan administration up to this point. Remember that when you SMILE! (ARRRGGGHHHH)


"It's like a war zone" Sure it is, Mr. Mayor. That's how the local mom and pop stores in the area survived this whole time: selling cigs and lighters and rolling papers and scratch tickets to scores of drug dealers and doers. The poor honest citizens of this area have been living through this for years. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN MR. CONCERNED? Oh yeah, right, on your "walking tour/photo ops", or meeting behind closed doors making deals in the name of the people of Fall River, deals that should have been at least discussed with members of the City Council. You ever heard of calling up the President of the City Council to arrange for an Executive Session? You folks on the School Committee, which you chair, call them all the time? And don't BS me Mr. Mayor, I've sat in on many an executive session in my time, don't EVEN try telling the people of Fall River that you ALWAYS only talk about a specific subject when IN executive session! As Willy Stark would have said "That dog won't hunt". And the people of Fall River are beginning to see just what has been going on since you've been Mayor. I don't think they like what they see.
 
But maybe you could make that the next walking tour.....talking to all those blades of grass up on the 300 acres originally set aside for the Bio-Park. I have this feeling it's going to be one long, lonely walkabout for you up there. But the photo's should be spectacular!