A city councilor desperate to solve Somerville’s rat problem invited an environmental activist and expert to speak, then cut her off when her presentation didn’t seem to offer the desired answers – at least, not quickly.
The presentation about the dangers of rodenticides by Laura Kiesel to a Rodent Issues Special Committee on Feb. 29 was “repetitive” and “abused” the officials’ time, Ward 4 city councilor Jesse Clingan said at the time.
Toward the end of the meeting Clingan offered that “I didn’t mean to get upset earlier,” and he later apologized and said he’s tried to make amends.
Clingan is chair for the Rodent Issues Special Committee and had invited Kiesel to give her presentation on rat poisons as founder of Save Arlington Wildlife and someone who has a background in wildlife biology and natural resources management. Kiesel said she’s been advocating on rodenticide issues for nearly a decade.
Her goals are explicit (including in a Jan. 22 essay in Cambridge Day) and Clingan introduced her Feb. 29 by explaining that his goal was an abbreviated version of a Jan. 23 presentation held by Green & Open Somerville at the Central Library.
Councillors apparently didn’t know what they were in for.
Not cut down enough for councilors
Kiesel said her presentation, which explains how poisons travel up the food chain as predators eat rats, is normally 45 minutes, but she cut it down to about 20 for the committee meeting. At around the 10-minute mark, Clingan stopped her the first time.
“Sorry, I don’t mean to cut you off, I mean, this is like, probably well suited for a TED Talk,” Clingan said to Kiesel. “I get it, poisons are bad. If we don’t use the poisons, how do we control rats?”
In response, Kiesel said her presentation would get to that, but she wanted to give a history on the use of rodenticides first.
“You asked me to give an abbreviated version of the PowerPoint. I’m glad to try to speed it up a little bit but I think that this is important to just give a little bit of a background,” she said.
Clingan stopped her presentation for the second around the 20-minute mark. Kiesel said that she only had a few slides left at that time.
“I think we pretty much get the picture – the poisons are not good for the environment,” Clingan said.
Kiesel did ask if she could finish her presentation but was unable when Clingan allowed for Ward 1 councilor Matthew McLaughlin to speak. Perceiving that Kiesel had criticized city staff, McLaughlin said he wanted to hear from the environmental health coordinator Colin Zeigler.
Audio from the meeting reveals only that Kiesel referred to Zeigler as a colleague passing information onward – yet Clingan interrupted her to say “I really don’t like you calling somebody out by name” and that he didn’t “want this to be a debate.” When McLaughlin spoke, it was because he wanted to “hear a rebuttal from Colin and Inspectional Services.”
Kiesel and city staff were generally aligned on policies around decreasing the rat population.
Awkward moment
In trying to hurry the conversation along, Clingan said he just wanted to hear about “innovative ideas about how to get rid of rats” and stumbled into another awkward moment. “I was hoping there was gonna be some new thing that that rodents eat and they kind of get high and just died a happy death or something,” Clingan said.
When Clingan made that comment, Kiesel said she flinched.
“I come from a family of people with addiction,” she said later. “I know maybe that wasn’t his intention. But I was kind of shocked that he made such a flippant comment about overdose and death even if you’re talking about rats.”
In an interview with Cambridge Day, Clingan said that “wasn’t my intent at all.” He added that since before he became an elected official, he has opposed stigma around addiction.
It was around this time in the meeting that Kiesel said Morgan Penny from Save Somerville Wildlife spoke up in support of Kiesel.
“Jesse, can I just interrupt for a second, because I just want to thank Laura for the time that she’s given us,” Penny said. “You said you were disappointed and you were very dismissive.”
There was some crosstalk. Clingan tried to impose order.
“I’ll just end the meeting now, honestly, I can’t have people just talking out. I’m the chair, I have feelings and opinions, and I’ve can make them and state them,” he said. “I’ve invited you all, and given you our time to listen and quite frankly, I think a little bit of it was abused. It was very sort of repetitive.”
Regrets
Kiesel said she was “incredulous” at and “floored” by Clingan’s comments.
“I’m not going to say I’ve never witnessed rude or inappropriate behavior in a municipal meeting, but I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it by that high-ranking of an elected official on this particular topic where I’ve been invited as a speaker,” Kiesel said.
After the meeting, she said she received several emails from attendees saying they were “horrified or really upset watching him speak to me like that.”
Kiesel reached out to council president Ben Ewen-Campen to file a code-of-conduct violation complaint against Clingan. “The only other thing he offered besides ‘vote them out’ is you could submit a public comment and it’ll be discussed at an upcoming City Council meeting,” she said.
Ewen-Campen declined to comment.
In the interview with Cambridge Day, Clingan apologized to anybody he may have offended.
“I never set out to offend anybody with this. I never set out to do any harm,” Clingan said. “I really feel badly toward Laura. I did try to email her to reach out to apologize to her for any embarrassment I may have caused.”
“Lots of rats and very little else”
The councilors’ abruptness reflected desperation for answers to a problem they experience in a city where upward of 60 percent of residents are renters, some turning over frequently and making education around rat prevention difficult. “The quality of life in Somerville is depleting very fast. It ruined my summer. I can’t go out into the backyard at this point,” Clingan said. “There were rats in my grill. The rats are everywhere.”
He also didn’t arrive at the meeting thinking poison was the answer, he said, and suspected it was the reason the city’s once-large population of possums and racoons are gone. “We now have lots of rats and very little else,” Clingan said.
Staff said some of the issues Kiesel was invited to speak on were understood: The city and its Department of Public Works has decided to get rid of rodenticide use on public property such as schools and parks and change the bait in residential traps to one with less risk of secondary poisoning for birds of prey who eat rats. Among other methods of population control, they plan to do more pumping of carbon monoxide into burrows and work with Cambridge on trying rat-infertility drugs to see if breeding rates drop.
“The mayor’s office has advised DPW to work on their contracts to get rid of rodenticides. Those changes are happening now,” said Alicia Privett, the city’s environmental health coordinator
Referring to her own presentation of anti-rat efforts to the special committee, “most of it kind of echoes what Laura was saying,” Privett said.
A stronger
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Poor staff work. In the corporate world, nobody would ever get to present to the board of directors without a lower-level employee reviewing the presentation first (and perhaps even multiple times).
Clingan did himself no favors in the meeting itself, and either he or an aide should already have had a long talk with Kiesel and seen her presentation.
Completely disrespectful and unacceptable. Absolutely no way he would have acted this way if she were a man. The Patriarchal dismissal of the expertise of women has no place in Somerville, particularly in elected office.
The only person who was abusing time of others was Clingan who invited her to speak but clearly preferred to hear comforting lies over uncomfortable truths.
Sounds like the only real winners here were Rats. Bummer.
There’s an item for Participatory Budgeting to vote on this week in Cambridge for the purchase of 250 additional “Smart Traps.”
https://pb.cambridgema.gov/pb10_rattraps
Cambridge apparently caught 929 rats during 2023 with the 40 Smart Boxes it has. I’m guessing Smart Boxes weren’t mentioned because too expensive?
Sounds like a typical politician. Not intererested in understanding the issue, but instead looking for two-word supposed answers. More poison, less poison, green poison, red poison. Something that fits into the mouth for a quick soundbite.