brendan halpin

Today’s the third day of the heat emergency in Boston. It’s supposed to hit 96 today with a dewpoint of 70 degrees, which equates to: miserably hot.

The city of Boston has 18 cooling centers open. Good for them. The city also has a partnership with five museums, so the Museum of Science, the ICA, the JFK Library and the Edward Kennedy Museum of Sexual Harassment—sorry, Edward Kennedy Institute for the US Senate (tomato tomahto) are all open for free so people can get cool.

All of this is good. But today is a holiday, so public libraries are closed. Which means vital, possibly lifesaving cooling is unavailable to a lot of people. Check out the City’s own map and look at the huge chunk of densely-populated Dorchester that doesn’t have an indoor cooling center open (City cooling centers are represented by snowflakes):

Also note that there are five libraries in the map area (they’re represented by the little “book with a roof over it” icon) with no other free indoor cooling facilities. The spray icons are for spray decks and splash pools, which are good, but maybe not great for an 80 year old or someone in an electric wheelchair.

The city could have opened libraries today. This would have involved paying overtime to a lot of library employees. So the city chose not to do it. Presumably there’s no room in the budget for it.

But remember, budgets don’t just grow organically—they are the result of choices made by the people who make the budgets.

I live near the construction of the new White Stadium, which desperately needed renovation, but make no mistake: the City of Boston is building a stadium instead of helping residents stay cool today.

At this construction site, there are usually two or three Boston Police officers making at least 75 dollars an hour to do nothing. They literally stand there for eight hours doing nothing. Actually sometimes they sit in their cars doing nothing. This is the Boston Police overtime budget at “work.” You’ll see similar scenes all over the city wherever construction or utility work is going on. The police overtime budget was level funded even as the school budget was cut this year because the people who make decisions in our city think that it’s more important to have cops standing idle outside of construction sites than teachers in classrooms. And that it’s more important to have cops standing idle than to open libraries during a heat wave.

But maybe churches are open today. Certainly the mayor could be calling on the city’s faith community to help serve the community at large. After all, they leech off city services without contributing anything to the city’s tax base. The least they could do is throw open their doors to help their neighbors stay cool. Maybe some are doing that—I checked the websites of some prominent churches and found nothing.

This isn’t our first potentially deadly heat wave and it won’t be our last. Hell, it probably won’t be the last one this summer. Our local and state governments have a responsibility to their citizens, and they are failing to meet it. They’re failing to recognize the seriousness of the climate emergency (Yes, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts still operates Hanscom Field, an airport for private jets, lest John Fish have to fly commercial) and they’re failing to prioritize the needs of broke, hot citizens over the needs of Weymouth-dwelling cops with boat payments.

Boston and Massachusetts are villainized nationally by fascists, who talk about our extreme left-wing government. I wish it were true, but I’d settle for even slightly left-wing at this point.