Councilor brings color to office

In the great gray-brown concrete lattice that is Boston’s City Hall, City Councilor Felix Arroyo’s office is a rare burst of vibrant color.

Artwork brilliant collages in blues, oranges and reds hangs on the textured walls and a round glass plate etched with a dove sits propped up on a large table.

While students may know him best for his proposal to force them to pay up on their debts to the city of Boston, the Puerto Rican native and former professor in Boston University’s Metropolitan College has an agenda that extends far beyond parking tickets. Just as his office brings a breath of humanity to City Hall, the first-year city councilor seeks to bring humanitarian concerns into the city government.

AN ‘AUTOMATIC’ ACTIVIST

Arroyo came to Boston from Puerto Rico in 1976 ‘a full lifetime ago,’ he joked.

This, he noted, was two years after the desegregation movement in the Boston Public Schools, a time when racial tensions in the Boston area ran high. The amount of discrimination and prejudice in the Boston area at the time was dispiriting, Arroyo said.

‘What you see first is the amount of universities, the quality of medical care, the financial power of the city … the one that’s called the Athens of America,’ he said. ‘You come to the city and find people make decisions based on the color of skin.’

Arroyo recalled a ‘feeling of disappointment, that people are unable to see in a place like Boston beyond color … it sounds so immature. I couldn’t believe that that was Boston.’

This disappointment, he said, encouraged him to take action.

‘It made me an activist automatically,’ he said. ‘I’ve been one ever since.’

Arroyo’s activism is evident from the Cesar Chavez poster outside his office to his presence at peace rallies to a slightly more personal duty. He fasted for peace 12 hours a day a one-man protest of the United States’ actions in Iraq.

He began the 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. fast just as hostilities were beginning to escalate. Now, with the main conflict drawing to a close, Arroyo has cut back his fast to Fridays only, but still holds out in hopes that the United States and the world at large will seek peaceful solutions to conflicts.

‘It’s a way for me to reflect on the fact that we think the solution to our problems is to kill each other,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid of this being a regular policy that we have.’

The hunger, Arroyo said, has not interfered with his duties as a city councilor. He takes a vitamin daily, which keeps his energy up, he said.

‘[Fasting] is not a bad thing,’ he said. ‘By being a little hungry, you reflect … it’s not even a sacrifice in comparison. After 6 [p.m.] I eat a very good meal many people in the world do not.’

Though his form of protest has been somewhat personal and low-key, Arroyo said he supported the thousands of demonstrators who took part in peace rallies across the city.

‘I think the protests also signal the reality of democracy,’ he said. ‘The people have and shall exercise the right to protest policies done in their name that they do not support.’

He also commended Boston’s police force for maintaining order in a large crowd without outbreaks of violence.

‘The protests went without incident,’ he said. ‘The police were not provocative. This makes a big difference how the police react.’

The protests, Arroyo said, are a good sign and it was not necessary to be in favor of the war to support the United States.

‘People believe that in order to support the U.S., they have to support the war. Our country’s not equivalent to war or at least it shouldn’t be.’

PARKING TICKETS

Perhaps Arroyo’s best-known policy, at least among students, is his effort to urge Boston-area colleges to hold the transcripts and diplomas of students with outstanding parking tickets to the city.

‘It is another tool to make sure people pay their debt to the city,’ Arroyo said.

Most criticisms of the proposal have come from students, he said. However, they can avoid having their transcripts held by simply not parking illegally.

‘If they don’t want to [have diplomas or transcripts held], don’t stop at a hydrant or in a handicapped space or park on the corner so the police and firefighters can’t get through,’ he said. ‘Just obey the law.’

The proposal, Arroyo said, is currently before a city committee that is working with area schools to forge an agreement on the issue, as well as hold meetings to get public opinion.

Its success, he said, will rely heavily on the willingness of universities to cooperate.

‘It’s not something we want to force,’ he said. ‘The intention is to ease the process by mutual agreement.’

Reaction from his fellow city councilors has been positive, Arroyo said.

‘Anything we can do to recover money due to the city of Boston,’ he said.

FISCAL MATTERS

As the state of Massachusetts and the city of Boston face one of the tightest budgets in history, Arroyo said he remains staunchly opposed to trimming the budget by cutting personnel.

‘How do you say to a person, ‘we are not going to require your service anymore … because we are going to balance the budget by getting rid of your position?”

Cutting employees, Arroyo said, simply leads to a downward spiral, as fewer jobs lead to fewer consumers, thus perpetuating the cycle of economic decline.

‘It doesn’t help the economy of the city to have residents without employment in the city.’

The city of Boston has suffered from the state’s cuts to local aid, Arroyo said, due in great part to its lack of taxable land and what he sees as an unfair system of forcing each town in Massachusetts to bear an equal burden.

One quarter of the land in Boston is occupied by the state of Massachusetts, Arroyo said, reducing one of its main source of incomes property taxes by 25 percent. In addition, the city’s 33 institutions of higher learning and its hundreds of churches and non-profit organizations, as well as the city government itself, all occupy non-taxable land.

This, Arroyo said, is unfair, especially when some towns in the state are able to tax all or almost all of their land. He cited the need for a distinction between equality and equity.

‘Equity has to be based on the level of need,’ he said. ‘The state is not fair in its distribution of local aid … I want to make sure they understand that.’

Arroyo also emphasized the need for equity in taxation, saying that the current federal and state tax systems favor corporations over middle-class citizens.

‘In the guise of incentives, we’ve returned taxes to corporations,’ he said. ‘This money doesn’t come back in salaries; it comes in profit.

‘Those with less pay more,’ he said. ‘That’s the way the budget with Romney is.’

The federal and state governments, Arroyo said, ‘have decided that less is good … that firing people is good for the economy.’

Under these policies, he contended, ‘money will continue to concentrate in a few places.’

Arroyo said he has no qualms with working with state and federal legislators or influencing policies outside the local sphere.

‘I don’t look at the three levels of government as disconnected,’ he said. ‘It’s a government for the same people at three levels.

‘I have a responsibility to have an oversight role as to how state and federal government affect Boston.’

‘OUR BEST RESOURCE’

The six areas of concern Arroyo outlines as his primary focus sound much like those of any other municipal politician health issues, environmental issues, economic vitality, housing, education and safety. Arroyo, however, said he takes a distinctive angle when addressing them.

‘I want to approach them from the humane perspective,’ he said. ‘How do we deal with our best resource human beings?’

He offered the example of safety, citing one of his main goals, a revamped system of reintegrating prisoners into society. The key to former prisoners entering society, he said, is to provide education and rehabilitation in order to keep them from committing crimes again.

Without proper rehabilitation, he said, ‘we throw them back into the community with new bags of tricks and without resources and then we get surprised they commit crimes again.

‘Unless we deal with that, we shall forget about safety,’ he said.

The overriding issue in all government policies, Arroyo said, is humanity and this should be the cornerstone of civic life as well.

‘It’s about how ready we are to take responsibility for each other it’s a basic requirement of society,’ he said. ‘We are failing on that because we are getting accustomed to the idea that things are there, and those who don’t have it don’t because they didn’t grab it.

‘That’s not right,’ he said. ‘It’s not even civilized.’