On Friday’s Boston Public Radio, nine-term Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone, who announced on Monday that he won’t be running for reelection, used a football analogy to double down on his criticism of Gov. Charlie Baker's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Bill Belichick,” he explained, “plans ahead. He strategizes, he’s ready to adjust and pivot given the games’ circumstances.” Alternatively, he continued, “You can draw rocks and sticks … plays in the dirt. I submit the latter as the best way to describe how the Commonwealth’s taken on the pandemic.”
Curtatone has been an ongoing and vocal critic of Baker’s pandemic response, beginning with Baker’s decision to partially reopen businesses back in July. More recently, he wrote an op-ed for Commonwealth Magazine expressing opposition to the governor’s decision to move vaccine doses from local, municipal vaccination sites to regional collaboratives and mass vaccination sites.
And on Friday, he continued to lament the administration's performance, responding specifically to a Boston Globe report detailing how Baker abandoned a vaccine distribution blueprint two decades and millions of dollars in the making, opting to instead lean on a handful of young, privately-owned companies.
“To say it’s a head-scratcher, I’m being kind,” Curtatone said, adding that his own team expressed “disbelief” to Baker’s earlier Friday morning.
Watch: Somerville & Weymouth Mayors Debate Governor Baker’s Reopening Plan
“Years of experience and planning, whether it’s in administering flu vaccines or developing emergency preparedness plans at the local level, have been totally abandoned,” he said, while stressing that Massachusetts has the fourth-highest COVID-19 death rate in the U.S., per capita.
Commenting on his newly-announced plans to leave office, Curtatone dismissed rumors of any broader political ambitions in the near-term.
“I don’t have a job,” he said. “I haven’t asked for one and no one’s called, and I’m not going anywhere until my duties are finished.”
Curtatone has served as mayor for the city of 80,000 since 2004 and is its long-serving leader. His successor will take office in early January of next year.
“You wanna leave before you wanna leave, and if I was excited that meant I waited too long,” he said, adding, “I’m gonna have to decide what I want to be when I grow up, eventually.”
