Since voting to disband in October the future of the Gove Street Citizens Assocation’s (GSCA) has been in limbo for close to three months. After GSCA secretary Nat Taylor left a void in the community group, former GSCA Chair Lorraine Curry made several pleas to non-board members to step up and fill Taylor’s position.
With no one from the community answering Curry’s call for help the others on the board were either unwilling or unable to pick up the extra slack created by Taylor’s departure.
Curry announced at GSCA October’s meeting that nine of the eleven remaining board members had resigned and the group would be ‘dissolved’.
Luckily, a small group of volunteers have decided to re-establish the community group and will hold the first meeting of the GSCA since October on Monday, January 24 at 6:30 pm via Zoom.
Neelesh Batra announced last week that the group would continue.
“A small group of volunteers has come together to keep GSCA running,” she said. “We are planning to have our regularly scheduled meeting this month on Monday, January 24, 2022, at 6:30pm.”
Residents can register for GSCA’s first meeting in months at https://govestreet.org/meetings/.
The agenda of next Monday’s meeting will include a welcome and introduction of the new board volunteers, an announcement from The Trustees, Boston Waterfront Initiative’s Gabriela Ramirez on the Piers Park Phase III project as well as an introduction of the two candidates, Tania Del Rio and Gabriela Coletta, who are running for the District 1 City Councilor seat. The two candidates will have 10 minutes each to address the community.
The news in October that GSCA was disbanding came as a shock to non-board members like Peter Doliber who felt one board member’s exit shouldn’t have created such a drastic decision by the rest of the board.
Doliber said that there was too much at stake, like the several large development projects proposed for the Gove Street area, to abruptly dissolve the community group.
It seems Doliber’s pleas for others to step up and continue the group were not in vain.
Between 1974 and 2005 the GSCA helped safeguard the Ward 1, Precinct 2 neighborhood and was reactivated in 2015 by longtime community activists Jack and the late Gina Scalcione.
The decision to reactivate the GSCA was due to Jack and Gina Scalcione’s opinion that there was inadequate representation of the Precinct 2 area. With a recent increase of small and large scale project developments like the Mount Carmel Project the group got back to work protecting the small Eastie enclave and has been a solid community advisory group for the past six years.