Robert Van Campen won the mayor’s office in Everett last November by promising a calmer, more transparent City Hall after 17 years of Carlo DeMaria. Nine months in, he has had a week in which City Hall was literally closed, and how his administration handled it says something about the government he is trying to build.
The election he won
DeMaria was Everett’s longest-serving mayor and presided over the city’s transformation from an industrial town into a development magnet, with Encore Boston Harbor as the centerpiece and a 25,000-seat soccer stadium as the unfinished business. He also drew scrutiny from the state inspector general over about $180,000 in “longevity” bonuses he received. Van Campen, a city councillor, beat him by nearly 700 votes on November 4, 2025, part of a night in which voters in Somerville and Gloucester also turned out incumbents.
“It’s time for our community to come together and solve real problems,” Van Campen said that night. “I’m hoping we can put the divisions of the recent past behind us.” His stated first priorities were the schools and overcrowding, and working with school leadership rather than around it.
He inherited two large agreements signed in DeMaria’s final weeks: the Wynn hotel and commuter rail deal announced January 6, and the Kraft Group stadium agreement of December 31. He said he supported the core of the hotel deal, and added a line that summed up his posture toward his predecessor: “My hope is that my predecessor, through due diligence, did make that happen with these deals.”
The week City Hall closed
At about 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 6, the city discovered an intrusion into its internal network. The next day was Labor Day. On Tuesday the city announced City Hall would be closed to the public, and it stayed closed Wednesday and Thursday. As of Friday the city had not announced a reopening date.
What the administration did in response is worth cataloguing, because it is the kind of thing residents only notice when it goes badly.
The first public statement came Monday, within 24 hours, on the city’s website, and it said plainly what was known and what was not: an incident affecting internal systems, an investigation under way, essential staff only. It named which services were unaffected, including police, fire, 911, public works, schools and libraries, and noted that online bill payment ran through outside vendors and still worked. It did not speculate about the cause.
By Tuesday the city had a workaround running. Nine departments, from the Treasurer and City Clerk to Inspectional Services and Housing Assistance, set up at the Connolly Center on Chelsea Street from 9 to 5, with parking in the stadium lot and an accessible rear entrance. Residents were told to call 311. The city updated its notice each day with the same structure, and the mayor’s quotes moved from “our priority is to ensure the security of our systems” to “our IT professionals and investigators are working around the clock.”
School Superintendent William Hart was able to say the schools were untouched because they run on a separate network, which is a decision made years earlier that paid off this week.
What is still unanswered
The administration has not said what kind of attack it was, whether any data was taken, whether a ransom was demanded, or what recovery will cost. Those are the questions that will define whether this week is remembered as a well-managed inconvenience or the start of something longer. Attleboro, hit last November, was still rebuilding servers weeks later. Andover, hit in August, later found itself named on a ransomware gang’s leak site.
There is also the question of what Everett had done beforehand. The state offers free cybersecurity assessments and in June awarded its first $1 million in remediation grants to 20 communities; the city has not said whether it took part. Everett had already been through one cyber problem on Van Campen’s watch: the December breach of the CodeRED alert vendor exposed residents’ names, phone numbers, emails and passwords, and the city switched to Everbridge in January.
The rest of the agenda
The cyberattack interrupted an otherwise ordinary late-summer stretch for a first-year mayor. On August 31 Van Campen stood in Glendale Park for International Overdose Awareness Day and talked about his own brother, who died of an overdose last year. “I can’t say enough how proud I am of him, his fight and everything he did,” he said. The city’s numbers that day were the kind a mayor wants to read out: 130 overdoses reported in 2018, 34 in 2025, and fatal overdoses down from 12 in 2021 to 4 last year.
He has been at the Connolly Center to celebrate Little League, announced the September 27 Golden Gears bikeshare clinic for residents over 50, and put his name on the Citizens Foundation’s June grant round. “The strength of Everett comes from people who step up to serve their neighbors,” he said then.
None of that is the test. The test is the one that arrived at 6:30 on a Sunday night, and it is not over.