Chelsea’s District 7 has a city councillor. What it does not reliably have is a councillor in the chair when the clerk calls the roll. Manuel Teshe has now missed 22 of the 59 roll-call votes the City Council has taken this year, more than twice as many as any colleague. He has missed six of fifteen meetings outright. Twice this year he has come late and left early on the same night. On Monday he arrived three minutes after the call to order, stepped out for the vote on the downtown Broadway reconstruction, came back, and was gone again for the last vote of the night. No reason was given for any of it, because nothing in Chelsea’s rules requires one.
This is not a complaint about a bad vote. It is a complaint about no vote.
The record
The numbers come from the clerk’s minutes, the only record the city keeps. We laid them out two weeks ago: absent from the March 3 special meeting on the council’s own rules, the regular meetings of March 9, March 23 and April 27, the June 22 special meeting, and the August 17 special meeting that set up the state primary. On June 8 he arrived at 7:35 p.m., stayed for the budget and the West Chelsea overlay, and left; the minutes mark him absent for the seven roll calls that followed, including a $15.4 million sewer loan. On September 14 the minutes record him late at 7:04 and absent for the 7-to-0 vote sending the Broadway layout plan to the Planning Board and the 4-to-3 vote on Rule 31 that closed the meeting at 9:46. He was in the room for the votes in between. Twenty minutes before the Broadway roll call he voted to accept the Brooks Law donation; forty minutes before that he was on the microphone asking the City Manager about condominium meters.
He also chairs the Subcommittee on Planning, Development and Transportation. It has met once this year, on February 9.
What he says when he is there
Fairness requires the other half of the record. When Teshe is present he is one of the more active members: 27 motions under suspension this year, the March 30 motion that sent the City Manager’s housing rewrite back for revision, a no vote on the $275,000 inclusionary fee that put him with the fiscal skeptics. On Monday he gave the sharpest speech of the night against creating a Chief Economic Development Officer without a salary figure: “We’re talking about a $100,000 position at the very least.” He was right to ask. Then, an hour and a half later, when the council took its last roll call, the seat was empty.
Nothing he has missed was decided by a margin his vote would have changed. That is true, and it is the weakest defense available to an elected official, because it describes a council that votes unanimously, not a councillor who showed up. The votes that split this year, 6 to 5 on the housing fee and 5 to 3 on the economic development officer, are the ones where District 7’s voice counted, and he was there for those. The pattern is that he is there for the headline and gone for the rest.
Why it matters more in Chelsea
Under the charter the council is the only elected body that oversees the City Manager. It cannot fire a department head or fix a pothole. What it can do is vote, and the votes it takes late in the evening, after the resolutions and the donations, are the ones that move money and land: the Broadway layout, the prior-year bills, the referral that decides whether a $100,000 hire gets a hearing. A councillor who is gone before the last roll call leaves those to the members who stayed, none of whom was elected by District 7.
Teshe was 23 when he won the seat and has never faced an opponent. He works full time in Boston on immigration cases and told the council Monday, “I’m not an attorney yet, but I’ll be in about a year.” Every one of those facts is to his credit, and none of them is the district’s problem. A Chelsea council seat is a part-time office that meets on Mondays, roughly twice a month, plus committee work. If the day job and the bar exam have made that impossible this year, the honest course is to say so and let the district decide whether it can wait. The dishonest course is silence, and silence is what the record shows.
What should happen
Three things, in ascending order of difficulty.
First, Teshe should explain his absences publicly, at a meeting, on the record. His colleagues Norieliz DeJesus and Tanairi Garcia missed Monday’s meeting entirely, and the council president told the public why before the first item: their children were sick. That took ten seconds and answered the question. Teshe has offered nothing for six meetings and 22 votes.
Second, the council should adopt an attendance rule for itself. The charter already deems a member of an appointed board to have vacated the seat after three months of missed meetings, and the Charter Review Committee, meeting Tuesday, has a proposal to tighten that further. Both exclude the council. A body that is about to require attendance of volunteer commissioners while exempting its own paid members will have a hard time explaining the difference. The minimum is what most legislatures already do: record the reason for an absence, and publish it.
Third, and only if the first two fail, District 7 should have the chance to choose someone else. The next municipal election is in 2027. Teshe has never faced an opponent. Whether that stays true is up to the people who live there, and the point of this editorial is to make sure they have the record in front of them when they decide.
The council-manager charter that four city managers celebrated on stage last week rests on an elected body that shows up. Seven of eleven councillors were still in their seats for Monday’s last vote; two of the others were home with sick children, and the president said so from the chair. Teshe should either stay for the vote or tell his district why he cannot.