5 Questions For: Yenni Desroches, Worcester D5 Council Candidate

WORCESTER, MA — Worcester residents living in City Council District 5 will get a new City Councilor this year. Four people are running to replace Councilor Matthew Wally, who is running in 2021 for an At-Large City Council seat.

Worcester Patch has asked each District 5 candidate to answer a questionnaire to help voters get to know them better ahead of the Sept. 14 primary, which will narrow the field down to two candidates.

Yenni Desroches, 33, is the former owner of a pet sitting business and volunteered on Andrew Yang's 2020 presidential campaign (Yang has also helped Desroches' campaign). As a former video game developer, Desroches is also advocating for more technology solutions to problems in Worcester, from traffic to the city website.

Here's what Desroches had to say about her 2021 bid for the District 5 seat:

D5 will have a new Councilor in November. What would you do differently than the current representative?

We need to focus on bringing Worcester fully into the 21st century. We can become the model for mid-size cities across the country by responsibly updating our neighborhoods, streets, policies and procedures, and especially our technology usage. If we want to be better, Worcester needs tangible change. We need to be an ally to small businesses, not court large corporations with tax rebates. I will also encourage the city to meet its deadlines and give regular updates on its projects, for example, the new city council website that was to be launched in February, but still hasn’t been published. Being a city councilor will be my only job, so my recusals will be rare to none. There are too many issues facing the district that need attention for someone to devote only part of their time to fix them.

Residents are still waiting on the City Council to resolve the safety issues at the Heard and Clover intersection. There have been frequent empty promises to address this intersection, but nothing has been even started. The southern half of the district has largely been ignored. We need to do more for the Webster Square area as it is clear that it needs revitalization, yet the city has failed to take action. We need to work with groups like the Webster Square Business Association and create a revitalization plan to support and attract new local businesses.

If you could have your way, what kind of transportation upgrades would you make in D5? This could be for vehicles, but please include thoughts on trails, bike infrastructure, and pedestrian upgrades.

When I think of transportation upgrades, I see the need for improvement in all modes of transportation. The city has solely focused on improvements for drivers for too long to the detriment of pedestrian and cyclist safety. I'm in favor of dedicated and protected bike lanes, separated physically from the roadway by barriers or parking. I would love maps of the trails in our beautiful parks to be available on the city website for people to view with information on the types of trails they are, as well as listing ones with accessibility and stroller-friendly features.

We need to improve the repair and maintenance of our roads with technology like the infrared patching machine the city is considering purchasing with ARPA funds. We also need to look at lowering speeds on major roads to 25 mph, 20 mph on side streets. The chance of a pedestrian being seriously injured or killed if struck by a car is 45 percent if the car is traveling at 30 mph but only 5 percent at 20 mph.

We see frequent calls for additional sidewalks, yet to add them, we require the property owner to pay for it, instead of it being treated as a public good. This same issue arises with converting our 80 miles of private roads to public roads. We need a program to address this without placing undue tax burdens on residents. Our existing sidewalks also need to be repaired in a timely manner. One repair finally happening this year was initially approved by the city council in 1997.

Bus routes need expansion, re-routing, and improved accessibility. The hub and spoke without a wheel model we currently use no longer serves the needs of our city and its residents. We need to solve the lack of interconnectivity between routes to allow for transfers. In turn, this will increase the speed and efficiency at which people can get to their destination.

The City Council voted 8-3 in March to adopt ShotSpotter Connect. How would you have voted and why?

I would have voted no on ShotSpotter Connect because it is an untested, beta pilot program for AI-driven policing that we were forced into on a narrow timeline as an incentive to discount the expansion of ShotSpotter Flex. The city council was not given the ability to do their due diligence in researching alternative options. Instead, they got marketing pitches. The company creating the program refused outside confirmation of the lack of bias in their system and the data they operate from, which is a huge red flag, and no alternative companies were even considered. Regarding ShotSpotter Flex, there have been multiple reports from other major cities that participated in the pilot program so far that have since left. An independent study in Chicago showed that 86 percent of the alerts from ShotSpotter Flex were sites of no crime at all. The company has admitted that the 0.5 percent false-positive rate was created by their marketing department, not engineers. I have no problem with police properly utilizing technology, but this option was not the way to go about it. As soon as the pilot ends in a year, I would suggest removing both ShotSpotter Connect and Flex and seeking other, more suitable alternatives.

What's your stance on making WRTA buses free permanently? Following up on that, when was the last time you rode a WRTA bus?

I have and will continue to vocally support a fare-free WRTA and it can be sustainable long term if we work with state and federal partners as other places in the country have. Conversations with the local leaders of our fare-free movement give me hope for the future of our public transportation.

There was an article recently that highlighted the Ride-the-WRTA challenge and I truly wish the author had reached out to me and the other candidates for comments so I could bring more attention to the issue of accessibility. While I wish I could use our public transportation, the challenge relies on the ableist assumption that all the candidates are physically capable of completing it. Unfortunately, it is beyond what would be physically safe for me to utilize, due to the distance, time, and unpredictability of my condition. Having Ehler Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, makes my dedication to making our city more accessible, personal.

While I'm not a wheelchair user, I bring them up because it’s typically where accessibility discussions end. We have far more to fix than just making the bus itself accessible. Wheelchair users still require a sidewalk that's the appropriate height for the bus to be able to load them and sufficient sidewalks to take them from their start to where the stop is and then to get off the bus and travel to their destination.

Having a bus option is wonderful for people who can take it, including my dedicated canvassers that have used it to travel across the district. Public transportation is imperative in modern cities, especially as we continue to grow and have increasingly less parking per resident. Our system needs major updates with large sections of the city that don't have a bus near enough for them to walk, including one of our colleges.

You have a visitor from out-of-town. Where are you taking them to dinner in D5?

This is a hard one as there’s so much amazing food on this side of town! My husband Jon and I try to go to new places frequently, but we have a few that we are regulars at. When we’re looking for traditional Chinese, there’s no better than Red Pepper in Webster Square. It's not exactly in the district, since it’s on the other side of the road, but West Side BBQ has amazing food. As far as coffee shops, I go to Root & Press. For pizza, we love Jason’s and it’s great that they are right down the street. For my friends with pets, if they’ve not brought food with them, I’d bring them to Tatnuck Pet Supply and Tatnuck Meat & Seafood. I’ve left so many out of this list, but if I were to list all the places I’d want to take people to you might need another article.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct Desroches' previous pet business and her role in the Yang campaign.