Editor’s note: Sophie Yarin spent Thursday, Feb. 3 with Mayor Jared Nicholson.
LYNN ― If you want to keep up with Jared Nicholson, you’re going to have to get up early and go to sleep late.
The newly inaugurated mayor spends the intervening hours taking meetings, having conversations with constituents, reading up on local and national issues, visiting local businesses, conferring with his staff, facilitating community conversations, and spending time with his wife, Katherine Rushfirth, and 2-year-old son, Henry.
“I usually get up at 6 and that gives me time to read the papers,” Nicholson said (The New York Times, Boston’s Globe and Herald, and the Daily Item all get their turns). Henry gets up shortly after, and helps his dad get ready for the day.
“He doesn’t actually pick out my ties so much as announce what color they are,” Nicholson said, but added that that was helpful as well.
The mayor usually arrives at City Hall, coffee in hand, by 8 a.m. unless he has a morning meeting ― always over coffee.
Today starts with an 8 a.m. meeting with state Sen. Brendan Crighton (D-Lynn) at Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee Co. on Munroe Street. The two officials nurse their drinks (hot and black for Nicholson, iced with milk for Crighton) while discussing a litany of pressing issues that will, in some ways, set the tone for Nicholson’s day; the topics brought up ― school construction, the COVID-19 pandemic, small-business recovery, and housing ― rule his working hours.
Though each schedule item today is brief, there are a lot of them and they keep coming. Once he gets to his office (already decorated with the world flags that flew at his inauguration), Administrative Director Wendy Pena hands him a new, color-coded schedule before he walks into a staff meeting.
“So far there hasn’t been a day where the schedule hasn’t changed,” Chief of Staff Jon Thibault said.
This staff meeting is with Thibault and Policy Director Danya Smith to discuss the city’s housing-production plan.
As they talk about a future “field trip” around Lynn with students from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government ― which recently worked with Revere Mayor Brian Arrigo on a similar initiative ― another piece of office decor looms from atop a corner bookshelf. It’s a posterboard copy of a slide taken from an earlier presentation: his administration goals. Each goal is listed with its corresponding elements and a status update.
“We are trying to do a lot at the same time,” Nicholson explained. “The key here is that all of these issues are interrelated anyway.”
Accomplishing such an agenda requires a taxonomical understanding of meetings: staff meetings, meeting with state delegation, City Council meetings, meetings with health-care leaders to discuss COVID-19, “get-to-know-you” meetings with city leaders, and urgent-priority meetings that could happen at any time.
“We try to come up with a system to get that balance right, but we also have to make sure that we have the time we need during the day to be responsive to crises,” he added.
A combination of the above (some scheduled, some last-minute additions) takes precedent for the next few hours. After he emerged at 2 p.m., the mayor and Thibault lit out from City Hall to Rincon Macorisano, a Dominican restaurant on Lewis Street, to deliver the city’s first American Recovery Plan Act (ARPA) small-business grant.
Restaurant co-owner Basilio Encarnacion, beaming from ear-to-ear the whole time, furnishes all who attended with bags of takeout food, and he and the mayor converse in Spanish before it’s time to leave.
Nicholson, who doesn’t often eat lunch (“It’s been tough, but someday we’ll come up with a better routine,”) offers his takeout to the members of his staff. He muses to Thibault that he might start considering lunch meetings.
“It would allow us to get out in the community and get to know the businesses and business owners in the area,” he said.
Back at the office, there was a quick turnaround to grab two staffers, Outreach Director Jean Michael Fana and Constituent Services Coordinator Sarita Ago. The three of them pile into the “mayormobile” (so termed by Ago), a Ford supplied by City Hall already decked out with a car seat in the back, and head for the opening reception of cannabis dispensary Good Chemistry.
Accompanying the three of them was the first of Nicholson’s official mayoral citations, which arrived earlier that day. They were delivered a few weeks into his administration, but there were things to cite in the meantime.
“We’ve been having to improvise,” he admitted.
Good Chemistry was a brief stop, Nicholson’s speech just one among many. The mayoral citation was given, and then the mayor had to be back at City Hall for his at-least-once-daily discussion with City Council President Jay Walsh.
“I think I talk to Mayor Nicholson more than I talk to my wife and family,” Walsh joked in a combined interview.
“We have a lot in common,” Nicholson replied. “We’ve got a lot of shared priorities; we have a shared vision, I think. There’s a lot to be able to complement each other with.”
The conversation was a brief check-in before the mayor convened with the School Committee’s School Building subcommittee. A new Pickering Middle School is one of the items on Nicholson’s Administration Goals poster, and the vote held at this meeting will secure a Request for Services to be sent to the state’s School Building Administration.
The Zoom meeting is brief, and Nicholson takes it at his desk with the city crest behind him. A voice greets the former School Committee member cheekily: “Hi Jared, or should I say mayor?”
With the last item on his agenda complete, Nicholson has a few hours of unscheduled time ― there were no emergencies today ― to catch up on some necessary correspondence.
“I think we’re firing on all cylinders,” he noted of his administration. “That doesn’t mean that we don’t learn something new every day, but we are ultimately responsible for what happens in the city and we need to own that from day one.”
When he gets home, however, it’s all about Henry.
“During the day I think things are moving at a pretty quick pace here, and then when I get home, I focus on Henry until he goes to bed,” he said.
Nicholson and Rushfirth, a midwifery consultant at Boston’s Neighborhood Birth Center, make it a point to have a 6 p.m. dinner and 7 p.m. bedtime for their son every night, while “there’s times with work that one of us will miss it,” she noted.
After Nicholson gets home, “We play; I sort of chase him around the house for a bit, and then we do bath time and we put him to bed.”
After their toddler is down for the night, Nicholson and Rushfirth will have their own dinner (Christopher’s and Rincon Macorisano are two favorites on takeout nights), and then read and catch up on emails before bedtime.
And when the sun rises at 6 a.m. the next day, he does it all again.
