1. Ward 21 Dems Elect New Chair
Leo Champion, Editor
The Ward 21 Democratic Committee has elected its first new chairperson in fifteen years
after Charlie Doyle stepped down at the committee’s January meeting. Nancy Myerson-Evans, a
former chair and for the last nine years the committee’s vice-chair, was elected unanimously.
Another long-standing committee member, local activist Tahir Hussein, was – also unanimously
– elected the new vice-chair.
Myerson-Evans, 60, is a Brighton lawyer who for some years was partner in a small
downtown firm that primarily handled discrimination cases. She has also been a paid community
organizer for various groups, and she currently works as an attorney at Greater Boston Legal
Services. She was Ward 21 chair from July 1985 until July 1986, when she left to attend the New
England School of Law.
She took her new position vowing to make the group “more community relevant,” a
sentiment shared by her vice-chair.
“Lately we’ve been basically just a private club where we discuss political science,”
Hussein said. “We need to get more people politically active,” by the committee’s members
involving themselves with local action and advocacy groups such as the Allston Board of Trade,
the Brighton-Allston Improvement Association, and others.
“We hope to work with one of the other local [Democratic] committees, on campaigns or
trying to continue the kind of enthusiasm there was during the Presidential campaign; the sort of
local MoveOn type stuff,” Myerson-Evans said. She cited the Brookline, Cambridge and Fenway-
area Democratic committees as being possible groups to work with.
The Ward 21 committee has had longstanding disagreements with the more conservative
Ward 22 committee. According to one member of the Ward 21 committee, it’s unlikely that
Allston-Brighton’s two ward committees will be working together in the near future.
“They think we’re a bunch of hippies, and we tend to think of them as Republicans,” he
said.
Former chairman Charlie Doyle, 67 (the uncle of State Representative Kevin Honan) had
for some months made it clear that he would be stepping down after the 2004 Presidential
election, although he intends to remain on the committee as a member. The committee’s other
officers are unchanged: Sara Curtiss remains the committee treasurer, and Mark Trachtenberg the
affirmative action officer.
Myerson-Evans, however, said that she would be taking the committee chair for a
provisional one-year period only, to begin with.
“I’ll see how it feels but I’m not sure I want to make a long commitment of my time,”
Myerson-Evans said. “There’s some young people on the committee now and we want to develop
leadership.”