A New Bedford court magistrate on Friday is scheduled to hear charges and counter-charges against two citizens and three city officials to decide if a misdemeanor criminal case stemming from an incident at City Hall in November should proceed.
As one of the players sees it, the dispute involving two council members, the city clerk, a freelance videographer and a resident who frequently attends council meetings is the latest turn in a running disagreement about decorum during public government meetings that has ebbed and flowed for years, spilled into court at least once before, and prompted a recent closed council session on security procedures.
“There’s a lot, there’s a lot going back years,” said Carlos Felix, a freelance videographer who covers meetings and other events for the news sites New Bedford Guide and Fall River Reporter. He also does video commentary for New Bedford Live, a Facebook page.
Felix and Craig Ptaszenski, who appeared on New Bedford Live and Guide years ago but more recently has attended council meetings as a citizen, have been accused in a police report of trespassing at City Hall on the evening of Nov. 30. Both say they were falsely accused, and are in turn trying to bring charges against At-large City Councilors Brian Gomes and Linda Morad, and City Clerk Dennis Farias, for making false statements to the police.
The police, not the three public officials, are seeking the charges against Felix and Ptaszenski.
The clerk magistrate hearings, set to be conducted Friday at Third District Court in New Bedford, are meant to decide if criminal charges are warranted. As of Thursday morning, the show-cause hearings are closed to the public and the media. Clerk-Magistrate Peter J. Thomas declined separate requests to open the hearings made by the New Bedford Light in writing on Tuesday and by Felix in a phone call to the court on Wednesday.
Gomes said on Thursday morning that he also wanted the proceeding to be open, but he had not yet contacted the court about this. Ptaszenski also said on Thursday morning that he supports the move to make the hearing public.
The Light appealed the magistrate’s decision to the Presiding Justice of the Third District Court, Joseph Harrington, and to the state Supreme Judicial Court, requesting that the hearing be postponed to allow for consideration of the request to open the proceeding.
Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, said that in light of the fact that parties to the hearing support opening the proceeding, there’s a good argument for doing so.
“It strikes me as unusual,” Silverman said on Thursday morning. “I cannot think of another instance where the accused has asked that it be open and it’s denied.”
According to published state standards, the privacy of show cause hearings is to benefit those who have been accused. But, in view of the fact that all parties in the hearing have been named publicly, Silverman said he could not understand the need to close the hearing.
“We already know who these people are, so there’s no privacy left to protect,” he said.
In a report on the Nov. 30 incident provided by New Bedford Police, the three public officials’ names appear, but the names of the two people identified as taking part in an altercation are stricken out. A copy of the same police report provided by Ptaszenski shows that he and Felix are the two people named in the incident that officials said started in City Hall and continued later on the street.
According to the unredacted report, two officers were called to City Hall at 8 p.m. in response to a complaint by Felix. Felix said he was trying to get into the council chamber, but was blocked by Farias, who was closing the chamber after the regular meeting had ended, according to the report.
Farias said in an interview that he was closing the chamber because councilors were gathering after the meeting to record their annual holiday greeting video. Farias declined to elaborate further on the incident.
According to the report, Farias told the officer “they were leaving shortly,” but Felix said he was not leaving. Felix said City Hall was open and a quorum of councilors was present, meaning the public was allowed to attend the gathering, the officer reported.
In the account written by Officer Timothy DaCosta, the officials told him that after Felix could not get into the council chamber on the second floor, he walked to the third floor, stepped into the chamber balcony, and was yelling down at councilors.
The unredacted report says that Morad and Gomes told the officer that the third floor “is blocked off to the public with posted signs and Felix was trespassing whilst yelling at them.”
DaCosta wrote that he was able to get photos showing the sign on the second floor stairway, which “clearly stated that the third floor was for ‘employees only’ and Carlos Felix and Craig Ptaszenski were seen by witnesses on scene on the third floor.”
No arrests were made that night, but the officer reports that he would request a hearing about the two men trespassing. That hearing is part of the proceeding scheduled for Friday.
Felix and Ptaszenski say the sign was not posted on the stairway that night.
“There was no sign there that night,” Ptaszenski said in an interview. “I have videos and photos to prove it.”
DaCosta wrote that he was called back to City Hall later that night “as a crowd was out front arguing.”
DaCosta wrote that Farias, Gomes and Morad told him that Felix followed them outside “and was harassing them. Morad stated Felix got right up to her and Brian Gomes and was yelling and harassing them as they attempted to walk to their vehicles.”
The officer wrote that Morad said she was placed “in fear for her personal safety. I advised Linda Morad of her rights to a harassment order as Felix placed her in fear,” according to the unredacted report. Felix told Morad her “days are numbered,” the report says.
Felix, 49, has a history of charges going back to the late 1990s of harassment, disorderly conduct, assault and larceny, District Court records show. All of these criminal charges but one were dismissed or “continued without a finding.” The records show that Felix pleaded guilty to a larceny charge in connection with an incident in 1998 and was sentenced to six months with 18 months suspended in the Bristol County Jail and House of Correction.
Most recently, charges against him were dismissed for interfering with a firefighter and disturbing the peace in New Bedford in 2020 and 2021. In the 2021 incident, according to the statement of charges, he was accused of refusing “lawful orders” to step back from a fire scene on Acushnet Avenue.
The Nov. 30 incident spotlighted council members’ existing concerns about security surrounding their meetings. By then, Morad, who was council president at the time, had already called for a special meeting for Dec. 4 to include a closed session on security in and around City Hall with City Solicitor Eric Jaikes, the council’s lawyer David Gerwatowski, and Police Chief Paul Oliveira.
The wording of the agenda item follows the language of the state’s Open Meeting Law, which allows executive sessions to discuss “deployment of security personnel or devices, or strategies with respect thereto.”
Nonetheless, Felix, who was there on Dec. 4, protested when the council voted 8-0 to go into executive session. Councilors Scott Lima, Ian Abreu and Shawn Oliver were absent.
“Booooo,” Felix said through a small battery-operated bullhorn. “What are you hiding, Linda? … Nazi Germany … What a shame.”
Councilors before the executive session declined to be specific about the nature of the security concerns. At-large Councilor Shane Burgo said “it’s one of those cumulative issues” that has been heightened by social media, where threats of violence have become commonplace in political argument.
Since Dec. 4, no one involved in that closed session has said what, if any, actions to change security practices have been taken as a result of the closed-door session.
Both Felix and Evangelos “Gilly” Safioleas, a steady attendee at council meetings who has his own history of run-ins with public officials, said they felt the security session was about them. They said the council was trying to find a way to shut them out of public meetings.
“It’s the same reason she took the benches out,” said Safioleas, referring to Morad, and a decision months before to remove benches from one side of the council chamber. Safioleas would sometimes sit there, behind a speaker’s podium — and in the frame of the live stream camera that covers the meetings — often displaying a sign containing an accusation or derogatory statement about a public official.
“This thing is for me,” he said before the Dec. 4 meeting.
The Safioleas-Morad conflict ended up in court in 2016 after Morad, who was then serving a previous term as council president, asked him to leave a meeting because he was disrupting the session by clapping. The criminal case of trespassing was eventually resolved as a civil matter with a $100 fine, according to court records.
Felix said he has a feeling that the accusation of a false report is also not going to stick, or go further.
“I don’t expect it to go anywhere,” he said. “I highly doubt anything’s going to come of it.”
Email reporter Arthur Hirsch at ahirsch@newbedfordlight.org.
Thank you for this report. Actions between city residents and elected officials are important for voters to know about.
Small town clowns with nothing to do! This is on both ends for sure! Who in their right minds chooses not only to disrupt a city council meeting but then chase the councilors out front? Unbelievable but gotta love good ole new beige