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Photo by
Vincent
Guadazno
Grant Administrator Michelle Jarusiewicz at
her office in the Gouveia Building. |
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Jarusiewicz has brought many gifts to
town
Sue
Harrison
BANNER STAFF
Remember Lee Majors, the Six Million Dollar Man?Well Provincetown's Michelle Jarusiewicz has got that topped. She's broughtin $7,303,004.99 in grants since she's held the job of Grant Administratorand she's done it all with quiet assurance and not a lot of hoopla.
Jarusiewicz (pronounced 'Jaru-shev-itz')never would have guessed when she moved here in 1980 that she would endup working for the town and being so involved in local issues. She graduatedfrom Smith College with a degree in economics in 1979 and says, 'Icame here for the summer, just for the hell of it before I got a real job.Then, I got sand in my toes and didn't want to leave.'
So she stayed, first doing restaurant work andlater opening a clothing shop for a year. During that time she took up karateand earned a black belt in the Indonesian style of Poekoelan.
'One of my favorite shows was 'The Avengers,''the mild-mannered Jarusiewicz says with a little gleam in her eye. 'Ialways wanted to do karate.' She was taken with the way the heroine,Emma Peel (played by Diana Rigg) made her moves and took down the bad guys.
Around the same tim,e Jarusiewicz started to getinto bodybuilding and won first place in a Cape-wide competition. In a largershow in Boston she still pulled a respectable fifth place.
She also posed for a nude centerfold in a localarts magazine during her bodybuilding days. ('You couldn't see anything,'she says of her pose. 'You see more on TV now.')
Then a job came up in the Treasurer/Assessor'soffice and she got it. That was in 1984 which was when she started workingat Front Street Restaurant, another job she still does, time permitting.In '86, she moved up to the position of Assistant to the Town Manager (differentiatedfrom today's Assistant Town Manager post), working first with Town ManagerJim Jeffers and then with Bill McNulty.
Another turning point in her life came in 1988when she married Sean Cowing, a local contractor.
In Oct. of '89, when the town was manager-less,Jarusiewicz was appointed Acting Town Manager, a job she did held untilMarch 1990, when Keith Bergman was brought on board. She had applied forthe top job herself but the Selectmen wanted someone with more high leveladministrative experience and education.
'I had thought there is no way in a million years I'd want to be TownManager, but then, when I was Acting Town Manager I liked it,' shesays of her unexpected try for the job.
By 1994, Jarusiewicz was expecting her third childand a Charter change was turning the assistant to the manager into an assistantmanager with expanded hours and duties.
'Something had to change,' she says.'It was too stressful and there was not enough time to do justice toeither [the job or my family].'
She resigned, but before her resignation took effect,the position of Grant Administrator was created and she said yes when thetown asked her to stay on. Since then, she's worked 20 to 30 hours a weekmaking money for the town.
As administrator for much of the money she generates,Jarusiewicz has gotten involved in a number of hot town topics. She didwork on harbor planning a few years back and has lately been up front onthe issues of affordable housing and illegal drug and alcohol use.
'Everybody supports affordable housing intheory,' she says, 'but it's different when you get down to thenuts and bolts.'
Provincetown has little land to donate to lessenhousing costs, as some other communities have done, and it's only been inthe past year that the Selectmen have targeted affordable housing as oneof their main goals. And, from a political point of view, 'They don'twant to spend taxpayer money,' Jarusiewicz observes, 'and whenyou look at other ways, like tax takings or impact fees, all hell breaksloose.' Neighbors, she adds, can also rise up in opposition, not wantinglow-cost housing in close proximity.
Jarusiewicz started out as a member of the AffordableHousing Working Group and now she's in charge. A local Housing Partnershiphas been formed and there may be some relief on the horizon.
Housing issues sent her and Sean off to Truro tolive temporarily over six years ago. They wound up staying and recentlybought a house, for which they are currently building an addition.
One thing keeps leading to another for furtherexample, her leadership role as chair of the Working Group on illegal Drugsand Alcohol also originated with a grant. 'It came out of a Youth Initiative,'Jarusiewicz says, 'to create extra activities for the kids. Then drugsand alcohol were picked as a community policing project.'
She was one of the strongest proponents of a zerotolerance drug policy, and she acknowledges she has some experience to backup her opinions.
'Is that [zero tolerance] my personal stance?'she says, answering, 'Yes. Have I ever strayed to the other side? Yes.'
A lot of her vehemence comes from being a parent.'I'm scared to death when I think of the teenage years,' she says,but she's even more fearful for today's youth. 'It's more intense now,'she says of drug and alcohol use among teens compared to her memories ofa time when sneaking out of the prom for a drink in the car was a big deal.
'Now they have keg parties and hard alcoholat parties that the parents host so they [the kids] don't have to drive,'she says. 'I have no problem with parents allowing a wine with dinneror a beer at home occasionally. But that's not it. It's a national issueright now. Kids are drinking themselves literally to death in school.'
Being a mother has brought a lot into focus forher. Even the senseless violence on TV is harder to take, she says, nowthat she has so much personally at risk. 'It wasn't until I had childrenthat I understood so much about relationships,' Jarusiewicz says, andone of the lessons she learned was that parents should model their own behaviorto direct how they want their children to grow up. 'Kids test theirlimits around that modeled behavior,' she says.
Another issue that's important to her is domesticviolence and the way society treats women.
'I don't think of myself as totally politicallycorrect, the former Avengers fan says. ''Xena' is my favorite TV shownow. She's probably the only woman that kicks butt and doesn't have to getrescued by a man.'
But as an equal opportunity mom, she says 'Hercules'gets the other top billing at home.
With her kids now ranging from three to almostseven, Jarusiewicz is taking up a page from the past and working out again,although she's not back into bodybuilding. But her black belt isn't gatheringdust, either. She's taught classes at the Community Center and is currentlyteaching an after-school karate class at the Truro Central School.
For the future, personally, she and Sean have a 10-year anniversary comingup in '98 and they hope to get away somewhere romantic, though probablynot back to Bali, where they went on their honeymoon. It's too far awayand the kids are too small.
As for the future, she is asked whether she mightbe interested in aiming for the job of Town Manager, somewhere down theroad. 'I'd always reconsider,' she says. 'A lot depends onwhere I am and where everyone else is at the time.'
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Dec 25th, 1997