EAST PROVIDENCE — For months, those elected to oversee the city’s well-being have allowed rowdy debates over labor contracts, budget cuts, even tow lists to dominate City Council meetings.

Personal attacks spew freely, triggering boos, wild applause and wisecracks from the audience.

The vitriol is not confined to council quarters. Someone sent Joseph S. Larisa Jr. — the always-ready-to-talk councilman carrying the title of mayor — a bag of coal. Police officers picketed the home of Valerie Perry, the council member they call “Larisa’s puppet.”

And just last week, Councilman Brian Coogan, a parent of five small children, received an envelope with white powder in it, an apparent anthrax hoax. The city’s hazardous-waste team rushed to his home to discover it was only sugar.

Against this background, Larisa took several minutes during a recent council meeting to make a public plea for civility.

“We’re still all Townies here,” he lectured. “We have to agree to disagree reasonably.”

If voters are unhappy with the council, Larisa said, they can go to the polls and change the lineup.

“Thank God for that,” yelled someone from the audience.

Even before Larisa finished his plea for good manners, the vitriol started.

“You’re pretty arrogant yourself and people are angry with you as well,” Coogan said, glaring at Larisa. “ … We do have state representatives here this evening that are not happy with your conduct and leadership and the role that you play as mayor, so … my mother always told me, ‘practice what you preach.’ ”

It wasn’t long before Larisa himself seemed to stray from his own appeal.

With five of the city’s six General Assembly members present, Larisa lambasted the legislators for not helping, and sometimes exacerbating, East Providence’s financial turmoil.

“We’ve been pleading for help since our legislative breakfast in January,” the mayor said. “We said ‘don’t hurt us, give us relief from mandates,’ and we have not heard from anyone on any substantive matter, any resolution” or anything about the School Committee reducing teacher salaries and imposing a fee for health benefit costs. Instead, Larisa said, the city’s legislators backed midyear state aid cuts and trashed council-driven legislation that gave the council final approval of all city contracts, including the teachers. Larisa said some legislators are supporting “the worst bill” ever, one that would give teachers the right to binding arbitration. If that legislation is approved, he said, it would push the city into bankruptcy.

As Larisa often does at meetings, he talked directly to the video camera that films the meetings for live viewing on the Internet, allowing residents at home to watch the proceedings.

Evoking laughter from the audience, Paul Moura, a former state representative who is considering a run against Larisa in 2010, stood next to the camera. During a pause, Moura insisted that the mayor “speak to the public” in the room, not those at home.

Larisa retorted that the people who attend council meetings aren’t representative of the city’s residents.

Countered Moura: “Thank you, wannabe real mayor.”

“This is what we go through every week,” Larisa said, still looking at the camera.

When the meeting reached the public comment period, state Sen. Daniel DaPonte stood at the podium.

“For the past year this City Council has spent its time and sat at these meetings playing politics,” he said. “Playing to the cameras and blaming everyone else for every problem that comes before it. This City Council and the School Committee you control have torn this city apart instead of providing leadership.”

DaPonte, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, continued: “You’ve put our city in the newspapers and on the television nonstop, to the point that the media openly refers to us as ‘a circus.’ Everyone is at fault except you.”

He said council members use “scare tactics and repeated untruths” by talking about such things as city bankruptcy, “make demeaning personal comments and attacks” against people who hold opposing opinions, and ignore studies that say the city and school department should consolidate services.

Larisa has cost the city money, DaPonte said, by creating “monumental parks” named after the mayor’s mother. And, DaPonte continued, Councilman Robert Cusack has cost the city “hundreds of thousands of dollars” by using city-provided health coverage to pay for his son’s extensive medical care.

“Tonight my message is: These politics and this rhetoric must stop,” DaPonte said. “We need you to lead, not play politics with our future.”

Some in the audience gave DaPonte a standing ovation as he departed. Nearly half of those in attendance left with him. “We have to rise above all this pettiness. It’s not good for the city,” Councilwoman Perry said.

After the meeting adjourned, Rep. Helio Melo approached Larisa and said, “You can’t continue to look at the camera and lie to the public.”

The two continued to debate in the halls. It was nearly midnight when the last heated exchange took place.

apina@projo.com