Weak-willed Menino

It's time the mayor started leading with the entire city in mind, not just South Boston

It's probably too much to wish that Boston City Council president Jimmy Kelly and State Senator Stephen Lynch had taken a broader view when they negotiated a lucrative waterfront linkage deal for South Boston. But no one can really fault them for bringing home the bacon for their core constituents. It is, after all, what they were elected to do.

Yet the deal, recently brought to light by the Boston Globe, is grossly disproportionate. It diverts 51 percent of the linkage payments -- money that developers pay to the city for affordable housing and job development -- to the community of South Boston through the South Boston Betterment Trust (see "Power Houses," News and Features, December 24, 1999). A neighborhood affected by development typically gets 10 percent to 20 percent of the linkage funds, while the city retains the rest. Waterfront development is expected to bring in approximately $70 million in linkage payments. The unusual linkage deal will give the Betterment Trust more than $35 million.

To put that in context, over the past two years Mayor Tom Menino has announced approximately $25 million in new citywide funding for housing initiatives. What's more, this deal, spelled out in 1998 in a Memorandum of Understanding signed by Kelly, Lynch, then-Boston Redevelopment Authority director Tom O'Brien, and State Representative John Hart, also empowers the Betterment Trust to negotiate with developers for millions more in "community benefits." All told, South Boston could reap upward of $60 million in linkage payments and benefits from the deal, which was enacted in part to get Kelly to sign off on the convention center.

Now that the greedy details of this arrangement have come to light, Menino is expressing outrage over the "community benefits" provision. He insists that he never intended to give the Betterment Trust the authority to negotiate everything from the height of what's built on the waterfront to additional cash mitigation payments. Never mind the question of why the mayor thought it was okay to allow a 51 percent linkage deal for South Boston in the first place -- the notion that Menino didn't understand the full impact of his agreement with Kelly back in 1998 is absurd.

The original agreement, and the subsequent angst and public soul-searching it's prompted, show just how anemic the political life of our city has become. This never would have happened during the early years of the Flynn administration, or at all during the White administration. Such a proposal would have provoked outrage. Only a mayor as seemingly directionless as Menino would have agreed to a deal that so flagrantly benefited one neighborhood over the entire city. And the mayor's current anger would be comical if it weren't so sad. His decision to approve a deal that screwed the city in favor of one politically powerful neighborhood, and his sputtering disapprovals of the deal now that the public is aware of it, are somewhat Clintonesque.

Sure, it's politically inconvenient to do open battle with politicians who represent the neighborhood that votes in the greatest numbers. But in 1997, 48,323 voters elected Menino, running unopposed, to look out for the city's interests above the competing demands of various constituencies. There's no question that the entire city deserves more cash mitigation for waterfront development. One of the reasons the waterfront is so valuable now is that the city, state, and federal governments -- not South Boston -- poured a great deal of money into its rehabilitation and the Boston Harbor clean-up. And the waterfront was never thought of as a part of South Boston until Kelly and his political cronies smelled green. The idea that the waterfront belongs to South Boston makes about as much sense as thinking that the
Esplanade belongs exclusively to the Back Bay and Beacon Hill, or that Franklin Park
belongs to Roxbury, or Jamaica Pond to
those with an 02130 zip code.

South Boston's convenient claim to the waterfront is a distressing example of the parochial impulses that have ruled this city -- to its detriment -- for decades. The convention center, the rebuilding of the waterfront, a new Fenway Park -- these are developments that should be considered as pieces of a whole, not as isolated projects. And cash mitigation agreements for neighborhoods affected by these developments should be negotiated with the entire city in mind. Menino hasn't been doing this. And we have to wonder why.

If the mayor has a coherent vision for this city, we'd like to hear him articulate it. And if he can't, someone else should step up to the plate and do it.

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com.