Sadly, a valiant campaign by Downtown Crossing boosters and City Hall to save the battered Hub shopping district threatens to degenerate into a first-class boondoggle.

And to add insult to injury, businesses and tower owners resisting what amounts to a Washington Street mugging are being held up for ridicule by Boston’s mayor for life.

The core idea was solid enough – get Downtown Crossing businesses to pay a little extra each year to spruce up the area with everything from street concerts to flower pots.

But between conception and execution, something went terribly awry. The boundaries of this new Downtown Crossing business improvement district (BID) ballooned beyond recognition, at least to anyone with a basic knowledge of downtown Boston, to include a rich slice of the Financial District. In fact, the new venture has shed the Downtown Crossing name altogether in favor of the “Downtown Boston BID,” with all that much broader name implies.

When those high-rise owners outside the traditional Downtown Crossing borders cried foul and refused to dig deep, they found themselves blasted as “selfish” by Mayor Thomas M. Menino – a comment made, admittedly, as he was jammed with a question by a reporter while leaving an event.

“Well you have to make money at this gig, don’t you?” quipped one downtown real estate executive. “They branched out to see if someone is going to pay. They pissed off a lot of people.”

The Full Story

If you read what has been written on the dispute in the local press, you likely have come away either confused or even sympathetic with the mayor.

After all, Downtown Crossing looks like Berlin circa 1945, with the collapse of the proposed Filene’s redevelopment having left a bombed-out block in the heart of the beleaguered shopping district.

So why shouldn’t building owners and developers along Washington Street and its environs help foot the bill to fix things up a bit?

Thanks to a few ingrates, the new business district’s budget will have to make do with a paltry $3 million, a million less than it had hoped to collect – or so backers gripe.

The problem is no one has bothered – or is willing enough to ruffle a few feathers – to tell the full story. At the heart of this debate is a foolish distortion of basic city geography by some overly ambitious BID backers, not some lack of civic spirit on the part of rich tower owners.

Do yourself a favor and check out a copy of the map yourself, which is readily available online. The boundaries of the district stretch well beyond Downtown Crossing right into the Financial District, taking in buildings along Federal Street on the edge of Post Office Square, a world away from Downtown Crossing.

Basically, the district mostly runs the course of Washington Street, but bulges in the middle to include a chunk of the Financial District.

It looks kind of like some gerrymandered Congressional district, drawn with an eye to include all the right demographics and voters, one veteran Hub developer noted after puzzling over the map of the new Downtown Crossing business district.

For that matter, you can find another odd boundary down on Summer Street near South Station, where the owner of 100 Summer St. is also fighting inclusion in the new district.

It’s pretty clear that whoever drew these boundaries – supposedly the Downtown Boston BID steering committee, with help from City Hall – was guided not by traditional Boston neighborhood boundaries as much as a crude sense of where the money is.

Not so, says City Hall and the Downtown Crossing Partnership. In an interview, Rosemarie Sansone, the partnership’s president, pointed to all the upstanding, civic-minded corporate players who are paying up, even though their buildings might not be within the traditional Downtown Crossing realm. It is an impressive list, one that includes Bank of America, Fidelity and State Street.

Apparently, most of the big downtown business players have bought into the idea of a broader, Downtown Boston BID, Sansone contends. Indeed, she said some business owners were so eager to pay up, they wanted the entire Financial District included, but a boundary had to be drawn somewhere.

Yet somehow, I think the real courage here is among the tower owners who are refusing to answer the call of yet another rattling tin cup – and bucking a very powerful mayor while they are at it.

Conflicting Maps

The Summer Street building, if you want to be charitable to BID backers, could at least be seen as on the “fringes” of the new district. But Federal Street is not on the fringes – it’s in the Financial District.

“When I market it, I really only refer to (Downtown Crossing) as Washington Street and the side streets,” the executive we heard from earlier elaborated. “Devonshire and Federal, to me that is in the Financial District.”

To that point, it’s also worth taking a look at the map the Downtown Crossing Partnership offers up on its website to the general public, ostensibly a guide to the district’s shopping destinations. Federal Street is clearly on the Financial District side of the map.

Of course, the new business district, defined now not as Downtown Crossing but as Downtown Boston, sucks in a few hapless Financial District tower owners and developers, while sparing the rest.

Caught in the crossfire is New York mega-developer Tishman Speyer, as well as travel mogul and entrepreneur Steve Belkin, who owns 133 Federal St.

His venture into development – remember the 1,000-foot-tall “Tommy’s Tower” project? – was far from a smashing success. But after spending a couple years drawing up grandiose plans for a towering skyscraper, Belkin at least figured out the difference between Downtown Crossing and the Financial District.

The same can’t be said for some of the folks over at City Hall.