| 
It’s time for my annual Turkey Awards. Hope you brought your appetite, for boy, do we have some big juicy gobblers for you this year!
There’s the town that talked of closing its T station to dodge new housing, the not-so-little transit system that can’t make it around the bend, let alone up the hill, and lazy lawmakers who sat for months on a key economic development bill, among others.
To win a Turkey, you have to really mess things up and stubbornly refuse to admit the error of your ways. So, a hearty congratulations to all our winners! Keep up the terrible work.
Here it goes, with the worst first:
Photo by Piper McCorkle | CC BY-SA 2.0
Kingston and Its Strange Plan
Yep, Kingston’s that town, the one that considered ditching its T station in order to avoid being forced to open its doors to more housing near the commuter rail stop.
Town administrator Keith Hickey floated the idea last month, reasoning that without a T station, Kingston would no longer have to comply with the MBTA Communities law. In case you don’t recall, that requires towns with or near T stations to create a district, ideally near public transit, where new condominiums, apartments and townhomes can be built.
Needless to say, that idea is going nowhere fast.
State House News Service photo/file
The MBTA
Patience with the MBTA was dwindling among riders and lawmakers alike when the troubled transit authority announced a month-long shutdown of the Orange Line in mid-August to do a repair blitz.
A series of high-profile mishaps and accidents and a probe by federal safety regulators had pushed confidence in the T to all-time lows. Top T officials promised a big upgrade in speeds and the final arrival of a fleet of shiny new cars.
When the line reopened, a number of trains were slower, while the big infusion of new rail cars never really happened.
It was yet another example of the T’s leadership overpromising and underdelivering, when common sense dictates the opposite approach.
State House News Service photo/file
Lackadaisical Lawmakers
It took Beacon Hill 100 days after the end of the legislative session in July to finally pass a crucial economic development, one with hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing programs and initiatives.
There was no major debate or controversy holding it up, though the triggering of a 1980s law that requires the payment of rebates to taxpayers across the state may have slowed things a big, but really, come on here.
One hundred days, by the way, is the amount of time it took FDR to pass a good chunk of the New Deal.
What’s up with these guys?
State House News Service photo/file
The MassGOP’s Mass Suicide
They were warned – multiple times – yet the current leadership of the state Republican party still wrapped themselves in former President Donald Trump’s banner, and lost everything.
Endorsed by Trump last fall, Geoff Diehl, the party’s candidate for governor, doubled down, hiring the ex-president’s one-time campaign manager and political henchman Corey Lewandowski as a senior campaign advisor.
Governor-elect Maura Healey crushed Diehl, 63.5 to 34.9 percent, earlier this month. Democrats also made a clean sweep of all the other statewide offices, while further shrinking the Republican party’s already-diminutive presence in the state legislature. Way to go!
Gannett, the Butcher of Local News
The big publicly traded corporate chain, which owns most of the local dailies and weeklies in Massachusetts, clearly sees no future in local news.
Rather, the company’s mission appears to keep cutting newsroom staff to keep profits up while it winds down one newspaper after another.
Yet there is an appetite for real, fact-based news out there, as witnessed by the growing number of nonprofit and for-profit local news sites and newsletters.
But Gannett, and its $7.7 million CEO Mike Reed, either don’t care or don’t have a clue on how to ride this budding wave.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
