One Commonwealth, the 501(c)(4) Gov. Maura Healey founded to fund pro-housing campaigns around the state, is having trouble winning MBTA Communities zoning votes. iStock photo illustration
Go big or go home.
That’s a bit of unsolicited advice for the Healey administration, which is waging what amounts to a stealth campaign in towns across Greater Boston in favor of the new MBTA Communities zoning regulations.
Gov. Maura Healey and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll formed the One Commonwealth nonprofit to help get out a pro-housing message on the local level in the wake of the debacle in Milton last year.
Voters in the inner suburb of Boston roundly rejected the new regs, which require cities and towns in the MBTA’s service area to open their doors to new apartment and condominium buildings.
So far, though, the results have been decidedly mixed, with embarrassing defeats in Needham and in Duxbury last fall for the new zoning.
One Commonwealth appears to be doing just enough to anger some local voters while at the same time delivering only modest financial support for groups pushing for approval of the new regs.
The Yes for Needham campaign raised $19,616, with the Healey/Driscoll nonprofit putting in $10,000 and the Charles River Regional Chamber chipping in $1,000.
Still, that’s a far cry from the estimated $60,000 typically needed to run a successful campaign for state representative.
And it wasn’t that much higher than more than $15,000 raised by the anti- crowd, all of it through dozens of individual contributions.
Backlash in Duxbury
It’s not clear how much One Commonwealth shelled out in Duxbury last fall, but the results were hardly stellar, with voters there rejecting the new multifamily zoning by a lopsided vote of 793 to 81.
To the applause and cheers of residents, speakers criticized “[Gov.] Maura Healey and her board of bureaucrats,” according to Banker & Tradesman, with just one lone, brave soul speaking up for the new law.
Efforts by One Commonwealth to sway the vote even boomeranged, triggering a negative article in a Substack newsletter about the town simply called “Duxbury.”
“Over the past couple of days, residents have expressed alarm at how a mysterious outside group called One Commonwealth, Inc. appears to be trying to interfere with the Special Town Meeting scheduled for tomorrow,” wrote Christine Hill, whose bio notes she spent 10 years writing about business, finance and economic issues in Asia for publications like BusinessWeek before starting her two-year-old newsletter.
Scott Van Voorhis
Hill did some nice digging as well, looking into the One Commonwealth’s incorporation paperwork and turning up the names of a number of top local Democratic consultants with lucrative political consulting gigs for Healey and Driscoll paid out of their campaign coffers.
One Commonwealth’s efforts to sway voters have also fallen short in Halifax on the South Shore, Marblehead on the North Shore and Dracut.
By contrast, two other suburbs that One Commonwealth did work in, Kingston and Hopkinton, approved new MBTA Communities zoning rules.
Ironically, while Healey has pledged to make state government more transparent, that openness does not extend to One Commonwealth.
As a 501(c)(4), it does not have to disclose its donors.
I reached out to Healey’s usually reliable spokespeople with questions on One Commonwealth, but did not hear back by deadline.
Ditto for the email sent to One Commonwealth.
But it still looks like the Healey administration’s campaign to win over local voters and build support for new housing is off to a stumbling start.
And it should raise questions about the group’s strategy.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist and publisher of the Contrarian Boston newsletter; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
