Richard Dimino
Title: President and CEO, A Better City
Age: 57
Experience: 34 years
If you take a look at his resume, you start to understand why Richard Dimino was chosen to head A Better City, a Boston-based nonprofit working to make Boston, well, a better city, by focusing on smart urban planning for transportation, land development and environmental issues. The man helped create the city of Boston’s transportation department and subsequently ran that department as the city’s transportation commissioner from 1985 to 1993 under former Mayor Ray Flynn. He was heavily involved in designing and permitting the Central Artery Tunnel project and worked hand in hand with famed civil engineer Fred Salvucci, the former state transportation czar under Gov. Michael Dukakis, to create the highway tunnel system currently running under Boston’s streets.
Q: What are the challenges the region faces regarding the future of land development?
A: One of the most exciting aspects of our job is that Boston has been and continues to be one of the hottest locations for commercial investment, even during the recent Great Recession. The challenge for Boston and the urban core and the metropolitan region is to really think about how do you guide that commercial development interest so that you end up with the right growth decisions and preserving the quality of life we’ve all become accustomed to, while at the same time capturing the human resource talent that’s so essential to … what makes Boston a great place for investment. The other wonderful aspect of Boston is that there are still places to grow into, like the South Boston Waterfront. There’s 20 million square feet of development that still can occur there. That’s unique for a city to have that kind of asset … within the urban core.
Q: How prepared is Boston and the surrounding areas for all this growth?
A: There are all these signals from an economic development standpoint and from an infrastructure asset standpoint about growth happening all across the Boston urban core, but the challenge remains that we keep up with the infrastructure to support all this growth. We, in the planning and development business, need to be sure we are keeping up with that. We do not want to see ourselves sitting on our hands as city planners and letting growth potential go wanting because we lack the transportation or water infrastructure or energy infrastructure to accommodate that growth in the future. You could say that we did do that on the South Boston Waterfront. We saw that growth could occur there, so what did we do? We built the supporting infrastructure there, and as a result there are millions and millions of square feet of development happening there. That’s where people are actually working today, because we had the forethought to create the infrastructure there.
Q: You’re also involved in the discussions about climate change and its potential effects on the waterfront and development. What are some of the things property owners need to be aware of to ready themselves for the changes ahead?
A: Smart growth has to take into consideration the environment and the related impacts of the environment and the changing occurring. We see ample evidence that severe storms are getting more and more frequent, and science is pointing to climate change as one of the rationales to the frequency. We’ve also seen scientific evidence that the sea is rising, and that means sea levels in and around Boston Harbor are rising. The combination of bad weather and high tides … We missed Hurricane Sandy-like impacts in Boston by just five and a half hours. We have to accept the challenges of this new reality. Together, Boston and its real estate community need to think about short-term, mid-term and long-term actions to help address those impacts. One example of things developers can do can be seen at the new Spaulding rehab facility in Charlestown. The utilities were not in the basement, they were located at a higher level above the first floor.
Richard Dimino’s Five Favorite Bass Players:
- Jack Bruce
- James Jamerson
- Jaco Pastorius
- Stanley Clarke
- Paul McCartney
