Boston Mayor Thomas Menino hasn’t yet declared his intention to run for re-election this fall. Maybe with the city’s financial picture clouded by the national economic dive, Menino will decide it’s just not as much fun being mayor anymore. But we’re going to go out on a limb here and predict that the person occupying the mayor’s chair in 2010 is going to be Thomas Menino.
Of course, there are already three professed candidates for Menino’s job. City Councilors Sam Yoon and Michael Flaherty and construction company owner Kevin McCrea are all sniping at Boston’s Big Cheese. The problem they’re having, though, is that there’s not really a whole lot of substantive things to criticize Menino for.
They have each, however, come to conclusion that the mayor is vulnerable for being too heavy-handed a player in the city’s redevelopment largesse. Indeed, in interviews with Banker & Tradesman’s Paul McMorrow, the trio sounded as if they had worked together on the script.
Menino, they say, plays politics with development deals in the city. He’s a one-man planning and zoning commission. Forget the collaborative process, Menino’s fist is tight around permits, access and public accountability. The Boston Redevelopment Authority, they all but sneer, is nothing but a satellite station for Menino’s ego and chutzpa.
To a man, they each swear the development process in Boston would be nothing like that under their stewardship. McCrea would disband the BRA, but would create a more amorphous planning and zoning commission “that’s accountable to the citizens.” Flaherty and Yoon say they would likewise put more power in the hands of the people, rather than the hands of the mayor.
What gibberish.
There is no power more important to a municipal leader than the power to give thumbs up or thumbs down to major development deals. Development changes the face of a community. Development moves the tax base. Development means jobs, and lots of them. These are all important political tools, and anyone who wants to be mayor on the promise of giving up such authority is either being provocatively disingenuous or is foolishly naïve. Neither of those are good attributes for the city’s head honcho.
It also seems foolish to put Menino in the crosshairs over development issues. During his tenure, big deals have flourished in Boston – a city that is merely stumbling now while others are collapsing.
Is this the best these would-be (or, as they claim, would-not-be) kingpins can do?
While Flaherty vaguely asserts he would try to recruit corporate headquarters to Boston, Menino was announcing he would be using funds from the new federal stimulus package to give companies an incentive to keep leasing space in Boston. Yoon touts that he wants all development deals to be a process of collaboration – as if there’s some magic dust in Boston that makes residents, developers and preservationists all willing to engage in friendly repartee and quick compromise.
McCrea contends that “no big, open, legitimate corporation wants to get involved in these backroom deals. You shouldn’t have to get anyone’s blessing or kiss any pinky ring.” We’re not sure what idealized companies McCrea is dreaming of, but real companies get involved in backroom negotiations every single day. And we believe that companies that want to build in Boston certainly ought to have to get someone’s blessing. This is, after all, why we have government in the first place.
Campaigns are built on foundations of ideas, financed by followers, propelled by philosophy and regulated by public opinion. They are developed by people who take charge. And they’re won by people who keep control of their message, making sure that in the end there’s something of substance that people can look to. Menino’s got that. So far, his opponents don’t.
