Anyone who thinks the future of Boston development hinges on now-fading campaign promises to shake up the permitting process at City Hall needs to get a lot more cynical, and fast.
For starters, it looks increasingly like Mayor-elect Marty Walsh is in no hurry to gut and rebuild the Boston Redevelopment Authority, despite all the mayoral race rhetoric this fall.
No surprise there.
In fact, Walsh’s nebulous plan for someday revamping the city’s permitting agency is a red herring, distracting our media watchdogs, such as they are these days, from the real issue at hand.
And that’s how the new mayor wields the considerable power he will enjoy over Boston’s development scene – power, inherited from outgoing Mayor Thomas M. Menino and mayors before him as well, to literally make or break projects.
Power that Walsh will likely retain and wield throughout the next four years, regardless of what sort of new window dressing or reshuffling of the furniture at City Hall’s deeply entrenched development authority.
Boston’s New Development Chief
Certainly Walsh seems a nice enough guy, but we are hardly talking about Gandhi or Nelson Mandela here, a political saint ready to swear off the temptations of power.
Walsh is your typical red-blooded American politician, and, like Menino and mayors before him, he will be calling the shots over development in Boston, whether through the BRA or whatever he winds up calling it or reinventing it as.
After all, why in the world would Walsh or any other mayor willingly give up that power? In fact, that was the rough consensus of a panel of media types I recently spoke on during an event put on by NAIOP Massachusetts, a group that included Peter Kadzis, the former Boston Phoenix editor who is now a contributing editor at WGBH, a State House News reporter, and Larry DiCara, the high-powered Boston development lawyer and former Boston City Council president.
Any idea that Walsh is going to somehow cut the city’s development authority free, making it an independent player that can pursue its own agenda is a joke.
Launched in the 1950s to help turn around what was then a decaying, moribund city, the Boston Redevelopment Authority has been used and at times abused by mayor after mayor over the last half century to pursue various development policies and, inevitably, to reward friends and punish enemies.
Yes, Walsh will become the city’s new development czar, the man behind the curtain, but the real question is how he will wield this power.
New Mayor, Hopefully New Approach
Like Menino, Walsh will sit astride Boston’s development world, with the power to delay or kill projects he dislikes and speed through others he thinks will be great for Boston.
But Walsh also has a chance to do things differently from Menino, and, frankly, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Menino had the power and enjoyed using it, too often and often to a fault.
For starters, it will be highly interesting to see if Walsh takes a page from Menino when it comes to cronyism.
Menino ruthlessly punished developers who bucked him. Don Chiofaro, the hyper-aggressive International Place builder who butted heads with the mayor, and New York mega developer Vornado, whose chairman made some tactless remarks, found themselves effectively frozen out of Boston’s development scene. Others, whose main offense appears to have been just a little too quirky and eager to tout their projects in the press, like would-be Filene’s tower developer John Hynes and Fenway Center developer John Rosenthal, have also suffered the mayor’s wrath.
Yet for other developers, some of whom either were or became personal friends during Menino’s two decades in power, the mayor’s backing was clearly the ticket to success, helping them win one big project after another.
These friends of Tom were skilled at the art of subservience, running away from reporters and, when cornered, being careful to praise the mayor in every other sentence, all the while acting as gray and dull as possible.
The former chief of the Boston Building Trades Council, Walsh will surely have his own friends to please, especially in the construction unions where his main power base is to be found.
However, even an easing up on the cronyism – and not seemingly basing every development decision on a litmus test of robotic political devotion – would be a breath of fresh air.
Certainly it will be telling to see how Walsh deals with some of the developers scorned by Menino, especially Rosenthal, whose bid for a standard city tax break to get his Fenway Center apartment high-rise back on track has languished.
If Walsh is going to ride to the rescue, it’s likely to happen in the first few months after he moves into the mayoral suite at City Hall, DiCara notes.
“If it doesn’t get action in the next six months, it is never going to happen,” he said.
But Walsh could boost his stature even more by refraining from the Menino practice of stiff retribution for every perceived slight, snub or sideways comment.
Menino and his thin skin stifled public debate in Boston on the merits of different development projects and policies, with critics either keeping their reservations to themselves or avoiding any public comments.
Being able to listen to criticism – and respond to it – is a sign of strength, not weakness.
If Walsh can show he can take a little carping without going bananas, he will have gone a long way to blazing his own trail as mayor.
Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
