Priscilla Rojas
Chair, Boston Planning & Development Agency board of directors
Age: 38
Industry experience: 17 years
Priscilla Rojas is balancing her new leadership role at Boston’s powerful land-use agency, her career in the corporate world and longtime creative pursuits. A native of Aurora, Illinois, Rojas captained the DePaul Demonettes dance team during her college years, an experience she credits for building her teamwork and leadership skills, while she studied accounting to prepare for a career as an auditor. After relocating to Boston, Rojas became active on the city’s cultural council before Mayor Marty Walsh nominated her for the Boston Planning & Development Agency board seat in July 2015. Rojas was named acting chair of the board in December following the retirement of Timothy Burke and was elected permanent chair in May.
Q: As the BPDA’s first Latina board chair, how does that influence your approach to the position?
A: When I was first asked to consider this appointment [to the board], I was honored to serve in the community. I’m very much a student of the servant leadership model, and this is a great opportunity to serve. When I was preparing for the confirmation I was like, “How am I going to introduce myself and let people know who I am?” I went through several iterations, but a phrase I use a lot to describe myself is I’m a fifth-generation Mexican-American, granddaughter of migrant farm workers from Illinois and a first-generation college student. That is me. I’m bringing my lens of how I see things. But ultimately, I am serving in this position with humility and with a great sense of responsibility, and leading from a place of authenticity.
Q: Who suggested that you seek the BPDA appointment?
A: I’m not sure of a specific person but I had great conversations with the mayor and with [Chief of Policy and Planning] Joyce Linehan. I was already serving on the Boston Cultural Council for six years and had maxed out my terms. I had a background in accounting and finance, and also [the BPDA] was coming off an audit, and that’s kind of my wheelhouse. I thought that was a great opportunity to leverage those skills, having been through a lot of organization change as a professional and knowing how difficult that is.
Q: How satisfied are you with the recent changes to Millennium Partners’ Winthrop Square project?
A: The way I like to approach this is, as a government agency our mandate is to ask the questions that are on our minds from our individual lens. We all have different skills and live in different neighborhoods, and we go through that questioning process. We addressed the concerns as individuals and groups that we represent, the different letters we’re getting from the public, reading the articles in Banker & Tradesman and the Boston Globe, and getting a feel for those topics and questions that people want answered. That’s the approach that we attempt to take with all projects.
Q: Do you expect you’ll be getting many more requests to modify approved projects as developers feel the effects of COVID-19 and the recession?
A: I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some of that trending, and we are actually having several internal meetings that board members are invited to sit in on and participate in these things. Tomorrow we’re having a discussion on the office market by our research team on Boston office rents and vacancies and how COVID is affecting the market. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had project changes that are coming with the financial strain the whole world is going through.
Q: What’s BPDA’s long-term plan for how to organize meetings in the age of social distancing?
A: We are committed to figuring out how we’re going to do this virtual engagement: what additional limitations do we have, what opportunities do we have to make the process more inclusive. This could be an opportunity to handle that. We’re always looking to engage with the community. In terms of virtual engagement, there’s a citywide inter-agency group that’s working with the elected officials to plan public meetings and planning discussions in a virtual way. Virtual engagement is going to be a significant part of the foreseeable future for us, but we also want to make sure that we have people participate via the phone, the way we’re doing it for public hearings. We’ve had a handful of them during this time.
Q: Did professional advancement bring you to Boston?
A: It was the age-old tale of love. I married a Boston guy and the plan was definitely to be relocating to Chicago and then, whoa: the financial crisis. Lots of really great Boston firms were in the need of financial audits, so I got a job really quick. We thought we’d settle back in Chicago because that’s my home and 11 or 12 years later, I’m a Bostonian now. My hometown will always be Aurora and Chicago where I grew up and learned so much, but Boston is my home and I love that the city was able to welcome me and give me an opportunity to get involved.
Q: How can BPDA planning studies anticipate fluctuations in real estate markets, such as demand for last-mile logistics on Dot Ave. or life science developers outbidding housing developers in Allston?
A: Without getting into the ins-and-outs of the process which I fully leave to the experts in the agency, coming from a board and government perspective, planning is important. We use the plan as a guide. As those change, then so does the plan and we adjust. We’re flexible enough you have to have something to go off of. If they don’t match, that might be a question I ask: how does this align next to the plan? And if it doesn’t, there’s an explanation for that, whether it comes with a variance or not.
Q: Do you think the city would benefit from an independent planning agency, as City Councilor Michelle Wu has suggested?
A: From my perspective, that’s a little outside of my mandate. I really focus on the process and adjusting those where we think they need to evolve, and that’s really what I as the board chair focus on. There are some really great discussions that have been happening for a long time about the future of the agency, but I really leave that up to the mayor and city councilors to be looking at our structure.
Five Books on Rojas’ Summer Reading List
- “Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age” by Lizabeth Cohen
- “The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data” by Gene Kim
- “People Before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making” by Karilyn Crockett
- “There There” by Tommy Orange
- “Be Bold! Be Brave! 11 Latinas Who Made U.S. History” by Naibe Reynoso
