The most important thing you need to know about Boston’s new development chief is what he’s not – yet another pathetic and powerless mayoral lackey.
Brian Golden won the top job at the Boston Redevelopment Authority after what amounted to an 11-month try-out as interim director.
The former state representative may not be the blue-sky, big-vision planner some sophisticates believe Mayor Marty Walsh should have picked to run the crucial agency. But he’s clearly his own man, with the authority to whip the troubled BRA into shape and keep the Boston building boom humming along.
And that puts Golden head and shoulders above the long succession of pathetically powerless directors that have held the job over the past two decades.
A Low Bar
Boston developers and neighborhood residents alike have suffered through a long line of smiling yes-men, with the mayor, the sadly departed Tom Menino, micro-managing Boston’s development scene and calling all the shots.
Long-time public relations guru Peter Meade, the last BRA director under Menino, was a nice enough guy, but he was clearly happy to toe the mayoral line and cruise towards retirement.
The guy before him, John F. Palmieri, a transplant from Connecticut, had a thankless job during his four years at the agency’s helm, from 2007 to 2011. Palmieri was left holding the bag for disasters like the disastrous launch of the Filene’s redevelopment in 2008, just before the global financial crisis, which left a giant hole in downtown Boston for years.
The longest-serving BRA director under Menino was the most obsequious, not surprisingly – Mark Maloney.
Maloney defended the often illogical twists and turns of Boston development policy under Menino, the one consistent theme seeming to be rewarding a few, trusted developer friends while punishing or giving the cold shoulder to others.
Maloney’s specialty was putting a spin on the mayor’s development disasters, insisting projects that had suffered from years of mayoral meddling and had clearly missed the latest economic cycle were instead, alive, well and ready to break ground.
My favorite was Maloney’s proclamation that Fan Pier, after years of inane debate and mayoral micromanaging, was nevertheless about to break ground, even as the 2001 recession set in.
I remember one veteran tower builder chuckling in disbelief as he recalled hearing Maloney talk about that supposedly imminent ground-breaking at Fan Pier during an interview by a local radio reporter. As it happened, it took nearly a decade longer, and the sale of the waterfront property to an entirely new developer, for work to begin.
Frankly, it was hard to believe that even Maloney truly believed the nonsense he was spouting.
Jokes aside, the long succession of powerless BRA directors did a tremendous amount of damage.
The BRA simply served as a façade to screen development decisions ultimately being made by Menino, with no transparency or accountability. The agency’s decisions all too often appeared pre-ordained or rigged, with the real debate and decisions having been made long before by the mayor.
The BRA board never voted against a project – the decision on whether to give a green light was decided long before the members met in public to supposedly debate the pros and cons.
A Big Step Forward
Against this sorry backdrop then, there is nowhere to go but up, and Golden is a big step in the right direction.
The former state representative from Allston-Brighton, who served in the State House with Walsh during his years on Beacon Hill, Golden is a long-time colleague of Boston’s new mayor, not a powerless yes-man. Sure, Walsh is boss, but Golden need not approach on bended knee, either.
Moreover, Golden, who volunteered for the Army after law school and served in 2005 in Iraq, has a well-known independent streak. A Democrat, he endorsed George W. Bush and survived, no mean feat around here.
For his part, Walsh does not seem inclined to try to become a development dictator in the mold of Menino, but rather to delegate authority to his various department chiefs.
Of course, Golden is unlikely to woo the fancy pants crowd with big talk about building a new Boston that will float on water or transform city living as we know it. But the BRA has long been a prodigious producer of all sorts of master plans, envisioning all sorts of wonderful new developments across the city that mostly never had a chance. I remember one that touted the “urban wild” of Fort Point Channel, with renderings of kayakers paddling merrily away in the turgid channel where the old Boston Herald building (now the Ink Block) once stood.
There are file cabinets full of such plans over at the BRA’s offices up on the eight floor of City Hall.
Yet as millions were being spent to support a host of planners, the agency literally couldn’t tie its own shoes, an audit of the agency released earlier this year shows. The BRA basically wasn’t tracking commitments made by developers, everything from dollars pledged to affordable housing to promises made to neighborhood groups. As a result, it was missing out on millions in lease and loan payments owed by various developers. There wasn’t even a central document center where all important agreements and deals could be found. Everything was still in paper form, with no way of tracking whether documents were lost or simply trashed.
Golden has had his hands full on his first year on the job as he has moved to correct some of these glaring problems. Even so, he has overseen the approval of billions in new projects.
After years of emasculated BRA directors, Boston needs an effective development chief. And that’s exactly what it is getting in Golden.
Email: sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com
