Massachusetts Politics

Tom Glynn was careful to describe Boston’s hottest new neighborhood as the South Boston Waterfront at the outset of an op-ed piece he wrote for the Boston Globe the other day.   You would expect nothing different from the CEO of the politically-attuned Massachusetts Port Authority.   From Glynn there will be no harping on the “Seaport District.”    (Why send all who call Southie their hometown into paroxysms of pain and anger?) Anyway, it was a heck of a piece, that column by Glynn, which appeared Sunday, Aug. 23, under the headline, “Boston’s future depends on a thriving seafood industry,” for it contained a much-needed reminder that new apartment buildings, new office towers, and trendy new bars and restaurants are not the only key ingredients for a city striving for vibrancy in the 21 st century. “Long before the biotech firms, cool restaurants, and law firms made a home there (the South Boston Waterfront), seafood companies were doing business in that p...

The site in Everett where Steve Wynn wants to build a resort/destination casino at a cost of more than a billion dollars has got to be the most run-down, contaminated, crummy looking oceanfront property in Greater Boston.   I speak as a witness. It was a warm and humid summer day three years ago when I walked the entire site with a group that was thinking of putting a casino there before Wynn came along.   “My” group saw the potential in the site and was briefly intrigued with the idea of having the "Boston casino" in Everett, but it never actually took the proposal beyond the brainstorming stage.   This theme recurs often in my life:   I get the dreamers; other consultants get the guys itching to drop a billion-plus on a deal. Anyway, the property on the Mystic River where a Monsanto chemical factory once stood, and where Wynn envisages a casino, is covered with fill -- a mixture of dirt, gravel, broken bricks and stones, and God knows what else, whic...

If you held a high position in the judiciary and were doing a bad job, I don’t think the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court would issue a press release saying good things about you when you filed for retirement. No, in that situation, the members of our state’s highest court would likely sigh with relief and begin the task of erasing you from their memories.   In the hallowed halls of the Adams Courthouse, the least said about a bust-out judge the better. One may thus infer that the soon-to-be-retired chief justice of the Massachusetts Housing Court, the honorable Steven D. Pierce of Westfield, is the genuine article.   Else, why would we have the July 7, 2015, SJC press release with Paula M. Carey averring that Pierce “was an early proponent of management reforms that have increased accountability and transparency across the court system” and that “his leadership of the Trial Court’s Fiscal Task Force was key to our efforts to avoid layoffs through the fiscal crisis”? ...

Thirty-two or thirty-three years ago, I can’t remember exactly, friends of ours bought a second home on Cape Cod, in the town of Dennis.   It was an older, kind-of-smallish home, nothing fancy, and just a short walk from the beach.   They paid $39,000 for it.   If that house were sold today, it would probably go for eight or nine times that price. Around the time our friends bought into Dennis, my wife and I had been renting a cottage in Chatham for three weeks every July with my sister-in-law and her husband.   We must have done that for four or five years straight.   The house was on Sea Shell Lane, a narrow dirt road leading down a steep hill to the beach.   We paid the owner, a couple from Wrentham we never met, $350 a week. I don’t know what it would cost to rent a place in that neighborhood today but it would probably be in the vicinity of $2,000 a week, maybe more depending on the house. A couple of weeks ago, I drove over from Harwich, where my sist...

If you're the one deciding the contents of a newspaper, you get to have it both ways.  Case in point: two recent Boston Globe pieces on the ill-fated attempt to bring the Olympic Games to Boston in 2024. Business reporter Jon Chesto wrote the first one, “After Olympics bid, John Fish is down but hardly out,” (Friday, July 31); columnist Joan Vennochi wrote the second, “Say farewell to old Boston,” (Sunday, August 2). With the demise of the Olympic bid, Chesto said, “Boston’s business community was left wondering whether the 55-year-old construction magnate (Fish) will remain a key power broker” in town.   He answered that question in the next breath. “All signs point to yes,” said Chesto. Fish was the mainspring of the committee advocating for a Boston Olympics for most of the committee’s existence. “Power shifted from old (Boston) to new the day a band of insurgents blocked the go-for-gold dreams of the city’s elite,” Vennochi observed.   She added, with relish, “It’s...