Massachusetts Politics

Two contractors involved in building the Assembly Square T station knowingly submitted inflated payment estimates for materials and will pay large fines and penalties to resolve the case, according to the Office of Attorney General Maura Healey. A press release from Healey’s office, issued this past Friday, Feb. 24, announced:   “S&R Construction Enterprises, its president Stephen Early, subcontractor A&S Electrical LL and its manager, Gregory Lane, agreed to resolve allegations that they violated the Massachusetts False Claims Act by knowingly submitting false and inflated pay estimates to improperly front load payments under their contracts.   “In addition, S&R Construction and A&S Electrical are barred from bidding on and accepting new public contracts in Massachusetts for five years and one year, respectively.” S&R Construction was the general contractor for the Assembly Square station construction project.   The T awarded the company a $29 m...

A week ago today, on Feb. 17, the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission announced the appointment of David A. Wilson as its executive director, where he’s responsible for administering and enforcing the state’s conflict of interest and financial disclosure laws. A graduate of Columbia University School of Law and Brandeis University in Waltham, Wilson is kind of a fixture of Massachusetts government, having been an attorney on the Ethics Commission staff for three decades.   For the past eight months, he’d been serving as the commission’s acting executive director.   He needs no warm-up for this big role. The commission is composed of five members, three appointed by the governor and one each appointed by the secretary of state and attorney general.   All of the current commissioners are attorneys, and three of them are retired judges: Barbara Dortch-Okara, Regina Quinlan and David Mills. (The non-judge lawyer-members are Thomas Sartory and Maria Krokidas. Wilson’s appoin...

It looks like Charlie Baker has for the time being thwarted the practitioners of outrage -- they who were demanding from him at least daily denunciations of President Trump, notwithstanding the Commonwealth’s serious-as-heroin financial dependence upon the federal government.   I’ve not heard anything in several days from any Massachusetts group ordering Baker to make explicit his revulsion toward the Donald or else risk losing any claim to political legitimacy, moral credibility, human decency, normal eyesight or clothes sense.   Baker’s winning this game by refusing to play. Good for him.   He knows that any denunciation he did make would never be judged sufficient, and that, if by chance it were so deemed, those suffering from Trump derangement syndrome would be back the next day, baying for more and louder condemnations.   Because Trump’s an idiot doesn’t mean Baker has to slash the Commonwealth’s wrists. Yesterday morning, the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Cen...

An interview with Steve Kadish, Charlie Baker’s chief of staff, by CommonWealth magazine’s Michael Jonas appeared online January 10.   Headlined “Governor Fix-It’s fix-it man,” the Q&A was heavy on the details of Baker administration policy and governance, but nevertheless a good, fast read. Somewhere near the end, as Jonas and Kadish were discussing the MBTA, to which both the governor and his chief of staff have devoted incredible amounts of time and energy, Jonas said something that had my head nodding like a bobble head doll’s. “I ride the Red Line.   One day this week there was a signal problem at Harvard.   I start at the far other end at Ashmont and we were delayed because of it,” Jonas related. “And the doors in one of the cars were not working, so people on the platform had to keep scurrying to another one.   It (the T) still has the feeling sometimes of being held together by bailing wire and bubble gum.” Indeed. I ride MBTA buses and subway cars every ...

The money crowd has dubbed him the “Oracle of Boston,” signifying his exceptionally high standing in the investment world as an equal to Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha.” Used copies of his book, “Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor,” sell for thousands of dollars on the Internet. He’s so important in the financial circles that, when he had heart surgery a while back, the Wall Street Journal kept its readers apprised of his medical condition and progress. Meet Seth Klarman, age 59, a Baltimore native, Harvard grad, resident of Chestnut Hill, billionaire, frequent donor to Republican office holders, (including Charlie Baker), and founder of the Baupost Group, a Boston-based private investment partnership. And, guess what? Our new Republican president has Mr. Klarman shaking in his boots. As just reported in the New York Times , Klarman recently wrote a private letter to his investors, which found its way to Times reporter Andrew...