Massachusetts Politics

Last December, with just a few days left in 2016, I decided to devote some time each month during the upcoming year to tracking new cases of public corruption and providing a summary of those cases in an end-of-the-month blog post for an entire year. Out of simple curiosity, I’d been reading, for years, every press release out of the offices of the Massachusetts Attorney General, the Massachusetts Inspector General, and the United States Attorney for Massachusetts, a habit that always left me shaking my head. I’d be amazed by how much corruption “business” these offices had and by how few of the corruption cases, whether they were at the point of indictment or sentencing or somewhere in between, were reported upon in the mainstream media.   With the opportunity to be a breaker of news, albeit a modest one, I could not help but unleash “This Month in Corruption” on an indifferent world.   It’s been an interesting exercise, bordering at times on the comedic. ...

The First Church in Malden, Congregational, a once-cherished emblem of the history of Malden, Massachusetts, was wiped out a few weeks ago for the sake of a new downtown development. The site of the church was contiguous to the Malden Government Center complex (city hall and police headquarters), which had been built in the mid-1970s in the middle of Pleasant Street in an attempt to create a pedestrian shopping mall from that point down to where Pleasant Street spills in to Main Street.   It turned out to be an ill-conceived and ridiculously hopeful project: no mall ever materialized.   For years, the people of Malden yearned to correct that colossal mistake by demolishing the Government Center and reopening the entire length of Pleasant Street to the smooth flow of vehicular traffic.   Enter the Jefferson Apartment Group of Virginia in 2015.   It proposed spending $100 million to demolish the Government Center; replace it with apartments, offices and hundreds of par...

This comes as no surprise to the people I work with (nor to my wife) but I was dead damn wrong in my last post, “Guv’s Sales Tax Holiday Bill Looks D.O.A.   Appearances Are Deceiving,” 8-6-17. I thought Charlie Baker must have set everything up with legislative leaders before filing a last-minute bill August 2 to have a sales tax holiday the weekend of August 19-20. I believed that despite the immediate negative reaction to the bill from an important House committee chairman, Revenue’s Jay Kaufman, who said it would be a “colossal mistake” to have a sales tax holiday this year. I figured our governor must have quietly secured support for the idea from House Speaker Bob DeLeo and Senate President Stan Rosenberg before the filing and that Kaufman must have been out of the loop. I figured wrong.   Kaufman was most definitely in the loop.   I’m not sure where Baker was. This past Thursday brought the last possible opportunity for Baker’s sales tax holiday to be enacted. The l...

Given the hand-in-glove nature of the relationship between the governor and legislature, it’s hard to believe Charlie Baker introduced a bill last week to establish a sales tax holiday on the weekend of August 19-20 if he had any doubts it would be enacted promptly.   Yet, at this point, it appears that the governor’s plan to suspend the state’s 6.25 percent sales tax the weekend after next is in serious trouble.   The bill was filed on Wednesday, August 2, and, the day after, it was sent by House leaders to the Joint (House-Senate) Committee on Revenue, whereupon Rep. Jay Kaufman of Lexington, the House co-chair of the committee, said it would be a “colossal mistake” to have a sales tax holiday because of how hard it is going to be to balance the state budget this fiscal year. According to Department of Revenue estimates, the state would forego around $25 million if no taxes were collected on the sale of goods during the third weekend of this month.   (Only purchase...