MOST PEOPLE do volunteer work at places such as hospitals, food banks, or shelters. But not Arthur Jemison — he takes his volunteer work to a whole new level, volunteering as the director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency, where he oversees 269 employees and a budget of roughly $78 million.
Jemison’s regular job is chief of planning for Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, a cabinet-level position that pays him $179,000 a year. His volunteer job pays nothing, even though his predecessor in that position was paid more than $220,000 a year.
It’s a very unusual arrangement, but one that seems designed to further solidify Wu’s control of the agency which she has said she eventually wants to abolish.
A Wu spokeswoman issued a statement saying Jemison’s two roles “work together to bring a uniform approach to redesigning Boston’s planning and development process.” The statement said making Jemison chief of planning in the city “ensured that planning was elevated in the city’s development process and that city departments were all aligned toward a vision of a Boston for everyone.”
Installing Jemison in both slots was by no means a simple process. First, Wu had the BPDA seek legal advice on whether such an arrangement would pass legal muster.
The board subsequently hired Jeffrey Mullan, a senior partner at the Boston law firm of Foley Hoag, to review the situation. He concluded that it would be legal for an individual to hold down the two slots as long as two requirements specified in the Commonwealth’s conflict of interest law were met.
First, the individual would have to disclose the dual roles to the “appointing authorities” — the city of Boston and the BPDA, the same entities implementing the precedent-setting arrangement.
The second requirement involves a provision in the conflict of interest law that precludes municipal employees from holding down multiple compensated positions within the same municipality. According to Mullan’s review, the law provides an exemption to the prohibition in order to “encourage volunteer public service.” To that end, he recommended that the individual performing the two roles work for free at one of them.
The BPDA board subsequently voted that the agency’s director be “uncompensated,” which is the language the law uses.
For his counsel, Mullan was paid $798 an hour, for a total of $25,695.
Shirley Kressel, who watchdogs the BPDA, said in an email that the intent of the volunteer provision in the law is to allow a government employee working in, say, the city clerk’s office to volunteer to clean parks for the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation — “not to run another city agency.”
“But by a mere flick of the pen,” Kressel added, “reclassifying one of these two jobs as uncompensated, Arthur Jemison now becomes a kindly volunteer in public service.”
In a memorandum earlier this year asking the BPDA board to appoint Jemison to the uncompensated position of director, Teresa Polhemus, the No. 2 official at the agency, told the board that the State Ethics Commission had informed the agency that it was all right for Jemison to hold down both jobs as long as he complied with the requirements of the ethics law.
Sam Tyler, a former president of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau with institutional knowledge about city government, takes issue with the need to have a chief of planning in city government.
“The effort to emphasize the planning function by making the director of the BPDA also the chief of planning for the city reporting to Mayor Wu makes no sense unless it was an effort by the mayor to get even greater control over the BPDA,” he said.
Tyler maintains that the more direct and legal approach would have been to bolster staffing in the BPDA’s planning budget to enhance the agency’s role as the city’s planning agency. “That was the thought behind restructuring the Boston Redevelopment Authority in 2016 and changing its public name to the Boston Planning and Development Agency,” he said.
Jemison did not respond to a request for a telephone interview, but he did respond via his spokeswoman to an emailed question asking what he would do if Wu insisted he take a certain action as BPDA director that he believes is not in the best interest of Boston.
“Arthur has not encountered a situation like the hypothetical you described,” the spokeswoman said in an email. “If he were in that circumstance, he would advocate for what he thought was right, but ultimately defer to the mayor because she was elected by Bostonians to choose the right course for the city.”