Bostonians head to the polls today. For the first time in two decades, they’re picking up mayoral ballots that don’t have Tom Menino’s name on them. As the city works to tap Menino’s successor, the retrospective takes on Menino’s 20 years in office are beginning to roll in. They’re wildly varied — in part, because there’s no consensus about what it means to be a great mayor in the modern era.
Menino leaves behind a city that is growing more quickly than it has in decades. Many neighborhoods, like the long-awaited Seaport, are booming. The city enjoys a sterling credit rating, and Menino’s own favorability rating is in the stratosphere. At the same time, the city remains wracked by economic inequality, and the slow pace of improvements to the public school system has become a source of political potency for Hizzoner’s would-be successors. Then there’s the fact that mayors inherit business cycles more than they dictate them; Cambridge is also booming, but no one is arguing that the city across the river is enjoying spillover benefits from the Menino effect. So just how does one evaluate the Menino era?
The latest issue of City Journal weighs in with a sharply negative take on “Tommy from Hyde Park.” The magazine argues that Menino has ridden a wave of economic good luck stemming from the Boston region’s dominance in higher education, medical services, and technology-heavy businesses. “He lacked the bold vision, the muscular policy agenda, and, above all, the ingrained sensibility and spirit of a committed reformer,” the magazine argues.
Boston magazine’s latest issue serves up a more nuanced take. Boston calls Menino a “petty thin-skinned ruthless S.O.B. who just may be the best mayor we’ve ever had,” and argues that Menino’s legacy is far more complex than just the cranes hovering over the Seaport, or the LGBT community whose cause the mayor championed, or the riotous political culture he starved to death. “There isn’t one single story of Menino’s Boston,” the magazine argues, “there are hundreds — each bearing his unmistakable thumbprint.”
Most interesting in the Boston package is a good cop/bad cop conversation between the magazine’s Jason Schwartz and Rachel Slade. Schwartz, the good cop, points to the city’s robust population growth, low crime rates, bulletproof finances, and to Menino’s urban mechanic persona: “Boston is arguably one of the best-run cities in the country, and we take a lot of it for granted. Clean streets, no union strife, no debt issues — it’s allowed a lot of good things to happen here.” Slade, author of a blistering take on Menino’s Boston Redevelopment Authority earlier this year, is having none of it: “His was a closed society in many ways… Congratulations to the mayor for not being on the take… Yes, there’s less crime, but we’re a smaller city that’s becoming safe for the rich and the private-school crowd.”
–PAUL MCMORROW
BEACON HILL
Bob Katzen of Beacon Hill Roll Call, writing for the Lowell Sun, examines which lawmakers supported Gov. Deval Patrick’s bids to veto various pieces of legislation this year.
Massachusetts is getting an $11.7 million federal grant to expand a “pay for success” initiative that rewards outside service agencies depending on the measurable impact of their work for the state. CommonWealth looked at the emerging world of so-called “social impact bonds” in 2011 and again last year.
MUNICIPAL MATTERS
Middleboro selectmen are considering an emergency ban on the sale of synthetic cannabinoid, a substance sold in stores as incense and marketed to kids that they smoke to get high but which can cause severe kidney damage and psychotic behaviors.
McMorrow: Tear down this (city) hall!
Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis says it was time to go. David Bernstein profiles Davis for Boston magazine.
CASINOS
The Pioneer Valley Planning Commission joins forces with Mohegan Sun to help the casino developer negotiate with towns surrounding its proposed Palmer facility.
KC Urban Enterprises, which is interested in a Southeastern Massachusetts casino license, argues that preferences accorded to the Masphee Wampanoag are hurting non-tribal entrants.
The Globe looks at a Maryland casino mogul’s unlikely door-to-door campaign for a slots parlor in Leominster.
MARATHON BOMBING
Lawyers for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev argue that federal prosecutors are not giving them enough time to prepare a defense for a death penalty case.
NATIONAL POLITICS/WASHINGTON
State reliance on federal money nears an all-time high just as the sequester is about to make most of that money vanish, the Washington Post reports.
The State Department announced it will allocate $10 million to fight “gender-based violence in humanitarian emergencies worldwide.”
The Atlantic frames Washington’s food stamp debate around an examination of why the poor don’t work.
ELECTIONS
In Boston, it’s all over but the voting, with today a test of organization and field muscle. Undecideds are facing the reality that there is no such box on their ballot. Margery Eagan believes that Charlotte Golar Richie presents liberal women with a dilemma; Eagan is intrigued by the idea of Richie, but less so by her actual candidacy.
James Aloisi continues his look back for CommonWealth at pivotal Boston mayoral races of the past, focusing in this installment on James Michael Curley, the mayor of the poor.
Even readers a little afar of our small hamlet on a hill are getting a taste of the transition being ushered in with today’s preliminary election. CommonWealth’s Paul McMorrow has this look at the end of the reign of big-city bosses for Time, the New York Times takes stock of the race here, and former CommonWealth managing editor Robert David Sullivan, now writing a regular blog for the Jesuit magazine America, has this take on what’s at stake in today’s balloting.
Lawrence City Councilor Dan Rivera, who is challenging Mayor William Lantigua for, calls on the state to run the election, the Eagle-Tribune reports.
Lynn Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy and her challenger, City Council President Tim Phelan, spar over the city’s schools, the Item reports.
BUSINESS/ECONOMY
The last two Massachusetts restaurants owned by legendary entrepreneur Charlie Sarkis, whose empire once included Abe & Louie’s and Joe’s American Bar and Grill, will close in December and 100 workers laid off when the lease in Hanover expires.
A private equity firm has offered $4.7 billion to buy former smartphone giant Blackberry just as the reeling company announces a $1 billion loss and impending layoffs of 40 percent of its workforce because the new phones and operating systems the firm hung its salvation on have failed miserably.
EDUCATION
The state-appointed superintendent of the Lawrence schools brings cake and ice cream to schools to celebrates gains made on standardized tests, the Eagle-Tribune reports. The superintendent, Jeffrey Riley, talked with CommonWealth’s Michael Jonas about the gains in this video conversation.
Massachusetts is getting ready to implement — online — a state test aligned with the new Common Core standards that will replace MCAS.
HEALTH CARE
A Quincy city councilor is trying to get officials from Steward Health Care to appear before the council to address the financial woes of Quincy Medical Center.
TRANSPORTATION
The South Coast Rail project is one step closer to reality after Gov. Deval Patrick announced a major hurdle had been cleared with the release of the environmental impact report from the Army Corps of Engineers giving the project a green light. Some activists, though, say the chosen option that will run the train through the highly sensitive Hockomock Swamp in Stoughton is environmentally and fiscally irresponsible. CommonWealth’s previous look at South Coast Rail is here.
ENERGY/ENVIRONMENT
The National Review says the EPA’s decision to effectively ban the construction on new coal-fired power plants is a waste of energy in every sense.
A foul odor from the Fore River in Quincy has been identified as a spill from a French cement manufacturer’s barge of beef tallow, a nontoxic animal fat used to prevent freezing on the barge.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
State and local police shot and killed a suspected drug store thief in Brockton after a wild midday chase through three towns.
A Worcester man is arrested on charges of stealing sewer grates and then selling them, the Telegram & Gazette reports.
MEDIA
The Nieman Journalism Lab reports on 61Fresh, the Globe’s new system for tracking what local news stories are trending on Twitter.
A former FBI agent has agreed to plead guilty to leaking classified information about a foiled Yemen bomb plot to the Associated Press, the New York Times reports. (The ex-agent is also pleading guilty to child pornography.)