What city official ‘knows’ turns out to be wrong, and lawyers fell for it. Now what?
What do you do when you hear a city official say something that’s obviously untrue?
In this case it was Kathy Born, chairwoman of the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority, saying Sept. 19 in reference to a Boston Properties project that “I served on the council with seven of the councillors who voted for this, and I know that they knew that there wasn’t a functioning CRA. The vacancies on the board were advertised on the city website in May of 2011 and all of the councillors were aware and in fact it was one of the councillors who brought it to my attention.”
The context here is that the executive director of the authority presented a project to the City Council in February when he had no legal right to do so. He was acting on his own with no active board members telling him what to do or approving his actions, a situation that went on for two years and eight months without him doing anything about it.
Born is saying this is okay because the councillors knew the facts when, in March, they voted 7-2 to approve the project.
And that might convince someone who wasn’t around at the time attending council meetings and listening to hours of councillor discussion and public comment. To anyone who was, it rings utterly false.
So what do you do? Fortunately, Erin Baldassari at The Cambridge Chronicle has done the hard work of contacting the councillors and asking them whether Born’s statement is true, so the doubters have some of the work done for them. The Chronicle accounting, under the polite headline “Cambridge Redevelopment Authority report does not match City Council’s account,” notes that Leland Cheung is out of the country and can’t be reached; that of the remaining eight councillors, six voted yes on the project; and that of those, a single councillor — Ken Reeves — said he knew there was no board.
This is, in itself, something of a surprise. If you sat through those meetings you will remember that in February there were questions about the authority board, but that it was generally believed there were three members. (This was the story through March, when executive director Joseph Tulimieri told Cambridge Chronicle reporter Andy Metzger that he had three board members and that it wasn’t “interfering with any of the decisions that have to be made. [It’s] just the simple matter of collecting a quorum.” At that point, in direct defiance of authority bylaws, there hadn’t been a board meeting for two years — since March 17, 2010 — so apparently it wasn’t such a simple matter.)
Here was Reeves’ comment at the time, responding to the fact only Cambridge residents may serve on the board: “This is the most curious thing, because the one [member] I know, Alan Bell, he’s been in California for years, so I don’t see how he could continue on it.” If Reeves said at any time during the monthlong proposal process that he knew there wasn’t a functioning authority, it was too subtle to register with the public, media or other councillors.
And what of Craig Kelley, the councillor who voted against the Boston Properties project and says he knew there was no active board at the authority?
When contacted Sept. 19 immediately after the authority meeting at which Born made her false assertion, Kelley said that his “memory is that everyone in the world was repeatedly saying we didn’t have a functioning board.” But he also said that “to be sure, I’d have to look at the comments” and that it wasn’t certain that the council understood what powers the executive director had or didn’t have “because I don’t know that any of us looked at the charter … I don’t think any of us knew with a level of certainty.”
Whatever Reeves’ and Kelley’s memories, based on public discussion in February and March, the actual timeline of events and Baldassari’s reporting in the Chronicle, Born is just flat-out wrong.
And it was Born’s incorrect comment that provided the basis for the authority’s legal counsel saying in a breathtakingly incompetent and irresponsible official report that “According to city officials and contemporaneous correspondence to the council, at least some members of the City Council were aware of the fact that [the] authority has had vacancies in its membership.” (The correspondence was a citizen’s letter asking for an official answer about vacancies. This is little better than Born’s belief that councillors remembered an ad for board members that was posted on the city website 10 months before the Boston Properties proposal was introduced.)
An actual fact
Here’s how it plays out: Born says she “knew,” but she didn’t. The authority’s legal counsel from Foley Hoag relies on Born, not even bothering to confirm it after councillor Minka vanBeuzekom told two authors of the report to their face that, as Baldassari puts in, “she felt personally misled at the time of the council’s vote because it wasn’t clear that the CRA board hadn’t weighed in on the plans.” And the board accepts the report.
But here’s an actual fact, rather than the kind stated by Born: No one has shown that Tulimieri has the right to singlehandedly accept, craft and present to the council a project such as he did for Boston Properties. If he doesn’t have the right and if it were understood there were no active authority board members, the Boston Properties project wouldn’t have been presented to the council Feb. 27 or voted on March 19.
By Tulimieri’s own admission in April, the authority board members could have killed the Boston Properties project. “Can the authority say, ‘No, we don’t want it’? Sure. The authority could do that,” he said. “I’m not going to speculate as to whether they should do that.”
Even on Sept. 19, Foley Hoag’s Jeffrey Mullan said that “I believe that at any time, the authority was not forced to proceed with the conveyance of land that was proposed in [Tulimieri’s] letter to the council. Now that would have stopped the project, perhaps, but once you were appointed and sworn, you considered that in I think every one of your meetings and took a vow to proceed.”
The board members decided to ignore this and judge the Boston Properties proposal because the council had voted on it. Now Born seems to be retroactively justifying that decision by making untrue statements, and she and the rest of the board are okay with legal counsel that doesn’t care.
Never mind what you do when you hear a city official say something that’s obviously untrue. What do you do when an entire project is based on it?
City officials will keep rewriting history until they wear the rest of us out. Facts are just immaterial to the discussion.
Ok, so if you go back and discover this decision isn’t legal, what then? Do you object to removing the park outright or do you want more for the “community” in return for the early release of the park? You can get as huffy as y’all like about this but the fact remains that the city has essentially a sublet agreement. What I really don’t care for is the idea that Councilors are making decisions one way or another without fully understanding what the situation is here. Craig Kelly may have just got it right by being the guy who constantly says no. Just by the 50/50 nature of the voting process he was bound to look good at some point. (No offense Mr. Kelley).
So you go back, put the CRA back together and put it all the table. The city is going to lose the park one way or another, so maybe we can get a little something more than a strip of land we already own and the outside means to clean it up. It still doesn’t change the fact that the Google expansion is the right thing to do.
My position is that city officials and especially lawyers who work for the city, government and taxpayers should care about following the law. If malfeasance isn’t addressed in the case of the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority, it weakens the case for addressing it elsewhere, along with the idea we’re supposed to follow rules in disposing of public land or in any public doings. In a crooked system, increasingly less crookedness gets notice because safeguards fail, as we’ve seen here, and civic engagement falters when people don’t think their input, attention or interest is respected.
If we know rules were broken, laws ignored and lies told, are we really supposed to simply shrug and say, “What’s done is done”? Surely there are millions of examples of this in public life, including instances where arguably no one was hurt and no one did it to get rich … but either the rules are to be followed or they’re not.
If not, to hell with it! Let’s not have those rules, laws and bylaws, eh?
Patrick,
When in comes to government, process matters because that’s what government is: a collective agreement to certain rules that constrain behavior.
Yes, unringing the bell would be hard and we might end up with the same outcome. But just saying “nothing o see here, move along” isn’t an appropriate response for city officials.
Patrick, you don’t understand at all what the rules that govern this situation are. I don’t believe you have attended a single CRA meeting, so it is unlikely that you have heard Tom Stohlman explain the intricacies of the zoning for the MXD District and how they affect open space. Even BP agreed that they couldn’t just get rid of the garden, even after the city’s easement expired, just that they would have more control over its use. Take a look at the article regarding the vaporware housing BP has offered over and over (https://www.cambridgeday.com/2012/08/23/agency-boosts-google-connector-plan-agrees-promised-housing-is-impossible-under-law/) to squeeze more and more out of the city and the neighborhood without actually having to do anything in return. Confirming what Tom Stohlman had been saying for quite some time, BP finally admitted that they could not build the housing under the current zoning, even though they are removing more of the roof garden precisely because of that alleged housing.
You also probably don’t know anything about the counterproposals suggested by two different architects and by MIT’s former chief planning officer that would have replaced some of the garden elsewhere on the roof of one of the abutting buildings and/or built the new Google building (two floors of 12,000-13,000 square feet each are not a “connector”, they are a building) differently so as to preserve as much of the existing garden as possible.
I have said all along that BP will only do something well when forced. The garden is evidence of that. We could have a solution that everyone could live with if there were any will to do so. City officials would have had to force BP to come up with a better plan, and you will never convince me they couldn’t have done so. Instead, city officials, including the CRA, and members of the public who keep carrying water for them have trained BP that they don’t have to do anything they don’t want to. There will always be another marquee tenant to create the necessity of ignoring the rules and people in charge eager to indulge in yet more giveaways.
Points well taken Mr. Admin (levy?) and Saul. I agree that the process has fallen apart here. However it looks more like apathy than conspiracy. So clean it up, put the authority back together and go forward with a clean slate. If you want mass firings, get people to vote. However, we would need competent alternatives to what we’ve got and I wouldn’t say our cups overrunneth in that department. I do agree that this looks terrible and is a mar on the whole process. I didn’t mean to sound like I was saying “no harm no foul.” Though now that I reread its hard to make that assumption.
And furthermore, with the millions of Square feet of development already approved in the area, Google could have gotten even better space without pissing off half the town. Instead they were influenced by Michael Cantalupa of Boston properties with his profitable monopoly on CRA land and Joe Tulimieri’s delusions of grandeur.
Joe Tulimieri has resigned. See http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/x1925499352/Tulimieri-resigns-from-Cambridge-Redevelopment-Authority-amid-salary-increase-benefit-concerns.