Only two City Council meetings remain before the summer break and nomination papers for council candidates become available July 1, with nearly two dozen people already identified as likely to swing by Election Commission offices to pick some up.
Nomination papers are usually due back at the end of July, and the campaigning and politicking through the Nov. 5 voting is likely to be fierce, considering the size of the field (which includes a half-dozen more candidates than two years ago); what we’ve glimpsed of the action so far (including incumbent Tim Toomey fighting off Michael Connolly in November to keep his seat in the State House, and the recent kerfuffle over the schools budget); and the overall quality (low, very low) of the council’s work in the past term.
Here’s a look at some council actions of the past year and a half that could inspire challengers to step in or serve as flashpoints in upcoming candidate debates:
The Google debacle. The gold medal of council failure really has to go, once again, to the Google land deal from March 2012. The tech giant renting space from Kendall Square developers Boston Properties won a 7-2 vote that took away 42 percent of a public rooftop garden, a deal that began and ended within a startlingly fast single month, during which the councillors:
bought the city manager’s premise that even though handing off the land at $127 a square foot was a matter of incredible urgency, the land was also too “insignificant” to go through a prescribed disposition process;
never bothered to ask or confirm whether there was any actual urgency to the plan;
ignored warnings (including in a letter from citizen Charles Marquardt, where he outright urged councillors to look into the situation) that the plan had been put together by a single rogue employee of the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority with no board oversight;
failed to recognize that of the five “commitments” Boston Properties made in exchange for the garden, only two were real (the other three had already been promised or were compelled by zoning law);
agreed to one of those commitments even though the apartment tower Boston Properties promised to build was not only already promised, but literally can’t be built without further bending by the council. (The councillors voted ignorant of this.) In fact, Boston Properties said later that the Google structure needed to be built the exact way it requested because it has to function with a housing tower – yet there was no design for the tower, which couldn’t be built anyway unless the council opts well over a year later to give the company land to do it on. And, in fact, the 42 percent of space that got taken away wasn’t even all for Google so it wouldn’t leave Cambridge; it includes rooftop garden space that will belong only to residents of that high-rise tower Boston Properties hasn’t designed yet and can’t build.
Click the page numbers below to see the rest:
A stronger
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Excellent article. I hope voters consider all these issues in November.