Bending for business. Davis said she took back her vote asking MIT to make its new campus in Kendall Square net-zero on energy use because Steve Marsh, managing director of real estate with the MIT Investment Management Co., “just said to me that [MIT officials] don’t understand the implications.” Yet this was less than two months before the city, MIT and Harvard signed a “Community Compact for a Sustainable Future” about which institute president L. Rafael Reif said:
Climate change is a global challenge. But momentum for action begins with strong local collaborations. Cambridge has helped to pioneer the idea of urban environmentalism. Building on that commitment, and drawing on the scientific, technological and policy expertise of MIT and Harvard, together we can make a difference for our local community and perhaps extract lessons with global value as well.
Davis has always been a leader in environmental awareness. In this case in which a personal issue and governing should have gone hand in hand, she let MIT dictate her conscience for reasons that are at best dubious and more likely an outright whopper and stand out even more when you consider that the city’s own $84 million Martin Luther King Jr. School project is essentially net zero, with 65 geothermal wells and a cladding of photovoltaic cells. How can the institute commit to a LEED Gold standard of building and sign that compact but not “understand the implications” of net-zero construction? How did they commit to LEED Gold – throw a dart?
The claim to institute ignorance also came shortly after Cheung praised it for addressing what is now a “climate crisis,” saying that he’d seen various institutions’ work and “by far and away MIT is doing more work on this than anyone else … and I hope MIT sees this [campus] as a part of it.”
But this is just one example of most councillors’ general lack of steel and brains when it comes to dealing with the city’s academic and corporate partners. While Kelley and vanBeuzekom tend to keep their heads, other councillors’ reactions range from occasional rebelliousness to outright acquiescence, with the Google structure being the ultimate example. (Runner-up: Councillors claiming that Reif showing up to speak at a meeting for three minutes was significant in any way other than as an illustration that MIT wanted its zoning put through.)
The council also reversed itself in January on zoning it wrote compelling Kendall Square corporations to have ground-floor cafeterias open to the public 20 hours per week. The Community Development Department’s Brian Murphy, who helped write the zoning when he was a councillor, brought the idea forward because he was supposed to “identify any possible barriers that would hinder Biogen Idec Inc. from relocating its headquarters back to Cambridge” – but Biogen’s return to Cambridge from the suburbs became official in July 2011, a year and a half before Murphy’s request. (It’s even less encouraging that attorney James Rafferty, who also helped write the zoning, called the rule “very much an eleventh-hour brainstorming idea.” It suggests city zoning is written without much thought.)
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Excellent article. I hope voters consider all these issues in November.