WooSox woo Congress | Sonia’s gain | Planning czar search | Downtown facts and fiction | Quick hits
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From WooSox to Boohoo Sox? Minor league teams lobby for federal cash
Owners of minor league teams in baseball and other sports are among the businesses lobbying Congress for $60 billion in relief money.
Jason Freier, owner of the Chattanooga Lookouts, is helping lead the charge after a 20 percent revenue drop last year and a near complete wipeout of the 2020 season, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Can WooSox owners Larry Lucchino et gang, who opened their new $160 million Polar Park last year in Worcester amid the pandemic, be far behind?
The Red Sox affiliate was forced to cancel their April games, while capacity during the first four games of May was capped at 25 percent, Charles Steinberg, the team president, said in an email.
Interestingly, Congressman Jim McGovern, a Worcester Democrat, is co-sponsoring a Minor League Baseball Relief Act, a related effort that would provide grants of up to $10 million to $15 million per team.
Steinberg referred questions on congressional relief-fund talks to Major League Baseball.
But the team, which had moved from Pawtucket where it had struggled financially, was able to fill the ballpark from June on after capacity restrictions were lifted, he said.
“We were finally able to make ends meet for the first time in years,” Steinberg said. “The people of Worcester embraced Polar Park, filling it nightly.”
As Healey procrastinates, guess who’s gaining?
That would be Sonia Chang-Díaz, the state senator and progressive darling who has made a free T a centerpiece of her campaign.
With the state AG mulling her options, Chang-Díaz’s campaign is picking up momentum, having lined up 50 endorsements from state and local officials, Masslive reports.
With state Democratic Party caucuses slated to start early next month, the end of January is looming large as a deadline for Healey to fish or cut bait.
Of course, Healey could skip those pesky caucuses, dominated by the party’s progressive faithful, as another state AG with big name recognition did back in 2007. However, it didn’t go so well for Tom Reilly, who later lost out to a then relative unknown in state politics, a certain gentleman by the name Deval Patrick.
Patrick rode a strong start in the caucuses all the way to the governor’s office.
Boston’s poised to start hunt for planning czar
That’s the word from the Boston Business Journal.
The Wu administration is putting the finishing touches on a job description for a new planning chief. The lucky winner will be part of the mayor’s cabinet and may also help manage the Boston Planning and Development Agency, the paper reports.
Given Wu has pledged to nix the agency, would it be more accurate to say the new chief will manage the agency’s dissolution?
Downtown Boston office space: sorting fact from fiction
Remember that 80s hit, "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades"?
That about sums up the take on the city’s office market by one of the top commercial real estate firms, even as towers sit empty and restaurants struggle to stay afloat.
So, kudos to the research team at JLL, which laid it out straight in its latest survey.
Sure, MassMutual, Sanofi and Verizon took possession of 2 million square feet of space in the last three months in three newly opened high-rises. But the leases were signed years ago.
And while there were other signs of positive leasing activity, downtown Boston has 8.7 million more square feet of empty offices than it did in early 2020, just before the pandemic hit, the JLL report notes.
Filling that empty space will take demand returning to 2019 levels for “multiple years,” while companies will have “hold firm” to return to office plans.
File under: Tall order.
You saw it here first
That would be the Globe’s story Friday about Gov. Baker’s decision to spend $100,000 on a legal fight with the MassGOP, the state party organization controlled by Trump hardliner Jim Lyons.
Here’s a link to the item we ran Jan. 10 after spotting an unusual transfer of cash from the governor’s campaign account to former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s law firm.
Message to WP: More stories like these, please
Here’s an excellent piece in today’s Washington Post, which details how U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland is moving suspiciously slowly on investigating what kind of role Donald Trump may have played in the plotting before the Jan. 6th Capitol attack.
By contrast, the House select committee has “has aggressively pursued information about Trump and those closest to him,” the paper reports, in a quadruple-bylined story.
It’s the kind of article that people used to read the Post for -- and on which it built its global reputation. And it’s refreshing change from the menu of USA Today-like features the paper has embraced under new editor Sally Buzbee.
Remembering MLK
In a new twist to an old tradition, Boston’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Breakfast will be entirely virtual this year and will take place over three days, the Globe reports.
The 52nd annual MLK Day breakfast kicked off today over Zoom with a keynote address by Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning book “On Juneteenth.”
That will be followed on March 15th, with a session on women leaders, featuring Sen. Elizabeth Warren as well as panelists US Rep. Ayanna Pressley, US Attorney Rachael Rollins and state Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz.
An awards ceremony is slated for April 4.
Quick Hits
Because we have so many higher-ed types in these parts: “Colleges lost 465,000 students this fall. The continued erosion of enrollment is raising alarm” (Post).
Ditto: “Lawsuit Says 16 Elite Colleges Are Part of Price-Fixing Cartel” (NYT).
Peter Coy is hoping they come down hard on the schools, which include MIT: “How Much Deference Do Elite U.S. Colleges Deserve?” (NYT).
What is Contrarian Boston?
I have fielded emails over the past couple weeks asking what Contrarian Boston is about.
Here’s a link to our mission statement – you can find it in the “about” section.
For a more prosaic, nuts-and-bolts description, read on.
An online newsletter, Contrarian Boston publishes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In Contrarian Boston you’ll find analysis of the day’s news, and original reporting as well.
Our focus is:
· Politics and all levels of governance, good and bad, with an emphasis on state and local, with some national mixed in;
· Economic growth and business, especially real estate, housing and new development projects;
· The media and why it does what it does;
· Education, from school board spats to the doings of multibillion-dollar university endowments;
· And whatever else catches our fancy.
Contrarian Boston seeks contributors
Have a news tip? Is there an issue you would like to see explored? Interested in writing up a news item or short opinion piece? As Contrarian Boston gets on its feet, I would like to add more news and a wider range of commentary as well.
Intrigued? Drop me a line at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
Thanks for reading and see you Wednesday.