02.26.2025

Mass. schools in deep trouble | Rising Boston fintech or predatory lender? | Green dream morphs into an eco nightmare in Jamaica Plain | Quick hits |

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Not so sustainable: One of Wu’s showcase green energy projects is driving neighbors in Jamaica Plain crazy

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s Green New Deal has become a nightmare for a group of Jamaica Plain residents.

Marie Mercurio, her husband Dr. Vijay Hegde, and their neighbors say work on installing a $15 million-plus geothermal heating and cooling system at the elementary school next door upended their lives last summer, with incessant drilling that was much louder than even city officials anticipated.

There was also little warning, with just one public meeting before construction crews started boring test wells.

And that was just for starters, as neighbors are bracing for another summer of loud drilling on the grounds of the Kennedy Elementary School, all accompanied by the jolting, periodic thump of dirt from the excavation work being dumped.

“It wasn't like nails on the chalkboard, but over the course of 10 hours, it was enough to get into your brain and make you start to think you were going crazy,” Mercurio told Contrarian Boston. “It was very agitating and created angst among our family members.”

City officials have since acknowledged that the noise generated by the drilling project - which neighbors say routinely well above the city’s limit of 70 decibels - was louder than has been anticipated.

However, internal emails, obtained by a neighbor through a public records request, shows that city officials were warned by the project’s contractor, months before work began, of the potential for high decibel levels of disruptive noise.

An official with the contractor, Honeywell, noted that the “sound of machinery, drilling, and equipment operation will be loud and continuous” for anyone within 100 feet, and recommended ear protection, according to one email.

With the closest borehole from the drilling just 50 feet from their fence, Mercurio and her husband, using hand-held sound measuring devices, clocked noise from the project in their yard that was well above the legal limit.

And while Mercurio and Hegde say they are all for reducing carbon emissions and saving money on heating and cooling costs, they question whether drilling dozens of 800-foot-deep holes for a geothermal project is the best or most cost-effective approach.

When the decline over time in the new geothermal system’s efficiency and other factors are taken into account, the savings from the project will dwindle to just $8,000 a year, according to analysis of the project’s projections by Hegde, a doctor and research scientist.

And let’s just say at that rate, there is no way the city will recoup its expenses on the project in any imaginable timeframe.

“Based on these projections, it would take approximately 2000 years (yes you read that right, Two Millennia) for the city to achieve a break-even point on this investment,” Hegde noted in an email.

City officials defended the project.

“The geothermal project at JFK Elementary is a critical investment in this vision, ensuring healthier indoor air quality and supporting Boston’s carbon neutrality goals,” a spokesperson said in a statement to Contrarian Boston.

Predatory lender or rising fintech? Mass AG cracks down on Boston lender with a home equity loan offering that it contends was too good to be true

Since it launched in 2017, Boston-based Hometap has built a growing national business in the home equity market, winning favorable coverage in the business press.

As of last year, it had originated 11,373 home equity investment contracts across 18 states, according to Morningside.

But where some see a successful homegrown fintech company, state Attorney General Andrea Campbell sees the latest incarnation of the predatory mortgage lenders that caused so many problems in the Great Recession.