| Walsh in the middle | Diehl’s bad deal | Planning czar approaches | Inflation forever? | Skewed rent control panel | About Contrarian Boston |
Decision nears on Boston planning czar hire
The search for the city’s first-ever planning chief may be drawing to close.
Mayor Michelle Wu is poised to announce her pick for the new post in a matter of weeks, sources say.
The decision couldn’t come a moment too soon.
Wu has already made a number of substantive decisions regarding the future of development in Boston.
Stirring controversy, Wu has had city planners refocus on East Boston’s waterfront, diverting their attention away from the more well-heeled stretch of harborside downtown, where a major tower has been proposed next to the New England Aquarium.
Boston needs to be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time” an environment legal eagle tells the Globe’s Shirley Leung.
Hopefully with a planning chief finally on board the city can master that particular skill.
Hanscom project battle: Biden’s union-only construction order faces challenge
President Biden won rave reviews from labor leaders when he ordered all major government projects to be built with union labor.
But a little more than month later, there is already a gaping, $279 million hole in the president’s union-boosting executive order.
A spokesperson for Gilbane confirmed Friday the construction giant is weighing plans to hire a mix of union and non-union contractors to build a high-tech lab complex at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford.
And Lou Antonellis, business manager/financial secretary for IBEW-103, is one very unhappy camper. Antonellis has spent a decade pushing the feds to award the project and commit to using union labor, traveling down to Washington to make the case.
“It just seems like they are going out of their way to defy the president’s order,” he said of Gilbane. “It’s a slippery slope.
The tiff, in turn, has put U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh in the middle of some very awkward crossfire on social media.
Antonellis took to Twitter to call out a Gilbane executive who posted a photo shaking hands with the former Boston mayor.
“You have some nerve post a picture with @SecMartyWalsh,” the IBEW chief tweeted.
Antonellis, who has spoken to Walsh, believes the labor secretary and former union construction boss wants the new Hanscom project to be an all-union job, but faces a U.S. Department of Defense taking a different approach.
That said, the timing of the deal may be on Gilbane’s side, with the feds having bid out the work before Biden’s executive order went into effect.
Undeterred, Antonellis said he is considering a lawsuit.
Stay tuned.
Contributions drop as Diehl doubles down on Trump
Republican candidate for governor Geoff Diehl, an unabashed Trumpie, could barely contain himself when he announced the hiring of Corey Lewandowski as a “senior strategist.”
But a month later, Diehl’s decision to hire the former Trump campaign manager looks like it has been a turn off for potential campaign contributors.
The former state lawmaker managed to raise just $64,000 in February, a precipitous drop from the previous two months, when contributions came in above $85,000.
Meanwhile, Diehl’s expenditures on his campaign more than doubled last month as he forked over thousands of dollars for out-of-state travel to woo donors and win over party bigwigs at the Republican Governors Association and CPAC, campaign finance records show.
Diehl’s decision to double down on Trump by hiring Lewandowski seemed like a terrible idea at the time for someone running for governor in Massachusetts.
And now the numbers bear that out.
File under: Money talks.
Guess what’s missing from Wu’s rent control group?
That would be a more substantial contingent from the real estate community, particularly apartment building owners.
We counted just six real estate industry types on the 23-member panel Boston Mayor Michelle Wu unveiled on Thursday to draft a proposal to rein in runaway rents.
There’s Curtis Kemeny, head of Boston Residential Group, which manages and develops apartments and condos.
There’s also Brian Kavoogian from National Development, Kirk Sykes of Accordia Partners and Kim Sherman of Related Beal, who have all been involved with residential development.
In addition, there’s also Jeanne Pinado, who ran a Roxbury community development corporation for years before joining Colliers International, and oh yeah, Dermot Doyne, listed as “landlord and business owner.”
Doyne sounds like a perfectly nice guy, but it’s the first time we have heard of him.
There are a lot of other great people on the panel – labor leaders, professors, nonprofit chiefs, foundation honchos, representatives from tenant groups – even a medical school professor.
But a few more real estate people might help ground the discussions in market and societal reality.
Scary prediction from banker who called inflation spike
Remember March 2020, when it looked like we were headed for a replay of the Great Depression?
Well, apparently former U.K. central banker Charles Goodhart had a very different vision of the future, one in which inflation would surge ahead in 2021 by 5-to-10 percent. It’s a forecast that probably had some people questioning whether the 85-year-old economist had finally lost it.
Now Goodhart is back at it, this time forecasting higher inflation for decades to come, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The British economist sees a shortage of workers keeping inflation rising by 3 to 4 percent a year, more than double the pace of the decade before Covid-19 changed everything.
Care to bet against him again?
Quick hits:
Not the best advertisement: “Mike Tyson credits marijuana for improved mental health, introduces line of products in Boston” (Boston Herald)
We are all heroes now: “One way we can help Ukraine: Work from home” (Boston Globe)
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.