Meet Boston’s planning czar | State House pork| Big miss by Warren on inflation | About Contrarian Boston |
PR nightmare? Casino construction dispute raises questions about treatment of woman-owned sub
The $2.6 billion Encore Boston Harbor opened in 2019 and has reaped billions in revenue since then on everything from high end restaurants and shows to table games and slot machines.
But the years since have not seen so flush for the project’s largest electrical subcontractor, who is still waiting to get paid for all of her work.
Coghlin Electrical Contractors was one of the largest subs that worked on the huge casino project in Everett and the largest woman-owned electrical contractor at the time.
The glitzy Everett casino won glowing praise in the wake of its opening for its efforts to recruit tradeswomen and woman-owned contractors to work on the project, with the Worcester subcontractor’s involvement clearly key to meeting those goals.
The chair of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, which regulates the casino and oversaw its construction, pronounced herself pleased with the diversity efforts of Encore and the state’s other casinos.
But the high fives have been little help to Sue Mailman, the firm’s owner and a member of Worcester’s school board, whose company did more than $87 million in work on the project, but contends it has been paid for only $64 million, according to state court filings.
In fact, Mailman’s firm has been mired since 2019 in a legal battle with Suffolk Construction, the general contractor on the Encore Boston Harbor, over nearly $24 million in additional work the sub performed, but was never paid for.
It is an unequal battle. A contractor with the heft of Suffolk, led by hometown construction mogul John Fish, typically has the resources to battle it out in court and wear down opponents, especially subcontractors.
The dispute is now headed to arbitration next month, a Suffolk spokesperson said in an email.
Is a resolution finally in sight? We’ll see.
Last big piece in Wu’s development team falls into place
That would be James Arthur Jemison II, a top official with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development who previously did key stints locally in state and city government.
Mayor Wu officially announced her pick on Tuesday, with the Dorchester Reporter getting a jump on the story with a piece that ran Monday.
Jemison will start on May 23 as the city’s first ever planning chief, while also helping oversee the Boston Planning and Development Agency, the agency Wu has talked for years about dismantling.
A veteran housing and urban planner, Jemison’s experience extends from City Hall and Beacon Hill to D.C. and Detroit, where he was that city’s top development and planning executive.
Jemison’s background in neighborhood housing and development is also telling, coming amid clear signs, reported here, that Wu is seeking to shift development momentum away from downtown towards oft-neglected areas of the city.
Jemison was chief planner for Roxbury back in the 1990s under the old Boston Redevelopment Authority, the BPDA’s predecessor.
Greg Bialecki, the state’s economic development chief during Jemison’s time in state government, told The Boston Globe he sees Boston’s first-ever planning chief as a “pragmatic idealist.”
File under: High praise.
Local pork? State lawmakers seek dollars for pet projects
Seeking to bring home bacon for their districts, legislators on Beacon Hill have filed a flood of amendments to this year’s state budget – a deluge of more than 1,500 requests.
There are certainly lots of serious requests for money for worthy causes like opioid treatment programs, food pantries and the like.
But there’s also some questionable stuff here, as in why state taxpayers should pick up the tab for a new garage door at Marlborough’s fire station. Or, for that matter, the $165,000 in state money requested for nebulous “public safety improvements” in Northbridge – no other details were provided.
And a few amendments verge into the silly and or even the completely absurd.
There’s a request for more than $20,000 to make improvements to a Marshfield dog park, as well as annual training for House members on how to handle group emails.
That last one, though, appears to be the work of a jokester by the name of state Rep. Smitty Pignatelli.
In 2020, the Lenox Democrat, in a bid to liven things up, filed an amendment calling for an annual training session to teach House members how to mute their phones during a teleconference.
Looks like we have a new State House tradition taking shape.
Warren’s blinkered election warning to Dems
Sen. Elizabeth Warren took to the pages of The New York Times on Monday to warn of potential disaster for her party in the mid-term elections this fall.
The Commonwealth’s senior senator is right on target on that, but her prescription for what needs to be done misses the mark.
Somehow, we don’t think something as wonky and abstract as corporate tax reform – as needed as it is – will turn a surging red tide blue.
Warren mentions the word “inflation” just once in her piece, suggesting that some predictable corporate villainy might be helping fuel the price rise.
Dems have been eager to find ways to talk around the issue, and clearly Warren is no exception here.
Yet it is a misguided strategy, for it fails to address why the surge in prices for everything from gas to ground beef has stoked such anger.
The sharp and sudden rise in consumer prices is not just some passing cloud in a brilliant, blue-sky economy. Rather, it is just the latest in a growing affordability crisis for the American middle class, coming atop decades of spiraling costs in health care, housing, and higher education.
And Massachusetts, with its crazy housing prices, hordes of overpriced colleges, and crippling health costs, is ground zero in this crisis.
Given her strong track record on middle class issues, Warren could have – and should have – knocked this one out the park. Instead, she settled for a single, at best.
File under: Unsolicited advice.
Note to readers: Evolution of Contrarian Boston
You may have noticed that Contrarian Boston started off as a Monday, Wednesday, Friday newsletter and has now migrated to Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
This new schedule has proven a better fit in terms of catching as much of the week’s news as possible on while still posting three times a week.
We hope to someday publish daily, but we are not there yet.
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 Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. 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.