09.15.2024

Healey’s stealth campaign to boost single-family home construction | The Times’ belated look at Hamas brutality | Long-time Boston development official given the boot by Wu | Boston reporters join Law360 strike | The Dems and their agonizingly slow learning curve on illegal immigration | Quick hits |

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Wu’s purge: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu cans critic who raised concerns about pet climate initiative

Apparently, in Wutopia everyone speaks with one voice - or else.

Last month Jay Hurley, the long-time chair of the Boston Zoning Commission, shot down the mayor’s proposal to impose tough new net-zero emissions rules for new buildings starting next year, accelerating her plan by an entire decade.

Hurley was a long-time top official in the ironworkers union who was involved, in one way or another, in any new tower or other project built in the Hub in the last half century.

As Boston’s development boom has gone bust, Hurley had grown increasingly worried about the impact of new Wu administration climate and other regs on proposed development projects struggling to get financing.

“I just felt it like they were pushing it too fast - it’s too much too soon,” Hurley told Contrarian Boston.

Last Tuesday, when the agenda for the next zoning board meeting failed to show up in his inbox, Hurley reached out to City Hall.

He didn’t hear back for several hours, which was odd. Finally, Hurley received an apologetic call from an old City Hall colleague. After expressing surprise that Hurley hadn’t been notified, he then told him the news: “You’ve been replaced.”

“‘Are you kidding?’” Hurley replied - clearly shocked.

So ended Hurley’s two decades of service on the zoning commission, in which he had outlasted a string of mayors: Menino, Walsh, and Kim Janey (acting mayor for a few months) before being unceremoniously shown the door.

Jay Hurley with Congressman Stephen Lynch, a former union ironworker himself

Hurley, who just turned 70, said he’s not particularly aggrieved by losing his seat on the zoning commission, for which he was paid maybe a couple thousand dollars in a good year.

“I’ve been fired from better jobs than this,” he quipped.

Hurley told Contrarian Boston he’s concerned with a large drop in construction activity in Boston. There has been a big falloff over the past two years in new projects moving ahead - everything from new apartments and condos to new lab space. And that, in turn, has meant increasingly lean times for union construction workers.

“Work has been the slowest it has been since I can remember, at least in the last 20 years,” said the veteran - and now retired - union official and South Boston resident.

But Hurley is also clearly troubled about what his removal says about the ability of members of the zoning commission and similar boards to speak their minds and raise concerns about Wu’s policies, with the uber progressive mayor’s sensitivity to criticism and perceived sleights an open secret.

“If you can’t vote your conscience, what are you going to do?” Hurley said. “You might as well not have the (zoning) board.”

Great points.

Contrarian Boston reached out to Wu’s press office for comment, but did not receive a response by our deadline.

Well that took a while: Nearly a year after Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, The New York Times looks at how the group uses murder and torture to control Gaza

We have been waiting for someone to write this story.