Those slow turning wheels of justice | Utopian scheme for reviving local news | State watchdog candidate wants to probe NIMBY suburbs | Should heads roll at the T? | Quick Hits | About Contrarian Boston |
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Novel approach: South Shore town considers shutting train station to sidestep state’s housing push
That would be Kingston, where Keith Hickey, the town administrator, has floated the idea of jettisoning the local commuter rail station in order to avoid having to comply with the MBTA Communities act.
Hickey contends the Baker administration’s campaign to spur the construction of as many as 200,000 new apartments, condos and townhomes near T stations is hobbled by “cookie cutter” regulations that don’t mesh with the reality on the ground in the town of roughly 5,700 people.
In an interview with Contrarian Boston, the Kingston town administrator acknowledged he does not know yet whether the town actually has the power to close the station, which he says is only half used now compared to pre-pandemic days.
Worth the price? Kingston is pondering whether it can shut its T stop to avoid new housing regulations (photo by By John Phelan)
But if it does, Hickey contends the town could avoid having to comply with the new MBTA Communities law without triggering its penalties.
Communities that refuse to revamp their zoning and open their doors to potentially hundreds and in some case thousands of new housing units would lose access to some small, but popular state grant programs, state officials have said.
“I think we have a third option we should at least be aware of,” Hickey told CB. “What would have to happen to shut the station down? I think it’s a question worth asking.”
Meanwhile, the town is also moving apace with the work it needs to do to fully comply with the law as well, applying for training grants and do other necessary work, stressed both Hickey and Valerie Massard, town planner.
Still, Kingston’s efforts to seek a “third option” around the new state housing law illustrates the depth of suburban opposition, even as rents and prices escalate to insane levels.
However, while local officials in Newton, Concord, Belmont and other communities have mused about simply defying the new law and writing off the loss of the state grants, none have talked about closing T stations, with the possible exception of Fall River.
Activists in Fall River want to inactivate a new station before it goes into service as part of the $1 billion South Coast line, arguing it will bring market rate housing and higher prices.
In Kingston’s case, the regulations are a poor fit for the town, with the T station in an industrial park with little if any developable land around it, Hickey said. To comply, the town would have to make room, through new zoning, for 800 to 1,000 new multifamily units in two different locations.
The town is also concerned about the impact on local roads and schools from a potential surge in new residential development, said Hickey, who rejects the NIMBY label.
One fear is that commuter rail service to Kingston, as it now stands, is not frequent enough to keep cars off local roads if lots of new apartments get built.
“It is not a NIMBY thing by any stretch of the imagination,” Hickey said. “When you start mandating what these things have to look like and how dense the area can be, you start losing some of the character of the community that people have fallen in love with.”
More than a year later, contractor still fighting $1.3 million fine for deadly downtown Boston accident
OSHA made headlines in August, 2021, hitting Atlantic Coast Utilities with a proposed, seven-figure fine after two workers were killed at a High Street worksite.
More than a year later, the federal workplace safety agency’s fines remain just that - proposed - as the contractor and its owner, Laurence Moloney, contest the more than two dozen alleged safety violations stemming from the fatal, February 24, 2021 accident, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Labor.
Two Atlantic Coast workers, Castaneda Romero, 27, and Figueroa Gutierrez, 33, were killed when a Ford F750 dump truck struck the two men at the downtown worksite, knocking them into a nine-foot trench.
The total number of fines Atlantic faces now tops $2 million, with OSHA proposing an additional $624,777 in penalties earlier this year, citing Atlantic for seven different safety violations during foundation work in East Boston.
OSHA is now in the beginning stages of having to make its case against Atlantic before an independent review commission. Both sides are in talks about combining the two sets of fines into a single case as well. No trial date has been set.
Meanwhile, Atlantic Coast Utilities, Moloney and Konstantinos Kollias, an employee of the firm, are fighting perjury charges after being indicted by a Suffolk County grand jury last November.
The trio allegedly lied on workplace safety forms contractors must file in Boston to obtain permits, denying the company had racked up previous safety violations, when it had.
Sounds like the wheels of justice are turning here, just slowly.
Well, speaking of NIMBY …
… towns like Kingston that push back against the Baker administration’s suburban apartment push could find themselves on the hot seat should Republican Anthony Amore win the race for state auditor.
Director of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Amore has the strong backing of the Gov. Charlie Baker and other members of the moderate wing of the MassGOP.
Anthony Amore, Republican candidate for state auditor, with Gov. Charlie Baker
Amore says he will use the powers of the state’s watchdog office to dig into why affordable housing has become so hard to build in towns and suburbs across the state.
In particular, Amore says the report will also highlight the questionable arguments used against new housing, such as complaints new apartments buildings will damage or even destroy a community’s “character.”
Not only is sunlight the best disinfectant, but the report and the attention around it will keep the pressure on the Legislature to enforce the new MBTA Communities law, designed to spur construction of apartments, condos and other housing units around T stations across the Boston area, or so the thinking goes.
“Right now, no one is drawing a line connecting how each of these projects fails using the same NIMBY arguments,” a spokesperson for Amore writes.
Stay tuned.
Washington Post columnist insists his proposal to spend billions in government money to revive local news isn’t a “pipe dream.” But it is.
For just $10 billion we could solve the local news crisis, putting 87,000 journalists to work at 1,300 nonprofit news organizations blanketing every congressional district in the country.
Or so says the WP’s Perry Bacon Jr. in a column that ran Monday.
“This is not a fantasy. We aren’t as far away from it as you might think,” Bacon writes.
Hmm, really?
Dan Kennedy at Media Nation, a national expert on efforts to reinvent local news, ruthlessly and rightly dispenses with the utopian scheme.
Even simple, common sense proposals - like letting the “news industry negotiate with Facebook and Google for a share of their advertising revenue,” have gone absolutely nowhere in Congress, he notes.
“Well, in fact, it is a pipe dream,” Kennedy writes. “There is little or no chance of anything like this happening, and it probably shouldn’t.”
Down and out, not unlike the current state of local newspapers
We’ll add our two cents here. That $10 billion may sound cheap, at least on the federal government’s scale of operations. But read Bacon’s piece a bit more closely and you quickly realize it’s not some sort of grand, one-time startup fee.
The federal government, or in other words, Congress - and whatever combination of private philanthropies that also want to chip in - would have to raise and spend $10 billion not just once, but every single year.
Hundreds, if not thousands of start-up news ventures have popped up over the last few years across the country as major chains like Gannett have shuttered local newspapers.
You are reading one of them now.
The reinvention of local news is already happening exactly where it should happen, on the local level.
But as for a top down solution in which Congress, that poster child for bi-partisan cooperation, doles out billions in annual subsidies?
Well, what could go wrong with that?
T already worse than other cities subway systems. And it is going downhill, fast
That’s the verdict from a new poll of local business executives by high-powered communications firm Seven Letter.
A strong majority, or 57 percent, believes the T has actually gotten worse in the past six months amid a series of high-profile mishaps and accidents, according to the survey, conducted in partnership with the Boston Business Journal.
Eight in 10 say Boston’s public transportation system is worse than other cities, with about half stating it is significantly worse.
Meanwhile, a new MassInc poll finds strong support among voters statewide for cleaning house at the MBTA and starting over with new management, which certainly sounds like a no brainer, the Boston Herald reports.
Stay tuned.
Quick hits:
Tag, you’re it: Wu tosses Mass and Cass woes to the state: “Wu defends city’s response to crises at Mass. and Cass, calls on state to create out-of-town housing” Boston Globe
Bad news in Senate battle: “Democrats discover they’re not immune to the ‘candidate quality’ problem” Washington Post
A key suburban race to watch: “Healey’s snub of Rausch hot issue in Senate race” CommonWealth Magazine
About Contrarian Boston
I have fielded emails over the past couple of months 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.