10.23.2024

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Controversial return: During his previous stint at City Hall, Boston’s new chief planner didn’t exactly impress with his management skills

In a gushy, oh-so-flattering piece in the Globe, Kairos Shen confided to columnist Adrian Walker just how surprised he was to be back at City Hall.

Maybe not as surprised, though, as city insiders with knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Shen’s ouster by the Walsh administration in 2015, which considered Shen a talented planner but an extremely problematic manager.

After a nearly decade hiatus, Shen last week made a triumphant return to city government, tasked with once again overseeing Boston’s development scene as chief planner.

However, it was a world away from the end of Shen’s last tour of duty at City Hall, when he departed under a cloud.

Shen was handed his walking papers in May 2015, just a few months after the completion of an internal probe of abusive texting between employees at the then Boston Redevelopment Authority, where he was chief planner.

The months long probe, conducted by the agency’s legal chief, with help from an outside law firm, examined thousands of text messages exchanged over a period of years between a group of roughly 15 people in the agency’s planning division, which Shen headed.

Kairos Shen

A number of the texts included explicitly sexual and graphically violent imagery, including one employee saying he wished a female colleague might be “ganged” - slang for gang rape, according to sources familiar with the report.

The review found that a small subset of staffers in the planning department were the main source of the abusive texts, with other employees effectively the victims of the abusive texts.

Shortly before Shen was pushed out of the agency, the organization, under then director Brian Golden, took disciplinary measures that resulted in the departure of at least one employee involved with the abusive texts.

For his part, Shen had no involvement with the abusive texting nor is it clear how much, if anything, he knew about it or the details of the messages being exchanged. In fact, several months before the agency’s director ordered an internal review, Shen had met with one of the ringleaders, told him to shape up, and sent him to human resources for counseling.

Yet the fact that the abusive texting had gone on so long in Shen’s department without any effective intervention was also likely not seen as a testament to his management skills.

Overall, Shen was seen as having presided for years over an “extremely toxic” work culture in the planning department, according to one insider.

The internal review was never made public and remained in draft form.

However, it likely added to the concerns about Shen’s management style on part of the Walsh administration.

Not long after Shen’s departure, city officials released a scathing audit of what was then the BRA that painted a portrait of deep dysfunction at the agency.

The McKinsey report found that housing and other developers believed that just two individuals controlled all planning and project review decisions at the agency, and that Kairos was one of them.

That’s the recipe for bureaucratic bottlenecks, projects not being approved or built, and potential cronyism.

The audit was also extremely critical of the design review process for major projects under Shen, which would drag on for months, raising costs for developers.

Now, as Shen takes over again as Boston’s chief planner, he will oversee the vetting of major development projects at a time when new construction of housing and lab space has stalled out.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu tapped Shen, who she got to know years ago as a young mayoral intern, to replace Arthur Jemison, the city’s development chief for the past two years who left to take a job in Detroit.

Asked about Shen’s actions, or lack thereof, related to the abusive texting by planning staffers under his supervision, a spokesperson for what is now the Boston Planning Department responded with a statement.

“Any actions taken under prior Administrations would have been at the direction of the BRA/BPDA Director or the Mayor,” a spokesperson for the city department wrote in an email. “Kairos was a division head, not the Director. Personnel matters are referred to and handled by HR.”

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