Environmentalists and their selective outrage | Swallowing the party line on China’s Covid protests | Housing plans stall as Boston City Council fiddles | Quick hits | About Contrarian Boston |
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Petty politics? Key part of Wu’s ambitious overhaul of Boston development stalls out in City Council
That would be Mayor Michelle Wu’s plan for a nearly clean sweep of a city board that decides the fate of hundreds of small- and mid-sized projects, many involving new housing.
Wu announced in late September her plans to effectively jettison all but three of the 14 members of the Zoning Board of Appeals, including its now former chair, Christine Araujo, who had become a lightning rod for rejecting badly-needed housing in Roslindale.
More than two months later, Wu’s slate of ZBA appointees is nowhere near being confirmed, with City Councilor Frank Baker, a frequent critic of the mayor and one of the council’s most conservative members, yet to schedule a hearing.
Meanwhile, the supposedly outgoing members of the ZBA are struggling to keep the lights on, given that they are down a member since Araujo, the former chair, resigned after news leaked of the mayor’s plans for an overhaul of the board.
The result has meant that the zoning board at times has struggled to put enough bodies in seats to achieve a quorum and do business, Mark Erlich, the board’s acting chair and a former long-time top official with the carpenters’ union, told Contrarian Boston.
And faced with a short-handed zoning board, a growing number of proponents with business before the ZBA, including plans for new housing, are requesting “administrative deferrals,” which effectively delays a vote until a future date, he added.
At a time when rents are sky-high - and the future of new residential construction is increasingly clouded by an uncertain economy - such delays are bad news.
Photo by shraga kopstein on Unsplash
There are legitimate concerns about the wisdom of replacing almost the entire ZBA at once, given the complexity of the issues the board deals with and its high volume of cases.
Just ask Larry DiCara, a former president of the Boston City Council and attorney who has sat on the board and chaired just about every major organization in town, including the Boston Municipal Research Bureau.
“I have handled a thousand cases before the board of appeals over the past 40 years,” DiCara told CB. “There has always been some continuity on the board so that the members who have been there for a long time can help break in the people who are new.”
If Baker has an issue with Wu’s proposed new slate of members - a mix of nonprofit community developers, neighborhood activists and construction union officials - then it is on the mercurial city councilor to hold a hearing and lay out his concerns.
Don’t sit and a corner and sulk while plans for new apartments and homes gather dust.
Environmentalists, where’s your outrage? Hydro electricity project key to decarbonizing NE grid still in limbo
An embattled transmission project that would funnel hydro power from Quebec to Massachusetts remains mired in Maine courts.
Lawyers for the utility company-backed New England Clean Energy Connect project have won a modest victory in the Maine Supreme Court, but the outlook for the vital transmission line getting completed anytime soon remains uncertain, CommonWealth Magazine reports.
The $1 billion project has been hanging on for dear life since Maine voters passed a referendum last November aimed at stopping work on the Maine transmission line, which would connect the Canadian and New England grids.
But you won’t find environmental groups lamenting the vote against the hydro power transmission line, which is looming even larger now as off-shore wind projects in Massachusetts face financing and other challenges.
That’s because an unholy alliance between fossil fuel companies and environmental groups shelled out tens of millions on the ballot question campaign to nix the transmission project.
The Texas-based fossil fuel companies, which have operations in Maine, don’t want the competition, while environmental groups, like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the local chapter of the Sierra Club, have argued that the transmission project would damage an undeveloped stretch of Maine woodland. Also, enviro purists have a thing against hydro power, which is apparently suspect in their book.
Fossil fuel companies are easy targets, but environmental groups for too long have gotten a free ride with this kind of nonsense.
If we are to have any hope of putting the brakes on, or at least slowing, climate change, this kind of “energy tribalism” has got to stop.
Memo to Washington Post: China’s zero-Covid campaign has long since ceased to be about Covid
We were dismayed to see this unsourced graph in a Washington Post piece on the lockdown protects in China that seemed to be channeling the official line from Beijing.
The Post writes, “Health authorities say this strategy of cutting off Covid transmission as soon as possible and quarantining all positive cases is the only way to prevent a surge in severe cases and deaths, which would overwhelm the health-care system.”
We don’t know who these “health authorities” are, so there is no way to judge their veracity.
The WP story goes on to cite China’s “less effective” crop of homegrown vaccines as another reason the government is continuing its draconian lockdown tactics.
Really? While China’s vaccines may not be as effective, other countries have used them in conjunction with standard prevention practices to effectively ride out the pandemic, according to a pretty interesting segment on The World, the public radio program hosted by Marco Werman.
Protest in New York on 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. (By SFT HQ (Students for a Free Tibet)
Here’s a BBC piece that does a much better job getting into the political dynamics driving what it correctly calls China’s “hellish lockdowns.”
Beijing began ramping up the lockdowns in advance of China’s recent Communist Party Congress, where President Xi Jinping’s increasingly neo-Stalinist rule was put on full display.
William Hurst, professor of Chinese development at Cambridge University, told the BBC that the lockdowns are likely to continue into the spring, when Xi is expected to be chosen president for the third time by China's equivalent of parliament.
"Covid is political in China," Hurst said. "Lockdowns prevent Covid outbreaks from spreading," Hurst said in the BBC piece. "But they also exert incredibly strict social control."
Quick Hits:
Now that’s a really good question! “Has Elon Musk succeeded by luck — or does he know what he’s doing?” Meghan McArdle/Washington Post
Yes, but it still won’t solve the problem: “Charlie Baker says Boston must go after dealers to solve Mass and Cass problem” Boston Herald
Idiot of the year: Sam Bankman-Fried Blames ‘Huge Management Failures’ for FTX Collapse New York Times
About Contrarian Boston
I have fielded emails over the past year 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.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/11/29/charlie-baker-says-boston-must-go-after-dealers-to-solve-mass-and-cass-problem/?__vfz=medium%3Dstandalone_content_recirculation_with_ads