Contrarian Boston/02.15.2024

Uber progressive Newton actually led by anti-union strike busters, teachers strike chief claims | Boston City Hall in denial over devasting revenue report | Nature group slashes staff but not pricey office space | Online news site in Belmont goes old school |

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Lack of common sense? Major nature reservation group slashes lower-level staff as it struggles to afford high-paid executives and pricey office space

In a letter to employees earlier this month announcing painful job cuts, Katie Theoharides, head of one of the largest conservation groups in New England, invoked the word “team” nearly a dozen times.

But the well-stocked and well-paid executive suite of the Boston-based Trustees of Reservations isn’t exactly stepping up to take one for the team, as it were, leaving employees lower down the food chain to walk the plank.

None of the top seven executives at the nature group, which oversees more than 120 properties across the state, from woodlands to farms to historic homes, are among those being being cut, a spokeswoman confirmed.

The Trustees won’t disclose what it is currently paying Theoharides, a former state environmental chief, who took over as CEO last June, or its other top officers.

Doing so seems like basic transparency for a nonprofit organization that relies on the goodwill of the public and has made the case that it had to let go 10 percent of its staff to deal with a structural deficit.

(Katie Theoharides, CEO of The Trustees of Reservations)

All told, The Trustees laid off 30 employees and decided not to fill 10 open jobs.

However, according to the nonprofit’s latest tax filings from March 2022, The Trustees CEO and treasurer each pulled down well over $300,000, with others, from the head of “community impact” to the chief of development, pulling down pay ranging from $184,000 to $270,000.

The total number of filled positions at the top has shrunk from ten down to seven with the end of a major fundraising campaign that had required additional staff, the spokeswoman said.

We’re betting the pay structure at the top hasn’t changed all that much, but on that question, all we got was crickets.

Meanwhile, The Trustees continue to shell out a hefty sum for downtown Boston office space, after its 2017 move from Beverly, where the group had previously located its headquarters rent free on a property it owned.

The nonprofit listed $1.8 million for rent on its last tax filing, though not all of that can be attributed to its digs a 200 High St. in Boston’s Financial District, the spokeswoman noted.

(The Trustees run their nature nonprofit out of this downtown Boston building.)

Given the changes in work patterns and office use, The Trustees are evaluating their options as the end of the lease approaches in 2027, she said.

Then there is the “test kitchen” in Boston the group spent money on for a bunch of years. That likely cost a pretty penny, but the nonprofit’s spokeswoman was unable to provide any information.

“The crazy thing was they weren’t paying for the space they were at,” recalled one former low-wage Trustees employee, who declined to make the move from Beverly to the new Boston headquarters after being told there would no additional pay to compensate for the much longer commute. 

“Now everybody is in Boston and they are paying through the nose,” the former employee noted. “They were cheaping out in one way, while paying oodles of money in another.”

Still, maybe the The Trustees’ ultimate failure of judgement came in the early weeks of the Covid pandemic in the spring of 2020.

The organization sparked a backlash when it shut down access to all its properties across the state at a time when millions of stir crazy people were desperate for a safe way to get out of the house.

The state park system, which largely remained open, wound up bearing the brunt of the shutdowns at The Trustees properties.

It was nothing short of baffling.

Then again, there are lot of things about how The Trustees conduct their business that just don’t make sense.

Clueless? Wu administration says it is not anticipating “any loss of revenue” from downtown office market meltdown

That’s the word from Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s minions in the wake of a devastating report that city tax revenue could fall by as much as $1.5 billion over the next five years.

The value of office buildings in downtown Boston is expected to drop by a much as a third by 2029 in the fallout from the nationwide shift to hybrid schedules and remote work, according to the report by the Boston Policy Institute.

In an early indication, sale prices of downtown buildings have plunged over the past year, with investors unwilling to pay top dollar for partially or even half empty corporate addresses, as Contrarian Boston and others have reported.

That is likely to mean a big drop in revenue pouring into city coffers, notes the report, which was written by BPI and Evan Horowitz, executive director of the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University.

(Evan Horowitz, executive director of the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University.)

Among other things, Boston already relies more heavily on taxes from commercial property than pretty much any other city in the country.

A drop of this magnitude would likely mean that Boston will have to either find new sources of revenue, such as state aid, or cut programs and services, the report notes.

If anything, the numbers in the BPI report are fairly conservative. Yet the response from City Hall has been nothing short of head scratching.