Contrarian Boston/10.27.2023
Mayflower descendants duke it out in court | Another downtown Boston building sells at a loss | No, Hamas is not a reliable source | Fitchburg paper’s newsroom goes missing | Accountability deficit at the T | Quick hits |
News tips? Story ideas? Email us at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com
Bureaucratic pigheadedness: When contractors screw up doing work for the MBTA, are taxpayers left holding the bag? The T is unable to say
Well, it’s yet another question the troubled transit agency either can’t or won’t answer, at least not in any timely fashion.
And let’s just say that doesn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence in wake of the revelations that the brand spanking new Green Line Extension has miles of defective tracks.
GLX Constructors built the new $2.3 billion line, which extends the Green Line into Somerville and Medford.
Now the joint venture, made up of Fluor Enterprises Inc., The Middlesex Corp., Herzog Contracting Corp., and Balfour Beatty, faces the task of fixing miles of defective rails on the new line.
T officials have insisted the joint venture will be responsible for making the repairs on their own dime.
Fine, but the contractors arguably should be on the hook for much more than just that.
The defective tracks have slowed trains on the new GLX to a crawl. At three miles per hour along some stretches, passengers might be better off walking.
Meanwhile, in order to repair the tracks, a partial if not complete shutdown of the new line looms. That could mean at least another two weeks of disruptions, delays and commuting hell for already beleaguered T riders.
It’s not clear what of that, if any, GLX Constructors be picking up the tab for.
The joint venture, which was months late opening the new Green Line extension last year, faced fines of up to $69,000 for each day the project was delayed, the Herald reported.
But John Dalton, the now former GLX project manager, offered few clues in that Herald interview last December whether the T was seriously weighing whether to pull the trigger on those penalties.
There are likely other penalties and fines embedded in the contract between the T and GLX Constructors.
But let’s just say the T exactly is not rushing to spell out to the media and the public what exactly those penalties are, and what, if any of them, they might be looking at enforcing.
A spokesperson for the troubled transit agency told Contrarian Boston that it would need to file a Freedom of Information Act request in order to get those fairly basic details, which we have.
Apparently, a FOIA request is also needed to find out how many fines the T has leveled over the past few years against construction companies and other contractors for faulty delivery and performance.
We suspect if there were great examples of the T lowering the boom on contractors and trying to make taxpayers whole, the agency would be just rushing to tell us.
And the problems with the GLX, open not even a year now, is just the tip of the iceberg.
A Chinese rail contractor is years later delivering new subway cars to the T. Many have required extensive repairs and work in order to function properly.
Chinese rail contractor CRRC is now years behind on its contract to build new rail cars for the T at its Springfield factory. And those it has already delivered have been riddled with problems.
Oh yeah, also: the cost of the contract, which started out at $565 million back in 2014, has since surpassed the $870 million mark, thanks to the T foolishly expanding the order back in 2017, and a $56 million change order as well.
Meanwhile, Cubic is now years behind on its $1 billion contract to automate fare collection at the T, with no firm timeline on when the system might be finally completed.
The allure of blue blood: Mayflower Society takes in hundreds of thousands each year from “genealogy validation” sales, lawsuit contends
That, anyway, is what a disgruntled former member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants argues in a lawsuit filed in state court.
The Plymouth-based nonprofit and its local member societies across the country raked in roughly $600,000 a year from 2016 to 2022, according to Charles Morgan, a former general counsel for the organization’s Florida chapter.
The money came not just from annual dues, but also from “the sale of Mayflower Match Reviews, Certificates of Lineage and various other goods, publications and the like,” the lawsuit notes.
Photo of Mayflower II (By Andrew Hitchcock)
For his part, Morgan, who we will just say is a stickler for detail, contends he was forced out of his post as chief counsel in 2017 after pushing unsuccessfully to update the charters of his Florida chapter and of the national society to reflect “changing times.”
Morgan has since spent years pursuing his case in court.
In his latest lawsuit, Morgan contends the Mayflower Society nixed his membership after he continued to lobby for changes in its charter and bylaws.
So what in the world is he so worked up over? While Morgan’s lawsuit doesn’t offer many concrete details, in a LinkedIn post the 76-year-old attorney decries the “raffling of wine baskets without liquor distribution licenses.”
The the raffling of wine baskets also highlights “general failure to comply with state gambling laws,” he writes.
Oh, my.
More seriously, Morgan told Contrarian Boston he pressed the Massachusetts chapter of the Mayflower Society to update its bylaws to protect its officers from personal liability, in line with a state law passed way back in 1986.
Sounds like good lawyerly advice.
Maine manhunt: More than 500 tips and no sight of suspect in two days
That was the upshot of the latest press conference by Maine police early Friday evening.
The tragedy is hitting close to home in Massachusetts, with the Globe and other local news outlets going big on coverage.
There’s a lot to dig into here when it comes to our nation’s porous patchwork of gun laws and our not-so-world-class mental health system.
Vanishing act: Fitchburg paper’s newsroom disappeared even before the pandemic led to rise of Zoom and remote work
By Mark Pickering
The newspapers in many New England communities could be following the trajectory of the textile industry. A case in point is the Sentinel & Enterprise, which used to have offices in both Fitchburg and Leominster while covering those cities and the surrounding area.
The Sentinel no longer has any office; its newsroom has disappeared. The Sentinel lists just three reporters on its website; one covers local sports. Not too long ago, the paper was a staple for budding journalists.
The Sentinel lost around two-thirds of its circulation from 2011 to 2021. The Alliance for Audited Media reported that the paper’s average Monday-to-Saturday circulation ‑ including digital and print ‑ dropped from 14,987 to 5,541 during that time.
The Sentinel lost circulation in both digital and print. The print edition dropped from 12,239 to 3,689.
The numbers remind us of the state’s textile industry. That is, the Sentinel is still alive and kicking, but in a state of decline.
That’s despite seeing the twin cities increase somewhat in population over those ten years. The 2021 combined population for Fitchburg and Leominster is estimated at 85,345 people.
Fitchburg’s downtown has a mix of classic New England brick buildings and “vintage” urban-renewal ones. The Sentinel’s former headquarters, one of the latter, sits next to a huge Romanesque church that dates from 1896. The church, now home to a congregation offering bilingual services, is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Fitchburg Historical Society is in a classic brick building across the street from the Sentinel’s former digs. The society has a collection of the Fitchburg Sentinel’s newspapers running from the 1840s until 1972.
Nowadays, the Sentinel’s small and deserted first floor lobby shows an elevator trapped in time: It’s not open, but nor is it closed. Some parts of the building seem to be rented out.
The traditional model for a community newspaper was often that of a factory. The inputs came in – including ads, photos and news stories – and then the product moved on to printing and delivery.
In 2018, the Sentinel’s current corporate owners, MediaNews Group, abandoned its Fitchburg digs and had most of its employees begin to work remotely. The editor of the Lowell Sun, another MediaNews property, supervised the “remote” journalists.
Thus, the chain led the charge to digital several years before the pandemic made remote work and Zoom meetings a fact of daily life for most professionals.
MediaNews had already consolidated the printing of the Sentinel with the chain’s other Massachusetts newspapers, including the Sun.
Also, in 2018, MediaNews bought the Boston Herald out of bankruptcy. The Massachusetts publisher of the trio of newspapers did not reply to requests for comment.
The Sentinel & Enterprise was created in the 1970s by the merger of the Fitchburg and Leominster papers.
Mark Pickering is a veteran of the local news business, having worked on the business desk and the opinion pages of the Boston Herald.
More trouble ahead for downtown Boston: Office building sees nearly 39 plunge in value
This time it is an office building in the Leather District that has taken a big hit, fetching a mere $11 million in a sale to local investor.
That’s down from the $20.6 million that 186 Lincoln St., perched near South Station and Downtown Crossing, sold for back in 2015, Banker & Tradesman’s Steve Adams reports.
It’s hardly the only downtown building taking a big haircut right now.
A Downtown Crossing office building at 33-41 West St. changed hands for just $4 million earlier this month, or just a quarter of what is sold for in 2016.
And One Liberty Square sold for $45 million in September, or $9 million less than its last sale a decade ago.
That’s bad news for office building owners.
But it could be even worse news down the line for city officials in Boston, who will see a drop in tax revenue from properties that have traditionally been cash cows.
And other cities and suburbs with a significant amount of office space, such as Cambridge or Waltham out on Route 128, will likely face the same revenue squeeze in the coming years.
Biased reporting? New York Times backtracks on Gaza hospital attack story
Umm, maybe relying on a terrorist group for your facts when you are reporting a story with huge geopolitical ramifications is not such a hot idea after all.
“Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinian Officials Say,” read the headline on the Times initial story on Oct. 17.
What the Times failed to mention was that the Palestinian officials were none other than the Hamas-controlled health ministry, and that, in effect, it was pegging a huge story - and its own hard-earned reputation - on the claims of a terrorist group.
The New York Times, in an editor’s note, has since acknowledged that it should not have relied so heavily on Hamas for its initial story on the hospital explosion, which suggested that as many as 500 people died in an Israeli air strike on the hospital.
As we know now, hospital was undamaged, while the explosion, which took place in the parking lot, may very well have been the result of a misfired terrorist rocket. In fact, it took only a matter of hours before the Hamas-driven narrative about an Israeli air strike began to crumble.
Dan Kennedy at Media Nation has all the details here, including new revelations that some inside the Times pushed back against that initial and very questionable headline.
Hopefully, the Times’ mini-epiphany will rub off on NPR. Just take the program On the Media, which focused last week on coverage of the Israel/Hamas war. Host Brooke Gladstone kicked things off with a tally of those killed on both sides, citing 3,700 killed in Gaza “according to the health ministry there.”
Hmm, aren’t we talking about the same, Hamas-controlled “health ministry” that supplied the now pretty clearly faulty facts the Times relied on during its initial reporting on the hospital explosion?
If it was - which seems likely since Hamas effectively runs the Gaza Strip - then Gladstone should have made the source clear.
Quick hits:
Dumb as a rock? “New House Speaker Champions Fossil Fuels and Dismisses Climate Concerns” New York Times
White flag law may be more like it: “In the wake of Lewiston shootings, scrutiny falls on Maine’s unique ‘yellow flag’ law” Boston Globe
Rotten system - tuition and fees in Massachusetts public colleges has tripled, after inflation, since the 1980s: “Tracing the origins of our college affordability crisis” CommonWealth Magazine
More excellent coverage from a local news startup: “Brookline’s tobacco-free generation law facing challenge in MA’s highest court” Brookline News