The Hill and the Hall Week in Review

(Cross-posted, belatedly, from Boston Daily)

Let’s start by picking on Hizzoner. Nothing gets the natives riled up like parking tickets, so Mayor Tom Menino’s $2.42 billion FY09 budget, which includes $13 million in new parking fines, is sure to be the only thing anybody in Boston ever talks about for the rest of time. Let the schools close; we demand parking amnesty now!

But seriously, the notion that the mayor is sewing great harm by balancing Boston’s budget on the backs of people who can’t manage to avoid parking in front of fire hydrants, rather than slogging through a nasty override fight, is about as dumb as the notion that kids wouldn’t be killing each other if it weren’t for these infernal T-shirts and video games. Gotta love this town.

In other City Hall news, the people who work inside City Hall still suck, just like they always have.

The Hill and the Hall Week in Review

(Cross-posted, per usual, from Boston Daily)

We hear that Governor Deval Patrick’s budget priorities are in trouble. That’s not any great surprise. The House and Senate took most of the governor’s recommendations and tossed them in the trash last year, too.

But here’s where things get interesting. The budget crunch is about to get a lot worse in the next few years, and when it does, it’ll put Patrick’s broad promises on public safety, education, parks, and property taxes in big, big trouble. Which, of course, will put Patrick in big, big trouble.

As previously discussed, because of the significant price tag that comes along with the myriad campaign promises Patrick made, his administration must look at fiscal troubles though a political lens. It’s one thing for the legislature to delay investing in new cops or early education for a few years; it’s quite another for the governor, who’s going to have a reelection fight on his hands well before the economy’s caviar and champagne days return.

And here’s what hurts extra-hard

The Hill and the Hall Week in Review

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

We may be watching the balance of power tip on Beacon Hill. While Gov. Deval Patrick and House Speaker Sal DiMasi go back and forth about casinos and taxes—and whether or not they’re going back and forth at all—Senate President Therese Murray is showing herself to be both smart enough to recognize the power vacuum brought on by the bickering, and strong enough to fill that vacuum with substantive policy proposals.

The Hill and the Hall Week in Review

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

Word broke early this week that Governor Deval Patrick’s casino bill was dead. House Dean David Flynn told the Taunton Gazette, “The casino bill isn’t going anywhere. I find very little support for it from members of the house,” adding that he expects a roll call vote on his racino bill, while “the casinos won’t,” because Dan Bosley’s committee “will issue an adverse report, preventing the house from voting on the casino bill.”

It’s not how things work – the Speaker’s office has repeatedly said that Patrick’s bill will receive a vote on the House floor before it wraps its budget bill in April, regardless of whether or not it gets a favorable committee report. (PS – it won’t.) But that doesn’t mean that casinos still aren’t headed for a messy demise.

The Hill and the Hall Week in Review

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

The most talked-about man on Beacon Hill continued to be widely talked about this week, as news that Speaker Sal DiMasi has been playing golf with a decades-old friend while not playing golf with a guy with a horrific haircut sparked an ethics uproar. It’s the surest sign yet that the state GOP has given up trying to win elections altogether, and will now focus solely on lobbing wobbly ethics complaints at its Democratic foes. And that Scot Lehigh hasn’t met a bad golf metaphor he doesn’t like.

The threat golf poses to democracy extends far beyond the current casino debate, though. Boston minorities who enjoy voting had better watch their backs: DiMasi occasionally hits the links with former Speaker Tom Finneran. Can federal voting rights violations, disgrace, and tears be far behind?

All the Attendant Evils of a Bad Slum

I spent most of yesterday in the BPL, dodging sleepy homeless people and researching a BoMag piece on Boylston Street’s weird place in the city’s architectural bureaucracy. Half of it is part of the Back Bay Architectural District, and subject to a litany of design and zoning structures; half isn’t. Unsightly newspaper boxes are banned from half the street, but allowed to pollute the other. The question is, logically enough, what the F?

The answer goes back to urban renewal, when Mayor Collins and the BRA were tearing down and encasing in concrete as much of the city as they could. Collins even proposed saving Old Boston from itself by placing up to eight high-rise condo towers along the A, B, C and D blocks of the Comm. Ave. Mall.

The Hill and the Hall Week in Review

(Cross-posted to Boston Daily)

Mitt Romney’s campaign for president has ended. Who’ll we make fun of now?

It was, by all accounts, a bizarre scene at City Hall on Wednesday when the Boston firefighters union met with members of the City Council.

“What they really should’ve done is convene the Council psychologist,” says a source. “They seem crazed, like they’re living in denial. I get it – they’re feeling pressure, the leaks are pissing them off, they feel like they’re being dragged through the mud. But nothing good can be coming from them fighting drug testing. Fifty minutes of that one hour meeting was just them venting. There were no talking points. It was just stream of consciousness emotion.”

As far as we’ve been able to ascertain, the union’s vaunted PR firm was not in attendance.