This was reported today by WBZ:
Governor Deval Patrick is facing questions over some contributions he received during his campaign for governor. The donations came from employees of two firms building a new development in Cambridge.
It gets worse:
Dan O’Connell and Greg Bialecki were both involved in the Northpoint development in Cambridge. O’Connell is now Patrick’s Secretary of Housing and Development. Bialecki is one of Patrick’s top aides involved in real estate permitting.
In February, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled against the Northpoint construction project in a lawsuit brought by a Cambridge neighborhood group. About three weeks later, the governor filed legislation that would reverse the court’s ruling on development over tidelands.
And even worse:
Now we are learning that Governor Deval Patrick received more than $12,500 in campaign contributions from Northpoint’s development firms last year. The Associated Press says O’Connell and Bialecki each donated $1,000.
Patrick is defending the bill, saying it was not directed at a single development but rather is for the sake of all coastal developments. He says that Bialecki and O’Connell were in no way involved in the legislation.
Can the citizens of the Commonwealth expect to see this type of thing over and over for the next 4 years? Is the press just being too nit-picky? Is this worrisome?
…Manny wrote about this yesterday – http://www.bluemassg… – and embedded in Manny’s post is a link to what David wrote last week. I mentioned it as one of my Death of a Thousand Cuts.
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What Deval actually needs to worry about is this story being reported three times by varied news media, at least 10 days apart, as if each was fresh and new and hence a new scandal.
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It may be time to send Cyndi Roy back to State House News.
… and posted repeatedly on BMG! Please, folks, check to see if a story has already been noted before doing so again.
I did a search for “Bialecki” but didn’t see anything recent.
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My bad.
not since you joined on January 11?
I think the search function looked at posts prior to Jan 1. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
No. This is old news, and more of the same smoke-no-fire journalism. There’s nothing here.
I don’t know any of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players doing Deval’s media – except Cyndi Roy – but do you think he has been well served by them?
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You can’t just keep saying, no, we spoke about this, nothing to see here, move along. As I said earlier – it’s the ten-day reporting on a single event that is creating this crushing appearance of multiple problems (like the actual ones weren’t bad enough!).