Just in case there were any remaining doubts about just what Boston 2024, the IOC and USOC is all about… read this.
Boston 2024 said in its planning documents that it has “engaged all owners in ongoing dialogue about permanent control of all land required” for the stadium and other venues.
Except, well, they didn’t.
Property owners where Boston’s proposed Olympic facilities would be located said they feel shut out of the process and have not been contacted by the Games’ local organizers, who have publicly released plans showing new venues on their land….
Vendors at New Boston Food Market off Interstate 93, where Boston 2024 is proposing the main Olympic stadium, said organizers have falsely represented that their property is for sale and the businesses are open to relocating.
“We don’t want to move. We’re happy doing business right where we are,” said Jeffrey Corin, owner of Robbins Beef Co. and president of the cooperative that manages the property. “It’s kind of mind boggling when people say, ‘We’re going to build it here and just move these businesses someplace else.’ Nobody’s even talked to us.”
What a monumental whopper for Boston 2024 to have included in their bid report.
Since we haven’t and probably won’t ever be given any of the real facts before the IOC makes a final decision, all I have are a bunch of questions.
After lying this brazenly in their bid report, can Boston 2024 be trusted with anything? Don’t workers and business owners who’s property is on the chopping block deserve as much advance time as possible to be “startled?” Isn’t allowing them to use their freedom of speech a part of the democratic process? Boston 2024 may not want to “startle” businesses by speaking honestly with them, but what about investments these businesses are making into their property or may want to plan? Are they just to be left in limbo or waste resources investing into property that could be bulldozed in a few years?
Why are only CEOs, high powered lobbyists and other rarefied elites invited into the planning stages? Do they care at all about the working people of Boston? Just how many jobs is Boston 2024 willing to destroy to turn vibrant businesses into white elephants and empty parking lots? And why is Boston 2024 describing a thriving enterprise like the New Boston Food Market, employing nearly 1,000 employees through providing a vital service for the entire region, as “a tangle of maintenance yards?”
If the plebes who happen to use this land don’t submit to their Royal Highnesses, Boston 2024, will eminent domain be threatened or used? The City is already seeking to extend its vast eminent domain powers for much of Boston right through 2024. Why?
After the West End and Scollay Square, are the people of Boston going to let the powers that be do this all over again?
Have we learned anything? Where is the transparency??
I think it’s time to throw Boston 2024’s tea into the harbor.
At least one person here has already commented on the similarities in behavior between Boston 2024 and casino boosters. The IOC does take into account public support locally when selecting a site and it seems this is one surefire way to alienate people and thus lose support. Also, it’s unfortunate IMO that SCOTUS a few years ago ruled that “public use” can mean pretty much anything for eminent domain purposes. Otherwise I’m not sure edifices would fit the bill, though infrastructure still would.
…that since eminent domain requires “just compensation” that taxpayers will be on the hook for something other than security and infrastructure, and that such compensation is more directly tied to building the venues than has been let on.
Beat me to this one, Rye…
Equally jaw-dropping is that some properties identified for venues already have non-Olympic developments plans in the works.
Emphasis mine.
Real Estate speculation is a very high stakes game here. Maybe the highest. This is particularly true when there is a housing crunch in a white hot residential rental market.
And the developers probably went through some impossibly long and expensive run of permit humiliation rituals.
How much imagination does it take to envision the parade of litigants that will roll through this mess?
I covered the Harborwalk sections of Columbia point last summer and noticed lots of building activity then. It really is one of the great success stories of the past 20 years.
http://youtu.be/P_ZawSC-mcE starts at the Dot side of Carson Beach.
http://youtu.be/_jvh2qlJKIg gets you to the edge of a building project in the campus area.
As to Boston 2024’s general competence to handle a project like this, even if it isn’t dispositive as to their intentions and attitude.
I can make an argument for them not having lied in the bid documents. They could argue that they’ve only contacted owners of land that would have to be used for the Olympics no matter what, and that where substitutions or changes in plans are possible the property in question is not “land required.” But even if we accept that they’re not technically lying, and that they mean it in the best possible way when they say they didn’t want to set off a giant panic by contacting the owners of properties that they may not wind up wanting to use after all, this still is a huge misrepresentation of the situation in all practical terms. And one that was bound to blow up on them, something any remotely competent team could and should have foreseen and taken steps to avoid.
And that’s taking the best possible view of the situation and of the intent of the organizers. Some might say that it’s so positive a view as to defy credibility. But the bottom line is, when that’s the best view you can take, it’s time to pull the plug. These people cannot be in charge of a project of this magnitude. They’ve already shown that they’re not up to the job — which, to be fair, is a tremendously difficult one, for anyone.
And without disagreeing at all with you, I can make the argument that, well, somebody lied. The fact that a classic he said/she said is before us doesn’t seem to have affect upon the notion of ‘dispositive’. Just upstream chris-rich posits the ‘high stakes’ of ‘real-estate speculation’ as explanation enough for perfidy upon the part of the bid committee, forgetting that the players on both sides are equally engaged in playing every angle on that high-risk speculation: whatever is planned already can, and will be, dropped in a heartbeat if they think they can get more money by selling… just because the land has plans doesn’t mean those plans are going to happen, what’s going up at Downtown Crossing is like the third iteration of the seventh plan and that’s not even seen as extraordinary…
The default assumption (indeed, a requirement for some…) is that the bid committee has to be the liars here (I’m not saying you’re making that assumption, but that author of the diary certainly is). It’s the ‘hurry up defense’, where all the previous arguments about how the Olympics can not/ must not/ will not happen having been demolished he turns to hurrying forward another form of hoped-for bulwark. ( The default assumption about me, which will explain the spite-ratings this comment will get, is that because I don’t buy their argument I must be in the tank, wholly, for the bid committee and have a hard-on for the Olympics that dismisses the obvious fact of deceit. But I’ve made no secret of the fact that, though I’d like to see the Olympics here, I’m not going foetal with despair if it doesn’t happen… an opinion easy enough to see for those who look. )
Nor am I saying that the bid committee are not liars. They may well be. And if they are acting in bad faith then we should not have them running the bid. Fire them and get new people in there, run the process through the USOC all over again. Or not and drop the idea of having an Olympics. Fine with me, either way. I want the Olympics but I want a better CommonWealth and a better civic engagement all around, before all else and I’m not willing to put up these kinds of shenanigans for the sake of an Olympics. But I’m not just going to take the word on shenanigans from someone who’s been defiantly opposed from the get go.
And they, almost certainly, will not be in charge. The organizing committee, which isn’t formed until after a city is selected and who will be tasked with doing the actual building, doesn’t have be comprised of all the same people who make up the bid committee. Anybody (and I’m looking at you Marty Walsh) particularly upset at the running of the bid committee should use what influence they have to make certain any real hack or hard-hitting dumbass now on the bid committee doesn’t make it unto the organizing committee.
You are correct that this is a difficult process. That is all the more reason to keep unkempt feelings, unthinking opposition and random accusations out of it: In Boston the process is being made more difficulty by arched backs, snarling opposition and dug-in heels.
…that it would be very nice to have someone from Boston 2024 come to BMG and take questions.
…Must fluff oligarchs.
The mere appearance of dissent and ranting rabble could scare the floundering boondoggle off… shhhh.
Our moment of greatness and maximum hollow self aggrandizement is at hand…. shhhhh.
No deference to rich idiots is too minor. Mother Harvard has spoken.
…what a person really thinks from the blanks they fill in. The beauty of the written word is that the reader reveals much about himself when he attempts to identify what’s between the lines. These can be useful things to know about one self… and others, when they read between the lines publicly…
And, indeed, one can learn much that is true about the written word by testing what they think they know about the space between the lines. Or they can just wing it and guess based upon their own prejudices.
If you look at the article itself, it seems pretty clear that no one from Boston 2024 disputes that the landowners and tenants who say they haven’t been approached or consulted about the bid have not in fact been approached. They’re not saying, “Wait, we contacted all those people.” Rather, they’re saying, “We had good reasons not to have contacted them, it would have been premature, this is all a fuss over nothing.”
So the problem is with the representation in the bid documents that Boston 2024 has “engaged all owners in ongoing dialogue about permanent control of all land required”. Whether or not that representation can be said to be accurate depends, God help us, on what the definition of “all” is, both as it applies to “owners” and to “land required.” It seems perfectly possible to me that Boston 2024 made this representation with no intent to deceive — that they really didn’t think of all the land identified on their own maps as “land required,” or that there was a miscommunication somewhere within the organization, or some one of the many things that can go wrong with complex transactions and complex sets of documents went wrong here.
But the problem remains that even without assuming bad faith anywhere, this is a huge screw-up, of the kind that casts doubt on the reliability of any and every representation anyone involved is making. And while I’ve been agnostic on the question of Olympics, yea or nay, as a hypothetical matter, in concrete terms this is the kind of early screw-up that gets identified in retrospective, lessons-learned analyses of disasters as points where decisionmakers should have known better than to forge ahead.
The article quotes several people; One of whom is the president of the co-operative that manages one of the properties; Another of whom was an owner of adjacent property, the use of which for the Olympics is in dispute; yet others, it is clear, are people who lease space from the actual owners — people who expect to be informed by ownership, but who may not reasonably expect that courtesy… The article makes use of the word “owner” very loosely, including people who own businesses, but who might lease property
The one guy, the president of the co-operative that manages property, might expect to be informed by the actual owners of the property, but why? Presumably the co-operative manages the property under a contract. Does this contract extend beyond the year? Beyond two or even three years? If the bid committee spoke with the actual owner about possible sale in 2018 or 2019, why does the management co-op, or even just its president need to be informed of his/her future plans for the property in 2015? If that’s the case the bid committess comments make very clear sense…
What happens if the owner informs everybody that, in 2018, the land will be sold and, come 2017, the Olympics goes to Rome? Awkward….
Because, look at the reaction of the Boston 2024 people who were contacted about the article. If someone from the Globe calls you to ask about why people are disputing a representation in your bid papers, and you have in fact made every contact and had every ongoing discussion that your bid papers say you’ve had on a plain reading of those papers, you don’t tapdance and hedge with the nice reporter. You find out what the allegations are and explain why they’re wrong; you don’t say, “Well, maybe we didn’t talk to some people, but that’s because we weren’t sure whether we’d really need that land despite its designation on some maps.”
Thus, the situation we have before us, where no one from Boston 2024 is attempting to explain the discrepancy on the basis that oh, gosh, leaseholders aren’t owners within the meaning of the language we used, we do have ongoing discussions with all the actual owners, and we can argue about the status of the leaseholders another time. (FWIW, a leasehold is a real property interest, and I wouldn’t be comfortable with making assumptions about their status without doing some research into Massachusetts real estate law.) If that is and was the actual explanation, wouldn’t you expect the side being accused of misrepresentation to mention it, rather than hope you would make the argument for them?
I mean, I suppose your scenario isn’t absolutely impossible. But it’s improbable in light of the normal behavior of people under the relevant circumstances. And if it did prove to be true, I don’t see how it would help your underlying case: it would then become another instance of incompetence by the Boston 2024 representatives, this time in the areas of communications and public relations and crisis management.
Not at all. It is entirely possible that a civic-minded group would not expect misrepresentation to occur in the first place… nor that such misrepresentation would become to their responsibility to reply to. Have you ever been in a situation where some action of yours was misrepresented and you were completely blindsided by it? I know I have. If someone fails to act in good faith what does that say about you if you expected, from the get-go, that they would not? So the instance, possibly, reduces to one of (perhaps momentarily) dropping the PR ball. Deval Patrick did that with a Cadillac once and we didn’t send him packing.
I think we all — myself included — spend an inordinate amount of time parsing what people say versus what they would be expected to say in different circumstances. Elizabeth Warren says “Do you want me to put an exclamation point at the end of it?” and still she’s not taken at face value… And because we do this parsing and meta-parsing — expectations and all that — we expect that such parsings are a part of political professionalism and fault people when they don’t make them or make them half-heartedly.
I think the bid committee can fairly be read as honest. I can understand why others read them as dishonest. But because I understand it, does that mean I have to buy it?
The proof might be in the pudding: As I read it, the bid committee has bent over backwards, and then some, to address all of the concerns raised about the Olympics. To wit:
— the USOC, never mind the IOC, will never choose Boston. Boston is too small. Um… ?
— The bid itself will cost millions: Yes. Therefore, institute Insurance policy to protect the city from bid costs.
— Cost overruns are inevitable: Maybe true. But before we see cost overruns: leverage existing venues; stress walkability to reduce requirements on public transportation; leverage existing and planned public infrastructure spending; ask the private sector to pay –up front– for operating costs.
Whatever else it may be, it’s clearly a plan that holds concerns foremost. No person who reads the bid documents can fairly dispute that.
Everything, so far, that people have said about the bid committee has not come true. Every concern that was raised about the bid and about the games have been addressed by the bid committee: maybe not comprehensively or perfectly, but they’ve certainly acknowledged them… Yet they get no credit because… well… I don’t know but I can guess. Instead of saying, well, maybe they are serious, we bounce from accusation to accusation to somehow prove that they can’t do the job. All the while, however, they’ve been busy doing the job. I’ve read the bid documents and, whatever you think of the possibility of Boston 2024, you cannot say that the bid committee has not done their homework.
But on the issue at hand, I’m not sure I’ve made myself clear. Whether or not members of the bid committee would or should have expected they might be accused of misrepresentation is beside the point. Call them the most upstanding and honest and straightforward group of people that God ever made: it is nevertheless the case that as the people who prepared the bid package and the accompanying maps, and had whatever discussions would have been had with the people holding property rights, they are the ones in possession of all the relevant information. They know what their internal reasoning was, who they talked to and didn’t talk to and why, what pieces of property are core to their concept and what aren’t, all these things that they know and we don’t. I don’t expect that even a fairly comprehensive set of documents will cover all the questions that might arise about their bid; documents frequently don’t, for perfectly non-sinister reasons.
What I do expect, and what project proponents also normally expect, is that when questions arise they will be able to answer them. Because they’re the ones with the information. It’s not an unanticipated threat to the project, or an unwarranted attack on people’s integrity, to ask those questions; it’s an expected, routine part of the process. Being able to answer them is a matter of familiarity with your own transaction, not one of being able to get over the shock of a supposed assault on your integrity sufficiently to compose yourself and speak accurately to the press.
Honestly, this isn’t a high bar to clear. And they didn’t clear it: we apparently agree about that. If they can’t manage that much, I ask again, why should we be confident of their ability to do the hard things? If people fall over the instant they strap on skates and take to the ice, it is not unreasonable to question their ability to handle the triple lutz, you know?
As I was relocating some snow outside my home just now, I was thinking that the planning for the venues so far has all of the rigor of some buddies and me sitting around drinking and contemplating, “Hey, if Boston had the Olympics, where would the events be staged?” Of course, we’d have an excuse for not actually checking things out: We wouldn’t be serious. What’s Boston 2024’s excuse?
Seattle has Howard Schultz, Gates, Paul Allen and Jeff Bezos and we have … what.. Robert Kraft? Romney’s old crew? Fidelity execs?
I’m not one to fawn on billionaires, but ours are nothing special. So it should surprise no one that they’d make a hash of it.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2015/01/22/somerville-mayor-boston-2024s-velodrome-proposal-wont-cut/
The ACLU is warming up. Gotta love ‘Troubling” and “Ridiculous”
http://www.masslive.com/news/boston/index.ssf/2015/01/boston_2024_city_should_prepar.html
Fortune echoes it and you even have arch shills like Keller already declaring it will be a messy soap opera while sniping at Walsh for trying to fluff the trade unions at the expense of everyone else.
http://boston.cbslocal.com/2015/01/22/keller-large-boston-2024-olympics-a-better-story-than-deflategate/
So we’re already seeing a number of shells coming in from several directions the pattern I described last week. And it’s early innings.
What didn’t get mention in the Boston 2024 documents was that the state-owned land where they’re eyeing the velodrome is a brand new public park on the banks of the Mystic River. Sounds like the mayor isn’t keen to give away the green space he established. Also sounds like the Boston 2024 planners should have mentioned this idea to him before floating it in public.
Awkward when an erstwhile supporter immediately shoots down your proposal.
I learned this years ago when I had to do a last minute rush to get a 20 thousand dollar check cut for Ornette Coleman from Tufts.
It was my first grant project, although tiny when compared to this thing.
So when the second project was ready, I met with each impacted person in the university finance department to learn how the process works. I’d ask each how I could make their job less aggravating as they were used to being lorded over by important if dim professors.
It immediately engaged their loyalty and attention and the next project worked far more smoothly. It also became the basis for everything I’ve since done that involves input and effort from multiple parties.
Mr. Robbins manages a cooperative of users of the Boston Food land but who OWNS it? Is it the city?
And remember the Kelo decision. Privately held land can be taken anyway.
All of the huffing and puffing above is by people who have very strong opinions on topics about which they have precious little knowledge.
The land is owned by a the New Boston Food Cooperative. It cannot be sold voluntarily without the consent of all of the shareholders of the cooperative. The way that an organization such as this works is that the land is held jointly, and the shareholder interest in the coop is linked to the leasehold interest in occupancy.
Thus, every business that operates there is both a tenant and a shareholder in the cooperative. The guy quoted above is the manager, which means that he deals with “common area” matters like clearing snow and making sure the real estate taxes are paid, and also is the person who returns reporters’ phone calls.
Presumably the Olympic organizers are insufficiently sophisticated to figure out how to find out who to call.
You are correct that under Kelo this land can be taken at taxpayer expense. What a bullshit project this is.
It says something that one of the most consistent and vocal supporters, not just of the bid but the bid process is starting to get real skeptical about the land use plans the bid boosters have put forth. As he pointed out, engage with the stakeholders-particularly those folks whose land you are proposing to build venues on, hold public meetings, and send someone on over here to BMG. And I would add a vote as well.
Please do not include or lump my diary “Wonkpost: Terms of The Debate, Cost” among those diaries that are clearlyl Anti-Olympics.
I worked hard to put forth a diary that was neutral in tone and I believe it can fairly be read that way. It attempts to set out what the costs are purported to be with out saying if those costs are good, bad or even realistic. It neither says go nor no go towards the Olympics but seeks to clarify.
I read it as an anti-Olympics post because it emphasizes the gap between what has been discussed to date, and what has not. But I can see that it can be taken in other ways, and have updated the promotion comment accordingly.
Except, well, they did, (quoting a lot of the article so that I won’t be accused of selective editing):
Clearly, going by what the representative of the New Boston Food Market has clearly stated (emphasized above) the New Boston Food Market hired a PR firm sometime prior to the fall and met with the bid committee organizers in the fall more than once.
Let me repeat that:
— The New Boston Food Market had engaged, sometime prior to the fall, Nauset Strategies, a PR/Lobbyist firm specializing in Commercial real estate whose web page states that: “Michael Vaughan founded Nauset Strategies in September 2002. Michael works with his clients to develop and implement government and community relations strategies to facilitate the entitlement of development projects”. They may have engaged Nauset in the entirely separate kerfuffle of their fight with a proposed stinky neighbor… (however, that fight did not involve government…) but whatever the cause, or maybe retainer, Nauset, a PR/Lobbying firm, appears to have been on the case for quite a while.
— The New Boston Food Market, along with the representatives of Nauset Strategy who has said “We had good meetings in the fall…, appears to have had meetings in the fall with the organizers of the bid committee.
While I’m sure there remains some discrepancies between the parties and maybe the differing opinions about what the meeting was about, that’s not yet relevant as the contention is that they have not met at all. They clearly did meet.
I am beginning to think that the fault for this particular slice of kerfuffle lies solely and comprehensively at the feet of Bostons much diminished news organizations for this epic failure of reportorial stinkage across the board.