I’ve been disappointed that, so far, we’ve seen more outspoken skepticism about Boston’s Olympic bid from Republican electeds than Democratic electeds in the state. It felt weird actually agreeing with Bruce Tarr (R-Gloucester) the other day. So this was a very welcome development:
Councilor Josh Zakim said Monday that he’s filed an order for four nonbinding Olympics-related ballot questions. He plans to present the order to the full city council on Wednesday.
The questions would ask if the city should host the games; if any public money should be used; if the city should promise to cover any overruns; and if the city should use eminent domain to take private land for the games.
In order to appear on the ballot, the questions would still require a majority vote in the City Council and the approval of Mayor Walsh. I think Michelle Wu would be on board, given her calls for a more democratic and transparent process, but I can’t vouch for any of the other members of the City Council (Can you?). And would Walsh quash the ballot initiatives if City Council did vote to move forward?
Either way, it’s nice to see that democracy is forcing itself into a most anti-democratic of processes.
For those of us with town meeting, it only takes 10 signatures to get it onto the warrant. Boston may want to say it’s all about them (shock, shock) but the potential for tax dollars from across MA makes this a state-wide issue.
Imagine if 200 – 300 communities across the state vote no!
I haven’t seen the language in any of the articles yet, but I will post the direct language when it is available.
http://www.masslive.com/news/boston/index.ssf/2015/02/boston_city_councilor_josh_zak.html
…it would make sense to substitute “City” with “State” for questions 2 and 3.
as opposed to city elections, mostly occur in the spring and it seems unlikely that there will be a mobilization this year given the late date. The numbers you would like to see will likely have to wait until 2016. I don’t think they will spring up organically though. A little organizing will be needed. I expect you know of some TM network serving regions or even the whole state. If you do, please share that info here.
One place to start would be to encourage some muni elected officials to take this issue to the Massachusetts Municipal Association and get that body to raise questions. A second would be to have a few members of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Local Government to ask questions at their meetings. Baker has raised some modest concerns about the event. He should be asked about the possibility that a large part of the state’s bonding capacity for the next decade will be diverted to Boston.
And there are usually two per year. And you only need a couple of days before the warrant is posted to get a vote into it.
Then the meeting takes a vote. No ballot, no extra expense. Just another article to vote.
It’s just NOT that hard to have direct democracy outside of cities.
but I agree with you on bringing this to a town meeting vote. My guess is that Boston 2024 is too much of a joke and this proposal isn’t going to fly, but we can educate people through town meeting.
but TM follows the elections when advocates would have an opportunity to get elected in communities that have a representative town meeting. In suburban Boston the representative town meetings are usually held only once in the spring and rarely in the fall. In short, there is a wide range of TMs from open to elected, with a range of schedules and windows in which warrant articles may be introduced (I know you know this porcupine but I write this for others who have not been a TMM).
So you represent yourself, but only if you show up, mostly in smaller towns and I believe the only option for towns less than 6000 people.
We have from posters that ‘city counselors make the decisions’ and we need to have a ballot question, and we need to elect different people elected to advocate in Representative Town Meetings, etc.
Of the 351 communities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY SIX have OPEN town meeting which only needs ten signatures and a favorable voice vote at the meeting. That is a majority of the municipalities in the state. If you add in the the Representative town meetings, you get TWO THIRDS of the state, and you add to the agenda in the same way, you just don’t have the entire populace vote.
One thing these 300 /- towns have in common – they will get little to no benefit from the Olympics, and will see what local and school aid they DO get vanish. There is excellent chance of real support here.
The way you all CLING to the idea that the political class makes all the decisions, so we need to elect the right people someday is grotesque. It explains all great deal about the *&$@#& legislators who slavishly elect the DeLeos and DMasis over and over.
If the IOC is presented with a list of even HALF of the communites in MA saying that they do not want the Olympics, they will likely go elsewhere. It wll not cost money it will not cost lobbyists, it will not depend upon the Legislature or the Governor to get acton.
The reason we have the right of free petton in the CONSTITUTION, as CMD pointed out, is that it was assumed that we would govern ourselves, and not create a political priesthood to administer us.
Activists of the state, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
Once the euphoria wears off from seeing our bunch of millionaires in tight outfits please their owning billionaire by beating the other billionaire’s gaggle of millionaires in tight outfits, we should see more attempts to regain the initiative by the supposed PR geniuses who choked with the big unveiling.
I have a feeling they’ll be behind the curve for the duration and this pipe dream can finally waft away.
It should be one or two, tops.
This will just confuse voters and turn them off. A question on whether Boston should host, and if Boston should spend public money should suffice.
This allows for conflicting results, where everybody has proof that they’re right and nothing is decided. I would still prefer to see a statewide vote.
Is there any legal infrastructure for votes by county? This issue seems tailor-made for that.
….town meeting can do this.
Of the 15 towns in Barnstable county – one of the few that were not abolished – 14 have town meetings that require 10 signatures to get on the ballot. Nantucket is a town AND a county.
FWIW, county offices are elected on Gov/Presidential ballots so there is no county vote. Esp. in places like Suffolk and Middledex where they don’t exist.
The mayor is not going to sign a statute to put this on the ballot unless he has strong polling data to feel confident that the results will go his way.
n/t
I believe a 2/3 supermajority would do the trick.
…given that there are thirteen Councillors.
n/t
What makes the Olympics so special that they get a ballot question? (much less four…?) What about the Olympics makes it impossible for the councilors to simple “do their job” and make an effin decision?
Is it about cost? Will the City of Boston spend more on the Olympics than it would on anything else? I don’t think so. According to the FY2015 budget, 42% of the 1.9 Billion capital budget is for new buildings and/or major renovations to existing infrastructure. That’s nearly a billion dollars this year alone on new construction and/or major renovations. If that trend continues (and by past budgets it probably will) by 2024 the City of Boston will have spent over $8B. Nobody, even under the most pessimistic of overrun assumptions thinks that the City of Boston will be on the hook for even half that regarding the Olympics… So why doesn’t that get a vote? If it’s about cost, then why not put that before ‘democracy’??
Is it about ‘disruption’ to the city? Should the city host the Olympics, some 15,000 athletes and coaches and another 60,000 spectators are expected to descend upon the city. Is that more than is present at the yearly Marathon? No. Why, therefore is the marathon not put before the ‘democracy’?? How many students descend upon the city in the fall and leave, abruptly in the spring? Boston College and Boston University, just to name two, has a combined enrollment of 47000. An estimated 250,000 students seem to come and go with the seasons without making the city groan under the weight.
Putting ballot questions before the electorate is clearly shirking their duties as City Councilors to make decisions on behalf of the electorate. There is nothing extraordinary about the Olympics from the point of view of cost or disruption or anything else: any of the myriad decisions made on behalf of the city every damn day are impactful, or not, as the Olympics. The decision on whether or no to host the Olympics in 2024 is no different, either in scope or in type, from any of the other decisions that affect the city and should not be fobbed off on the electorate to make.
Do your job.
Most of the state rejects that model. Approx. 300 communites have a town meeting where a board cannot repair a road, negotiate a contract, or even accept a gift without their approval.
And this IS a statewide issue. The best we can hope for is the cannibalization of infrastructure funds and at worst invasion of local aid, regional school funding, and all the other things the state promised to pay for and then un-funds.
You have allies out there that are NOT top-down like the cities.
Unlike other expenditures, this is one that doesn’t address any identifiable need. And there really can be no question that regardless of how well everything goes, the Olympics will be a gigantic disruption to the normal activities of the businesses and residents in Boston and surrounding areas for at least the weeks of the events themselves.
Given that, it is perfectly reasonable that the voters get some extra input.
In any case, if the voters want a ballot question, they should get a ballot question.
There are plenty of things that are expensive, hugely disruptive as well as optional. The Marathon is one. College move-in weekend is another. I would trust the City Councilors, in concert with the Mayor, to make decisions about those things and I’m willing to do it with the Olympics as well..
You elide the fact that I’m not calling for the Councilors to make a specific decision… I’m not seeking a specific outcome, whatever you may think. I’m asking for them to make a decision. That decision might, in fact, be every bit the ‘hell no’ you want it to be. And if they make that decision, rather than acting like puppets who are helpless until the electorate pulls their strings, I’d be completely fine with it. That’s the job.
The job of city councilor is to say “yes” or to say “no”. The job is not managing the electorates mood swings.
Why should this be the case? Are the voters magically, somehow, bestowed of a sudden with mystical powers of righteous decision making? If the voters erred in voting for Mayor Walsh and/or any of the City Councilors (the subtext of a ballot question) what magically makes them right if they want to reverse the effects of their earlier votes? That smacks, too much, of not wanting to pay the piper after the dance…
The Marathon has been running for over a century with only one major disruption that comes to mind. People in the affected areas know what to avoid, it doesn’t require a significant amount of state or public capital to put on, and the feds already pledged to pick up the beefed up security tab after the attack made that a priority.
College move in day is a regular event nowhere near the kind of disruption of an Olympics. You consistently conflate sophistry with sophistication.
The only local analog is the big dig, and I suspect most voters wish they had more say over how that fiasco was financed. I might add voters in most of our competitor cities will have a say, and that say matters to the IOC.
My point exactly. We do it yearly. Almost effortlessly. Why do you think the Olympics will be any different? More people? No. Bigger people, maybe? Doubt it. Crazier people? We already have a Gronk.
Again, a large population of people descends upon the city en masse. We absorb it and move on because it’s not that big a deal. Same for the Olympics.
The Olympics isn’t the big deal that you think it is… that you want it to be…
Really. A decades long scar through the heart of a city is analagous to 2 months of scattered sporting events (elsewhere described as a party). I think you conflate the Olympics with everything in your life you can’t control. Which is everything. I have no greater control over my life than you have over yours, with the exception that I’m not scared at the lack of control and I don’t make something bigger than it is…
None of that, however, has to do with my centrai point, which you’ve neatly elided in an attempt to paint the Olympics as behemoth inside a leviathan wrapped in a titan.
The point is this: the mayor and the city council make the decisions. That’s what they were elected to do, and the fact that we have a pretty well run city — a city that can absorb a half million marathoners and spectators in a day and a quarter million students without breaking a sweat — is testament to the job past city councilors and past mayors have done.
Since previous Olympics have left visible scars, we have already been over this!
Chicago, Montreal, Athens, London, and that’s just the democratic countries. Sure their denizens wish they had a vote. Public Price tag in the billions, tourist revenue for the games in the mere millions.
They also had heftier price tags than the Marathon or college move in day!
$3 billion average public loss according to Sandersen.
College move in day doesn’t cost Boston a dime, I can’t find the links showing it does anyway, but I did find links showing it contributes 50,000+ jobs with a $1.8 billion annual payroll pumped back into the Boston economy. The Olympics won’t create nearly as many permanent jobs or economic stimulus, and will be significantly more expensive and disruptive.
Marathon security costs were in the low double digit millions and picked up by the feds, no info on stimulus but a short tourist boost I am sure. It also doesn’t completely shut down the city or require us to radically transform our infrastructure in a short period of time. Yesterday’s red line fiasco should show Olympic planners are talking out of their asses when they say existing MBTA can handle the capacity. It can’t even handle the weather.
We can argue (Chicago never did any Olympics, Montreal was a winter games, Athens has long been an economic basket case and should never have done the Olympics in the first place, London has two straight years of being the top tourist destination in the world post 2012… In excess of 20% increase over previous tourism records) but that’s not the point.
That’s not the point. The point is that the Mayor and the City Council can stand on the steps of the state house and BURN MONEY for no other reason than to piss you off if they want. It’s likely not to win them re-election, but that’s the power they have. They have 9 budgets between now and 2024 that will cumulatively waste more money than will ever be spent in the 2024 Olympiad and a good deal beyond that. That is exactly the nature of their decisions.
Yes or no on a 2024 Olympics is a decision.
As decisions go it’s not bigger or smaller than other decisions they make so why, of a sudden, do they feel the need to pass the buck off to the electorate? If it’s that big a deal just fucking say no and have done. If it isn’t a big deal, suck it up and do it. That’s the job. End of story. Massaging and managing the mood swings and passive aggressive tendencies of the electorate isn’t the job.
Now we are once again debating abstractions instead of the statistical data I have consistently alluded to that show the Olympics are a really bad deal. Anything else you bring up is a point to obscure the fact that the data demonstrates it is a bad deal.
I used to see this sort of thing at U Hub a lot too. Local PR minions who assume the new hip way to mold public opinion is to take to the smart sites and pontificate to beat the band.
Except it is usually misplaced and ineffective.
Atlanta has the worst traffic I have ever seen, the MARTA doesn’t go anywhere, and it worked fine there in 1996. Traffic and crowd management are totally do-able.
That said, these things aren’t really on the same scale. It would be more like holding two Boston Marathons a day for three weeks.
The thing that would give me pause, though, isn’t the disruption, the crowds, or the traffic. It’s the construction of a lot of high-priced buildings– multiple stadia and arenas– that cost a lot of money to build, a lot to maintain, and don’t have a heck of a lot of benefit long-term. Those are the things for which local government winds up stuck with the bill, either through tax fiddling, loan guarantees, or direct subsidy or expenditure. Maybe the “Olympic Village” housing can be mitigated, as in Atlanta, using the empty student dorms.
Though I am open to being persuaded that the Boston Olympics might somehow be different from EVERY OTHER Olympics that have been held, the evidence at this point seems to suggest pretty strongly that the benefits do not justify the expense.
There is a lot of evidence –overwhelmingly so– that tax cuts do not stimulate the economy and do not, in any way, justify the expense. Somehow, politicians are allowed to make THAT decision, but not THIS decision.
I simply do not understand.
Under the logic proposed here: A) that the electorate, should they want a ballot question, must be given a ballot question and; 2) benefits must justify the expense; I can’t see how anything would or could get done, ever. Between checking the back seat for directions and input and arbitrarily pre-approving a set of rules under which some decisions are made — while leaving similar decisions un-examined, the car is surely going to crash.
Mayors, City Councilors, Governors and every functionary and bureaucrat in between make decisions all the time: Sometimes the immediate benefits justify the expense; other times only the long term benefits justify the expense; and, yet, at still other times, no expense is justified, but it happens nonetheless — maybe they took a chance and whiffed…?. It hardly seems efficacious to add to this mix a veritable mob arbitrarily attempting take control of the steering wheel. But that’s where we are heading. Why have Mayors, City Councilors, Governors or functionaries or bureaucrats at all if we’re going to say one decision is ok for you to make but another isn’t on a fairly arbitrary and ad-hoc basis?
It seems unworkable.
It is right there in the Constitution.
So, all of this huffing and foot-stamping of yours is just because you don’t like the ballot initiative process in Massachusetts? Why don’t you just start a different thread on ballot initiatives, instead of hijacking all of these other threads?
Ballot initiatives exist in many states, including Massachusetts, because the legislative bodies are venal, corrupt, entrenched, and insulated by party machinery from the will of the people they theoretically represent.
I suppose that there can be debate about whether the ballot initiative has been at all effective at its original goal of restraining corrupt legislatures. Given the last week’s happenings in our own House of Representatives, the case seems rather strong that the ballot initiative has been entirely ineffective, to put it mildly.
But, nevertheless, there it is, right there in the Constitution. And so long as it remains there, it is in my book, ample reason for removing certain decisions from the hands of elected officials– all of whom are, I believe, bound to the laws of the Commonwealth.
… the obligation to worship the Supreme Being and Harvard University: yeah, atheism is outlawed and Harvard is mandated. Boy have we come a long way…
If we hew to those particular questions with the energy you wish to apply to ballot initiatives, then a lot of people here are going to get very angry.
I thought this thread was about the ballot questions. It’s right there in the title.
…I’m pretty sure those provisions have been superseded by amendment.
but your contention that a few ballot questions will bring a world-class city and its government to a screaming halt seems a little over dramatic.
Sure, elected officials have no obligation to communicate with the people who elected them, but they still get and answer mail, speak in public, go on the radio, and even call for the public to vote on certain issues. How you can arbitrarily decide that one of these activities is not legitimate seems kind of –I don’t know how to put it. But like I said I’ll assume you’re not malicious.
I don’t know from malicious. And I don’t know from where you pull the notion that I’m making that ‘contention.’
I think a few ballot questions will not bring the city to a screaming halt. I think they are simply wrong in and of themselves. They represent the city councilors pointedly refusing to do their jobs. I don’t the the proximate affect of them will be so much as to shatter the nearest egg, never mind the earth shattering you
I do think after the casino debacles, and now with the Olympics ballot questions, a precipitous slide is approached and that’s why I asked the question: what’s to stop somebody who objects to everyday decisions of the City Council from demanding, and getting, a ballot question? The Olympics may be costly but if you use that costliness to justify backseat driving by the electorate what’s to stop some shmoe from tallying up a similar amount of costs in the budget and forcing that on the ballot using the Olympics vote as a precedent?
You mistake me. All those activities are purely optional on the part of elected officials. We are approaching a point where people are demanding a ballot question as though it is a right. They are not entitled to sit in the backseat and drive. It is not a right. It is an abrogation of the vote they already took to elect the officials in the first place. That is certainly not legitimate.
We aren’t “approaching a point” where a ballot initiative as a right, we have been there for a very long time– because it is a right. If proponents meet the standards of the ballot initiative laws, then they have the right to the question’s inclusion on the ballot.
are often if not usually used by the advocates of a position to demonstrate to elected officials how the public feels. They do not relieve the pols of their duties but they do inform them of public sentiments. It is up to the pols to interpret those sentiments and then act as their powers allow.
Generally I do not like advisory questions but they sometimes serve a purpose.
…Let me, just for the nonce, stipulate the definition you have just given: ballot questions as advisory.
How does that advisory capacity fit into this discussion given that the title of this diary (“Will the Olympic Bid Have to Face Democracy This Fall? City Councilor Files for Four Ballot Questions”) clearly implies that democracy will be slighted, even perhaps damaged, absent a ballot question? Surely, we have functioning representative democracy going on as we speak… but the very title of this diary — in addition to many statements made herein — implies pretty clearly that anything less than a ballot initiative is something less than democracy.
I daresay many people here want a ballot initiative for purely tactical reasons: because they see it as a clear, compelling, final and definitive no for the Olympics and would not agitate for one without they know for certain that anybody with a clear head would absolutely vote that no. “It’s patently obvious, duh” they may say to themselves… and so they agitate. Certainly most of those who are saying “Must have ballot question” are adamantly opposed to the Olympics.
If that’s the case, will THEY, and not I, accept your definition of ballot question as merely advisory? What will happen if the vote comes back a clear no and the City Council and the Mayor go ahead with the Olympics anyways? If, as you say, the ballot question has no power to compel or require, they must be prepared for that…
And if they are prepared for the scenario where the elected officials ignore the advisory ballot question, why are they not prepared to take the elected officials decision to begin with?
In the end, as in the beginning, it comes down to the elected officials, as I have been saying all along. If we go through the process and the vote comes in and, whatever the raw numbers of the vote, the elected officials decide to do what they decide to do why is that any different for the electorate than the prima facie decisions of those same elected officials. They decide to do what they decide to do… If the electorate are prepared for the one instance, they are prepared for the other and the one, therefore, is not necessary. If any of the electorate is not prepared but are merely fomenting agitation because they want a specific outcome… well, they’ve come to the wrong shop for entitlement.
Every town meeting, we have several petition questions – end war, abolish the Cape Cod Commission, censure officials, withdraw from the UN, etc. These are all unenforceable ‘opinion polls’, although Grannies Against Guns and Cape Downwinders set great store by them.
The Olympics are an exception, because the IOC actually CARES about public opinion. If enough citizens of the Commonwealth make public declarations that they do NOT support the Olympics, there is a real chance that the bid will go elsewhere.
(And THEN we can plan the Springfield Olympics!)
I’m pretty sure my town never acted on any question that was not directly related to the business of the town.
Lowell is a city, with a manager and a city council. Somehow, I think you knew that, so why are you pretending that the famously-corrupt government of that city has such purity of purpose?
…and while I now technically live within the Lowell city limits (just barely – I often joke that while Sarah Palin couldn’t see Russia from her house I really can see Dracut from mine.) I grew up in Dracut, still substitute teach there, and back in 2011 when I still lived there I even ran (unsuccessfully) for Town Moderator. I still very much identify with Dracut.
But the literally hundreds of OTHER communities that DO have these kinds of questions might be interested in going on record to say that they do NOT want the Olympics. And the IOC is very sensitive to that kind of thing.
My town isn’t even UNUSUAL in this regard. It’s commonplace.
I truly do NOT understand the opposition to this. We want our elected officials to decide what’s best for us, and then shamble along like sheeple?
What the hell kind of grass roots activism IS this?
FWIW Petr,
This comment is a perfect example of how you sometimes piss people off. 1. 1. You title it with a slight, but deniable, insult.
2. You completely ignore empirical evidence that has been presented several times before.
3. Then you use logic games, and in this case straw man fallacies and ad hominem fallacies to maintain a contrarian position. You cloak them in humor or cleverness, but in the end, the effect is the same.
a) False analogy. Again, a large population of people descends upon the city en masse. We absorb it and move on because it’s not that big a deal. Same for the Olympics.
b) Ad hominem. I think you conflate the Olympics with everything in your life you can’t control.
c) Red herring. Crazier people? We already have a Gronk.
I don’t consider you a troll, but you are trolling. Just as DFW used to do. You throw a bunch of crap disguised as argument at a position you disagree with, require your opponent to clean it off to realize that there was no genuine argument there. You either know or can easily figure out why college students moving into college or how the Boston Marathon is different than the Olympics, yet you put it on your fellow commenters to unpack the bullshit. That’s exactly what DFW did, though much less skillfully.
I realize that this comment might be unwelcome, and if so, I expect you’ll respond accordingly, but you seemed to be sincerely asking me before, and I pulled my punches.
Where arguing with him is like arguing with a table, a strange table committed to the Olympics at any cost and opposed to representative democracy.
I’ll give it a shot.
et
This is only a false analogy if you assume the Marathon is a just weekend race and that the Olympics is a radioactive meteorite the size of Putins ego crawling with measles infected velociraptors hurtling towards Boston and against which not even Bruce Willlis and Billy Bob Thornton can stand… I’m not putting it on anyone to refute what I said, I’m putting it on people to prove that the Olympics is going to be a ragnarok inside a cataclysm wrapped around an apocalypse that everybody assumes it to be.
OK, maybe a little hyperbole… but the Olympics is not going to be the unbearable burden some here say it will be. London survived and is thriving. Beijing is still standing. Even Athens, Sydney, Atlanta and all those other cities, are still standing. All everybody here can say is “cost!” and “disruptive!” — sometimes even “hugely disruptive!’ — without anything in the way of details or even plausibility. Yeah the Olympics is a special, once in a lifetime sort of thing that is emotionally big and involves effort and striving and all that, but it’s not going to be something Boston cannot handle. It simply is not.
Further, everybody acts as though the Marathon is just this thing that spontaneously happens: a bunch of runners get together and run. The Boston Marathon is a huge international sports event that draws tens of thousands of runners and half a million people as spectators. 2014 had 36,000 runners alone. That’s not nothing and we — that is to say the City of Boston and the other towns through which the race winds — handles it extra-ordinarily well. Maybe over the course of the two months the Olympics and Paralympics together will draw half a million spectators but for sure the number of athletes and coaches won’t exceed 36,000. As a point of comparison it is entirely valid. Purportedly the security apparatus and practices put in place for the Marathon is one of the main selling points to the USOC and IOC.
On the subject of college move ins: It’s not nothing either. You may wish to elide it because it doesn’t impact much, but –as with the Marathon — that is precisely the point: if somewhere between 150 and 250 thousand people descend on the city within a very short time frame without making waves that speaks extra-ordinarily well of the ability of Greater Boston to handle a large influx of people over a short time frame. What else is the concern about the actual Olympics? Yeah, there is some concern over costs and infrastructure. But that doesn’t speak to what actually happens, how it is going to impact the city and the ability of the city to deal…
The point, with both the Marathon and college moving, is that we do what others might consider ‘disruptive’ without blinking. It might make us ideally suited for the Olympics like no other city.
.. I did, later, acknowledge it as hyperbole. Did you read that far?
I’m not deliberately trolling, I do honestly and sincerely believe what I right and even so, wouldn’t write it just to get a rise even if true. I do find that people’s attitudes have concretized and feel maybe the jackhammer approach to be entertaining, if nothing else, but that’s hardly much better than trolling, I expect, from your POV.
approach to be entertaining to whom?
And you’ve appointed yourself to annoy them because…? It’s entertaining you? How is that different than trolling?
… I asked a question: what is so special about the Olympics that they get (deserve maybe the word?) a singe ballot question? Much less four? I still think it’s a legit question and I will continue to ask it. I might have fun with those who wanted to turn this into yet another iteration of Olympics as Armaggedon without answering directly the question I asked, but I’m not appointed by anyone to annoy anyone. If they didn’t like the question I asked they should not have replied to it..
I asked whether a ballot question is justified on cost and, if so, why aren’t other similarly costly items given ballot questions?
I then asked if a ballot question was justified on some amorphous concept of “disruption” and (again), if so, why aren’t similarly disruptive events like the marathon or college moves subject to ballot questions.
Nobody has answered these questions. They keep throwing up some version of “disruption!” and “cost!” and whenever I counter their arguments they accuse me of trolling.
Straight up answer the question: what’s so special about the Olympics that they get a ballot question? If there is anything specific to the decision regarding the Olympics that is not specific to other daily decisions that the City Councilors make that would justify the extraordinary, and dangerous, precedent of a ballot question? It’s a straight question. I await an answer.
If you answer the question with, “It costs a lot” I will name you any number of things that will cost more. If you answer the question with “it’s disruptive” I will name you a few ostensibly disruptive events that we handle regularly… if you dismiss them as not disruptive I say you’ve undermined your own argument when you say disruption handled is somehow proving we can’t handles something disruptive..
So answer the question.
of what you said. This is what you do: say something inflammatory and now you say all you said was… and you leave out the inflammatory stuff. That’s trolling. You are merely annoying people for your own pleasure.
Anyway, I went meta for a purpose. I stated that purpose. I tried. I’m done.
You end up debating all sorts of questions he brings up-philosphical, semantic and pedantic questions all of which obscure the fact that to the basic questions:
Does Boston want the Olympics?
How much will it cost, who will pay? Will this benefit the city? How will this Olympics be different from every other?
He has no answer. In fact-he has no fuckin clue.
Every response let’s him hijack the thread from these basic questions, which again, Boston 2024 doesn’t seem to have an answer for either.
The Lowell Sun has this interesting tidbit about another pseudopod of presumption the 2024 amoeba has extended toward public transportation speculations in which it channels the outcomes of things planned before it was born.
http://www.lowellsun.com/breakingnews/ci_27466924/attorney-olympics-bid-overstates-state-funding-commitments
http://www.aroundtherings.com/site/A__50055/Title__Rio-Olympic-Dreams—-Media-Watch/292/Articles
I wrote an entire diary about the cost. You even said “i appreciate it” and uprated a few of the responses I made therein.
Now, 180 degrees (or so) later, I have “no fuckin clue.”
Somebody here is clueless. It ain’t me. That much is demonstrated.
Which you have now started to continue with renewed vigor and exertion. Dancing around and around the questions rather than directly addressing them, and evading them by asking more.
Listen, you oppose ballot questions in principle, for any issue, than feel free to advocate that constitutional change in a separate thread. And don’t cry foul when your pet issues don’t get a public hearing or a public vote. By all means do that.
But that philosophical position is completely irrelevant to this discussion. If it gets enough signatures, it gets on the ballot. That’s the system we have, and it looks like there are more of us willing to sign those petitions than there are folks supporting the Olympics. Let’s have a vote. If Boston 2024 are the benign experts you think they are who only have Boston’s future at heart, the great city we so desperately need to have an Olympic event to prove to the world how great we are, the only city able to pull off what cities with significantly larger sizes, more sophisticated infrastructures, and better streams of public and private support failed to do. If we simply believe in the magic enough, maybe our dreams can come true! And you can put that before the voters of the entire state preferably, or even just the city of Boston, and they will tell you ‘give me a friggin break’.
Right after the red line breaks down or the third week their street isn’t shoveled or when the long island bridge falls into the sea or the Everett casino fails to get built. See if they believe in the magic then.
Our state and our region have severe infrastructure needs that have been consistently underserved. The Olympics are a historically proven terrible means of getting those needs addressed. The debt and white elephants they leave behind are their only legacies-a fact which you have never ever ever ever addressed in a coherent or consistent way other than dismissing it out of hand with obfuscating arguments, delaying tactics, wishful thinking, or pedantic philosophical arguments about the right to petition.
So yeah, I appreciated it at the time and encourage you to go back to that.
jconway does not need defending but the truth does from your dishonesty. jconway wrote: “I appreciate your tone”
jconway is being perfectly consistent in writing two weeks ago that he appreciated a rare moment of civility from you and now acknowledging that you have “no fuckin clue.”
Was the original question inflammatory?
I’ll cop to a frustration when the replies to my questions call them ‘desperate’ and clearly miss the point. I’ll even cop to hostility and apologize.
But I’m asking you, here and now, if you think the originalquestion I asked is legit or not?
If it is, I’m asking for a straight answer. I’ll do my dead level best not to inflame or antagonize in my response.
If it isn’t a legitimate question, then by all means ignore me.
“Just answer this one question. I’m really just being honest. I have a point. I’m just misunderstood.” Et cetera.
I’m not interested in your copping or apologizing or your question. I wrote something snotty and deleted my comment. I’m all done.
Mark
…For what it is worth
What’s so special is people think it is so special. That’s all it takes. In any case, your question has been answered many times over.
You repeatedly insist that disruptive (albeit tolerated) events like the marathon are not disruptive at all. It appears that you must possess a magic teleporting ability that allows you to travel around Boston when the roads are clogged. Good for you. The rest of us experience disruption.
If you think that we have to just suck it up and accept whatever our elected officials decided to do, then wouldn’t that include our City Councilors deciding to have a ballot question? Instead you try to claim they are not doing their job. So it seems that they can do whatever they want as long as it is not what YOU want?
I strongly suspect that the reason that you are making such a huge fuss over this issue is that you are absolutely terrified of having objective proof that the voting citizens of Boston do not want the Olympics.
— What happens when people think that something else — something with which you disagree — is special? What happens if a sufficient number of people put the “everyone should get a pony” question on the ballot?
When I call a cab I don’t expect to get behind the wheel and drive. The driver has a job. He could argue, as you do, that ‘well, the car is here, you take the wheel and you’ll get where you are going…” When I take a flight I don’t sit in the pilots seat. When I go to a restaurant I don’t go in the kitchen and cook my meal myself. When get my haircut I tell the barber what I want and don’t grab the scissors.
City Councilors make decisions. Making the choice to put the decision elsewhere is not a decision.
If everyone thinks there should be a ballot question to abolish cats wearing pajamas, I would think it strange, but if enough people want that on the ballot, fine with me.
Of course, a ballot question that requires that the government spend money they don’t have foolishly is quite different from one that requires the government NOT spend money foolishly. It won’t require any special effort for Boston to continue to not host the Olympics, just as we have been doing for the last 400 years.
Once again, deciding to have a ballot question is a decision. It is a decision you don’t like, but it is one nevertheless.
Where do you live? Do you not realize that at least half the people who work in the city either take the day off or work from home that day? Do you not realize that the city is cut in half and it is extremely difficult to drive across the marathon route? What is “effortless” about that?
I guess you also haven’t tried driving around the neighborhoods where students live during moving day either?
Now with the Olympics we are talking about taking away many miles of roads and highways for two weeks or more.
And don’t forget the massive security….
Ugh.
33 miles of Rtes 90, 93, 95, all of the Boston ByPass, all of the roads surrounding the Common and a lot of other roads around the Village will be privatized for use only by people associated with the Olympics. Then there is a plan that I could not decipher that will have Olympic guardians telling us who can get on what mass transit vehicles.
Don’t worry it will only last for three weeks, hardly a comparison to the one day Marathon!
Don’t forget to smile at the IOC members every time you see one!
when that day is a State holiday. Yes, I know not everyone gets it as a paid holiday, but lots of people — especially city employees — do get it paid. I haven’t seen any proposals to declare the Olympic weeks as holidays, so I’m pretty sure most of the time, they’re going to land on workdays. That’s not even considering the tiny amount of temporary structures put up for the Marathon, as opposed to the large construction projects required for the Olympics. Comparing a weeks-long (mostly on workdays) event requiring months of major construction to a one-day holiday event is really ridiculous.
The Marathon and moving day? Really???
The Olympics is like both of those together times 10 for at least two solid weeks. And that is just the transportation side of it. If you think about the cost, it is even worse.
As I said. If the voters want a ballot question they should get one. Yes, the Mayor and City Councillors can freely ignore the will of the people until they are voted out of office. That does not mean in the slightest that the people have to simply suck it up until they do.
And who is not wanting to pay the piper in any case? The vast majority of Bostonians did not vote for Marty Walsh. And not a single person in Boston voted for Marty Walsh because he would bring the Olympics here. The topic did not come up at all during the campaign. As I have said a number of times, I have yet to meet a single person in Boston who wants the Olympics. Not one.
That is clearly, precisely, without vaguery or ambiguity of any kind, just exactly what that means.
Elections are not the only way that people can make themselves heard.
Yes, politicians can ignore us. That doesn’t mean that we should simply shut up because they technically don’t have to any more than you are going to shut up because we don’t have to put any value on your arguments.
The Mayor and the City Council are accountable to the people during elections but also otherwise.
I guarantee you that the Boston City Council (for one) does *not* “freely ignore the will of the people until they are voted out of office.” To the contrary, like most local elected officials, they are constantly seeking to assess and understand the will of their constituents. Not only because they want to be reelected but because they understand that they have a moral and ethical duty to represent that will. That, plus “leading” on important matters where the current “will” of the majority is counter to what is best for the municipality, is the job.
Anyone who believes that “the people’s” only role in shaping the jobs that their local elected officials is to vote are ignorant of the lobbying process.
I don’t know if this occurred to you, but 2015 is a Boston municipal election year…
You will have to explain why you think this contradicts or abrogates any single thing I wrote. If the city councilors want to run on the Olympics question, I don’t see where this is something I’ve said should not happen.
In fact, the contrary…
You would much rather have this be an election issue so that you can pretend that anyone who gets reelected and is in favor of the Olympics means that everyone wants the Olympics.
In any case, what happens if Marty Walsh loses reelection after the IOC has already awarded the Olympics to Boston. Based on your previous statements, you would presumably have no problem with some future mayor telling the IOC that we changed our minds and will refuse to host it?