[An open letter to Globe columnist Shirley Leung, in the spirit of her recent open letter to Red Sox Executive Larry Lucchino.]
Dear Shirley:
Just read your open letter to Larry Lucchino, in which you implore him to save the city’s Olympic bid.
It’s clear you think pretty highly of the guy — his “storied career,” his “outsized role” in the Sox turnaround, his “discerning eyes,” etc. Heck, in your view of things, Larry Lucchino can build stadiums that “transform entire sections of cities and make people realize we can be better than we are.”
As you argue, Larry accomplished this very thing in San Diego, getting voters to approve a referendum to build a stadium for the Padres. The stadium, in turn, was to be the cornerstone of a bigger redevelopment project.
But here’s some more about that stadium and that redevelopment project that your open letter didn’t include. Back in 1998, at the urging of San Diego’s mayor and the redevelopment team (of which Lucchino was a part), the voters of San Diego voted to contribute $275 million to the project in the form of bonds. The beauty part for the San Diego electorate was that the bonds would be paid off by the property taxes that the project would create. A free lunch, as it were.
Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, something happened to that free lunch along the way. A California-wide budget crisis in 2011 led to a new state law that intercepted the property taxes that the city was counting on to pay off the bonds. When the city asked to be exempted from the new law, the state said “no.” Now the whole thing is in litigation and the city may well be on the hook for the money it ponied up in reliance on what may have turned out to have been a broken promise. You can read more about it here.
So, here’s to recognizing what, as you said, Larry Lucchino knows: God is in the details. All of them.
(Cross-posted at hesterprynne.net.)
As a fledgling engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid 1970s, I like the rest of my rookie cohort, were explicitly directed in the “Engineering Handbook” to “always do the right thing”. The executives of Digital at the time wrote “your management will sometimes direct you to do something you know is mistaken. If you are sure that they are mistaken, then do the right thing and trust that your management will figure it out”. This attitude and explicit cultural norm had a great deal to do with the astonishing success of Digital in the 1970s and 1980s.
It reflects a reality about the world that remains true today — even if short-term political and management victories are won, doing the wrong thing seldom prevails in the long run.
Boston 2024 is the wrong thing for Boston and Massachusetts. The best PR and management team in the world can only achieve short-term victories — in the long run, Boston 2024 is bad for the city and bad for the state.
Massachusetts and Boston does not need yet another stadium, old or new. We need a public transportation system designed to serve an entire region, not a one-time event focused on Boston. We need infrastructure improvements throughout the region, not just around Boston. We need a state government that is responsive to the needs of the 99%, not the 1%. Boston 2024 takes us in precisely the wrong direction.
The right answer to Boston 2024 is “no”.
And pay attention. Us ordinary grassroots activists will not be persuaded by substituting another volunteer poo-bah for the one we have now. Or hiring more of the tired old highly paid political consultants who claim credit for designing and winning with the same door to model that was institutionalized by Boston Ward 5’s Mahatma and NYC Democratic Clubs a hundred years ago.
was all, “Carmen Ortiz” for Governor?
I don’t know Shirley Leung, but if I were lost in purgatory and in danger of taking the door to hell, I still wouldn’t ask Larry Harmon for directions,
It takes certain types to dole out advice to people more informed than they are. Cokie Roberts, for example. David Broder. David Brooks. People who dip their vessels in the of puddles left by the 1% and serve it up to us as a good drink of water.
The days when former reporters could be credible pundits are gone. The difference is they don’t know it.