All you Olympics fans can stop the self-pity now. The BBJ asked the PR experts. Below are a sample of their responses:
And what they had to say about it all should help ease the fear of those here who might feel that the city’s overall brand was irreparably damaged after the USOC abruptly pulled the city’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics.
“The impact will be minimal, I believe,” said Jim Farrell, president of PR First. “Although the Olympics might have brought excitement and revenue to the region, we should not fault our officials for insisting on due diligence before signing on the dotted line.”
“We are Boston Strong. Agree or not with the outcome, that is the Boston the world knows,” Solomon McCown & Co. CEO Helene Solomon said.
An ancillary point made, with which I agree, is that Mayor Walsh came out of this smelling like a rose. The IOC and USOC, by pulling the bid made excellent scapegoats.
… but the fact that the BBJ asked in all soberness and that these 8 or so took the time to answer seriously makes your description of “Olympics fans” as merely self-piteous look somewhat petty. (At the risk of seeming petty myself I’ll note that hometown PR experts exist to maximize the positive and minimize the negative: aspirational can be confused with actual where “media and marketing” are concerned.)
Fans of Boston, not just “Olympics fans,” should take the question a lot more seriously than you appear to be doing…
I do hope they are correct. We shall see as others weigh in, the repercussions shake out and the rubber meets the road.
He did get us into this mess in the first place, and I am sure that he lost some voters. But I think he does come out of this relatively well at least with the public.
..as opposed to objective policy criteria, and the merits thereof, Marty Walsh came out of this pretty well. His popularity was independent of anti-Olympic sentiment in the City, according to all the polling data I’ve read.
The last three or so weeks of this process involved damage control and proactive spin by the Walsh Administration. Accordingly, when the bid was yanked (which was pretty much a foregone conclusion), the Mayor could play the populist card.
I believe that you touched upon this in your last sentence, and that is what I meant.
… because that’s what we’d have to do to validate your statement Charley…
The formation and incorporation of NO Boston Olympics pre-dates the formation and incorporation of Boston2024. They couldn’t possible demand full and consistent accounting from an organization that didn’t yet exist.
The name is NO Boston Olympics. It’s not “No unless it’s a Fully Transparent Olympics… It’s not Let’s ask pertinent questions about the Funding for the Olympics … the name is NO Boston Olympics. It’s a straight up, un-equivocal and un-mistakably declarative refusal. NO doesn’t mean yes-if-we-mind-our-ps-and-qs. No means no. It has always meant no. There are no circumstances under which no was not applicable for the carpetbaggers who simply wished the Olympics would not happen: The requirements of transparency and full and consistent accounting were bolted on after the fact to justify that knee-jerk refusal and to take advantage of the supremely ugly and constantly shifting process of bidding and mega-project planning.
All mega-project planning and implementation look like a rolling swirl of multiple cluster-fucks colliding with each other. A lot of mega-projects ACTUALLY are just that… but all of them resemble that to an outsider. There’s no possible way that, this early in the process, the accounting could have been comprehensive, never mind full and transparent. When and if we do any large scale infrastructure it’s going to look exactly like this and we’re going to go over all this again…
So let’s not pretend we’re all perspicacity and acumen and that’s how we dodged the bullet. It’s not. We didn’t.
deserves much of a post-mortem. It was pretty much inside baseball. People inasmuch as they cared were unenthusiastic about hosting the games, but six months from now, no one is going to give a crap. The media will do their yearly obituary of news stories, and this will get mentioned.
No one is going to stop doing business in Boston. Other countries aren’t going to point and laugh when Boston turns its back. Boston isn’t going to have to wear dark glasses, show up late to social occasions, and try to avoid the media. Boston’s mom isn’t going to have to defend the city to her bridge partners.
Unless there is some interesting reporting done on the whole fiasco or unless it matters as an example of some larger context, this issue doesn’t matter. It’s done. Over. Time to stop carrying a torch for it.
..not that it wasn’t an inside game; it was.
What was important is that an underfunded bunch of civilians took on the pros at their own game and won. If – and this isn’t a certainty – the folks who worked to stop the bid build something sustainable on the ground, Boston might see a resurgence of populist politics.
That is the potential larger context.
… to go with your soupcon of ‘move along…’
… there’s a concurrent thread happening right now in which jconway defines “real infrastructure vision” as “howsabout we not suck so gosh-darn hard.” It’s important to fix things and I support what NYC is doing with LaGuardia, but let’s have a little more respect for ourselves and our imagination and not call playing catch-up to the third world ‘vision’
Whatever else you may think about Boston2024 they had a vision. They even made up pictures and crunched some numbers and tried to share the vision with the CommonWealth. The vision wasn’t “let’s fix something drastically broken’ but rather ‘let’s make a good thing great.’ You may argue with the motives and the possible profit they hoped to reap by taking a rough diamond and cutting it into something prettier… but you’re just arguing with capitalism and with the scale of the vision. You simply can’t say they didn’t have a vision.
And they got shafted for this. All kinds of people now think they’re just inept moneygrubbers. It doesn’t matter that their actions can also be explained as an earnest and forthright commitment to community made by non-politicions in an ever changing maelstrom of politics and PR. No. They’re just the mini-Donalds who couldn’t make it happen.
So, fine, Boston2024 is history. Leave ’em behind. Ok. Who’s going to step up and promote a similar vision? Not of of the Olympics but of the T…? of the bridges? … And the roads? Who’s going to want to go through what Boston2024 just went through? ‘Cause, I guarantee you, the early stages of that process will look NO DIFFERENT than the kerfuffle we just dusted off. Any REAL vision for the CommonWealth is going to give every Tom, Dick or Hrs-kevin something to complain about and some messiness to disdain and fear. That’s what we have to overcome. If that wasn’t true we’d still be treating illness with leeches.
Or will the political path of least resistance mean we wait until decay is noticeable and then we fix it, calling that ‘vision’?
… what, reallly, is the difference between Boston2024 and Beverly Scott???
n/t
.
…They both, essentially, were ‘fired’ after articulating a vision.
What’s your vision?
In the case of the MBTA, it’s not to difficult to be consistently polite to bus drivers, inspectors, mechanics, etc. Over time (once they get to know you, and provided you maintain confidentiality), you get a decent idea of what’s going on internally. The problems with the T included low priorities for preventive maintenance (of vehicles and signals alike) and arbitrary personnel problems – including tolerance of racism and sexism in the workplace, which continued under Scott.
In the case of the Olympics what we saw were wish lists and magical thinking, not planning. The lack of basic due diligence (lack of title searches, for example) and profound political stupidity (volleyball in the Common) did more to do in the bid than anything. The FOIA’d documents just reinforced the aura of incompetence.
My “vision”, such as it is would be that some sort of grassrooots reality-based politics develop in the Commonwealth.
I’m not going to hold my breath, however…
… because I never said articulation was the same as planning. If you want me to clarify even further I will un-equivocally state that ‘vision’ is distinct and separate from ‘planning.’ There. Happy?
I will continue, however, with the caveat that you cannot plan adequately without vision…
It would be more precise to say that one cannot plan without data.
Effective planning requires both vision and data
Vision — a statement about the world to be created — is needed to articulate requirements and goals. Data is needed to establish the difference between where things are and where things need to be in order to fulfill the vision.
The current government lacks vision for the MBTA (the data has been known for decades) — or hides the real vision of the current government, which is a region totally dependent on highways. The B2024 proponents offered a myopic vision that focused solely on the event itself, and either lied about the data they had or confused bias and speculation with “data”.
What you would call “vision” in this context I would call an honest assessment, based upon available data.
Re: Your second paragraph.
The problem with getting MBTA infrastructure improvement is not so much a lack of vision as the fact that the T has a limited political constituency; hence a low priority in capital and operating budgets. There is at present no embedded-on-the-ground force that would create the political pressure needed for comprehensive Statewide mass transit – and it would have to be Statewide to get buy-in from Worcester County and points west.
The current government (and the informed public) has the data; however there is no political upside to acting proactively on the basis of the information – and this goes for other comprehensive infrastructure work the Commonwealth needs. That includes road and highway maintenance, by the way.
I agree with your last sentence in that I think that B2024 suffered from a negative feedback loop comprised equally of arrogance, narcissism, and confirmation bias.
The MBTA by definition serves the most populous parts of the state, especially if you include Commuter Rail. I haven’t counted exactly, but it seems like a sizable number of legislators represent districts so served. Roads and highways of course serve the entire state so it seem that issue really would impact people everywhere.
Starting with the fact that there has never been any competent effort to counter anti-tax sentiment on the ground. The returns for Question 1 (repealing the gas tax index) are here. Note the numbers in high-density automobile-dependent areas.
Only in Suffolk County was there a comfortable “no” vote margin of victory; in Middlesex Counties the spread was only 1%. In the case of Berkshire, Dukes, Franklin, and Hampshire Counties the total votes were small as to not materially affect the result.
A similar dynamic applies to public transportation. There is no systematic effort to build a pro-mass transit constituency on the ground in sufficient numbers to affect State policy.
There are other variables in play, such as increased automobile ownership and use in Metro Boston as the area gentrifies, the widespread collapse of grassroots politics (and the resulting effects on turnout), and the rarity of organized on-the-ground environmentalism; just to name a few.
Which is why the progressive income tax campaign could be an exciting development or play itself out as another defeat, but it’s worth the fight regardless.
The narrative right now is that this is the most taxed state in the union and all the jobs and freedoms are in New Hampshire. The Massachusetts Democratic party, it’s legislators, and it’s nominees for statewide office have collectively done little to nothing to change that narrative, many of them even subscribe to it.
I hear that narrative from extended family, close family, white working class friends of mine and my older brother’s who have fled Cambridge and now vote Republican, and even overhearing people on the plane ride back to Chicago, totally oblivious to the fact that the place they are leaving is actually the most taxed and the place they are going to actually ranks 26th highest in the country.
I logged on within a few seconds after you posted this comment, which was thus the newest on the thread at that point. It seems the comment count doesn’t update exactly simultaneously. I was looking at the front page version of this diary which said 10 comments (7 new) and at the same time the link in the margin diary queue said 11 comments (8 new).
on my account. At this point, the project is dead, and there’s no new information. It seems to me that no one here is saying anything new.
Personally, I’ve stopped thinking about Boston 2024. And the Olympics. Unless something new comes up, I’m moving on. No need to join me.
Our former, late Town Meeting Moderator was known to say “Everything has been said, but not everyone has said it” whenever a debate started running too long. I think we were at that point even before the USOC pulled the plug.
…because I need to remember that line when I chair meetings!
Their vision was of the Olympics itself plus some large scale commercial real-estate development.
The stuff we really care about — improvements to transportation infrastructure — were afterthoughts for them. They really added very little, if anything, to our vision for better transportation. They simply piggy backed on the already existing plans. To be fair, that wasn’t really their mission, but we should pretend that it was.
Maybe I’m not the best one to break it to you, in particular, but “our” vision sucks. “Our” vision is Gov Baker trying to cut millions of dollars from the transporation budget the week before the MBTA meltdown. So, yeah, their vision certainly doesn’t align with that. “Our” vision is Beverly Scott being ‘fired’ after speaking the truth about what needs to be done. So, yeah. their vision certainly can’t compare with that. “Our” vision is Speaker DeLeo, a week or so after the MBTA meltdown resurrecting the return of the revenge of the son of “Reform before Revenue”. So, yeah, “our” vision sucks and, clearly, does not align with the vision posit’d by Boston2024.
“our” vision is, in fact, not so much a vision as a wizened, narrow-minded, short-sighted shriveled up viciousness that, more than anything, resembles the opposite of a vision. Any vision with even a modicum of aspiration isn’t going to compare to ‘our’ vision. That’s because ‘our’ vision sucks.
I’m sure that you, personally, have a vision that is expansive and generous and, when you are Governor and/or Speaker I look forward to supporting it with full throat and even more vigor. But ‘your’ vision isn’t ‘our’ vision. ‘Our’ vision is that laid out by our duly elected representatives, for good or ill… Maybe if we had given more thought to that we’d have elected more responsible and capable representatives. Alas, we did not.
but it appears that most people think Boston 2024’s vision sucks as well.
As I said, Boston 2024 didn’t really have a vision for fixing the T that was any more detailed than what we already know we want. So I am not sure what you are talking about.
Either way, you are correct that our elected representatives are going to have to fix this — just like they would have had to if we had continued with the bid.
In any case, I think it is past time that we stop simply saying that things suck and try to figure out the best way to pressure the Governor and Legislature to actually start doing something real.
on the same scale of Boston 2024’s Colombia Point and “Midtown” ideas, and none of them required the threat of eminent domain to get done. Critically, too, Colombia Point and Widett Circle could still be redeveloped — but now it will be on the terms of the businesses and community that’s already there, not with a bunch of hot shots making demands and having the juice of an Olympics bid behind them.
So if developers want that land, they’re going to have to adequately compensate the folks already using it now…. and that’s a good thing.
The whole point is that there is no shortage of Boston redevelopment going on — all within a framework that requires developers to play within the rules. There’s no reason why all of the “vision” (aka profits) that Boston 2024 wanted couldn’t still happen, but now it’ll be considerably more transparent and fairer if it does go forward.
…the notion that eminent domain was on the table? When I asked for a cite I never got it. During the debate last week this is the one question Steve Pagliuca did not hedge on. Whereas so often that night he rejected the premise of the question or called hyperbole, when the moderator read a viewer question off of Twitter asking if they would try to get the Mayor to invoke eminent domain if necessary, his immediate and forceful response was, “absolutely not!”
First, if the owners of the various parcels involved in Widett circle or other venues decided not to play ball then the City would be stuck with either funding massive overruns to move the venue somewhere else or pulling the domain card. Second, Walsh didn’t quite promise that the BRA or state government would not use eminent domain. Third, the IOC does require that all billboards and visible advertising be given over to their exclusive use. If the billboard owners don’t agree to that, it would be similar to other uses of eminent domain.
In any case, we will never really know if it would have actually come into play, but denials aside you cannot entirely rule out the possibility.
You’re in the odd position of claiming that the city will spend a lot of money to avoid having to spend a lot of money… Or did you think ’eminent domain’ means ‘free land for the gubmint’? It does not. For the Government to seize any property they don’t already own at Widett circle, they’d have to compensate, at fair market value, the owners of the land they seize. So hypothetical “massive cost overruns” associated with moving the venue would be traded for hypothetical and likely equally “massive” overruns associated with compensating the owners. Under either circumstances they’ll spend a lot of money so “being stuck with funding massive overruns” doesn’t form the motivation to use eminent domain you think it does. In short, eminent domain is not a cost effective alternative to moving the venue and the need to save money won’t form the impetus for the use of eminent domain.
BRA projects are always subject to the approval of Hizzoner, the Mayor, one Martin J. Walsh. So when Martin Walsh says that he would not allow the use of eminent domain he is, in fact, saying the BRA won’t use it. The BRA is self-sustaining and self-funding but it is not self-determining and it is not an independent entity.
No exigency — be it a refusal to “play ball” or BRA shenanigans — abrogates the promise the Mayor made not to use eminent domain for the Olympics. It could not happen without Mayor Walsh publicly breaking his word. So unless you are willing to posit deliberate malfeasance on the part of Hizzoner, we can definitively state that once the Mayor said eminent domain was off the table it was definitively off the table.
Who would have bought the land in the first place? It would have been Boston 2024, not the City. So if the City or State or the BRA were to take the land by eminent domain, although they would have to pay “fair market” value, they would immediately turn around and sell it to Boston 2024, so there would be no financial loss in that case. It is just a way to force the owners to sell.
This is totally hypothetical of course, but you could imagine if the owners held out long enough they might have put Boston in a situation in which they would have to make a relatively late venue change which would likely involve very different plans. That type of situation is highly likely to result in large cost overruns and that is what I was talking about.
Yes Walsh does have influence over the BRA but he and Menino before him have talked of the BRA in ways that makes it seem distinct from the City. For instance, Walsh claimed that City was not paying anyone to work on the Olympic effort despite the fact that there are people at the BRA who were spending significant time on the effort. So when Walsh says “the City”, I a cannot always be sure that he means to include the BRA in that statement.
I do think that a big enough stink was made about this issue, that it would have been politically difficult to resort to that.
separate entities, which is an awfully convenient arrangement for when the BRA exhibits horrible behavior that no one in the city wants to be blamed for.
…Boston2024’s bid specified that, at no point, would they purchase land. The city would own it and cede control only temporarily for the building and the event and then control would revert to the city for development. The scenario you outline, while plausible in other circumstances, wouldn’t hold here.
Again, eminent domain is not necessarily a cost effective alternative to this scenario. Even a ‘quick and dirty’ seizure of property involves lawyers who bill for hundreds of dollars per hour and court processing that could take months if not years. Then there are appeals. If time and cost are the factors affecting the decisions then the last thing you want is to give the landowners ways to stall: eminent domain can provide such built in stall tactics like appeals and counter-suits (and these are good things, in most circumstances). As the window for the actual work narrows (’cause the Olympics is at a pre-fixed time) costs to build will skyrocket as the builders will be required to double- and/or triple- up, or more, on workers to complete on schedule. A hundred workers could build a stadium at relatively low cost if time isn’t a factor, but it’ll take several thousand workers (that is to say several orders of magnitude larger numbers) to complete a stadium quickly. So eminent domain, especially in the situation of a ‘relatively late’ change, has huge risks of massive overruns. And, though unlikely, the risk that the landowners could prevail in their appeals and or countersuits is always present,and even more so in such a circumstance in which public scrutiny is intense.
when it comes to the government using eminent domain powers. There are literally thousands and thousands of cases of homes or property being taken and “fair market value” being significantly less than what a person or entity could get on the open market.
As for the BRA using eminent domain powers (as opposed to the city itself) being considered a violation of the Mayor’s word… it’s debateable how that would play out in the media, especially years from now, and you ignore the possibility that there could have been an entirely different mayor then, unbound by such promises, or the possibility that the state or some other entity could employ eminent domain regardless of what the city wants.
And while anyone can speak about honor and trust, if you had property that the IOC desperately wanted, with billions on the line, I’m not so sure how seriously you’d take any promise that eminent domain wouldn’t be used — even from a very very good, honest Mayor like Marty Walsh. I imagine most people would feel a lot of pressure to give in in that situation, even if they aren’t getting the best deal, simply to avoid the catastrophe of a possible eminent domain taking.
It didn’t have to be used, either. Just the threat of it — that it could be used — would be enough to push things forward with an Olympics in 10 years.
Now, I believe the Mayor when he said the city wouldn’t use the powers of eminent domain.
The mayor wouldn’t need to for those powers to be invoked, though. The BRA is a separate entity and also imbued with extensive powers of eminent domain within the city of Boston — and is exactly the kind of murky, behind-closed-doors organization that wouldn’t be afraid to use it or threaten its use to get what it wants.
Furthermore, not only did the BRA refuse to make any kind of promise to avoid eminent domain, but it maneuvered to get a 10 year extension on its anything-goes eminent domain powers… a ten year extension which would have lasted just long enough to for the full Olympic development cycle.
Maybe I’ve become far too cynical in life, but that’s too much of a coincidence for me — and even if the BRA would never intend to use those powers for the Olympics, I’m sure all the organizations and businesses on Widett Circle and Colombia Point read all the same articles — about the BRA extending their eminent domain powers long enough for an Olympics — that I did.
The 2013 decision by the BRA declaring that Yawkey Way is “blighted” in order for the city to bypass normal open-bidding rules, handing the property to the Red Sox for exclusive commercial use during event days, is illustrative of the BRA way of operating.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/07/16/blight-yawkey-way-judge-says-way/rZd0V1XtbjTaOdTVE0c6gI/story.html
But at Widett we have one extra level of protection in the state ownership of a large part of the parcel, which cannot be subjected to a Boston eminent domain taking. Of course a tax-phobic governor might be glad to sell the air rights over the tracks for the right price.
I thought that drawing conclusions from the opinions of ‘experts’ was wrong — at least back when they said things that we didn’t agree with. Is the method wrong, or was their answer wrong?
It’s nice that Boston had a few months pretending to be a top-level city, but I can’t imagine people around the world really cared yet. As someone else said, it as mainly inside-baseball. Had Boston actually given it a serious go and been the US candidate for the next two years, then it would have mattered. But, didn’t happen.
The T isn’t world class, housing isn’t world class, we don’t have single payer, we don’t have progressive taxation, and we still are a place that has a reputation for racial intolerance we haven’t devoted the time and energy to overcoming. Let’s fix all of that first, and then put our best foot forward to the world as a city that works and a city ready to have it over for the summer. We weren’t anywhere near ready, even a competent Boston 2024 would’ve just been putting lipstick on a pig and doing the bare minimum to meet IOC requirements. We can host an event of this caliber when we actually have a livable city that works for everyone, maybe it should be the icing on the cake, not the shot in the arm boosters thought we needed to perform.
of lefty ideals is cute and quaint as what you see as the barrier to Boston hosting the Olympics, but including single payer health care as a condition makes it clear that you are more about ideology than reality. The rest of your complaints about Boston are shared by pretty much every city in the US, oh wait, every city in the world.
Please stop talking about “we” until you at least live in the metro area.
Enough with the personal attacks. We get that you have a beef w/ jconway. To paraphrase from above, you’ve said everything, just not in every way.
jconway knows more about what goes on around here politically than most of the people I know who actually live here.
And he has definitely met the qualifications for being included in the BMG “we”.
The tactic of “we can’t do X until we do Y” is a very powerful one. It’s how the Republicans have excused doing nothing on immigration reform for years, by waiting for border security to the extent as existed in East Berlin. That tactic is also dishonest — we both know that list will not happen in our lifetimes, frankly. Better to forthrightly say “never, no how, we’re not that type of place.” Which was my point…thanks for reinforcing it.
We didn’t have enough hotel beds for the anticipated guests, it’s a dense city with no room for big venues, and the transit system-essential for a winning bid-is one of the worst in the country. I think we need to have those “x’s” in place in order to get to Y. I sympathize with aspects of the catalyst argument and all but endorsed Curtatones proposal-that’s not the bid Walsh rejected which went out of its way to pretend we could host them without any major upgrades to our infrastructure or housing.
I am not anti-Olympics, I am against putting the cart before the horse and the taxpayer on the hook. If we can plan to make improvements in those areas that are sorely needed anyway, not just for pie in the sky progressive ideals but for economic competitiveness-lets just do it. I think we should all get in the same page asking for the revenue needed to fund our future, rather than continuing to debate the merits of a rejected bid that has now receded into the past.
could possibly believe that the failure of the bid must be damaging to the city’s reputation.
Along with the fact that the IOC is as evil as FIFA and nothing they say can be trusted, Boston — and its Mayor — came out smelling like a rose. We don’t fund NFL or MLB stadiums, and we don’t run up billions in debt for a 2-week party. Let BIG international cities and dictatorships spend their money. We have better, more important things to fund.
Seems to me that the people of the Commonwealth, if not our politicians, have the advantage of NOT looking like morons, by not falling for the ridiculous confidence scams set up by the IOC and USOC.
I was actually expecting quite a bit more. Maybe Boston 2024 was waiting for the referendum to be set, but I thought with all their money they would be airing TV ads on the scale of a political campaign the week before an election to get the public on their side.
There was a media post-mortem yesterday, which included Shirley Leung from the Globe – arguably the most prominent supporter of the bid in Boston media.
According to Ms. Leung, there was little to no media outreach on the part of Boston 2024. It’s not the best PR when you stonewall your supporters…
At all. As it was, I think they thought they could appeal to the some old Boston vs. NYC inferiority complex with the “world class city” crap and it backfired.
As long as the process is Sell the USOC and IOC, and then make it work; rather than Come up with something that works, and then sell the USOC and IOC, then some other sucker city can have it. Maybe LA can make it work without big taxpayer boondoggles. Good on them if they can.