The state is creating a new department called the Department of Family and Medical Leave. This is the perfect opportunity for the state to help an area of the state that is lagging.
The Boston economy is white-hot. The city’s unemployment rate was 2.3% in December 2018, and most suburbs have rates less than 2%. Housing prices are high, and commercial rents are even higher.
Meanwhile other parts of the state are still being left behind and the income disparity is widening.
Springfield’s unemployment rate is traditionally more than double that of Boston, and December 2018 is no different, its rate was 4.9% – certainly better than 2010 (earliest data I can access), when it was 15%, but still high. Median family income is well behind the rest of the state, reported as $34,731 per year, compared to the state at $67,846 and Boston at $54,485, and the Boston Metro area at $74,494. Downtown vacancies are rampant, and even though the new casino has been open for six months, there has been zero ancillary development around it – most storefronts directly across from it are still vacant with no development even being considered.
So doesn’t it make sense to put this brand-new department in a city like Springfield? Cheaper rents, less-crowded, overall lower cost of living, and it helps balance the state’s economy across the entire state?
You’d think it would be a no-brainer, but Boston doesn’t think that way. It recently consolidated several departments back into Boston, closing a Department of Unemployment Insurance call center in 2016, and the relocation State Lottery functions from Springfield to Worcester this May.
Why isn’t is automatic state policy to do something like this?
All those new state employees could just use commuter rail to get to and from their various appointments with other government workers and Boston-area clients, right?
Oh. Whoops. No commuter rail between Springfield and Boston. In fact, just one direct Amtrak train per day, two and half hours one-way. It’s also possible to get from Boston to Springfield by way of New Haven — two and half hours Boston to New Haven, connect to a Springfield train, then one and quarter hours to Springfield. At least four hours, plus connection time. Great if you enjoy riding trains. Probably not so great if you need to be in your Springfield office at 9:00a and also be in a Boston lunch meeting at 12:30p.
They can drive, of course — an hour and half on the Mass Pike, assuming no traffic.
Perhaps if the state had a regional transportation system — or even a PLAN for a system, or even a plan for a plan — then this is a compelling proposal.
It’s a catch-22. So long as voters believe the lies (from both parties) that we don’t need new taxes, the transportation system needed for a proposal like this will never happen. Funny thing — if this proposal were enacted, and the transportation system was in place, there would be that many more working-class families in Springfield who are served by and value commuter rail.
I agree that we should be pursuing proposals like this. That’s why we should be aggressively pursuing statewide regional transportation plans. That’s why we desperately need significantly higher taxes on the wealthy and very wealthy among us.
I don’t disagree that we should be pursuing regional transportation plans, but that doesn’t mean we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
This isn’t a customer-service department. This is an administrative department. Such departments generally don’t have thousands of people visiting it per day. They have workers who are drafting policy, following up on things, etc.
So proximity to the state’s #1 population center is not a reason to keep this department in Boston.
Understood.
Let’s do both. It will be easier to persuade families contemplating such a move if there’s a viable plan that lets them get to Boston — or Worcester, Lowell, Lawrence, the north shore, the south shore, New Hampshire, whatever.
I just walked through downtown Fitchburg on a weekday. It’s a dismal, depressing experience. I imagine Springfield is similar. Sadly, part of why housing prices are so low in Springfield is that, like Detroit, nobody wants to live there. It’s another catch-22.
Lowell was in trouble in the 1970s. The late Paul Tsongas found a marvelous and ingenious way to revitalize the city — the creation, in 1978, of the first national historical park. I cite that not because I think a similar designation will work in Springfield, but to instead emphasize that a successful revitalization needs to give people a reason to want to be someplace.
So I agree with your proposal to site the new agency in Springfield.
Even with that, I think Springfield needs to somehow create its own version of the “Lowell Miracle”.
Yes, I agree that Springfield needs a “Lowell Miracle”. Lowell’s miracle was spurred by Paul Tsongas, using federal dollars – not by the meager resources Lowell had cobbled together by itself. We’re not going to be able to do this on our own.
You are precisely correct in saying that each of our Gateway cities needs to be a place that people want to be. Our reason to exist has been globalized away – increasingly, cities/regions of less than 1m people are losing the ability to exist autonomously. The private service economy doesn’t really work that well at this scale. Yet we have so much built infrastructure in these places, does it make sense to try and cram even more inside the 128 beltway? Do people within that beltway salivate at the idea of their neighbors’ houses being bulldozed for apartment blocks – which is what we’re going to need to do to get more people close enough to Boston? Doesn’t it make sense to spread the people around more?
Jobs is a big part of that though. We have housing that costs 1/4 the equivalent housing in the Boston area, but no one is moving here for the housing because it is considerably harder to find an equivalent job.
Boston is the capital. It certainly makes sense to have regional offices throughout the state, but HQs for state agencies should be in Boston IMO.
Boston is also very likely to be underwater with a few decades — especially the currently-hip Seaport District.
Climate change is real. Now is the time to stop siting HQs in Boston and start putting them someplace that is NOT going to be underwater in 20-30 years.
I think it makes more sense to talk about moving the state capital to someplace like Springfield or Worcester than to expand the government footprint in Boston.
You have a one-track mind on climate change lately, don’t you?:( I often joke that we’ll have to dust off those colonial Boston maps pre-land reclamation, but you’ll have a hard time moving the capital I think. Then again, other states moved theirs from the coast to the center so maybe Worcester makes sense.
You sound more and more like a climate change denier lately.
Do you agree that the science of climate change is compelling?
Have you noticed that ALL recent science is showing that the predicted changes are happening faster than expected and with more intensity than expected? Every scientific prediction/theory has error bars. Observed climate data is diverging towards more change faster than predicted (though still within the error bars).
Our national government has, for the last two years, been rolling back and reversing the already meager steps we had taken to manage climate change. In particular, our fossil fuel consumption is skyrocketing again. We have removed emissions caps on new cars. We have restored subsidies to make gas cheap again. We have removed the constraints that would have made it harder sell trucks as “automobiles”.
The climate changes are happening all around us. They are happening sooner than expected. They are more extreme than expected.
When the first of the Hurricane Sandy-style “storm of the century” events hits Boston and the subways all flood, how much will it cost and how long will it take to restore government while our key agencies are all located in a flood zone? When those “100-year” storms start happening every few years, what is our mitigation plan?
We can either deal with coming reality now or we can delay, deny, and deceive ourselves until the streets are literally under water.
Which makes more sense?
Of course I understand the science of climate change, but being an alarmist has just never been my style.
@ not my style:
Suppose you are in a building, you see a piece of equipment (such as boiler) burst into flame, and you realize that even as the flames are spreading the buildings automatically-triggered fire alarm has not gone off.
Is is “alarmist” to pull the fire alarm yourself?
Suppose you are in a flammable building full of people, the fire alarms go off, and the hallway starts to fill with smoke. You are in a very important meeting with a very important official. Is it “alarmist” to get up and leave the building?
What additional evidence do you require to admit that our climate change fire alarms are going off and our collective hallways are filling with smoke?
I suggest that our preferences about style MUST, in an emergency, yield in favor of doing whatever needs to be done to address the emergency.
We are in a climate change emergency.
I categorically reject the comparison. Obviously if the building is burning down right this second you pull the fire alarm and get out, but if you get an inspection report on your boiler saying it will explode in a few months if it is not repaired then, yes it probably should be a priority, but you consider your options and take the best course of action rather than pull the fire alarm today.
We got the inspection report on the boiler twenty years ago.
The building is on fire, Christopher. The west coast burned all last year. Lake Meade is essentially empty.
Look at what is happening! The building is on fire.
I apologize for responding so harshly, yet I fear the situation is becoming very urgent.
We have been pursuing “multi-track” policies for a long time now, and we seem to be losing ground on every track:
– Wealth concentration is pretty much worse than its ever been and still increasing
– Public transportation is terrible and getting worse
– The executive branch is, by all appearances, doing the bidding of our most hostile foreign adversary and we are making glacial progress towards doing ANYTHING
– We are dismantling our already-feeble efforts to combat climate change even as the climate around us is spiraling into unprecedented terroritory.
We MUST act on climate change. There appears to be a very real likelihood that the Big Dig, MBTA, Logan Airport, and most of the Seaport (among others) will be underwater by 2050, just three short decades from now.
You, like me, are old enough to remember 30 years ago. Buildings that we created in 1989 still seem recent. The Red Line extension beyond Harvard had just opened — it is still the lifeline of virtually the entire Boston/Cambridge economic engine.
What will “Boston” be if Logan airport is underwater? What happens when the Callahan and Sumner tunnels are underwater? What happens when ALL the subways are flooded?
This is no joke, my friend.
Why? Especially when telecommuting has become so mainstream? Is there one giant state boss who stops by all the HQs each day to make sure everything is going OK?
Any argument you make about proximity can be made to argue for one enormous state campus with all state agency headquarters – yet no one ever makes that argument.
I guess I’m just old school in this regard, that a single city or district have the privilege of being designated the Seat of Government for the jurisdiction over which that government has authority, and as such house all branches and agencies of our government. That very telecommuting you refer to means that residents throughout the state have an easier time accessing a single capital than they did when Boston was established as the colonial capital almost 400 years ago.
Most states – and even the US – recognized that placing the capital in the most populous and powerful city was not the best approach, because that city will monopolize the government. Most often the capital was centralized, so that people would have equal access to it. Note the subtle distinction between that and “in the most populous city, so that more people will have easy access to it”.
Maybe it is time the capital is relocated to a more central location like Worcester.
Heh — as someone who grew up in a nearby MD suburb of Washington DC, I was not surprised to learn that the location of the newly-created US capital — the “District of Columbia” — was intentionally chosen because of the swamps, mosquitoes, and generally worthless real estate value of the chosen tract. I was always taught that this was in direct response to the concerns you mention about Philadelphia, PA (the original capital).
Later in life, I learned that the politics of slavery were involved, even then.
In any case, Washington DC has always been an abysmal place to live, especially in the summer.
Massachusetts could do worse than Worcester. At least nobody is currently proposing to relocate state government to one of the many swamps of middle or western Massachusetts.
Placement of the capital at Washington, D.C., was a result of the compromise of 1790, whereby Alexander Hamilton got a Federal Bank that would/could assume the debts of the states and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison got a Capital city that was not New York (which was the capital immediately prior to D.C.) and a city which was ‘in’ the South, if not ‘of’ the South… The choice of D.C. had nothing to do with Philadelphia, which was only nominally a capital as, being where the initial congresses met to moon the king prior to declaring him null and void, was only a seat of a provisional government. Other towns in PA, like York, PA, served as the ‘capital’ under the Articles of Confederation. I believe, under the present constitutional regime only New York and Washington, D.C. deserve the appellation, ‘capital.’
All this is to say that the choice of capital had little to do with centrality and ease of travel: it was a compromise between competing factions.
A related note: Albany, and not New York City, is the capital of the State of New York. It was locked in as the capital in 1797 because, it was believed, that the location on the Hudson, and the brisk trade there upon, would ultimately make it more populous and prosperous than turned out to be the case. Nobody foresaw the rise of trains and the obliterating ruin they would deliver to river transit, once the fastest way to move bulk materials, inland…. This is not unlike Springfield, which lies at the confluence of several rivers. Springfield Illinois, the capital of Illinois, (not Chicago) was chosen, immediately prior to the Civil War, for similar reasons.
Philadelphia was the capital of the US between NYC and DC under the Constitution for Washington’s 2nd term and the beginning of Adams’s.
Ok. Corrected.
I relayed what I was taught in MD public schools between 1963 and 1970. I’m not surprised that aspects of actual history were overlooked.
The undesirability of the real estate chosen for the District of Columbia was a strong factor in the choice, though, at least according to generations of Washington DC residents. Washington DC, once perfect ten-by-ten mile diamond, was formed in 1790 with land grants from MD and VA. The VA portion was returned to the state of VA in 1846.
Various site like this suggest that slavery (for or against) was not a key factor in the 1846 retrocession.
I think one thing the competing factions agreed on was that the land ultimately chosen for the new Capital was essentially worthless prior to the choice, and that characteristic helped cement the choice.
There was always some sentiment to get the capital centrally located, but it’s also what the South got in exchange for assumption of Rev. War debt at history’s most famous dinner party. Washington chose the exact site himself based in part on convenience to Mt. Vernon.
Generally, though not always, state capitals are located away from the largest cities in the state to counter the dominance of those cities..