Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  The merger required City Council approval. Appearing before the committee considering the merger, I spoke with feeling. “The hospitals that resist change, that fail to remain competitive . . . simply will not be in operation at the start of the twenty-first century,” I told the councilors. “Let’s protect our hospitals from that horrible fate. The people who need them deserve better than that.”

  The unions were lobbying the councilors to reject the merger unless stronger labor protections were written into it. So to win the vote in the council, we had to win over the unions.

  Three days of face-to-face talks around the conference table in the brick-walled meeting room of the Parkman House, a converted carriage barn, brought us close to an agreement. The union heads at the table knew the score. The merger would cost jobs—most, but not all, by attrition. But nothing like the nearly four thousand people who stood to lose their jobs if the merger failed. BCH was Boston’s largest employer of minorities. They would lose the most jobs.

  My chief of staff, David Passafaro, chaired the sessions. From time to time I stopped by to take the temperature of the room. On the third evening it felt chilly. So I put on a show.

  I stood up and, with a swinging hand, swept papers and pencils off the table. I yelled, cursed, and grew red in the face. I said I was tired of the pettiness and the bellyaching. Sick of the speeches and the posturing. It was now or never. Then I took off my watch, slapped it on the table in front of Passafaro, and barked in my General Patton voice: “It’s nine o’clock. If you don’t have a deal in two hours, I’ll go on the eleven o’clock news and denounce the holdouts. David, call me when it’s done.”

  I stormed out of the room, through the long hallway, and down the spiral staircase to the front door. David ran after me. He was afraid I had lost it. Hell, no, I said, when he caught up with me at the front door. It was an act. He started up the stairs. “I want that watch back,” I said, and slammed the heavy door behind me.

  A deal was struck at three A.M. By a vote of 10 to 3, the City Council approved the merger. It added language to the agreement creating a commission to monitor the merged hospital’s care for the indigent. Every year the city would convene a public meeting to hold the hospital to that mission.*

  I vowed to drive a hard bargain with the merged hospital (now Boston Medical Center) “to make sure the mission stays the same.” The city’s subsidy to BMC—$56 million over its first five years and $12 million annually after that—gave me leverage.

  “The poor, the homeless, children, elders, the uninsured will not go without appropriate health care while I’m mayor,” I declared at an April 1996 City Hall press conference announcing that the two hospitals would operationally become one in July. The merger, I said, was “the most important thing I will do as mayor.”

  Today Boston Medical Center employs nearly six thousand people. Twenty-five percent live in Boston. Forty-five percent are racial or ethnic minorities. Seventy percent are represented by unions. BMC serves 150,000 low-income patients a year, 65 percent from the poorest Boston neighborhoods. I could tick off its awards, praise its researchers, describe its efficient operation—it finished 2012 with a surplus! But what moves me when I think of BMC is its Grow Clinic, a national model for treating children diagnosed with “failure to thrive,” a heartbreaking condition associated with malnutrition, poverty, and family stress. The clinic treats two hundred kids at a time. It saves their lives. It gives them a future. Knowing I helped make that possible fills me with pride.

  I spent nearly $1 million on Irish consultants.

  —Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots

  A historian of bad ideas could trace the “Boston megaplex” to a spring day in 1992 when Massachusetts governor Bill Weld dropped by the Toronto SkyDome, home of baseball’s Blue Jays. The tall redhead stood on the pitcher’s mound, wound up, and threw an imaginary strike.

  “To his companion, state Secretary of Economic Affairs Stephen Tocco,” Joan Vennochi reported in the Boston Globe, “it seemed the governor was basking in the echo of cheers from countless . . . fans.”

  Perhaps he dreamed of taking a bow in the first game played in the WeldDome. Why not? Weld’s family dated from the founding of the Bay Colony. His name was on a Boston street. It could be on a Massachusetts town. It belonged on a stadium. He was a ruddy-faced sportsman who hunted boar and caught trout, but after his perfect pitch under the SkyDome, it was Weld who was hooked.

  Weld’s dream harmonized with the ambition of James Orthwein, then the owner of the New England Patriots football team. The Patriots played in suburban Foxboro in a small rented stadium. Orthwein wanted them to play in Boston (where the franchise began in the early 1960s), in a bigger stadium built by the public. But the taxpayers wouldn’t pay for a stadium used ten or twelve times a year. So Orthwein came up with some inspired packaging: Attach a stadium to a convention center in a megaplex, and to make it mega-mega, throw in a new baseball park for the Red Sox.

  Weld seized on the megaplex: It gave cover to his dome. He proposed a $700 million convention-sports center financed from revenue generated by five casino boats floating in Boston Harbor and by a diversion of revenue from the city’s hotel tax.

  This was in 1993. I was acting mayor. “I’m against taking any additional revenues from the city of Boston,” I said. “We need every penny to provide services to people who live and work in our city.” To shift money from the schools, from police and fire and other city services, to spend on a football stadium? Not on my watch.

  I tasked the BRA to research the feasibility of a megaplex compared to a stand-alone convention center. The BRA study, which took seven months to complete, found that the “disadvantages of combining the facilities outweigh any advantages.”

  The pieces pulled in different directions. The football stadium wanted to be on the outskirts of the city near a highway. The convention center wanted to be downtown, near hotels, restaurants, and public transportation. Unlike City Hospital and University Hospital, merging the separate pieces in a megaplex was not cost-effective. Hosting so few games, the stadium would not stimulate enough commerce to pay for itself, and the convention center could not pay for both.

  But it could pay for itself.

  “Today I challenge the Legislature and the governor to work with me to get the convention facility built,” I said in announcing the study. I laugh at myself now for expecting the project to sail through the legislature.

  Boston was among the most desirable cities in the country to hold conventions, but was ranked forty-eighth for its ability to host them, below Wichita, Kansas. The Hynes Convention Center in the Back Bay was too small to compete for meetings of major trade and professional groups. A larger state-of-the art facility was a needed public investment.

  The BRA selected a twenty-seven-acre site west of C Street in a fading industrial area between South Boston’s residential district and Boston Harbor. Building the convention center would displace no houses and only 284 jobs.

  Nor would the center present traffic or parking problems for South Boston. Out-of-town conventioneers would arrive and depart by cabs or public transportation from Logan Airport to the north, not through one of the city’s densest areas to the south.

  The 600,000-square-foot exhibition center would generate an estimated $436 million a year in direct spending and create from seven thousand to twelve thousand jobs, mainly in retail, transportation, and the hospitality industry. The BRA estimated that the convention center would spur the building of an additional three thousand to five thousand hotel rooms, with one person employed for every new room.

  There would be service jobs. In the 80s Boston had lost half its manufacturing jobs. They wouldn’t be coming back. The new economy was producing low-wage jobs. Compared to my dad’s job at the plant, they weren’t great. But unlike manufacturing jobs, they couldn’t be outsourced to China. Many of those generated by the convention center would go to Boston’s new Americans. Think of the Dominican
pizza delivery man, working overtime to get his family started in America; think of Richel Nova gunned down in Hyde Park. Thanks to his sacrifices (and to a scholarship fund we set up), both his daughters graduated from college. Ideally, that’s how it is with these jobs. Families stand on them, and the next generation moves up.

  The convention center’s $440 million cost would be financed by an increase in the hotel tax (not a diversion of Boston’s portion), a fee on taxi service, and a $2.50 charge on car rentals. These sources would yield $47 million a year, more than enough to meet the debt payment of $37 million.

  The convention center was a thrifty engine of economic development. Conventioneers and tourists would pay the taxes and Massachusetts businesses and residents would reap the benefits.

  Becoming mayor in a down economy, my challenge was to use the public sector to stimulate growth and employment. The trade journal Bond Buyer captured the strategy in a headline: “Boston Is Building Itself Back to Prosperity.”

  The multibillion-dollar, nearly two-decade-long “Big Dig”—the federally funded depression of Boston’s elevated highway and the construction of a new harbor tunnel—was part of that. Less heralded was Boston’s five-year $900 million long-term capital investment campaign. The idea was to avoid the feast-or-famine cycle of construction work seen in the 80s. Bond Buyer identified me as “one of the architects of the city’s capital plan” because I was chair of Ways and Means on the City Council when it was adopted.

  “During this recession, we have made a very conscious effort to put people back to work as quickly as possible,” I told Bond Buyer. “At the same time . . . we are interested in keeping these people employed. Five years ago, we decided that the schools and the hospitals and the community centers in the city were in desperate need of repair.” So the city coordinated with Boston’s health care and biomedical research sectors to stagger these projects over a span of years. The new construction would provide a steady tempo of work in the building trades, yield permanent jobs in the new facilities built or existing ones expanded, and “further improve the quality of life in the city.”

  Bond Buyer forecast that “construction projects partially or fully backed by the city . . . will create about 17,000 construction jobs and 18,000 permanent positions.” Some would be public jobs. More would be in private hospitals and research labs. “Although the construction of the Central Artery . . . [has] earned the bulk of the local headlines,” Bond Buyer concluded, “the permanent employment picture produced by some of the smaller projects may end up as the biggest story of this recession.”

  The key piece of Boston’s do-it-yourself recovery strategy was the convention center. It would boost the economy. As important, it would reassure investors, start-ups, and companies looking to relocate that, recession or boom, Boston got stuff done.

  Though approved by a special commission stacked with legislators, by late 1995 the megaplex was foundering in the legislature, pulled down by its cost and especially by its location.

  The bill proposed a megaplex for South Boston, near my C Street site for the convention center. In that tight-knit, suspicious, and fiercely political neighborhood, the megaplex touched off mega-resistance.

  I heard it in the voices of the six hundred people who came out for a megaplex meeting with me and my BRA director, Marisa Largo. Their message was, Don’t let our neighborhood be turned into an exit ramp and parking lot for suburban football fans.

  “A lot of people out there want to change our neighborhoods for their own self-interest,” I said to a large audience at a ribbon cutting in Southie. “We won’t let them do that.”

  The lesson of the West End devastation of the 50s, the “urban renewal” of the 60s, and the “Inner Belt” bulldozer of the early 70s that I saw firsthand was “never again.” The people of Boston would not sacrifice their neighborhoods to “development.” They would not even give up intangibles like Sunday quiet.

  I’d tell developers: Want to build in the neighborhoods? Talk to the neighbors. Convince them that change won’t harm their quality of life.

  From the sinking megaplex Weld reeled in a stand-alone domed stadium. For $500,000 a year he offered to lease twenty-two acres of state-owned land on the South Boston waterfront to the Pats’ new owner, Bob Kraft, a cardboard box millionaire and an intense local sports fan.

  In December 1996 Kraft invited state officials, business leaders, and executives from the Herald and the Globe to a meeting in a space he rented in the basement of BankBoston, a business ally. He walked his visitors through a full-scale replica of one of the luxury boxes he was counting on to pay for the stadium. You can be sure that Kraft made these two points to his guests: (1) that, unprecedented for a National Football League franchise, he planned to finance the stadium himself, and (2) that other cities were offering a “free”—publicly financed—stadium to lure the Pats away from Massachusetts.

  Give newspaper barons news and you can expect to read it in the paper. The Herald put the BankBoston meeting—and Weld’s offer to Kraft—on the front page. Overnight South Boston’s politicians mobilized the community against the stand-alone stadium.

  To shift public opinion, Kraft mounted a charm offensive. It did not go well.

  At one community meeting a South Boston man asked him: “My kids play on the street every day and I will be right in the shadow of the stadium. What do I do about my house, which we’ve had for two generations?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll buy your house,” Kraft replied, and took his name and phone number.

  Kraft had long since fingered me as the chief obstacle to the stadium. He had that right.

  “I don’t tell Bill Parcells how to coach his team,” I said. “Why does someone come in here and tell me how to build our city?”

  The stadium would not only disrupt a city neighborhood. It was a distraction. The focus needed to be on jobs, on building our way to prosperity, on the convention center. I hoped Kraft (and Weld) would see that South Boston was hopeless and move on to another site, whether in Boston (I had suggested one) or the suburbs. But instead of caving on the stadium, they fired up sports fans to pressure me to cave. I was a pol more afraid of losing votes in Southie than of losing the Pats to another state.

  Thomas M. Menino is being hammered unmercifully these days for stubbornly trying to block a proposed new stadium for the Patriots. He has been denounced by the local press, the powerful downtown business community, the Governor and, above all, a legion of fans euphoric that their team—once so bad that spectators would put paper bags over their heads as a sign of embarrassment—is now a winner.

  —from “A Classic Boston Brawl Pits Mayor Against New Stadium,” New York Times, January 22, 1997

  January 1997 was a cruel month for me. I was blocking a new stadium for the Pats just as the team went on a tear. In a rally held on frozen City Hall Plaza, fifteen thousand Pats-crazy fans drowned out my pep talk with cries of “Stadium, stadium, stadium!”

  For the first time in memory, the Globe and Herald agreed: I was dead wrong on the stadium.

  I read that I was a “small-time mayor.” That Boston under Menino was “three steps behind Poughkeepsie.” That “Menino doesn’t have a vision and the neighborhood is parochial.”

  The Globe ran “news” stories that supported the arguments in its editorials. For example, it solicited this warning from a sage at the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce: “You don’t want to get into a political battle and run the team out of town because they will go someplace else.” Bob Kraft might follow Art Modell. Two years earlier, with his Cleveland Browns recording the second-highest attendance in the league, Modell had moved the team to Baltimore.

  That wouldn’t happen in Atlanta, the Chamber man told the Globe. They knew how to treat a big-league team down there: “When the Falcons said they wanted a new stadium, Georgia shelled out $200 million to keep them in the city.”

  Yet in Boston, Kraft was ready to spend $200 million of his own money for a stadium, and
still Menino said no.

  The Globe fretted that “the team will move before he moves. . . . Menino is apparently willing to take the risk that Kraft could move the Patriots on his watch if the team is shut out of South Boston.”

  In an election year, the risk was political. Worst case: Could I win reelection as “the mayor who lost the Pats”? Turn that around. Could a challenger win on that issue?

  I liked my odds.

  I’d play the suburban card. I stand with Boston residents, I’d declare, my opponent, with suburban fans who want to turn our neighborhoods into their parking lots. People across the city rooted for the Pats, but they also resented the suburbs.

  I’d also play the class card.

  To pay for his stadium, Kraft planned to sell six thousand executives midfield seats for $6,000 a year for a minimum of ten years. For their $60,000, Kraft’s funders would become members of a private year-round club, with a restaurant, bar, and meeting rooms. Selling tickets to high rollers, Kraft displayed a model not of the stadium but of the club, described by the New York Times as “testosterone as architecture, all-wood-paneled walls, leather chairs, a marble bar, helmets and footballs resting on shelves.”

  Kraft’s dome—stadium, club, and NFL “pavilion”—was billed as “self-financed.” But Kraft was asking government for $65 million in infrastructure improvements. My challenger would answer for that. You lost the Pats, he’d say. Where do you get off asking taxpayers to subsidize a country club with an ocean view? I’d retort.

  I liked my odds, but the Pats weren’t making it easy for me.