Downtown downer
BPDA overhaul hits sour note in city center
The Alliance of Downtown Civic Organizations is blasting the Wu administration’s approach to BPDA overhaul, particularly hitting it over the fact that only one of the nine members tasked with putting together reforms to the largeproject permitting process is from a neighborhood group.
“First, this once again signals that Boston’s neighborhoods are subordinate to the desires of the development community in the City’s eyes,” ADCO head Ford Cavallari wrote in the letter to councilors also arguing for them to vote against the BPDA abolish-and-reform proposal before them on today. “Second, it places no value on the deep expertise which exists in many Boston neighborhoods on BRA/BPDA performance, and what has gone wrong historically.”
Cavallari sent the letter to the 13 councilors on Monday, focusing on two separate but related topics: the steering committee on Article 80 reform and the bill before the council to, as he put it, create a new Boston Planning & Development Agency “reborn from the ashes of the old organization.”
The steering committee to look at the rules governing how large projects move toward approval — a longstanding area of strife in Boston from many quarters — is the body he’s frustrated only has one neighborhoodorganization member. That member is Tony D’Isidoro of the Allston Civic Association;
the other eight are a labor union rep, a former city planning director, two developers, an architect, a land-use attorney and two people focused on diversity in development and construction.
“I love Tony D’Isidoro, but Allston has just recently become a beneficiary, if you want to put it that way, of this kind of development activity,” Cavallari told the Herald, saying at the very least downtown should have a neighborhood rep on the committee. “We’ve been down this route for 40, 50 years.”
He’s referring to what many see as something of the original sin of the BPDA, then known as the Boston Redevelopment Authority — the mid-century bulldozing of large chunks of neighborhoods including the old West End and South End, both areas under ADCO, in the name of “urban renewal.”
D’Isidoro, for his part, said he understands why people would be concerned that there’s just one neighborhood representative on the committee, which is expected to work away on these issues for the next year or so — but he’s asking the other members to bear with him and he’ll be their conduit.
“We’re just getting started — have some patience with us,” D’Isidoro said to the Herald. The tales of BPDA-process woe he’s hearing from other neighborhoods are much like “a lot of the war stories I’ve encountered myself.”
He held a call with 70odd neighborhood organizations citywide on Monday after the first steering committee meeting last week, and he intends to make this a habit to get info out and feedback in.
Several members of ADCO did take issue with the de-brief; Cavallari, for example, said it was “relatively free of content,” leading people to voice their concerns.
D’Isidoro said the first committee meeting simply didn’t have much going on besides figuring out the way it itself is going to function.
“It really was a nice representative sampling of the city,” he said of the de-brief meeting. “We do still have some work to do” to get it all going smoothly, he said.
A Wu spokesman said in a statement, “We intentionally chose a small group of members for the review committee that could work together to improve the process for all stakeholders. We will have a robust community engagement process and full opportunity for residents and stakeholders to provide feedback on the proposed reforms.”
On the other side of town, Fatima Ali-Salaam of the Greater Mattapan Neighborhood Council said she wasn’t able to attend the Monday-night debrief meeting because of a previous engagement, but will keep an eye on the debriefs from D’Isodoro, who she said she doesn’t really know but “he seems like a thoughtful person.”
“There’s a lot at stake, so people are rightly concerned,” said Ali-Salaam, who’s served on IAGs for different projects.
She was of a couple of minds on this. On one hand, “If you have 24 neighborhoods, how do you only have one person who represents the neighborhood process?”
On the other hand, she said she believes the Wu administration is trying to do the right thing and it bears watching how it plays out: “There are a lot of people trying to fix things, all with good intention.”