REVAMPING HOW BOSTON BUILDS
Oversight of BPDA at center of debate
Restructuring the city’s planning department for the first time in nearly seven decades is off to a shaky start.
The ordinance, proposed by Mayor Michelle Wu last month and broken down by a City Council committee this week, would move Boston Planning and Development Agency staff and functions to a new planning department within City Hall.
It would give the City Council budgetary oversight over the new department. Mayor Wu, a longtime advocate for first abolishing and now restructuring the BPDA, says that, among other changes, it would ensure the “same accountability and oversight as all other city departments.”
A point of contention, however, was how much oversight councilors would have, since the ordinance keeps a part of the existing entity, the BPDA board, independent from such accountability. It would continue to function as the planning board and approve development projects in its current form.
“My understanding is that this ordinance is only moving some staff, potentially some land and some money under city control,” said City Councilor Gabriela Coletta, who chaired the government operations committee meeting. “We’re creating this planning department. However, there will still be an independent agency outside of the city’s jurisdiction.”
Chief of Planning James Arthur Jemison said councilors would retain only their existing oversight role over the BPDA board, which is to decide whether to approve mayoral board member appointments that come before them.
“Nothing in this ordinance changes any of the rules associated with those board members,” Jemison said, adding that councilors have the chance to interview each prospective candidate before clearing that person to join the board.
City Councilor Ed Flynn raised doubts about whether councilors have “the ability” to ask potential board members difficult questions, saying that their tendency is to simply approve those types of appointments without any probing.
“I’m just being honest,” Flynn said. “It’s not your problem, but I think it falls on us to be more engaged, more involved and not just suspend and pass — but it’s also up to the residents as well, to hold us accountable, to hold city councilors accountable and ask us to take these issues seriously.”
He doubled down on those remarks Friday, stating that councilors need to abide by their responsibilities, “whether they be fiduciary, oversight and otherwise.”
The decision to keep the BPDA board functioning in its current iteration was also criticized by the watchdog agency Boston Policy Institute and residents, the latter of whom provided public testimony at Thursday’s committee hearing.
That public feedback was centered around the mayor’s vision for abolishing the BPDA in a 2019 white paper she wrote as a city councilor. The mayor’s current proposal, critics say, stops far short of what she was pitching back then.
“It’s a very complicated proposal,” Greg Maynard, executive director of the Boston Policy Institute, told the Herald. “There’s a lot of moving pieces here, but it is not as far-reaching as she proposed.
“The major change that was being proposed in the 2019 report was to take the planning board power out of the BPDA and put it back in the city of Boston,” he added. “The Wu administration’s current set of proposals does not do that.”
Ford Cavallari, chairman of the Alliance of Downtown Civic Organizations, said the proposal in its current form makes it unclear whether it would provide more transparency as promised by the mayor’s administration.
Not moving the planning board is “crazy,” he said, while giving the ordinance a “D” in terms of meeting the vision of that white paper.
“A lot of people have said, well, it’s a first step,” Cavallari said. “First step is often a euphemism for badly incomplete and will fail. This is one of those cases.”
Still, City Councilor John FitzGerald, past deputy director of real estate operations for the BPDA, cautioned against the potential for creating too much oversight, “where it actually stifles the ability for an agency to do what it needs to do.
“I think there is a fine line between having a board and mayor overseeing the agency and then adding too many layers of oversight where they can pit folks against each other and stifle the work,” FitzGerald said.
The mayor also has legislation pending on Beacon Hill, approved by the Council last spring, that would legally restructure the BPDA.