Letters to the Editor
Boston Globe, July 23, 2002
GREENWAY TRUST ISN'T THE ANSWER
The Boston Park Department oversees 2,200 acres of open space, including the 51-acre Common and the 24-acre Public Garden. Why are we establishing a new authority to maintain 6 acres of downtown open space?
The beguilingly named Millennium Greenway Trust isn't about parks, and never was. Park maintenance was just a pretext for private intervention. The "trust" is now revealed as a development authority, set up to take over public land, money, and power on a monumental scale. The trust is a solution to an artificial crisis: an inflated maintenance cost projection of $6 million. Maintenance for the 6 acres will cost about $1 million yearly, easily shared by city and state. The trust bureaucracy itself would require $1 million a year before a blade of grass is cut.
Yearly city and state payments of $250,000 each, free city services, and other state cash infusions would be required. So the money that could pay for maintenance would pay the trust, which would then begin its real job: generating money from real estate dealings and from new taxes they'd get the city to collect for them from other, as yet unwitting, downtown property owners.
An unprecedented public/private hybrid, the trust would wield far-reaching powers. It could buy, sell, and lease property, take at will any Central Artery corridor land owned by state agencies and the BRA, and accumulate private land beyond the corridor. It could replan the corridor and redefine "open space." It could license businesses in the parks and collect admission fees. It could float bonds. It could limit public access to the open spaces. It would pay no taxes, live in perpetuity, and be accountable to no one.
Tweaking this legislation won't work because the basic intent is wrong. This is not a good-faith premise with some errors in implementation. Radical changes would be needed to change this trust to a public-interest parks organization. The corporate proponents, however, are pushing for even more development power and less regulation.
SHIRLEY KRESSEL
Boston
The writer is a member of the Alliance for Boston
Neighborhoods.
Additional paragraphs not published in Globe:
Proponents threaten that good designers will turn away without a "client." However, the Turnpike Authority is an adequate client, and well into designer selection after a long and publicly inclusive master-planning process. In fact, legislation this fundamentally flawed will certainly cause more delay, due to community protest, duplication of effort, and legal challenges.
The answer is simple. The City and State should make a joint commitment to maintain the parks publicly. Private donors can always contribute through voluntary Friends groups.
We should build the best park we can afford now, and make it better over time as we live with it. We can always make it prettier; we can never reverse the privatization proposed in this legislation.