Privatization of the Public Realm

Keep Boston Common public

Wed, 3 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Beware of public-private partnerships formed to "rescue" public spaces. They typically start with a manufactured crisis of safety and/or funding; this is used to justify the handover of the space to private "benefactors" who then reap far more than they contribute while they take control of the public realm. Unless we are vigilant, the Boston Common, America’s first public park, is about to be rescued.

Councilors Michael Ross, Bill Linehan and Sal LaMattina have created a City Council Special Committee for the Boston Common, focusing on concerns about public safety and "quality of life." It appears that abutting residents, businesses, and institutions who consider the Boston Common their front yard are displeased with the "negative activities" in the park. Crime is under control, and drug-related activity has been largely displaced by policing, but the homeless "hanging around" in the park are apparently spoiling the park’s ambiance.

This is a problem especially for two rapidly expanding institutions, Suffolk University (Ross’s alma mater) and Emerson College, which already occupy over 30 buildings around the park. They want to carve out an attractive space in the inner city for their students, and to borrow the public landscape as part of their campus.

The Committee’s recently drafted recommendations focus on a trendy remedy - one unmentioned in its two public hearings: a private conservancy, made up of abutters and area institutions. As Councilor Linehan envisioned at the committee meeting reviewing the draft report, the conservancy would handle all the revenue-producing operations in the park, and would take over management responsibilities from the Department of Parks and Recreation. They’d hire, he opined, more Park Rangers, who, as in privately policed New York parks, would keep the homeless "moving along."

The draft report also recommends one or more restaurants in the Common, to bring in funding (do we know how much of Tom Kershaw’s Frog Pond revenues go to the park?), and to be "marketed to broaden the appeal of the area...connecting its marketing strategy with an overall plan for Downtown Crossing renewal. ...The opportunities here are not just for an improved park, but of a rejuvenated Downtown Crossing."

The Committee’s idea is that "positive activity" - special events and commercial uses - draws in desirable people and drives out negative activity. The Councilors spoke enviously of New York parks they had visited, kept full of people, events, vendors and customers - to the point where there was no place for homeless to sit! (They suggested installing sharp spikes atop the planters in the Common that had been designed as seating, to accomplish the same goal, noting, without irony, that this is working well in the Liberty Tree Park in Chinatown). Of course, the Common is already so heavily used that maintenance can hardly keep up. Evidently, it’s not about the number of people, but who they are.

But why create a private conservancy for a park that already has a renowned private Friends group - one that defers to City control?

Ross told The Boston Globe, "The conservancy would be a group of people who...are self-governed...that look to private dollars instead of non-existent public dollars." That is, the gentrification of the Boston Common is best done by private, unaccountable parties, empowered by the myth of public poverty. The inspiration is perhaps the recently triumphant Greenway Conservancy, which is taking over the whole Central Artery park and quite probably other public spaces nearby.

So Boston Common, the quintessential democratic public space, is in the cross hairs of the same corporate/institutional alliance that created the Greenway Conservancy, the Friends of Post Office Square, and the nascent Business Improvement District of Downtown Crossing. Their goal is to sanitize and manage the urban environment as suits their economic interests.
We already know how this works. At the park at Post Office Square, which is on public land and is vastly subsidized by City tax breaks (not, as commonly thought, by its garage), free speech and assembly are prohibited. On the Greenway, the Conservancy’s "reasonable regulations," not city or state rules, will govern the park. The Downtown Crossing BID would cleanse the streets of the primary local "undesirables": black teens and homeless people (who might but for the conservancy migrate to the Common), to make suburban shoppers and tourists comfortable.

Other relevant "public-private partnership" experience is available from Rotch Field in the South End, renovated by Emerson for its athletic uses, where tightly controlled community access has already caused conflicts. Clemente Field is being generously refurbished, and privatized, by Emmanuel College. Ebersol Field on the Esplanade was beautified and fenced by its private donors.

As to the "non-existent public dollars": My previous column outlined hundreds of millions of dollars the City loses yearly to waste, fraud and abuse. The City Council itself has millions of surplus dollars, which it will, as usual, quietly divvy up internally. As to Emerson and Suffolk, intended anchors (and beneficiaries) of the proposed conservancy: together they pay about $1 million dollars in taxes (for Emerson’s commercial buildings) and negotiated Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT). The City assesses their properties at about $300 million - but tax-exempt property is routinely under-assessed. To get an idea of its real value: Suffolk just paid $4,750,000 for a parcel of tax-exempt BRA property at 523 Washington Street, which is assessed by the City at $890,000. Either the BRA is extorting money from Suffolk in exchange for project permits (unimaginable!) or tax-exempt property is worth over five times its City assessment (which jibes with other assessment-to-sale comparisons I’ve made). If the latter, the two institutions should be paying $10 million a year more in PILOT. That would more than take care of the whole 48-acre Common (the entire Parks budget, for 2,200 acres, is only $15 million) - and shelter all the homeless "hanging around" on it. Instead these schools will spend a few hundred thousand dollars for improvements enhancing their front yards, and with the Council’s gratitude, get all the social control they want.

If we keep accepting the false "non-existent public dollars" excuses and entrust our public domain to private donors, we will lose our democratic public space. The Boston Common Committee shows how far along that road we’ve already come.

Published in South End News

A private power grab on the public's Greenway

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

While politicians dithered about responsibility for the Rose Kennedy Greenway - an environmental mitigation for the Big Dig - a Greenway Conservancy formed, promising to save the public park with private money. But under legislation this entity is now promoting, we'll be funding a private park with public money.

The conservancy isn't a join-up group of park advocates. It's a board made up mostly of corporate executives and lobbyists. They represent businesses in the corridor that want control over the park and surrounding development, maximizing their own economic benefit at the least cost to themselves.

The conservancy won popular support by promising a private rescue. It reported raising $20 million (including $8 million in public grants) and committed to raise another $17 million, through donations, book deals, event sponsorship fees, vendor fees, and even tax-exempt bonds.

Yet it now claims that it can't keep its promise, and demands state funding.

The bill filed on the conservancy's behalf authorizes a $2 million state grant, a Turnpike land-lease of 20 years, and state funding of half its proposed budget - up to $5.5 million annually. So it is planning a budget of at least $11 million annually for what, by a reasonable calculation, is about 10 acres of park. (For perspective: The city manages 2,200 park acres with $15 million.)

How much should Greenway management cost? At New York's Central Park per-acre rate, the Greenway would need $300,000. Other estimates approach $500,000 to $1 million a year.

The conservancy wants taxpayers to provide much, much more: Upfront public grants totaling $10 million, plus $110 million for the 20-year term - enough to run the park for a century, without private money. Was this just a bait-and-switch?

Why is the state willing to waste so much money? And what would the conservancy do with all that funding? Nobody knows.

The private conservancy is exempt from laws on open meetings and public records, as well as prevailing wage, competitive bidding, and conflict of interest. The bill requires only partial disclosure, so we will never get the full story. Bountiful money and lack of transparency and accountability are a recipe for a make-work patronage bureaucracy.

Beyond money, the conservancy wants power. The long-term lease would confer land interests similar to ownership. The bill specifies powers over future redesign of the park, including buildings and memorials, and a review role in surrounding development - the fox guarding the henhouse.

The conservancy board has already preempted real public advocacy, sacrificing the Dewey Square gardens' sunlight to an abutting tower proposed for Russia Wharf by a conservancy member. The relevant zoning agency discounted public protest on the grounds that the conservancy would oppose the project if there were a problem with it. Inherent conflicts make this the wrong guardian for the Greenway.

The bill also lets the conservancy control events and activities, and, yes, admission fees. In fact, the park would be open to the public, subject to conservancy regulations over its use. Not state or city regulations; private regulations. And the community's role in future decision-making would be marginal.

It's fair to say that if this bill takes effect, the Greenway park would not be "common ground" in any meaningful way.

Post Office Square Park was created by many of the same business interests. They leased public land and built a park to enhance their business environment. They also set their own regulations: they prohibit free speech and assembly. Public park rangers (which the conservancy also plans to hire) eject the undesirables - people engaging in political activities, taking photos, sunning with their eyes closed, tossing a ball with a child, strumming a guitar, and, of course, looking impoverished. Post Office Square also claims to be privately funded, but it gets a huge tax subsidy. It's pretty, but it's private. We pay them to keep us out. That's the model for the Greenway.

We elected a governor who promised civic engagement, transparency, and fiscal accountability; that's what we need. The Turnpike Authority, which built and owns the park, should simply solicit bids for a cost-effective, high-quality management contract, funded by the state. Private donors could simply form a friends-of-the-park group.

Unless the bill is defeated, the Kennedy Greenway, whose name honors a tradition of democracy, will never be truly public again.

Op-ed by Shirley Kressel
Shirley Kressel is a landscape architect and urban designer.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/07/14/a_private_power_grab_on_the_publics_greenway/

Stone Soup from the Goldway Preservancy: An Urban Fable

Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Once upon a time, in the Polity of Beanandcod, the people undertook the creation of a series of grand new public grounds, a ribbon of parkland that led through the very heart of the greatest town. It was joyously sited upon the former location of a terrible old dragonway that had plagued the citizenry for decades, and all awaited it with a great celebratory spirit.

But, alas, even before the wondrous new parkland, the Goldway, as it was known, was finished, the elders decided that they could not pay for its upkeep. For the landowning nobles along its corridor had insisted upon standards of husbandry that would be far above those of ordinary parks, and had foretold of extra-ordinary and awesomely burdensome costs of such husbandry. And, of course, the nobles would not hear of anything ordinary near their courtyards, and persuaded the elders and citizenry that only such excellence would do for the Goldway in the heart of the greatest town.

The elders conceived what they thought was a clever plan: They approached the landowning nobles and asked them to give of their riches in order to assure the special care of the special park, since their land value would be much enhanced by it (hence, the Goldway). The nobles agreed that this land must indeed be kept so as to most benefit their environs, and opined further that the public could not, and should not, be the steward of this special park.

But the nobles wanted to share as little of their own wealth as possible. So, they offered to set up an association, called the Goldway Preservancy, which would seek contributions from merchants, landowners, and sundry goodie-two-shoes from Hither and Yon and even Beyond. And in return, of course, the Preservancy was to be empowered to spend the money they thus obtained in order to assure that the park would be kept in their preferred image. The elders thought this was eminently reasonable, envisioning a park of surpassing beauty, yet imposing no burden upon themselves or upon the resources of the hard-working citizenry, and eagerly drew up an agreement.

But the nobles had met together in the great nobles meeting-hall and devised a clever Plan of their own, one which had worked quite well before; it was the Stone Soup Plan. And thus it came to pass.

Having offered to pay for everything to make a rich soup for the citizens of the land, they put forth only a stone - a small portion of the required monies to show good faith, promising to give the rest later. However, they asked the elders for a sum of funds - a bit of carrot, sufficient to help the Preservancy get started, which the elders thought eminently reasonable and provided readily. And thus the nobles could keep possession of their own monies as they commenced their work of preparing to commence their work. Then, just before the elders’ funds were exhausted, they discovered, with great surprise, that the task of stewarding the park was somehow becoming far greater than they expected, and that they need far more money from the elders, lest the park become a festering sore upon the land and shame those elders who had entered the agreement. The elders, having much heralded their own clever Plan, and fearing the ire of disappointed park-loving townsfolk, managed to find a hitherto unnoticed pot of public monies that they could quietly devote to this purpose.

And so the Stone Soup park, begun with just a tiny nugget of the nobles’ gold, was enriched by the meat and potatoes of the public treasury, with both sides in happy agreement, and the citizenry none the wiser. The elders’ purpose, to appear to spare the public purse while providing a wondrous parkland, would be served; the people, blessed in their ignorance, would be happy and give all honor to the nobles for coming to their rescue, true as always to their motto: Noblesse Oblige. And they would all mark this as the template for future parkland stewardship!

And thus, the Plan worked again, just as Planned.

But, after a time had passed, some of the people noticed that certain parts of the Goldway were no longer treated as parkland, and the land and its environs were being used for enhancement for noble property interests. It also came to pass that that some of them, the less fortunate ones, and their family and friends, were hastened from their park at the will of the nobles, lest they besmirch the beauty of the Goldway and frighten away visitors and commerce partners from afar. The people also came to wonder whence the monies came flowing abundantly to this park, even as their other parks lay languishing. But, of course, no one was privy to the meetings and documents of the nobles, who were entitled to their privacy as nobles even as they were masters of the public parkland.

But it was too late to wonder. The deed was done, the public purse was purloined, and the nobles would have their way on the Goldway - and on many other places in the years to come, based on their glorious rescue of the ribbon of park in the heart of the greatest town.

Shirley Kressel
Published in South End News

Pyramid radio

Fri, 7 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The MBTA, like every other public agency, has been looking high and low for more money, and it is now experimenting with low. On October 10, on the pretext of providing a “service” – to “enhance the customer’s experience” with music, news clips and travel alerts, General Manager Dan Grabauskas has piloted T Radio in three stations. He asked for feedback via tradio@mbta.com and hired students to collect comments.

If people like it, he said (with no sense of irony), he’d add commercials.

What is T Radio? Go to the website of Pyramid Radio Inc., (www.pyramidradioinc.com) the programming geniuses behind the noise, listen to the five-minute demo, read their own words, and weep.

“…entertain your customers and drive sales … influence consumers… powerful and targeted messaging and branding… Music, commercials and customized jingles are seamlessly integrated….share in the revenue generated by the advertisements we sell….communicate with your most valuable customer…increase “share of wallet,” increase customer loyalty and strengthen the brand…. profiling your customer using demographic information… Repetition of targeted messages will create impulse buying. … aligning that demographic with products and services they will find alluring… lifestyle brands…. “

In short, the T is selling us to corporate peddlers.

Among its other insults, T Radio would drown out the subway musicians, the only uplifting touch on the dreary, ill-maintained stations, with its torrent of relentless commercial blather. In response to their petition offensive, Pyramid has already offered to co-opt them, as the October 23 Metro paper reported, with on-air interviews, broadcasts and promotions of their music, no-Radio zones where they can be heard, an ad-based revenue-sharing fund and various other incentives – even a “life support fund for artists with temporary health issues.” Hopefully, the artists will not be led over the edge of the tracks by this Pied Piper.

There’s a lot of indignation on the blogosphere about this imposition on our ears and brains. Adam Friedman from Somerville posts what I think is the most important issue: “The MBTA is a public institution that works for the public good. Therefore, its stations are public property. Allowing a radio station … to broadcast there is analogous to a station being able to broadcast at a public park, like the Boston Common….”

We’ve forgotten the public realm, because it’s been so enveloped in corporate advertising. The next generation won’t even understand the term. They’ll just assume that civic life is a set of financial transactions, that nothing can be done by the collective resource, that all public goods and services must be provided by corporations at a profit.

Aside from the annoying specifics of T-radio, we have to understand this in the bigger picture.

A few years ago an ill-conceived “forward funding” strategy sent the MBTA out of the Commonwealth budget to fend for itself -- saddled with $8 billion dollars of debt to pass along to the helpless fare-payers, just as the State Highway Department shifted the Big Dig to the Turnpike Authority, using the quasi-public, non-accountable agency to raise tolls with political impunity to pay for Big Dig over-runs. It’s a great game the state politicians (Republican and Democrat both) have learned – how to avoid political accountability by substituting user payments for taxes.

In the end, there is only one possible direction for this pile-up of irresponsible negligence to go: privatization. The Transportation Finance Commission, “revealing” to the State House a multi-billion-dollar maintenance deficit (weren’t all those legislators right here creating it?), is already talking about “public private partnerships,” which invariably turn out to be public money and power given to private profiteers -- the worst of both worlds.

The possible sale or lease of the toll roads and the lottery are both suddenly on the table. We have become easy prey for glib brokers of schemes for handing over public services to private corporations that can with impunity raise the costs of those services and also avoid union labor. These shell games let politicians disown responsibility for our newly increased cost burden, and brag about “efficiencies,” “choice,” “competition,” and above all, “holding the line on taxes” while promising “local share of revenues.”

We can expect T Radio, now shelved for “tweaking,” (the feedback, alas, was bad) to be a step along the same road. It was stopped in the subways, but I heard that the commuter trains would now be “served” with “announcements.”

And here is the most insidious part: We, the taxpayers, are being blamed. We want more services, but we don’t want to pay for them, and our selfish “tax revolt” has left our beleaguered pols no choice. So this shower of plagues – privatization, casinos, tolls, TRadio –is our well-deserved punishment.

Not one politician will get up and put the blame where it belongs: on big business. Not one has the courage to say that all this stems from the fall of the corporate contribution to our tax pool, both at state and federal levels, by two-thirds, from 30% to under 8%, since the 1960’s – and that the corporate tools accomplishing that drop were deregulation, privatization and union-busting, leading simultaneously to decades of wage stagnation. The corporate-welfare state, shrinking public funding and “devolving” fiscal responsibility to the local level all the way to the citizens as end users, combined with falling real incomes, is the reason for the tax revolts.

Until we wake up to this scheme, we will continue to suffer declines in public services and increases in costs, and we will lose our public sector to private profiteers, as has happened on the federal level with the postal service, the military, and other sectors. Public education, water supply, prisons, media and safety-net services are among the next corporate frontiers, already deeply breached and prepared for wholesale take-over. Our electoral process has already been corporately captured, assuring that our vestigial show of “democracy” won’t get in the way.

Very soon, the whole concept of public domain will be a remote and quaint historic relic, replaced by the “ownership society.” Once privatization takes public life away from us, we won’t get it back until, as history teaches, the inevitable catastrophic collapse reminds people why government was invented.

Shirley Kressel
Published in South End News

Rose Kennedy Greenway Common ground or proprietary installation?

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Parcel 13 is a designated Greenway park parcel, a small but important parcel located near Columbus Waterfront Park and Faneuil Hall marketplace, adjoining the site of the proposed Boston Museum. Like all the others, its concept and design should be determined through a full public process to maximize public benefit. It should be built, programmed and maintained in the public’s interest by an entity fully accountable to the public.

Toward this end, there can be no pre-conceived outcomes, no abridged processes, and no curtailment of opportunity to come up with the best possible design for the park.

In consultation with Governor Deval Patrick, who has promised to support genuine civic engagement and democratic public process, EOEEA Secretary Ian Bowles wrote to the Turnpike Authority on June 8, 2007, confirming the mandate for a true public process for the Greenway:

“Parcel redevelopment is subject to the CA/T Project joint development, or tripartite, process established in the Project’s mitigation requirements under the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act MEPA and the Federal Highway Administration Record of Decision. This process arises not only from the language of the various documents, but also from an established practice interpreting that language. The process was designed to achieve broadest possible consensus on the ultimate uses of the public open spaces created by the Project. See Central Artery/Tunnel Joint Development Protocol for Surface Parcels, June 6, 2003.” (emphasis added)

However, after a remarkably responsive, inclusive public process for the creation of the Greenway thus far, the process for Parcel 13, the last of the parks, has been privatized for a special-interest group offering to pay the cost of construction of their preferred design.

The Turnpike and the Mayor/BRA are going through the motions of a sham two-meeting “process,” orchestrated to legitimize a pre-determined design promoted the Armenian Heritage Foundation, which has offered the Turnpike money for allowing them to appropriate the park as a genocide memorial site.

The first meeting, on September 19, purportedly to set design guidelines, was a by-invitation neighborhood gathering packed with memorial supporters, who openly used the guideline-setting exercise to further their goal. The second meeting, scheduled for Thursday, September 27, is planned simply as a forum for the Foundation to explain how their design meets their criteria.

At the meeting, the Turnpike outright refused to carry out the most important part of the public process whereby the other park parcels were designed: the competitive designer selection process. For those parks, disinterested professionals were selected to work with the public in creating the best possible designs for each parcel. That is the heart of the public process, the key to the successful outcomes on those parks.

This charade of a process for Parcel 13 violates the letter and spirit of the CA/T agreements, and of the Administration’s letter. The Turnpike and the Administration must remedy this embarrassing subversion of “civic engagement.” It is a betrayal of the public trust – a fragile trust the Governor promised to restore as an antidote to citizens’ loss of confidence in their government. Indeed, neighborhood people who oppose this use of the parcel did not bother to attend a meeting wasted on a “done deal.” The broader public was not even included.

It is shameful – and inexplicable -- that the Turnpike Authority, which managed $15 billion for the road project, designed and built the entire Greenway according to a genuine and successful public process, and committed a contribution of $10 million to the Greenway Conservancy (a private group of donors chartered to give, not take, funding!) cannot find the trivial sum involved in designing and building a 16,000 square foot (one-third of an acre) park.

We should halt the Authority’s sale of our public realm, and demand that a legitimate public process be provided for design of this park parcel.

I have requested, on behalf of the public that has been locked out of this unauthorized disposition of their parkland, that the Commonwealth and the Turnpike Authority, the City of Boston, and the community Task Force conduct a public process on Parcel 13 equal to that conducted for all the other parks.

Regardless of the group, regardless of their proposed use (with full appreciation for the worthiness of an Armenian genocide memorial), and regardless of the Turnpike’s constrained budget (of which Parcel 13 would be an insignificant speck), the agency is obligated to inform all interested parties – as it has done in the past -- that the “common ground” we have all awaited for over a decade is not for sale, not now and not in the future. No Greenway parcel should be a proprietary installation.

The Turnpike Authority should make a firm public commitment that:
• There will be a park on Parcel 13.
• It will be of a quality and character consistent with the other Greenway parcels.
• It will be designed through the same standard process that produced the other parks
o Guidelines set by a broad public process
o Competitive designer selection process
o Public participation in design finalization
• It will be funded, controlled and maintained as an integral part of the Greenway, and its design and use, like those of the other parks, will be able to evolve in response to future changes in public open space needs and in the surrounding context.

Bernard Cohen, Secretary of the Executive Office of Transportation and Public Works and Chairman of the Turnpike Authority, told the Boston Globe for a Sept. 11, 2007, article, "The process remains open to all proposals." So it should be.

All interested members of the public should attend the meeting on September 27, 6:00 pm, Nazarro Center, in the North End, to request that an open, competitive designer selection process be carried out, and that the people receive the best park, not the only one private money will buy.

Shirley Kressel
Published in South End News