Tom Keane

40B in voters’ backyard

Keeping zoning power at the state level encourages needed growth

I WRITE this while in Dubai, a city perched on the edge of the Persian Gulf, one filled with spectacular buildings thrusting like glass-and-steel stalagmites from the desert sand, including the gorgeous Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest. A generation ago none of this existed; now one wanders an urban landscape of dazzling fountains, man-made islands, and wild and breathtaking structures, any one of which would make Don Chiofaro’s oh-so-scary plans for the Boston waterfront look timid by comparison.

Dubai represents an extreme, a city-state created from the vision of one family — in this case, the Al Maktoums. Autocracies are like that. Their rulers can pretty much do whatever they want.

Massachusetts sometimes seems to represent the opposite extreme. If Dubai is progress unimpeded by dissent, the Bay State is dissent run amok. Be it a skyscraper downtown, transit-oriented developments in suburbia or windmills in Nantucket Sound, there are always voices raised in opposition. Sometimes they come in the clothes of environmentalism, preservation, or tradition. Other times, more nakedly, they are simply opposition to any change whatsoever.

Of course, anyone can complain. But here in the Bay State, our long tradition of local control over almost any physical development gives those complaints unique force. Objectors are accorded such deference that projects are readily delayed, watered down, or, most frequently, simply killed. Unlike many other states — or certainly Dubai — we have few genuinely effective regional or state-wide authorities that can act as a counterweight.

Which brings us to Chapter 40B, the 41-year-old state law that now faces a judgment day of sorts this November. Question 2 on the ballot would wipe it off the books, ceding back to towns and cities the near-absolute right to decide what will be built — or more accurately, what won’t be built — in their communities.

More properly known as the “comprehensive permit law,’’ 40B was first sold as anti-snob zoning, which sounded fine to folks back then because, of course, who among us is a snob? The law overrides local controls when it comes to building affordable housing, and when it started affecting towns like Arlington, Sharon and Weymouth, it suddenly occurred to a lot of folks that, Pogo-like, we had met the snobs and they is us. Opposition began to build, helped along by the fact that 40B itself had flaws. (The most important of those was that clever developers had figured out how to use the rules to extort: agree to let me build my project or else I’ll use 40B to build something even worse.)

In truth, 40B is pretty small potatoes. It only applies to communities where less than 10 percent of the housing stock is “affordable.’’ In other words, if 90 percent of the housing in your town is not affordable, that’s fine. It would seem an easy hurdle except that Massachusetts remains a state remarkably segregated by wealth. Amazingly, 300 of our 351 cities and towns don’t hit the 10 percent mark (and of those that do, most are cities).

On the merits, supporting 40B — and voting against Question 2 — is an easy call. Many of the most egregious abuses of the law (such as developer extortion) have been fixed over the last decade. The law itself has accomplished much, creating 21,861 units of housing this decade alone (with another 21,000 in planning), according to a UMass Donahue Institute study issued earlier this month. And to be frank, many of those in the anti-40B camp spout a creepy anti-family agenda: what they really seem to want is to avoid having to pay for the education of kids. If you are to be known by the friends you keep, I’d rather stick with the pro-40B’ers.

But this debate is about more than housing. Chapter 40B’s real affront is that it challenges both communities’ power and the pervasive not-in-my-backyard mentality that stymies growth and drags the entire state down. These are challenges we should encourage, not discourage. No town is an island but many act as if they are, which accounts for our crazy-quilt patterns of development, transportation, and infrastructure. So too, we need mechanisms that allow broader goals to trump narrow self-interest. Get rid of 40B? No way. Indeed, we need more laws like it.

Originally published September 27, 2010, in The Boston Globe, op-ed page.

Cahill is many things, but a spoiler isn’t one of them

TIM CAHILL has been cast in the role as spoiler, the man who will bring down Charlie Baker’s otherwise sure march to the corner office. If true, so what? If you don’t want candidates in elections, move to Burma. But in all likelihood, it’s not true anyway. Voters are smarter than most pundits think. Come Election Day, they’ll figure this stuff out.

Cahill, the state treasurer, got his job with the cute “Tim for Treasurer’’ line uttered by his then 10-year-old daughter. The same daughter today less alliteratively urges “Tim for Governor’’ on behalf of the one-time Democrat. With his run, Cahill is tearing up a script that had Baker going one-on-one against incumbent Deval Patrick. Baker had seemed the GOP’s dream candidate. With a resume to be envied — degrees from Harvard and the Kellogg School of Management, financial wunderkind for two governors, and architect of the resurrection of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care — he was a Bill Weld for the 21st century. Early polls pointed toward a solid Baker victory.

But with Cahill in the mix, things looked different. From the moment he entered the race, polls started showing him with a meaningful chunk of support — somewhere in the mid-teens — with Baker now trailing the governor. Patrick supporters were ecstatic and Republicans despondent. Both sides were drawing the same conclusion: Cahill was taking votes away from Baker. Cahill didn’t get into the race to be a spoiler, of course. Sensing the same voter anger that gave rise to the Tea Party movement, and knowing that he would have no chance of successfully taking on Patrick in a Democratic primary, he figured the time opportune to cast himself as independent of both parties. For any number of reasons, however, his candidacy has not caught fire. The message he has offered has been unclear, a brutal ad campaign financed by the Republican Governors Association has tarnished his image, and the voter anger Cahill once detected may not be as strong as he thought.

With it seemingly the case today that his campaign doesn’t have a chance of winning in November, the calls for him to pull out have increased. Cahill says adamantly that he’s staying. Good for him (and Jill Stein as well). On a principled level, allowing anyone to run is the fundamental stuff of democracy. And more practically, the chances that Cahill ultimately will be a spoiler are actually quite small.

For one, the ready assumption that, absent Cahill, Baker would be ahead ignores the changing dynamics of the election itself. Baker may well have a good resume, but his campaign itself has been flat-footed, with the challenger stumbling over obvious questions about the Big Dig. Meanwhile, Patrick is getting beyond the gaffes that marked the beginning of his term (the luxury car, the redecorated office, the pompous autobiography). He seems to have become more comfortable and interested in his job; he managed well a difficult budget for next year; and is presiding over a state whose economy is outperforming that of the nation’s. That last point, of course, may have nothing to do with Patrick’s policies, but if we blame the guy in office for the bad, so too he should get credit for the good.

Moreover, it’s by no means clear that Cahill actually does disproportionately take votes away from Baker. A recent poll for State House News Service by Gerry Chervinsky, for instance, found about half of Cahill’s votes coming from conservative Democrats who otherwise would support Patrick. That seems reasonable. Cahill once was a Democrat and his candidacy is as likely to split the Democratic Party as it is to draw voters away from the GOP.

And finally, there are voters themselves. They really aren’t dunderheads, you know. Third-party (or independent) candidates usually don’t do well on Election Day — getting far less than they had been polling — because voters choose from likely winners. Here’s what I suspect will happen: Some voters may well favor Tim Cahill in the run-up to the election, but at the voting booth the calculus will become pragmatic; if Cahill looks too weak to win, then they’ll vote for their second-preferred candidate. Whether the winner in November ultimately is Baker or Patrick, don’t blame Tim.

Originally published September 20, 2010, in The Boston Globe, op-ed page.

Lynch’s primary dogfight

STEPHEN LYNCH is a pariah to much of the Democratic establishment. Yet should he win tomorrow’s primary, Lynch may be positioned as perhaps Democrats’ best hope for beating Senator Scott Brown two years from now. The congressman and the party might want to consider making amends.

Lynch has never played well in the political sandbox. In 1996, when state Senate President Billy Bulger was retiring from office, he fairly anointed his son, William Jr., to be his successor. For decades the brothers Bulger — politician Billy and criminal Whitey — had held sway over the town. Lynch, in what seemed a disrespectful move — and one that caused some to worry for his safety — announced his candidacy. The race turned into a near-referendum on the family’s influence over the neighborhood. Lynch’s overwhelming win was like a catharsis. From then on, the influence of the Bulgers was a shadow of what it had been.

That unwillingness to do what he is supposed to do has marked Lynch’s political life. He is a prolife Democrat, a position that is anathema to the party’s orthodoxy. He reportedly doesn’t get along all that well with the House leadership, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And he has bucked the party on a number of high-profile issues, including, most notably, health care reform. His refusal to automatically support the president’s plan a year ago (saying that he wanted to read the bill before committing to vote for it) caused enormous backlash from labor bigwigs, effectively killing a planned run for the Senate seat opened up by Ted Kennedy’s death. It is also the reason why Lynch, uniquely among Massachusetts’ nine incumbent congressional representatives, now faces a serious primary challenge.

Lynch’s opponent, Mac D’Alessandro, is New England political director for the SEIU, and it’s easy to read his candidacy as yet another rebuke from union leaders. He’s run an aggressive and well-organized campaign, attacking Lynch from the left and impressing many, including the Globe’s editorial board. For his part, Lynch has been low-key. He’s participated in just two short debates. Lawn signs — even in hometown South Boston — are scarce. His television ads have been soft-focus bio pieces, designed to promote a positive image rather than rebut D’Alessandro’s sharp hits.

All of this, of course, reflects the tried-and-true tactic of ignoring one’s opponent. D’Alessandro doesn’t have Lynch’s resources; at the end of August, he had but $178,000 in the bank while Lynch had more than $1 million. So he has to rely on free media. But if there aren’t any clashes between the two, there isn’t anything to report. And if there isn’t anything to report, D’Alessandro has a hard time getting himself known.

Assuming Lynch wins, the focus of many in his camp will turn to November 2012, when Brown’s Senate seat comes up for election. Lynch has made hay lately that if he, rather than Martha Coakley, had been the nominee last January, Brown would not be senator. I suspect he’s right. Unlike the many politicians trying to jump on the Brown bandwagon, Lynch’s lone wolf persona is not of recent manufacture. His discomfort with the health care bill, remember, came well before Brown’s election. On top of that, Lynch connects well to the population that gave Brown his win: disaffected union workers. He’s one of them (literally; he was an ironworker) and as much as his relationship with union leadership may be frayed, his connection to the grass roots is strong. At the same time, on most issues (including gay rights, the environment, economics, and even — excluding his vote on the bill — health care), Lynch actually doesn’t stray that far from the party mainstream. He may not be as lock-step as the rest of the delegation, but he’s certainly no Republican.

Lynch’s challenge two years from now, however, will be the same one he faces tomorrow. Democratic primaries are playgrounds of the left. Unless the field is crowded (which is what happened when he first ran for Congress in 2001), a centrist like Lynch can easily lose. That would gratify Democratic liberals. It would likely gratify Scott Brown as well.

Originally published September 20, 2010, in The Boston Globe, op-ed page.

A la carte menu at the annual Labor Day union breakfast

TODAY IS Labor Day, a demarcation between seasons, the old one hot and lazy, the new intensely political.

For many candidates, particularly those of Democratic stripes, the morning will be spent breakfasting with union leaders. If the bowing and scraping during the meal seems sincere enough, those candidates may walk away with an endorsement, a prize promised to bring them money, workers, and votes. The first two will certainly be delivered; the last, perhaps not.

Union members, about 17 percent of the employed in Massachusetts, are often disinclined to follow their bosses’ lead, a phenomenon to which Martha Coakley can attest. This year, indeed, some canny politicians may avoid the labor breakfasts altogether, or at least downplay whatever support they might be receiving. The reason is Scott Brown. The winner of last January’s slugfest is Exhibit A for the argument that something is different, that the old rules of the Massachusetts political game are, if not abandoned, at least in flux. When reliably Democratic cities such as Quincy or Lowell — not left-wing communities, but certainly blue-collar communities — vote Republican, shivers run down some spines. Winning a Democratic primary, it is now feared, no longer is tantamount to winning the whole thing.

One fundamental that hasn’t changed, however, is our obsession with politics. It’s an obsession with defined parameters. From June through August, politics takes a backseat to vacations and another local mania, the Red Sox. Sure, there are plenty of events over the summer where eager pols will show their faces, shaking hands and feigning interest in the lives of potential voters. Yet the attention isn’t reciprocated. The September and November elections still seem a long way off and the needed critical mass of media and water-cooler conversation has yet to develop. That makes summers frustrating times for those running for public office. That all changes today. With the post-season prospects for the Red Sox seemingly doomed and the football season just gearing up, politics now takes center stage. Absent some natural or man-made disaster, it’s what we’ll be talking about.

Inevitably that talk will be about what the whole thing means. One supposed theme of this year’s election season is “voter revolt in the Bay State.’’ Voter anger — and the seemingly spontaneous rise of the Tea Party movement — is the national zeitgeist, of course, but it has particular resonance here. Brown’s win marked the first major victory of the Tea Party movement, one that gave rise to an astonished hope (or dread, depending on your perspective) that if it can happen in Massachusetts then it can happen anywhere.

So how does that theme play out? Republican Charlie Baker certainly could beat Deval Patrick to become governor, but that hardly marks a major change in Bay State politics. For decades, the top job in state government has been the one position voters have felt free to hand to the GOP. And in any event, Baker, an establishment stalwart, is hardly Tea Party material, notwithstanding his recent clumsy efforts to glom on to the Scott Brown sheen (of course, as Sarah Palin has made clear, Brown too is not Tea Party material). Moreover, the other races around the state still look to be dominated by Democrats, in part because incumbents (mostly Democrats, of course) are hard to beat but also because of the surprising lack of strong GOP candidates. (Martha Coakley, for instance, is literally unchallenged for attorney general, a situation a close adviser told me was almost as shocking as her Senate loss.)

But the revolt theme may play out in a different arena: the three statewide ballot questions. One would reverse the newly imposed sales tax on liquor. A second would eliminate section 40b of the state’s housing law — the one that compels communities to allow housing in their midst that meets state standards for affordability. The third would cut the sales tax from 6.25 percent down to 3.0 percent. Most members of the state’s political establishment oppose all three, making them, in a sense, perfect indicia of the voters’ mood and their appetite for rebellion. If those measures pass, then perhaps politics really is different in Massachusetts. Glenn Beck undoubtedly will look on with interest.

Originally published September 6, 2010, in The Boston Globe, op-ed page.