CORRECTION: Because of a compilation error in data supplied to CommonWealth, the spending numbers for police and fire were transposed in the “Measuring Menino” chart accompanying this article (see PDF of full article) Police spending in 2009 was $284.9 million, while fire spending was $161.6 million.
On a Wednesday morning in May, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino throws a neighborhood party in a small South End park. It’s a sparkling, lilac-scented day, the kind that makes Bostonians feel good about the decision not to decamp to one of those Southwestern cities with great weather and $100,000 homes. Everyone is smiling — at the sun, at the toddlers scooting around the jungle gym, at the City Hall workers serving up free Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and pastries. Women with strollers mingle with retirees and youth workers. Neighbors talk about planting radishes.
As the mayor steps out of his black Chevy Tahoe, in the first of many stops that day, he causes only a slight stir in most of the park’s corners. One woman wants a picture of him with her babies. A man with a shock of white hair buttonholes him to discuss efforts to spruce up an overgrown city park. “Oh, yeah,” says Menino. “You wrote me a letter.”
“You got that?” The man looks surprised.
“Yeah. We’re working on it,” Menino replies.
But many residents don’t react at all to the mayor’s appearance. He waits for people to approach him, cracks a few jokes, and presses a college student from Pittsburgh to promise him she’ll stay in Boston after graduation. He gives out flowers and some free pastries — grumbling as he does so about his own difficulty digesting them — and talks to a young mother about her child’s nut allergy.
Like a good chaperone, Menino blends into the party rather than being the life of it. He is not someone who naturally commands center stage. Yet for Menino, Boston is a moving stage; he attends multiple events on most days, shaking hundreds of hands. Politically, he is someone who grinds it out day after day, more a steward of the city than a visionary. Indeed, he insists “vision” is overrated, that “visionaries don’t get the job done.”
His speeches tend to blend complacency and purpose: Life in Boston is good, he tells us, and he will work to make it even better. He does not exhort city residents to be different than they are, he doesn’t subject them to the social experiments of the 1970s, and he isn’t using them to launch a bid for higher office.
According to Boston College historian Thomas O’Connor, an expert on Boston politics in the 20th century, Menino’s pragmatic knack for encouraging Bostonians without criticizing them was a potent winning formula in 1993, when the wounds of busing, racial discord, and social engineering were still raw. “All the neighborhoods wanted was peace and quiet,” says O’Connor. “We didn’t want anyone controversial or Harvard liberals or financiers. We just wanted to be left alone. In walks Menino. He’s one of us. He’s not a flaming liberal. He’s not going to rock the boat. He’s just a good guy, a good Joe.”
Menino, O’Connor suggests, went on to become a kind of father figure to the city — one who makes residents feel loved and protected, and like they’re good enough the way they are. A recent Boston Globe poll indicated that 57 percent of Boston adults (or more than 250,000 people, if the poll is accurate) have met the mayor personally, and 72 percent approve of the way he does the job.
As the 66-year-old Menino runs for an unprecedented fifth term against three challengers — City Councilors Michael Flaherty and Sam Yoon and South End businessman Kevin McCrea — the race will largely be a referendum on his 16 years in office. (See "Three Voices for Change.") The mayor says that those years have been good for Boston and the future will be even better. His challengers, all close to the age of 40, say the city has done well under Menino but could do better with someone new. (See "Keeping the Customers 'Satisficed'," CW, Fall 2001, for the possible limitations of that strategy.) The question facing every Boston voter is whether the city still needs a father figure or whether it’s time for a new generation to take over.
Middle-of-the-road Menino
Once considered the unlikeliest of politicians, Menino is now Boston’s longest-serving mayor. Almost 15 percent of today’s Bostonians were not yet born on July 12, 1993 — the day Ray Flynn resigned to become US ambassador to the Vatican and Menino, then City Council president, replaced him. He’s served under three presidents and five governors, through flush years and lean ones, through September 11, the Democratic National Convention, the end of the Red Sox curse, the dawn of the Internet age, the start of gay marriage, and the embrace of all things “green.” It’s been a long ride for the mayor, and he’s not ready for it to end.
With his somewhat garbled speech and late-in-life bachelor’s degree, Menino is a surprising leader for a city riddled with MBAs, PhDs, and high-tech wizards. But he’s managed to turn his education and speaking limitations into advantages. Voters can relate to him. Bigwigs aren’t threatened by him; if anything, they underestimate him.
Menino can be, at once, confident and unassuming, relaxed and prickly, boastful and self-effacing. Although fond of saying that he isn’t a “fancy talker,” he is actually quite skilled at manipulating conversations onto safe ground. Ask him about the giant hole in the ground at Downtown Crossing and you may find yourself listening to his thoughts on ways to improve local nonprofits. Driving past Boston Medical Center, which was created during his first term, he points and announces, “I did that.” But when a reporter comments on the hospital’s Menino Pavilion, the mayor makes a shooing motion with his hands: “I hate it. I don’t like having my name on stuff.” Yet the man who purports to hate having his name on things has his name on a great many things. It is hard to find a parks department sign or a city employee’s T-shirt or a page of the city of Boston’s website that doesn’t say menino in two or three places.
Much has changed in Boston during Menino’s 16 years in office. Race relations have improved markedly on his watch. The schools have made gains by some measures but not by others. Crime, particularly gang violence, remains a concern, but national crime statistics indicate Boston is in the middle of the pack among cities its size. (See crime statistics here; download this article's full PDF for other data.) Development has slowed due to the recession — note the big crater in Downtown Crossing — but buildings continue to go up. The South Boston Waterfront, the city’s newest frontier, is beginning to take shape, while the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, a once-in-a-lifetime gift to the city from the Big Dig, struggles to find an identity. (See “Plush Park,” CW, Fall ’08.)
Faced with a $95 million reduction in state aid, the mayor cut spending this year by $26.3 million and plans to lay off 67 police officers and 74 teachers. Yet, overall, the city’s finances are sound. Menino previously socked away $121 million in a reserve account and plans to use a third of it to forestall more cuts in this year’s budget. And after seven years of lobbying on Beacon Hill, lawmakers finally granted cities and towns the authority to assess new taxes on meals and more taxes on hotel stays, powers that will benefit Boston the most.
The city’s unusually resilient economic base of health care, education, financial services, and tourism has played a role in making the mayor look good. During the past 16 years, those sectors have helped generate a steady stream of tax dollars that Menino has plowed into the neighborhoods, the schools, and public safety — as well as the paychecks of the politically powerful unions that teach children, fight fires, and walk the beat. He has been able to bolster city services and keep property taxes relatively low for residents by sending the bulk of Boston’s tax levy to business and commercial firms whose leaders often live elsewhere.
During Menino’s tenure as mayor, city spending has outpaced inflation. The Boston-area Consumer Price Index rose nearly 54 percent between 1993 and 2009. Spending by the city during that period increased 86 percent, rising from $1.3 billion to $2.4 billion, according to the Boston Municipal Research Bureau. Some of the biggest increases in city spending were for fire protection (243 percent) and schools (116 percent). City paychecks have grown dramatically under Menino for police officers, firefighters, and teachers. The average teacher salary in Boston is $71,123, according to 2006-07 state data.
The cost of employee health insurance has grown 204 percent to $264 million, with the mayor only recently pressing the city’s unions to pay 15 percent of the cost of their HMO insurance coverage instead of 10 percent. Nationally, the average employee share is 27 percent, and in Massachusetts it’s 25 percent, according to 2007 data from the Massachusetts Health Connector.
While Menino has ramped up spending, Bostonians have shouldered relatively little of the cost. In fiscal year 2009, the city’s residential property accounted for 64 percent of total assessed value but only 36 percent of actual taxes paid. By contrast, commercial property accounted for 31 percent of total assessed value, but 55 percent of the actual taxes paid. Boston residents pay a pittance compared to their neighbors: the average single family tax bill in Boston is $2,762, compared to $10,064 in Brookline, $8,043 in Newton, $4,375 in Quincy, and $5,720 in Cambridge.
The city’s financial workings make it a comfortable place for a mayor who fashions himself an urban mechanic, tinkering under the city’s hood. But Menino has at times hopped into the driver’s seat and taken off in unexpected directions. In 2005, he took over management of the city’s two golf courses to keep them out of the hands of a private contractor who was suing the city and bad-mouthing the mayor. (See "Finances of City Golf Courses Murky.") In 2006, he floated the idea of selling the current City Hall and moving his office to the South Boston waterfront. That same year he called for developers to build a signature 1,000-foot building at the site of a rundown city garage in Winthrop Square. More recently he hired a city bike czar and ordered the Boston Redevelopment Authority to invest $1 million in a business networking website called Boston World Partnerships.
Some of these initiatives, like biking and the networking website, are still trying to gain traction. The golf courses are in good shape, but the city doesn’t have a handle on their finances (see sidebar). The rest of the initiatives have either died or fizzled.
Thomas Birmingham, the attorney and former Senate president who occasionally serves as a mediator during city labor negotiations, says Menino is often out in front on issues, specifically mentioning gay rights. “He’s often ahead of the curve on things that, to look at him, you wouldn’t expect him to be in the vanguard,” he says.
But Menino can also be incredibly cautious, someone comfortable with study commissions and incremental change. His approach to recycling is a useful case study: During most of his time in office, Menino made minimal effort to reduce the city’s solid waste stream. While other towns used trash bag fees and other incentives to spur residents to recycle, Menino did little more than hand out recycling bins. According to 2007 state data, the most recent available, Boston’s recycling rate was 11 percent, one of the lowest levels in the state. A year ago the city launched a pilot program to see if allowing residents to place plastic and paper items in one container rather than separating them would boost recycling. Recycling increased 50 percent, so city officials are rolling the program out citywide at an expected savings of $1 million a year. Now, in the midst of Menino’s reelection bid, city officials are sending out how-to recycling brochures to every household with a letter from the mayor proclaiming Boston as “one of the greenest cities in the nation.”
The mayor also been late to the game on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. The Greenway represents the biggest physical change in Boston over the last 16 years, yet Menino, like many state and local politicians, spent years keeping it at arm’s length for fear of getting stuck with the upkeep tab. Only now, after the Greenway is up and running under the direction of a private conservancy, is the mayor’s administration studying what kind of development belongs along the park. He insists he could not have done the planning any earlier. “We didn’t know what was going to happen, or how it was going to shape up,” he says.
Neil Sullivan, a key Flynn advisor now at the helm of the Boston Private Industry Council, says Menino honed his approach to governance during his years on the City Council. According to Sullivan, Menino became the “inevitable swing vote on every issue” — never staking out a position until he had talked to everyone and heard every side. “When you’ve mastered the skill of holding down the middle and only moving to the majority, you always win,” says Sullivan. “If you’re the last vote, you’re always on the winning side.”
Tough road for challengers
Time is winding down before the September preliminary election that will narrow the mayoral field from four to two candidates. Menino, with $1.3 million in his campaign account, is a fundraising machine, while his opponents struggle to gain name recognition and money in a town where no one wants to cross the mayor. McCrea, with just over $4,000 in his campaign account, is the entertaining long shot of the race. The South Korean-born Yoon is the idealistic outsider, the only challenger who wasn’t born in Boston. He has $190,000 in his account. Flaherty, whose Irish Catholic profile is more similar to mayors from Boston’s past, has nearly $550,000 in his account.
All three candidates say that it’s time for a change. (Flaherty, in fact, says the words “it’s time” five times in a 45-minute interview.) They also share the same twofold dilemma: one, things aren’t all that bad under Menino, and two, when the mayor finds himself on shaky ground on an issue, like whether more charter schools are needed in Boston, he simply changes his position.
Flaherty has tackled the dilemma head-on with his “good/better” campaign, which features “good” products like Walkmans and cordless phones juxtaposed with “better” products like iPods and iPhones. Ultimately, Flaherty portrays Menino as good and himself as better. “Things may be OK. Some may say they’re good,” he says in an interview. “But good is not good enough in 2009.”
McCrea agrees. “It’s not that we’re Detroit,” he says. “The reason I’m running is not what the city is. It’s what the city could have been through a bunch of missed opportunities. Good things have happened, but I’d suggest that a lot of the good things that have happened are the same things that happened in a lot of metropolitan areas. It’s a nationwide trend, people moving back into cities for economic reasons, green reasons. The mayor has been the beneficiary of that nationwide trend.”
Yoon echoes his rivals. “The overarching rationale is not that the city hasn’t seen progress in the last 16 years,” he says. “It has had some progress, just like every major urban area in the country. It’s just that he’s been there too long and while our country at this moment is undergoing incredible transformation, we don’t have a mayor that believes in transformation. What I’ve seen in City Hall is just politics that is really devoid of ideas and fresh thinking. There’s real wasted potential.”
All three candidates want greater transparency in city government. Yoon and McCrea think Menino has been too generous with the city’s unions. “Every major contract, he’s had opportunities to enact reforms that eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, but he hasn’t,” says Yoon. Adds McCrea: “What the mayor has done is buy a vast army of union workers who are loyal to him.” Flaherty, who has been endorsed by several Boston unions, including the firefighters, is less critical of the unions and says reform can be accomplished by working with them.
Flaherty blames the mayor and the Boston Redevelopment Authority for delaying a lot of development projects when the economy was strong that now can’t get off the ground with the economy so weak. “There’s a lot of stalled development right now because we mismanaged it during the good times,” Flaherty says.
He worries that may be happening again with developer Donald Chiofaro, who built International Place and now wants to build a skyscraper at the site of the Harbor Garage next to the aquarium. Flaherty isn’t saying what he would do with Chiofaro’s proposal, but he says a mayor needs to be willing to sit down with developers and work out disagreements. He calls Chiofaro “another guy that can’t get a call back” from the mayor.
Menino himself is cagey on Chiofaro’s project. He says Chiofaro isn’t working to address the concerns of the surrounding neighborhood. He also says the proposal is going through the same approval process at the BRA as any other project, but then, seconds later, says the project won’t be built as originally planned, with two towers casting shadows on the Greenway. “It’s not my responsibility to make a developer a gazillionaire. No, I have a responsibility to the taxpayers of Boston to try to develop the city, and one of the things I think we’ve done is continue the European look of Boston better than most cities. That’s important. We have progress, but controlled progress.”
Chiofaro, who at one point sent city officials a picture of himself dressed as a tin man with a tin ear, issued a statement saying he and the mayor share a common heritage, a love of the city, and a commitment to its future. “I have tremendous respect for the job he has done so consistently well over the last 16 years and I think he will come to appreciate the jobs and significant benefits our project will deliver,” he says.
Yoon and McCrea both say development in Boston is driven by insiders for the benefit of insiders, and that they would do away with the BRA entirely. “What we have is a complete laissez-faire approach that says the loudest people, those with the most specialized private interests, get to the table,” Yoon says. “There’s no process in Boston,” McCrea adds. “The only process is: Does the mayor want it?”
Taking charge of the schools
In his 1996 State of the City address, Menino said he wanted to be judged, and judged harshly, by the performance of the Boston Public schools.
On Menino’s watch, the district launched pilot schools and carved old behemoths like Dorchester High School into small academies. But perhaps the biggest change was the introduction of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests, which all students in the state must now pass to graduate from high school. Since Menino’s tenure as mayor coincided precisely with statewide education reform — he entered office the same year the Education Reform Act passed — it is not easy to parcel out responsibility for progress, or lack thereof, in Boston’s schools.
But the mayor has had far more opportunity to influence the schools than his predecessors. Eighteen months before he entered office, Boston switched from an elected to an appointed school committee, giving the mayor new control over, and new accountability for, the Boston Public Schools. Perhaps his greatest legacy is the leadership stability he has given the schools. Nationwide, the average tenure of an urban school superintendent is 3.5 years, but Menino has had only three superintendents during his time in office, with Thomas Payzant holding the post for 11 years from 1995 to 2006.
“I’d never been offered a five-year contract,” says Payzant, who had been the superintendent in San Diego, Oklahoma City, and Eugene, Oregon, before coming to Boston. “That told me Boston was serious and knew it wasn’t going to be a one- or two-year turnaround. They were in it for the long haul.”
MCAS, the state’s yardstick for student achievement, indicates Boston students have gained ground on their counterparts at other schools. In 2001, 60 percent of Boston 10th-graders passed the English Language Arts test and 53 percent passed the math test, well below the statewide averages of 82 percent for English and 75 percent for math. By 2008, Boston’s passing rate had risen to 91 percent in English and 84 percent in math, just below the statewide averages of 96 percent in English and 91 percent in math. Boston students were less successful in catching up to state averages for “proficient” and “advanced” levels on the tests, lagging 20 percentage points behind for the two categories combined.
In 2006, the Boston Public Schools received the Broad Prize for Urban Education for the best overall performance and improvement among large urban US school districts. Urban districts are often compared because they have the most difficult students to educate. In Boston, for example, three-quarters of the students are low-income, 38 percent don’t speak English as their first language, and nearly 20 percent have a cognitive or physical disability.
But despite its comparative success, the Boston Public Schools remain troubled. In 2008, Boston failed to attain adequate yearly progress as the federal government defines it under the No Child Left Behind law. It was the third time in eight years the city’s schools have failed to reach the federal accountability goal.
Dropout rates have stagnated, hovering around 20 percent. A high percentage of those students who do graduate go on to college, but many of them never get a degree. Of the 2,964 who did graduate in 2000, according to research by the Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies, only one-fifth of them earned a two- or four-year college degree within seven years.
A Boston Globe series in June revealed that the school department was spending less than $4 million on its sports programs, less than a half percent of its total budget and far below state and national averages. The Globe reported that relatively few students were participating in sports, in part because the school system didn’t have enough teams, coaches, trainers, and even uniforms.
The mayoral challengers say these deficiencies mean the school system is broken and needs new leadership. “To call it an incrementalist approach almost gives it too much credit. It’s almost as if it’s incrementalist by default, by the mayor’s lack of courage,” Yoon says. “We should have world-class public schools that aren’t just ranked against other urban counterparts. When you talk ‘urban ed,’ you know that’s code for second class.”
Flaherty says it’s a disgrace that more Boston students are not graduating from college. He has three children in the Boston Public Schools, and thinks too many people with school-age kids are leaving the city because of the schools. He gives the mayor a grade of “D” for his handling of the schools.
Menino isn’t satisfied with the schools either. “We’ve done a decent job but we can do better,” he says. In June, with the campaign heating up, he said he would launch a nonprofit charitable foundation to support school sports, voiced support for merit pay for teachers, and backed more non-union charter schools. It was a stunning about-face for a mayor who had long stood side by side with the Boston Teachers Union against more charters.
The mayor says he was frustrated with the teachers union’s resistance to change and wants to be at the front of the line for a chunk of the $5 billion coming from the Obama administration for education reform. “To do that, I may have to do some things the union doesn’t like,” he says.
Flaherty and Yoon both support the expansion of charters, a potent issue with the parents of the approximately 11,000 Boston children on waiting lists for the schools. Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union, says he sees only one explanation for Menino’s charter school conversion. “I have to attribute it to the politics of the moment,” he says.
Indeed, when Menino talks about education, he sounds more like one of his challengers than a 16-year incumbent. “If we want to bring this school system to the next level, we have to do things a little bit differently,” he says. “The status quo must go.”
CommonWealth reporter Jack Sullivan contributed to this report.