Grand Prix of Boston

Sooooo... this is officially dead. =(

Indycar race scratched for Seaport

By Mark Arsenault GLOBE STAFF APRIL 29, 2016

Promoters of an Indycar race in the Seaport this fall are peeling out of Boston and will not race here, said John Casey, president of the Grand Prix of Boston.

“The relationship between us and the city is not working,” Casey said in a Globe interview. “The relationship is untenable.”

The inaugural Grand Prix of Boston had been scheduled for Labor Day weekend, on a 2.2-mile temporary street course around the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. Promoters last May signed an agreement with Walsh to hold the race in 2016, and annually for up to four more years.

Instead, the promoters will turn to Plan B, and will try to hold a Labor Day race in a backup city in the Northeast, he said. The promoters have had contact with two other cities, he said, one of which is in New England.

“They are both willing to do it without the headaches of Boston,” he said.

Casey said city officials made relentless and unrealistic demands on the promoters that eventually just became too much to bear.

“I’m writing a book about this whole process,” he said. “It’s so ridiculous, it’s hysterical.”

Casey’s announcement comes after months of negotiations with city and state officials on agreements to hold the race.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...for-seaport/bGK50NRCat3ldIjYKL7D1J/story.html

No one is ever going to want to plan/host an event in Boston again if we continue this bs.
 
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It's jarring how undiplomatic he is with his language -- nothing but scorched earth behind him. I guess you don't see that often because the other 99.9% of people who go through The Boston Approval Process™ will probably have to go through it again at some point in their lives. Not this guy:

“I’m writing a book about this whole process,” he said. “It’s so ridiculous, it’s hysterical.”

Damn. You don't have to write a book, John, but please keep giving interviews. Would be nice if the area columnists had a new guy on their speed dial when they write their quarterly "this is why nothing gets done around here" columns.
 
Oof.

Seeing the USOC and IndyCar pull out of this city makes me realize that Steve Wynn must be one of the most patient and resolute people in America.

The mentality that sent these events running is one of the main reasons why our housing costs are so high.
 
The silver lining here is that if there is no IndyCar race, either a one off or as an annual thing, that is one less obstacle towards fixing the Seaport District's street grid.
 
Sooooo... this is officially dead. =(



No one is ever going to want to plan/host an event in Boston again if we continue this bs.

Right, other than the hundreds of trade shows annually at the BCEC & Hynes, the Tall Ships coming in 2017, First Night Boston, Boston's 4th of July, The Boston Marathon, Boston Pride Festival, Boston Calling, Outside of the Box, The Boston Cup Classic Car Show, Boston Harborfest, The Walk For Hunger, The Boston Massacre Reenactment,The Tea Party Reenactment, The Boston Tea Party Reenactment, Red Sox championship parades in 2004, 2007, 2013, Bruins Championship parade in 2011, Celtics Championship parade in 2008, Patriots Championship Parades in 2002, 2004, 2005, 2015, god it's getting boring typing all this.

I'm trying hard to think of a more knee-jerk reaction, really I am...
 
Right, other than the hundreds of trade shows annually at the BCEC & Hynes, the Tall Ships coming in 2017, First Night Boston, Boston's 4th of July, The Boston Marathon, Boston Pride Festival, Boston Calling, Outside of the Box, The Boston Cup Classic Car Show, Boston Harborfest, The Walk For Hunger, The Boston Massacre Reenactment,The Tea Party Reenactment, The Boston Tea Party Reenactment, Red Sox championship parades in 2004, 2007, 2013, Bruins Championship parade in 2011, Celtics Championship parade in 2008, Patriots Championship Parades in 2002, 2004, 2005, 2015, god it's getting boring typing all this.

I'm trying hard to think of a more knee-jerk reaction, really I am...
You left out Red Bull Cliff Diving off the ICA & PUMA City.

Anyway, all of the things you listed are deep-rooted Boston traditions, not unique international special one-off events. The cliff diving is actually something that is unique & takes place in different locales around the world. PUMA City was too. I wouldn't be surprised if the No groups turn their sights to cancelling the cliff diving too.
 
^ The cliff diving event hasn't come to Boston since 2013 and again won't be coming back this summer.

Can you imagine if the Boston Marathon weren't 120 years old and was proposed today? No way in hell it would ever happen.

And it's funny that Boston Calling was cited as an event that Boston allows given the news about it tonight.
 
^ The cliff diving event hasn't come to Boston since 2013 and again won't be coming back this summer.
Damn, it's been that long? Time flies.

Can you imagine if the Boston Marathon weren't 120 years old and was proposed today? No way in hell it would ever happen.

Bingo.
 
Tom Menino got everything he wanted while he was mayor, residents be damned.

The "failure" of the OlympicsTM and IndyCarTM race rests in the hands of the current mayor, not Ten People on Twitter.
 
^ The cliff diving event hasn't come to Boston since 2013 and again won't be coming back this summer.

Can you imagine if the Boston Marathon weren't 120 years old and was proposed today? No way in hell it would ever happen.

And it's funny that Boston Calling was cited as an event that Boston allows given the news about it tonight.

Also, the Tall Ships example has a very mixed recent history in Boston. Menino forced them to scale way back in 2009 after the city didn't get reimbursed a million dollars or so in security and cleanup costs after the 2000 event. If I recall correctly, most of the ships didn't dock or weren't allowed visitors to cut down on the crowds and related security and cleanup costs onshore.
 
You left out Red Bull Cliff Diving off the ICA & PUMA City.

Anyway, all of the things you listed are deep-rooted Boston traditions, not unique international special one-off events. The cliff diving is actually something that is unique & takes place in different locales around the world. PUMA City was too. I wouldn't be surprised if the No groups turn their sights to cancelling the cliff diving too.

Although Boston Cup Classic Car Show, Outside The Box, and Boston Calling are all recent innovations of the last five years and therefore by definition not 'deep-rooted Boston traditions,' I do appreciate the distinction you draw between them as repeating annual stagings and these 'unique international special one-off events.'

But since you phrase it like that with such precision, let me play devil's advocate and ask: assuming the permitting/regulatory regime in Boston is NOT in fact objectively more onerous than other municipalities of its size/stature, do the benefits of a 'unique international special one-off event' ever outweigh the hassles, given that it does not repeat year after year, with all the economic, psychological, and cultural benefits that annual repetition accrues?
 
It’s too soon to sort out what happened, but I suspect some fair portion of blame can go in both directions. In an article about the Boston cancellation, the writer notes some other problems the IndyCar folks have had:

http://sports.usatoday.com/2016/04/29/indycar-boston-race-cancelled-507840/

This jumped out:
This is not the first time IndyCar has struggled with scheduling issues. The series was planning to open in Mexico City this season, but Miles told USA TODAY Sports in October that concerns over proper promotion for the Mexico City race, IndyCar’s first junket outside of the United States or Canada since Sao Paolo, Brazil in 2013 – prompted the series to refocus on 2017.

“The process they needed to go through to get everything lined up has not really left a lot of time to be confident that everything can be done to properly promote the first race,” he said. “So I think the conversation is very much about ‘17. We just kind of ran out of time for ‘16.”

Races in Qingdao, China, and Brasilia, Brazil, also were on track before being scrapped locally.

So this is not the first time IndyCar has announced a race in new city and then not been able to pull it off on their announced time frame. There seems to be a kind of ad hoc, make it up as you go along, aspect to this “organization.” And I put scare quotes around “organization” because I don’t think there is one organization, but rather promoters spring up for potential venues, and pay in to a franchisor for the name rights. If I understand that right (not sure I do), there’s inevitably going to be stronger and weaker teams in different places.

Having said that, I’m not dismissing the idea that they faced unique issues here. Certainly that part of Boston is a crazy quilt of city and state land, and apparently even a US Post Office parcel with access issues during the race (though I believe they did get that piece of the puzzle sorted out). And with this story, Mayor Walsh has repeated the B2024 pattern of: 1) big splashy announcement on a special event, creating the impression he’s 100% behind it; 2) scant mention at the outset of how much will be needed from the state; 3) repeated assertions from the mayor that the private sector will cover 100% of any costs, 4) mayor prodding everyone to “get it done”, then 5) mayor’s staff finger-pointing at the private sector when it falls apart. So, what was the mayor up to behind the scenes? This might really not be a Boston bureaucracy problem but a Marty Walsh problem.

I won't be at all surprised if we eventually learn the IndyCar Boston team was really weak, making all sorts of mistakes, AND were getting some sort of uniquely problematic run-around from Boston (with perhaps Walsh doing some personal waffling to make things worse). I also won't be surprised if our esteemed local media never manages to get a clear story out there for us to understand what happened.

As an aside, I will be real curious to see if Providence is really willing to step up into the role Boston just vacated; anybody else besides me think the whole Curt Shilling / Rhode Island loan saga might come into play?
 
But since you phrase it like that with such precision, let me play devil's advocate and ask: assuming the permitting/regulatory regime in Boston is NOT in fact objectively more onerous than other municipalities of its size/stature, do the benefits of a 'unique international special one-off event' ever outweigh the hassles, given that it does not repeat year after year, with all the economic, psychological, and cultural benefits that annual repetition accrues?

You weren't asking me, but I'll take a stab. If I lived in the Seaport, I'd have a very different opinion if the following three "one-offs" were proposed: a one-time repeat of the cliff diving off of the ICA, a one-time repeat of the OpSail "tall ships" event, and a one-time IndyCar event. ( I do understand that all of those either were more than one-offs or at least had the potential to be more than one-offs, but I'm answering your question as posed.)

The cost/benefit analysis for me as a neighborhood resident would come down to not just the event, but any pre- and post-event issues. For the cliff-diving and tall ships, I can't see how any pre- or post-event issues could affect me, or at least not much. So for each event, there'd be some extra tourist crowds in the neighborhood for a weekend. So? I could deal with that. But the IndyCar thing involved a LOT more pre- and post-event work. In a few cases, that work would mean insuring tat the course itself had really good quality paving: that'd be a benefit. But from what I saw, there were median strips being removed and re-installed every year, and that sort of thing, not to mention the deployment and then gathering up of all those barriers. This would be vastly more of a hassle and would weigh heavily on my willingness to support it. I am pretty sure I'd come down against it: too many weeks/months of hassle.

That's my answer if I lived in the Seaport. I don't live there, or even within Boston city limits. As a MA taxpayer, I'm open to having some modest amount of state tax dollars go to support one-off events (most of which, though not all, will tend to be in Boston proper). Key word is modest tax expenditures, with letters of credit from sponsors covering any really big overruns that happen. And, I'd want those events to be something unique, that also benefits us with unusual exposure for either Boston or a Boston institution. The ICA cliff diving, for instance. I have no idea whether any of my tax dollars supported it, but I wouldn't have been upset at all to learn they did. That was really an off the wall (see what I did there?) event, and showcased not just a newly arriving neighborhood but also the ICA itself. IndyCar? I'm a lot more "meh" on that. There's all sorts of car racing that race fans can go see, so it's just way less of a unique thing in my mind, so the alleged benefits on exposure seem minimal. So my opinion was (and is), if it can be done with no MA tax money, it's no skin off my nose, but I'd be opposed to MA tax dollars going in. Since I'm not a Boston resident, i's not my call where the city comes down on it, but if I were a city resident, I'd feel the same way on the city's financial stance.
 
You weren't asking me, but I'll take a stab. If I lived in the Seaport, I'd have a very different opinion if the following three "one-offs" were proposed: a one-time repeat of the cliff diving off of the ICA, a one-time repeat of the OpSail "tall ships" event, and a one-time IndyCar event. ( I do understand that all of those either were more than one-offs or at least had the potential to be more than one-offs, but I'm answering your question as posed.)

The cost/benefit analysis for me as a neighborhood resident would come down to not just the event, but any pre- and post-event issues. For the cliff-diving and tall ships, I can't see how any pre- or post-event issues could affect me, or at least not much. So for each event, there'd be some extra tourist crowds in the neighborhood for a weekend. So? I could deal with that. But the IndyCar thing involved a LOT more pre- and post-event work. In a few cases, that work would mean insuring tat the course itself had really good quality paving: that'd be a benefit. But from what I saw, there were median strips being removed and re-installed every year, and that sort of thing, not to mention the deployment and then gathering up of all those barriers. This would be vastly more of a hassle and would weigh heavily on my willingness to support it. I am pretty sure I'd come down against it: too many weeks/months of hassle.

That's my answer if I lived in the Seaport. I don't live there, or even within Boston city limits. As a MA taxpayer, I'm open to having some modest amount of state tax dollars go to support one-off events (most of which, though not all, will tend to be in Boston proper). Key word is modest tax expenditures, with letters of credit from sponsors covering any really big overruns that happen. And, I'd want those events to be something unique, that also benefits us with unusual exposure for either Boston or a Boston institution. The ICA cliff diving, for instance. I have no idea whether any of my tax dollars supported it, but I wouldn't have been upset at all to learn they did. That was really an off the wall (see what I did there?) event, and showcased not just a newly arriving neighborhood but also the ICA itself. IndyCar? I'm a lot more "meh" on that. There's all sorts of car racing that race fans can go see, so it's just way less of a unique thing in my mind, so the alleged benefits on exposure seem minimal. So my opinion was (and is), if it can be done with no MA tax money, it's no skin off my nose, but I'd be opposed to MA tax dollars going in. Since I'm not a Boston resident, i's not my call where the city comes down on it, but if I were a city resident, I'd feel the same way on the city's financial stance.


Thoughtful back-to-back analyses, West. Some notes:

1.) Boston has never had and never will have a municipal fairgrounds, so far as I'm aware. That really hampers it for this kind of stuff. Heck, there's not even a Suffolk County fairgrounds, so far as I know. [Although I realize the whole Indycar proposition is that it's supposed to take place within urban grit/canyons, and not at a fairgrounds. nevertheless.]

2.) It was just too late in the day given Seaport's evolution. Seaport from circa, what, 1960-1995, maybe even as late as 2000, it would've been fine. Not nearly enough stakeholders down there yet. But then it became a desirable residential neighborhood. In retrospect it seems like race organizers, City, etc., were employing retrospective blinkers/romanticizing the Seaport as it was pre-ICA, Moakley, Fallon luxury condo towers, Vertex, etc., for this event. Strange.

3.) Speaking of ICA, I did go watch the Red Bull cliff-diving spectacle. It came off great. I also think the crowd control perhaps may have been negligent bordering on criminally indifferent. Tens of thousands of spectators were hemmed in by the end along the waterfront pathway, sardine tan conditions, as I recall. It was a real struggle for me to forge a path out as I was leaving. No designated egress corridors from what I saw. If there'd been an incident, that could've gotten very very ugly. I know there are fixed spatial ratios for this kind of permitting--"x square feet for every body." I think they must have just wildly underestimated number of spectators? Maybe I'm misremembering...
 
DBM:

re, point 1: A fairgrounds could be a re-use for Suffolk Downs. If the owners of it could ever accept that both the horse racing and casino ideas are dead and gone. Granted, it spills over into another town/county, so that's an issue. But you're right, without a fairgrounds, these one-offs are much more constrained.

I completely agree with your second point.

I hadn't heard that about the ICA event. Scary thing, eh?

I was one of the 750K or so people who made it onto the Golden Gate Bridge for its 50th birthday. Another 750K tried to get on but there just wasn't room, especially since the first 750K on the bridge were getting nervous about the crowding and wanted to leave. About 95% of all who showed up came from the SF side so it was badly lopsided in terms of flow.

The police had pre-estimated that about 250K would show up, and had crowd control ready for that. Oops. It was damned scary. We all found out later it was the bridge's heaviest ever burden, but that wasn't the main fear during the mess: it was the "what the hell happens if a mass panic / stampede erupts?" Me and my buddy had gotten there early enough to be towards the less horribly packed side of the mob over closer to Marin County. If a stampede had started, we'd have had some degree of a path to escape - not a sure thing, but we weren't completely penned in. However, I met a friend later who ended up closer to the SF end where all the pushing and shoving was happening, and she was really shaken - it was very bad. Disaster was averted, but it was bad.

All of the large-scale Boston events I've ever been to have been handled pretty well on crowd control. There were tons of crowds for the OpSail thing, squeezing out onto long those piers, but I never felt unsafe, and I had two young girls in tow. So it's too bad they handled the ICA diving event badly: maybe they just badly underestimated the appeal of it. I wonder if that's why it hasn't been back?
 
DBM:

re, point 1: A fairgrounds could be a re-use for Suffolk Downs. If the owners of it could ever accept that both the horse racing and casino ideas are dead and gone. Granted, it spills over into another town/county, so that's an issue. But you're right, without a fairgrounds, these one-offs are much more constrained.

I completely agree with your second point.

I hadn't heard that about the ICA event. Scary thing, eh?

I was one of the 750K or so people who made it onto the Golden Gate Bridge for its 50th birthday. Another 750K tried to get on but there just wasn't room, especially since the first 750K on the bridge were getting nervous about the crowding and wanted to leave. About 95% of all who showed up came from the SF side so it was badly lopsided in terms of flow.

The police had pre-estimated that about 250K would show up, and had crowd control ready for that. Oops. It was damned scary. We all found out later it was the bridge's heaviest ever burden, but that wasn't the main fear during the mess: it was the "what the hell happens if a mass panic / stampede erupts?" Me and my buddy had gotten there early enough to be towards the less horribly packed side of the mob over closer to Marin County. If a stampede had started, we'd have had some degree of a path to escape - not a sure thing, but we weren't completely penned in. However, I met a friend later who ended up closer to the SF end where all the pushing and shoving was happening, and she was really shaken - it was very bad. Disaster was averted, but it was bad.

All of the large-scale Boston events I've ever been to have been handled pretty well on crowd control. There were tons of crowds for the OpSail thing, squeezing out onto long those piers, but I never felt unsafe, and I had two young girls in tow. So it's too bad they handled the ICA diving event badly: maybe they just badly underestimated the appeal of it. I wonder if that's why it hasn't been back?

Wow, that story about the Golden Gate is quite impressive. Of course there weren't nearly the numbers at the ICA cliff-diving event. But, on a body-to-square-foot ratio, once that ratio falls below a certain number, then a critical mass is a critical mass, and a stampede becomes the unthinkable. To me, it was somewhat scary how densely the crowds were packed. But, realistically, it was such a drawn-out, static kind of spectacle... I think the crowd was very lulled an and incitement would have been very difficult to catalyze. It just wasn't that exciting, to put it bluntly--part of the reason I left early.

I had gotten there pretty early, I suppose--I was right on the Harborwalk lawn where it makes the "L"-hook in the transition from Fan Pier to the ICA stretch of the Harborwalk. I extricated myself straight along the Harborwalk, back toward the Moakley, first heading due north and then due west when the Harborwalk makes the turn back toward the Moakley. The crowds didn't really thin out to a comfortable level until the Harborwalk transitioned to grass at Fan Pier Park on the Moakley's backside.

In hindsight, of course, such huge crowds--especially in light of what a snoozer I thought it was!--are a great argument to bring it back. But with better funneling/cordoning/ingress & egress configuration...
 
I should qualify my remarks--although I thought the diving component of the ICA event was a snoozer, the spectacle of the masses itself--the huge crowds thronging the Harborwalk, everyone craning their heads up en masse as the divers prepped to dive, and especially the vast armada of pleasurecraft anchored on the harbor--was a delight to take in.
 
I really wish we could get some proper investigative journalism in this town. I didn’t have much personal interest one way or the other in the IndyCar race itself: could have lived with or without it.

But I DO have an interest in whether this is an example of Boston and MA permitting problems, or if this IndyCar group was way in over its head, or some of both.

So, for example, here’s an article about how the local IndyCar team gave the national IndyCar staff no advance warning whatsoever about the collapse of negotiations:

http://sports.usatoday.com/2016/04/29/indycar-boston-race-cancelled-507840/

If that’s true, that is raw incompetence, you’ve got to give the national franchisor at least a few day’s advance notice so they aren’t caught off guard.

Another thing that I now see was missed by local coverage: IndyCar racing has been beset by financial problems for decades now. I’m not going to post links because there are dozens of them, y’all can go find them yourselves. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall seeing a peep about this in the local coverage. Maybe this is common knowledge for motor sports fans, but I’m not one of those, that’s what I rely on professional journalists for. I believe the local franchisee’s inability to produce an adequate letter of credit was a big part of the problem, and they’re hiding behind permitting woes.

And as for the specific collapse of these talks, I’ve found articles in the racing press from outside Boston that places a lot more emphasis on IndyCar’s internal problems, rather than on Boston (while noting Boston’s a tough town to get things done, and there was opposition, etc). Just one example, and this one lists the many aborted or ultra-short-term city relationships that IndyCar has had:

http://www.racer.com/more/viewpoints/item/129066-miller-healing-indycar-s-black-eye

But do we get investigative local journalism to give us a full contextual picture of what happened here? No. We get whining about how NIMBYs ruin everything, and not a lot else, when it’s not clear this private group could have overcome the most basic financial hurdle, never mind NIMBYs. Add in some attacks on the Mayor for not being able to get things done. I am sure the permitting process was hyper difficult, but a lot of us here on aB could have predicted that, the Seaport is well known to be a crazy quilt of regulatory fiefdoms. But it could also be the case that this IndyCar group had zero financial backing from their national organization, no real organizational capabilities, and just wildly overpromised upfront. If that’s the case, either partly or mostly, the main criticism I’d have for the mayor is not doing better due diligence up front, and signing a letter of intent instead of a more guardedly tentative exploratory letter. Phrasing that differently, I’d put it that the mayor’s problem isn’t that he can’t get things done, it’s that he promises he’ll get things done that are far beyond his ability, and beyond the ability of the private groups he partners with. It would actually be a more easily correctable problem.

Our permitting processes are problematic enough without local media coverage being lazy about how they report it, and thereby helping sell the (bad) message to the world.
 

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