^ Good lord, Boston Magazine and the BBJ need to stop it with the excessive FOIA requests that do nothing but "expose" VERY standard procedures and processes of communication across all levels of government.
Boston 2024 and City Hall have sent many emails to one another! Scandalous!!
Boston 2024 wrote a form letter that Mass DCR signed! More scandal!!
It's worthless, lazy journalism that fabricates negative spin for the sake of getting clicks.
This on the WGBH website clarifies that it hasn't been the BBJ or Boston Mag who've been doing the FOIA requests:
http://wgbhnews.org/post/how-anti-olympic-activists-are-shaping-boston-2024-media-coverage
The scandal-mongering does go overboard at times. I'm not sure I'd call these folks "lazy", however. It's fair to call BBJ and Boston Mag lazy if they're just sitting back and letting themselves be spoon fed, without doing any independent reportorial follow up. But these opponents aren’t being lazy.
Having opined that I find the scandal-mongering excessive at times (pretty often actually), I will also opine that the Olympics opponents did not invent the harshness of local politics. The Olympics proponents are fund-raising millions for PR, and spending much of it poorly. The Olympics opponents are working with far smaller budgets, but are landing punches, even if many of the punches taken on their own merits are pretty trivial.
To complain about the opponents' tactics reminds me of the US military's complaints during the Viet Nam war: "If those goddamn pajama-wearing bastards would come out of the fucking jungle and fight like [American] men we could kick their asses once and for all." Right, which is precisely why.....they....don't..... etc, etc.
As for the specific letter in this instance, I have gathered boilerplate letters of support from various pols or public servants, and I've seen many more than I've personally gathered. No public entity ever promised me or my colleagues anything at all like the ability to rent public lands at “either no cost or at a market-rental rate to be pre-approved” by me, the proposed renter. The letter has the smell of just a quick “sure, we’ll hand over some public land for a while, no problem” with an implicit air of “this’ll be the next guy’s problem.” OK, the next guy was a gal, but you know what I mean.
This was signed days before an election with all polls indicating that Duval Patrick’s preferred successor was likely headed to defeat. So this commissioner makes a sweeping promise to B2024 just days before the voters will choose a new boss – one who might replace said commissioner (and did). It’s utterly toothless. So since it was toothless, it’s certainly no big scandal. But, does it make B2024 look yet once again like something cooked up by people with ties to the Patrick administration as it was on its way out the door? Yes. Is that some great sin? No, it’s not even a little sin. Does a letter like this help in putting Baker into the right state of mind? I doubt it, though I also doubt it’ll be within a mile of the top of Baker’s list of issues. But it’s one more little paper cut. As discussed before on this site, this has been the classical case of watching an effort get bled by thousands of paper cuts, many either self-inflicted or easily avoidable. The B2024 drafter of that letter could have just thrown in some boilerplate language along the lines of “DCR will of course need further information to evaluate the impact on public property, and while we will work with you flexibly on rental price, we do have a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers”. Then even if the commissioner had slapped his name on it with no edits, when it inevitably came out, it’d be vastly easier to dismiss it with a shrug, and a “so what, he promised nothing of essence.”
