Rose Kennedy Greenway

If they don't have $250 to plant fucking rose bushes then they should be publicly executed per mayoral order.
 
Two thoughts.

1. 20 people have bought it already. That's not good. They deserve zero and what a pity those 20 and probably more that will give money when the managers are making 6 figures.

2. I noticed they have a "Buy it for a friend option." It would be an epic way to troll if someone bought this as a gift to someone here or just to Archboston.
 
I am certain some here opposed the sale of bricks as well.

http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/10/23/greenway_plan_etched_in_stone/

And as for the Public Garden, why isn't the city doing this?
  • Since the 1970s the Friends have collaborated with the Parks Department in planning the renovation of the Public Garden and in guiding its horticultural development.
  • The Friends have set out in all three parks over two hundred gift and memorial trees as well as extensive shrub plantings.
  • The Friends monitor the health of established trees and fund critical treatment, including pruning and injection to combat Dutch elm disease.
  • The Friends have restored some fifteen monuments and tablets in all three parks including the Shaw / 54th Regiment Memorial on the Common and Washington Monument in the Public Garden.
  • In 2001 the Friends assisted the City and Light Boston in the restoration and lighting of the Brewer Fountain on Boston Common.
  • In 1987 the Friends sponsored and installed the Make Way for Ducklings sculpture by Nancy Sch?n.
  • The Friends have assisted in the restoration and enhancement of the fountains and their sculpture.
Click to expand...
http://www.friendsofthepublicgarden.org/accomplishments/index.htm#plantings
 
^Stellar

The above list comes with a price. If it's paid by private entities, I don't care. If it's paid by taxpayers (including me) or its funding has an opportunity cost resulting in a failure somewhere else in Boston, I do care what the costs are.

I think the unyielding criticism of the Conservancy is that its budget, salaries and administrative fees seem out of proportion given that the RKG has not moved beyond being more than large landscaped park with a few fountains. The RKG and Conservancy has had a few years now to prove its mettle. Great proposals, no major improvements.

Boston's property taxes don't seem to level off as the City unloads its own obligations for park maintenance. Do the Boston Parks Department and Department of Conservation and Recreation play a role?

I don't expect answers to the above questions about cost, but figured it was worth mentioning.
 
Sicilian said:
^Stellar

The above list comes with a price. If it's paid by private entities, I don't care. If it's paid by taxpayers (including me) or its funding has an opportunity cost resulting in a failure somewhere else in Boston, I do care what the costs are.

I think the unyielding criticism of the Conservancy is that its budget, salaries and administrative fees seem out of proportion given that the RKG has not moved beyond being more than large landscaped park with a few fountains. The RKG and Conservancy has had a few years now to prove its mettle. Great proposals, no major improvements.

Boston's property taxes don't seem to level off as the City unloads its own obligations for park maintenance. Do the Boston Parks Department and Department of Conservation and Recreation play a role?

I don't expect answers to the above questions about cost, but figured it was worth mentioning.
Click to expand...

Sicilian, the Friends create endowments to fund and maintain projects.

http://www.friendsofthepublicgarden.org/anniversary/legacy.html

Someone who has access to Guidestar can probably look up the Friends tax return and find out how their admin and overhead costs compares to the Greenway.

As I suspect you recall, the mayor punted big-time when it came to the Greenway. At the time he punted, he was cutting the budget for Parks and Recreation in a major way, and as he explained it, the city was in no position to pick up responsibility for maintaining the Greenway. And thus, it fell to the state and the turnpike authority, who also didn't want to do it either.

The operating budget for Parks and Recreation (excluding cemetery expenses):

2008 $13.9M
2009 $14.0M
2010 $13.0M
2011 $13.1M

That's for 2,346 acres (some of which is cemetery). Over this period, the city usually removed more street trees than it planted.

In addition to the above, the city gets about $7 million in annual funding for Parks and Recreation from private trust funds, i.e., endowments, but these funds are for designated parks, e.g., the Common, the Public Garden.

Note: the operating budget does not include funds for capital projects.
 
^Stellar

I'd be interested in hearing your perspective regarding the Conservancy's mission and performance. Could the RKG have been managed within Parks and Recreation given it appears the administration mainly seems to be landscaping and fixing fountains?

One of my past misperceptions was that I had long held that groups named "Friends of..." and "Conservancy" were comprised largely of volunteers, weekend gardeners, abutters and business owners rolling up their sleeves, and some generous philanthropists.

For better or worse, "Friends of..." organizations function as fiefdoms (at worst, patronage havens). They are essentially non-profit corporations entrusted with public assets, insulating City Hall from poor decisions.
 
Sicilian said:
^Stellar

I'd be interested in hearing your perspective regarding the Conservancy's mission and performance. Could the RKG have been managed within Parks and Recreation given it appears the administration mainly seems to be landscaping and fixing fountains?

One of my past misperceptions was that I had long held that groups named "Friends of..." and "Conservancy" were comprised largely of volunteers, weekend gardeners, abutters and business owners rolling up their sleeves, and some generous philanthropists.

For better or worse, "Friends of..." organizations function as fiefdoms (at worst, patronage havens). They are essentially non-profit corporations entrusted with public assets, insulating City Hall from poor decisions.
Click to expand...
IMO, the city of Boston is cheap, very cheap. Its hard to compare individual cities in the document below, because different entities often have responsibility for park acreage within the city: in Boston, that includes the city, the state, and the Federal government.

But let's take Minneapolis. Minneapolis the city spends $76 million a year on its parks. Boston, the city, spends $20 million, including the donated funding from the various trusts. Boston, the city, spends about $33 per capita on parks and recreation. Minneapolis, the city, spends $203 per capita. (In the tables in the link below, from which I got the Minneapolis numbers, total spending on parks and recreation in Boston by the city, the state, and the Federal government is $69 million. (There are no non-local parks in Minneapolis, which is one reason I chose it for comparison.)) Minneapolis has 580 non-seasonal employees for its park system; Boston, the city, has 223. Seattle, the city, with a population similar to Boston, has 1,021 park employees.

http://www.tpl.org/content_documents/CityParkFacts_2010.pdf

It does not appear that Arnold Arboretum is included in the Boston totals. Lovely place. 265 acres. In 2003, Harvard's operating budget for the Arboretum was $7.5 million.

The Emerald Necklace has its own Conservancy, which seems similar to the Greenway. So from what I can tell, all the better parks in Boston are administered by a Conservancy group, or the state (putting aside the Feds) and not by the city. I have to believe that these conservancies took on this role/responsibility because the city was unwilling, or unable, or both, and that has been the case for a long time.
 
^Stellar

Insightful & interesting. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
 
stellarfun said:
Someone who has access to Guidestar can probably look up the Friends tax return and find out how their admin and overhead costs compares to the Greenway.
Click to expand...

It's like night and day. Total employee compensation for Friends is just under $54,000. Officers are all volunteers, and fundraising costs are listed as $33,000 (to raise a little over a $million).
 
HenryAlan said:
It's like night and day. Total employee compensation for Friends is just under $54,000. Officers are all volunteers, and fundraising costs are listed as $33,000 (to raise a little over a $million).
Click to expand...
Thanks. Quite a difference between their admin and overhead costs and the Greenway, though in the case of Public Gardens, the Common, and the Comm Ave mall, the Friends can avail themselves of city services and support for some of what they do, and the Greenway cannot.
 
stellarfun said:
Thanks. Quite a difference between their admin and overhead costs and the Greenway, though in the case of Public Gardens, the Common, and the Comm Ave mall, the Friends can avail themselves of city services and support for some of what they do, and the Greenway cannot.
Click to expand...

Right, the scope is significantly different, to such extent that I'm not sure we get an apples to apples comparison. The other thing, is that it's best to chart the data over time because any single year can be anomalous. My organization one year had a huge bump in fund raising costs because we ran an event that was not part of our normal business model, one that required a significant level of donor resources. Anybody looking at just that one year would get the wrong idea. The Greenway Conservancy hasn't been around long enough for that particular exercise, though.
 
I don't see what your point is stellar, though I do appreciate your well thought post. I'm personally happy with the appearance of most Boston parks, and I don't often come across complaints about their states. If Boston can do a good enough job maintaining these parks with $20 million, why should they spend more? Isn't it possible that Minnesota and Seattle are wasting a lot of money on their parks because they have an inefficient bureaucracy handling them? And why does it matter where the $20 million comes from, I personally would rather donate and have other people donate to improve the parks than to have the money taken through taxes which could better be spent elsewhere.
 
^porter

At far as I can tell from my neighborhood (Seaport / Fort Point), the City's abdication of responsibility for parks is rarely shifted to generous private philanthropists as you suggest. In the case of the Conservancy, I think the goal is to shift the cost of maintenance mainly to abutters through a "voluntary" (emphasis on "voluntary") BID-like payment.

The City's abdication of responsibility quite often falls on the backs of property owners and developers who are called upon to create and maintain park spaces ? sometimes even away in the site of their development project, in exchange for staying in the good graces of the administration.

Very often as I've seen it, parks are created and maintain by property owners seeking rezoning for large development projects.

The opportunity cost of the expense of parks shifts capital that otherwise might have been focused exclusively on the quality of large development projects and often other amenities such as civic space and onsite improvements that ordinarily would accompany the large project.
 
I didn't suggest generous philanthropists fund the parks, I only aligned my response with earlier suggestions in this thread that contributions like this were being made. I can hardly feel bad for the property developers paying to maintain parks when most of them get subsidized to build in the first place or stand to gain the most from their locations near parks. As far as staying in the good graces of the administration, this sort of balancing act is always required with any bureaucracy or government, so Boston is no different.
 
Harvard is spending $3.5 million to build the city a 1.74 acre park in Allston (called Library Park). (This is no special park, from the standpoint of features.) Harvard has agreed to spend $220,000 a year for 10 years to maintain the new park. Total 10 year cost: $5.7 million. (Harvard is doing this because the city required Harvard to spend millions in community benefits in order to secure city approval of the science complex.)

If one took the maintenance and operating cost of this park and applied it to all the park acreage administered by Parks and Recreation, my calculation is that the cost would be about $240 million, or more than 10x what the city of Boston annually spends on parks from tax revenues and trust fund income.
 
BOTTOM LINE: THE GREENWAY IS A FUCKING JOKE.

Could possibly be the worst type of planning in history. Lets wait another 10 years so it can evolve and the taxpayers continue to fund the Greenway Conservancy and their 100K salaries for the directors.

EPIC FAILURE

Nothing more to say.


"Quote in the Herald today says it all.

Bill Motley of brokerage firm Jones Lang LaSalle added that Back Bay is attracting more and more firms that previously stuck to the Financial District.

?The Back Bay is much more vibrant in the evenings, with shopping, restaurants and residences,? he said. ?Companies recognize that ? particularly when they?re recruiting top talent.?


The Greenway has no shops, restaurants and lacks a vibrant atmosphere. No ENERGY.
 
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