James P. Freeman: Mass. in '15: A state of hope and (fiscal) peril

It is right there
Betwixt and between
The orchard bare
And the orchard green

— Robert Frost from “Peril of Hope”

With an eerie prescience, the Jan.  9, 2015, front page of The Boston Globe captured perfectly the mixture of fear and anticipation associated with the hope a new year brings. Two headlines above the fold – “Boston picked to bid for Olympics” and “Baker promises firm fixes, sensitive touch” – would set the tone for 2015 in Greater Boston.

Boston 2024 Partnership, the consortium of business and political interests (so-called “thought leaders”) to bring the 2024 summer Olympic games to The Hub, underestimated Bostonians’ capacity for common sense and overestimated Bostonians’ tolerance for large municipal projects. (Didn’t anyone remind planners of the Big Dig experience?) Residents rightly feared costs would be socialized and any profits would be privatized by special interests. The bid was rescinded in July.

Charlie Baker was sworn in as Massachusetts’ 72nd governor within hours of the Olympic announcement. No politician campaigned on the Olympics but it consumed precious time and energy from more mundane and serious matters, such as the opioid emergency, which rages on unabated (1,256 people – likely more this year – fatally overdosed in Massachusetts in 2014). Alarmingly, more people die  in Massachusetts from overdoses than from car crashes.

Boston broke the record for snowiest winter on record, with 108.6 inches. But the MBTA was broken long before 2015 from decades of incompetent government oversight. With melting irony, man could not make the trains run during the blizzards but a train actually ran without a man this December in Braintree, due to “operator error.” Baker must restore the entire system to ensure a second term.

The New England Patriots earned their fourth Super Bowl championship in February, amidst the faux-scandal of Deflategate (which is now being taught as a class at University of New Hampshire). A federal judge determined that the NFL went too far in suspending quarterback Tom Brady. In May, some suggested that Salem State University went too far in paying him $170,000 for a one hour “lecture.” But don’t tell that to the local media, which cover the team by way of sports jingoism, not journalism.

It took a jury in April nearly 26 minutes just to read the “guilty” verdict on all 30 counts against unrepentant terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in the Boston Marathon bombing trial.

Irish rockers U2, who lived through the terror of “The Troubles,” charmed the town with four sold-out concerts this summer, as “#BostonStrong” was featured prominently on a massive vidi-wall during their encores.

Pedro Martinez was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and David Ortiz announced this post season he would retire in 2016. Their recognition and retirement mark the perilous end of an era of Boston baseball dominance. Perhaps no other players were better catalysts of hope for a despondent Red Sox Nation before 2004.

Two films about Boston’s ugly underbelly proved to be, in many respects, largely for Boston; another cathartic exercise in order to exorcise criminality. “Spotlight” chronicled the unspeakable and unimaginable clergy sex abuse cover up, and “Black Mass” showcased Whitey Bulger. Each affirmed that evil can reside both in men of the cloth and the cleaver.

After nearly a century, Cambridge-based Converse unveiled the long-awaited Chuck Taylor II sneakers.

After 20 years since the first charter school was opened in Massachusetts, with some municipalities having reached their quotas, many want a reset, a Charter 2.0.

Atty. Gen. Maura Healey, prodigal progressive, concluded that more regulation (of course) would be best for Boston-based fantasy sports league website DraftKings (and FanDuel). But former Gov. Deval Patrick, promiscuous progressive, discovered free enterprise by joining the investment firm Bain Capital.

In November, the financial news Web site 247wallst.com ranked Massachusetts as the best place to live among the 50 states. General Electric thinks so, as it imagines what a world headquarters might look like in Boston as it contemplates relocation from Connecticut for lower taxes and closer proximity to the area’s innovation ecosystem.

This autumn, the Oxford Dictionaries determined that its word of the year was, in fact, not a word, but a pictograph. The “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji according to Oxford lexicographers, “best reflected the ethos, mood and preoccupation of 2015.”

In retrospect, then, Frost got it partially right. Time — and 2015 — might best be defined as an alloy of peril and hope.

James P. Freeman is a New England-based writer and a former Cape Cod Times columnist. This comes via the courtesy of The New Boston Post. 

For some of his previous columns, read:

- See more at: http://newbostonpost.com/2015/12/30/the-year-2015-and-the-peril-of-hope/#sthash.VrgyiQQu.dpuf

Robert Whitcomb: Republicans bother to vote

‘’The people have spoken … and now they must be punished.’’

-- New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s quip after an election loss

The politicians elected yesterday to new jobs will soon be blamed for doing the same sort of things that their ousted predecessors did as they tried to mate good governance with reality and ambition/ego with idealism.

Distracted and often ignorant citizens, many of whom are usually fleeing reality at a good clip, will demand a perfection from their elected officials that they would never demand of themselves. They will also praise, or more likely blame, the politicians for everything from the weather to the economy’s gyrations. (The first is out of politicians’ control --- unless you factor in the need for us to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the air. The second has so many global variables that government’s ability to manage economic cycles remains highly constrained.)

In its existential anxiety, the “the Public’’ will continue to depend on politicians to solve all its problems. Modern electronic media, with their instant ‘’analyses’’ and search for simple, vivid narratives, heighten this dependence and the resulting anger when public/personal problems aren’t immediately fixed.

Our news media (who roughly represent the citizenry’s character flaws) intensify our tendency to pour our hopes and fears into a few people, or even just one (especially the president). Such personalization is easier than trying to understand the details of, say, public policy, economics and history, let alone science.

My sense of the sloth of those who attribute all fault and praise in a big news event to one or very few individuals came together back in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush was in effect blamed for not restoring Dade County, Fla., to its pre-Hurricane Andrew strip-mall glory within 36 hours. Then in 2005, the public blamed his son for the Hurricane Katrina New Orleans mess, although that disaster was inevitable – New Orleans was/is a very corrupt, badly managed city most of which is at sea level or below.

And now some call the complicated (scientifically and otherwise) Ebola situation President Obama’s fault. (That his father was African may inform some of the attacks against him in this….)

Meanwhile, the public takes commands from the media and politicians about how they should feel. If the preponderance of the big (and small) media say that “Americans are pessimistic’’ or ‘’optimistic,’’ then we salute and feel accordingly, whatever the unemployment rate. But not for long, since the conventional-wisdom narrative can be changed overnight and the change “go viral.’’

That’s not to say that politicians’ characters and personalities don’t count – especially in great crises --- e.g., Lincoln in the Civil War or Churchill in the summer of 1940 as Britain stood virtually alone against the Nazi onslaught. But they rarely count nearly as much as we’d like to think they do. Life is far too complicated.

Now we look forward to more gridlock in Washington because the public doesn’t know what it wants (other than more services and lower taxes). It says “government doesn’t work’’ and ensures that it doesn’t by its conflicting and rapidly changing voting -- or, especially in a mid-term election, its nonvotes. The nonvoters are always among the biggest complainers.

Democrats have particularly little excuse for whining this year. A Pew Research Center survey shows that among those who were unlikely to vote last Tuesday, 51 percent favored Democrats and 30 percent the GOP. In this matter, Republicans are harder-working: They summon the energy to take 20 minutes to vote.

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The lack of a direct long-distance rail connection between Boston’s South Station and North Station has always seemed to me ridiculous. Connecting them would make it considerably easier to move between southern and northern New England and further energize passenger rail as demographics (including a huge increase in the number of old people and a new propensity of younger people not to drive) makes public transportation ever more important.

The link should have been made at least a century ago. But the dominant New England railroads of the time – the Boston & Maine (at North Station) and the New Haven (at South Station) -- the city and the state’s couldn’t get it done, as it wasn’t done between New York’s Grand Central Station and Pennsylvania stations.

The Big Dig’s cost overruns haunt efforts to make this link. But rail projects make rich cities even richer by making them more efficient and attractive. The Big Dig made Boston more of a world city. Past gubernatorial foes Michael Dukakis, a Democrat, and Bill Weld, a Republican, recently joined to promote the link. All of New England will benefit if they succeed.

Robert Whitcomb is a Providence-based editor and writer and a partner in Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com) a healthcare-sector consultancy. A former editorial-page editor for The Providence Journal and  a former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, he's also a Fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy and oversees this site, newenglanddiary.com

A streetcar named reasonable

People like to call most new large public projects boondoggles, but if politicians followed such negativism religiously,very few useful public projects would be built and the public would find life much more difficult. Yes, even Boston's Big Dig was worth it.

So it is with the idea of putting in a streetcar line in Providence. With the city's thick downtown density, large numbers of college students without cars and an aging population not driving as much these days, I think that the line would do very well in improving the city's economy and quality of life. The rich cities to our north (Boston) and south (New York) owe much of their prosperity to mass transit.

Charles Chieppo: MBTA hole gets deeper

BOSTON The recent news that the estimated cost of an ongoing Boston-area subway-line extension has risen from $1.4 billion to nearly $2 billion surprised exactly no one. The more-than-two-decade history leading up to this most recent cost overrun contains a lifetime's worth of cautionary tales for state and local governments.

Almost everyone reading this should have some familiarity with Boston's "Big Dig." After all, you probably helped pay for it. The project included taking down an unsightly elevated roadway and running it underground, extending the Massachusetts Turnpike to Boston's Logan Airport and constructing a bridge over the Charles River. When it was finally completed in 2007 (nine years late), the original $2.8 billion price tag had swollen to $14.6 billion, more than a quarter of it covered by federal taxpayers.

Less attention has been paid to the court-ordered construction of 14 transit-related projects as environmental mitigation for the additional traffic the Big Dig would accommodate. Twenty-three years after the 1991 mandate, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) owes nearly $9 billion in debt and interest, almost half of which can be attributed to the transit-mitigation requirements. If not for a series of fare hikes in recent years, the MBTA would pay more in debt service than it collects in fares.

Cost overruns on the current 4.5-mile extension of the MBTA's Green Line are a microcosm of why the mitigation requirements have been a disaster. Engineers encountered more than 500 "utility conflicts" along the corridor. Then there are the add-ons: A community path for bikers and walkers and more drainage for a river that was long ago covered by landfill but apparently still wreaks havoc during rainstorms. It's mitigation for the mitigation.

Payments to the design contractor jumped by more than half because platforms had to be extended to accommodate longer trains than had been envisioned 23 years ago. That's what you get with government by mandate.

And since the MBTA had to dedicate so much money to financing the mitigation projects, corners had to be cut elsewhere. A large concentration of MBTA vehicles are approaching or have surpassed their useful life. If you can't get down to Havana to watch the parade of pre-1959 American-made cars, just take a ride on a Boston-area commuter train. Old rolling stock means compromised reliability.

That  it's impossible to know what system priorities will be more than two decades down the road is just one lesson governments can draw from the unmitigated disaster of Boston's transit mitigation. The first lesson is that it's a spectacularly bad idea to mandate the construction of billions of dollars worth of new projects without a funding source.

But construction expenses are only part of the picture. Projects should be budgeted based on the cost of building, operating and maintaining them over their lifecycle. If that had happened in Boston, seeing more realistic numbers might well have resulted in some of the projects being eliminated.

Lifecycle budgeting also reduces the temptation to skimp on maintenance. The MBTA faces a maintenance backlog that topped $3 billion in 2009 and has only grown since. In the transit authority's fiscal 2010 budget, just six of 57 maintenance projects that received a safety rating of "critical" could be funded.

Budgeting based on transportation projects' real costs makes it less likely that government officials will be put in the position of robbing Peter to pay Paul by skimping on maintenance and not replacing assets in a timely manner. Forcing planners to take a clear-eyed look at real project costs might cut back on the ribbon-cuttings that politicians so enjoy, but it would result in infrastructure that functions better and lasts longer. And it might just avert disasters such as the one that the MBTA is facing.

Charles Chieppo is a research fellow at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School.  This originated at Governing Magazine's Web site, governing.com