Moving City Hall

Tommy’s Taj Mahal demands debates
By Boston Herald Editorial Staff
Thursday, June 26, 2008 - Added 13h ago

Dealing with City Hall these days is a little like dealing with the old Kremlin - and that has nothing to do with the Cold War “brutalist” style architecture of the building.

No, it’s the mindset - a mindset that comes with a mayor who by next month will have served 15 years in the job and shows no sign of wanting to relinquish it. But next year is an election year and so a potential rival to Mayor Tom Menino has emerged from the ranks of the City Council to ask some annoying questions about an already approved capital budget.

The Council has rather limited powers but one of them is to hold hearings and ask questions and Councilor Mike Flaherty is making the most of that.

At issue is an $850,000 item for a feasibility study involving city-owned land on South Boston’s Drydock 4, part of the Marine Industrial Park. The $850,000 is only the first installment in a three-year appropriation of more than $2 million involving that same site.

It is a possible site for a future waterfront city hall Menino seems to want as his legacy. And while the current city hall building has few fans, the possibility of relocating to the waterfront seems to have only one truly ardent supporter - and that would be Tom Menino.

Now at some point the Boston Redevelopment Authority likely can and should determine what level of development that site can support. That is a legitimate expenditure of public dollars. In fact, such a study may show that the site is prohibitively expensive for a major public building.

The real problem here is that except for this week’s Council hearing all of this is being carried out without public debate or discussion. The taxpayers of this city deserve at least that much before Tommy’s Taj Mahal on the harbor takes on a life of its own.