On Brookline

For the love of God people near St. Aidan’s, save yourselves. The Boston Archdiocese is stirring up the lead (in paint) and asbestos in the area and your only hope is that the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection sees that this material is removed properly. No one else is going to, that’s for sure.

Neighbors tell me that a flunky from the Brookline Health Department was on site last week and saw no issue with heavy equipment scraping lead-laden paint from the Church’s exterior (pictured above).

[An aside: Come May we may be looking to make real cuts to the Brookline municipal budget and I'd posit that 80% of the health department could be eliminated without notice.]

And what about worker protection? The employee above is not protected from lead and asbestos. Why would they be, though? Health and environmental safety are the furthest things from this developer’s mind. (A Christian principle not familiar to this writer, but I’ve lapsed.)

What this means is that the developer, the “quality developer”, with which Brookline town government is so enamored has violated the agreement they made with neighbors. An agreement stemming from a lawsuit made, in part, to protect their health interests [see lead removal protocol from settlement agreement].

So what? Who is going to make the Archdiocese live them up to its promises? Not the Town. See, when residents who happened to be plaintiffs to a lawsuit contacted the Town to urge less money for the project, they were ratted out by town employee Francine Price. And those residents then received threatening letters from the Archdiocese’s lawyers.

But to know St. Aidan’s is to know that for people like Price there is no punishment that residents (who have opposed the project) ought not endure. This is Brookline town government, where the public is the enemy. And someone’s going to pay for getting in the way of a developer.

Even if that means respiring a dose of lead and asbestos.

Update: Turns out the flunky from the Town is Pat Maloney, the director of environmental health. Good grief.

Update (2): Let’s not forget that this is the same developer and contractor which failed to secure the proper local permits prior to removing asbestos inside the church building [see previous post].  Why bother?  When you work for Brookline town government a neighborhood’s concerns can be explained away as the work of hysterics.