The Compromised Club.
By Jim Conley • May 29th, 2007 • Email This Post to a Friend •
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Leave it to the Brookline Selectmen to appoint to its Zoning Board of Appeals a lawyer who makes his living attending to the needs of real estate developers. Lawrence Kaplan (the ZBA member who needed two Brookline police officers to walk him to his car because a five foot grandmother challenged him to an intellectual smack down) is a partner at the Boston office of Goodwin, Procter.
Here’s how Kaplan advertises his services on the firm’s Web site:
“Larry Kaplan, a partner in the firm’s Real Estate Group, represents institutions, owners, developers and tenants during the permitting, acquisition and financing process. In addition to his land use and development expertise, Mr. Kaplan has considerable experience and expertise in construction and permanent lending on behalf of lending institutions and in hazardous waste law and liability.”
Great. Kaplan spends his days representing the business interests that he is charged with regulating as a ZBA member in the evening. Do you think that Kaplan may be a little compromised? I don’t know how a real estate lawyer’s book of business can be sustained if the digital archives are filled with examples of saying no to developers in your home town.
That would be like the Selectmen appointing a lawyer whose firm represents the developer at St. Aidan’s (The Boston Archdiocese) to serve on the Selectmen’s Housing Advisory Board. Oh wait a minute, they did that.
Back in December of 2005, while a lawsuit on the developer’s project was pending, the Selectmen tapped Attorney Daniel Rosen to advise them on housing policy in Brookline. To be fair, Rosen doesn’t participate in matters concerning St. Aidan’s (kind of, but we’ll save that for another day).
Oh yes dear reader, your town leadership sees to it that no matter how big the stakes, they’ll find someone with the narrowest of views to counsel them on an approach, or to decide issues of import to the rest of us.
Why, they’ll even put the mother of an attorney whose law firm does a vast amount of work before the ZBA and then give her a “blanket waiver” from having to declare a conflict in cases where she’s (her name is Enid Starr) hearing evidence and arguments from her son’s law partner.
Can’t make this stuff up.
Jim Conley is publisher of On Brookline.
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[...] There’s an e-mail circulating on behalf of Housing Board Chairman Roger Blood apologizing for the Friday at 8:30 start time due to problems “getting a quorum” (for its meeting to consider gifting the Boston Archdiocese more public funds for the St. Aidan’s project). Gee, maybe the Selectmen appointing a lawyer to the Board whose firm represents the Archdiocese may have something to do with that, inasmuch that he can’t be in the room when the subject of St. Aidan’s comes up [see previous post]. [...]