Muzzle Tough.
By Jim Conley • June 27th, 2007 • Email This Post to a Friend •
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Last night’s Selectmen’s hearing on a $1.5 million gift to the Boston Archdiocese for its housing project at St. Aidan’s appeared to be a typical town hall-engineered pep rally. Not as many opponents to the additional funding as there are proponents, it would appear.
There’s an interesting back story to that.
It seems that some of the 75 plaintiffs to the lawsuit [see post below] made a distinction between “not opposing the project” - as agreed to in the case settlement - and opposing more public funds for the project (you know, acting as citizens in a democratic society).
Those who had signed onto the lawsuit and then wrote to the Housing Advisory Board opposing more lending have reportedly received threatening letters from the Church’s lawyers, leading residents to retract the messages sent to their town government.
Now how would the Archdiocese know what’s in the mailbag at Town Hall?
Update: Well we know who the snitch is - Brookline Housing Director Fran Price. I’ve received documents that show Price receiving e-mails from town residents and immediately sending them off to Archdiocese lawyer Michael Vhay.
Click here to see an excerpt of an e-mail from Price to Vhay.
Yes, that’s right folks. If you live in Brookline and pay taxes to support town government, you can wait weeks to get information out of town hall. But if you’re a developer who has essentially muzzled opponents to your project, you can count on same day turnaround when those on the list of people you’ve bullied petition their government.
Thanks to Fran Price, the developer’s lawyer gets to send a letter threatening a lawsuit if residents don’t retract their statement. Maybe a lawyer can tell me how the settlement agreement [read here] not to oppose construction and permitting at the St. Aidan’s project trumps a person’s right to freely express their opinion on the use of public funds.
I don’t know how the Brookline Selectmen can give more funds to a project where the opponents have been bullied by the Catholic Church. I also don’t see how we can justify paying Fran Price another dime from taxpayer funds. If she’s going to work for the developer, let them pay her.
Update (2): I just received word from Price that I can get copies of the e-mails she’s been sending to the Church’s lawyers, but it’s going to cost me $120.00
Classic Brookline.
Update (3): There’s a new wrinkle to this that I may have more on tomorrow. Let’s just say that there are now three members of the Brookline Board of Selectmen that appear to have a conflict of interest on the question of more money for St. Aidan’s. Money that, were it not assigned, might mean that a certain law firm would not be paid.
Jim Conley is publisher of On Brookline.
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This is a job for … a public records request! Can’t one not be in opposition to the project by protecting public trust funds? I think it’s time for an altar-cation. If attorneys are making such threats, perhaps the Board of Bar Overseers should be notified. I’m sure that signators to the agreement have no objections to private funds being used for the project. As to the contents of the Town Hall mailbag, perhaps there is a “higher authority” divulging the information. Let’s hope there is a public records paper trail to reveal the “sin-ergy.”
The request has been made. And I don’t expect to see the documents until after the church gets its clams.
I was not at the HAB meeting, so I do not know what Roger Blood or the other HAB members said about the Settlement Agreement, Exhibit-N, or the Plaintiffs’ position on the currently proposed project or the “Revised Proposal”.
However, it should be clear from a reading of the Settlement Agreement and Exhibit-N, that the “Revised Proposal” for which the Plaintiffs “urge support” is a plan to reduced the scale of the project by building a 4-story building on Pleasant Street instead of the currently proposed 5-story building, while maintaining the same number of affordable units.
Urging support for the “Revised Proposal” should not be misconstrued as either supporting or opposing the currently proposed project. The Plaintiffs have agreed not to oppose the project or funding requests. While they have agreed not to oppose the project, to my knowledge, none of the Plaintiffs have expressed support for it either.
When the Selectmen decide to make the funds requested available they will probably announce it with a “MAZELTOV!” Now which Selectmen are up for election next year? So voters can give their successful opponents a hearty “MAZELTOV!”
[...] Archie Mazmanian: When the Selectmen decide to make the funds requested available they will probably announce it with… [...]
[...] They say that, “snitches end up in ditches.” But in Brookline instead of eating dirt, our snitches are busy digging up dirt for developers. That’s what happened last week, when On Brookline got word that the Town’s Housing Director Fran Price was ratting out (the muzzled) plaintiffs in a lawsuit to lawyers for the Boston Archdiocese [see story]. [...]
[...] Given the track record so far, it’s hard to see what could be worse than tearing down the wall of reason and wisdom that has long kept public assets out of the hands of churches. Especially, in this case, a Church that has been nothing but bullying of those who would prefer not to live with their ill-conceived project. Or to use public assets in doing so [see previous post]. [...]
[...] It’s not the quality of the developer that’s at issue, though. It’s the fact that a semi-lucid developer from outside can see that Brookline is wired in favor of a few cronies. For pity’s sake, the entire planning and economic development department of town government exists to serve a favored few. We have employees in that department snitching on residents to developer’s lawyers [see previous post]. [...]