Mayor’s Double-Teamed
September 17, 2009
By: Wayne Woodleif
City Councilors Michael Flaherty and Sam Yoon know one thing for sure: Only one of them will be left after Tuesday’s preliminary election to challenge 16-year incumbent Mayor Tom Menino on Nov. 3.
Not that either man thinks Menino is a shoo-in for the final. Both camps claim that in an in-house poll – scoffed at by Menino’s troops – 67 percent of voters said they’d consider (key word: consider) voting for somebody other than Menino, and 50 percent said Boston is moving in the wrong direction. Continue Reading…
Boston Phoenix
Vote Yoon
It is time for Boston to debate its future
September 16, 2009
EDITORIAL
Barring supernatural intervention next Tuesday, incumbent Thomas Menino is expected to top the ticket in Boston’s four-candidate mayoral preliminary. The final vote will take place November 3.
With 16 years of executive service under his belt, Menino is the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history. So it is no surprise that he is seen as the leader of the political pack.
Menino has not faced a vigorous challenge since 1993. This year, the focused and intelligent candidacies of City Councilors Sam Yoon and Michael Flaherty, as well as the campaign of inspired maverick Kevin McCrea, have some voters thinking it is time for a change.
Even the city’s two dailies lately seem to have shed their assumptions that Menino should be mayor for life.
With the national economy still in meltdown, and city finances likely to be even more painfully strained next year than they are now, Boston desperately needs a vigorous debate about how it will confront an uncertain future.
The Phoenix believes that Sam Yoon is best equipped to challenge Menino in November’s final election. Continue Reading…
Looking for a missing link
September 15, 2009
By: Adrian Walker
Ronald Wilburn has a keen interest in Michael Kineavy’s mysterious missing e-mails.
Wilburn was the key government informant in the federal corruption inquiry that led to the indictment of State Senator Dianne Wilkerson and City Councilor Chuck Turner. For months, Wilburn has been incensed that the investigation seemed to hit a brick wall when it reached City Hall.
Now he believes he knows why.
“What they should have found was e-mails to Kineavy,’’ he said yesterday. “I know there was communication with Kineavy.’’ Without that evidence, he theorizes, the investigation into licensing corruption stalled. Continue Reading…
Yoon: Time to Fix Our Broken System
September 15, 2009
OP-ED By: Sam Yoon
They say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
I’m running because the way we do business in City Hall is broken, and we need to change it. Right now all the power of city government is concentrated in the office of the mayor. And we have a mayor who has been there for 16 years. This makes City Hall a place where innovative ideas go to die.
Cities worldwide are introducing innovations in city government — like 311 systems for non-emergency calls — that are attracting businesses and making life easier for their residents. But Boston is getting left behind. Continue Reading…
Investigation into deleted e-mails sought
Two mayoral contenders blast Menino for alleged violations
September 14, 2009
By: Tony Lee
City councilors Sam Yoon and Michael Flaherty, challengers to Thomas Menino in the mayoral election, will formally request a criminal investigation today after the Boston Globe reported that top Menino aides deleted e-mails.
The alleged acts, most notably involving Menino’s Cabinet Chief of Policy and Planning Michael J. Kineavy, are violations of state public records law, which requires government employees save such correspondence for two years. Continue Reading…
Deleted e-mails spark a furor
Mayor’s rivals want practice investigated
September 14, 2009
By: John M. Guilfoil
Two Boston city councilors and challengers to Mayor Thomas M. Menino called yesterday for an investigation after a Globe report revealed that at least one city official has been routinely deleting work e-mails – a practice that potentially violates state public records law.
City councilors Michael Flaherty and Sam Yoon, both candidates in the upcoming mayoral preliminary election, said they would ask Attorney General Martha Coakley and Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley to investigate the deletion of e-mails by officials in Menino’s administration. Continue Reading…
Affable in the neighborhoods, touchy behind the scenes
September 14, 2009
EDITORIAL
DURING the 16 years Thomas Menino has led the City of Boston, close observers have learned there are two very different sides to the mayor – one affable and appealing, the other petty and off-putting.
In his interactions with the public, Menino remains Mayor Everyman, a father figure who after nearly four terms is still a man of the people. An astonishing percentage of Boston residents say they have met Menino, and many harbor warm feelings about him. That reflects well on a mayor who has neither lost touch nor tired of attending neighborhood meetings and talking with residents about their concerns.
Still, as objects of the mayor’s ire can testify, Menino runs the city government as his own fiefdom, which can make interacting with City Hall like trying to accommodate the imperious ways of a monarch. Continue Reading…
A well-tuned political machine, powered by zeal
Menino’s army of neighborhood workers a 24/7 force for constituents, and for him
September 13, 2009
By: Stephanie Ebbert, Michael Levenson, Donovan Slack
On their own, they are petty encounters: A couple of “friends’’ of Michael F. Flaherty were admonished by city workers to get off his Facebook page; a state aide got advice from a city official that led to a parking ticket being dismissed; a Sam Yoon campaign office was cited by city inspectors for having too many window signs.
But taken together, these seemingly inconsequential incidents offer a rare window into the workings of Thomas M. Menino’s City Hall, a place where not even the most trivial slights go unnoticed and the smallest opportunities unnourished. Continue Reading…
Menino’s office acknowledges city employees routinely deleted e-mails
September 13, 2009
By: Donovan Slack and Michael Levenson
Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s administration, prompted by public records requests from the Globe, has acknowledged that city employees were routinely deleting e-mails, a potential violation of the state public records law.
The acknowledgement came after the Globe filed several requests for e-mails sent and received by Menino’s Cabinet chief of policy and planning, Michael J. Kineavy. He is one of Menino’s most powerful and trusted advisers, intimately involved in nearly everything at City Hall, but a search of city computers found just 18 e-mails he had sent or received between Oct. 1, 2008, and March 31 of this year.
The unusually low figure prompted administration officials to question him about what happened to the rest of the e-mails he was presumably sending and receiving during that period. Kineavy, who is also one of the mayor’s chief political advisers and a strategist on Menino’s reelection campaigns since 1993, told them that he deletes all his e-mails on a daily basis, in such a way that they are not saved on city backup computers, administration officials said. Continue Reading…
Strong debate energizes Mayor Menino’s foes
September 12, 2009
By: Richard Weir
Sensing blood in the water, Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s rivals said yesterday that their relentless, three-pronged attack during Thursday’s Herald-FOX 25 debate had left him wounded and them charged up….. Continue Reading…
