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Did you know the intersection of Beacon and Tremont is blighted?
By adamg on Sat, 07/11/2009 - 9:08am
Kevin McCrea writes the owners of One Beacon Street get a tax break of between $5 million and $8 million a year for building in a "blighted" area:
The juxtaposition of the One Beacon tower on beautiful Beacon Hill, just down from the State House and Franklin Park which is in the heart of Dorchester and Roxbury is striking.
When will our society stop giving tax breaks to the rich, while crying poor and shutting down cultural attractions in poorer sections of town?
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Comments
is this for real?
...a tax break for One Beacon Street? This must be a joke, yes? If not, this has to be one of the most corrupt places on earth.
Developers cut these deals
before they start building, and I think they last for a lifetime.
That site was blighted...
...in the early 70's it had been the sight of a razed old department store that had gone out of business in the 30's, and leased to offices and run down since. It was a parking lot for five years until Commercial Union Insurance agreed to develop the land (I knew folks who worked there in the 70's).
However, my understanding is that those tax abatements are supposed to run something like 15 years. My math has it that 1972 to 2009 runs a bit over that. Wonder if doing renovations every few years extends it somehow?
This scan is an article from the NYTimes on CU's initial plans to build on that spot.
It has been there for decades, even if I do remember it when it was young...:)
Yrs,
Shava (showing her age)
It is blighted. One Beacon
It is blighted. One Beacon St. is just a terrible, terrible looking building. We ought to demolish it and put in something nicer. Likewise, we need to tear down Center Plaza and not rebuild much of that site so as to open up Pemberton Sq, City Hall needs to go, etc. etc. I could live with the tax break if it meant that the building went away.
yeah because there's not
yeah because there's not nearly enough open space there--just tug the brick blanket across cambridge street a little
Kevin McCrea for Mayor!
Kevin McCrea would be the change that Boston needs.
One Beacon: It's the BRA that's blighted
Kevin McCrea is right, but it's actually much worse. The BRA has extended the tower's tax break, which should have terminated when it changed owners, as has happened three (or four, they won't tell me) times since 2000 and maybe before as well -- in return for million-dollar cash payments. I estimate (because there's nowhere to get actual information, neither at the BRA nor at the Assessor's Office) that the City taxpayers have lost about $40 million since 2000 on this boondoggle. And -- One Beacon is not the only huge and hugely profitable building buying property tax breaks from the BRA. The City loses unknown millions every year so the BRA can rake in cash. And Mayor Tom Menino signs these agreements! Where does that money go? It's a mystery....like everything else at the BRA, our omnipotent black-box quasi-private government. I will be writing about this soon in my South End News column, "City Streets."
Without Kevin, no one would even know about this. The Mayor isn't telling; he's happy to give away our tax revenues to real estate developers and to the BRA (both of which will help keep him safely ensconced in that fifth floor office), knowing that he over-taxes us so vastly that he'll have plenty left for his other strategically directed cash give-aways. The City Councilors are either clueless (in Boston, quelle surprise, 121A's are not under City Council power) or complicit (they may know, but I guess they'd just figure, as Councilor Mike Ross shrugged the last time I reported to him that the BRA was taking City-owned land by eminent domain without paying a dime, "Well, the BRA's gotta eat too, ya know"). And the media...ah, the media. I have tried for many, many months to get the Herald, Globe and other papers and even TV producers to expose this theft of public assets, to no avail. The ethics and other law enforcement agencies are AWOL. Our politicians are lucky to live in a city (and state) where no evil is seen, heard, or revealed in public. One of these days, maybe something will get out there that will finally get people off the couch and into the streets -- hopefully, in time to "t'row da bums out" on election day.
And it gets worse
I testified (along with Shirley and one other person) against yet another similar tax break last year in South Boston for Bob Beal and JP Morgan at Beal's South Boston property on D Street. Beal could have just lowered his rent $2 per sf and it would have had the same dollar effect - instead the mayor handed Beal and JPM a multi-year, multi-million dollar tax break that was completely unnecessary and possibly illegal. Somehow Beal convinced the mayor and the city council that if they didn't give them a $120,000 a year tax break for 15 years or so that JP Morgan would take their large, rapidly growing business to Braintree for some cheaper rent - something nobody with an ounce of common sense would do. They also promised to bring dozens/hundreds of new jobs to Boston as the business grew - would love to see Ms. Colley and her staff of three at the BRA let us know where we stand on that promise a year later.
Bottom line - this basically subsidized Beal's rent on the taxpayer's dime. Anybody out there missing a teacher or two in their school that might be able to use that $120k?
Yet this stuff never seems to get much press.
I guess multi-million-dollar tax scams are just not as sexy as "The Bodybuilding Fake Disabled Fireman", who (while admittedly an apparent jerk) was in the papers like 50 times.
My favorite part of the Beal/JP Morgan episode was Sam Tyler assuring us that granting the tax break was the prudent thing to do, while both he and the Globe neglected to mention that the Beal Company is one of hid bosses, listed as a director of the "Boston Municipal Research Bureau".
The Tyler thing
Thank you, Dan, for pointing out that the "Boston Municipal Research Bureau," to which the press always refers as the "city's fiscal watchdog" and which the City Council always invites to its hearings as its chief advisory agent, is merely a corporate lobby, representing the biggest business interests in the city and region. The BMRB is mainly a watchdog over City employment, politely calling attention when workers are paid too much (leaving less in the till for corporate welfare) and over commercial taxes (tax breaks are always prudent, of course, and when the business taxes blip up, MRB is there to make sure that they are shifted back onto residents). Now, exposing the vast hiring and pension fraud and abuse in City Hall is a valuable service, but the MRB seems to do it so gently ...maybe it's just a reminder to the Mayor that it knows what he's doing, so he'd better be nice to them.
I fault the media; surely, the theft of billions of dollars from the beleaguered taxpayers can be made interesting, even when there is no underwear involved...