Part 2 of Chris Faraone's Weekly Dig series on Somerville

[ron_newman]

The second installment of Chris Faraone's Weekly Dig series on Somerville politics is now on the street and online:

Ghosts of Assembly Square

The article ends with a teaser for upcoming part 3: "the Dig will show some of the ways Curtatone’s development agenda has manifested throughout Somerville: an ethically challenged zoning board, uncertified building commissioners, and residents learning to fight back."

(for part 1, see both The Somerville Files, Part 1: Nightmare on Beacon Street on the Weekly Dig website, and the resulting discussion here on DSLJ.)

Comments

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this! This installment seems much meatier -- and damning -- that the first one. These two paragraphs struck me in particular:

"Curtatone also got assistance [for his mayoral campaign] from Natasha Perez, a former campaign staffer who worked on his previous mayoral run. Perez, also deputy director of the state Democratic party at the time, was working for a company called Gravestar, which belonged the limited partnership that wanted to develop a strip mall at Assembly. There, Perez was tasked with managing political and media relations for Assembly development efforts.

In the process of campaigning, the aspiring mayor—whose campaign account started off more than $100,000 in debt in 2003—accepted thousands in donations from real estate professionals. Bolstered by these private forces, he outspent his opponent by nearly 400 percent, and sailed to victory. With Curtatone in office, Boston-based attorneys Palmer & Dodge, whose partners pumped nearly $2,000 into his campaign, was [sic] paid at least $450,000 to write new zoning for Assembly."

[ron_newman]

The dispute that I have with that section is that the "strip mall" isn't really a new development -- it is the reopening of the old Assembly Square Mall that had mostly closed after Macy's closed the former Jordan Marsh store.