Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  So gays marched in 1993. But not City Councilor at-Large Albert L. “Dapper” O’Neil. “For the first time in many years,” he declared, “I will not be part of the parade, because I will not have my nose rubbed into their way of living.” The small band of gays were cursed, spat on, and pelted with snowballs. Vendors sold T-shirts printed with the words 90 YEARS WITH NO QUEERS. That was the last parade I marched in.

  As mayor in 1994 I tried to bring the two sides together. But when the Supreme Judicial Court found that the gay marchers could not be banned, the vets canceled the parade. “They will never, ever march down the streets of South Boston as a group again,” said Wacko.

  At the eleventh hour, I tried to persuade other South Boston citizens’ groups to sponsor the parade. I got no takers. Finally, I announced a substitute celebration (minus the green beer) at City Hall Plaza and said that, if necessary, the city would sponsor the 1995 parade.

  “I’m struck by Menino’s willingness to stand up for what he believes in,” said a board member of the Greater Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance. “That’s real significant for us. We didn’t get that kind of support from Flynn.”

  Seven times state courts ruled that gays should have “equality of access” to the parade, a “civic celebration.” But in January 1995 a federal judge sided with Wacko and the vets, who had come up with a new constitutional angle: Their lawyers made over the St. Patrick’s Day parade into a protest march.

  “The 1995 parade will protest the decisions of the courts of the Commonwealth,” wrote U.S. District Court judge Mark L. Wolf. “Speech addressing such matters is at the core of self-expression that the First Amendment is intended to protect.” If the gays marched, “the veterans’ protest would be confused and muted; indeed, the veterans’ protest would be silenced because they would cancel the parade again.”

  “In essence, what the judge ruled is that the St. Patrick’s Day parade no longer exists,” Mary Bonauto, a gay rights lawyer, commented. “The veterans destroyed the parade in order to save it. It is no longer a parade, but an anti-gay protest.” Parade officials would wear black armbands, and an opening motorcade would fly black flags.

  Wacko Hurley was confident that the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold Judge Wolf’s ruling. Regardless, the protest/parade would go on. “If necessary, we’ll protest the rest of our lives,” he said.

  When a group of former servicemen suffering from AIDS applied to march, Wacko turned them down. Asked why, he said: “We don’t give reasons. It’s our parade.” Asked where he got his nickname, he said: “I was born with it. . . . If you find out where it comes from, you let me know.”

  My office released this statement: “The federal court has ruled very directly on the 1995 parade, ordering the city to give the veterans a permit. The City is now obligated to comply with the judge’s ruling and will do so.”

  “I am not planning to march in the parade,” I said. “Many South Boston residents will be attending events which are open to all and I feel my time should be spent with them.” One year Angela and I were invited to a St. Patrick’s Day reception at the home of Bill Bulger, the veteran South Boston legislator. A burly guy started in on me about the awful gays (only he didn’t say “gays”). Bill’s wife, Mary, stepped between us and straightened him out: The mayor is a guest in our house. You are way out of line. Please leave now. He did. Occasionally we’d even drop by Wacko Hurley’s house party for banter and green bagels. Principled differences—yes. But when politicians read their opponents out of the human race, they give the rest of us a bad example.

  My stand on the parade hurt an old pal. “I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face by a friend,” said Jimmy Kelly, Southie’s city councilor. “Menino turned his back on an awful lot of good and decent people in order to be politically correct.” The papers speculated that my decision not to march “caused a rupture in the mayor’s friendship with Kelly.” Certainly it made a rift.

  I laid down a policy followed for the next two decades. City workers could not participate in the march. City emblems could not be shown. And, except for public safety during it and street cleanup after, city money could not be spent on the parade.

  “I am gratified by the mayor’s leadership on this issue,” said Cathleen Finn, spokeswoman for GLIB, the Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston. “It is clear that anyone who participates in the parade is serving to legitimize discrimination.” A Globe editorial called my ban on on-duty city workers representing Boston at the parade “courageous.”

  June 10, 1995, was the silver anniversary of Boston Gay and Lesbian Pride Day, commemorating the Stonewall Riots in 1969, when police beat gay men resisting arrest at a Greenwich Village bar. Over 100,000 spectators lined the streets of downtown, the South End, and the Back Bay watching—and cheering—thousands of marching gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender men and women. Many wore T-shirts reading CLOSETS ARE FOR CLOTHES. “Times have changed since I first marched in the 70s,” one man said. “It is not so much a political event as a celebration. We’re out and proud today.”

  I was proud that my friend Harry Collings, director of development at the Fenway Community Health Center, was a grand marshal of the parade.

  It was Boston’s first Dyke March, with a large contingent of lesbians joining the parade in Copley Square. From a stage in front of the Old South Church on Boylston Street, a few hundred feet from where the first bomb exploded in April 2013, I told the marchers: “Twenty-five years of progress and positive change have passed since those brave gay men and lesbians marched up Charles Street in 1970. . . . Your strength in numbers today sends a loud and clear message that every single person in this wonderfully diverse city matters. . . . We all know that the mean-spiritedness must stop.”

  In 2014, for the twentieth year in a row, Wacko & Co. kept gays from marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade. So the mean-spiritedness hasn’t stopped. But it will stop. Gays will march. As the Yiddish saying has it, Where there’s mortality, there’s hope.

  Usually I marched in the Gay Pride parade. But in 2013 I was sidelined by the broken leg that, three days before the Marathon bombing, landed me in the hospital. Angela took my place. Recuperating at the Parkman House, I watched the parade from a wheelchair inside the vestibule. A young woman, spotting me, left the marchers, ran across Beacon Street, and bounded up the stone steps. She wanted to thank me, she said. Years before, rejected by her parents, she’d left her hometown and come to Boston, a stranger. But, she said, beginning to cry, I’d helped her feel that Boston was her home. She wiped her tears, squeezed my hand, and rejoined the parade. As I battle cancer, her words bring me contentment.

  Chapter 4

  Getting Stuff Done

  Cities and metropolitan areas are on their own. The cavalry is not coming.

  —from The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce

  Katz and Jennifer Bradley

  IN THE new America, cities have to supply their own cavalry. Mayor Mike Bloomberg stated their challenge this way: “As a result of [the federal] leadership vacuum, cities around the country have had to tackle our economic problems largely on our own.”

  A partisan standoff paralyzed economic policy after the Tea Party won control of the House in the 2010 elections. With millions unemployed, Washington did nothing. Scratch that. To block “Oba­macare,” the Tea Party shut down the government and threatened to destroy the nation’s credit.

  Project the Tea Party backward. Suppose those radicals were in office in 2008–9, when the financial crisis morphed into a recession. Almost certainly they would have blocked the policies that prevented “the worst recession since the Great Depression” from turning into a second Great Depression—President George W. Bush’s loan program to prop up the tottering banking system and President Barack Obama’s $800 billion stimulus to revive the economy.

  Now project the Tea Party roadblock forward: In the ne
xt recession, the federal cavalry won’t be coming to rescue the economy.

  That’s the situation I faced in 1994. The nation was slowly emerging from recession. Boston was still mired in its worst slump since the 30s, having lost 25,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs in the 80s and 75,000 jobs of all kinds since 1988. The economy needed action, but Washington wouldn’t act. In the 1992 election campaign, candidate Bill Clinton promised to restore growth by deficit spending on infrastructure. But after his spending plan bogged down in Congress, President Clinton made deficit reduction his top economic priority. Boston was on its own. “How the public sector can help stimulate economic growth is the crucial question facing the next mayor,” said the Reverend Charles Stith, a respected voice of the African American community.

  Over the next three years Boston ran an experiment with lessons for post-Washington America: Unable to go into deficit by cutting taxes or increasing spending, the federal cures for recessions, can a city government stimulate prosperity on its own?

  Politically, Boston was testing a proposition stated by a local authority on “urban affairs”: “Mayors just aren’t important anymore.” We’d see about that.

  The week before the 1993 election, looking back on my months as acting mayor and ahead to my first term, I said: “We have taken positive action in virtually every area of government affecting people’s lives. . . . Come November 3rd—the day after you elect me as mayor—the city of Boston will begin a new era in which the needs of families are given the highest priority.” Participation in a growing economy was among the highest priorities for Boston families.

  “If we can create an economic climate in the city that creates jobs,” I said after taking office, “a lot of other problems in the city will take care of themselves.”

  The mantra of city economic strategy should be: Build it and they will work. Buildings create jobs. Blue-collar jobs in constructing them. White-collar jobs when they are finished.

  Consider this: Between 1947 and 1964, only 27,745 jobs in financial and professional services were created in Boston. Between 1964 and 1968, Boston gained 32,000 such jobs. That’s more jobs in four years than in the previous seventeen. Something changed in 1964. What? The Prudential Tower, Boston’s first skyscraper, was completed. Build it and they will work. (During my tenure, Boston added the equivalent of a new Prudential Tower every other year for a total of 13 million square feet of office space.)

  Clinton’s turn toward deficit reduction lowered interest rates. That encouraged developers to borrow and build. But they could build anywhere. Why in Boston? I had to show them. How? First, by erasing a question mark over the city’s fiscal future. Second, by launching a major project to generate economic activity.

  . . . the most important thing I will do as mayor.

  —from a City Hall press conference in April 1996

  Starting in the 1970s, 128 cash-strapped cities, including Kansas City, St. Louis, Detroit, and Philadelphia, closed their public hospitals. By 2005, 40 percent of the country’s remaining public hospitals were predicted to follow them. That wasn’t an option in Boston. Not with me as mayor.

  Boston City Hospital was a precious social legacy. Established to fight cholera in the nineteenth century, built up to serve the poor by James Michael Curley in the twentieth century, by the dawn of the twenty-first century BCH was in trouble. To save this great public hospital, I had to privatize it.

  To progressives, “privatize” is an ugly word. Government is about helping people, not making money from helping them. That was my belief. Still, to preserve its mission for the new century, I had to risk being remembered as the mayor who sold “the City.”

  My first month in office I toured the new $170 million Boston City Hospital. It had taken ten years to build and even before admitting its first patient was obsolete. Yet, to pay off its FHA mortgage, Boston was on the hook for $20 million a year for decades. Closing it made no economic sense.

  Changing patterns of health care were working against BCH:

  With fewer illnesses requiring hospital stays, hospitals were competing for a shrinking number of patients.

  Competition was intense in Boston, the health care capital of America, where major independent hospitals were merging.

  As they merged, they offered more comprehensive procedures, becoming more attractive to insurers and HMOs competing to offer customers total care.

  Under national health insurance—then “Clintoncare”—instead of being “steered” to public hospitals, the poor would be enrolled in health care plans specifying which hospitals to use. Compared to the merged private hospitals, BCH had little to offer those plans. It would lose its patient base to the private competition.

  In March 1994 a commission on the future of BCH recommended merging it with its next-door neighbor in the South End, Boston University Medical Center Hospital, and that “dramatic reductions be made in costs in order to save the municipal hospital.”

  How would it work? I asked. No one could tell me. Public hospitals had been shut. Some had been sold. None had been merged with a private hospital. We’d be stepping off into the public policy void. The merger was what I called it—an opportunity for “Boston to make history.”

  I appointed former state senator Patricia McGovern to lead a second commission to coordinate the merger. “The commission’s job is to get the two hospitals to the altar and actually perform the ceremony,” the Globe commented. “Within two years, and preferably sooner, the hospitals are to consolidate—merge, unite, become one—legally and operationally. . . . Everyone understands that huge difficulties complicate such a drastic move.”

  “The biggest obstacle to this merger are the unions,” I said. BCH was heavily unionized, University Hospital less so. “We have to make [the unions] understand what happens if we can’t do the merger. I understand there is fear that jobs will be wiped out. We’ll do the best we can to preserve as many jobs as we can. But if we don’t do it, we may lose all the jobs.”

  “Market forces dictate the need to merge if the two hospitals are to remain viable,” said Sam Tyler, director of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, an independent budget watchdog. “Either one cannot survive standing alone.”

  The numbers told the story. BCH admitted 14,000 patients annually and University Hospital 10,000. Only as a single hospital with 24,000 admissions could it compete with Boston hospitals admitting 20,000 to 35,000 patients.

  A second obstacle was the difference in the “client groups” served by each institution. Less than 50 percent of the patients at University Hospital were from Boston, compared to 90 percent of BCH patients. Five percent of University Hospital’s patients were poor and only 4 percent were uninsured. Many of BCH’s patients were poor and 45 percent were uninsured.

  Treating patients regardless of their ability to pay, BCH provided half the indigent care in Boston, and a quarter of it in Massachusetts. Would the merged hospital continue that mission? Would it serve Boston residents or suburbanites? The merger’s announced purpose was to cut costs, but could that be achieved without cutting services to those needing them the most? Yes, yes, and yes, we answered critics who raised such questions. But with no experience to guide us, how could we be sure?

  A third obstacle was the public relations embarrassment that BCH had a $4 million surplus for 1993 while University Hospital showed a $9 million loss. If BCH was doing so well, why merge it with its failing neighbor? The unions pushed that talking point hard. But by the end of the century, BCH was expected to run an operating deficit of up to $7 million. And every 1 percent drop in patients would add another million. That was one of my talking points. After a year of exposure to the arguments, the public was moving toward support of the merger. I’d been mayor long enough for people to take my measure. They trusted me not to sell out the poor.

  To survive, hospitals need patients. So when eight Boston community health centers representing 200,000 patients agreed to make the new merged hospital their principal aff
iliation, it was a huge step forward. We outbid the private hospitals competing for their patients, promising to contribute $6 million to the health centers for “capital improvements.” University Hospital was led by Elaine ­Ullian, a longtime friend. We easily agreed to kick in $3 million each.

  The proposed merger had an unexpected dividend: Standard & Poor’s awarded Boston its best-ever credit rating. “We thought the highest risk for the city would be to do nothing with City Hospital,” an executive from S&P’s Boston office explained. “Clearly they are taking steps to avoid being left in a difficult position with no options.” The merger was not about constructing new buildings; but acting today to fix tomorrow signaled that my administration was businesslike and development-friendly. Over the next decade the high bond rating helped the city refinance $600 million in debt, saving taxpayers nearly $35 million and lowering borrowing costs for road repairs, new buildings, and other capital improvements.*

  So much for the good news of 1995. My commission delivered the bad news: A private corporation had to manage the hospital “to free [it] from civil service rules, city purchasing requirements and much red tape.” Otherwise costs could not be contained. BCH’s 131-year history as a public institution was over.

  It was a “gotcha” moment for the unions, who had been warning that in any merger “the City” would be swallowed up. The signs members carried at demonstrations—KEEP THE PUBLIC IN HEALTH CARE and STOP THE HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF BCH—had a new bite.