Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Change is a sign of life

So said the moderator at tonights meeting in Chinatown at the "Chinatown Tomorrow: Visions and Goals 2010" forum that was attended by about 100 local residents. If this is true, then our local political institutions are nearly dead.

We broke up into individual groups to talk about what is good, what is bad and how to improve Chinatown. People definitely felt that they had not received their fair share of development promises, and as one woman said to me: "I've learned to not trust the BRA".

There was something very odd about the circumstances of the meeting to me however. The meeting was being run by Taintor & Associates for a group called the Chinatown Gateway Coalition. They want to redo the Master Plan for Chinatown in 2010, after it was redone in 2000 and in 1990.

I asked where the funding for this group came from to work on this revised Master Plan and I was told it was from an anonymous source! Definitely something strange (to me) going on. An anonymous group is funding some urban planners made up in part with former city officials to craft a Master Plan for Chinatown and they are in talks with the BRA? Can anyone initiate talks with the BRA about rezoning their section of the City? Certainly not very transparent.

Will Boston ever have open, clean government processes?

No comments: