Partners knew it would take a
beating from Mayor Tom Menino, who had been pushing them for months to relocate
the employees to a site in Roxbury. And
so it did: on Dec. 6, Menino
body-slammed the kings of our health care world on the front page of the Boston
Globe.
“I’m very disappointed,” he said.
“Partners has an obligation to this city, where they have acres and acres of
tax-exempt property. This could have
been their opportunity to help revitalize Roxbury. Every time they had a problem, they called me
and I was there for them. The social
conscience has gone out of Partners.
This is all about their bottom line.”
Menino leaves office in less than
a month; his ability to wreak vengeance on anybody is extremely limited. Partners knew it could ride out a storm
stirred up by this lame duck.
(That Partners was able to inflict
this pain precisely because he’s in no position to retaliate will torment
Menino no end. Like that of all good
politicians, his life has been a never-ending quest for the upper hand.)
Partners recognized other
advantages, as well, in taking their best shot at a minimally painful news
rollout now: it’s after the Boston mayoral election and before the new mayor
takes office.
Under no circumstances would
Partners have allowed the Somerville story to become an issue in the Boston mayor’s
race, when two fully loaded candidates could have outdone each other in the
outrage department.
Regarding the winner of that
race, Mayor-elect Marty Walsh, Partners probably hoped he’d be so busy planning
the transition and assembling his administrative team he would not have the
time and energy in December to take a major bite out of their backsides. A reasonable hope.
Also, Partners knew that, if it
made the announcement on Somerville in early December, it would give Walsh a
month to settle down and calmly assess the downside of going to war against the
largest group of hospitals and related health care enterprises in
Massachusetts. The Partners board, for
example, is a who’s who of the smartest, most successful and most influential
people in Greater Boston.
Why, hello there, Anne Finucane
and Jim Manzi!
This is not to say that the Mayor
of Boston has to avoid taking Partners on or that he’s bound to lose such a
fight, only that the start of a new administration, when a mayor is getting his
bearings and trying to establish a positive vision for the next four years, may
not be an auspicious time for it.
The Mayor of Boston has screws
enough to turn on all those Partners’ thumbs, as Menino demonstrated whenever
he got the urge to talk about more “community benefits” and payments in lieu of
taxes (PILOT) from this and other Boston non-profits.
Partners put Menino in the
rearview mirror and the ball in Walsh’s court on Dec. 5. Now it is waiting, no doubt nervously, to see
how Walsh will swing.
Shirley Leung wrote a good column
on this topic today on the Business page of the Globe: “Is Somerville gain really a Boston loss?” It seemed to indicate that Walsh is taking
his sweet time in deciding what to do next.
“You don’t want to lose 4,000
jobs out of the city of Boston. I’m not happy about it,” Leung quoted Walsh. “When I talk about
regionalization, I don’t talk about it from taking one business from one city
to the other. I talk about attracting
new businesses to a region. There is a
very big difference here. I wish
Partners made a different decision.”
Maybe those will be Walsh’s final
words in public on the issue. It
wouldn’t be a bad way to leave it behind him. It’s not as if there are people marching every
day on city hall demanding that Partners build its new offices in Boston. This has been kind of a manufactured crisis
from the beginning. No new jobs are
involved in the move to Somerville. Partners is merely consolidating a bunch of
offices in one location, 10 minutes by subway from downtown Boston.
Maybe Walsh has decided it
would be good to keep Partners in suspense until well into his first year in
office, or later.
There’s an advantage in his
holding his fire until the day he really needs something important, say a
five-figure, multi-year commitment to a new program benefiting a large Walsh
voting bloc. Then he can dispatch to
the Partners board room an emissary who’ll have a psychological
advantage. (When you’re the mayor of what we like to think of as a "world-class city," the
messy stuff is best left to others.)
“You know, the mayor could have
killed you guys on that Somerville office thing,” the emissary might say. “But did he do that, even when Tom Menino –
Tom Menino, the most beloved mayor in the history of this city! -- was screaming
for your scalps? No. No. No. He
deliberately chose not to make your
lives more difficult. Now he needs you
to make life a little easier for the good people of Boston.”
If Partners improbably declines,
Walsh can always reach for the PILOT thumbscrew.
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