Only someone who doesn’t know Aloisi, a lifelong resident of
East Boston, would take him lightly. Here
are some of the things you’ll find on his curriculum vitae:
·
- Former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation
- Former member, board of directors, Massachusetts Port Authority
- Former member and chairman, Massachusetts Turnpike Authority
- Former Massachusetts assistant attorney general
- Graduate, Boston College and Boston College Law School
- Holder of graduate degree in history from Harvard University
- Former chief legal counsel to Massachusetts Department of Revenue
- Former director, Goulston & Storrs, a Boston law firm
- Author of three well-received books on Boston history and politics
- Senior vice president, Kanaan Consulting US (KCUS, Inc.)
This is not on his CV because you don’t talk this way about
yourself unless you suffer from terminal egomania, but I can say it about him:
Aloisi is a public intellectual of the first rank.
In a recent opinion piece published online by Commonwealth
Magazine, Aloisi said his support for those trying to stop the Suffolk Downs
casino “has everything to do with my view that the process surrounding gaming
on this site has been rigged, that the will of the people as expressed at the
ballot box is being ignored or given short shrift, and that the people of East
Boston are once again being dealt a bad hand by those who would put profit
before people.”
Ouch. When Aloisi
shed a younger man’s clothes, he must have dropped the diction of diplomacy,
too. I have to wonder how many current
and former members of the legislature reached for their Valium after reading that. (“Jimmy, how could you?”)
In Commonwealth Magazine, Aloisi described the progress East
Boston has made in recent decades and said that that part of Boston, in many
ways, has become “a model of what a multi-ethnic, mixed-income, urban
environment ought to be.” He then
lamented:
“This progress is being directly jeopardized by the prospect
of a casino at Suffolk Downs. What’s
worse, when East Boston voters resoundingly voted against the casino, the
immediate response (of doubtful legality) was to fashion an electoral
bait-and-switch by offering a supposedly ‘Revere-only’ casino site. The Revere-only proposal is an insult to East
Boston’s intelligence, not simply because such an outcome is not practically
feasible (unless the owners are prepared to accept a perpetual restriction on
the use of their East Boston land for non-casino uses), but also because it
proposes to relocate horse stables and highways on the East Boston side of
their site. Imagine that you are the
mayor of Boston, and you have a 100-acre, largely undeveloped site in your city
that is two minutes away from an international airport and adjacent to two MBTA
stations and an urban wetland. And the
owner tells you he wants to use the land for horse stables and a roadway system
to feed into another city. You might
throw that person out of your office, or at least question his sanity. But that is exactly what Suffolk Downs is proposing
to do on this site.”
If you want to read the entire article by Aloisi, go to:
Woe is the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. When it grants the single available casino
license for Eastern Massachusetts, the commission will have to choose between
two cities, Revere and Everett, which badly need the cash and prizes a casino
will bring -- two cities enamored of their respective, proposed casino
operators, Mohegan Sun and Wynn Resorts. This is a fight card with two underdogs on it.
For a long time, Suffolk Downs was the only site in the
running for the eastern license. It
looked like a sure thing. Then Steve Wynn
arrived like Patton’s army in Germany.
He grabbed an option on the old Monsanto chemical factory site on the
Mystic River in Everett and captured the hearts Everett’s elected officials and
citizens in less time than it takes to get married in Vegas.
East Boston surprised most of the pundits, not to mention
the legislators who crafted the casino-enabling legislation, when it voted this
past November against a casino at Suffolk Downs on the same day that Revere voted
for it.
With its back to the wall, Suffolk Downs quickly redesigned
its proposal and put the casino entirely on the Revere side of the property. Revere embraced the concept because it would
mean millions more for it than the original deal, which had the casino
straddling the East Boston-Revere site and tilting heavily toward East
Boston’s favor, revenue-wise.
Of course, the new plan enraged East Boston. The “No Eastie Casino” forces quickly massed
again on the battlefield of public opinion, where they remain today, defiant
and spoiling for more action. One sees
in them the kind of spirit that only an upset victory over better equipped
forces unleashes. Jim Aloisi embodies
that spirit in its most articulate form.
This is like 1941 and he’s their Winston Churchill.
I don’t envy the members of the Gaming Commission: Steve
Crosby, Gayle Cameron, Enrique Zuniga, Jim McHugh and Bruce Stebbins. No matter which way they vote on the eastern
license, they’re going to make a lot of people angry. For a very long time. Maybe permanently.
Not that I’m in favor of people ducking their
responsibilities, but the commissioners could always decide this thing on two
cuts of the deck. Suffolk gets the first
cut because it was the first in the competition; Wynn gets the second; high
card wins. Makes sense for officials in
a gambling-friendly jurisdiction, no?
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