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By adamg - 3/28/24 - 1:23 pm

Mayor Wu said today she will seek state legislation that would let the city tax owners of commercial and industrial property at a higher rate for four years, should official assessments being conducted this year show a precipitous drop in the assessed value of downtown office space in particular due to work shifts caused by the pandemic. Read more.

By adamg - 3/27/24 - 5:33 pm

The Boston City Council today approved a measure to set up a planning department as the first major step towards abolishing the BPDA and giving the mayor and the council - and residents more of a direct say in how Boston grows. Read more.

By adamg - 3/27/24 - 1:08 pm
Giselle Byrd, executive director of Theater Offensive, addresses councilors

Giselle Byrd, executive director of Theater Offensive, addresses councilors.

City councilors voted unanimously today to support the trans community in Boston and across the country on Sunday's Transgender Day of Visibility. Read more.

By adamg - 3/26/24 - 4:30 pm

Lawyers for Civil Rights and the law firm of Fick & Marx today announced a $4.7 million settlement of the civil-rights lawsuit they had filed on behalf of Hope Coleman, who called 911 to request an ambulance to transport her son to a hospital to get treatment for his mental illness, but who was instead fatally show by Boston Police officers outside his home on Oct. 30, 2016. Read more.

By adamg - 3/22/24 - 9:26 am

CommonWealth Beacon reports Boston has had just two murders so far this year, compared to at ten for the same period last year - and that the number of gunshot victims is also down, by 64%.

By adamg - 3/20/24 - 12:49 pm

The City Council voted 11-2 today to seek permission from the state legislature to change the date on which councilors and the mayor are inaugurated following an election from "the first Monday" in January to "the first weekday after the second day in January." Read more.

By adamg - 3/13/24 - 1:11 pm
FitzGerald

The City Council will consider a proposal to grant handicap parking placards to pregnant people in their third trimester or who have given birth within the past six months.
Read more.

By adamg - 3/7/24 - 5:41 pm

CommonWealth Beacon reports on the situation at "Boston's NPR news station."

By adamg - 3/6/24 - 2:18 pm

The Boston City Council today unanimously approved a measure in which the city would shift federal Covid relief money originally targeted to increasing the composting of garbage to leasing a 5,500-square-food cold-storage facility to give food pantries and soup kitchens a central place to store refrigerated foods - including food "rescued" from restaurants and markets. Read more.

By adamg - 3/6/24 - 1:36 pm
Louijeune pulls an Oprah and puts a jar of honey under every other councilor's desk

Louijeune pulls an Oprah, tells all the councilors to look under their desks for some honey.

The Boston City Council today unanimously approved a measure that will make it easier for residents to raise bees.

By adamg - 3/5/24 - 3:18 pm

Boston Police report home-owning seniors are being targeted by larcenous alleged paving contractors who use pressure tactics to try to sign them up for what seem like cheap paving or masonry jobs that turn into expensive money-pit operations. Read more.

By adamg - 3/5/24 - 9:33 am
Murphy

Kelly Garrity reports that Councilor Erin Murphy (at large) is going to run this fall for the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County's clerk job that Maura Doyle recently announced she is retiring from. Read more.

By adamg - 3/4/24 - 11:53 am

The Public Interest Legal Foundation of Arlington, VA, which is convinced large numbers of unregistered people are voting, today dropped its lawsuit demanding a data dump of all of Boston's voter registration records, just four days after it filed it.

The group's filing, in US District Court in Boston, does not explain the change of heart, but says it was doing so "voluntarily," which means it's reserving the right to re-file it at any moment.

By adamg - 3/1/24 - 4:21 pm

The City Council this week approved a measure under which the city will hire two companies to install 250 chargers along Boston streets to let people without their own driveways top up their battery-powered cars. Read more.

By adamg - 3/1/24 - 11:07 am

Update: Although the group has a history of making claims that voter rolls are full of unregistered voters - to the point of publishing names and contact info of voters it claims are illegal, even if they are sometimes not - the group's complaint does not make any specific claims about the nature of Boston's registered voters, so the story has been edited to reflect that. Also, the group has dropped the complaint.

A Virginia-based group that claims it's only interested in ensuring fair elections yesterday sued the Boston Elections Department to try to gain access to the city's voter rolls. Read more.

By adamg - 2/28/24 - 10:27 am
Boston tree map

Fronm the Boston tree map.

All of Boston's street trees, mapped.

The data comes from the city's inventory of both street trees and trees in parks, which is available for download as spreadsheets.

More info on Boston's "urban forest" efforts.

By adamg - 2/21/24 - 10:21 am

A housing advocacy group today sued a series of Boston-area landlords and brokers it says violated state law by refusing to consider prospective tenants who said they had Section 8 or other government housing vouchers. Read more.

By adamg - 2/15/24 - 12:38 pm

MBTA General Manager Phil Eng says the T's subway lines will be free between 3 and 7 p.m. to try to make up for this morning's three-line disaster, which he blamed on some sort of failure in a National Grid "feeder cable" supplying power to the T via North Station. Read more.

By adamg - 2/15/24 - 7:55 am
T pain chart by Bacon Doughnut

Update: T blames National Grid feeder cable.

The MBTA reports the Orange, Green and Blue lines all died this morning due to some sort of power and signal problem. The power is back, but trains are moving like molasses (in the traditional sense, not the Boston sense). Read more.

By adamg - 2/14/24 - 2:56 pm

Councilor Ben Weber (Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury) today withdrew his proposed resolution calling for a negotiated Gaza ceasefire to let him rewrite it so that it doesn't cause "more division" rather than lessen it. Read more.

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