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For Michael Flaherty, a chance to relive 2009 mayoral campaign

City councilors today overwhelmingly supported the idea of bringing back the Boston Police mounted unit, disbanded as a cost-saving measure in 2009.

Councilors, including at-large Councilor Steve Murphy, who made the proposal, said cops on horses are just better at patrolling certain types of large gatherings and that they are excellent at public relations and as ice breakers between police and citizens - who doesn't love horses?

But while Murphy quietly said a return of a mounted unit would fix a budget battle the council lost in 2009 and that its return has the backing of current Police Commissioner William Evans, at-large Councilor Michael Flaherty rose, twice, to tear into former Mayor Tom Menino.

"Eliminating the mounted unit was shortsighted and misguided," he started. And the mean side of the Menino administration came out when it reassigned and demoted several members of the mounted unit who spoke in favor of the horses he said.

After other councilors spoke in favor of the proposal - which now goes for a public hearing before any formal action, Flaherty rose to speak in favor of it again. He said the city might even be able to get some of the former mounted-unit horses back, because the officers who rode them have maintained ties with the farms that took them in. And then he complained again about what he said was mistreatment of those officers by Menino:

"It was a complete travesty - mean spirited and completely unnecessary," he said.

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Comments

The police just got a huge raise, do we really need to spend all that money for them to have pets too?

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How many horses were sent to the glue factory for pissing off the mayor? What did they do to deserve this fate?

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He retaliated against the officers. Veteran officers got put on punishment desk duty.

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neighed, they were really just mocking him!

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Remember when Menino bullied the unions into accepting a wage freeze? The cops basically told him to pound it, because it was rightly suspected that he was hiding money. That was in January 09, the BPD mounted unit was gone in June.

Regarding the hidden money: The unofficial story is that the Firefighters Union hired a forensic accountant to present evidence to the arbitrator during the last contract dispute. The city was shown to have been crying poor mouth and lying to the arbitrator regarding it's finances, which is part of the reason that contract went the way it did. Of course, those arbitration proceedings were confidential, and it wasn't in Menino's interest to leak that story, so it was never reported.

You may, remember this story from the Phoenix.

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Hey what happened to the links?

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The links were still there, but not visible because they were wrapped around blank spaces, rather than text. I grabbed the text you had in the "title" statements.

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Thanks, I don't really HTML.

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Boston really F'd up that one.

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a losing mayoral campaign. Does settling for city council make you Tonto to Steve Murphy's Lone Ranger.

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