Gov. Patrick’s Costly New Regs
If you are in the development business in Boston, you probably know me by now.
But in case you need a primer, here it is.
I spent nearly 15 years reporting and writing about anything and everything related to the commercial real estate market and development. I got my start in business reporting for Banker & Tradesman in the mid-1990s. I later went on to the Boston Business Journal and after that the Boston Herald, where I spent nearly a decade covering everything from the construction of the city’s new convention center to Tommy’s Tower, Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s fantasy plan for a 1,000 foot skyscraper.
I left the Herald this past fall to launch my own freelance writing business. One of my gigs is writing the Commercial Interests column for B&T. Now I am adding a blog to go along with the column.
If you want to find out what’s really going on around town when it comes to development, check in here and on the B&T website regularly. I play fair but this can be a hard business. If politics are a blood sport in Boston, so is development.
So let’s kick things off.
It’s just wonderful the Charles River is finally clean after decades of being an open sewer.
But if it comes to the choice of killing more jobs in a bad economy or having a river so clean you can bend down and drink from it on a hot day, I’ll choose jobs.
But Gov. Deval Patrick sees things differently. He wants to take river cleaning to a new level and stop stormwater from running off parking lots and pavement and into the Charles River and its tributaries.
In fact, the governor has effectively expanded this controversial initiative to the point where it covers most of the state, well beyond the sluggish Charles.
Of course, you can guess who will end up paying for it. The mandate requires building owners and developers to pay for expensive new paving and infrastructure.
NAIOP Massachusetts warns the new regs, now under review, could cost local developers hundreds of millions if not billions in additional compliance costs.
Ideally, state environmental regulators would just love it if everyone with sizable parking lots, from office building owners to factory operators, embraced the new rules. The regs are a little more limited than that, but not much more so, kicking in not just with new projects, but with modest plans to expand current lots as well.
A typical business with a five-acre parking lot that wants to repave a small portion of it, say 5 percent, could be forced to shell out as much as $450,000, NAIOP contends, citing recent private sector research.
Say goodbye to another four or five jobs, I guess.
Tags: Gov. Patrick, NAIOP