“Selfish.” That’s what Mayor Thomas M. Menino is calling office tower owners who are balking at forking over big money to tidy up troubled Downtown Crossing.

Yet just maybe out-of-town tower owners like Tishman and Equity Office actually have a better sense of where the true boundaries of Downtown Crossing actually are than Boston Tom, the Hub’s mayor-for-life.

I certainly have a hard time understanding how Downtown Crossing, as traditionally defined as the strip of stores along Washington Street, has suddenly leaped over to all the tall towers along Federal Street.

Just check out this map, drawn up by city officials, of the new business improvement district.

It was formed to essentially levy an additional tax to pay for everything from street cleaning to marketing for the battered shopping district, on life support since the Filene’s tower fiasco left a giant hole in the ground.

Interestingly, the city’s map of this new Downtown Crossing business district is not long and narrow as one might expect given all the stores and shops along Washington Street, the main boulevard, but sports a huge pot belly - one that just happens encompass a big chunk of the neighboring Financial District.

I checked the city’s map with a map of Downtown Crossing and its attractions on the website of the Downtown Crossing Partnership, which has played a key role in organizing the new business district. Now granted the map is for “shoppers’’ – but it shows the towers along Federal Street, looking over Post Office Square, as part of the Financial District.

It’s pretty clearly the map was drawn the way it is to include Federal Street. In Boston, that’s where the big money is, not Washington Street.

Gerrymandering anyone?

Everyone may simply have their eye on the wrong ball.

Clearly, the passing of Sen. Edward Kennedy has had a huge impact on the nation’s health care debate, though not exactly in the way the late senator would have envisioned.

But what executives around town are really talking about is what is going to happen to all the National Institutes of Health research funding that has made the Bay State a life sciences powerhouse.

Our bevy of research institutions and hospitals pull down billions each year in NIH grants – an amazing 13 percent of all that is awarded.

That, in turn, not only keeps our cutting edge researchers employed. It has also fueled a never ending building boom in the Longwood Medical Area and over in Cambridge as well.

That’s a lot of construction and real estate jobs.

But it was Kennedy, as chairman of the Senate’s powerful health committee, who helped bring home all that bacon.

Can newly elected Republican Sen. Scott Brown or Sen. John Kerry, now the states senior stateman and of course, a Democrat, fill the void Kennedy’s death has created?

Well, let’s use common sense here. Brown may be an adept campaigner, but he does not strike me as a technocrat who likes to get dirty with all the details. Kerry, for his part, has developed an expertise in foreign affairs.

Great if Afghanistan is your big concern, less so if you are worried about bread and butter issues like keeping our local life sciences industry humming.

Anyway, a lot of jobs depend on what happens on here.

“He was certainly very effective in making sure that we were able to attract a substantial amount of funds,’’ notes Bob Richards, president of Richards Barry Joyce and Partners, of Kennedy. “That absolutely has an impact on construction companies, architects, engineers and developers

Boston area developers already have their hands full desperately trying to keep projects on track amid the worst recession in generations.

Still, the one silver lining to the downturn has been a dramatic, 30 percent drop in construction prices. That could be just enough to push some projects into construction.

But wait, because even as construction costs go down, state officials and environmental activists are heaping on an array of tough new green building regs.

And developers brave enough to push ahead in this market may soon find their plans entangled in all sorts of costly green tape.

The latest darling of the Bay State’s save-the-earth-by-killing-all-our-jobs crowd is a new, “stretch’’ energy code passed by the Legislature this spring.

It allows local cities and towns to pass more stringent green building codes than the tough tones the state already requires.

And it could push up the cost of building a new home, never cheap around here, by another $8,000.

Kind of like the first-time buyer tax credit, in reverse.

All eyes are now on Cambridge which – big surprise – could become the first city in the state to up the ante here.

And it may be just a preview of what may soon be coming out the green-crazy Patrick Administration.

Later this fall, state environmental officials will roll out long-awaited regulations calling for expensive new stormwater runoff systems. The aim, to keep dirty water from running off the pavement into local waterways, is noble, but it could cost billions, warns NAIOP Massachusetts, which represents local developers.

The group fears the new rules will require the new systems anytime a hospital expands a parking lot or a developer puts up a new condo complex, no matter whether the Charles River is 100 feet or 100 miles away.

We’ll see, but it doesn’t look good.

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.