Massport's latest insult

By Brian McGrory, Globe Staff, 4/13/2001

A few years ago, some restaurant owners near the Big Dig complained that the
construction was driving them out of business. So the Central Artery brain
trust had a nifty idea: Print logos of the establishments on shirts and hats
and send them around town, then mail fliers to potential diners.

Most of the brochures were returned because of outdated mailing lists, and
no one seems to know whether the shirts did any good. The most memorable
part of the plan was the price: a stunning $1.3 million.

Money has never been an object with the Central Artery, which spent $750,000
building a Holocaust Memorial in Boston. Is a Holocaust Memorial a worthy
idea? Absolutely. Should an overextended public works project fund it?
Absolutely not.

Then there was the fish startling program, which involved the Big Dig
spending $1 million to scare our finned friends away from the area Ted
Williams Tunnel was being placed. A group of 9-year-olds with a bucket of
pebbles could have accomplished the same thing for free.

I bring this up after meeting Maureen Colangelo in the ParkEx lot in East
Boston, a bland ribbon of concrete wedged into a neighborhood that looks
tired even on the brightest spring day. Cars flash past on the elevated
highway as jets from Logan Airport thunder overhead.

After years of state attempts, Massport has bought the airport satellite
parking lot for $75 million from a partnership that includes convicted felon
Richard Goldberg. In the past, Goldberg took elaborate - read: illegal -
measures to drag every nickel from the government that he could.

Massport will now transfer the 10 acres to the state highway department,
which will use it as a staging area for Big Dig construction, then convert
most of it to a park. The state will, in turn, give Massport a parcel
adjacent to the airport.

Everyone gets what they want. Goldberg gets a fortune. The Big Dig gets its
land. Massport gets more airport space. East Boston gets a new park.

Well, not quite everyone.

Colangelo, of Revere, was walking through the lot this week wearing her
bright blue ParkEx windbreaker, wondering about a future that faded into the
fine print of a complicated real estate deal. A single mother, she's worked
for the company for nearly two decades as a dispatcher, and for the past
four years has perfect attendance on a shift that begins at 5 a.m. Come May
15, she's out of a job.

''I have a son going into college next year,'' she says. ''I thought I'd
retire here. I'm 46 years old and this is all I've done for 19 years. Where
am I supposed to go now?''

Colangelo is one of 37 workers who are being turned out on the streets of an
uncertain economy with an average of a month of severance pay and no health
insurance. Even when they find a new job, all their seniority is gone.

I asked Massport officials if, as they made a convict wealthy for life, they
thought to offer ParkEx employees positions in their notoriously bloated
agency. The answer: No.

I asked the Big Dig if they were planning to offer mitigation to the
displaced employees in the form of money or training. ''That was a buyout
from Massport,'' said Sean O'Neill. ''We had nothing to do with that.''

Good one. While rich criminals get richer off the state's dime, while
companies like Bechtel pad their profits with multibillion-dollar overruns,
while millions of dollars in taxpayer money are spent protecting fish,
building monuments, and buying T-shirts, the hard workers of a little lot in
the middle of East Boston get nothing more than the government shaft.

Is this what Massport director Ginny Buckingham intended when she vowed to
change the culture of her agency? Is this what Jane Swift means by more
family-friendly policies?

Yet again, the rich get richer, and people like Colangelo pay with their
jobs. It's the American way.

This story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 4/13/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

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