Just over half a year since a bribery scandal rocked Boston’s Zoning Board of Appeal, Mayor Marty Walsh said Monday the city is "moving forward" with reforms to the ZBA.
On Monday, Walsh signed an executive order aimed at bringing more transparency and accountability to the embattled agency, including new ethics restrictions to prevent conflicts of interest and requirements that more of the ZBA’s decisions and process be posted online and made accessible to the public.
But not everyone is ready to put the scandal in the past.
Boston City Councilor Michelle Wu has criticized the Walsh administration’s investigations into the agency, and is contemplating calling for Council hearings on the scandal and the administration’s response to it.
“The key questions of what corruption specifically happened, who enabled it, and who knew about it need to be front and center in order for us to restore trust in the agency and in the city,” Wu told WGBH News.
Councilor Lydia Edwards, who applauded Walsh’s executive order and has sponsored a home rule petition to bring additional reforms to the ZBA, said she shares some of Wu’s concerns.
“It’s still not clear to anybody, including myself, why those things happened,” said Edwards, referring to the facts and events underlying the federal bribery charge.
The questions come after the Walsh administration on Monday released the second of two independent inquiries into the ZBA’s workings, commissioned by Walsh after a long-time city employee, John Lynch, pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges last September.
Lynch admitted to taking a $50,000 bribe from a developer in exchange for promising to try to swing a ZBA member to vote on the developer’s behalf regarding a property on H Street, in South Boston.
The charges did not say that Lynch succeeded, or even tried to sway any ZBA members; and no ZBA members, current or former, have been accused of wrongdoing.
But, according to the charges to which Lynch pleaded guilty, the developer in question did get what he wanted.
The developer of the H Street property had petitioned the ZBA for an extension of zoning relief, but the board voted to reject that request when the developer failed to show up to a hearing in March 2017. Normally, such a denial would mean the developer couldn't petition the board with the same request for at least one year. But at the ZBA's next hearing two weeks later, the H Street project mysteriously re-appeared on the ZBA’s docket. This time, the board approved the petition by unanimous vote.
Wu’s critique of the Walsh administration’s investigation of the bribery scandal surfaced Tuesday, during a Council hearing on Edwards’ home rule petition, as Wu questioned whether the Walsh administration had tried to investigate the basic details of the scandal.
Neither of the city's two reports on the ZBA found wrongdoing by board members or other city employee besides Lynch.
Thefirst report, by former prosecutor Brian Kelly and released in October, summarized interviews with ZBA members, staff and other key city employees. The report found no evidence of improper behavior by any "current" ZBA members or other city workers, but acknowledged that two former ZBA members declined interviews, including former member Craig Galvin. His real estate company, the report noted, was at the time the subject of an ongoing federal inquiry.
The second report, by the law firm Sullivan and Worcester, released Monday, contained recommendations for changes to make ZBA more transparent and more efficient and did not address the details laid out in the bribery charge.
Senior Walsh advisor John Towle defended both reports in Tuesday's Council hearing.
Towle said the second report was intended to provide a roadmap for structural and procedural changes to the ZBA – not investigate a crime.
The first report, Towle noted, did address the details underlying the bribery charge and found no evidence of wrongdoing by anyone other than Lynch.
“As for anything that happened with former members and things like that, I’m not sure that’s something any of us I think can fairly answer, or should,” Towle told Wu at Tuesday's meeting.
Wu said these answers didn’t satisfy her.
“It's hard for me, after these reviews are done, to hear this is the extent to which we've reviewed circumstances that are under federal investigation and a bribe was taken,” Wu responded to Towle.
“I don't want us to pretend that this will take care of the crisis of public trust," she said. "There was an incident of corruption that we still don't have answers on from both of these reviews.”
Among the unanswered questions Wu cited was how the H Street property at the heart of the bribery charges wound up reappearing on a ZBA agenda and coming up for a favorable vote after having been denied just weeks prior.
Wu also noted that that vote was noticeably missing from meeting minutes from that hearing.
Speaking with WGBH News later this week, Wu said she is considering holding a Council hearing on the facts underlying the bribery incident and the administration’s investigations.
“Every vote that the [ZBA] takes translates to money for somebody,” Wu said.
“And the two reviews and the very little information contained within them, that is unacceptable to be the ending point of the city’s efforts.”
