The Convention Center Authority convened a panel of the city’s great and the good some months ago to determine if it should go forward with an expansion plan that included a publicly subsidized 1,000 room hotel. It floated a trial balloon over the weekend regarding that hotel and the response has not been great. The BBJ’s Craig Douglas does a back-of-the-envelope calculation and comes up with 1,350 privately-supplied hotel rooms in various states of planning and development. He notes that these projects, all under the leadership of various well-connected developers, are experiencing some sort of delay and questions how an additional 1,000 rooms (all benefiting from a public subsidy) improves the situation. I take a different tack in examining the […]

Decidedly not a Pioneer topic, but one that is on the minds of so many. What are the major pathways for the radiation released from the Fukushima nuclear reactors? See for yourself, with ranges of radioactivity color-coded by region. This map is updated regularly.

Everyone outside of the Dome knows that Massachusetts is in a race for jobs. When you are in a race, you run the whole race. You don’t just show up for the flag waving. If you listen to Governor Patrick talk about how Fidelity did not give the state an opportunity to “compete for jobs,” I am sorry. Fidelity has been competing all along, trying to beat its competition. It’s the state that has for the longest time turned a blind eye toward financial services, one of its largest sectors, and more specifically toward one of its largest employers. State House News [subscription required] reports that: Back from his 10-day trade mission to Israel and Great Britain, Gov. Deval Patrick […]

The Globe is doing a full ‘package’ on the Boston school lottery (a subject near and dear to my heart, see here and here). They’ve done a nice job explaining the very complex lottery and selecting a number of different families to profile (although the West Roxbury family seems like a reach — the pastor of a start-up Evangelical church?). It appears that this series will continue over the next two weeks as lottery results go out to each of the families. A few observations: 1) How many receive their top 3 choices? The introductory Globe piece has graphic (apparently unavailable on-line) that emphasizes the how the vast majority of applicants get one of their choices (but those who don’t […]

UPDATE: His TED talk just went up. Well done overall and worth watching. But its not really his fault. Mr. Gates is getting a lot of press for some recent comments about state spending at TED. In conjunction with the presentation, his foundation has set up a nifty budget analysis tool. If you look at MA, we look pretty bad – 47th in nation on K-12 spending, etc. But our poor showing is driven by the underlying data source, NASBO’s state expenditure guide. In it, we’ve got a $47b state budget (versus a roughly $30b operating budget) while other states’ are reporting numbers much closer to their operating budget numbers. I think we reported a gross number while other state’s […]

As the Governor continues his march through the quasi-publics (many of which have taken him a full term to gain control over), it is worth mentioning two key points that were raised in the compensation review done by UMASS’ Steve Crosby. First, the report emphasizes that, for all the kerfluffle raised by the various quasi-public boards about independent studies and ‘market compensation’ rates, a troubling number of these hires came from the local market. In the words of the study: “..with almost no exceptions, the individuals hired to run these agencies are hired locally and not from a national pool. Does it make sense to use national standards and then hire locally?” Next is a point that I made in […]