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Your recent article regarding the upcoming preliminary election for mayor of Boston, inaccurately portrays my proposal for the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), the city’s planning and development agency. If elected mayor, I would dismantle the quasi-public BRA and replace it with the creation of two new separate city departments that will be responsible for planning and economic/workforce development, respectively. For too long, the BRA has let developers steamroll through our neighborhoods without community support and without providing justification for how projects fit into any long-term vision for our city. At the same time, the city must improve its efforts to sustain and expand our small-businesses and start-ups, which are key to revitalizing our communities by filling empty storefronts, creating jobs, and jumpstarting our local economy. By creating two new public agencies that are amenable to residents’ best interests, we will finally have the accountability and rationality needed to strengthen all of Boston’s neighborhoods.Michael F. Flaherty
Candidate for Mayor
Justice deserved
Regarding “The Punch That Took Two Lives”: there’s a scene in the movie Bad Boys where Sean Penn’s character is discussing the death that landed him in jail. “It was an accident,” he says. The parole officer looks right through him and says, “No, it wasn’t. The way you were going, sooner or later you would have killed someone.” As the district attorney said, the only real tragedy in this case is that Shon McHugh wasn’t tried as an adult. Joe Donovan had a chance to plea and get 15 years. Looking back, he should realize it was a mistake to forgo the deal, not because of the reduced sentence he would have ultimately received, but because he was guilty as hell and should have, even then, realized it was a good offer.
Tim Smith
Boston
The only true injustice in this story is that McHugh isn’t serving a life term, as well. And while it’s certainly appropriate to analyze the legal issues regarding Donovan’s incarceration, please don’t waste our time with a load of touchy-feely bullshit. It doesn’t matter that Donovan had broken up with his girlfriend that day, that he felt “insecure” in front of his friends or pressured to live up to the example of his “rugged” grandfather. Should every testosterone-addled crybaby with daddy issues be excused when they beat the shit out of innocent passers-by? Tough crap, Donovan, you screwed up.
Rich Feinberg
Boston
Gunning for the Governor
Deval Patrick should definitely be re-elected. He is trying to fix the problems that have been growing under 16 years with Republican governors and a selfish legislature. The Big Dig and the dysfunctional “universal health-care plan” are two of the many problems he inherited. I hope he is effective in tying gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker to the Big Dig and our rising health-care costs. Your editorial was great.
Cynthia Bauman
Cambridge
Correction
In our August 7 feature “For Those About To Lock,” we incorrectly stated that locksport hobbyist Jon King discovered a way to bump a lock made by the manufacturer Medeco. The technique he developed actually involved picking and decoding.
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