Kelly's heel

Is the city-council prez finally vulnerable? Plus, Menino runs into last-minute opposition in the State House.

by Ben Geman

Speculating about the decline of Boston City Council president Jimmy Kelly is almost a sport among political observers. Will the tenacious South Boston power broker someday be voted out by yuppies moving to the emerging waterfront? Will he be removed as president next January when fellow councilors finally decide he's too conservative to be the body's public face?

No one's sure. But there are signs that the power of the conservative councilor -- who just last year had the juice to stare down Mayor Tom Menino in a fight over the name of the city's new waterfront district -- may really be on the wane.

In the past several months, Kelly's been hurt by the ongoing flap over how much benefit Southie should reap from waterfront developers. He has defended an agreement that clearly favors Southie at the expense of other neighborhoods. Citywide, it's made him look parochial; at the same time, his defense of the deal hasn't necessarily boosted his standing in the neighborhood. A recent poll commissioned by the Boston Globe showed Kelly with just a 54 percent approval rating in South Boston.

That's probably one reason why several people who could mount credible races in next year's council elections -- credible enough to keep Kelly busy, anyway -- are mulling challenges.

One possibility is Paul Gannon. The 40-year-old attorney is a former state representative from South Boston who beat Michael Flaherty -- father of the current city councilor of the same name -- to win his seat in 1990. That proved to be the apex of his political career, however. In 1994, he was toppled in the primary by upstart Stephen Lynch, who today is the neighborhood's state senator. Now, Gannon is again testing the waters. According to one South Boston political insider, he has grown more visible in recent months, surfacing frequently at community forums.

"He's a name and he can raise money," says the source. "Who knows? No one thought that Flaherty could be beat, and he just caught him off-guard. And from what I understand, he might be trying to recapture that same magic in a bottle with Kelly." The Force hasn't been with Gannon for a while now, though. He did lose his seat to Lynch. And he lost two bids for an at-large city-council seat in 1995 and 1997.

Gannon says he may run but cautions that it's too early to decide anything. "I don't rule anything in or out," he says, reached at his West Broadway law office. Gannon is reluctant to criticize Kelly openly. But he does accuse the council president of blocking his efforts to participate in the South Boston Design Advisory Committee, a group that helps steer neighborhood development. "That's not what this town is all about," Gannon says. "We are all supposed to be working together and allowing people to participate in this process." Sounds like a campaign hook.

Other names that have surfaced include that of Martin Nee, the former head of the South Boston Neighborhood Development Corporation. Nee is a long-time housing advocate who's wondered aloud whether the South Boston Betterment Trust -- a group created largely by Southie pols to channel money from waterfront developers -- will build housing that would be available to lower-income renters. Another possible candidate is Thomas Tinlin, a high-ranking city transportation official who's part of Menino's South Boston political machinery.

Right now Kelly's support among die-hard Southie voters is still high enough to keep him in office, even in the face of a strong challenger. It's pretty tough to imagine Kelly losing his district at this point, and no one really knows what a successful challenge would look like: Kelly has held his Second District seat since it was created in 1983. But it's not impossible to imagine a scenario in which the influence of his old-line supporters would be dented. Southie, after all, is not Kelly's entire district -- he also represents the South End and Chinatown, and if there's a contested mayoral election next year, it could attract more voters from these neighborhoods to the polls, who wouldn't automatically line up behind him. There's even a wild card within Kelly's South Boston base itself: a demographic survey by Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies, released last year, showed that about 37 percent of Southie residents have moved in since 1990. How newcomers will vote, or even whether they will vote at all, is anyone's guess.

In the nearer term, even before someone can make a long-shot run against Kelly, he could well lose the council presidency, a post he first won in 1994. Kelly faces a built-in base of four opponents on the 13-member council: Charles Yancey, Chuck Turner, Dan Conley, and Mike Ross. Beyond that, observers speculate that several loyalists are probably ready to jump ship. There's Allston-Brighton councilor Brian Honan, who's voted both for and against Kelly in the past and has been mentioned as a possible successor. Likewise, nobody would be shocked to see Maura Hennigan, Paul Scapicchio, or Steve Murphy vote against Kelly despite past support. Murphy, for example, has been willing to criticize the South Boston deal.

For now, though, this is all speculation: nobody wants to wage such a fight in July, so serious maneuvering on the presidency, which is decided in the winter, is probably months away.

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