How students can take over City Hall

Part 5

by Michael Crowley

Certainly, Steve Tyler will never serenade supermodels from behind the mayor's desk. Boston isn't about to become an American Amsterdam.

But even though a teenager or a rock star might never oversee the city budget, students can flex their political muscles with more-practical goals in mind.

History suggests that students simply can't be coaxed into the process, and that Joe Nose-ring might never be persuaded to care about his four-year home. But other groups who have abdicated their role in city politics -- young postgrads, as well as minorities -- can't make that argument. They have the greatest stakes in Boston's future.

And they have power. With better turnout, the city's vast minority population could clean out City Hall. In the last mayoral election, just over 40 percent of Roxbury voters went to the polls. Even worse were the showings in neighborhoods stocked with postcollegiate young professionals; the '93 turnout in the Back Bay, Beacon Hill, and South End was little more than 30 percent.

As a result, political influence remains limited to small pockets of Boston, and important decisions continue to be dictated by a small fraction of the population. How was South Boston able to sabotage the stadium plans of Bob Kraft and the Super Bowl- bound Patriots last winter? How come Southie gets the new convention center, no questions asked? Think it had anything to do with 65 percent voter turnout?

That gap, between neighborhoods that vote (Southie and Hyde Park) and those that don't (Roxbury and Allston), will most likely widen in November's city election, which could set new records for low turnout. Mayor Tom Menino is running unopposed -- he is the first Boston mayor ever to do so -- and in his second term, the city's voters will have given him little reason to rethink his timid agenda.

But perhaps right now, in the freshman class of BU, BC, Emerson, Northeastern, Suffolk, UMass, or Berklee, there is a charismatic teenage crusader polishing his guitar and his oratory, studying the system, preparing for the Boston mayoral election of 2001. As Max Frost would say, "Wouldn't that be groovy, babies?"

Back to part 4

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.