Dog days

Is anyone following up on the mayor? Plus, our monthly report card.

City Hall by Yvonne Abraham

It sounded pretty good at the time. Back in January, at his triumphant inauguration speech at Faneuil Hall, Mayor Menino, with a nod to his own Italian-born grandparents, promised to make life easier for the city's immigrants.

REPORT CARD The dog days of summer do dog one. N'est-ce pas, Mr. Mayor? THE MOVE Mayor Menino, having approved the new living-wage law under pressure from unions, backs down on some of its provisions under pressure from business. THE SPIN Menino, who looked like a slave to the unions at first, now comes off as a reasonable guy. A THE REAL WORLD The revised law makes almost everyone happy. A THE MOVE Menino appoints a panel to restore the reputation of the city's summer jobs program for teens, tarred by a summer of rotten press about patronage. THE SPIN The mayor as champion of justice and purity. B+ THE REAL WORLD The mayor has been part of the problem for years, doling out jobs to city councilors as rewards. C THE MOVE An ancient water main bursts, flooding the just-renovated Boston Public Library and doing $10 million worth of damage. The deductible on the city's insurance policy is, um, $10 million. THE SPIN He's taken serious heat for other acts of God -- snowstorms and floods, for example -- but this one wasn't laid at Menino's feet. So he gets to play the civic-figurehead-in-time-of-crisis unchallenged. A THE REAL WORLD Most cities' insurance policies have high deductibles. Plus, the mayor deserves credit for being generally supportive of the library. A THE MOVE The city tries to stop MassCann's annual Freedom Rally. Again. The judge says forget it. THE SPIN Menino as intolerant ogre. D THE REAL WORLD It's fine to impose reasonable restrictions on a rally, but the city has been trying to harass it out of existence. D THE MOVE Menino publicly opposes city council president James Kelly's plan to do away with affirmative action in the police and fire departments. "We have to have diversity," he tells the AP. "It's so important." THE SPIN Menino's stand may be lukewarm, but it's a big deal, especially since he has the power to nix councilors' initiatives. B+ THE REAL WORLD The mayor usually avoids race like the plague: this flaccid statement is more significant than it appears. B+

"Today," Menino announced, "I am proud to create the Office of New Bostonians. This office will help newcomers become productive members of our community." The office was supposed to help recent immigrants get legal assistance, job training, education, and health care. "We will find ways to foster and celebrate diversity," said Menino. "To affirm the many cultures that strengthen the fabric of our city."

So far -- nine months after that announcement -- there's been little fostering or celebrating on the Office of New Bostonians front. In this year's city budget, $153,816 was earmarked for the office to hire a director, an office manager, an outreach coordinator, and a referral specialist. But so far, staffing seems to have fallen short of the mark. Add that to an advocacy group's recent criticism that the city has failed to provide adequate, and legally required, education for some immigrant students, and the city's record on its newest residents doesn't look so good.

The Office of New Bostonians doesn't even have a director yet. David Passafaro, the mayor's chief of staff and point man on the initiative, says the city has been "in search mode" for some time and has interviewed some candidates -- but not the right one for the $60,000-a-year position. "It's going slower than we'd hoped it would be," says Passafaro. "I was hoping -- we all were -- that a candidate would emerge fairly quickly, but we haven't found one."

Without a director, the Office of New Bostonians remains a flowery abstraction, an excuse for a few nice turns of phrase. Right now, this unfulfilled promise is also a testament to the Menino administration's chronic inability to recruit talented people.

"It's one thing to talk about diversity and equality," Menino preached back in January. "It's quite another to back that talk up with meaningful action."

Indeed.

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Menino has followed through more successfully on initiatives to reduce domestic violence, which has hardly been going away on its own. According to a recent report by the city's public-health commission, 13,429 incidents of domestic violence were reported in Boston in 1995; the commission's executive director, John M. Auerbach, says the actual number of incidents could be two or three times that.

It's certainly a safe issue politically, but it's also close to the mayor's heart: he turns up at fundraisers and rallies, such as last fall's "Week Without Violence" on Boston Common. Around the same time, he promised to fire any of his own 85 appointees if they are convicted of domestic assault or violate a restraining order.

"We've had really good support from the city," says the Reverend Cheng Imm Tan, who heads the Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence. "The mayor understands the issues, and he's been supportive personally. He regularly appears at our annual fundraiser, and this year he's hosting our auction."

In July, Menino also bumped up the public-health commission's domestic-violence budget by $100,000 (a fact that got lost in the brouhaha over the commission's much higher-profile restaurant smoking ban, which goes into effect at the end of this month).

Some of the money will be added to state funds and used to produce a two-year public-education campaign. "It will have a preventive focus, to change some assumptions about masculinity," says Auerbach. Some will be used to pay a full-time fundraiser on domestic-violence issues. And some will be used to educate EMS personnel on identifying and discreetly helping victims who are afraid to press charges against their abusers.

Auerbach expects most of these initiatives to get under way in the next few months.

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.