Proposals to replace the Boston Planning & Development Agency could empower city councilors and their NIMBY allies to curb new development – and the city’s future. iStock illustration

Don’t like the Boston Planning & Development Agency? Think it’s too close to developers and business interests and should be abolished?

Well then, I have the perfect replacement for you, and it doesn’t even involve creating a new city department.

It’s called the Boston City Council.

That’s right, the same body that has descended into name-calling and shouting matches over redistricting, police reform and other hot-button issues in previous legislative sessions, can invest that same passion into shaping the major development projects on which the Boston’s future – or at least the future of the steady stream of tax revenue that pays for everything from cops to parks – hinges.

Too bad Kendra Lara is no longer on the council, for she would have been the perfect person, given her lived experience, to handle traffic analysis on the impact new development projects will have on city streets.

After all, having crashed her car into a constituent’s house in Jamaica Plain while driving around without a valid license, who better to understand just how crazy the streets of Boston can get these days?

Ditto for Ricardo Arroyo and Frank Baker, two other now-former councilmembers

With his extensive experience dealing with his own ethics violations, Arroyo could surely have spotted a crooked builder a mile away.

And Baker, who once called Arroyo a “predator” over decades-old sexual misconduct allegations, could surely have been counted on to deliver some his patented straight talk to developers whose projects ran afoul of neighborhood critics.

The Big Idea: Copy the Suburbs

In all seriousness, you would have to be off your rocker think having the Boston City Council influence major development projects is a great idea.

Given the council’s track record, it is not hard to imagine current or future versions mucking up the city’s future with their petty bickering and silly grandstanding.

Yet with demands that the agency be wiped from the face of the earth, hardcore critics of the Boston Planning & Development Authority, if successful, would create a void that would likely be filled by the City Council.

For years now, some of the agency’s most inveterate foes have called for restoring to Boston the same kind of city oversight of new development that suburban communities have long exercised, where a planning board works in concert with the local select board or city council to approve or reject major projects.

As a city councilor, and then as mayoral candidate, Michelle Wu channeled that sentiment.

She issued a lengthy manifesto that rehashed the agency’s well-known and increasingly ancient sins, such as the leveling of the old West End in the 1950s at the behest of the mayor at the time, while calling for the demolition of the BPDA.

Changes Give Councilors Big Power

Now that she’s mayor, Wu has taken a somewhat different tact, even as she insists that her plans to sunset the agency have not changed, though they clearly have.

Sure, she’s transferring BPDA planning employees to a new city department. But the BPDA itself will remain in shrunken form, even if it will no longer be allowed to take property by eminent domain under the pretext of combatting blight. Rather, the magic words will now be “resiliency, equity and affordability,” – very woke and with enough ambiguity for any skilled city bureaucrat to drive a tractor trailer through.

Neighborhood activists aren’t buying Wu’s argument that she is truly moving ahead with her plans to get rid of the agency – plans that still need approval by state legislators.

And they’re right.

Scott Van Voorhis

Wu’ proposal, which would effectively revamp the agency and remove the planning functions to a new city department, are hardly what they have been pushing for all these long years, and critics have made that clear in recent public hearings.

Under Wu’s plan, the BPDA board will continue to review projects, as it does now, without any review by the City Council. And while council members will gain some influence over the new Boston Planning Department – which is slated to become a city department as opposed to being part of the quasi-independent BPDA – that power will be mainly over budget issues, not individual development proposals.

Still, it’s a power any savvy councilor could wield to shape what city planners let come up for a vote by the BPDA board, or even throw sticks in the spokes of sensible and much-needed building proposals just to please a few NIMBYs in their district, or their own ego.

The mayor’s proposed overhaul of the BPDA creates another new set of problems, too, including the possibility of legal challenges now that blight is no longer considered a legitimate reason to take land and buildings to clear the way for new apartments or an office tower.

After all, there any number of residential and office projects built over the years in formally designated urban renewal areas that used “blight” as a pretext. If that is no longer a legitimate reason for land taking and redevelopment, why then should various building owners now be bound by other elements of those now decades-old agreements, such as affordable housing deals?

It’s Failed Elsewhere

As problematic as the mayor’s plans are, giving the City Council so much influence would be even worse, that is unless your goal is to severely limit all new development in Boston, including desperately needed new housing.

The BPDA’s most determined critics yearn for suburban-like oversight of new development, where the naysayers rule the roost and elected officials bend over backwards to placate loudmouths and those who believe their communities are private clubs where admittance should be restricted to those able to pay huge prices for single-family homes.

It is a system that has helped create the housing crisis that everyone across the state in one way or another is paying for now.

By contrast, Boston, with help from the BPDA and some determined mayors, has managed to keep housing production rolling, even as it has lagged in the suburbs.

The last thing the city needs to do now is impose faux reforms that hobble the agency’s ability to do its job, or worse, abolish it altogether.

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist and publisher of the Contrarian Boston newsletter; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.