The Newton Teachers Association took to the State House steps on Thursday, Jan. 25, 2024 during the fifth day of their strike. Photo by Sam Doran | State House News Service

Newton has a mostly well-deserved reputation for chewing up and spitting out proposed development projects, both large and small.

In some ways, it’s perfectly understandable. The Garden City is a great place to live, and residents want to keep it that way.

And there is no shortage of highly educated people in Newton ready to debate everything from traffic studies to the shadows new buildings would cast.

But it is also worth asking whether some of Newton’s more vocal skeptics of new development, from leaders of neighborhood groups to elected officials, have been missing the forest for the trees here, and in particular, the new tax revenue generated by large new office, lab and even residential projects.

In fact, it is a question that is particularly relevant right now in the wake of Newton’s heated – and illegal – teachers strike, which though ended still hasn’t resolved a larger debate over whether the city has been adequately funding its schools.

Multi-Million-Dollar Gap

Until the final days, when Gov. Maura Healey herself intervened, there had been a huge gap, measuring in the tens of millions of dollars, between the proposals put out by the two sides – the Newton Teachers Association on one side, city school officials and Mayor Ruthanne Fuller on the other.

A good part of that gap, arguably, was due to the nature of the maximalist demands being made by the teachers union, which seem designed to both stoke a confrontation and force dramatic concessions by school committee members and the mayor, regardless of whether the deal is financially sound or sustainable over the long-term.

That confrontational approach, in turn, comes as the Massachusetts Teachers Union, under new and more militant leadership, wages a campaign aimed at fomenting strikes by local teachers in various communities.

Why? Because the MTA is pushing legislation at the State House that would legalize strikes by teachers, who, like other public employees, are barred from hitting the picket line, though they allowed – critically – to unionize and collectively bargain.

By encouraging local teachers unions to make reach-for-sky proposals they know will lead to strikes, the MTA can then pin the blame on local school officials, while banking on the public and the local media not understanding or being terribly interested in the actual details off the offers.

How? By claiming that local unions were forced to strike by stubborn and penny-pinching school committees who, barring the threat of a walkout, won’t bargain seriously.

More Tax Money, Fewer Problems

That said, under all the heated rhetoric, there are surely valid concerns over the level of school funding in Newton that have built up over the years.

In fact, both Newton School Committee members and city officials have indicated that while they believe their offer of a significant-but-hardly-lavish bump in pay for Newton teachers is fair, their hands are tied by other equally pressing obligations, such as helping shore up an underfunded pension fund for city employees.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Newton could use a few extra million in property tax revenue right now – money it might actually have had it not spent years kicking around the massive Riverside project, among many others.

Plans for that major project on parking lots for Newton’s Green Line terminus began to take shape well more than a decade ago in 2011. It took until 2020 for Mark Development’s plan to get through the City Council, with a major lab component added a short while later.

The endless negotiations and renegotiations with city officials, and threatened lawsuits by neighbors, delayed the project long enough that it eventually ran into the buzzsaw of the pandemic and then a downturn in the demand for lab space.

In late 2022, Mark Development announced its big plans were being put on hold and sought state permission to swap the Riverside project’s lab component for something “housing-centric” before jumping back on the city’s project review treadmill.

Now, instead of collecting a couple million dollars a year in extra taxes on shiny new buildings, Newton is stuck with a field of asphalt.

And as they scrounged for every last penny in contentious talks with the teachers union, maybe city officials should have been kicking themselves over the Riverside fiasco.

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.