My latest for the Globe looks at the recent noise emanating from City Hall about using a Suffolk Downs casino to pressure Vornado into filling its Filene’s pit. The problem with these threats coming from City Hall is, there’s no way Hizzoner will actually throw the brakes on Suffolk Downs as payback for Filene’s. The mayor can’t credibly threaten Vornado when he’s been in the tank for Suffolk Downs for yeas.

Which is not to say those threats can’t or shouldn’t be made. The solution: Take the casino question out of the mayor’s hands, put it to a citywide vote, and unleash an angry electorate on the developers.

Read the whole thing here.

[Creative Commons image via]

Let’s start by picking on Hizzoner. Nothing gets the natives riled up like parking tickets, so Mayor Tom Menino’s $2.42 billion FY09 budget, which includes $13 million in new parking fines, is sure to be the only thing anybody in Boston ever talks about for the rest of time. Let the schools close; we demand parking amnesty now!

But seriously, the notion that the mayor is sewing great harm by balancing Boston’s budget on the backs of people who can’t manage to avoid parking in front of fire hydrants, rather than slogging through a nasty override fight, is about as dumb as the notion that kids wouldn’t be killing each other if it weren’t for these infernal T-shirts and video games. Gotta love this town.

In other City Hall news, the people who work inside City Hall still suck, just like they always have.

Are your civic outrage juices flowing? If so, please send some money to Michael Flaherty. The guy is really gonna need it. He’s not even officially in the mayor’s race yet, and it already appears that his fundraising base might be in danger of drying up.

Flaherty took in a little over $60,000 during the year’s first three months. Pocket change. He spent nearly $43,000 of it, and has around $450,000 in cash-on-hand. That’s in keeping with his 2007 fundraising patterns, when he didn’t really start raising money until May, taking in the bulk in the fall.

A look at Mayor Menino’s finances should throw a wicked scare into the Southie city councilor. The mayor has been raising money at a furious pace this year. He ended 2007 with over $973,000 in the bank, and through the end of March, had added $282,569 to that total. He has spent twice what Flaherty has – $86,000 – but has also socked away $650,000 in savings, investing in CDs and money market accounts.

Flaherty pounced on the 311 and parking ticket stories in this week’s papers, issuing a pair of press releases blasting the administration’s ineffectiveness. He has also been an outspoken (occasionally shouting and red-faced) opponent of towing. This suggests he may try to run a populist, nuts and bolts campaign, and try to out-mechanic the urban mechanic.

There’s no way Flaherty outspends Menino in this race. The mayor out-gunned him three to one last year, and that was during a City Council election. But it’s critical that he get whatever receipts he can this year, because once he is officially in this race, the pool of saps willing to cross the mayor and give money to him will only get smaller. (This is also one reason why observers believe Flaherty won’t, and can’t, declare his candidacy until after Labor Day.)

It seemed that if Dianne Wilkerson couldn’t lose last year – a year in which the powerful but embattled state senator couldn’t manage to wring 300 good signatures out of her sprawling district, and had to wage a high-wire write-in campaign against a two-headed Diaz monster and an old cop. All that self-destruction, the money troubles, the staggering sense of entitlement conveyed by the signature fiasco – and none of it seemed to matter. The woman was invincible.

Invincibility isn’t protecting her, though. Wilkerson looks to have two challengers this fall. JP’s Sonia Chang-Diaz is once again gunning for Wilkerson in September’s Democratic primary. An independent candidate, William Theodore Leonard, will sail into November’s election. That’s assuming, of course, that everyone involved can get signatures in by the end of this month. It shouldn’t be a significant hurdle, but for some reason, it is.

A third would-be challenger, Robert Patton-Spruill, pulled nomination papers for the seat but recently decided to shut down his nascent campaign and go to work for Chang-Diaz.

The Roxbury filmmaker (he shot Tim Murray’s campaign commercials, and his Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome debuts this month at the Independent Film Fest) began gathering signatures and says his campaign could’ve been competitive, but backed out when he decided he’d be “better off using my skills behind the scenes.” And he maintains that, with more time to organize this time around, the Chang-Diaz campaign can do more than just throw a scare into the eight-term senator.

In Jamaica Plain, Patton-Spruill says Wilkerson “has issues.” He also insists that “We can be strongly competitive in Roxbury.” They’ll have to be; Chang-Diaz got rolled on Wilkerson’s turf two years ago, and it cost her the race. “African-Americans of my generation are looking for change,” Patton-Spruill says. “They’re upset at the current black leadership on Beacon Hill. The whole country is looking for new youthful voices.”

That’s some Deval Patrick Just Words stuff right there, and it’ll be fascinating to see if a netroots organizational machine can be deployed with any success at the ward level. Patton-Spruill will be building an online broadband channel for Chang-Diaz, and loading it with long-form videos – “on demand” campaigning to “show the real Sonia” and help fuel shoeleather politics.

For this campaign to work, Chang-Diaz has to make the conversation about youth, hope, change and the like. Because, otherwise, commentators will look to the 2006 results and frame the election as a race about skin color, class, and neighborhood division. And that’s certainly not a conversation many people are eager to have anytime soon.

Neither woman has to file paperwork with OCPF until the fall, so until then, we’ll all have to be content with trolling through their 2007 off-year campaign finance reports.

One big difference: Wilkerson blew through nearly $34,000 in a non-election year by spending on staffing, fundraising, phones, food, and airfare. Chang-Diaz spent $618.

The off-year donor lists are interesting as well. Chang-Diaz got money from big names like Barbara Lee, former Menino aide Howard Leibowitz, and Micho Spring in 2007. Wilkerson received support from a buttload of labor unions, as well as Bruce Bolling, John Nucci, Maura Hennigan, lobbyist and former House Speaker Charlie Flaherty, Angela Menino, Susan Passoni, BRA planner Muhammad Ali-Salaam, Jerry Rappaport, Jr., Chris Iannella, and two members of the troubled Winn clan.

We hear that Governor Deval Patrick’s budget priorities are in trouble. That’s not any great surprise. The House and Senate took most of the governor’s recommendations and tossed them in the trash last year, too.

But here’s where things get interesting. The budget crunch is about to get a lot worse in the next few years, and when it does, it’ll put Patrick’s broad promises on public safety, education, parks, and property taxes in big, big trouble. Which, of course, will put Patrick in big, big trouble.

As previously discussed, because of the significant price tag that comes along with the myriad campaign promises Patrick made, his administration must look at fiscal troubles though a political lens. It’s one thing for the legislature to delay investing in new cops or early education for a few years; it’s quite another for the governor, who’s going to have a reelection fight on his hands well before the economy’s caviar and champagne days return.

And here’s what hurts extra-hard: Whatever extra cash Beacon Hill budget writers have been able to stuff into budgets in recent years, hasn’t come from any real growth in the economy. 

Instead, it’s come from the stock market (and lotto-brainwashing, obvs). When Wall Street tanks, the state’s built-in budget deficit is going to balloon like crazy, making it even less likely that Patrick will be able to check many things off his to-do list anytime soon.

Here’s a hot backroom fight to keep an eye on. On Wednesday, a week after voting to approve Cheryl (rhymes with…) Jacques’s appointment as a workers’ comp judge, Governor’s councilor Marilyn Petitto Devaney (yes, it’s her) took her vote back.

It’s not clear whether the no backsies rule applies to judicial nominations, but Devaney believes Jacques told the Governor’s Council that, if confirmed, she would close her controversial campaign account. It remains active. Hence, scandal, screaming headlines, etc.

Jacques has said that she wants to hold on to her cash so she can dole it out to charity; we’ll soon see if a hot iron to the skull can change that right quick.

Teamsters are targeting anti-casino politicians. They’ve put lawmakers on notice that they’re ready to solicit opponents to run against Sal DiMasi’s minions, and are even promising to send a few into early retirement. This, after Bobby “Bullshit!” Haynes assured State House News that labor would not target anti-casino incumbents, saying, “We have no intention of beating [DiMasi] or his members up over casino gaming.”

We’ve also heard complaints from inside the State House that other unions are acting similarly uncharitably towards Reps who voted against them last month.

It’s natural that the unions would act this way. After all, without casinos, it’s unlikely that anything at all will be built in this state for the next century or so. Which means no jobs for anybody, ever. Way to go, legislature.

It didn’t seem possible, but there’s even more turnover coming to the Senate. The bleeding has been rampant over the past year, and word broke late yesterday that Robert Creedon, the affable co-chair of the judiciary committee, will be joining the stampede out of the legislature’s upper chamber. The twin lures of a fat raise and short commute are irresistible, apparently.

Shameless plugs abounded at this week’s Boston City Council meeting. Rob Consalvo pushed a resolution supporting a ban on Salvia Divinorum by urging his colleagues, repeatedly, to “Go on MyFoxBoston.com and YouTube” and “check out Fox 25’s exposé,” while Steve Murphy took the time to mention that Dunkin’ Donuts is “a very popular brand” in the greater Boston area. You don’t say!

Save of the week: Charles Yancey leaping forward and ripping the lens cap off a camera just seconds before a staffer was to shoot a photo of him and birthday gal Maureen Feeney. Nothing gets past that guy.

And a close second: Mike Ross bounding into the council chambers, beverage in hand and in real danger of missing a photo op with the state champion Catholic Memorial basketball team, shouting, “Hey, wait a minute!” They did.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job Dept: Consalvo and Murphy dazzled the crowd at Michael Contompasis’s retirement party Tuesday night with what is rumored to be some rather fancy footwork. The pair donned formal-wear and placed second in a Dancing with the Stars-themed salute to the longtime school department administrator. According to reports, the duo – the competition’s only male-male team – would have won, were it not for the rather uncharitable score of negative five that Mayor Tom Menino awarded them.

Just wondering whether that first place team will be of any use when Menino has to get his education budget passed in the coming months.

Wire services contributed to this report.

We may be watching the balance of power tip on Beacon Hill. While Gov. Deval Patrick and House Speaker Sal DiMasi go back and forth about casinos and taxes—and whether or not they’re going back and forth at all—Senate President Therese Murray is showing herself to be both smart enough to recognize the power vacuum brought on by the bickering, and strong enough to fill that vacuum with substantive policy proposals.

The death of the governor’s casino bill should shine a spotlight on Murray’s health care reform-reform bill. That’s for the best since it does what magical slots leprechauns doesn’t, that is address the real reason cities and towns are going broke. Murray should also get serious credit for leading the effort to implement the now one-year-old Transportation Finance Commission report, especially by harpooning politically thorny MBTA health care benefits and police details.

These are weighty and decidedly un-flashy issues, but it’s going to take heavy lifting on boring issues to raise the state out of the hellward fiscal death-spiral it’s currently locked in. Interesting that it’s Murray, who just celebrated a year on the job, and not her two counterparts, who is leading the way.

A side note: This is the second time in recent months Murray has refused to leak a major policy proposal to the press before formally unveiling it. At least one major paper (blind item!) responded to this tactic by boycotting her Worcester health care presser. It was good to see everybody on board – and on a level playing field – this time around.

Ralph Martin isn’t running for mayor. Attention now turns to his maybe I will dance partner. Mike Flaherty’s got the campaign slogan: “Change is in your hands,” but does he have a campaign to match?

Well, which is it? On the same day that Patrick spiced up his “Together We Can” attitude by telling the New York Times that DiMasi’s leadership style is “part of what we ran against, and it needs to be called out,” the governor told the State House News Service, “There’s a bigger record, a vastly bigger record than the difference over casinos, and the sooner that the people and the media appreciate that, the better off we will all be.” Huh?

Idle, totally unfounded speculation: What are the chances that John Hynes’s massive, $3 billion Seaport Square development, combined with the possibly-successful mixed-use redevelopment of Fort Point, will wind up killing the Silver Line?

For anyone who has anywhere to be, at any time, the branch is a disaster. Can you imagine how slow those shiny buses masquerading as subway cars will run when there are actual people living in the neighborhood who’ll need to get around on the things?

And more to the point, can you really imagine all those international CEOs Hynes wants to bring to the neighborhood actually riding it when the T could just slap down light rail tracks and make the whole thing run three times as efficiently?

The casino game may have limped to a bloody stalemate on Beacon Hill, but, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we can rid ourselves of these awesome slots-r-iffic good times. They’re just shifting south, where the Mashpee Wampanoag are making the long slog towards taking their land into trust.

The feds held a couple hearings on the Mashpee’s Middleboro land grab this week. They were notable for a few reasons.

First, the Mashpee appear to be either wicked hardball players with an already-in fix nobody knows about, or they’re Cubs-fan-level delusional.

The Cape Cod Times noted that the first phase of the not-yet in existence Middleboro casino would include a “600,000-square-foot casino building on two levels, with 4,000 slot machines and 200 table games, restaurants, retail shops, and an event center.” Which is hilarious (or, alternately, terrifying), because neither slots nor table games are legal in Massachusetts yet. Nor, in the aftermath of last week’s vote, do they look to be legal any time soon.

Are the Mashpee just pushing ahead and blowing all their investors’ money for whatev’s sake, or do they know something none of the rest of us do?

Second, reservation shopping will absolutely be a prime factor in whether or not the tribe gets to do anything with that pricey piece of land they’re sitting on. Consider the comments the Massachuseuk lobbed at the Mashpee this week: “There were several groups of native people that were in Middleboro, but none of them were Mashpee. It is disturbing that the Mashpee would come to the Massachuseuk territory and try to establish this as their homeland, which it is not, it has never been and, if we have something to say, it never will be.”

This one will be fun.

One other casinorama loose end to tie up: It looks like the Patrick administration handled something right during this month’s gambling debacle. The Globe recently dropped a quiet bombshell when it reported that in the run-up to last week’s vote, the Mashpee tried to cut a deal that would’ve given them a federally-recognized casino in Middleboro in exchange for 20 percent of the casino’s slot machine revenue. That deal is the same kind of stinker that Connecticut has been laboring under for decades, and the administration’s decision to say no to it shows the kind of clear, rational thinking they’ve rarely displayed during this whole saga. So, cheers!

Most people wouldn’t normally associate the City Council chamber’s glaring fluorescent lights with mood lighting. But that didn’t stop one mystery couple from whispering to each other, giggling, and canoodling through the entirety of this week’s council meeting. Flabbergasted pols’ reactions ranged from “Who are they?” to, “What are they doing?”

Backhanded comment of the week: Charles Yancey, in the most gracious terms possible, rising to “Thank the administration for providing us with the information that’s required by law.”

And a close runner-up: A councilor complimenting Mike Ross’s decision to pair a blazer and tie with a charcoal sweater with, “You look like a modern-day Mr. Rogers. Tell Mr. McFeely I say hello!”

Word broke early this week that Governor Deval Patrick’s casino bill was dead. House Dean David Flynn told the Taunton Gazette, “The casino bill isn’t going anywhere. I find very little support for it from members of the house,” adding that he expects a roll call vote on his racino bill, while “the casinos won’t,” because Dan Bosley’s committee “will issue an adverse report, preventing the house from voting on the casino bill.”

It’s not how things work – the Speaker’s office has repeatedly said that Patrick’s bill will receive a vote on the House floor before it wraps its budget bill in April, regardless of whether or not it gets a favorable committee report. (PS – it won’t.) But that doesn’t mean that casinos still aren’t headed for a messy demise.

Last week was not kind to Patrick’s bizarre pet cause, and this week, the bill abandoned its slow grave-ward lurch in favor of a full-on sprint. The Globe finally buried the Chamber of Commerce’s well-intentioned but ham-handed casino report, while Bosley issued a position paper that blasts yawning holes in Patrick’s economic projections. And then things got messy.

Bosley has repeatedly said that the fate of casinos, long sold as an economic development package and not a revenue-generation scheme, will rest on two questions: Where does casino revenue come from, and how much does it cost to get at it? Reps appear to be responding to those questions by rapidly coming to the conclusion that the money behind Patrick’s plan isn’t really there. Either that, or budget season’s around the corner. Whichever it is, the casino hearing the administration has demanded won’t even happen until next week, but already, the bill’s most ardent backers are declaring it all but dead.

We’ve seen a major – and stunningly quick – reversal of fortunes for a plan that, a few months ago, was building plenty of momentum, and threatening the Speaker’s hold on his own chamber. It may be that last bit – DiMasi, not Patrick, controlling the House’s fortunes – that accounts for the astounding display of rancor erupting over the past few days.

After those persistent, widespread rumors, it turns out that Senator Marian Walsh won’t be taking a job on the bench after all. All those would-be successors are, as they say, SOL.

It’s not as devastating to the collective ambitions of the state’s political establishment as John Kerry’s inexcusable failure to move his ass out of his Senate seat in 2004 was, but it’s still not good news for any pol who might think of himself as being destined for bigger and better things. (That’s no short list, either.)

Best legislative literary allusion of the week: At a Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Senator Robert O’Leary took the microphone to testify. But first, he apologized if he looked or sounded weary. “I spent last night tilting at windmills,” he joked. Senator Robert Creedon consoled O’Leary, saying that, if he didn’t succeed in halting Cape Wind, then at least he landed himself “a nice picture in the Globe.” “Very Kennedy-esque,” Creedon nodded, admiringly.

Rookie councilor John Connolly livened up an otherwise sleepy City Council meeting on Wednesday by peppering his speech with ten-cent words like “quibble” and “quagmire.” If we didn’t know better, we’d think Connolly had already tired of the whole “public servant” gig, and was now honing his vocabulary in the hopes of becoming a sesquipedalian New York Times obit writer. Hope our normally-razor-sharp instincts are wrong on that one.

It’s time for the Hill and the Hall Rumor Control!

Item: Is the Council in for a major post-St. Paddy’s bender?

Turns out, no. Council President Maureen Feeney seemed to leave the door open to government-sanctioned revelry and debauchery when she closed this week’s meeting with a vague promise to keep the celebration rolling the next time the Council meets, “At which time I will bring you some refreshments to keep you going.” And at least one councilor was overheard asking Feeney if she was planning on distributing pints of Guinness on the Council floor. Unfortunately, Feeney was just alluding to a batch of Irish scones she’d forgotten to bring to work this week.

Wire services contributed to this report.

The most talked-about man on Beacon Hill continued to be widely talked about this week, as news that Speaker Sal DiMasi has been playing golf with a decades-old friend while not playing golf with a guy with a horrific haircut sparked an ethics uproar. It’s the surest sign yet that the state GOP has given up trying to win elections altogether, and will now focus solely on lobbing wobbly ethics complaints at its Democratic foes. And that Scot Lehigh hasn’t met a bad golf metaphor he doesn’t like.

The threat golf poses to democracy extends far beyond the current casino debate, though. Boston minorities who enjoy voting had better watch their backs: DiMasi occasionally hits the links with former Speaker Tom Finneran. Can federal voting rights violations, disgrace, and tears be far behind?

Legislators returned from their mid-winter jaunts to Orlando this week, and immediately got back to doing the people’s business. Which is to say, they threw themselves neck-deep into pervs. Pervs, pervs, pervs, pervs, pervs. A question nobody else has asked yet: Have any of these pervs ever gone golfing with Donald Trump? Somebody get Peter Torkildsen on the phone, quick!

Chuck Turner is one of the few city councilors who actually hasn’t been mentioned as a mayoral wannabe, but perhaps he should throw his hat in the race. Soaring rhetoric is king lately, and during an otherwise excruciatingly drawn out debate on whether or not to accept piles of rare public housing money from the feds, Turner uncorked what may turn out to be the non-election election year slogan of the year: “This is America. Some benefit, while others move backwards. Isn’t it time we had a policy where we all move forward?”

If David Axelrod is reading this, no, you guys can’t borrow that one, too.

Turner’s paean came after one of the young session’s most bizarrely contentious debates. He and Charles Yancey had railed against the demolition and reconstruction of Roslindale’s Washington-Beech public housing development because the new housing complex, while not built in the cheap, failed, rotting mid-century style, would push residents towards home ownership, and thus reduce the stock of public housing units, and thus totally hate on poor people. As Yancey put great wind behind this viewpoint, Council President Maureen Feeney (a self-described “project kid” who grew up in Dorchester’s Franklin Field development) shook her head and shot the Mattapan councilor one of the icier looks we’ve seen inside City Hall in a while.

How wicked excited is Mayor Menino that, thanks to councilor John Tobin, the city council will be debating term limits just as election season heats up? More than anything, the term limits proposal will be a vehicle for mayoral critics to paint Menino as this generation’s Kevin White – a tenacious mayor who remains in office, past his time, for tenacity’s sake. What remains to be seen is whether this little trick can work better than it did when Maura Hennigan pulled it three years ago.

Hey, have you heard about this casino thing? Yeah. It’s kind of a big deal. And after last week’s abrupt cancellation, the stakes for the legislature’s upcoming gambling hearing (set for a to-be-determined date in March when committee co-chairs Dan Bosley and Jack Hart can align their schedules) are growing by the day. House members are already being polled for the big vote, even though a full third of the House is said to remain undecided. Meanwhile, reports had Governor Deval Patrick also taking a number of casino-related meetings with lawmakers this week.

And while the pro-casino side has already lined up labor and municipal leaders to lobby fence-sitters, Bosley is, in some sense, expecting the hearing to give him the ammunition he needs to show his colleagues that Patrick’s rosy predictions don’t hold water.

“We’ll ask the administration what made them come to these conclusions, we’ll look at what’s happened in other states, we’ll try to collect a lot of data,” Bosley says. “We’re looking at this from an economic perspective. My two basic questions are, what does it cost to bring that money back from Connecticut, and where does that money come from?”

Bosley’s looking forward to the hearing, he says, because it’ll finally be a chance to have a “wider discussion about costs and ramifications. That hasn’t happened publicly. The public discussion has been very baseline – it’s been, ‘We’re losing money to Connecticut, and people want to gamble anyway.’”

At the same time, while the hearing should be quite constructive to anybody actually willing to sit through it – the showdown over the governor’s background research should be especially contentious – Bosley doesn’t expect many of the gambling advocates who’ll testify to stray far off message, because they’ll be playing to the press, not the committee.

“It’s not a good issue for the press,” he says, matter-of-factly. “The good issues are, there’s friction between the governor and the speaker. We’ll take testimony all day, and maybe six lines of testimony will show up the next day. The governor’s going to come down and say, ‘We’re going to have 30,000 jobs,’ and I’ll say, ‘No, you’re not.’ And we’ll go back and forth and have a wider discussion, but that’s what shows up in the paper. And the proponents know this. So they never have to go deeper.”

Wire services contributed to this report.

The answer goes back to urban renewal, when Mayor Collins and the BRA were tearing down and encasing in concrete as much of the city as they could. Collins even proposed saving Old Boston from itself by placing up to eight high-rise condo towers along the A, B, C and D blocks of the Comm. Ave. Mall.

The Back Bay historic district was formed, in part, as a way to keep Collins from doing to the neighborhood what he was doing to Scollay Square.

The historical preservation push didn’t come without a good deal of controversy, though. I came across this utterly hilarious – not to mention wicked prescient – 1964 letter from noted local architect Isidor Richmond to the City Council, begging them to slap a few towers in Frederick Law Olmsted’s park before it was too late.

The consequences of not doing so were dire indeed. Without condo towers, Richmond warned, Comm. Ave. would become “A region of rooming houses and eventually a slum, with all the attendant evils of a bad slum. It is now necessary to tear down and reconstruct the South End by Urban Renewal… The days of Commonwealth Avenue are numbered unless something extraordinary is done.”

Mitt Romney‘s campaign for president has ended. Who’ll we make fun of now?

It was, by all accounts, a bizarre scene at City Hall on Wednesday when the Boston firefighters union met with members of the City Council.

“What they really should’ve done is convene the Council psychologist,” says a source. “They seem crazed, like they’re living in denial. I get it – they’re feeling pressure, the leaks are pissing them off, they feel like they’re being dragged through the mud. But nothing good can be coming from them fighting drug testing. Fifty minutes of that one hour meeting was just them venting. There were no talking points. It was just stream of consciousness emotion.”

As far as we’ve been able to ascertain, the union’s vaunted PR firm was not in attendance.

Word surfaced this week that C. Stanley McGee, the Rhodes scholar, eminently stylish Bostonian, and chief grunt behind Governor Deval Patrick’s casino gambling proposal, has been placed on unpaid leave after being arrested for allegedly performing oral sex on a 15-year old boy in Florida. File this one under “not helping your own cause.”

The MBTA is broke. So says the T’s general manager, Dan Grabauskas. The agency is facing a $75 million deficit next year, even in the face of massive fare hikes and a wicked successful crackdown on fare evasion. It’s struggling with a massive debt load, and Grabauskas’s broke-as-a-joke statements were clearly designed to goad the state into bailing out the struggling bureaucracy. (We’ve seen this strategy before, of course.)

Grabauskas isn’t lying when he says the T is drowning in debt (accounting for an unheard-of 27 cents of every dollar it blows). But when Beacon Hill observers read Grabauskas’s woe-is-us comments in the Globe, they didn’t see the key word mentioned a single time—by the GM, the CFO, or anybody else. It’s as if the T’s brass is praying they can create a panic and sneak one by the whole of Beacon Hill.

“Before you say, ‘We need more revenue,’ you have to look at costs,” says House Minority Leader Brad Jones.

Those costs are frightening. Consider this passage from last year’s scathing Transportation Finance Commission Report:

The MBTA has long been known as having among the nation’s highest operating costs, and cost control was a key element of Forward Funding. The MBTA has not come close to meeting the objectives … that growth in operating costs would be only 2.5 percent per year for the period between FY 2000 and FY 2007. In actuality, the rate of growth over that period has been 5.0 percent per year. By FY 2007, the difference between planned and actual operating expenses was $143 million per year.

In other words, if the T had controlled its costs like it was supposed to this decade, its $75 million deficit would be a healthy surplus. Instead, it has continued to offer one of the nation’s most generous benefits packages – early retirement with a full pension and free health care.

Grabauskas “Hasn’t talked about” benefits, says Mike Widmer, president of the Mass Taxpayers Foundation and a member of the TFC. “Health care costs need to be addressed aggressively.” According to the commission’s report, health care eats up 44 percent of all fare revenue; by 2026, that figure is forecast to be 94 percent, assuming fares grow with inflation.

As the T’s management ratchets up its campaign to alter, or even end, Forward Funding, the discussion should digress into a nasty fight over the T’s benefits. Management certainly isn’t blind to the costs of their benefits; their silence on the issue suggests either intransigence on the issue, or cowardice, hoping that the legislature will do their union-busting dirty work for them.

And while there are those in the legislature who want nothing more than to put the T on a severe austerity diet (Republican leadership has bills pending that would fold the agency into the state’s insurance and pension systems, moves that could cover the bulk of next year’s deficit), they can’t, because they’re awaiting Patrick’s much-talked about MassTrans proposal. And even if MassTrans does get filed soon, it likely wouldn’t see action until late 2008, at the earliest.

And in the meantime, the wheels continue to fall off the bus.

“If anything, the Transportation Finance Commission understated the problems,” Widmer says. “The situation is compounding by the month, by the week. They’re coming unglued even faster than we thought would happen.”

Meanwhile, as the legislature waits on the governor’s transportation reform package, discontent seems to be bubbling up from the right side of the aisle. Jones, the House Minority Leader, is frustrated that his T reform bills haven’t gone anywhere – and that nothing else has, either.

“I recognize that [Patrick] has to come in, put his oar in the water and row, but we filed these bills to get the ball started, and it would’ve been a good first step. The legislature’s reluctant to act. We haven’t been doing much. We meet one day a week. It’s frustrating. You’ve got school vacation coming up, and after that, it’s March and it’s the budget, and the next thing you know, we’re in July. This is shaping up to be a pretty sparse year.

“And for all the promises of one-party government, the record doesn’t match that rhetoric. When there’s two parties, both sides have to justify their successes; they need to get things done. We’re going to get to the point in the calendar where we have to say, what can we get done?”

Asked whether the governor’s biotech initiative will emerge next week, as scheduled, Jones responded, “We’re not very good at hitting deadlines.”

What are they good at? Running for office, for one. Which is convenient, because with two Senate seats opening up in a single night last week, the special election train hasn’t slowed down one bit. An early, obvious choice to succeed outgoing Senator Pam Resor is Jamie Eldridge – provided he can put some cash into that meager-looking bank account of his.