Sue thy neighbor, 2
I must be the only business writer in the Western world who can't get a call back from the very quotable Lucian Bebchuk.
The Harvard Law School professor is a dial-a-quote machine when it comes to his favorite topic, the abuses of executive compensation. In the book he coauthored, ``Pay Without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation," and in big-city newspapers from London to LA, Bebchuk is a ubiquitous presence on the need for companies to do the right thing and rein in runaway executive pay. The New York Times quoted the guy at least four times in April alone, including twice in a single day.
Among other things, Bebchuk likes to talk about the positive effect of ``a new so-called outrage constraint" on the super-sized paychecks for CEOs. ``The caveat is that even though there is an outrage constraint, shareholders have very limited power to do anything about it," Bebchuk told the Times in January.
If only that so-called outrage constraint could do something about reforming the professor's own bad behavior in his own neighborhood. More than a year ago I wrote about how the famous Harvard Law professor was using the law to block construction of a children's art studio next to his lovely home on Sacramento Street in Cambridge. Repeat: a children's art studio -- run, no less, by the nonprofit Agassiz Neighborhood Council, where his son, Alon, went every day after kindergarten.
The neighborhood council, which provides after-school care for about 100 kids, a summer camp, and other community services, spent years raising $1.2 million to renovate an old carriage house in its backyard into an art studio. Cambridge issued a permit three years ago, but Bebchuk and three other neighborhood whiners, including a Harvard rabbi and a Harvard zoologist, sued to block it, raising the usual NIMBY complaints about traffic and noise. As Bebchuk noted at a hearing four years ago: ``If it were to be on Garfield Street [a block away] maybe I would be here today speaking like some of the other people who wrote letters of support."
Bebchuk knows well how the law works -- or doesn't work. Three years after his suit was filed, the project remains at a standstill, shuffled around Middlesex Superior Court from judge to judge. Delay means the costs are rising, Bebchuk is winning, and the children of Cambridge are losing. And, by the way, Bebchuk and his family have spent much of the last year abroad. Does the guy have no shame?
``It's just where it was three years ago," says Terry DeLancey, executive director of the neighborhood council. ``The court has passed it around and around and around. It is as though we just got the permit."
DeLancey and her neighborhood council aren't giving up, and neither am I. A lot of Cambridge kids -- including my girls, Ariel, 14, and Mona Lee, 5 -- would love to have this art studio. So while Bebchuk is filing shareholder resolutions against the likes of Bristol-Myers Squibb and Time-Warner, landing on ``most influential" lists, and going on CNBC with Jim Cramer to declare, ``If it wasn't earned, it must be returned," I'll be keeping you up on what's happening -- or not happening -- on Sacramento Street.
In the meantime, you can share your thoughts with the Great Reformer at bebchuk@law.harvard.edu. The caveat is that even though there is an outrage constraint, neighbors have very limited power to do anything about it.
Neighborhood news. Rupert Murdoch, who sold the Boston Herald to Pat Purcell a dozen years ago, is now printing the Boston edition of his New York Post here at the Globe -- as was forecast in this space in March. The Globe prints about 35,000 copies of the Post, seven days a week, a Globe spokesman confirmed.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902. 
