Boston sampler
Boston Herald employees went to the polls yesterday -- and at least one of the battered tabloid's unions was saying no to more cutbacks.
At issue is a plan by Herald publisher Pat Purcell to undo part of the existing contracts and freeze wages for two years to close a $2.8 million budget shortfall. Yesterday, a union that represents employees in the advertising, circulation, and other business offices rejected the salary freeze. Editorial employees approved the freeze. Last night it was unclear what other unions would do, although those in the pressroom and mail room were leaning against it, employees said.
Even with a wage freeze Purcell has told employees to expect more layoffs. As an incentive to take the freeze, Purcell has offered to extend contracts by two years, employees said.
The Herald, like the Globe, is under severe pressure as the Internet remakes the media business, and Purcell is looking for any port in the storm. Among them: Partnering in some fashion with his Boston business friends, Jack Connors and Joe O'Donnell, who along with former General Electric boss Jack Welch , are considering the purchase of the Globe from The New York Times Co. Purcell didn't return my call. But in the Herald Purcell said: "I am an advocate of convergence and under current market conditions that could be very beneficial. Anything that helps to preserve diversity of voices in a community is a good thing."
Gay marriage was the headline event yesterday at the state's Constitutional Convention. But the convention also did not act on an amendment designed to guarantee affordable health care coverage to all Massachusetts residents. Look for the backers of that proposal to file suit as early as today in Suffolk Superior Court, seeking to force the constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2008.
The suit will argue that the Legislature violated its own rules in July by referring the amendment to a study committee. The amendment was sidelined after the Legislature passed what was hailed as a landmark bill to provide healthcare to everyone in Massachusetts.
"We believe that the incremental strategy that has pitted hospitals and insurers against employers has to be replaced with one that brings everyone to the table to figure out how to efficiently deliver excellent quality to everyone," says Barbara Waters Roop, co chairwoman of the Health Care for Massachusetts Campaign, an advocacy group. Barbara Anderson, head of Citizens for Limited Taxation and an advocate for such ballot questions, is among those who plan to file suit.
Prominent Harvard Law School professor Lucian Bebchuk is continuing his fight to block a neighborhood arts center beside his house. Bebchuk and a few neighbors are appealing a court decision in August dismissing a lawsuit seeking to block plans by the nonprofit Agassiz Neighborhood Council to build a children's art center in Cambridge, a project Bebchuk & Co. have managed to block for three years. "It's another huge delay," says Terry DeLancey, director of the council. Says Bebchuk, a crusader against excessive executive compensation: "The appealing neighbors including myself remain willing to welcome a large children's program and seek only to constrain evening and weekend adult activities." The kids are OK; it's the moms he doesn't want.
This from Beekman Winthrop, the Washington, D.C., cousin of Jonathan Winthrop, president of the Beacon Hill co-op board that has blocked the chief executive of Elizabeth Grady salons from buying a unit in the building: "Jonathan Winthrop may be a chip off the ancestral block who said, 'A democracy is, amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government,' but most of the descendents of Governor John Winthrop are small-d democrats who do not share the views of the 68 Beacon St. co-op board, and we resent being tarred with the brush of snobbery and classicism. Jonathan speaks for himself and his discriminating neighbors, and not for the family."
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902. 
