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Boston City Councilor Maureen Feeney, who is widely expected to be elected to a second term as council president today, wants to start 2008 with a bang and unveil plans for an unprecedented gathering of city residents - a New England-style town meeting of sorts - at the South Boston convention center this spring.
Feeney said she wants to invite every neighborhood and business group, parent-teacher organization, and crime-watch group in the city as well as residents unaffiliated with any group, and even those who are not civically engaged at all.
The one-day gathering would be akin to a congress, where people could voice their concerns and hopes for the future of the city, a forum for innovative ideas and finding common ground, she said.
"I would like people to think about their role, to recognize their role in shaping this city," Feeney said in an interview last week.
"For far too long, I think there has been this compartmentalization, where people don't see what's happening in the neighborhood next door."
Feeney has secured the support of several colleagues on the council and said the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority has agreed to donate use of the 500,000-plus square-foot Boston Conven tion & Exhibition Center for one day in April.
Feeney conceded it could be an organizational nightmare and she has no idea exactly what the logistics would involve, but she is planning to convene a committee this week to begin working out the details.
The initiative drew raves over the weekend from some neighborhood groups and government watchdog agencies that called it a bold and fantastic idea that, if executed properly, could change the face of the city. But some pointed to the difficulties in making it work.
And the idea is not going over too well with Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who said the needs in each neighborhood are different and should be addressed separately.
The mayor said he worries that such a gathering would raise attendees' expectations of city government, which might fail to deliver on them.
"That's the worst thing you can do in government," Menino said in a phone interview Saturday.
"How are you going to pay for them? The idea of listening to people, we do that every day. I go to a lot of meetings every night, talking to people."
Feeney said she hopes the mayor will warm to the idea. She would like Menino to participate in the planning and attend the event. But if he refuses, Feeney said she will go forward with the initiative anyway.
"This is a day for Bostonians to come together and speak to each other," she said. "This is a day for us to reach out and say, 'What can we do better?' "
A city councilor for as long as Menino has been mayor, Feeney was first elected city council president last year. The first woman since 1976 to hold the position, she has morphed over the past year from a self-described "worker bee" councilor focused largely on day-to-day constituent needs in her Dorchester district into a citywide force rumored to be eyeing a run for mayor in 2009.
Last week, a majority of her colleagues on the 13-member council said they expect to propel her today into another year as council president. The council is scheduled to vote on the presidency during a noon meeting.
Lawrence S. DiCara, a former city councilor and longtime City Hall observer, said that if Feeney's plan for a citywide meeting comes off successfully, it could give her and, in turn, the council more political capital and a greater voice in how the mayor runs the city. Past efforts to produce citywide movements and grassroots communication have typically fallen flat, DiCara said, largely because politicians back off of the ideas before they materialize.
"What has happened on many occasions is that elected officials have concluded that they may be creating a platform for their own future opponents," he said.
"The fact that Maureen is prepared to do this is very bold because she doesn't know what she will create."
Samuel R. Tyler, president of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, a business-funded city watchdog, said the gathering could present a valuable chance to develop consensus around a series of issues, but he was a little wary of its workability.
"It hasn't been done before," Tyler said. "It could be unwieldy, depending on how it's organized, but this would be an opportunity. It has the possibility of producing some interesting outcomes."
Workable or not, the idea has captured the imaginations of many of Feeney's colleagues. Sam Yoon, city councilor at-large, said it would be "fantastic" to break down some of the silos that city residents often live and work within.
"Just to have a neighborhood activist in the South End share a doughnut with a neighborhood activist in East Boston, it would just be a really good thing," he said.
John Tobin, West Roxbury city councilor, joked that maybe if he attended this one event, he wouldn't have to attend all the others in different neighborhoods every week. "It would be like shopping at Costco, buying in bulk," he said.
Tobin suggested there may need to be some star power to draw residents not normally involved in government, perhaps the Red Sox and the Dropkick Murphys.
"Ben Affleck might do it," he said.
Shirley Kressel, a Back Bay resident and a neighborhood activist who has spent 10 years linking neighborhood groups on common causes, said she believes getting people together from across the city will show them that they have common problems and motivate them to solve them together.
"People can be in their isolated demographic circles all their lives here and not really know what the city's about," Kressel said.
"The more unification there is, the more we can change the system. Rather than your house, your street, your project, if people get together, we can make government reforms that will help everybody."
Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
