Gov, lend an ear to neighborhood activists
By Alan Lupo
Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - Updated: 04:25 AM EST

Memo to Gov. Deval Patrick:
We’re getting engaged, you and I. Don’t panic. I am talking civic engagement, one of your favorite phrases and not a bad one at that.
You have set up a Public Liaison staff in your office. This is good. Its job is to connect with neighborhood folks, to keep them and you in the loop, to come up with ideas to make life better.
As an engaged newspaperman, I offer a few ideas.
Despite the presence of a couple of high-level staffers who used to toil at Massport, maybe your liaison folks can turn a sympathetic ear to the East Boston and Winthrop residents who oppose Massport’s plans to build a taxiway.
Given your campaign promise to put more cops on the streets, maybe your liaison people can deliver same to Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, who wants to beef up community policing, and to places like Chelsea, Revere and Lynn, where youth gangs roam hither and yon.
Speaking of Chelsea, one hopes that the liaison staffers will help neighborhood people there deal with yet another power plant proposal, as if that city didn’t have enough facilities that exist for the great and general good, enough road salt, for example, to melt a couple of glaciers faster than global warming.
Perhaps your good offices could ride herd on Harvard to be sensitive to Allston and Brighton as the university clones itself in those neighborhoods.
One could probably take this theme out to Route 128 and beyond, but this writer gets nervous in suburbia, so we’re keeping it urban and local here.
Indeed, it was in these very precincts that neighborhood activism was spawned big-time and grew to become fairly potent.
Citizens with neither fame nor fortune began fighting in the 1960s to stop dangerous highway plans and airport expansion. They fought for affordable housing, job training programs, cleaner environment and more cops on the beat.
Some of these fighters went from being outsiders to insiders. Three Boston mayors, Kevin White, Ray Flynn and Tom Menino, and two governors, Frank Sargent and Mike Dukakis, brought them or their advocates into government.
Thanks to such neighborhood activists and their allies, no longer do we witness such inanities as a high-rise Columbia Point Housing Project, the devastation of a West End or the taking of homes, businesses and open space for an Inner Belt.
But preserving the fragile existence of urban neighborhoods is an ongoing task, so maybe, your public liaison staff is the next logical step in a process of neighborhood involvement begun so fitfully four decades ago.
Neighborhood outfits are often composed of a handful of conscientious citizens who must fight the apathy of their own neighbors along with the power of private developers, public bureaucracies and quasi-public authorities.
Over the years, some of the legendary neighborhood leaders such as Anna DeFronzo of Eastie, Melnea Cass of Roxbury and Joe Smith of Allston-Brighton, have died. Others have grown old or moved away. Some just give it all up because the fight, while worth fighting, can be debilitating.
That means they need support, from regular morale boosts, to public advocacy, to a sense that people in power are taking them seriously, something that seems to have been AWOL in the executive office for the last 16 years.