Pete Stidman

JAMAICA PLAIN GAZETTE

Mayor Thomas Menino handed over his proposed fiscal year (FY) 2007 budget to Boston City Council April 13. For the next 10 weeks the City Councilors will be holding public hearings to help them decide how they will use their only real power, approving or disapproving the budget.

Revenue for the city is up for the third year in a row, but so are costs. Rising health care premiums and energy bills eat up the majority of the $74 million budget increase over FY 2006. The catch phrase circulating among elected officials and public servants alike is, “Do more with less.” Except Councilor Sam Yoon, that is.

JAMAICA PLAIN GAZETTE

A number of Jamaica Plain’s citified-farmer types are itching to know the future of eight plots of land and a pile of cash that have been in limbo since the year 2000. Boston Urban Gardeners (BUG), a former promoter of urban gardening across Boston, folded that year and has struggled to dissolve its assets ever since.

According to BUG’s Exempt From Income Tax Returns, the organization’s cash assets totaled $447,578 at the end of 2004, down from $468,664 in early 2002. And then there’s the land. The Southwest Corridor Community Farm in JP is BUG’s busiest garden, four other active plots are in Dorchester, and three others around the city are currently unused.

As expected, Bush has announced his intention to reduce gas prices this summer. This is perhaps the most obvious example of his loose grip on reality.

Three dollars may seem like a lot to most drivers, but it is nothing compared to what is inevitably coming down the line, whether it begins this summer, or summer ten years from now.

Oil resources, no matter how many new areas engineers say they have discovered, are not infinite. When they run out, we won’t experience it as a sudden last drop in the tank at the gas station...

It’s nearing the end of another long Monday and the weekend glow is just beginning to get tarnished. I’ve been working on a few stories for the JP paper that are pretty interesting. They’re tempting my tendency to spend way too much time on research. (There are deadlines to meet!)

One is about Mayor Menino releasing the budget for Fiscal Year 2007. Of course the story itself is dry as hell unless you were hoping they'd drop a dime and fix up the park or the library next to your house.

But have you ever wondered why Mayor Daley of Chicago has the funds to build a whole building dedicated to bicycles in the Loop, bike lanes criss-crossing the city, and a green roof on city hall designed by world class landscape architects and Boston doesn't have diddly?

This time of year you can witness the madness.

On one had, the budget illustrates the almost unlimited power the mayor has over the city in relief. On the other, it demonstrates his almost total helplessness against the state... (yo, click that read more button!)

MISSION HILL GAZETTE

“It’s surreal,” said Mission Hill resident Maureen St. Guillen of the loss of her daughter Imette St. Guillen, brutally murdered in New York City Feb. 25. “At the beginning you feel like you’re not a part of it, you’re just looking down on it. And then every day you ask why. And we’re waiting, and we’re waiting.”

The St. Guillen family is now focused on how Imette St. Guillen lived, not how she died. One of their goals is to raise enough funds for an endowment for a scholarship in her name at the Boston Latin School.

Press coverage of the murder has been enormous, from the moment Imette’s body was first found, to the indictment of Darryl Littlejohn, 41, and beyond. Maureen St. Guillen avoids reading any of it.

“I’ve never seen anything and I’ve never read anything,” said St. Guillen, sitting in a café at Brigham and Women’s Hospital with her daughter Alejandra and her daughters’ stepfather, Frank Holbrook. “I’ve separated myself from that entirely.”

BY PETE STIDMAN
GAZETTE STAFF

The first of a series of articles chronicling JP’s invasive species.

When breathing in that fresh spring air and reveling in the greenery returning to Jamaica Plain this season, take a closer look at those vines, those shrubs, those reeds. They might be choking each other.

“Some of these plants are thugs in your own garden,” said Tom Smarr, horticulture director at the New England Wildflower Society. “There are a handful of nasty plants out there that are causing environmental degradation.”

The people who fight leafy ruffians say the invasives threaten native plants and wildlife, eco-systems, and even the city’s tree canopy. They’ve been creeping in for decades, even centuries. Jamaica Pond has Japanese knotweed. Olmsted Park has Asian bittersweet. Bussey Brook has black swallow wort. The Boston Nature Center is teeming with purple loosestrife. And that isn’t the end of it.

BY PETE STIDMAN
GAZETTE STAFF

      PARKSIDE—Everything from paint-ball gun bans to sensitivity courses for park rangers burst out when the Franklin Park Coalition asked for public input on a park management plan last Saturday. Over 50 people from Dorchester, Roxbury, Roslindale and Jamaica Plain, and other conservationists, gathered at the Franklin Park Golf Clubhouse to hear about what is known and what needs to be done in the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed park.

BY PETE STIDMAN
GAZETTE STAFF

   SOUTH STREET—A voracious blaze charred at least two storefronts, and smoke damaged five more, after an arson attack at 138-142 South St. in the early morning hours of March 24. Witnesses said a man ran from the scene carrying a hammer and escaped in a Lexus.

JP tends to favor independent businesses

JAMAICA PLAIN GAZETTE

Jamaica Plain has a long colorful history of standing up for itself. The neighborhood has halted a state highway pro-ject, fought back and won against several neglectful slumlords and blocked the advance of more than one corporate chain store. It is a neighborhood with 234 non-profits, or one for every 170 persons. A local group intent on preserving the main business district describes the desired mix of commerce as “funky, but functional.”

Therefore uttering the word “Starbucks” is tantamount to shouting fire in a crowded theatre.

Parakeet survives snowy night

By Pete Stidman
Gazette staff

JACKSON SQ.—Nelly Hernandez’s pet, Polly the parrot, enjoys inclement weather, but she won’t be seeing it up close anymore.
“When it rains and snows he likes the water,” translated her granddaughter, Denise Gonzalez. “So [grandmother] puts him on the porch.”
Apparently Sunday’s blizzard was no exception. Hernandez placed the bird on the porch around noon, as she does during any precipitation, and proceeded to the basement. When she returned five or 10 minutes later, Polly was gone.
Hernandez said she feels that the green, blue and yellow feathered avian must have been taken by someone. With clipped wings it seemed unlikely to her that she would fly away.