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Bad art or at least trite art headed to The Museum of Bad Art?
A City of Quincy Image
It is not often that the South Short broadsheet beats Quincy Quarry News to exposé breaking badly bad news© in Quincy, much less also the local tabloid — sorta/kinda anyway — involving the Koch Maladministration.
Even rarer still does anything grifted by the Koch Maladministration shock the seen just about seen it all grizzled Quincy Quarry News news crew.
In particular, Mayor Koch’s disrespecting of the unarguably valid views of a retired forty year member of the Quincy Police Department and now a City of Quincy ward councillor.
Even so, the celestial aspect of a harmonic convergence of a hat trick occasionally happens and this Quincy Quarry story addresses this hen’s tooth of a rarity.
The event or rather a larger set of events?
The triggering event of what has become a still metastasizing kerfuffle is Quincy Mayor Thomas P. Koch’s plans to install two ten foot tall bas relief statutes on the exterior of the impending $172 million new Quincy Police Department headquarters.
Stalin bites the dust, ends up in the dustbin of history — whatever …
A Nino Chibchiuri/Reuters image
On top of what is readily argued to be bad art commissioned by Mayor Koch with his go to Soviet-trained and thus Stalinist School sculptor, the gobsmacking problems are that Koch has spent or has obligated the spending of likely over a million dollars all costs duly counted to be paid for with tax dollars on so-called art of a couple of Roman Catholic saints who are the patron saints of firefighters and police officers, respectively.
So what for the fact that such new displays of religious artwork on public buildings are constitutionally proscribed by the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution, state statute, and a massive body of germane case law.
Then again, such a blatant disregard of the rule of law is only to be expected as the rules “… are more like guidelines than rules” in Quincy during the unbridled reign of the Koch Maladministration.
Mayor Koch thought it was OK to disrespect the unarguably valid views of a now-retired forty-year member of the Quincy Police Department and now a City of Quincy ward councilor because this former forty-year Quincy Police Department member and now a current City of Quincy ward councilor is not one of Mayor Koch’s relatives.
If it is OK for Mayor Koch to break the law by illegally using public funds, does that make it OK for all Quincy residents and visitors to the City of Presidents to also break the law? Mayor Koch leads by example.
The statues look completely out of place. If the goal is to showcase the grandeur of the new building, why not enhance it with accent lighting instead? Let the building itself be the work of art.
This week’s city council meeting was an embarrassment to Quincy. I have never seen Ian Cain and the mayor’s representative so defensive. The people want transparency, accountability, and the opportunity to be heard—not dismissiveness.
This is a $172 million project. Where is the transparency? A living dashboard tracking project costs and construction updates should be standard. Quincy’s crime rates have been steadily declining, so why are we spending this much on public safety infrastructure? When will Quincy see a real return on this investment?
It was also wrong for the mayor’s representative to frame opposition to the statues as opposition to the men and women who keep us safe. This project has been presented as a massive investment in public safety personnel, yet the budget and payroll data show that Quincy has already been investing in police and fire—primarily through overtime pay.
Dismissing concerns about statue spending by saying it’s “less than 1%” of the overall budget is misleading. When you separate the cost of the building from the broader project expenses (sidewalks, demolition, a gas station, a new garage), the percentage increases significantly. We don’t have clear cost breakdowns because there is no transparency for this publicly funded project.
Faxon Park was a win. This building? Not so much. Imagine if we had partnered with the state to build a boardwalk at Wollaston Beach or invested in another project that actually revitalized Quincy.
I sincerely hope there will be more opportunities for public input. Kudos to Nina Liang and Scott Campbell for being the only ones to call for additional public hearings. Quincy deserves real dialogue on how our tax dollars are being spent.
Andrew,
Solid points. At the same time, Councillors Liang and Campbell should have called on their fellow councillors to make referrals to the MA Inspector General, the States Ethics Commission and/or the MA Attorney General given a readily arguable misappropriation of taxpayers’ money.
Also, no matter how one cares to spin, surely close to a million all costs duly tabulated is a million dollars, especially when at minimum most dubiously misspent in the first place.
Andrew,
Great idea about some mood lighting! A smart lighting plan made my woefully unattractive now Eisenhower Executive Office Building look at least passable enough after dark.
Then again, a lot of things look at least less bad at night.
The seal of the City of Quincy on one side of the building and signage indicating Public Safety Headquarters — Police and Fire — on the other side would be absolutely appropriate, accurate, tasteful, informative, and far less expensive than the bronze idols Koch wants to piss away $850,000 on.