The Boston Globe - 11.09.2019

B6 The Boston Globe WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

Business

Shirley Leung

Paul Grogan
remembers the
FBI removing
files in a hand-
cart from a city
office. Micho
Spring remem-
bers how te-
dious the docu-
ment requests
were from inves-
tigators. George Regan remembers how a
federal probe was both “painful” and “un-
settling” for City Hall staffers.
They should know: They were all top
aides to the late Boston Mayor Kevin H.

White, whose fourth — and last — term in

office in the early 1980s was defined by an

obsessive corruption probe by the US attor-

ney at the time, Bill Weld.

Weld’s investigation — it began with

suspicions about the funding of a birthday

party for White’s wife and soon spread to

allegations about fraudulent disability pen-

sions and bribery — led to the indictment

or conviction of more than a dozen

low-level operatives.

No charges were filed against White.

I bring this up because of US Attorney

Andrew Lelling’s ongoing corruption probe

of Boston City Hall, which is making anoth-

er mayor and generation of city employees

feel under siege. Based on history, things

are likely to get worse before they get better.

On Thursday, John Lynch, a former em-

ployee of the Boston Planning & Develop-

ment Agency, is expected to plead guilty in

US District Court to accepting a $50,

bribe to help a developer receive a favorable

vote by the Zoning Board of Appeal. He fac-

es 46 to 57 months in prison under an

agreement with federal prosecutors.

This comes on the heels of another

Lelling case that led to the trial and convic-

tion of two top aides to Mayor Marty Walsh

— Kenneth Brissette and Timothy Sullivan

— for conspiring to extort organizers of the

Boston Calling music festival. A sentencing

date has not been set yet.

I can’t help but think city employees

must be looking over their shoulders and

wondering who’s next.

The weight of this moment could bring

the daily grind of City Hall to a halt, and

that would be unfortunate.

“This is a huge distraction, I’m sure. It

produces a lot of anxiety,” said Spring, who

served as White’s chief of staff.

“The advice would be to focus on the

mission and keep your eye on that, which is

tomoveBostonforward.”

Spring, who is president of PR giant

Weber Shandwick’s New England office, re-

calls how a lot of time was spent assembling

documents for investigators and holding

the hands of staffers who were being called

by Weld’s office to testify.

But beyond those tense episodes, Spring

said, she was buoyed by what the adminis-

tration was able to accomplish “in spite of”

the investigation, such as helping the city

survive a fiscal crisis spurred by Proposition

LEUNG,PageB

Lessons from another City Hall under siege

GEORGE PATISTEAS/GLOBE STAFF PHOTO ILLUSTRATION; GLOBE FILE PHOTOS

In the early

1980s, the last

term in office

for Mayor

Kevin H. White

(left) was

defined by a

corruption

probe by the US

attorney at the

time, William

Weld (right).

By Robert Weisman
GLOBE STAFF
The National Institute on Aging has
awarded a five-year grant worth up to
$53.4 million to Boston’s Hebrew Se-
niorLife and Brown University to find
ways to improve the hodgepodge of
care now available for people with Al-
zheimer’s disease and related demen-
tias.

Under the grant — one of the larg-

est federal awards ever for dementia

care — the two parties will lead a so-

called “collaboratory” of researchers

from more than 30 universities and

hospitals ranging from Harvard Uni-

versity and Massachusetts General

Hospital to Duke University, the Uni-

versity of Pennsylvania, and the Uni-

versity of California Los Angeles.

They will run up to 40 pilot pro-

grams to develop care protocols for

people with dementia. Researchers

will take ideas and experiments pio-

neered in small settings, such as using

music to calm agitation in Alzheimer’s

patients, and test them in large-scale

clinical trials.

The best practices could include

ways to support caregivers, like help-

lines and mindfulness programs, and

establish better prescribing proce-

dures at hospitals and nursing homes

to minimize side effects from the med-

icationsgiventopeoplewithcognitive

impairment.

Much of the focus will be on boost-

ing quality of life for people with Al-

zheimer’s and other forms of dementia

while scientists continue to search for

disease-modifying drugs.

“We’re going to be creating a

knowledge base for nonpharmacologi-

cal interventions,” said Dr. Susan

Mitchell, senior scientist at Hebrew

SeniorLife’s Marcus Institute for Aging

Research and coleader of the new fed-

erally funded collaboration.

More than 5 million Americans

now live with Alzheimer’s and other

memory-ravaging diseases, a number

that’s expected to double by 2050, ac-

cording to the Alzheimer’s Associa-

tion. The cost of dementia care already

tops $226 billion annually in the Unit-

ALZHEIMER'S,PageB

Researchpartnersget$53mdementiacaregrant

‘Collaboratory’ hopes to improve best practices

Hiawatha Bray

TECH LAB

The annual
September rollout
of new products
from Apple
delivered less this
year than I’d
expected. And
that’s a good thing.
It wasn’t a
secret that Apple
would be
introducing the new iPhone 11. But it was a
surprise the base model would carry a starting
price of $699 — $50 less than for last year’s
iPhone XR. And while we foresaw the
announcement of Apple’s new Arcade gaming
service and the company’s long-awaited TV
streaming service Apple TV Plus, I wasn’t ready
for the low price: $4.99 a month for each.
It looks like Apple has taken to heart the
lessons of its humbling slump in iPhone sales,
which proved there’s only so much consumers
will pay for even a very good phone. The
company has also realized the vital importance
of taking an early lead in a cloud-based gaming
market that has attracted the attention of

competitors Microsoft and Google.

Apple knows it’s late to TV streaming.

Netflix dominates, Disney is on the way, and

AT&T isn’t too far behind. So forget about

charging premium prices. For Apple TV Plus,

it’s a bargain-basement pricing strategy that

even included the company’s chief executive,

Tim Cook, shouting “This is crazy!” like a guy

peddling Veg-O-Matics on late-night TV.

TECHLAB,PageB

FromApple,asurpriseontheprices

TONY AVELAR/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Kaiann Drance,

senior director

of product

marketing for

the iPhone,

talked about

new Apple

products

Tuesday.

Jon Chesto

CHESTO MEANS BUSINESS

The state’s solar energy industry

faces a new challenge, and this one is

coming from an unlikely place: the en-

vironmental community.

A battle is brewing over the future

of rural Massachusetts, as the Baker

administration adjusts a set of state

incentives created to spur the growth

of solar power. Think: open space vs.

clean energy.

The proliferation of solar projects

in often-remote areas has sparked a

backlash that the administration is

trying to address as it retools this set

of incentives, nicknamed SMART. The

changes have been rumored for

months, and the state Department of

Energy Resources started formally

rolling them out in listening sessions

during the last several days.

The new SMART rules include

many provisions that aren’t particular-

ly controversial, such as new stan-

dards encouraging energy storage to

be built alongside bigger arrays.

But the way the rules would treat

larger, ground-mounted arrays — as

opposed to rooftop solar — has many

developers upset. The existing rules,

in place for about a year, already offer

reduced incentives for most larger

standalone solar plants. The new

rules, expected to take effect later this

fall, would reduce the incentives even

further by a factor of five. Another

change would impose a new limit on

the size of solar projects based on

CHESTO,PageB

Backlashcouldcomplicate

largesolarprojects