Josh Kraft calls on Mayor Michelle Wu to ‘immediately halt’ Boston’s White Stadium demolition

Boston mayoral candidate Josh Kraft is asking on Mayor Michelle Wu to “immediately halt” the razing of White Stadium that started final Friday, till the courts can rule on the town’s public-private plan to rehab it for a brand new professional girls’s soccer workforce.

Kraft, in an announcement issued Tuesday by his marketing campaign, cited the ballooning taxpayer tab, which has grown from $50 million to $100 million in current weeks, persistent neighborhood opposition and authorized challenges dogging the mission as causes to press pause on demolition work on the 76-year-old Franklin Park facility.

“I am calling on Mayor Wu to listen to the concerns of the community and pledge today to stop any planned demolition work at White Stadium until the legal process is resolved,” Kraft mentioned. “There are legitimate legal matters before the courts that deserve to be heard and adjudicated before any trees are removed and any demolition of the current structure occurs.

“The communities around Franklin Park and the people of Boston are not on board with Mayor Wu’s plan to pour more than $100 million in public money into a project that primarily benefits a private commercial interest,” he mentioned, including, “To race ahead in this moment when there are so many legitimate community concerns would be a total failure of leadership.”

Kraft, 57, who stepped down from his place as president of the New England Patriots Basis on Feb. 1, days earlier than formally launching his marketing campaign for mayor, had first known as for a pause in deliberate demolition work at White Stadium when talking briefly with reporters after his announcement speech.

He mentioned he attended a neighborhood assembly final Thursday that targeted on hashing out alternate options to the town and Boston Unity Soccer Companions’ public-private plan to redevelop White Stadium for a brand new Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League growth workforce. Nobody from Mayor Wu’s workplace was there, Kraft mentioned.

Buyers for Boston Unity and the brand new professional workforce embody Boston Globe CEO Linda Pizzuti Henry, spouse of the billionaire Pink Sox proprietor John Henry.

“Over the weekend, Mayor Wu sent out a campaign fundraising appeal to her donors saying this: ‘We don’t believe politics should be controlled by billionaires throwing around vast personal wealth — we believe it should be controlled by the people,’” Kraft, a son of the billionaire New Patriots proprietor Robert Kraft, mentioned.

“Given Mayor Wu’s actions on White Stadium, where she is standing with ultra-wealthy private interests at the expense of her community, her actions don’t match her rhetoric,” he added.

Shortly after the Boston Metropolis Council deadlocked, 6-6, late final month on a vote to halt demolition at White Stadium and a associated protest was held close to the power, Wu mentioned she had no plans to halt the public-private rehab.

On Tuesday, Wu’s marketing campaign fired again at Kraft’s “opportunistic” name.

“Kraft’s cynical and opportunistic attacks will not stop us from delivering on this long-delayed promise to BPS student athletes or derail this major investment in Franklin Park,” a Wu marketing campaign spokesperson mentioned in an announcement. “Kraft’s glaring financial conflict in opposing this critical project should be a warning to all Boston families about where his loyalties lie.”

Wu, 40, has beforehand taken goal at Kraft’s potential battle of curiosity along with his household’s involvement in plans to construct a brand new stadium in Everett, which has encountered resistance from the mayor and different Boston officers over visitors and parking issues in close by Charlestown.

The Kraft Group and Wu administration are in what look like tense negotiations to hammer out a neighborhood mitigation settlement for impacts to Boston, and Kraft mentioned he would “recuse” himself from any discussions if he have been elected mayor.

Some opponents of the White Stadium plan have urged that the brand new professional girls’s workforce, BOS Nation FC, ought to as a substitute share use of the Everett stadium with the Revolution.

In a letter to the Metropolis Council after its deadlocked vote, Wu described the deliberate renovation because the “largest investment in BPS athletics since the stadium first opened in 1949, one that will transform the facilities and opportunities for Boston Public School students, Franklin Park lovers, and all community members.”

For Louis Elisa, president of the Garrison-Trotter Neighborhood Affiliation and a plaintiff in a pending lawsuit that seeks to cease the mission, the mayor’s reasoning behind the plan is “laughable.”

“You’re going to give $100 million to the Boston Public Schools, who for 35 years didn’t spend $5 million to fix up the stadium, to fix up this part that was broken, that was repairable,” Elisa instructed the Herald. “The mayor is going to spend $100 million in a park that, over the last 10 years, she hasn’t spent $100 million in for capital improvements.

“I mean, please. Somebody has to open their eyes and be realistic. This is not a benefit to public school children. This is a giveaway,” he mentioned.

As for Kraft’s enter, Elisa mentioned he appreciates the sentiment nevertheless it got here too late, as crews started taking a wrecking ball to the stadium final Friday, in what he described as a “Valentine’s Day massacre.”

“Day late, dollar short,” Elisa mentioned. “I appreciate his concerns and his commitment to look at the welfare of the city of Boston and all the residents, but it’s a little bit late … They’ve already started destroying antiquities, a national monument. They’re destroying the park, this stadium.”

The mission has grown from a projected preliminary price of $100 million to north of $200 million, with taxpayers funding the town’s half of “roughly $100 million,” and counting, because the Wu administration has not dominated out additional price overruns.