Downtown Update; More on Magnan v. Boisvert

The Johnsonia got its first public viewing yesterday, as the effort to transform the building into 46 condominimums.

Ten of the units have already been sold, and the developers believe they can sell half the total this year and the rest next year.

This has been one of those projects that a lot of folks have been kind of wondering about, so it's good to get an update. Redevelopments like this one will play an important role in the remaking of downtown. It will happen one unit, one building, at a time, but that's how momentum is built. Hopefully, the Johnsonia is a success, and brings more developers to the table for future projects.

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The Sentinel checks in on Magnan v. Boisvert. They don't have the money quote from Boisvert that the Telegram had, but it does sort of shape Magnan's argument a bit better.

Also, the Sentinel notes Magnan mentioned the ethics filing after the mayor's press conference yesterday. Interesting. Some commenters today position Magnan as something of a publicity hound, and we've gotten some off-blog feedback from good sources that back that up.

We don't know Magnan well enough to make that publicity hound assertion, but it appears as if Magnan went out of his way to make this public. It is a little opportunistic to make hay over a fellow public official's situation, but that's certainly not unheard of. It's also not unheard of for a politician to look for ink.

Finally on this matter, Boisvert tells the Sentinel, "I didn't figure it was anybody's business to be honest. I wasn't doing anything wrong so I didn't make anything public."

The way that's written, without a comma between "business" and "to," it reads like it wasn't in the public interest to be honest. It would read a lot differently with the comma in there, as in Boisvert was being honest, and that's probably the way Boisvert intended it. Although it took a couple of reads for us to get there.

Here's the thing, though: Boisvert knew this was coming. Magnan had warned him, and Boisvert didn't think he needed to say anything. The general guideline is usually, "If there's the potential for conflict, there's a conflict." It's a fancy of way saying don't take any chances. All Boisvert had to say was, "My wife works for the city, but I've been counseled I can vote on the overall budget," and he'd be done with it. Magnan may be looking for some news hole, but Boisvert could have avoided this mess with one sentence.