Thomas Menino - Public Opinion

Public Opinion

Menino enjoys high approval ratings among Boston residents. An April 2008 Boston Globe-UNH poll indicated that the city was “smitten” with the mayor, with a 72% approval rating; 54% reported having personally met the mayor. Menino's perennial popularity has garnered him the tongue-in-cheek epithet "Mayor for Life."

Menino has met with controversy a few times during his political career. In 1993 when running for mayor, Menino pledged to serve "only two terms, and that's it for me." In 2001, when Menino ran for a third term, he clarified "I promised I'd serve two terms - in every century." In 2001, Menino personally intervened to help stop a chain drugstore from opening a few blocks from a pharmacy owned by a close friend and political supporter. The case raised the question of favoritism and cronyism in the city's zoning and licensing practices.

In 2008, the Friends of Mary Cummings Park delivered a complaint to the Massachusetts Attorney General alleging breach of charitable trust by the Menino administration, which had sought to sell over 200 acres of public parkland for development. The Menino administration had used hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Mary P.C. Cummings care and maintenance trust fund, substantially depleting the fund, to pay for legal services working towards breaking the trust and to hire a real estate agency to prepare a extensive plan on how to develop the public parkland as either commercial or residential real estate. According to the Boston Business Journal, Joe Timilty, "the former Boston city councilor and developer who spent time in prison for his part in a 1980s real estate deal gone bad", was among those interested in acquiring the land from the City. "Timilty at one point looked closely at the Route 128 land owned by Boston, hoping to build an upscale golf community featuring a green surrounded by luxury homes". Attorney General Martha Coakley, a fellow Democrat, declined to investigate.

In 2009, the Boston Globe printed an article alleging dirty tricks in Menino's mayoral campaign race. The article reported several instances of questionable behavior, including more than one case of Menino's associates monitoring mayoral opponent Michael F. Flaherty's Facebook affiliations. According to the article, the Menino campaign sent out a campaign memo containing the name of at least one small business owner who supported Flaherty. In 2011, Flaherty alleged that his former running mate Sam Yoon had to leave Boston after running against Menino because the mayor's allies made it difficult for Yoon to find a job locally.

In 2011, controversy arose surrounding Menino's decision to evict members of the Occupy Boston protest on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Menino later commented that "I sympathize with their issues, some of those issues we really have to look at in America, but when it comes to civil disobedience I will not tolerate civil disobedience in the city of Boston."