
We look forward to working with you.”ĭennehy, in an e-mail to the Globe, said O’Donovan got no special treatment.Ĭity purchasing records show that the Walsh administration has since spent about $7,100 on Bio-Organic Catalyst products. “It sounds like a great product,” Dennehy wrote back.
#Sean donovan free#
Within a week, O’Donovan was writing Dennehy directly, and offering to drop off a free sample for the department to test. Subsequent e-mails suggest that O’Donovan obtained an in-person meeting with top public works officials two days later. In an e-mail to Passacantilli, O’Donovan described one of the company’s products and inquired: “Can I ask you to forward this to Mr. Vitale, executive director of the Water and Sewer Commission. O’Donovan wanted help pitching Bio-Organic Catalyst, a California cleaning product maker, to Dennehy, the public worksĬommissioner, and to Henry F. O’Donovan had also represented him in an unrelated 2011 court case. In May 2014, five months into the new administration, e-mails show, O’Donovan sought a favor from a friend - Stephen Passacantilli, then a special assistant to Walsh at City Hall, whom O’Donovan had known for many years.
#Sean donovan professional#
“My personal friendships and relationships do not influence me or my professional work,” he said. O’Flaherty, the city’s corporation counsel, said in an e-mail that he has not helped O’Donovan’s business. He did not respond to messages left by phone, e-mail, text, and in person at his offices. O’Donovan, long a fixture in Somerville as a 13-year member of the Board of Aldermen, has opened a second office more befitting a Boston rainmaker, in a stately red-brick building at 10 Tremont St., a chip shot from City Hall Plaza. But they’re not going to get any special privileges from me.” “I’m not going to tell they can’t represent somebody because they have a relationship. O’Donovan is “doing business in the city of Boston,” Walsh said. Now there’s an opportunity for other people to get involved with the city.” “With a change of administration - you’ve got to figure the administration was here for 20 years - people got used to going to the same people over and over and over to get things done. “Certainly we don’t favor any one particular person or dislike anyone else,” he said. Walsh, in an interview, defended his administration’s interactions with lobbyists, saying he has no favorite sons in the influence industry and has cast nobody into political Siberia - an accusation frequently lobbed against his predecessor, Thomas M. new rules against conflicts of interest.” O’Donovan is just one very active example among the new faces leveraging influence in Boston’s seat of government.ĭuring his 2013 mayoral campaign, Walsh promised a new era of transparency at City Hall, vowing in his inaugural address to “set tough, new ethics standards for my staff. The perception that City Hall works better for the well-connected is as old as municipal government, and its drab concrete corridors remain fertile ground for lobbyists and lawyers with friends in high places. Since the start of the new administration, O’Donovan has exchanged 668 e-mails with city departments and the BRA, officials say, in response to Globe public records requests. City departments during those years included O’Donovan on just two impersonal “mass e-mails,” Walsh’s office said.

He had no e-mail contact with the Boston Redevelopment Authority in the two years prior to Walsh talking office on Jan.

People who work in Boston’s real estate and lobbying worlds say O’Donovan appeared as if from nowhere to become one of the new go-to guys for companies that need something from city government.īefore Walsh took over, there is little record of O’Donovan in City Hall e-mail traffic.

“Anything for an O’Donovan,” interim Public Works Commissioner Michael Dennehy wrote to O’Donovan in 2014.
