City Council President Louijeune hasn’t filed all of her required financial disclosures, but Boston Housing Authority Chief Bok Appears Even Less Transparent by Blowing Off Her Own for Years
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It may be a little-known provision of Boston’s municipal code, but Ordinance 2-14.3 sends city councilors and other top officials scrambling every Spring to submit their required Statements of Financial Interest (SFI) forms to the City Clerk by the June 1st deadline.
This ordinance makes financial disclosures mandatory and even threatens a $300 fine for every month past the deadline that an official fails to submit the detailed, multi-page form.
Councilors, the Mayor, and most top appointees in the City must disclose their income range, employment, investments, assets, and business ownership stakes in significant detail. Newly elected and appointed officials must also submit an SFI for the calendar year before they take office.
A review of recent filings shows that most, but not all of Boston’s elected officials submit their SFIs by the deadline. These documents are public records and serve to reassure the voters that powerful officials are not hiding financial interests that ethically conflict with the duties of their position.
By law, being a public servant is not meant to be a profitable enterprise that opens the door for personal financial gain.
For example, Mayor Wu has been submitting SFIs for years. As Wu’s most recent filing shows, she and her husband are joint owners of their two-family home. Her mayoral salary is her only source of income and her husband owns stock in Rockland Trust. The Mayor’s financial interests appear modest, mundane, and straightforward.
A recent BAN Report showed that Council President Louijeune has an incomplete disclosure history. Louijeune failed to submit her SFI for 2021, which was due in June 2022. However, compared to BHA Chief and former City Councilor Priscilla “Kenzie” Bok (D8 Beacon Hill), Louijeune is a model of transparency.
According to an official response from the city of Boston, Bok has never once filed a disclosure with the City Clerk’s office.
There are different penalties for violations of these laws at both the city and state levels. As previously mentioned, the city of Boston can impose a fine of $300 every month a disclosure is late. For Bok, who was appointed to head the Boston Housing Authority by Mayor Wu, she will likely continue to meet state filing requirements as a public employee.
This is how the state defines these different positions:
For Louijeune, whose 2021 disclosure is roughly 19 months past due, this tardiness equates to a $5,700 fine – $300 more than Boston City Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson had to pay when she violated the conflict of interest law by hiring her sister and son. Louijeune’s potential penalty is also higher than the fines levied by the Ethics Commission on new Councilor Enrique Pepen (D5) and disgraced former Councilor Ricardo Arroyo (also D5) for their ethical lapses.
Why have Anderson, Pepen, and Arroyo been held publicly and financially accountable while Louijeune and Bok seem to be getting a free pass?
Granted, Louijeune’s infraction pales in comparison to Kenzie Bok, who is the scion of a Boston fortune older than the Freedom Trail and a woman whose primary residence is a Beacon Hill townhouse worth an estimated $4.1 million on the open market. Bok has never once submitted any financial disclosure statements as required by law and owes for 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 (her 2023 disclosure is due June 1).
BHA Chief’s home is an inherited townhouse on the flat of Beacon Hill worth more than $4 million dollars.
Bok, who has advanced degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, is intelligent enough to understand the importance of these mandatory forms, so it’s unlikely she just forgot to file them four years in a row.
But since Bok has never bothered to inform the public just how silver her spoon is, we don’t know whether she can just write a check for the $32,000 in potential fines she could face for blowing off years of disclosures, or if she’d need to work out a payment plan with the City treasury.
Perhaps Bok doesn’t want voters to know just how wealthy her family is? This is unfortunate because most people don’t care how much money someone else has. What voters don’t like, however, is when holier-than-thou millionaires hide potential financial conflicts of interest because they’re too rich to care or too entitled to recognize that the same laws that apply to working-class immigrants like Tania Fernandes Anderson also apply to Ivy League elites like Louijeune and Bok.
Maybe Louijeune doesn’t want to disclose her salary and sources of income for 2021, the year she somehow qualified for a sweetheart $424,000 mortgage from Rockland Trust at 2.99% fixed interest – more than a point lower than the going rate at the time? Maybe Bok thinks it’s bad optics for an oh-so-humble public servant now responsible for housing Boston’s poorest to disclose a trust fund, securities, and real estate fortune that might tarnish her carefully honed “just folks” political persona?
Maybe. But until Councilor Louijeune and Director Bok stop defying the law and start disclosing their financial interests to the State Ethics Commission and the public, we simply won’t know.
*Update: January 22, 2024 at 11:45am
The city of Boston previously closed our records request on former Councilor Bok’s disclosure forms, stating this:
Earlier today, a representative from the city of Boston contacted BAN with the following email:
It is troubling that the city of Boston is trying to deflect blame for its original withholding of records, whether intentional or not. The use of “financial statements of interest” is required by Massachusetts’ Financial Disclosure Law. As such, BAN interpreted this to mean that these were encompassed by our request for “any and all disclosures.”
However, both BAN’s interpretation and the state regulation are arguing semantics. For a clear explanation of whether these statements of financial interest(SFI) classify as a “disclosure,” one only needs to refer to the Boston Municipal Code. More specifically, the city of Boston directly and explicitly refers to SFIs as disclosures:
BAN is looking into why the city of Boston originally withheld this information as well as the questionable justification it has provided for withholding it. We have sent the following to determine the city of Boston’s official position on the matter:
We will provide an update on the city of Boston’s response when and if one becomes available. Those interested in reviewing former Councilor Bok’s filings can do so by clicking here.
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