[Kenn Turner]
[00:00:00] I guess I'm gonna just round out with the last question because we're gonna talk about a little bit a preview of your speach, You're gonna talk about. Sure. And I know as soon is around supply diversity and some of the work that you did. Why is that important to you? Sure. And how are you gonna incorporate it into your tenure? As I mentioned earlier, I came to the Massachusetts Board Authority if memory serves in the summer of 2013, having
previously served for two years, which was my first stent in government as the Deputy Secretary and CFO for Veteran Services under the Patrick administration. I had the pleasure of serving under the Secretary Coleman knee and we are terrifically good friends to this day as a result of that. And so when I came to that work I didn't have a background in DEI.
DEI. I am a marketer. I'm a general manager. I was, I think, fairly deep background in trade marketing as well and strategy. But I was not a DEI practitioner. I came to it with the thinking that I wanted to think about how business, how making money in the end [00:01:00] gets everybody's attention.
How can we make a difference there? Why? Because one making money is where folks focus. And two. It was an opportunity in my head to drive economic empowerment within the black and brown communities. And I found out very early in my tenure that there had not been a significant investment in commercial real estate in the city of Boston in any of those billion dollar projects going up and around the city.
'cause anywhere you went, all is cranes even to this day. And projects are huge projects. Million here, $800 million there, billion and a half there, et cetera, et cetera. They're all white The last 50 years and by God I was determined to do something about it. And so we able to leverage the commercial real estate properties at Massport.
Many of which are plots of land in the most desirable neighborhood in Boston, which is the Seaport district. Yeah, it was. So [00:02:00] we changed the game by saying if you want to compete to build one of these commercial real estate projects on Massport land on one of our parcels, we were gonna offer four criteria and four criteria only in the RFP.
Access to capital, viability of the team, design, excellence and diversity, equity and inclusion, which included a component for equity. In other words, you're not gonna just throw 'em crumbs by God, they're gonna be owners of the building. And folks said, oh my God, you can't do that. You're gonna chill the market, the developers are gonna sue you.
My initial response to that, which is first off, bring it on and second off, the last time I checked on the third floor, we got a whole floor full of lawyers. So you bring your lawyers, we'll bring our lawyers and see what happens, and we'll see where we net out. We didn't have one lawsuit. [00:03:00] Wow. Not one lawsuit.
When we did Boston, we did not have one. Lawsuit. That's amazing. We had,if memory serves me right, we had one over six or eight competitive bids in that first project, which is the Omni Hotel, which we just did the ribbon cutting on. Yeah. A week or two ago. So my hotel is now up and running.
That was an $800 million project that has about 40 independent investors and people who look like you and me. And that's called the Massport model. And we replicated it on parcel A two and on parcel H right before I left. And there are still two or three more parcels left that I'm sure Tiffany Brown Greer, who is just promoted to be director of DNI compliance for the Port Authority, who is my deputy.
I'm sure that Tiffany and Lisa, who is the CEO Lisa Wheeling will continue that model, but that model is now called as a case study at the Kennedy School of Government and at the Harvard Business School. Wow. And so I say that to say this, if you can come to that job with no experience in DNI and then have [00:04:00] your work be held up as a national model, which it is, then I think we can do the same in life sciences.
Absolutely.