• They fixed the duct opening which their subcontractor made too small, and replaced the screw in the duct cover that was damaged when I had to unscrew the cover from its frame because the frame was wedged to tightly into the too-small opening.
• They fixed the air leaking from the furnace manifold.
• At their expense, they replaced the whole-house humidifier that was wasting a huge amount of water, with a Humid-a-Mist humidifier that doesn’t.

The fact that they addressed these issues, as well as the manner in which they went about doing so, suggests to me that they really are trying to do right by their customers, or at least what they perceive as doing right by their customers. Having said that, there are some caveats deserving of mention with the repairs listed above:

• The frame of the aforementioned duct cover is still irreparably bent from having been jammed into the too-small opening, but I didn’t really expect them to fix that and didn’t press the issue.
• Surely a huge air leak in the furnace manifold is something they should have noticed and addressed when they were installing the system.
• They programmed the thermostat for the new humidifier incorrectly when they installed it, such that it was humidifying the house in the summer when the furnace wasn’t running (bad both because of the wasted water and because who wants their house humidified in the summer?). They did come back and fix this when I complained, but this is a rookie mistake that shouldn’t have happened.

Furthermore, some of the issues I mentioned in my previous postings still remain, e.g., their inability to process a simple credit-card change for many months, and their offer to replace a toilet handle, a 15-minute job involving a $5 part, for the absurdly high price of $238.

Given all I’ve experienced with them, here’s my take on Winters Plumbing:

1. They try to do quality work, but they don’t always succeed.
2. Their rates are high.
3. If you are an educated consumer and you know how to stand up for yourself, then they will address any issues with their work that you bring to their attention. If, on the other hand, you just leave everything to them and don’t pay attention to what they’re doing, the odds are pretty good that they’ll screw something up.

In a nutshell, Honda Village lied to us when we bought our car, lied to us after the fact, ignored our complaints, sent us (and others) intentionally misleading junk mail and refused to stop when asked, sent us lots of spam and refused to stop when asked, and did mediocre auto-body work for us which took multiple attempts to get right (this last point was Village Collision, another business within the Village Automotive Group umbrella of which Honda Village is a part).

Nevertheless, Honda Village is where we bought our Honda Odyssey minivan, and they are the closest Honda dealership to our house, so when we need service done that is warranty- or recall-related and/or inexpensive and hard enough for them to screw up, we take our van there. Or so I thought.

A number of months ago, I brought our van to Honda Village for some simple service or recall or something; I forget the details. After looking up our van in the computer, the associate informed me that I had to speak to the service department manager about something. I went into the manager’s office, where he informed me that Honda Village would not service my vehicle.

Honda Village has never apologized for any of the things I complained to them about. They have never acknowledged doing anything wrong, unless you consider it an “apology” when they paid me the refund I demanded for the warranty which they convinced me to purchase by outright lying to me about its coverage (fraud!).

Their response to my legitimate complaints was not to acknowledge them and try to improve. No, their response has been to continue on with business as usual and refuse to serve me.

Judge for yourself whether this is a business which deserves your patronage.

P.S. I just realized that I never got around to posting what happened after my last letter to Honda Village’s lawyer. So, for those who are curious… Their lawyer sent back a response asserting that the precedents on which I was relying were out-of-date, and citing a newer precedent which he claimed precluded my filing a Chapter 93a claim against Honda Village. After reviewing that newer precedent, I thought he was probably right, and in any case didn’t have any more time to waste on it, so I dropped it.

My wife and I have used them numerous times for many different services, including routine maintenance (e.g., oil and filter), auto-body work, repairing a broken automatic minivan door, and tire repair and replacement.

In all cases they have been friendly, responsive, and affordable and have delivered high-quality work on time.

Here are two examples of how great they are:

1. We needed a couple of body panels repaired and repainted after someone borrowing our minivan ran it into the side of his garage door (d’oh!). Stadium Auto Body said that all of the damaged panels would have to be replaced and gave us an estimate of $2,400. A-Z repaired the existing panels — no replacement parts needed — for only $860. While they were at it, they detailed the interior of the minivan at no extra charge!

2. Herb Chambers Honda said it would cost $400 to fix one of our automatic minivan doors, which was repeatedly sticking when we tried to open or close it. A-Z did the repair for only $169.

In all of our dealings with A-Z, it has felt like they were being completely honest and up-front with us. Not once have we gotten that unpleasant feeling, so common with car-repair places, that they were trying to jack up the price of a repair or sell us something we didn’t need. In short, these guys are great, and we heartily recommend them!

Dear Gov. Patrick (via Fax), Rep. Honan, Rep. Brownsberger, Mayor Menino, and members of the Boston City Council,

I am writing to you all in incensed opposition to the abhorrent plan currently under discussion to close the MBTA’s budget gap by decimating Massachusetts public transportation.

The T’s budget gap is structural, resulting from the Big Dig debt thrust upon it several years ago, coupled with sales tax revenue that was supposed to increase but flattened instead. Drastic cuts in service won’t actually solve the structural issue, they’ll merely postpone it. They are not the answer.

The idea some people seem to have that public transportation should pay for itself is simply absurd. Public transportation is an essential public service, like roads, bridges, police, fire departments, and schools. Do the Commonwealth’s roads and bridges pay for their own maintenance?

I ride the 501 express bus from my neighborhood in Brighton to and from my job downtown nearly every day. No matter what time of day I commute, the bus is full or nearly full. Eliminating this particular route will cause many T riders to start driving to work instead of taking the bus, increasing pollution, traffic, and road maintenance costs. It will also make Brighton a far less attractive and stable neighborhood and damage property values, since easy access is to downtown is a huge plus for professionals looking for a place to live.

Every one of the more than 100 other routes whose elimination is under discussion serves many people whose lives and communities would be similarly impacted by the elimination of their route. This proposal isn’t an answer; it’s a disaster.

The right way to solve the T’s budget woes is actually quite obvious:

• The Legislature should compare how much the T was projected to receive from the 20% cut of sales tax revenue vs. how much it actually received, and pay off that much of the T’s debt, including any debt servicing interest paid on it over the years, from the state’s general fund or rainy day fund.

• The T should raise its fares to make them comparable to fares charged in other cities and should raise them regularly moving forward to keep up with inflation. Some of the fares charged by the T are absurdly low. For example, I pay $89 per month to ride the 501 bus every day, whereas if I drove to work I’d pay a minimum of $265 for parking, not to mention possibly needing to buy and insure a car, as well as paying for gas and increased maintenance. I suspect the T could easily charge 50% more than it’s charging now for the 501 and other express buses and keep most of their riders. I know I’d pay it.

• Other sources of revenue, such as income or sales taxes or even state highway and bridge tolls, should be used to offset any remaining budget gap on a year-by-year basis. To make this politically feasible, the Legislature needs to change the conversation by first educating itself, and then educating the public through a massive public opinion campaign, about the fact that a good public transportation system actually saves the Commonwealth and its citizens money, creates jobs, reduces traffic, protects the environment, and reduces our country’s dependence on foreign oil.

I love living in Boston. However, the parochial mentality which so often seems to dominate how things are done around here frequently prompts me to wonder if I live in a minor town with pretensions of being a major city. Destroying our public transportation system would reinforce that image in many people’s minds. Please don’t let this happen.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

CC: fareproposal@mbta.com

Speaking as a religious Jew, I can assure you that I do not find it “inclusive” or “welcoming” for you to call the tree you’re lighting today a “holiday tree”.

If it were my choice, there would be no religious symbols of any sort on public property. But since that’s never going to happen, at the very least the symbols that are erected to recognize various people’s religious observances should actually recognize those observances, not water them down and engage in ludicrous newspeak to imply they’re something they’re not.

The only December holiday that involves a tree is Christmas. Please call it what it is and stop pandering to a class of people that don’t actually exist. Nobody who’s offended by Christmas trees on public property is mollified by calling them something different.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

To the editor:

Herman Cain was forced out of the campaign by his immoral acts and lies about them, not by liberal ideologues as Joe Fitzgerald claims. Cain’s plummeting poll numbers came from conservatives who might have actually voted for him.

It’s true that other politicians, on both sides of the aisle, have dallied, gotten caught, and emerged with little damage. The difference is not their politics or their race, but rather their reaction to exposure. It’s obvious that Cain is lying through his teeth, and as usual, the coverup was worse than the crime.

As is befitting in an America which is increasingly post-racial, Cain was judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

To run an article which aggressively calls into question the safety of blood transfusions [2] [3] [4], without so much as a single word countering the scare-mongering, goes well beyond bad reporting and crosses the line to irresponsible, dangerous journalism.

Certainly, there are risks to blood transfusions. But there are risks to pretty much every medical procedure, and to print such a one-sided article is outrageous.

What’s next? Are you going to run a fawning article about how great Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaccine campaign is?

If your unbalanced article causes someone to refuse a blood transfusion in an emergency and they die as a result, their death is on your hands.

Shame on you.

Jonathan Kamens

I write in opposition to H.408, “legislation to establish civil or criminal penalties for motorists failing to yield to bicyclists,” which you sponsored.

Bicyclists are legally prohibited from riding in crosswalks. To use the crosswalk, a bicyclist is legally required to dismount from his bicycle and walk it, thus making him a pedestrian and therefore protected by the existing law. If he does not dismount, he is legally required to operate his bicycle as a vehicle, which means (among other things) staying out of the crosswalk.

Bicyclists riding in crosswalks are dangerous both to pedestrians and other vehicles on the road. It is both unnecessary and unreasonable to enshrine into law protections which would encourage bicyclists to violate other laws and operate their vehicles dangerously.

Drivers can already be cited for driving unsafely; there is no need for a new law protecting bicyclists in this particular context. This is especially true since the law would create a presumption that the driver of a car that strikes a bicycle in a crosswalk was at fault, when in fact it is just as likely, if not more so, that the bicyclist was at fault for darting into the crosswalk too fast for the driver to stop in time.

I speak from the point of view of someone who regularly walks, bikes, and drives in Boston; someone who strives to adhere to the law in all of those contexts; and someone who resents the many bicyclists who do not.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

Cost and incentives

Here are the incentives I’m taking advantage of in my solar panel installation project:

• 30% federal tax credit on the total cost of the system
• 15% state tax credit on the total cost of the system, capped at $1,000
• state Commonwealth Solar rebate based on the capacity of the system
• $750/kW base incentive
• $850/kW “adder” because my home’s assessed value is considered “moderate”
• Renew Boston rebate equal to 1/3 of the state rebate
• Solar Renewable Energy Credits, a.k.a., SRECs (pronounced “ess-recs”), through which the utility companies will pay me to produce solar energy for at least the next ten years
• Massachusetts law prohibits towns and cities from adding the value of installed solar panels to the assessed value of a home for 20 years after the panels are installed.
• Because my roof was too old and needed to be re-shingled before I could install the solar panels, I am able to include the cost of the re-shingling job in the total cost of the solar project, so I get the 30% federal tax credit on that as well.

In addition to the moderate home value “adder” for the state rebate, there’s also a moderate income “adder” of the same amount; you can only get one or the other of those, not both. There’s also a $100/kW “adder” if your system is built out of solar panels or inverters manufactured in Massachusetts, but my system doesn’t qualify for that adder (because of the size of my roof, I needed to use high-efficiency panels that aren’t manufactured in Massachusetts, and because of the shading conditions, I needed to use micro-inverters, ditto.)

Note that Commonwealth Solar rebate applications have been closed for “block 7,” the block of rebates my system is being installed under, but block 8 is scheduled to start taking applications in October 2011.

Note that the state and city rebates are taxable income. As the one hand giveth (tax credits), the other taketh away (tax on rebates). Go figure.

In terms of raw cost, a 5kW system (the size at which tax credits and rebates start to cap) can cost upwards of $30,000 before all of the incentives listed above.

What you need to qualify

Basically, you need to have a south-facing roof that is mostly unshaded. A little shade is OK, but if a shading analysis (the installer will do one) shows that your system will operate at less than 80% of maximum capacity overall, you won’t qualify for the Commonwealth Solar rebate. That’ll probably be moot, though, since in that situation it probably won’t be cost-effective for you to install a system anyway.

You need to have free space on the wall near the electrical panel in your basement to install the inverter (unless your system uses micro-inverters) and monitoring equipment.

What a solar panel system consists of

Solar panels

Obviously. When sun shines on the panels, they make DC electricity.

Inverters

One or more inverters convert the DC into AC that’s compatible with the electric grid.

If your roof gets very little shade, your system will probably have all the panels connected in series to a single inverter. If, however, your roof gets shade that varies across your roof, it’ll probably make more sense for your system to use micro-inverters, i.e., a little DC-to-AC inverter connected to each panel on the roof.

This is because if all the panels are serially connected to one big inverter, then the efficiency of the entire system will be limited to that of the least efficient (i.e., most shaded) panel, whereas with micro-inverters, different panels can operate at different efficiencies without dragging each other down.

Monitoring stuff

At a minimum, you’ll have a box in your basement, separate from your utility company meter, which keeps a running tally of how much electricity your system has generated. This is necessary so you can claim your SRECs.

However, you may also have access to more complex and powerful monitoring capabilities. For example the Enphase micro-inverters that will be installed in my system include extensive monitoring at no additional cost, and the installer I’m using also provides its own monitoring.

New electric meter

The electric company will install a new electric meter capable of handling net metering, described below.

Connection to your electric panel

Your inverter and/or micro-inverters will be connected to your home power grid. Any solar-generated power you don’t use will be fed back through the utility meter onto its grid, and you’ll get credited for it as described below.

External disconnect

There will be a box on the outside of your house containing a big rocker switch that the electric company can use to quickly disconnect your solar generation system from their grid. This is a safety precaution in case your inverter fails to shut down properly when the power goes out (see below).

What happens when the power goes out?

In a normal solar panel installation, you cannot use power from your solar panels when the utility company power is out. For safety reasons — to prevent your panels from feeding electricity back onto the grid and electrocuting workers trying to repair it — your system will detect when utility company power goes down and automatically shut itself down until the power comes back on.

Solar panel systems can be designed to charge batteries instead of feeding directly into your home electric grid. Such a system can be designed to automatically switch over to battery power when utility power goes down.

However, such systems are significantly more expensive and higher maintenance, and are almost certainly not worth the expense unless you live in a rural area where the power goes down often and/or for extended periods of time.

Payback

With all these incentives, a solar panel installation can easily pay for itself in only a few years. In my case, payback is going to take a bit longer, for two reasons:

• As noted above, I had to use high-efficiency panels and micro-inverters, both of which are more expensive; homes with more roof space and less shade than us would be able to get by with less expensive components.
• Also as noted above, my panels are going to be a bit shaded, so the system isn’t always going to be operating at maximum capacity.

I expect my system to entirely pay for itself, including paying back the interest on the money I am borrowing from my home equity line to pay for installing it, in well under ten years.

It is also worth noting that the preliminary data that’s available suggests that you get back >90% of the money spent on solar panels when you sell your home. Therefore, even if you move before your system pays for itself, the odds are that you’ll end up ahead.

Net metering

Included in my payback calculations is the electricity that the panels are producing. I expect my system to produce about half of the electricity that is used by my home in a year.

Home solar panel installations in Massachusetts are interconnected with the power grid, and electric utilities in Massachusetts are required by law to support “net metering.” What that means, in a nutshell, is that when I’m producing more electricity than my home is using, it gets fed back into the electric grid and my electric meter runs backward.

If I produce more electricity than I use in any given month, then my electric bill will show a credit instead of a balance due. That credit will offset future electric bills, but note that it’s not the same as cash — I can’t ask NStar to send me a check for it. It’s therefore not cost-effective to install solar panels with more capacity than your home needs over time.

Financing options

I’m buying my system outright. When it’s finished and turned on, I will own it and all the electricity and SRECs it generates.

Some of the solar installers offer various other financing and leasing options. I’m not going to get into them here. All I will say that if you have the money to pay outright for your system or you can borrow it for a low interest rate, you will definitely make out better in the end by buying your system rather than leasing it. Any installer who tells you otherwise is selling you a pack of lies and you should run, not walk, away from that installer and find a different one.

Warranty, maintenance, system lifetime

Commonwealth Solar requires any systems installed under its aegis to be warrantied for parts and labor for five years.

Solar panels are pretty plug-in-play, so the odds of one failing after the five-year burn-in period are quite low. Having said that, there’s always the possibility of failure, or indeed of a tree falling on your panels. This is the one thing that could reasonably be construed as an advantage of leasing — if someone else owns the system, and it breaks, then it’s their responsibility rather than yours to fix it. Having said that, the odds of this happening are sufficiently low that it doesn’t come close to justifying the significant decrease in ROI when you lease rather than buy.

The efficiency of solar panels degrades by 1-2% per year. Even after 50 years, the panels will still be producing a significant amount of electricity. After 20-30 years the panels on the market may be so much better that you’ll want to install new ones even though the old ones are still working. However, even if you’re too lazy to bother doing that, you’ll still continue to generate electricity and save money, and by that point the system will have paid for itself long ago, so it’s all gravy.

Inverters and micro-inverters tend to die before solar panels. Reputable installers will factor into their ROI calculations the cost of replacing your inverter(s) once during the lifetime of your system. Note, however, that inverters are getting better all the time. For example, the Enphase micro-inverters in my system have a 25-year warranty.

Solar installers I looked at

SunBug Solar

SunBug is the first installer I spoke with. They were my favorite from the start, and they were the ones I ended up choosing to install my system.

I spoke first with Ben Mayer. He spent a very long time on the phone with me, patiently answering my questions and educating me about everything. After that, Dan Covey came out to my home to do the site assessment. He, too, has been consistently knowledgeable, competent, and helpful.

SunBug is a small, local company. All of their installation work is performed by employees, not subcontractors, with the exception of the final electrical interconnection work, which is handled by a subcontracted electrician with whom they have a working relationship.

Small companies are often run in a chaotic and ad hoc fashion, but that does not seem to be the case with SunBug. They give the distinct impression of running a very tight ship.

SunBug originally proposed a system that was only half the capacity of the system proposed by Transformations Inc. I wanted the higher capacity system, but I was also feeling slightly more comfortable with SunBug than Transformations, so I asked SunBug if they could submit a second proposal for a higher capacity system. They did, and that’s the system we ended up going with.

By the way, SunBug offers a referral bonus, so if you contact them, please let them know I sent you!

Transformations Inc.

I liked Transformations, and they were my second choice if SunBug hadn’t worked out.

The guys I spoke with at Transformations seemed just slightly less “with it” than Ben and Dan at SunBug. It’s not like they made mistakes or anything like that; they seemed just a little bit less on the ball. When all was said and done, I felt just a little more comfortable with SunBug than with Transformations.

The other reason I chose SunBug over Transformations was because SunBug’s monitoring capabilities were more extensive, and that appealed to me.

For the record, I think Transformations would have done a perfectly good job if I had opted to use them instead of SunBug.

SolarCity

I recommend strongly against using SolarCity.

They’re a big, big, national company, and they act like it in all the stereotypical, bad ways.

They didn’t send a technical guy to do a site assessment. Instead, they sent a sales guy to give me a hard sell.

He handed me a proposal which he said up-front wasn’t final and wouldn’t be final until I signed on the dotted line. Only then would SolarCity’s engineers get involved in actually assessing the site and designing the system. If I didn’t like the result, I would be free to back out, but by then weeks would have been wasted and I probably would have missed the Commonwealth Solar block and ended up waiting months to try again with another installer in the next block.

He tried really, really hard to convince me that leasing was a better option than buying, even though it, well, isn’t. Under the terms of SolarCity’s leasing programs, homeowners can’t buy the system at the end of the lease — the only choices are signing a new lease, upgrading to a new system, or having SolarCity remove the system completely. Only a fool would enter into a deal like that.

As part of trying to convince me that leasing would be better than buying the system outright, he told me that the SREC program “could disappear tomorrow,” which would hurt me a lot financially if I bought the system outright, but wouldn’t hurt me at all if I leased. The problem is that it’s simply not true — the SREC program is pretty much guaranteed to be around for at least ten years after my system is installed. Either the salesman was totally clueless, or he was lying scum. Either way, no thanks, I’m not interested.

Alternate Energy

Steve Pitney at Alternate Energy seems like a nice guy, and he has a huge amount of experience in the solar energy business. However, he definitely seems to fit the “chaotic, ad hoc” small company stereotype, which made me pretty uncomfortable.

For one thing, he missed our scheduled site assessment appointment without calling to let me know.

When he did come and do the assessment, the system he proposed to install was one which I was fairly certain, from what I’d learned from the other installers, wouldn’t actually fit on our roof.

Furthermore, he didn’t see any need to use micro-inverters, even though both SunBug and Transformations were convinced that they were essential because of the shading conditions on my roof.

Steve said he could not quote a 5kW system for my roof without putting up weirdly angled panels on my dormer, even though SunBug and Transformations were both able to do so.

Steve’s quoted prices for the systems he was able to quote were in the same per-kW range as the quotes from the other installers, but his system didn’t include any web-based monitoring.

If Alternate Energy had been the only installer I spoke with, they probably would have done an OK job and I probably would have been happy with it. However, after speaking to multiple installers and educating myself, Alternate Energy definitely wasn’t the front-runner.

The steps in the process

Here, in a nutshell, is what it takes to get solar panels installed on your roof:

1. Assemble a list of candidate installers (in my case, the list was predetermined by the vendors certified for the Renew Boston rebate program).
2. Call them all. Chat with them on the phone. Make site assessment appointments with the ones you’re comfortable with.
3. Wait for them to submit proposals to you after the site assessments.
4. Compare and contrast the proposals. Ask hard questions. Pick an installer.
5. Do tons of paperwork. Put down a deposit.
6. Wait about six weeks for Commonwealth Solar to approve your rebate. The installer can’t start work until the rebate is approved.
7. While you’re doing that, get your roof re-shingled if the installer told you it needs to be done before solar panels are installed. Make sure the roofer removes the old shingles rather than putting new ones over them; with the weight of solar panels on your roof, you don’t want the weight of extra shingles as well. How to find a decent roofer is beyond the scope of this document.
8. Once the rebate is approved, give another chunk of money to the installer so they can order all the materials.
9. You and the installer wait a few weeks for the building department to get around to approving the project and for the all the materials to arrive. The building department will probably take longer than the materials (at least, that seems to be the case in Boston).
10. The installer does the installation work.
11. Wait for the city to come inspect. The inspection is coordinated and supervised by the installer.
12. Wait for the electric utility to come inspect. Again, the inspection is coordinated and supervised by the installer.
13. The installer turns on the system, and you start saving money on your electric bill.
14. Once a month, report how much electricity your system generated through the web site that manages SRECs.
15. When you’ve generated enough electricity to produce an SREC, the web site will broker a sale of the SREC and deposit cash in your bank account.

When I arrived home (__ ___ Street, Brighton) at 6:15 this evening, I found a “Connolly for Boston” campaign sign secured to my porch railing with zip ties:

My wife tells me it was not there when she arrived home at 5:15. My three-year-old son tells me he saw “a man in a pickup truck” put up the sign.

Neither my wife nor I has spoken to anyone from your campaign or approved the placement of this campaign sign on our property.

Please explain yourself.

Furthermore, please remove this sign from our property immediately.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

CC: UniversalHub.com
CC: allstonbrighton2006@googlegroups.com
CC: blog.kamens.us
CC: Boston Globe
CC: Boston Herald
CC: Allston-Brighton TAB

[Simulblogged.]

UPDATE: I received a response from John Connolly shortly after sending the email above:

Jonathan,

I don’t know why the sign was put up. In putting up 500+ signs across the city, I am guessing it is possible we had the wrong address or confused it with a list from two years ago or maybe someone e-mailed us the address and we didn’t properly confirm it. Just last week we put up a sign at a home where the owner of 20+ years had told us to put up a sign anytime we want without asking during only to find out the owner had since moved. I had it removed right away. I don’t know why the sign is up at your home, but I will try to find out when I next talk to my campaign manager. The only thing I do know right now is that we made a mistake, and for that, I apologize.

I’m confused as to why you copied media on the e-mail, but I’ll publicly acknowledge I made a mistake if that is what you want me to do or you can just forward my e-mail to whomever you wish.

In any event, the sign will come down tomorrow. In fact, I’ll be in Brighton tomorrow morning so I will do it myself.

I apologize for the inconvenience, and I hope you are well.

Apologies,
John

For the record, I believe we did allow him to put up a sign on our lawn for one of his previous elections, so that would explain why he’d think he could get away with putting one up without permission this time around, but I frankly don’t buy his claim that his campaign “confused” its lists; it seems rather likely to me that any such “confusion” was intentional. I sent Connolly this response:

I copied the media because I think it is a newsworthy event when a candidate trespasses on a resident’s property to further his campaign. If it was an accident, then that reduces the severity of the offense but certainly does not fully mitigate it.

And I haven’t forgotten, frankly, what you did to Steve Murphy. Your hands are not entirely clean of campaign hijinks.

  Jonathan Kamens

The reference in the last paragraph above is to an incident in 2007 when Connolly sent out an anonymous campaign postcard attacking Steve Murphy. You can Google for more information. Here is how the Globe reported it.