The Point: Dean David Terkla

10/26/2020

David Gabriel Terkla, 1953-2020. 

https://www.keefefuneralhome.com/memorials/david-terkla/4367405/obituary.php

We miss him so.

“[T]he Greater Boston area is experiencing a distressing expansion of inequity, not only among individuals, but also among communities. The state has relied largely on new immigrants for all of its workforce expansion in the 1990s, and many of these immigrants are locating in the poorest cities. This adds to the stress on these communities to provide needed services and adequately educate this workforce, which Massachusetts businesses continue to rely on and will need to rely on even more as the economy pulls itself out of the recession. At the same time, the current fiscal crisis at the state level is resulting in significant cuts in state aid to cities and towns, which puts additional demands on local communities to fund services previously subsidized by the state. Such a shift is particularly harmful to the poorer communities, whose residents are much less able to pay the additional taxes needed to support such services. Therefore, it is important for state policymakers to give more attention to this growing disparity among communities in the Greater Boston area. Efforts should be made to reduce the rapidly expanding differential in incomes that has developed through the 1990s, e.g., with more broadly based statewide taxes for funding services and with enhanced efforts to improve the infrastructure in poorer communities (particularly transportation) to enhance business development in these areas and to increase higher-paying job opportunities there”

--David Terkla,  “Growing Disparities among Greater Boston Communities during the 1990s” https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=econ_faculty_pubs (2003)

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