Note: This article was originally published in the Beacon Hill Paper, June 10, 1997.

“All politics is local,” a maxim attributed to the late Tip O’Neill, expressed with perfect clarity a proposition too often forgotten in politics. Yes, of course I care about the British handing over Hong Kong. And sure, single-payer health care matters, if I could ever figure out what it means. But what I really care about is what’s happening in my own back yard, and what really aggravates me is that no one in government seems too sympathetic.

So it is these days on Beacon Hill, where the number one concern is not the city’s recycling policies, or school busing, or the success of Boston’s one-year-old merger of City Hospital with the Boston University Medical Center (all issues to which I have devoted much time). Instead the complaints concern an issue as basic as parking.

The city allows construction contractors to obtain temporary parking permits so they may place equipment in front of a building while they renovate or construct an addition. It sounds reasonable and unobjectionable. But the last several years have seen a proliferation of contractor-designated spaces throughout the Hill, so much so that residents are finding already scarce spaces to be unavailable. And to make matters worse, the so-called “temporary” permits are not for days, or perhaps a few weeks as originally envisioned. Instead they stretch out to months and even to years.

The problem of contractor parking is uniquely a concern of Beacon Hill. It’s unclear why. It may be that other areas of the city, such as the Back Bay and the Fenway, have sufficient spaces in alleys and side streets to allow contractors to stage their work. On Beacon Hill, as we all know, there is no such thing as an alley. They’re all streets, even if a few are so narrow that one feels constrained to walk down them sideways.

A close-by example neatly illustrates the point. One year ago, a contractor received permission to take over the equivalent of three parking spaces in front of 43 Chestnut Street. The temporary parking was good only for a few weeks, but when its expiration date came up, the contractor asked the city’s Transportation Department for an extension. It was granted, and upon the next expiration, the department granted still another extension.

Twelve months later the contractor is still there and the parking spaces are still occupied. Residents are frustrated, and become even more outraged when they see the spaces used not for conventional construction work but instead as a convenient parking slot for the contractor’s employees.

In September 1996 — almost nine months ago — some Beacon Hill residents met with me and the Transportation Department. We developed a new policy that would limit the time period for any contractor-designated parking space, and would require that the use of that space be only for construction vehicles, not for employees’ parking convenience. That discussion served as the basis for an article on the subject that appeared in these pages.

A lot of time has passed since then, and nothing has been resolved. The proposed policy has yet to be adopted by the city. The complaints continue to roll in. Contractors continue to get parking spaces, keep them for an inordinate amount of time, and abuse them. It is, seemingly, an issue of little importance.

But indeed, it is an issue of great importance. No one has to live in Boston. If the city doesn’t work, if it doesn’t address the basic quality-of-life issues that matter to residents, then those residents will leave. Our job as a city and as a government is to keep those people here, to make Boston a desirable and attractive residential community. If we fail, then Boston itself will fail, like so many other major urban areas that have been unable to keep their residential base.

Sure, contractor parking may not seem the biggest issue on the planet. But politics is local, and on this local issue, the city has dropped the ball.