A word of advice to the next director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority: Rent, don’t buy.

Just ask Marisa Lago, Mayor Thomas Menino’s first BRA chief.  She arrived from New York in 1994, full of vim and vigor, only to be sent packing less than three years later.  Or ask Menino’s second BRA chief, Tom O’Brien.  O’Brien was ousted at the end of last year, ostensibly because of scandal, but really because he was too independent, and too much of a political threat, to the Mayor.

There was once a time when the power of the director of the BRA rivaled that of the Mayor himself; times in Boston’s recent history that, at least in the eyes of some, were more defined by men like Ed Logue or Steve Coyle than the mayors (Collins and Flynn) under whom they supposedly served.

No more. In recent years the BRA has moved from independence to dependence, a point that was underscored in Menino's State of the City address this week.

To most Bostonians, the BRA is mysterious and inscrutable.  Created by state law back in 1957, the agency was charged with development and planning responsibility for the city.  In theory, it was to operate free of political influence.  A five-person board (four appointed by the Mayor, one by the state) was to run the agency; that Board would select its own director. The BRA was given some extraordinary powers, including eminent domain authority and the ability to grant tax concessions. Its finances were independent of the city as well; profits the BRA made on various development deals went to support BRA operations themselves. Its budget is still largely a secret, unreviewed by the City Council.

From its inception, the agency has had an enormous effect on Boston’s physical landscape.  It was responsible for the development of the Prudential Center at the beginning of the 1960s as well as the razing of the West End and construction of Government Center/Charles River Park.

During the 1980s, it led the reshaping of Boston’s downtown skyline. As controversial as some those projects continue to be, most observers credit the BRA with having been a key player in Boston’s economic revitalization.

Under Menino, the BRA has become more powerful yet at the same time more subject to the Mayor’s control.  For one, the once independent Economic Development and Industrial Corporation (the EDIC, which is responsible for Boston’s industrial development and owns three industrial parks in the city) was effectively merged into the BRA in 1995. At the same time, Menino made the BRA director his cabinet chief for economic development, making it clear that the director works for him, not the BRA board.

Virtually every planning and development decision now requires the signoff of Menino and his staff on the fifth floor of City Hall. Should the BRA director begin to emerge as an independent player on the city scene, that director, as Lago and O’Brien discovered, is quickly gone.

This week the Mayor made it plain that he wants the BRA brought further under his control.  A portion of the agency’s budget is now to be funded directly by the city’s operating budget.  The Mayor also wants to hire a city planner who, although still technically within the BRA, will actually be reporting directly to him.

In a sense, the BRA is being converted from a quasi-autonomous agency to just another line department reporting directly to the Mayor.

If so, Menino is in essence executing the same strategy he used with the Boston School Committee.  The School Committee once was popularly elected, running the school system and almost ignoring Mayor.  Menino championed changes that made him the one to appoint school committee members.  The effect, of course, was to vest more power in the mayor, giving him de facto control over the Boston Public Schools. As Menino noted at the time, that meant that no mayor, including him, could avoid responsibility for the fate of the city’s schools.

So too with the BRA. The mayor himself is becoming the development and planning czar of Boston. It’s sure to be a controversial change.  But it has one benefit.  At least he won’t fire himself.

Tom Keane, a former city councilor, writes regularly for the Herald.