The Globe reports that Craig Galvin, a Dorchester real-estate broker whom Mayor Walsh recently re-appointed to another term on the Zoning Board of Appeal, resigned this weekend.
Galvin was the broker for a two-unit condo building in Dorchester built by John Lynch, who agreed to plead guilty to federal bribery charges for taking $60,000 in payments from a developer to try to convince a zoning-board member to vote for an extension he needed on an 11-unit project on H Street in South Boston. That extension let him sell the project to another developer at a profit.
The board had initially approved the project in 2014, granted him an extension after he was unable to start work before the approval ran out, then, in 2017, considered granting him another extension - this time after the first extension had run out. Galvin was the only member to vote for the extension at a hearing at which the developer, Steven Turner, failed to appear. At that hearing, the board's attorney told members that he had heard from John Lynch, at the time a mid-level manager at the BPDA with no direct involvement in zoning issues, in the hallway outside the eighth-flooring hearing room that Turner would not be attending the hearing.
Two weeks later, though, Galvin made a successful motion to grant Turner the extension after Turner did appear with his lawyer and his architect, James Christopher.
Christopher took over the work from his father, William, after Mayor Walsh appointed the elder Christopher as ISD commissioner. William Christopher, who took a leave of absence on Friday from his current city job as head of efforts to clean up Methadone Mile, worked at the Department of Neighborhood Development with Tuner and Lynch in the Menino administration.
Walsh last week announced he was hiring an outside law firm to review how developments get through the city zoning process in general and a separate lawyer, a former federal prosecutor, to look at possible criminal wrongdoing spinning out of the Lynch charges. The US Attorney's office has said its investigation, which led to the charges against Lynch, is continuing.