CAPTION: Tracy Hollander, 40, has owned 7 Eleven at the corner of Mount Vernon and Charles streets since he was 22 years old.

It’s possible that every issue Beacon Hill residents contend with finally comes back to trash.

The latest matter began when Tracy Hollander, 40, owner of the 7 Eleven at the corner of Charles and Mount Vernon streets decided to apply for a license to stay open for 24 hours a day.

“We have people waiting at 6 a.m. and coming in the middle of the night when nothing is open,” said Hollander who has owned the store, which opened in 1979, for 18 years. The store now closes at 2 a.m.

Hollander has four other 7 Eleven stores, all in or near the financial district. All of these are open 24 hours a day.

But neighbors have a problem with this 7 Eleven, and it has little to do with its operating hours. “I would be against the extra hours primarily because of trash,” said Diana Govern, who lives on River Street and summed up sentiments expressed by other neighbors.

“They do not do a very good job about cleaning up,” she said. “There may be the occasional need, and it’s not worth the extra traffic. The trash has a way of blowing down our way, and it’s evident where it came from. In the middle of the night would be when people are least likely to dispose of trash properly.”

She said that a business such as the leather shop, which generates little or no litter, is always sweeping up and is a good neighbor. She wishes that the 7 Eleven did as much, she said.

Hollander said trash has always been an issue, but residents are part of the problem. “We used to have a trash barrel in front of the store,” he said. “We had to empty it many times during the day because people would put their [household] trash in it.”

He said at some point the barrel just disappeared, and he has asked City Councilor Mike Ross’s office to put in a request for another one, which he realizes his employees will have to empty.

Hollander said his store does sell items that can generate trash, but that people want these things, and that they want them all night.

“We put a petition at the cash register and we got 227 positives in the first three days,” he said.

A few years ago, Hollander said, he hired the same person who every day washes down the sidewalk in front of the Sevens pub, but that it was expensive, so he discontinued it.

Hollander has to appear before the zoning and licensing committee of the Beacon Hill Civic Association to seek a vote of non-opposition, and that is likely to occur in March, he said.

“It’s an issue of an expansion in hours of a convenience store, which we haven’t dealt with in recent years,” said Tom Clemens, co-chair of the committee. “It raises a red flag, but a lot would depend on the concerns of the neighbors.”

Neighbors will probably vary in their reactions to it. One neighbor, Bob Owens of Mount Vernon Street, owned a River Street house behind the 7 Eleven for a few years. “I thought they were already open all night,” he said.

Last week didn’t go so well on Cambridge Street.

First of all on Monday, NStar actually appeared to connect the innards of the new traffic light control cabinets for Grove and Blossom streets and basically turn them on. But the control boxes were missing the timers, so they couldn’t do the work.

The timers were missing because John Lepore, who is in charge of the work for Mass. Highway and did not know when NStar was coming, had removed them. Cold weather can be harmful to these sensitive and expensive pieces of equipment.. “Condensation builds up in the unheated boxes,” Lepore explained. “I don’t want to fry a new piece of equipment.”

When the control cabinets are functioning properly they are heated enough to handle cold weather.

Finally NStar’s representative and Lepore worked out that NStar would come back on Wednesday.

But when Lepore got to work early Wednesday morning, he found that a vehicle had hit the control cabinet, which is located on North Grove Street on the left as you walk toward Mass. General. The control cabinet’s door was askew.

The cabinet’s door has to seal and lock, said Lepore, keeping out curious people and condensation. The live wires inside are dangerous, and the equipment can be ruined by condensation.

Lepore did not know exactly what happened, since he could find no one who saw the accident and the police reported no incident.

He speculates, however, that a Bobcat machine tried to pass between the cabinet and a light pole and caught the door of the cabinet. “It was pretty much the only thing that could have squeezed through,” said Lepore. The space is too narrow for a car.

The only reason he could think of for a Bobcat’s presence at that location would have been that it could have been salting the sidewalk, but Lepore doesn’t know that for sure.

On Friday, despite the cold, Best Electric employees were out repairing the door and cleaning a deep tire mark off the bottom.

More accidents: Someone drove a car up onto the corner of Staniford Street and smashed a new traffic signal base and also hit an old street light pole. Those too are in the process of being fixed.

There is good news too, however. Bricks were laid last week around the light fixtures at Joy Street, and the only bricks remaining to be laid are at three other locations plus patches that must go in after old street and traffic lights are removed.

NStar representatives and Lepore are now in close contact. “They’re being really good,” said Lepore. He hopes, barring no more damage to equipment, that the traffic lights at Grove and Blossom streets will be operating by the end of this week.

And the concrete tests for all the bases have passed, so workmen can now put up the poles that fit into the bases.

The problem with the new street lights on the median and on the north side of the street, which have not yet been turned on, remains unresolved.

Despite speculation to the contrary, Senate President Robert Travaglini, who represents Beacon Hill’s south slope, is not leaving the Senate, according to Ann Dufresne, Travaglini’s spokesperson.

Rumors started because the Massachusetts Hospital Association (MHA) is about to begin a search for its next president and CEO whose salary is $500,000 a year, and there is reason, in some observers’ minds, for Travaglini to be a top contender. As it is, the former president was let go, and Travaglini’s childhood friend and former classmate, Bob Gibbons, has been named to head the MHA as interim president.

"The officers have had discussions about the next steps," said MHA board Chairman Dan Moen. "We are in the process of contacting some well-known search firms and intend to conduct an inclusive search process."

The story of how Travaglini and the MHA became linked is an interesting one. It begins with former CEO Ronald M. Hollander being forced out by the board for being an ineffective State House lobbyist. Some believe it will most likely end with Travaglini as the association's new head — maybe not this month, but soon.

Hollander's demise can be traced back to the deal Partners HealthCare Chairman Jack Connors, Jr. was able to broker with Travaglini and House Speaker Sal DiMasi on the groundbreaking universal healthcare reform. Last year, while the MHA was at the negotiating table and with Hollander looking on, Connors was able to convince Travaglini and DiMasi that companies that don't offer insurance should pay $300 per employee into the state's pool for the uninsured.

Later, the MHA board complained that Connors was able to broker deals with legislative leaders while the MHA's go-to guy, Hollander, was completely out of his element.

Hollander, a well-liked fixture at the State House, according to insiders, was owed one, and perhaps Travaglini thought he'd pay sooner rather than later.

Last fall, after the House passed the nurse's staffing bill, a majority of senators had already signed on as sponsors of the original bill. Many Senate supporters of the House bill lobbied Travaglini to bring it to the Senate floor for a vote. However, a Senate bill was crafted and supported by the MHA that reflected the belief that the House's bill represented inflexible policy that would cause devastating economic effects to already financially stressed acute care hospitals. It was a quick win for Hollander but soon turned into defeat as the Senate bill was buried in committee.
Maybe, at this point, the MHA had seen enough.

Last week the MHA's board voted unanimously to remove Hollander as CEO because of his perceived weakness at the State House. The association had never needed political muscle until last year and paid dearly because it didn't have clout.

With a huge vacancy to fill, some immediately speculated Travaglini was the most likely candidate to fill the post for the state's major hospital lobbying and policy group.

In Travaglini, the MHA would have someone with State House influence, a great interest in health care and health care issues, and the ability to comfortably move in the spotlight if need be. A move by the MHA to acquire Travaglini would also remove him from brokering deals with Partners HealthCare with a helpless MHA at the table.

Dufresne maintains that Travaglini is committed to the Senate. "The Senate President is focused on the duties of his office and organizing the Senate for a very busy and productive legislative session," she said.

The Esplanade Association has received a grant to help it get the word out about what it has accomplished and what still needs to be done to preserve and maintain the historic riverfront park.

Manning Selvage & Lee, a global public relations firm with offices in Boston, named the nonprofit group its recipient of the 2007 Agnew Carter McCarthy Community Grant, which provides $100,000 of in-kind public relations services to a select non-profit organization over a two-year period. The agency will help enhance the association’s reputation among Massachusetts residents through increased media visibility.

The Esplanade Association works to restore the Charles River Esplanade by acting as its primary steward, partner and advocate. More than three million people annually visit the Esplanade, which offers sweeping views of the Charles River, access to cultural events and an oasis for city dwellers.

“We are thrilled to have the firm’s support to help increase awareness of what The Esplanade Association means to the Boston community,” said Executive Director Patrice Todisco. “This partnership will help us highlight the association’s accomplishments and alert the public to the continuing needs of this landmark park.”

CREDIT: D. Harney

The silhouette of the George Washington statue in the Public Garden is bathed in the late afternoon winter light.

Going, going, gone

The Yellow Book phone books have been delivered. And they have already been thrown away.

Knowing our neighbors as we do, we can bet there are still Beacon Hillers who use them to look up telephone numbers. After all, there are still neighbors who refuse to have an answering machine on their telephones. And some still carry around their quaint address books rather than tapping into their personal digital assistants.

But those folks are disappearing, if the number of phone books still lying around at the end of last week was any indication, and if the piles of phone books that went into recycling last Friday is a clue.

If these books had been published by Verizon, whose books we’ve not yet seen this year in this neighborhood, would they have been more readily brought into the house and stashed by the desk? Probably not.

It appears that gradually most people, some quirky Beacon Hillers excepted, use their computers, not paper, to find phone numbers. Or perhaps they use their personal digital assistants, a name that is so preposterous, yet illustrative of our time that we have to write it again.

There is a lot to recommend a phone book-less life. The phone books are heavy. They have to be hoisted down from a shelf to a surface on which they can be opened. They are ugly. And many households now have not just one but several computers in different rooms, hooked up to the Internet without wires. It takes less time for Google to find the name and phone number or a category of services or products than it does for us to open up the book and page through the alphabet.

Moreover, as the years go by more and more of our friends are reachable primarily by cell phone. Many younger people don’t even install a landline in their apartments. And all phones less than a few years old now store numbers, so we don’t have to look up numbers for most of the calls we make.

Thousands of trees were sacrificed this year, and recycle bins were filled to the brim, but it’s hard to fault the publishers of the Yellow Book. They could not have predicted how people’s habits would change as new possibilities emerged in software and Internet tools. Besides, they did their bit. They employed people to sell the ads in the book. Graphic designers and printers made money. Manufacturers of plastic got business for making the wrapping. Someone was paid to deliver the books. The economy kept rolling.

The phone books look like just another icon of a bygone era, such as CB radios or typewriters. We predict it will take three more years before the big phone books are a thing of the past. Perhaps the companies will deliver CDs instead of books. Maybe we will download them if we want them.

Meanwhile, brace yourselves. The Verizon phone books have yet to be delivered.