(The following article by Raphael Lewis was posted on the Boston Globe website on September 23.)
BOSTON — Governor Mitt Romney yesterday gave the go-ahead to the Greenbush commuter rail project, ending a construction moratorium that threatened to doom the controversial South Shore transit link.
The project had been on hold for seven months so the Romney administration could review cost projections and decide whether the $479 million project was the best use of transportation funding. If completed without further delay, the project would open as much as a year behind schedule, in spring 2006, officials said.
Romney, who had recently voiced doubts about the cost and value of the project, ultimately decided that the Boston-to-Scituate line would offer residents the best transit alternative available, said Douglas Foy, Romney’s transportation and development chief.
Still remaining to be secured for the project is a key wetlands permit.
Minutes after Romney made his decision, officials at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority called the contractors, Cashman/Balfour Beatty, and told the company to press forward, said MBTA general manager Michael H. Mulhern. As many as 100 construction workers will be in the field by spring, he said.
One leg of the former Old Colony rail system, Greenbush will carry an estimated 8,600 commuters and leisure travelers each weekday from the Greenbush section of Scituate to Cohasset, Hingham, and Weymouth before connecting with existing lines in Braintree for the final 9.5 miles to Boston’s South Station. MBTA officials yesterday said the trip from Greenbush to Boston would take a little less than an hour and include seven station stops.
It was Mulhern who unilaterally halted the 18-mile project in February, amid mounting concerns that the cost and legal issues were rapidly endangering the endeavor. Soon afterward, the Romney administration began questioning whether the task was worth it at its current cost. Mulhern was forced to quickly nail down a precise cost and hammer out other issues to justify the nearly half-billion dollar project.
With those issues apparently resolved, Mulhern spent hours over the summer personally lobbying for Greenbush in Romney’s office, state transportation officials say. Meanwhile, the MBTA in July negotiated the purchase of a key 1.5-mile section of rail line necessary to the project and more recently won a crucial legal decision in an administrative law court that all but doomed legal challenges to the MBTA’s state environmental permits.
Yesterday, Mulhern said he was now confident that the biggest questions dogging the project had been resolved: The cost, he said, will be $479 million and the MBTA could now promise a start-up of service by spring 2006 — about one year later than the most recent projections before the moratorium.
“I have a tremendous amount of confidence that we’re going to get this job done and that I will be on a train from Scituate to Boston in the year 2006,” Mulhern told reporters at a news conference, where he made the announcement with Foy and state Transportation Secretary Daniel Grabauskas. “There are no obstacles in terms of moving the project forward; just issues.”
Despite his predictions, the MBTA has yet to secure a mandatory Army Corps of Engineers wetlands construction permit, which Mulhern insists the authority is “very close” to obtaining. Opponents have said repeatedly they would appeal any such permit, given the fragile ecosystem through which the Greenbush line would travel.
The Greenbush proposal formed just one piece of roughly $2 billion in transit expansion projects the state promised to build as part of the legal agreement with the environmental groups that paved the way for the Central Artery/Tunnel project in the late 1980s. The administration of Governor Michael Dukakis brokered the Big Dig agreement in part with the Conservation Law Foundation, where Foy then served as president. Officials said yesterday that legal commitment was a major reason for Romney’s ultimate decision to back Greenbush.
Bennet Heart, a senior attorney for CLF, said the foundation was gratified by Romney’s decision to back Greenbush in the end. “It was a commitment of the Central Artery project, and it’s important that that commitment be fulfilled,” he said.
Still, the Romney administration suggested yesterday that it has little appetite to embark any time soon on projects of similar magnitude with the potential to get as bogged down in permit and cost issues. According to Foy, the governor and Legislature next month will begin the arduous task of formulating a 25-year state transportation plan to create a list of transportation priorities. Doing so, he said, would create a badly needed road map for transportation spending. Many MBTA proposals, such as a plan to link New Bedford and Fall River to Boston via commuter rail, may not make the cut, Foy said.
Such planning did little to assuage the anger of Greenbush opponents, however.
State Senator Robert L. Hedlund, a Weymouth Republican and vocal critic of Greenbush, blasted Romney yesterday for making an “easy” decision that hundreds of residents in his district have fought. “While I appreciate the fact that Governor Romney made time to personally review this project, and didn’t just rubber-stamp the irresponsible actions of previous administrations, he made an easy decision instead of a courageous decision,” Hedlund said in a statement.
Hedlund’s remarks were notable because they constitute one of the few instances since Romney took office in January that a fellow Republican had directly criticized one of his decisions. Interviewed later, Hedlund said, “I thought I was being very diplomatic. I didn’t say what I really wanted to say.”
He continued: “There’s a lot of disappointed people down here. The courageous decision would be to right a wrong, and not pour good money after bad.”
At a hearing in Hingham earlier yesterday, town officials from several neighboring communities wrangled with the MBTA over how to make the railroad crossings as safe as possible, an issue that promises to heat up more with the approval of Greenbush. Town officials accused the transit agency of violating past agreements and compromising public safety by refusing to use four-arm gates at street crossings, a proposal that could cost up to $6 million.
MBTA officials, and other proponents, say the unfortunate side effects of running diesel-fueled commuter trains are vastly outweighed by the benefits of having less car traffic on Route 3, which is becoming one of the state’s busiest bottlenecks.