(The following article by Raphael Lewis appeared in the Boston Globe on July 24.)
BOSTON — Governor Mitt Romney contemplates abandoning the Greenbush commuter rail project, the MBTA’s general manager says the agency has already spent $85 million on the train line — about 20 percent of the total cost.
The largest part of that money, about $27 million, has been paid out to the contractor who has already designed most of the project and broken ground on a bridge, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officials said. Another $23 million went to land acquisitions, and the rest went to preliminary engineering, obtaining permits, insurance, and train vehicles, the officials said.
The financial revelation comes as the Conservation Law Foundation is threatening legal action if Romney scuttles the project, which was part of a broad court settlement that paved the way for the Big Dig in 1990, a pact the foundation brokered.
”When it comes to Greenbush, we’ve crossed the Rubicon, so to speak,” said MBTA general manager Michael H. Mulhern, who outlined the costs to the Globe yesterday. He added that halting Greenbush at this stage would force the state to pay additional legal costs that would drive the project’s bills higher still — all without delivering a rail line.
”I don’t ever remember stopping a large project in its construction phase, and I’ve been here 24 years,” Mulhern said.
On several recent occasions, including last week, Romney has said that the state has ”no capital” for Greenbush or other potential expansions of the commuter rail network, such as an extension to Fall River and New Bedford.
Douglas I. Foy, Romney’s development and transportation chief, insisted yesterday that the governor has yet to make a final decision on the fate of the $470 million rail line, which would stretch 18 miles from Braintree to Scituate. The administration has been reviewing all major transportation project plans, Foy said, and Greenbush is among them.
Unlike many such plans, the Greenbush line was one of several projects the state signed a legal agreement to build, as a way to offset increases in automobile traffic brought on by the new Central Artery.
Foy, the former head of the Conservation Law Foundation, was one of those who signed of the landmark Central Artery transit settlement in 1990. At the time, Foy told the Globe that he would stand at the ready if the state backed away from the transit commitments it had made: ”If they fall off the wagon, we’re right back in court the next day.”
But yesterday, Foy said the settlement was written in such a way that no one project was set in stone, as long as comparable transit initiatives were offered as substitutes.
Stephanie Pollack, acting president of the Conservation Law Foundation, has been publicly silent on Romney’s Greenbush comments, saying she was still under the impression that the administration had made no final decisions.
But she vowed a court fight if Romney abandons Greenbush.
”If the administration is going to try to get around building Greenbush, they’ve got a fight ahead of them,” Pollack said. ”If there are better options on the same corridor, they can apply to do that, but saying they don’t have enough money is not a good enough excuse.”
Questions remain, however, on whether the MBTA can afford to follow through on its quest to complete Greenbush.
Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Association, said Greenbush would force the agency to cut back on key other projects. His organization issued a report last year that predicted a $1.7 billion shortfall for the T over the next 10 years — not including $4.5 billion in proposed expansion projects.
With communities along the corridor demanding that the MBTA make costly additions to the project, Mulhern halted construction of the Greenbush line in February to determine a bottom-line cost. But the agency is still paying about $1 million a month to the contractors, Cashman/Balfour Beatty, for design and engineering work, which is now about 90 percent complete.
Some of the $85 million already spent would be lost forever if Romney does decide to delay the project beyond his term in office, which wraps up in December 2005, Mulhern said.
Virtually all of the nearly two-dozen environmental and construction permits taken out for Greenbush expire in three to five years after any halt in work, including the difficult-to-obtain Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act certificate.
To date, the T has poured about $18 million into the permitting and preliminary engineering process — an undetermined portion of which would have to be spent again if certificates lapse.
In addition, the contractors have already built large concrete abutments for one rail bridge in Weymouth. The abutments cost about $900,000, MBTA spokesman Joseph Pesaturo said.