 |
|
Will the Big Dig serve Boston--or bury it in debt?
By Alex Ulam
The Metropolis Observed
April 2002
The central inspiration for Boston's Big Dig was to remove what is surely
one of the sorriest mistakes in the history of urban planning. In 1955 the
state of Massachusetts rammed the "Green Snake," an enormous elevated
highway, right through downtown Boston. Dense ethnic neighborhoods were
torn apart for the 40-foot-high wall of green steel and concrete. More than
20,000 people were evicted from their homes.
Now the Big Dig itself looks like a big mistake. The construction project's
costs have soared from a 1991 estimate of $6 billion to a current $14.5
billion, making it the most expensive public-works project in the history
of the country, perhaps the world. For the past 11 years, Bostonians have
been under siege, enduring regular street closings, nighttime jackhammering,
and an occupying army of more than 5,000 construction workers. Scheduled
for completion in 1998, the project will now allegedly be finished
in 2005. Almost every year brings a revised timetable, and many Bostonians
are only half joking when they ask: Will it be finished in my lifetime?
Will the grandchildren be paying for it? Recently some have been asking
more serious questions: Who's to blame for a project that is billions of
dollars over budget and years behind schedule? And why wasn't there better
oversight?
One thing is certain: when the Big Dig is finished, Boston will be
a different city. The Green Snake, which cut downtown Boston off from its
waterfront and the Italian North End, will have been sunk into an eight-lane
high-tech tunnel covered over with 20 acres of downtown parks. The project
is also providing Boston with a new subway line, the widest cable-stayed
bridge in the world (across the Charles River), and the Ted Williams Tunnel,
which extends I-90 underneath the harbor and goes to Logan Airport. Thanks
to the new transportation links, the South Boston Waterfront District--an
enormous dilapidated industrial area comparable in size to the entire downtown--is
now opened up for redevelopment. Under construction are hotels, office
buildings, and a new convention center.
But then there are those nettlesome questions. Whose fault are the multimillion
dollar screwups--the most recent being a tunnel section that was installed
incorrectly despite reported warnings? The tunnel troubles added $60 million
to the project's overall costs and caused a three-month delay. Since that
debacle the Big Dig's contractor, Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff--thought
to be the largest construction joint venture in the world--has stopped guaranteeing
a final cost for the project.
Every few years there is a new scandal or investigation. In 2000 James Kerasiotes,
chairman of the board of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, was axed
after a federal investigation revealed that he had concealed up to $2 billion
dollars in cost overruns. Now two of the authority's three board members
are questioning a new set of billion-dollar cost overruns. But in doing
so they are defying Governor Jane Swift, who has attacked them for holding
up the project's financing and is now trying to fire them.
The renegade board members are alleging that their agency has no effective
control over the project: they say that Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff is
operating without the proper oversight. In addition to having a runaway
project on its hands, the state doesn't even have a real plan to pay for
projected cost overruns of the Big Dig, board member Jordan Levy says. "If
the people of Massachusetts and this country realized how much this is going
to cost," he says, "there would be a revolution."
Levy also has a problem with the work that's already been completed. The
Ted Williams Tunnel stinks, literally, because of an unsolved problem possibly
involving deicing þuid from Logan Airport seeping into the tunnel.
According to Levy, there's no way to rein in the costs because the state
doesn't have personnel capable of evaluating the contractor's work. Inþuential
Bay State congressmen have recently joined him in his call for an independent
monitor. "I want somebody to do a peer overview of Parsons Brinckerhoff,"
Levy says, "and to assist with the recovery of hundreds of millions
of dollars that are due the Commonwealth."
Other Turnpike Authority officials attribute the astronomical costs
of the Big Dig to the complexity of the undertaking. "We're probably
the most investigated and reviewed project in the country," says Bob
Bliss, the authority's official spokesperson. According to Bliss, the
added expenses are not "cost overruns" but rather "changes
in scope." He says the state-of-the-art engineering involved in building
the tunnels has simply cost a lot more money than people realized. "We're
within inches of some big buildings and within a foot of the subway,"
he points out. Bliss also blames history. "This is not a plan that
was fully defined and sitting on the shelf," he says. "People
wanted to get going--federal money was available. It was 'use it or lose
it.'"
But history, in the form of Frederick Salvucci, known as the father of the
Big Dig, holds Republicans responsible for many of the cost overruns. Salvucci
is a former state transportation secretary who in 1990 drew up the original
agreements in the last days of a Democratic gubernatorial administration.
He says that a subsequent Republican administration under Governor William
Weld did away with the important public-sector review teams that he had
set up to monitor the project. Salvucci says that many of the problems with
the Big Dig can be attributed to the "excessive rhetoric of privatization,
where you hire the private sector, and then you put them on automatic pilot--and
suddenly nobody is watching them."
As if the delays and extraordinary expenses were not enough to argue about,
Bostonians are also battling over who will control, design, and maintain
the park space that will be created. Richard Dimino, president and CEO of
the Artery Business Committee, a prominent association of neighboring businesses,
is proposing that a nonprofit corporation under the oversight of a
special public commission be in charge of maintaining it. Dimino, who refers
to the Boston Parks Department as "financially challenged,"
argues that the parks need to be anchored by cafés and cultural offerings
such as museums, a performing-arts center, or exhibition spaces. "We're
trying to activate this space for the four seasons," he says, "to
keep people in downtown Boston after 5 p.m."
But Salvucci contends that the state promised under the original Big Dig
agreements to maintain 75 percent of the open parcels as public parks. "Some
of the elements in the Artery Business Committee are arguing that we don't
have the resources to maintain the open space," he says. "That's
bullshit." He points out that the maintenance costs of the parks will
be relatively small compared to those for the tunnel. Others are alarmed
about the possible consequences of ceding control to a quasi-public organization.
"The main focus of privatized maintenance of public space is social
housekeeping," says Shirley Kressel, cofounder of the Alliance of Boston
Neighborhoods. "Protecting property owners, tourists, and shoppers
from social and economic 'undesirables'--that's the unspoken agenda in urban
planning today."
It will take a while to sort out these questions of privatization, unexpected
engineering challenges, and oversight. But the single biggest cost of the
Big Dig is indisputable to many observers: doing business in a post-urban-renewal
era in which the needs and rights of various special-interest groups and
constituencies have to be addressed. "It [the Big Dig] has taken into
consideration a wide variety of stakeholders--that's why it's an expensive
project," says Dimino, who served as Boston transportation commissioner
from 1985 to 1993. He notes that involving business owners, environmental
groups, and neighborhoods in the bridge design process alone added more
than a billion dollars to the overall cost. The Green Snake was imposed
on Boston neighborhoods, he says, but the Big Dig has to respect them: "Bob
Moses used to just build things through, but in 1987, when we got the green
light to build this, it was a totally different set of rules."
|
|
|
BACK TO TOP
