When the Alewife parking garage and its surrounding acreage is redeveloped by the MBTA, Cambridge officials want its infrastructure to be a part of a cleaner Alewife Brook, where each year tens of millions of gallons of untreated sewage is discharged after storms.
The formal request for that infrastructure was approved by city councillors 6-3 at a Monday meeting despite an attempt by city staff to wave them off. That councillors weren’t dissuaded reflects the years put into ending the so-called combined sewer overflows and reviving the green areas shared by Cambridge, Somerville and Arlington.
“Part of our job is to be aspirational,” vice mayor Marc McGovern said.
Cambridge and Somerville are in the process of drafting a long-term control plan for the sewage outfall with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority; a draft is due by the end of this year, and final recommendations by 2027. The MBTA, whose facility sits on the brook, has a July 16 deadline for potential development partners to submit proposals and expects to hear presentations and give a notice to proceed in August, according to documents posted online by the agency.
The Cambridge councillors’ order asks the state to rewrite the document it will use to entice that private developer, which will partner with the T to remake up to 30 acres around its red line subway station and its parking garage. Cambridge officials hope those acres will provide housing and new business uses, as well as house a new commuter rail station.
Plans at Alewife should include as much green stormwater infrastructure as possible, their order says, as well as a major underground storage tank to help control CSO discharge – the result of weather overwhelming systems in which pipes for stormwater and sewage connect (but, at normal levels of flow, don’t mix).
“I would feel snookered if I was the private partner and entered into an agreement with the MBTA to develop the site without realizing that addressing or at least improving the CSO outflow issue, even if it wasn’t going to be funded by me, was part of the issue,” councillor Cathie Zusy said. “I feel like the goal of this policy order is to bring more attention to the need.”
Message to the MBTA
Taking up the issue toward the end of a meeting that lasted more than seven hours, councillors seemed annoyed by staff’s attempts to tamp down the policy order, which they softened in a series of amendments over a two-week process, such as “recommending” green infrastructure be included instead of “requiring” it.
“Sometimes the administration wants us to send messages to the MBTA,” councillor Sumbul Siddiqui said, “sometimes they don’t.” Councillor Ayesha M. Wilson also expressed frustration at what seemed like an inconsistency in the relationship with city staff, giving clear direction on some topics but not others.
The Alewife order wasn’t the only one Monday in which the state’s transit agency played a role. Staff also delivered a report on the lack of progress creating a Grand Junction Multiuse Path along old rail lines because of a “change in position” from the state. “The city has been seeking to establish a high-level leadership conversation with the MBTA for a number of months. This conversation has yet to happen,” city manager Yi-An Huang wrote.
“Premature and overly prescriptive”
For Alewife, the warnings seemed mostly practical, with some political undertones.
The objections were prompted by mayor E. Denise Simmons, who asked staff whether councillors were “over their skis” in trying to craft language for the Alewife redevelopment and nudged deputy city manager Owen O’Riordan to speak bluntly about his objections – because he is retiring soon. “We can’t hold it against you,” Simmons said. “So blurt it out.”
O’Riordan, whose portfolio – and background – includes Public Works, obliged.
“I have deep concerns about this order, and I feel it’s both premature and overly prescriptive,” he said.
Huang agreed with O’Riordan. “The policy order really comes in with an answer that the city administration doesn’t support and asks us to then go and work with the MBTA and the governor and the state administration on how we would implement it,” Huang said. “We’re going to get in a room with their engineers and we’re going to say we don’t really understand what this policy order means.”
Staff looks to Bellis Circle
O’Riordan said he was skeptical of councillors’ ideas for Alewife in large part because the MBTA station isn’t the best place to handle a sewage overflow: The city is looking at putting a gigantic stormwater storage system at Bellis Circle, the parking lot in Neighborhood 9 near Fresh Pond that the city bought for $8.3 million in 2023.
Kathy Watkins, the Public Works commissioner who will succeed O’Riordan, also told councillors last week to look inland.
“That control structure of where you decide ‘Can the volume of water stay in the system, or does it need to go out to the overflow?’ is actually at Sherman Street, right adjacent to the parcel that the city purchased,” Watkins said.
A stronger
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In paragraph six,I see:
“the result of weather overwhelming systems in which pipes for drinking water and sewage connect (but, at normal levels of flow, don’t mix).”
Don’t yiu mean pipes for STORMWATER and sewage?