In its first meeting of the new year, and amid ongoing frustrations about its work, the Charles River Task Force established a timeline for continuing efforts to gather feedback from residents and to begin drafting recommendations for state agencies to better engage with underrepresented communities. The group, which was established last year, also set June 30th as the deadline for completing a report on how the state can ensure area residents can equitably access portions of the river and surrounding streets.
Over the course of the three-hour meeting on Jan. 28, open to the public both in person and virtually, the task force reviewed feedback collected in the fall by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), the project consultant. The feedback was collected in multiple ways, from knocking on doors (staff dropped off 129 flyers seeking community engagement and spoke to 35 residents) and one-on-one conversations with representatives from city departments and local organizations to two public hearings and a focus group with residents of the subsidized housing complex at 808-812 Memorial Drive, as well as an online survey that received close to 500 responses.
Comments received by the MAPC staff ranged from the need to improve communication and decision process — such as more regular updates from the state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) on projects — to infrastructure recommendations such as safer speed limits, better pathway maintenance, and improved stoplight coordination.
Safety and access issues fall outside of the group’s purview, but task force members agreed that those issues should be taken into consideration and could have some place in the final report to ground the recommendations in physical examples.
During the meeting, task force members engaged in a visioning exercise that included answering four questions on project strengths, weaknesses, and future priorities. Many recommended more in-person meetings and a clearer focus on the project mission during discussions. Considering upcoming engagement efforts, they discussed how best to identify gaps in people’s knowledge of and access to DCR and the state’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA), which co-leads the task force.
Next steps
The timeline shared by the MAPC consultants outlined that between February and March the task force will draft and edit its recommendations, then publish an initial version for feedback from the public. In May, the group will incorporate that feedback into the draft, and finalize and submit the report by the end of June.
The task force will also prepare for a public hearing in April, including setting an agenda, drafting a survey to mirror the vision-exercise questions posed at the Jan. 28 meeting, and designing more outreach to continue to collect feedback. The group also voted to move forward with focus groups involving public housing residents at Woodrow Wilson Court, Putnam Gardens, and Lyndon B. Johnson apartments, and had already made plans to meet with Cambridge Housing Authority to engage those residents.
Continued tensions
Despite the focus on the upcoming report, the meeting trod familiar ground with acknowledgement of ongoing irritation about the work of the task force. EEA co-chair María Belén Power noted hearing “a lot of frustrations” with the group at meetings last year, namely on the scope of the project and which voices were prioritized as stakeholders. “We want to acknowledge that these concerns are real — we’ve seen them and we’ve felt them,” she said. Looking ahead, Power noted she doesn’t expect the task force to solve decades worth of issues surrounding river access and state decisions. “We see it as a building block,” she said.
The matter of which voices the task force would prioritize, an issue that was highlighted at the Nov. 17 hearing, also came up again. Attendees at the November meeting debated which residents or institutions should be considered key stakeholders. The task force defines stakeholders as anyone living within a half mile of the project site, a stretch of land along the Charles River between the Longfellow and Eliot bridges, beginning in West Cambridge, passes through Riverside and Cambridgeport and ends in Area II at Kendall Square. It has a particular focus on Riverside.
State Rep. Marjorie Decker’s budget act that created the group in 2025 defines task force membership as individuals who are “members of an environmental justice population or live in subsidized housing,” with at least two living in Riverside, which has historically been a predominantly Black and immigrant neighborhood. At the meeting, state Rep. Mike Connolly noted that the group’s membership is “skewed” and that Cambridgeport, part of his district, is not sufficiently represented. “The task force has raised deep concerns for me,” he said.
In response, Decker, who is not a task force member but represents key areas along the Charles, said that the task force is charged with bringing marginalized voices into conversations about the Charles River. “That’s what environmental justice is about,” she said. By state standards, Cambridgeport is defined as an environmental justice neighborhood due to a minority population over 40 percent, according to a state map. Despite his concerns, Connolly noted that he’s “ever optimistic,” adding, “I’m hopeful that as we move forward we bring everyone into the conversation.”
The task force was scheduled to meet Feb. 10 but DCR commissioner Nicole LaChapelle sent a notice by email Monday evening canceling the meeting, writing that “the notification list was not comprehensive.” LaChapelle is the DCR co-chair for the task force, though her designee Monika Roy has overseen other meetings.
“This was my oversight, and I sincerely apologize for not catching it earlier,” LaChapelle said in the notice. “My late cancellation is more than regrettable with the forward process in our last meeting. With help from the task force support team, I’ve updated my review process so this doesn’t happen again.”
Cambridge Day has reached out for more information on the cancellation.
This story was updated to note that a Feb. 10 task force meeting was cancelled.
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Did they ever figure out what this was for? “completing a report on how the state can ensure area residents can equitably access portions of the river and surrounding streets” is still pretty vague.