The Waste Land

Basking in pumped-in heat and self-congratulations on a cold winter day, an A list of Boston politics and power packs a tent set atop hastily smoothed gravel to break ground for a section of the long-awaited Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. Though today it looks more like tundra than hope, the nearly 30-acre Greenway will finally invite the sun to shine down on land that for more than 50 years was trapped under the Central Artery. It’s the centerpiece of some 45 parks and other public spaces citywide, a Big Dig payoff that is supposed to be completed by the spring of next year.

“This is the fulfillment of a 15-year promise,” says former Plimouth Plantation executive director Nancy Brennan, who took the same post with a private nonprofit group called the Greenway Conservancy, finally created last year after endless political haggling about who would oversee this narrow string of parks. “By 2007 people will be able to wiggle their toes in the grass and run through the mist in the fountain.”

Fifteen years. It was almost exactly that long ago that then state Secretary of Environmental Affairs John DeVillars issued his approval for what would become the nearly $15 billion Big Dig. “The construction period may feel like open heart surgery but it will work like plastic surgery, and when it is completed the City of Boston will have a bright new look,” that document said.

These days DeVillars wishes the approval had been more specific about how this bright new look would be paid for. Maybe if it had, something other than gravel and construction barriers would already be in place where parks were promised a decade and a half ago.

“There is no legitimate reason why many of the public benefits have been delayed,” DeVillars says. “Knowing what I know now,” he says, he would have been “much more precise and definitive about what was going to happen on the open space, when it was to happen, and who would be responsible for financing and maintaining it.”

And there’s the rub. In classic Boston political fashion, everyone wants credit for the Greenway, but almost no one wants responsibility for it. The land, which is above the Big Dig tunnels, is owned by the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. The city holds design review and zoning control over any actual construction, but isn’t willing to maintain this new downtown parkland unless the state lets it collect new taxes to do so—something the antitax Romney administration/presidential campaign operation won’t tolerate. The nonprofit organizations that are supposed to develop three major civic projects there—currently, a local history museum, a cultural center, and a community center, intended as the anchors to draw people to the Greenway—say they can’t afford to pay for covering the open highway ramps beneath their designated parcels. State taxpayers will have to do it, they contend. As for the developers and the businesses abutting the Greenway that will reap its benefits, some are willing to contribute to the cause, but only in a limited way and only if they can control how their money is spent.

“The requirement that 75 percent of the Greenway be open space was a wonderful idea and a bit of a burden,” says Brian Fallon, managing director of Extell Boston Harbor, whose new InterContinental luxury hotel-and-condo complex offers such public amenities as a waterfront park and a pathway to the harbor. He says private developers shouldn’t have to pick up too much of the Greenway tab. Which may be why the Greenway Conservancy is barely one-fifth of the way toward its goal of raising $50 million for an endowment to maintain the Greenway’s open space and parks. “The conservancy has been given a very difficult task,” says Fallon, looking out the window of his International Place office over a Greenway landscape sprouting blue and yellow fences instead of irises and grass. “At the end of the day, there must be very significant public funding for the next 100 years.” But the city and state aren’t willing to be such significant public players. As for the feds, “I don’t think that’s where it is right now,” says Senator Edward Kennedy, for whose mother the Greenway is named.

“The public realm is supposed to be the government’s responsibility. Instead, everyone thinks they’re off the hook with the conservancy,” fumes Boston landscape architect, urban planner, and longtime public-space watchdog Shirley Kressel. “There’s a public acceptance of this ideology that the government can’t do it, but private donors and corporations can. We’ve reached this point because of the deliberate abdication of their role by both city and state government.”

The state is even reluctant to assume responsibility for other parks created along or above the Big Dig. The Turnpike Authority, which spent about $320 million for parkland projectwide and $100 million for Greenway parks, is more than ready to pass them off to somebody else. Frustrated Turnpike Authority chairman Matt Amorello says he’s excited about the Greenway—so excited, in fact, that the authority has agreed to cover the cost of Greenway maintenance through at least 2012, and Amorello wants to move his agency’s headquarters to a building it owns along the new park. He only wishes more attention went to the other Big Dig parks. “People just don’t know about places like this,” he says, waving at the canals and other amenities of the new $29 million North Point Park, near Zakim Bridge. “We spent $12 million here alone just to clean up contaminated soil.” Now Amorello is waiting for the state Department of Conservation and Recreation to take this and other parks off his hands. But department spokesman Joe Ferson says it is “unclear” when the parcels will be turned over. The department appears in no hurry to take them. It’s so underfunded it can’t properly maintain the parks it already oversees. The long-simmering feud between Amorello and Governor Mitt Romney may further undermine the fledgling parks.

So an odd reverse turf war is under way. Agencies that typically duke it out for control of such people-pleasing features as public parks are doing their best to avoid it. So for now, Bostonians will have to wait to wiggle their toes in the grass. The Big Dig has become the Big Dodge.

IN BOSTON, public leadership vacuums are often filled by private players with the connections, bucks, and clout to close deals. That tradition lives on in the Greenway conservancy. Its 10-member board—appointed by the Turnpike Authority (five members), Governor Romney and Mayor Tom Menino (two each), and Senator Kennedy (one)—is a Rolodex of what’s left of Boston’s corporate base. The board is chaired by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts executive vice president Peter Meade and includes current or former CEOs of Harvard Pilgrim, Raytheon, and Sun Express, a division of Sun Microsystems. No elected officials sit on the board. Former Governor William Weld is a member, but his plate is pretty full right now with New York politics.

“The game has always been to run the parks with someone else’s money,” says Big Dig expert David Luberoff, executive director of Harvard’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. “Right now, you have no one with clear control, no real maintenance budget, and no capital budget. Instead, everything drops into the lap of the conservancy, which lives in this gray zone between the public sector and the private sector.”

Meade, one of Boston’s go-to guys, acknowledges the fundraising challenge facing the conservancy, which must find $15 million by the end of next year and $50 million overall to cover expenses when the Turnpike Authority ends its maintenance responsibilities. The endowment, Meade says, will generate enough income to maintain the Greenway.

He says it is neither unusual nor untoward that the conservancy depends upon the kindness of private giving. “If you look at the great park space in this country, it almost always involves a combination of public and private financing,” he says. “Do we have the right mix [with the Greenway]? I’m not sure we know.” The glass-one-fifth-full news is that the group has raised $11.3 million, of which $5 million came from the Turnpike Authority and $1 million from the Kennedy family, with the rest mostly from the usual cast of Boston donors, including Raytheon, State Street, and Meade’s Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. The glass-four-fifths-empty news is that $50 million remains awfully far away, especially with so many causes competing for a shrinking pool of corporate donors. Even assuming that the interest from $50 million is enough to maintain the Greenway’s parks and public operations, it doesn’t help close the financial canyon facing the nonprofits that are supposed to build those people-drawing civic and cultural anchors.

THE UNCERTAINTY OF these efforts is epitomized by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s 15-year on-again, mostly off-again quest to build a glass-encased public garden on three parcels of Greenway land near South Station. Unable to raise enough money, the society is now reportedly leaning toward less grandiose uses for the space. “The Greenway will not be a success unless there are destination points that really work,” Meade says. Take the case of the YMCA, which dropped plans to build a recreation center on the Greenway mostly because it would have cost too much to cover the underlying highway ramp. “[The Y] is saying it can’t do that. So the ball is back in the state’s court,” he says. The issue remains open.

The corporate-backed Artery Business Committee hopes to get the Legislature to allocate $30 million or more to cover the ramps emerging from the Big Dig tunnels. That leads Boston Redevelopment Authority director Mark Maloney to wonder why the state should spend more on the Greenway while other parks go begging. “We have a concern if the state is going to start to fulfill the obligations of the Turnpike Authority with funds that could go to even more-worthy causes in the city,” says Maloney, who instead wants to be allowed to raise the meals tax by 1 percent to pay for Greenway maintenance. The BRA says this will bring in at least $17 million a year.

With public funding uncertain, the conservancy is left to tap into a pool of already heavily tapped private donors.

“You have things like the local history museum, which I think is a good thing, competing with funding to support battered women,” says former state Transportation Secretary Fred Salvucci, whose permanent moniker has become Father of the Big Dig. “This is crazy. These parks are a public-sector responsibility.” Besides, he notes, cutting grass and cleaning fountains is nothing compared with the much bigger—and more important—job of maintaining the Big Dig vents, tunnels, roads, and other infrastructure. Which may be the next Big Dodge.

”If this project is not maintained, you’re wasting $15 billion,” Salvucci says. “And that’s really nuts.”