Quincy buoyed by order on bridge
Quincy’s mayor is touting a state environmental order that declared Boston’s plan to rebuild the Long Island Bridge not a “repair” project as a win for his city in its ongoing battle to stop the project.
“In my view, this is clearly a slowdown message to Boston,” Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch said Thursday. “There’s still a number of hurdles yet to go.”
A hearing in March will determine the fate of a key permit Boston received in August in the larger city’s six-year-long odyssey to rebuild the bridge to Long Island, where Boston intends to rebuild a large addiction-recovery campus.
At that hearing, according to Tuesday’s order issued by the Department of Environmental Protection, the current state of the concrete pylons already in the water will also be discussed. Boston is proposing to build the new bridge on top of those pylons after working to shore them up.
A spokesperson for Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said the hearing will still be when Quincy’s appeal of the granted permit is determined.
“This order, which identifies issues for decision at the future hearing, does not impact the validity of the draft license issued by the State this year or the City of Boston’s position in the appeal,” the spokesperson said in an email.
The ruling from MassDEP presiding officer Margaret R. Stolfa is regarding a “Chapter 91” license, which evaluates the impact of a project on public access to coastline and waterways. Stolfa put to bed the outstanding question about whether there was an existing license from 1949, saying there is no evidence of the decades-old permit’s existence.
She also ruled that building the new bridge does not count as a “maintenance and repair” project.
A bridge ran from Moon Island, which is in Quincy and accessible via causeway from that city’s Squantum neighborhood, to Boston’s Long Island until 2014. Structural issues led Boston to close it and demolish it, meaning the social services programs there had to close.
In 2018, then-mayor Martin J. Walsh announced his intention to rebuild the bridge and situate recovery services on the island in an effort to combat the opioid epidemic and ease the mounting issues of drug use and homelessness in the Mass. and Cass area.
The plan to rebuild the 3,300foot-long bridge has been met with stiff opposition in Quincy, with residents saying the project could increase traffic through Squantum, harm the local environment, and impact local quality of life. Koch has urged Boston to try to locate a recovery campus elsewhere or to use ferries to get to and from the island.
Quincy has challenged the bridge’s permitting process on multiple grounds, but Boston over the past few years has cleared most of the hurdles.