The
mood seemed to be mostly one of excitement toward the new project that
aims to make a hot spot for Somerville retail, residence and office
spaces more accessible to rapid transit riders. Though, for the most
part the various Somerville residents seemed concerned with not only
the funding for this project as is, but also the fundamental design
that members of the MBTA and other organizations spearheading the
project like ACOM had come up with thus far.

The station right
now is projected to be a $50 million project. According to Joe Nolan, a
member of the Construction Department for the MBTA, the new station at
Assembly Square has gathered about $40 million in funds so far, which
already leaves a $10 million gap in the initial estimate of the cost to
build the station. Still, this station is in the very early stages of
production. The organizations in charge of the design will take another
year just to design the station.

The station will be right in
between Sullivan Square Station and Wellington Station, filling a gap
in a now non-accessible area where a new IKEA is being built. This area
will also have a tremendous amount of retail outlets, as well as over
1.75 million square feet of office space and a vast amount of
residencies. The idea, according to the project leaders such as Joe
Cosgro, Patrick Dunford, a traffic engineer, and Kyle Davis, the deputy
design officer of ACOM, is to pick a particularly busy and emerging
node of business and focus as much public transportation around it to
make it grow as much as possible.

This technique, if executed,
can be a great step for the City of Somerville to pull itself out of
this great economic crisis it finds itself in today. One of the best
parts of this equation is the cost to the taxpayers of Massachusetts.
As mentioned, the project has gathered $40 million in funds to go
toward the design and building of this new station. The MBTA will not
need to pay any of this, a very bright point considering the $27
billion backlog to repair its existing infrastructure.

Instead,
the Federal Transit Authority will be contributing $25 million dollars,
while the Federal Realty Investment Trust and IKEA will be picking up
the other $15 million. This is a big step considering the vast
shortages in funds for vital projects that the MBTA has been trying to
take care of for an extended period of time.

During the
question and answer stage of the meeting, it was clear that the
majority of concerns were toward the initial designs that the project
overseers had come up with. The proposed station will be state of the
art, and of course fulfill all MBTA guidelines, but will only have one
headhouse. This poses somewhat of a problem in the sense that only
having one headhouse would not make the spaces that are the target area
of new accessibility not completely optimal in accessibility. Most of
the residents of Somerville asking questions, as well as the Mystic
View Task Force who were represented at the meeting, seemed to believe
that having only one headhouse would be a complete waste of time and
money.

For optimal accessibility, the station apparently needs
to have two headhouses. The members of the MBTA seemed to only be able
to say that right now the money is so tight, that an addition to the
new Station so big, one that could come close to doubling the costs is
just not in the cards at the time being.

The MBTA stated that it
would continue to consider this change to the design. The next meeting
will be held in the fall of this year, when the initial designs should
be beginning to take some shape.