By Joseph A. Curtatone

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

There’s a lot of good news about the MBTA’s Green Line Extension through Somerville to Medford. The state remains strongly committed to completing the project by 2014.  It’s going to open up access to Union Square, Brickbottom, Gilman Square, Ball Square and more. It will greatly expand economic activity while reducing car traffic and improving air quality.

But our immediate challenge in keeping the Green Line Extension on time and on track is to work with the state’s Executive Office of Transportation to find the best location for a necessary maintenance facility – and to do that in a way that preserves the economic development potential of our remaining prime commercial space.  It would be extremely counterproductive – and in our view, completely unnecessary – to locate a Green Line maintenance facility in a way that significantly interferes with Somerville’s ability to attract urgently-needed, mixed-use development that can expand our commercial tax base and reduce the burden on our hard-pressed residential taxpayers.

Yet the first – and so far the only – proposal from EOT threatens to do exactly that. It would straddle the existing rail right-of way through Inner Belt and Brickbottom, eating up 11.5 acres and raising new barriers to the movement of pedestrian and vehicle traffic.  It would require more than 10 feet of new landfill along its entire length, so the only way to link Brickbottom back to Inner Belt would be to build new tunnels 300 to 600 feet long and 30 to 60 feet wide. When you add the height of the maintenance building itself to the new fill, you end up with a structure that is at least 40 feet higher than the existing street level. At approximately three acres in size, the structure would have dimensions of approximately 350 to 400 feet on a side – and it would be sited immediately adjacent to the Brickbottom Artists Collaborative, literally the only residential building in the entire area and one which has been identified by the EOT itself as a ‚Äúspecial building‚Äù that would be adversely affected by increased noise, light, and vibration.

Now there’s no question that building the maintenance facility is essential to completing the Green Line Extension. And it may be that, when all is said and done, the only place it can be built is in the Brickbottom and Inner Belt area.  But so far, EOT hasn’t explained why other locations wouldn’t be feasible – and they have yet to respond to our concern that Somerville is already overburdened with regional highway and rail infrastructure.

It may also be true that the new maintenance facility has to be big enough to accommodate 80 cars – although it doesn’t look like the Green Line Extension will be using more than 32 cars..  (For some reason, EOT wants to bring the 20 cars now stored at Lechmere Station to this new facility, but even that only gets you to a total of 52.)

EOT hasn’t really explained why the maintenance facility has to be here in Somerville or why it has to be so big, so it’s difficult to accept their reasoning. But, even if both of these assertions are valid, that still leaves us with one more huge unanswered question:  Why can’t you build the maintenance facility in a way that preserves developable open space instead of chewing through one of our most scarce and precious urban resources?

We decided this summer that we couldn’t wait for EOT to answer this all-important question – and we needed to bring in some experts of our own.  We therefore turned, as we have in the past, to the use of private funding to answer a public question – and the results have been illuminating.

Back in June, we announced that the City had asked developers with an interest in Inner Belt and Brickbottom to contribute to a study of these issues led by a respected non-profit urban design collaborative called the Urban Ecology Institute. That study has confirmed that it would be feasible to build a Green Line maintenance facility in this area in such a way that it would minimize impacts on residents and – just as important – permit developers to build right over it, using air rights in much the same way that the Prudential Center was built over the Massachusetts Turnpike without taking additional scarce land in Boston’s Back Bay.

Such an approach would also have the welcome effect of providing the storage area and maintenance yard with better cover from the elements, and presenting less of a barrier to pedestrian and vehicle traffic.

One of several possible uses for those air rights might be a new stadium – it’s no secret that the Kraft Group is interested in building an urban home for the New England Revolution – and that’s a solution that would generate considerable additional ridership for the new Green Line Extension (and revenue for the T).

In the short term, an air rights solution might be more expensive, but it is feasible, and it could have a much larger payoff for all stakeholders (including the city’s and the state’s taxpayers).

So here’s what we need to know right now: Will EOT answer our questions and work with us to come up with a solution that meets everyone’s needs?  I am confident that, in the end, they’ll meet us halfway – because no one’s interests are served by slowing the steady progress of this much-deserved and long-awaited transit program.