by Michaela A. Falls

A member of the Somerville Transportation for Equity Partnership (STEP) spoke at the Jan. 7  contributors meeting of The Somerville News about the possible evading by the state of its court-ordered obligation to extend the Green Line from Lechmere to West Medford.

“Somerville has been run over by Interstate 93, by Route 28, by Route 38. It’s close to Route 99. We’ve been run over by the highway traffic and the rail traffic that serve the region but are not served by it,” said Wig Zamore.

STEP, a community group formed to improve transportation in Somerville, has worked with groups like the Mystic View Taskforce to encourage citizens to write letters to the Boston Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), the 101 city and town group established to carry out transportation plans and programs from Eastern Massachusetts to Washington D.C., he said.
 

“For the last several years of the transportation planning cycle, Somerville citizens have represented about two thirds of all the letters, comments and testimony on the Boston MPO plan of the whole 101 city and town region,” said Zamore.

Although the state committed to enhance public transportation in a 1990 agreement as a condition to starting work on the Big Dig, funding plans have not yet been established, he said.

“STEP has really put probably most of its energy this year into doing public outreach around the Green Line extension. The Green Line extension is written such that the state has to do the planning, the environmental permitting, the engineering, the construction, and the opening of all the stations in Somerville by the end of 2011. The state and the Boston MPO plans show no funding to do that—no long-term funding, no short-term funding,” said Zamore.

“One of the obligations of the Boston MPO and the state itself is to forward the transportation plan to Washington. That plan must give priority to the ozone projects, which includes the Green Line extension, and the plan must show where the real money is to build those projects on time. Neither of those things has happened.” said Zamore. 

“The transportation plans for the Boston MPO which reflect the state government’s priorities show the Green Line extension being done in the plans by 2011 but show no source of money to do that. In last year’s transportation bond bill, Governor Romney did not include a dollar to do this, notwithstanding that the plans that the state sent to Washington show the project done on time.”

The obligation to extend the Green Line, which falls under the Clean Air Act, is in two separate legal agreements that are identical in their features but have completely different legal provinces, one of them being the state itself, said Zamore. The Ozone State Implementation Plan is between the state and EPA and the Administrative Consent Order is overseen by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection , he said.

Somerville has 36% more deaths due to lung cancer and heart attack than it should have, said Zamore. In fact, Somerville, the densest city in the state, has more deaths from lung cancer and heart attacks per square mile than any of the other 350 cities and towns in Massachusetts, he said. 

Zigamore said, “Those two large mortality categories represent about 20% of all the deaths in Somerville so where we should have 15 deaths, we have 20 deaths. 

    "We should have 90 deaths a year but we have about 120 due to those causes. Other areas that have a very intense overlay of population and transportation sources, like Chelsea, Revere and Everett, also have elevated mortality rates due to those two causes," he said.

“We’re the largest state where the whole state is in violation of the ozone clean air standards. We’ve been in violation since 1970 when the Clean Air Act was first passed. We had excess carbon monoxide, excess particulate matter, and excess oxygen in eastern Massachusetts, especially in Somerville.”

I-93 was constructed and opened after the passage of the Clean Air Act. Due to public outcry, all highway building in Massachusetts was stopped in the ’70s with the exception of completing I-93 in Somerville.  Before the opening of I-93, the state knew that Somerville air fell far below federal standards and that I-93 would make Somerville air and the public health impact much worse, said Zamore.

“The thing that’s particularly egregious in our situation is that the state knowingly extended Interstate 93 notwithstanding the clear violation of safety standards. The same Clean Air Act used to stop the building in the rest of Massachusetts was used to excuse the building in Somerville.”

While there are 198 diesel commuter trains that travel through a city of just four square miles, there is only one Red Line stop at Davis Square in Somerville, he said.

“The MBTA has known for a very long time that the diesel emissions from their commuter rail trains are very problematic to public health,” said Zamore.

As the third densest city in the state, Cambridge has much better public health than Somerville, he said.

“The difference between Somerville and Cambridge is that Cambridge was part of the Clean Air Act solution 30 years ago. They kept the highways out, they rely heavily on the Red Line, which is electrified clean transit, and they kept most regional truck cut-throughs out of the City of Cambridge," he said.

About 300 people attended a public hearing at the State House on Dec. 14 led by the Executive Office of Transportation (EOT) and the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).  Zamore said the hearing was the start of a strategy by state government to change the law rather than do the projects but there was strong resistance from people who insisted that commitments be honored, not reevaluated.

“It was important to get a lot of Somerville citizens to the hearings both at Somerville High School the night of the last World Series game and then to the State House, which was tough given that it was mid-week during holiday season with no advertising," he said.

In both cases there was a big turnout. Zamore said that the concerned citizens who showed up might not have even been aware of the issues if not for the press and the participation of a lot of people. 

“This is somewhat of a unique time because there are a lot of people pushing for the extension of the Green Line—there’s elected officials and specific groups like STEP and then the general public that doesn’t fall in these other groups. In the past, I don’t think Somerville has ever defended its public health and, at this point, there’s a lot more people starting to think about that," he said.

On Jan. 12, the Conservation Law Foundation filed a Notice of Intent to sue Massachusetts state agencies for not upholding its transit commitments.

The City of Somerville filed a notice of intent to sue the state for failing to extend the Green Line train into Somerville and for violating the Clean Air Act on Jan. 14. State transportation officials are still in the midst of deciding whether to go forward with the extension of the Green Line in Somerville.

“These mortality rates from air pollution represent an invisible death—it’s just a steady kind of slow slaughter but they represent more deaths than any known environmental disaster in the United States that I’m aware of," he said.