State and local officials are determined to do everything they can to make sure that the Green Line Extension project continues through to its completion.

By Josie Grove

Last Sunday, Deborah Kaplan waited for the 88 bus to take her from Union Square to Lechmere. In a few years, the Green Line Extension could make her trip faster. But since the project has been projected to go nearly $1 billion over budget, its future is becoming less certain. Kaplan is ambivalent. “I never particularly expected it to be on time,” she says. “If it actually happens, I will be pleasantly surprised, but the buses are great.”

State Representative Denise Provost thinks the project is urgent, because the buses are often unreliable. “For a lot of people, it comes down to ‘Do I need to be punctual? Do I need to make sure that I’m more or less in control of my schedule?’” Buses in Somerville are liable to get stuck in the city’s snarled traffic, and getting to the Red Line is inefficient for many Somervillians, she says. “If people in the city could just get on the Green Line…” mused the representative.

Since the early 1980s, the MBTA has been considering extending the Green Line into Somerville to alleviate traffic and air pollution. Somerville is particularly afflicted, says Provost. “Our roads were built before cars were commonplace, and we’ve got parking on both sides of most streets. Most of our transit is buses, which get terrifically delayed by being caught in surface traffic,” she says. “And we have very poor air quality. These things are related.”

The Green Line project began in January 2013. The project was going according to plan, until the Massachusetts Department of Transportation announced a major budget shortfall last month. “The contractor’s numbers were coming in higher than they should have been, and MassDOT has been engaged in trying to get a more reasonable quote,” said Provost.

The project’s costs are split between the Commonwealth and the Federal Transit Administration, after the project won a grant from the FTA in 2010. The FTA’s contribution is capped at $996 million, which at the time of the grant award represented half the project’s $1.992 billion cost. MassDOT now estimates the Green Line Extension will cost between $2.6 and $2.9 billion.

There are two main reasons for the increase over the 2010 quote, according to MassDOT. First, prices have increased because Greater Boston’s building boom has increased demand for labor and construction materials. Second, the project designs were just 60% complete when the quote was given, and additional cost became apparent when the design was finished. Provost says the new price represents a conservative estimate, a worst-case scenario for the project. “It’s deliberately calculated to be a high number, in order to gauge what the highest possible price for the project might be,” she said.

The cost was adjusted upward more than once during the dependency of this project. In 2008, when the first big bond authorization for the GLX was put to a transportation bond bill, at that point the project was still under a billion. And that number has risen and been adjusted.

According to MassDOT, failure to build the extension could result in the U.S. Department of Transportation withholding funding. “The Commonwealth made a commitment to the government, as part of their federal funding for the Big Dig, that they would build the Green Line Extension to alleviate the congestion and poor air quality in Somerville,” said Rep. Provost.

“In order to comply with the federal Clean Air Act, the state has to reduce surface ozone. In order to clean up the air, Eastern Massachusetts has to shift more trips to transit from automobiles, because the Big Dig created additional road capacity. The federal requirement was that additional transit capacity be created,” said Provost.

Provost says that economic modeling has shown that the Green Line Extension has the greatest air quality benefits and would eliminate the most car trips of any proposed mass transit project.

The MBTA has proposed four ways to deal with for the over-budget Green Line Extension. The first solution is reducing the scope of the project. This would include trying to find $100M of cost savings, building smaller stations, and eliminating a maintenance and storage facility. MassDOT estimates that all these reductions would be at most $317 million in savings, around a quarter of what is needed.

MassDOT is looking at other ways to come up with the money for the project. The state could look for more federal funding, or ask cities to shoulder some of the cost. The state could also look for money from institutions or private companies, such as Tufts University or the land developers. There is no certainty any of these requests would be successful.

The MBTA could stop the project and open it to new bids from other contractors. This could reduce costs by attracting more competition, but savings are not certain. Further, the re-bidding process would delay the project at least a year.

Cancelling the project is an option, but counter-intuitively, the cost is significant. Cancelling the project would mean forfeiting the $996 million FTA grant, and the state would risk a lawsuit because it would not be complying with the Clean Air Act.

“[MassDOT] Secretary [Stephanie] Pollock has been clear that all options have to be on the table,” said Rep. Provost. “That said, I don’t think that terminating the project would be the option of choice on the part of the administration.”

“I think the option of choice is proceeding with the project along something closer to the financial terms we had all anticipated. I think this means looking hard at the details of the increase. I think it may possibly, and this is the sort of the worst-best case, and means going out to bid again,” said the representative.

The MBTA’s Fiscal and Management Control Board, the five-member board appointed in July by Governor Charles Baker, will take up the issue later this month.