By William C.  Shelton

(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.)

Last Thursday the Somerville Planning Board voted to extend an expired Special Permit that it had granted to IKEA in December 2006 to construct a 340,000-square-foot store.

IKEA’s previous unwillingness to use the permit created a hardship for Somerville. A 2009 deal with the state would have redirected taxes on the store’s sales and employees’ incomes to make payments on $50 million in Assembly Square infrastructure bonds. When IKEA balked, the city went on the hook directly for $25.8 million in bond debt.

Construction and operation of the store would cause some hardship as well.

So the Planning Board could have conditioned its approval of the permit extension on IKEA’s making serious improvements to its design that would benefit the city and its residents.  The Board should have insisted that IKEA step up, or step out. It did neither, routinely approving the extension.

Doug Greenholz, VP of Real Estate for IKEA North America, said he could not promise that IKEA would build in Somerville. But the company wants to keep its options open.

Mr. Greenholz is a friendly and gracious man. In fact, I’ve never met an IKEA representative whom I didn’t like.

I met the first two in the summer of 2006. Joan Hooke and David Iemolo represented IKEA in a mediation to end lawsuits supported by the Mystic View Task Force (MVTF).

At the outset of negotiations, the IKEA reps promised a revolutionary new store design, a prototype for future urban IKEAs in the U.S. Such stores already exist in Europe. They said that IKEA staff were designing little wheels that customers could stick on their flat-pack purchases to facilitate taking them home on the T.

Ms. Hooke and Mr. Iemolo subsequently left IKEA, and we got the same cookie-cutter blue-and-yellow box, only bigger and without stick-on wheels. The mediation did produce some positive outcomes.

Among them, Federal Realty Investment Trust (FRIT) and IKEA agreed to a plan that would reduce daily auto trips from 100,000 to 50,000. To get a sense of how big this is, 50,000 trips represents the increased I-93 capacity produced by the Big Dig.

They committed to contributing $15 million to build an Orange Line station. FRIT agreed to construct bike and pedestrian connections to Ten Hills, East Somerville, and Draw 7 Park, and help fund water-access improvements.

MVTF negotiators signed the settlement, agreeing to support IKEA’s development, with the provision that we could advocate for how it is implemented. Accordingly, I advocate improvements that IKEA could make to seriously reduce its burden on Somerville.

IKEA projects that its Somerville Store will produce 6,200 weekday auto trips and 10,200 on Saturday. Even though these projections are understated, they equate to the store’s customers driving 68 million miles per year, burning 3.4 million gallons of fuel, and pumping 67 million pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Somerville residents drive far fewer miles per day than the regional average, but we already inhale more transportation emissions than do residents in any other Massachusetts city or town.

City government has, rightly, pinned hopes for emerging from our structural fiscal deficit on property taxes that wise Assembly Square development would bring. This would require construction of office buildings and research-and-development facilities.

But potential tenants have to believe that their companies’ employees can easily get to and from work. The more congested Assembly Square, the more difficult this is. Readers who commute past the Square on Route 28 already know about congestion.

IKEA could significantly reduce its trips per day by building an elevated walkway from the Orange Line station’s southern end to its store. The design approved by the Planning Board would obligate customers to carry their weighty purchases up and down the equivalent of seven flights of stairs, greatly reducing use of the T, and increasing car trips.

The walkway would boost IKEA sales as well.  1.1 million people per day ride the Orange Line or could do so with 1 transfer. Local air-quality expert Wig Zamore says that this one improvement could make the Somerville store the busiest and most sustainable of all North American IKEAs.

Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership president Ellin Reisner advocates the walkway as a means of reducing traffic and pollution impacts on her East Somerville neighborhood. But IKEA refuses to consider changing its one-size-fits-all design.

In it’s settlement agreement with MVTF, the company committed to dedicate 200 of its 1,550 parking spaces for use by T riders who would pay the same rates as those charged by similar facilities, like the one across the river at the Wellington Orange Line station. This commitment was not in the IKEA plan approved by the Planning Board, and the Board is indifferent to its disappearance.

Somerville has the lowest proportion of usable open space of any municipality in the Commonwealth—less than 3% including cemeteries and paved schoolyards. And the open-space allocation within Assembly Square’s current development plan is small in comparison to other Boston-area land transformations.

MVTF persuaded IKEA to allow a path connecting East Somerville to the waterfront to be constructed along the eastern edge of its property. But the company could add at least two additional acres of usable open space by simply shifting the location of its parking garage.

This would necessitate no change to its store design. But IKEA is unwilling to consider it, and the Planning Board is unwilling to require it.

Throughout living memory, and especially during this administration, city officials have chosen to approve low-value developments that bring new problems and costs. In so doing, they block future projects that would bring high tax revenues and a range of good jobs.

IKEA’s Assembly Square site comprises 12 acres. Building the kind of office structures on it that FRIT intends for its own property would create ten times the net tax revenues, ten times the jobs, and one-tenth the car trips as the IKEA store.

Understandably, IKEA’s business is to sell furniture, not build offices. But it could improve its plans so as to impose less hardship on Somerville.

The Planning Board’s unwillingness to compel such improvements extends the pattern of grabbing illusory short-term gain, oblivious to the inevitable long-term pain.