Editor's note: this story contains swear words.
A virtual public hearing about the Allston Multimodal Project last Friday afternoon was supposed to focus on the project's impacts to regional rail service.
Instead, the meeting went off the rails altogether when a staffer for VHB, an engineering firm that's received millions of dollars over the past decade as a consultant on the troubled project, told a member of the project's task force to "shut the fuck up" during a question-and-answer session with the project's stakeholder task force.
Still no answers for the Grand Junction problem
The proposed Allston Multimodal Project involves a $2 billion reconfiguration of the Massachusetts Turnpike and Soldiers Field Road through a former rail yard in Allston.
As we've reported previously, MassDOT's project consultants had been proceeding with plans to build 12 new lanes of riverfront highway by demolishing the southern approach to the Grand Junction Bridge across the Charles River (pictured at the top of this article).
However, all of the MBTA's south-side commuter rail trains rely on that bridge to access the MBTA's main commuter rail maintenance facility, the Boston Engine Terminal, in East Somerville.
When MBTA and Amtrak officials learned of MassDOT's plans last summer, they warned that "MBTA service would cease within weeks" if the highway project proceeded as planned.
Last Friday, MassDOT convened its project task force for another virtual meeting to discuss the rail and transit aspects of their highway plan – including their rationale for adding an unpopular rail layover facility into the center of the project.
But officials admitted that they still hadn't figured out a workable solution for the Grand Junction bridge.
Luisa Paiewonsky, MassDOT's new chief of megaprojects, said that her team is "looking at alternative solutions," including the possible construction of a dedicated new commuter rail maintenance facility for the south side of the regional rail network.
However, that would likely add hundreds of millions of dollars to the Allston I-90 project's costs, and even if it were a priority for the MBTA, it's unlikely to get built on MassDOT's desired schedule (by way of comparison, a new MBTA bus garage in Quincy cost half a billion dollars and has been under construction since 2022).
MBTA officials at Friday's meeting confirmed that the agency's current capital budget does not include any funding for a new rail maintenance facility.
Task force member and Allston resident Harry Mattison asked the project team a series of questions challenging the contradiction between their lack of plans for maintaining regional rail service, and their desire to begin highway construction in 2028.
"Is there a point where there's a go/no-go decision? Because 2029 (the year when MassDOT intends to demolish the Grand Junction connection) is not that far away to design a major maintenance facility," observed Mattison.
Paiewonsky responded that "it's not for lack of urgency that you haven't seen that kind of update. It's not a simple challenge."
"It's a huge challenge," agreed Mattison. "But again the question is, do you have any schedule, any milestones you can share..."
At that point, Austin White, a consultant for VHB, broke in to interject, in an exasperated voice, "Oh my god dude, shut the fuck up."
After a moment of shocked silence, an unidentified meeting participant said "OK, let's try to keep this civil," and Mattison asked, "what's going on here?"
Paiewonsky answered "I don't know," and asserted erroneously that "that did not come from within our team. I apologize."
The discussion continued, but without addressing the underlying conflicts that Mattison had identified.
Later in the meeting, several other members of the project's task force came to Mattison's defense and denounced the vulgar interruption from White.
Stacy Thompson, the former executive director of the LivableStreets Alliance, said that "I have never seen an outburst like what happened be addressed so poorly... This was so deeply inappropriate."
On Saturday, MassDOT officials told StreetsblogMASS in an email that the agency "apologizes for the inappropriate outburst during the Allston Multimodal Project meeting. The individual responsible, an outside consultant, has been identified and removed from the project."
VHB has received millions in Allston project consulting fees
To get some insight as to why White reacted the way he did to Mattison's questioning, it's helpful to understand his employer's role in the megaproject.
VHB is one of several large engineering firms that has been assisting MassDOT in designing the Allston Multimodal Project since 2014.
Over the past decade, the project has gone through multiple major design revisions in response to rising costs and logistical challenges associated with building 12 highway lanes on the banks of the Charles River.
All those trips back to the drawing board have been lucrative for the project's private-sector design consultants.
At the end of 2020 (before MassDOT switched to the current "at-grade" design, and the last date for which MassDOT had released public invoices on its spending for the project), VHB had already collected over $6.7 million in payments from MassDOT for its work on the project.
StreetsblogMASS requested up-to-date copies of MassDOT's contracts and invoices with VHB and numerous other consulting firms involved in the Allston Multimodal Project last July.
In violation of public records laws, the Commonwealth still has not fulfilled those requests.
However, a MassDOT official told StreetsblogMASS last fall that the agency had already spent over $42 million on the project's preliminary designs.
