By Jenny SpeerBACK BAY – In late June, a sign featuring a construction the MBTA's mascot, Charlie, hung crookedly on a wire fence surrounding the construction site of the new head house of the Arlington T station, asking pedestrians to pardon the mess. Across the sign, a graffiti artist offered a blunt response to the message: “$4 MILLION, 4 YEARS, ONE BIG WASTE OF TIME.”
The spray paint-wielding activist was off in the figures: Nov. 22 will mark two years since construction to add eleveators started on both stations. The costs for the project have jumped from the original $46 million to nearly $61 million. The sign has since been replaced, but some passengers remain disgruntled.
“It makes me want to not pay taxes anymore,” Sara Dart, 24, of Brighton. “I pay taxes and the ever-increasing fare; it’s like I’m paying double for a slower ride.”
The MBTA is sitting on more than $8 billion of debt, though it still awarded 240 executive employees a 9 percent salary increase in August.
“We are supposed to trust that the authority has the process under control and is managing it well, but what a commuter sees on a daily basis does not give them much in the way of hope,” Bill Daras, 26, of Jamaica Plain, who writes about transportation in his blog, said in an email. “They see banners proclaiming the shiny new, accessible station that will be ready for them in ‘Spring 2009,’ but they look behind the barricades that have stood for nearly two years and they find everything looks more or less how it did in 2006.”
Both the MBTA and the project’s architect, Leers Weinzafel Associates of Boston, declined to comment on the project’s status. Both stations are in the construction stage of development, according to the MBTA's website.
The project has faced opposition and delays since 1992, when the MBTA first proposed that the Copley station needed to be made wheelchair accessible to comply with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.
"Obviously we want that station to be accessible," said Sarah Kelly, executive director of the Boston Preservation Alliance. "We just wanted to see a different location for the headhouse."
The Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, in association with the Boston Preservation Alliance, filed a lawsuit against the FTA and MBTA, claiming that the project would violate historical preservation regulations by destroying some of the stairs of the Boston Public Library.
“There was some damage to the side of the [library] building during construction, which was exactly what we were concerned about,” Kelly said.
Jackie Yessian, former chairwoman of the association, claimed that this mishap was avoidable.
“We gave them a lot of options that they didn’t study,” she said. “They damaged a historic national monument. There’s legislation in place to protect that.”
Despite concern over the welfare of national historic landmarks – the Boston Public Library, the Old South Church and Trinity Church are all affected by the renovations – local businesses have not felt the impact of the construction.
“It actually hasn’t been that bad,” Rich Marcella, bar manager of Parish Café on Boylston Street, said. “There’s a lot of traffic, so that’s inconvenient, but half of Boston is under construction.”
As the project’s two-year mark approaches, the estimated completion date – now winter 2009 – is met with growing skepticism by passengers like Daras.
“We're asked to have faith, but we're not given any rewards for our faith,” he said. “ Maybe that elevator will be finished next year, maybe the platform will be finished the year after that…Meanwhile, the high rise down the road has gone from excavation to completion in the time it's taken to pour a few inches of concrete.”
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