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Viewpoint
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Business New Haven
7/13/1998
By: BNH
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The 'Little Dig' Gets Bigger
Boston's massive Central Artery project has become cemented in the mind of the region and the nation as the Big Dig. Because of that, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr.'s grand plan to depress a mile and a half of I-95 at Long Wharf and reunite the city with its harbor might well be a great plan to reshape New Haven but it more likely will take on the “Little Dig” moniker instead.
Little or no, it just got a lot bigger.
On July 8, consultants hired by the state's Department of Transportation told the South Central Regional Council of Governments that the project could cost a whopping $500 million from soup to nuts and take six years to complete. To keep out seawater from New Haven Harbor, the new, below-sea-level roadway would require what the experts described as a “huge pump station” at work 24 hours a day. It would house six pumps - three operating round the clock, two as backups, and one as a backup to the backups. With the pumps come the power costs as well, so this underwater road way would have an overhead as well.
At the meeting, DOT planner Carmine Trotta acknowledged that there might be other options that would accomplish the same objectives, but at a far lower cost. However, none has yet been offered or studied.
Half a billion dollars? Triple fail-safe pumping systems to keep the ocean away from where the laws of physics say it should go? Less costly options unstudied?
The original price tag estimated for this project was $175 million and it's already at $500 milliion, where does it go from here, to a billiion dollars? While we share the vision (just look at the cover of this issue), it seems prety plain that we need to bury this plan and seek some other more creative and practical proposals.
Bad Timing, Eh?
To the hundreds of New Haveners - young and old, white and black, rich and poor - who toiled earnestly on the Elm City's bid to be named an All-America City, it was a cruel blow of fate that their efforts were rewarded with success - at the very moment when the Livable City Initiative loan scandal came crashing down around City Hall the third week of June.
Powerful evidence that those close to Mayor DeStefano steered moneys intended to improved blighted neighborhoods to themselves and their cronies has cast a darkening cloud over the administration and the city, squandering what should have been a warm, feel-good afterglow for the enthusiastic, hard-working innocents who were so justly rewarded in Mobile, Ala. in late June.
Two points merit reflection:
• The earnest thanks and congratulations of the entire community ought to go out to the volunteers and others whose imagination, enthusiasm and honest efforts put New Haven over the top. They, truly, deserve to be hailed as All-Americans, a lustrous reflection of our community at is best, even in troubled times.
• The city's and region's business community must step forward and demand in the most unequivocal terms possible good, honest and open government from its leadership, both elected and appointed.
For too long too many business leaders have, by their silence, enabled the excesses of single-party rule in New Haven, of government by a wink and a nod.
We ought to have been able to use the All-America City designation as a powerful marketing tool to spur new and more vigorous economic development in greater New Haven. That we cannot in good conscience and taste unfurl that banner proudly is a testament not only to political leadership gone wrong - but also to a business leadership that, for far too long, has remained on the sidelines of meaningful public-policy discourse.
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