The state has backed away from a plan to take Magazine Beach land permanently and expressed openness to seeking alternatives for burying a massive water tank there, said attendees at a Tuesday meeting of the Cambridgeport Neighborhood Association.
The plan including infrastructure to prevent combined sewer overflows – the spilling of waste into public waterways after storms – shocked residents and officials when it was introduced Oct. 5 by staff from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.
The retreat by MWRA staff was well-timed, as many of the roughly 100 residents at the meeting now resist the plan even without a permanent fencing off of land, said attendees such as city councillor Cathie Zusy, state representative Mike Connolly and Magazine Beach Partners president Ken Carson.
Even if the MWRA found ways not to permanently fence off 2.3 acres of sports fields over the tank, residents’ resistance grew with the understanding that installation of the 75-feet-deep, 10-million-gallon tank would remove 8.3 acres of Magazine Beach from public use for six to eight years. Magazine Beach is 17 acres.
“That’s effectively just taking the park offline for six to eight years,” Carson said, noting a swimming pool area would be used as a path for dump trucks removing soil. “Are we really going to have our little children scurrying to the swimming pool between dump trucks? I don’t think so. So people are pretty upset.”
Six to eight years of construction, Connolly said, “that’s a kid’s childhood. That’s the golden years of a person’s retirement.”
It would also tear open a park that has cost more than $12 million in painstaking revitalization since being left derelict in the 1990s, Zusy said at an Oct. 20 meeting of the City Council. She led the reclamation from 2010 until she joined the council in 2024, when Carson took over her work as president of the nonprofit Magazine Beach Partners. Her council order asked the MWRA to “come back and to rethink what is being proposed for the site – maybe they can move it to Goose Meadow, which would be much less disruptive. Maybe the tank doesn’t have to be 10 million gallons, maybe it could be 5 million.”
As of Tuesday, she said, “I think the MWRA has heard the residents and realizes they need to come up with some alternatives – and something’s going to happen, because the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] requires it.” Officially, the federal government mandates that the 80-mile Charles River should be fishable and swimmable, but the state gets variances because “that standard is impossible,” Zusy said.
Plans to tackle sewage spills
Cambridge, Somerville and the MWRA have collaborated for four years on a $1.3 billion plan to reduce the combined sewer overflows, but the plan has drawn resistance for its failure to fully prevent the CSOs or to keep up with their worsening as climate changes grow more severe in the coming decades. To go up to higher level of control regionally increases costs to around $4.7 billion, Cambridge deputy city manager Kathy Watkins has said; a full CSO solution just in Cambridge could cost $400 million and take 20 years to finish, said Jim Wilcox, a city engineer.
A submittal by the MWRA to the federal government is expected May 31, followed by a review period lasting until Aug. 31, 2029.
Tanks being buried throughout Cambridge and Somerville are meant to take in either stormwater to keep old pipes from getting overwhelmed and spilling, or sewage before it reaches the Charles, Alewife Brook or other bodies of water.
The Magazine Beach tank makes little sense, Carson said. According to state data, at its proposed size it could have prevented 14 of the 22 sewer activations at the site since 2020 – the rest being too big – and the outfall there is of treated water, which has been chlorinated to kill bacteria and other pathogens and then dechlorinated.
“So the net of it is that what that tank buys us is a reduction of about four discharge events a year of treated water,” Carson said, and that may matter little considering what pollution may come floating downstream. To him, that suggests that the money on a Magazine Beach tank may be better spent elsewhere – though staff at the Tuesday meeting did not have a price estimate on hand.
“We’re at a very conceptual level”
Zusy compared the feeling in Cambridgeport to the resistance in East Boston in the late 1980s to plans for the Ted Williams Tunnel to take down homes – and the reason why that tunnel was redirected.
Would Cambridgeport tolerate years of construction for a tank if it kept the sports fields overhead in public use? “No, there was consensus – no,” Zusy said. “It would mean basically obliterating the park for minimal gain, so there was a great call for more evaluation of the pluses and the minuses.”
The MWRA began to walk back its Magazine Beach plans at a meeting last week with Cambridge staff, state senator Sal DiDomenico and stakeholders, Connolly said, and he said the board chair of the water authority, Rebecca Tepper, seemed similarly open to different ideas at a meeting Monday. Tepper is also secretary of the state’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.
“One of the things staff made very clear,” Connolly said, “there is an enormous amount of different alternatives. In terms of the actual implementation mechanisms, we’re at a very conceptual level.”
Tunnel to treatment
People are talking about tanks going instead under surface parking lots in the area or under Goose Meadow – and a plan developed by the MWRA and city for a deep-underground tunnel that would move water to Boston from Cambridge. The tunnel is “orders of magnitude bigger” than the tank and, though it could offer advantages, becomes less likely as the scale is imagined.
“There’s talk of it potentially being under the river,” Connolly said. “I couldn’t believe it. MWRA were saying, like, imagine the Sumner Tunnel – that’s the size this would be, with blasting dynamite and building access shafts. A big construction project.”
It seemed unlikely to Connolly that the tunnel would get far in planning. Adoption of the tunnel plan seemed even less likely to Carson.
“Oh, the tunnel proposal is crazy,” Carson said. “They’re not pushing the tunnel alternative.”
