1. Day 390 at the Destroyed Nesting Area.
2. Cambridge, MA hosts a fake environmental conference.
Bob La Trémouille reports:
1. Day 390 at the Destroyed Nesting Area.
I did a visibility on the far side of the BU Bridge on December 4 because pedestrians are no longer allowed on the side by the destroyed nesting area.
A brief look at the parking lot dumped on top of three quarters of the nesting area indicated once again, that the needless destruction was needless. There was plenty of room there, and there was plenty of room under Memorial Drive where the parking would be put if Massachusetts and Cambridge had responsible governments.
Folks, as usual, were quite responsive, both pedestrians and drivers.
2. Cambridge, MA hosts a fake environmental conference.
The environmentally reprehensible government of the City of Cambridge, MA, is conducting another con game loudly and falsely calling themselves environmental saints.
This one will be conducted December 12 in Cambridge City Hall.
I have offered the following op ed to the Cambridge Chronicle and a short version should the editor wish to print my communication as a letter to the editor.
**************
Editor
Cambridge Chronicle
“They would never stoop so low.”
People simply cannot believe that Cambridge City Councillors and their friends are as destructive as they are on the environment.
This standard Council analysis comes from their pretty much nonstop claims of sainthood.
The City Council calls their latest environmental event a “congress.” As usual, they will save the world and ignore the environmental destruction being done by themselves and their friends.
Ignored will be:
● The coming destruction of the Alewife reservation for flood storage that should be placed about 500 feet away under a parking lot just north of the commuter rail. That parking lot is on the verge of being developed without the flood storage.
● The ongoing destruction of perhaps thousands of trees at Fresh Pond for what has been described as “a thousand” saplings.
● Environmental destruction in too many projects, particularly needless destruction of healthy trees.
● The ongoing and accelerating outrages on the Charles River:
Hundreds of healthy trees and animal habitat being destroyed between the BU and Longfellow Bridges, apparently using Obama money.
Heartless animal abuse continues of the 28 year native Charles River White Geese: deliberately starved for five years; their habitat needlessly reduced to a fraction of what it was. It is down to a quarter of what was a three month visiting area: their nesting area.
The Magazine Beach playing fields were quite uniformly considered not needing upgrade. So:
▸ Poisons are being dumped on the fields to feed sickly grass. The sickly stuff replaces healthy grass which survived the better part of a century without poisons.
▸ A bizarre wall of bushes has been introduced between Magazine Beach and the Charles with no value except starving native animals.
▸ Part of the playing fields have been replaced for drainage to remove the poisons. It is sure to fail in severe weather.
Particularly telling is the choice of a chair.
The chair brags that he got his neighborhood Lorenz Park on Broadway. More than twenty 100+ year old trees on Cambridge Street were destroyed as part of the creation of this grassy area.
The buildings that were placed on top of those hundred year old trees should have been placed at Lorenz Park. It replaces two buildings which stood at that location for most of the last century.
The chair and friends have filed many “downzonings” with undisclosed fine print that limited or reversed their claims for the proposals.
Three examples:
Their first petition was named after the chair. He bragged about benefits listed on a particular page. I repeatedly pointed out that the next page proved his claims to be false. He never would look at the next page.
The most recent petition, fronted by his friends, destroyed open space requirements on the north side of Memorial Drive. The sponsors bragged that they increased open space requirements. The words were belied by undisclosed fine print.
His design review zoning has a provision which requires all submittals to obey the requirements of the zoning law. Then you discover that the developer can be exempted from any requirement in the section, INCLUDING the requirement to obey the zoning law.
The chair was the biggest single problem in my three downzonings of Mass. Ave. between Harvard and Central Squares.
In the first initiative, he and his friends demanded an upzoning by destroying first floor open space and first floor housing throughout the residential half of the area.
They claimed to be acting on behalf of a neighborhood association. They destroyed the initiative by making this false claim through half the consideration of the zoning petition.
The neighborhood association ultimately rejected the chair and his friends.
This outrage created the canyon on Bay Street. This outrage forced us to concede major parts of the petition because of the time spent responding to his rogue group.
This concession allowed one or more large buildings which the chair later condemned. Those buildings would have been illegal under the petition he killed and were made illegal under the petition we finally passed, after the fact.
Then there is the Inn at Harvard.
The chair falsely told the neighborhood group defending East Harvard Square: “You have made your deal with the City Council. Now you must negotiate with the Planning Board.”
He bullied major, unneeded concessions, but the group finally stood up to his outrageous falsehood. The group would not concede on the Inn at Harvard.
He almost got the Inn at Harvard constructed 72% larger, probably without grass.
The city council’s “congress” is yet another lie from environmental destroyers who keep on claiming that they are saints on environmental issues.
Looking at the unstated omissions, this “congress” is yet another con game.
The most important achievement will be the false impression that city councillors who, with their friends, are destroying Cambridge’s environment are saints on environmental issues.
