Luisa Paiewonsky is promising Allston that this will be a year of action.
The state transportation official was talking last week about the long-proposed turnpike realignment and new train station, a $2 billion megaproject that could reshape the neighborhood. But many of the project’s task force members remain skeptical.
It’s hard to blame them for being impatient. Rearranging the Mass. Pike and building a new commuter rail station there has been discussed for roughly 13 years, and not one shovel has gone into the ground.
Much of the task force’s meeting last Thursday at a community center in Brighton focused on MassDOT’s search for a consultant or consulting team to reassess costs and engineering after the Trump administration terminated $327 million in federal funds last summer. Time to regroup, and maybe look for savings. Bids for the consulting job are due Friday.
To MassDOT, this is a catalyst for action.
Many in Allston see it as a pause in the action instead.
The tensions became apparent last week as members of the task force — a group of 40-plus residents, government officials, and business leaders — pleaded for access to the consulting team during the year-long reevaluation. Paiewonsky pushed back, explaining that her agency needs to remain the proper sounding board for their input.
There are underlying fears that this review will delay the project for yet another year, or result in cuts that curtail the scope. No wonder Allston Civic Association president Tony D’Isidoro, when he saw I was calling the next day, answered his phone with a question: Do you think we’ll be in the ground by the end of this century?
He was obviously kidding. But maybe only sort of.
D’Isidoro vividly remembers gathering with neighbors on a rainy day in September 2014 at Beacon Park Yard, the old railyard now owned by Harvard and hemmed in by the turnpike. There, then-governor Deval Patrick declared that MassDOT would include a new commuter rail hub, dubbed West Station, in the still-new turnpike project, while making dozens of acres at Beacon Park available for redevelopment.
The station was supposed to open in 2020. Or so the thinking went.
Flash forward a decade. The station is nowhere in sight, and MassDOT had to patch up the crumbling turnpike viaduct that the new highway was supposed to replace. The projected costs have shot up, all around.
Neighbors are still tangling with state officials over layover tracks: Allston advocates want land around the future West Station to go to a more productive use, such as housing, rather than the train parking sought by MassDOT.
The promise of federal funds helped hone the project discussions. Grant deadlines can’t be missed. MassDOT finally hashed out a largely state-funded financing package, with some help from the city, Harvard, and Boston University. In 2024, good news came back from Washington: The feds would kick in $335 million through a federal program aimed at communities hurt by the impact of transportation infrastructure. Allston was a logical candidate — a neighborhood cut in half by the turnpike in the 1960s.
Then President Trump was elected. All bets were off. The Republican-led Congress cut most of the funding in the program that was supporting the Allston project, leaving Governor Maura Healey’s administration with $8 million in crumbs and a big headache.
Paiewonsky, a transportation pro, is trying to make the most of a tough situation. Healey hired her in late 2024 to oversee transportation megaprojects, primarily the Allston turnpike realignment and replacing the Cape Cod bridges. Relations between the neighborhood and state government were already strained. Then-transportation secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt’s reversal on a no-layover promise for West Station didn’t help.
Now, the project enters a newly uncertain phase. The scope of services for the consultants calls for an independent cost analysis, breaking down the project’s various components, and an engineering review, looking at possibly completing it in phases.
That document outlines three main goals: strengthen “multimodal” access between Allston and the region’s transportation network, improve rail and highway connections from Western Massachusetts through the Worcester area and all the way to Boston, and ensure the future redevelopment of Beacon Park.
These all sound great. However, task force members piped up last week with suggested additions, like north-south connections and Charles River conservation (along with a few complaints about a temporarily closed bike lane on Cambridge Street). While Paiewonsky said she would take these priorities under advisement, the task force would not be able to lobby the consultant directly.
A Better City, the prominent business group, has expressed concerns about this new review. From ABC’s perspective, everyone should focus on how to fully fund the project, not strategies for shrinking it. And the task force, ABC says, should be allowed to engage directly with the consultants, to share the history and complexity of all that has come up during the last decade.
Seth Gadbois of the Conservation Law Foundation agrees that the task force should be more involved, given its collective wealth of knowledge and experience. (ABC and CLF both have seats on the task force.) From his perspective, the federal funding loss was a big setback, and state officials need to account for the implications.
To underscore the Healey administration’s commitment, Paiewonsky has her team working on so-called early action items — elements that might be broken out and completed ahead of time. Top among them: sound barriers above the Pike along Lincoln Street, running parallel to the highway.
Even a sound wall going up along the highway would be welcome news to Allston at this point. D’Isidoro says he has mixed opinions about hiring the outside consultants: He appreciates the proactive response to the federal cuts but can’t help but be concerned that it might slow this endeavor’s glacial pace even further.
D’Isidoro remembers being a wide-eyed optimist when he attended that rainy press conference more than a decade ago in Beacon Park to hear Deval Patrick promise train service for the area.
Now? He simply would like to see a finalized design in 2026, as well as some clarity about this project’s future. But he’s learned over the years to be realistic about his hopes.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.