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Columbus Center developers admit the end has come by Brandon Simes
Managing EditorWednesday Mar 10, 2010 State working on agreement with developers for cleanup costs
The Columbus Center project, which has wallowed in limbo for years, won’t be built, the site’s developers have acknowledged. Two of the lease-holders on the land slated for the project, Boston-based WinnCompanies and the California state pension fund known as CalPERS, could not come up with a viable business plan during the month that they were given since Feb. 9 to present a plan to state officials that indicated they had a scheduled timeline to restart construction on the project.
Massachusetts transportation officials told Columbus Center developers last month that they were in default of their 99-year lease of the property for a number of violations, including failing to complete proposed building projects on time and maintain the construction sites to Department of Transportation standards.
Work on the long troubled development was sparse since its inception 14 years ago, and state officials had long grown tired of asking their constituents for more time to produce a resolution. The next step, both 3rd Suffolk State Rep. Aaron Michlewitz and 2nd Suffolk State Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz have advocated for some time, is an immediate cleanup of the area.
"The first step is to get the area looking like it did before the developers moved in," said Michlewitz last month. "After that, I’ve always been supportive of building in that area above the Mass Pike, but it needs to be a project that is sustainable and viable. It’s obvious that Columbus Center wasn’t."
"You guys have been more than patient," an evidently frustrated Chang-Diaz told a crowd of 30 or so at the Ellis South End Neighborhood Association’s monthly meeting on Jan. 26. "I’m embarrassed to come to you and ask you to wait a little longer, and all I can tell you is that we carry-and you’ll have to take my word for it and I know that’s an ask-that we do carry that impatience to our meetings with the administration, they hear it from us. You guys have been waiting for too long. [We say] ’Can you please just bring this to a conclusion, and just call the question?’ We’re going to keep needling them."
That needling appears to have officially ended.
MassDot, the state agency now charged with managing the site, is working with the developers toward a settlement for cleanup costs. No agreement is imminent.
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