What?s A Developer To Do?
Smog From Mass Pike May Be Residents? Only Angle Left To Fight New Pru Tower
By Paul McMorrow
Banker & Tradesman Staff Writer
Avalon Bay's proposed 311-foot luxury apartment tower.The floors of Boston City Hall are littered with proposals for towers that are going nowhere fast. One Franklin is a hole in the ground, Columbus Center is a punch line to a cruel joke, and towers slated for South Station and Winthrop Square look like pipe dreams.
Amid all this wreckage, there?s one developer who desperately wants to soldier on. AvalonBay is pushing ahead with plans to build a 311-foot luxury apartment tower, dubbed the Exeter Residences, on the southeastern edge of the Prudential Center. Avalon received Boston Redevelopment Authority approval for the project in December. The REIT believes in the market and has the cash to finance construction itself.
Naturally enough, the one developer looking to build in this market is now staring down what could easily become a bruising environmental review that might set the project back by months. Those Back Bay residents who failed to derail the Prudential expansion in December may be more successful this time around if they can prove that car exhaust vented from the Massachusetts Turnpike under the property ? which is not currently regulated ? needs to be so.
That would send shockwaves through an air rights development market that?s already fraught with political and economic hurdles.
Nothing To See Here, MEPA
AvalonBay and Boston Properties, owner of the Prudential Center site, filed a notice of project change with the Mass. Environmental Policy Act Office (MEPA) in late January, asking state environmental secretary Ian Bowles to approve the Exeter Residences and the 17-story, 422,000-square-foot office building slated for 888 Boylston St. with ?no further publication or comment.?
It was not a strange request: The developers of The Mandarin, which is around the corner, got the same request approved.
This time, however, MEPA responded by publishing the notice and seeking public comment ? a sign that project opponents see as presaging a full-blown, highly detailed environmental review.
?MEPA staff were ready to send a letter to the developers saying they were OK,? said Ned Flaherty, a Back Bay resident. Flaherty was also a vociferous opponent of Columbus Center. When he caught word of Boston Properties? January MEPA letter, he helped flood the agency with letters that urged Bowles not to waive review of the towers.
?They told us they looked at it, and it seemed OK, and they were going to send a letter saying so,? he said. ?They told us they were going to waive everything ? it was only when they got the community letters that they took another look.? It?s Flaherty?s contention that in telling MEPA the two towers wouldn?t have significant environmental consequences, ?the developer fudged the answers.?
Flaherty contends the new Prudential Center buildings will illegally eliminate open space and will negatively impact the historic Boston Public Library. City officials dismissed those concerns, and the state is likely to follow suit.
However, the state seems to be seriously considering the claim that the exhaust from the Mass Pike tunnel running beneath the complex constitutes a serious environmental and health concern. MEPA looks to be leaning toward making Boston Properties responsible for cleaning up the exhaust belching out of the Pike tunnel. That would mark a significant regulatory shift that would ripple up and down the Pike, and beyond.
Correspondence between state officials and John Rosenthal, developer of the 1.1 million-square-foot Fenway Center air rights development, provides clues to how the state will deal with the Prudential projects.
Early letters focused on the areas that environmental reviews usually focus on ? wind, shadow, traffic and carbon monoxide. Rosenthal addressed those issues in his draft environmental impact report (DEIR).
But after Rosenthal filed that report, Suzanne Condon, director of the state Department of Public Health?s Bureau of Environmental Health, wrote to Bowles complaining that the Fenway Center DEIR hadn?t addressed the effects of ?traffic-related pollutants.?
Avalon Bay's Exeter Residences may be held up by a state environment review involving Mass Pike fumes.Such pollutants are almost never covered in state environmental reviews. Even so, Condon asked Rosenthal to consider several means of mitigating the pollutants, including installing filters on his Turnpike tunnel exhaust vents. Bowles, in turn, ordered Rosenthal to address Condon?s concerns in his final environmental impact report, due to be filed this spring.
While acknowledging that ?there are no recognized national or state-level regulatory programs or standards to measure? ultrafine vehicle emissions, Bowles asked Rosenthal to ?outline mitigation measures to be implemented on-site to reduce the potential exposure to [such] pollutants.? Bowles? request, sent in mid-November, specifically asked Rosenthal to consider vent filtration systems.
The Longer View
Flaherty, the neighborhood activist, has high hopes that any state review of the two new towers at the Prudential would open the door to new regulations on the emissions from the thousands of cars that run under the Prudential Center every day. (Boston Properties owns a portion of the tunnel covering the Turnpike, and the exhaust vents that ventilate it.) If MEPA is worried about the pollution that Rosenthal?s 900-foot long tunnel would throw off, they?re likely to show similar concerns about the Prudential Center?s tunnel, which is much longer, and vents larger volumes of exhaust.
When the Prudential Center had its last environmental review, in 1989, mitigation for tunnel exhaust amounted to placing the vents flush with retail roof lines, so as not to spew noxious fumes in pedestrians? faces. But since that time, DPH?s Condon noted, ?a substantial body of evidence ? has found strong positive and statistically significant associations? between traffic pollutants and a number of illnesses.
Any effort to regulate or mitigate pollution produced underneath air rights developments would touch several projects in the development pipeline. Trinity Financial, John Fish and Adam Weiner, and Don Chiofaro are currently vying for development rights on three Pike parcels along Boylston Street and Massachusetts Avenue And it?s a sure bet that if exhaust vent filters start cropping up east of the Allston tolls, Columbus Center?s developers will find themselves under siege. Again.
