Battle of the (Long Island) bridge: Boston, Quincy at odds again after latest permit

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said a new state permit will allow the city to move forward with its years-long plan to tackle the opioid epidemic by building a bridge out to a future 35-acre addiction-recovery campus on Long Island.

The latest approval, however, has reignited a five-year battle with the mayor on the other side of that prospective bridge, Quincy’s Thomas Koch, who says recreating that access point to Long Island will exacerbate traffic and safety issues. His legal team is preparing an appeal.

“I have said from day one that the city of Quincy was going to do everything in its power to keep the city of Boston from building that bridge,” Koch told the Herald on Thursday.

While Wu said she was expecting an appeal, she didn’t seem fazed by the prospect on a Thursday morning call with reporters. The mayor is on vacation until Saturday, but convened a virtual press conference to announce the “major state approval.”

“We are now taking this as a sign that the city will move ahead with the reconstruction of the Long Island bridge,” Wu said. “We can’t waste any more time with this project. It is about creating an island of opportunity that will connect people to the lives and community and pathways that they deserve.”

Wu said the draft Chapter 91 permit issued Wednesday through a MassDEP program that ensures projects in waterways meet public-access requirements is the last “substantive review” needed. The final two required permits, from the state Office of Coastal Zone Management and U.S. Coast Guard, are more of “checklist” approvals, she said.

It allows for a new bridge and the first phase of the recovery center to be built within four years, she said. Reconstruction will be relatively “quick,” Wu said, with crews working off of the piers and pieces still in place from a former bridge that was closed in 2014 for safety reasons.

Chris Osgood, Wu’s senior advisor for infrastructure, said an appeal could slow down the permitting process by 6-12 months, but won’t have any major bearings on construction milestones. He said the courts have ruled in favor of Boston in the four other appeals, and the city has “similar confidence” that it will be successful this time as well.

While Boston sees the latest permit as a green light of sorts, Koch said it’s just another step in a lengthy process. He plans to appeal each permit approval to “create an obstacle,” but insists that he’s not opposed to Boston’s plans for an addiction-recovery campus.

“We need a place for these people and I don’t disagree with that,” Koch said. “There’s so many different aspects of treatment and each of those may or may not generate traffic. Look, I’m not opposed to what they want to do with the island. It’s the access to the island that is my greatest concern.”

It makes more sense for Boston to look into a ferry service there, “to be a better neighbor to Quincy,” Koch said, adding that approach could also be “far less expensive.”

Osgood said the city allocated $81 million in the fiscal year 2024 budget for the bridge, but he anticipates the final cost will be more than $100 million.

A prior estimate put the cost of building a full-scale recovery campus at $540 million, but Osgood and Wu declined to provide an updated figure, saying that number was still being calculated as part of the design process.

First, however, the city needs to repair and stabilize the 11 principle buildings it imagines as “being the heart of a future public health campus,” Osgood said, noting that $35 million has been allocated in the FY24 budget for that purpose.

The improvements will go out to bid later this year, with construction expected to start in the spring of 2024 and be completed 16-24 months, city officials said.

The latest movement on the Long Island bridge and recovery campus comes at a time when increased violence and drug trafficking have led all non-city teams to pull their outreach workers out of Melnea Cass Boulevard and Massachusetts Avenue, the epicenter of the city’s opioid crisis.

Wu described the situation there as reaching a “new level of public safety alarm,” last week. She added Thursday that “every single day at Mass and Cass,” an area long known for open-air drug use and homeless encampments, “drives the urgency to make sure that we’re providing resources.”

There were 2,300 opioid-related overdose deaths in Massachusetts last year, and overdose deaths increased by 36% in Boston, from 2018-2022, according to Dr. Bisola Ojikuto, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission. The city statistics are twice the statewide average, she said.

“The need continues to outpace what is available and we are working person by person by person at Mass and Cass, but to have the scale and the chance to really coordinate all of that with such greater capacity will be a game-changer for Boston,” Wu said.