How to do it right: Pawtucket

Many in Brunswick seem to assume that NNEPRA’s approach to bringing a layover facility to Brunswick represents the only viable way to proceed.  Many assume that the “Brunswick West” site offers the only possibility for a layover facility simply because NNEPRA asserts it.  Many also assume that NNEPRA is proceeding according to professional best practices. 

The reality is quite different.  The truth is that NNEPRA has from the start badly mishandled the addition of the layover facility to the Downeaster expansion.  Compare NNEPRA’s bungling in Brunswick with a comparable story, the placement of a layover facility in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 2006.

1.        NNEPRA has placed the Brunswick facility improperly.  Abutters to the Brunswick West location are understandably upset that a three-bay, 60,000 square foot train maintenance facility will be operating less than 200 yards (in some instances, 200 feet!) from their homes.  An unfortunate number of town leaders and others labeled these neighbors NIMBYs, as if no one has a right to complain about an industrial facility being placed in the midst of residential neighborhoods. 

But whereas in Brunswick a layover facility is being introduced into a residential neighborhood, the layover facility in Pawtucket is being moved away from one, to an industrial area.  From the very start of that project, leaders keyed in on industrial sites, precisely to relieve neighbors bothered by noise at the existing East Junction facility.

2.        Town leaders in Brunswick have thrown their own constituents under the train.  In Brunswick, no one from the town offices sought to work with neighbors negatively impacted by plans for the facility.  The first time neighbors heard anything about it was when the town did the absolute minimum to notify abutters that NNEPRA sought a variance from local zoning measures.  Even then, not all abutters were notified.  Town councilors have publicly proclaimed their support for NNEPRA over the interests of their own constituents, and have gone to unethical extremes to ensure NNEPRA’s success, conducting business out of session and circulating week-end letters among each other to build support.

Compare this to Pawtucket.  There, state law made it difficult to expand rail service, thus impeding movement of the layover facility.  Yet so eager were lawmakers to ease the noise and pollution burdens on residents near the existing Attleboro facility, they changed state law so that it could happen.  Everyone won in the Pawtucket case, from commuters who benefited from more trains, to residents who were relieved of longstanding noise nuisances.

3.        NNEPRA put the cart before the horse, and has not done its homework.  The plan for Downeaster expansion never included the addition of a new maintenance and layover facility.  NNEPRA added plans for a facility late.  It did so by going straight to the Zoning Board of Appeals for a variance at a site it had not even rigorously studied.  Yet the fact that it had not secured funding for the project did not inhibit it from promising the town three, five, or even seven train runs per day, instead of the originally planned two.  Now, when NNEPRA finds itself unable to fund the promised facility, it has cast blame on the abutters who have rightly resisted an improper facility in their midst.  Yet only NNEPRA’s haste is to blame. 

In the Pawtucket case, matters were handled quite differently, with preliminary analyses of a range of sites, analysis of multiple scenarios with environmental impacts factored in, rigorous narrowing of options, detailed analysis of final candidates, final determination of feasibility, development of contract bid specifications, etc. 

Where is the rigor in the Brunswick process?  NNEPRA concluded that it preferred the Brunswick West site before systematically subjecting others to analysis.  When called to the carpet for its rush to judgment, it put presented Brunswick with a sales job rather than a systematic analysis, and then had the temerity to suggest that resistant neighbors had caused it to spend money needlessly! 

Were there no other example of how to build a layover facility, the incompetence evident in the Brunswick case might be excusable.  But the successful recent example of Pawtucket exposes what’s happened in Brunswick as an absolute farce.  

If  you were building a monstrous train garage as part of a $38M expansion, wouldn’t you try a little harder than this to get it right?  And if you were the town government impacted by the project, wouldn’t you ask a few more questions?

Now that NNEPRA’s haste has exposed the insufficiency of its methodology, it should go back to the drawing board and re-think the entire project.  That discussion should include elected officials at the local and state level, who should act not as rubber stamps for NNEPRA’s whims, but as rigorous challengers to a process that has been exposed as badly flawed.  There is too much at stake to keep approaching this in the Mickey-Mouse fashion that has been pursued up to now.

This is the lesson from Pawtucket:  it does not have to be this way.  Brunswick deserves better.  Let’s get this right.