Some environmental activities echo his beliefs about Scheme Z's potential harm to the land, including Mark Primack, who has resolved concerns that Scheme Z is dangerous to the environment. Primack chairs Move Massachusetts 2000, a pro-Central Artery coalition group, and also serves as executive director to the Boston Greenspace Alliance, a coalition of more than 100 community and environmental groups concerned with green space in Boston.
Primack points out that Scheme Z, while aesthetically displeasing, is no more environmentally destructive than the other plans being considered. Opponents to the plan could not disagree more strongly.
Land Undervalued
"Scheme Z isn't going to take houses, but the value of the land is being vastly undervalued for the future," McManus says. "Just because it's industrial wasteland now doesn't mean it has to be in the future."
Primack's enthusiasm for Scheme Z doesn't just stop with the plan, though, it extends to its MIT-educated architect. "Within the spectrum of highway engineers, Fred Salvucci is one of the most creative and brilliant men in the United Sates," Primack says.
Questions of Ethics
But brilliance notwithstanding, Salvucci's critics have few qualms over attacking the man's methods.
Last December, Scheme Z opponents assailed Salvucci's style of leadership, accusing him of ruthlessly pressuring environmental officials to approve the plan without allowing them adequate time to consider adequate proposals.
"We feel he really did overstep his bounds," says Karen I. Pelto, environmental affairs coordinator for the Charles River Watershed Association, which supports better water quality and public access to the river. "I'm not saying [(Scheme Z] wouldn't have been approved, but there would have been stricter requirements had Salvucci not been as powerful as he was."
Others suggest that perhaps Salvucci has poured so much time into the project that proposals for alternative methods of crossing the Charles River now fall on deaf ears.
"He's worked very hard on this--maybe even become fixed on it," says Francis H. Duehay '55, a Cambridge city councillor who strongly opposes Scheme Z. "It's become a thorn he doesn't know how to deal with."
"Fred is a brilliant man, but he thinks he talks to God. He isn't openminded," summarizes Duehay.
Salvucci admits that he pushed John P. DeVillars, who served as Environmental Secretary at the same time as Salvucci was in office, to approve the plan.
"I was going crazy thinking DeVillars wasn't going to approve the it. After working on it for 20 years, I wasn't going to walk out the door with it unapproved," he says." "So I think it's fair to say that I haunted him for a while."
But he emphasizes that DeVillars is a very independent man, who made his final decisions completely on his own.
Watching and Waiting
Since his term as Transportation Secretary expired in January, Salvucci has been relegated to watching the latest progress on Scheme Z from the outside.
But from his new post as research associate and guest lecturer at the Center for Transportation Studies at MIT, he continues to survey his pet project's development with an eagle eye.
The project is awaiting federal funding and the go-ahead from a state-appointed advisory group before the state will give it a final nod of approval.
"My understanding is that the advisory committee is walking [around Scheme Z] and looking at it," Salvucci says. "I'm hoping that they will, if not come to love it, at least come to understand it."