Even if the tunnel issue remains unresolved this spring, Harvard officials insist the construction of CGIS—on parts of the project unrelated to the tunnel—will begin after immediately after Commencement.

But in the meantime the tunnel remains bogged down in layers of consultants and committees.

Last Friday, a joint Cambridge-Harvard committee met for the first time to negotiate issues surrounding the tunnel construction. The committee had been formed at the request of the city council last month and the appointments were made by City Manager Robert W. Healy.

The committee is comprised of three Harvard representatives, three city officials and three residents of the Mid-Cambridge neighborhood where Harvard seeks to build CGIS.

On Monday, the same day Healy publicly announced the committee’s membership, the neighborhood contingent submitted a letter expressing its dissatisfaction with how the panel was formed and how negotiations had progressed so far.

In their letter to Healy and the city council, Mid-Cambridge residents took issue with the proposed deadline for its work—May 29—arguing that timeline is “unrealistic.”

Neighbors have long said they would like to see CGIS’ south building—surrounded on three sides by apartment buildings—scaled back. They have suggested the neighborhood might accept the tunnel, but only if Harvard builds what the neighbors call a “modified south building.”

“Our contention has been from the beginning that the project is much too large from the area and that it changes the area drastically by putting the Yard into our backyard,” says Betty Collins, one of the neighborhood’s three representatives on the committee.

In their letter, the neighbors argued that the negotiation process that Healy outlined, which focuses almost entirely on the tunnel itself, takes “too narrow a view” of what is under discussion.

And they wrote that, in the first meeting, Harvard representatives “distance[d] themselves from any discussion except about the tunnel itself.”

So far, according to Associate Dean for Physical Planning David A. Zewinski ’76, one of Harvard’s three representatives on the committee, the University has yet to decide what changes could put on the negotiating table.

“It is difficult to say what is negotiable,” he writes in an e-mail.

Any cuts in the square-footage would require the approval of Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, he says, as would a decision to give up classroom space by scaling back the building.

For the time being both sides say they are looking to the next step in the five-year-old process, toward hammering out a plan for CGIS acceptable to both sides.

According to Zewinski, Harvard’s three committee representatives met yesterday afternoon to talk about the next meeting.

And Sullivan says he hopes the negotiation process goes forward.

As for the mayor’s take on the first meeting—“people stayed in the room,” he says.

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.