A construction worker prepares to drill at the site of the proposed Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS). Harvard gave up on building an underground tunnel to CGIS this week after a year of heated negotiations.

After nearly a full year of negotiations, Harvard has given up its fight to dig a tunnel beneath a city street, telling neighbors in a letter that the city’s demands put a ten-million dollar price tag on a “project assessed at less than $280,000” and were not “within reason.”

The tunnel would have connected the two buildings of the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS), the future headquarters for the government department and a dozen related centers.

Over the past half-dozen years, Harvard representatives have spent hundreds of hours negotiating with neighborhood activists, bargaining with Cambridge City Councillors, and even circulating a petition using the e-mail address tunnel@fas.harvard.edu.

But in this week’s letter, Harvard’s lead negotiator said that the City Council’s terms—which essentially doubled the cost of Harvard’s final offer—were infeasible.

“This doesn’t seem to me to be within reason, so with regret, I have written to the Council to inform them that we will move forward without the tunnel,” wrote Alan J. Stone, Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs in a letter to neighbors dated Jan. 28, 2003.

“As demolition is already underway for the North building, and as our faculty and students have waited nearly seven years for this important new center, it is time to move on,” Stone added.

Harvard’s decision to end the year-long tunnel fight marks the culmination of six years of tumultuous negotiations for the CGIS, involving University officials and community activists from the Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Association (MCNA).

Harvard’s final offer included a million-dollar parcel of land designated for a park, $300,000 for neighborhood projects, and a five-year moratorium on local building—concessions which administrators estimated came with a $5-million price tag.

But the council’s response doubled each of those terms, and after dozens of hours of phone calls in recent months, Harvard’s negotiators at last gave up.

To the community, the tunnel was a luxury for Harvard which would cause 20 months of traffic jams, noise and air pollution during construction. Some activists even went so far as to call the proposed site of construction another “ground zero.”

But professors and administrators, who fought for the tunnel until the bitter end, said they considered it the lynchpin of the new CGIS facility, providing an essential link between related offices in the two buildings and connecting food services to the lecture halls and seminar rooms.

“I’m obviously very disappointed because it seems to me an irrational decision by the council,” said Roderick MacFarquhar, chair of the government department and one of tunnel’s most ardent supporters.

MacFarquhar added that although he didn’t regret his time-consuming advocacy work for the tunnel—including going to city meetings and leading the charge on the tunnel@fas petition—he was happy that the fight was finally over.

“Of course I’m glad I made every effort to try and sway the council,” MacFarquhar said, adding that, even without the tunnel, he’s relieved that plans for his department’s new home are finally settled.

Since Harvard had received every other required permit for the CGIS before it tried to clear the final hurdle—the council’s approval to dig under Cambridge Street—construction for the Faculty’s most pressing building project can now go ahead unhindered.