According to Pitkin, the University gave the neighborhood representatives only three days over a holiday weekend to make their decision, giving them a deadline he describes as: “Sign tonight or it’s gone tomorrow.”

Although Pitkin—along with two other neighborhood representatives—signed on to a “statement of intent” on July 3, he says after a night of thinking about the agreement, he told Stone he could not sign the final document.

An MCNA meeting that month sealed the deal’s death. The residents voted that they were opposed to the tunnel on any terms.

City Councillor David P. Maher, who also sat on the committee, says that it was difficult to negotiate an agreement on the project’s final piece so late in the planning process.

“My own feeling was that the agreement was a very positive one for the city. I was disappointed that things fell apart.,” Maher said.

A Last-Ditch Effort

Even though the committee came up empty, Harvard and the council kept talking.

In executive session meetings, which are closed to the public, Maher says the council came up with the idea of offering Harvard a counter-proposal.

Sullivan and Healy suggested a new plan to Harvard in October, calling for a ten-year moratorium on construction, doubling the amount of money Harvard would give, and requiring that the University take any future development projects directly to the MCNA for approval.

Maher says the Council never held an official vote on this proposal, but that it represented their general feeling that Harvard would have to “sweeten the deal” in order to get approval for the tunnel.

Councillors say their intent was not to kill the tunnel project, but to raise the stakes of the negotiations.

“If Harvard could have continued to be in a good negotiating frame of mind even after the seeming impasse, I think they could have gotten a tunnel,” Reeves says.

Stone kept talking to the Council—in November, he said he was spending significant portions of his day talking to councillors about the deal.

But in the end, the two sides couldn’t talk it out.

In late January, Stone sent a letter to neighborhood residents, announcing that the University had rejected the council’s proposal—saying their terms were not “within reason”—and saying that Harvard would construct a tunnel-free CGIS.