Opponents of Boston’s public-private plan to rehab White Stadium for a new pro soccer team say they are taking a deadlocked City Council vote on a call to halt the project as a “win,” given how “masterfully stacked” the body is in the mayor’s favor.
Roughly three dozen residents gathered at the 75-year-old stadium in Franklin Park late Thursday morning to protest against the ongoing demolition and tree removal work taking place behind them — and bash the Wu administration and city councilors who voted against a resolution that sought to pause a tear-down that began last week.
“Yesterday’s 6-6 tie was actually a huge win,” Derrick Evans, who lives in Roxbury, said. “Mayor Wu’s oversized, expensive, and fast-tracked dream project, with once unanimous support, now can’t even win a simple majority in her masterfully stacked City Council.”
“White Stadium, its children, its neighbors and Boston at large,” Evans added, “deserve deeper considerations and concerns, and much better treatment than the heavy and hurried hand of a hasty, ambitious, dismissive and self-contradicting progressive … mayor’s staff and other rubber-stamped loyalists.”
Evans is part of a group of 20 neighbors who joined the Emerald Necklace Conservancy in filing suit against the city and Boston Unity Soccer Partners last year, with the aim of stopping their public-private plan. The plaintiffs allege that the project would illegally privatize public-trust land.
The Wu administration denies the privatization claim. Mayor Michelle Wu and her deputies have argued that the city and Boston Public Schools will retain ownership of the stadium via a lease agreement that will see the new pro team paying rent and sharing use of the facility with BPS student-athletes.
Opponents contend, however, that as the National Women’s Soccer League schedule typically lasts from March to November, BPS football teams would be displaced from White Stadium for much of their seasons.
The plaintiffs announced this week that they have filed an expanded legal complaint in Suffolk Superior Court. The case is set to go to trial March 18.
“Fundamentally we believe this is public parkland,” Karen Mauney-Brodek, president of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, said at the day’s protest. “The case is going forward, and we believe that there’s a way forward. We can do it for a lot less. We want to make sure that it remains public.”
Boston’s new pro soccer team is owned by an all-female group that includes Boston Globe CEO Linda Pizzuti Henry as an investor, and is set to take the pitch in March 2026.
The plaintiffs and neighbors who oppose the project favor renovation, but in a way that would preserve the stadium as a high-school-only facility.
The Emerald Necklace Conservancy released a report earlier this month that says that pared-down alternative would cost about $29 million — “a fraction” of the “roughly $100 million” the city is now estimating its half of the project will cost.
The initial $50 million city taxpayer tab has doubled in recent weeks, and opponents of the now more than $200 million project contend that they were shut out of the process.
“This was a total inside job,” Allan Ihrer, who lives in Jamaica Plain, said. “There were no other plans looked at other than the professional stadium option.”
Mayor Wu says, however, that the final project design was informed by extensive community feedback. She told reporters at an unrelated event Thursday that the city has no plans to halt the public-private stadium rehab.
“We’ve had nearly two years of a really thorough conversation on all sorts of issues,” Wu said. “We are sticking with the schedule of moving this project forward because the community has waited long enough.
“It’s been four decades of talking about fixing White Stadium without concrete steps to do so, and now we have a great plan in place and the legal backing to make sure that it happens with clear benefits for the community and protections for the city,” the mayor added.
Benjamin Weber was one of six councilors to vote against halting demolition but drew the most ire from protesters, given that his district touches Franklin Park. He defended the project and his vote on Thursday.
“I think the mayor’s come up with a plan that is going to finally get that stadium revitalized and make it a real resource for BPS kids and the community, and I want to see that kind of investment go into my community,” Weber told the Herald.
Of the opponents, Weber said, “I think the issue with the community process that they’re having is they don’t like the outcome, not necessarily about what happened during that process.”
In a letter to councilors sent after Wednesday’s vote, Wu described the planned renovation as the “largest investment in BPS athletics since the stadium first opened in 1949, one that will transform the facilities and opportunities for Boston Public School students, Franklin Park lovers, and all community members.”
Louis Elisa, president of the Garrison-Trotter Neighborhood Association and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, disagrees. While holding a sign reading “Save Franklin Park, no private sports complex,” he said the project is aimed at benefiting wealthy investors.
“They want to take the money that’s dedicated to the park and they want to give it to people who already have a pot of gold,” Elisa said. “This has nothing to do with our children.”