The proposed Everett Soccer Stadium to be located at the designated port area, a docking place for marine vessels, will be the destination of close to 30,000 fans and support staff will have a total of 75 parking spaces.
Yes, that’s correct, 75 parking spaces. Six hundred buses, or thousands of Ubers navigating Sullivan Square coming from the North, South and West corridors will no doubt impact the already congested, traffic-laden Sullivan Square.
Referring to a recent article written by Gayla Cawley (Aug. 2), much was focused on Everett’s stake in this proposal. The focus on Everett, while neglecting the potential traffic situation seems to be a disservice to the surrounding communities.
We here in Charlestown, without any public or community engagement regarding this soccer proposal, are treated like an afterthought. Our representatives haven’t given the Charlestown community the common courtesy of giving us any information of their proposal / amendment regarding the soccer stadium they have submitted to the rest of the legislature.
Meanwhile, the traffic impacts that we will endure, as well as the pollution of idling vehicles impact our physical and mental health of all 20,000 residents in this one square mile.
A soccer stadium located close to a major city will have a negative impact on the surrounding communities with the changing climate and the increased traffic. A new soccer stadium is a gargantuan heat island, and not an environmental impact benefit.
A better use for the land would be a waterfront park that the people of Everett and Charlestown could enjoy year-round.
Keep it green, not money green. Put the people first.
Ann Kelleher
Charlestown
Joe Dwinell reports in your edition of Aug. 6 that victims of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his late brother – the Boston Marathon bombers – are getting fed up at the legal delays in the implementation of the death penalty to which he was sentenced. Not only has a long stretch of time gone by since he was sentenced, but an enormous amount of public funds has been expended on this indigent defendant.
All of these problems can readily be solved if only the federal government followed Massachusetts and abolished the death penalty, substituting “life without parole” in its place. It is true, of course, that if anyone deserves to be put to death, it is Tsarnaev due to the atrocity of his crimes. However, there is an institutional problem with the death penalty that goes beyond any single case. A certain number of those sentenced to death turn out to have been wrongly convicted. Indeed, The Innocence Project that specializes in finding evidence of wrongful convictions has discovered one case of an innocent person having been executed.
It is crucial that we not allow a single atrocity to destroy our systemic safeguards. To quote the English jurist William Blackstone, who wrote in his Commentaries back in the 1760s: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
Harvey A. Silverglate
Cambridge