Who will prevail in the Battle of the Bridges?
Will it be Boston Mayor Michelle Wu in her attempt to rebuild the Long Island Bridge at cost of $100 million?
Or will it be Gov. Maura Healey who is attempting to replace the two ancient Cape Cod bridges, first the Sagamore and then the Bourne, for $4.5 billion?
The Long Island Bridge, dedicated in 1951, was demolished in 2014 after it was deemed unsafe, although its underpinnings are still in place.
At its dedication, former Boston Mayor Maurice Tobin, then Secretary of Labor, called the bridge “a symbol of compassion” in that it connected “the aged, the infirm, the needy and the lame” to medical and caring facilities on Long Island.
Mayor Wu would like the bridge to represent the same thing, only now for those afflicted by drugs and despair. The bridge is her effort to cope with the increasing number of drug addicted people who have turned Boston’s Mass and Cass area into the New England center of addiction, homelessness, dread and death.
She wants to send them to Long Island to proposed addiction recovery facilities built on existing structures that need restoration.
Unlike the Cape Cod bridges, which were built and owned by the U.S. government, the Long Island Bridge was built and is owned by Boston.
But the main obstacle to replacing the bridge has been the opposition of Quincy officials and residents of the Squantum area of Quincy.
They are concerned about increased traffic and the potential harm to the environment and their quality of life. The only road access to the Long Island Bridge is through Squantum.
Back then, when government seemed to work much better than it does today, Tobin praised Quincy officials for their help in getting the bridge built.
It is different today. Current Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch has a different outlook.
He told the Herald, “I have said from day one that the city of Quincy was going to do everything in its power to keep the city of Boston from building that that bridge.”
Perhaps Mayor Wu should change tactics to win Quincy support. One way is to rename the bridge after a loved and respected Quincy resident. That might work.
Long Island, after all, only got its name because it was a long island, and nobody came up with anything better.
Wu could call it the Bellotti Bridge, after lifelong Quincy resident Francis X. Bellotti, a man of compassion, who gained state and national fame after serving as an outstanding attorney general for 12 years. He is now 100 years old.
Healey could do the same thing with the two Cape Cod Bridges that were built in built in 1934 and were determined to be “functionally obsolete” years ago.
As it stands, Healey is attempting to get federal funds to replace one of the two aging bridges rather than money to replace both.
Healey came up with the plan after the Massachusetts delegation to Congress, all Democrats, failed to get President Joe Biden, a fellow Democrat, to approve the $4.5 billion appropriation for both bridges.
The state will now seek $1.45 billion toward the $2.15 billion it will cost to replace the Sagamore Bridge, and then later seek more billions for the new Bourne Bridge.
We all should live so long.
To quicken the process, and to suck up to Biden– while there is still time –Healey, like Wu, should consider renaming the bridges. She could call them the Joe & Jill Bridges, the Sagamore for Joe and the Bourne for Jill, his wife.
There should not be too much opposition to the name changes, if the billions of bucks are flowing in. Sagamore would still be known as a section of the town of Bourne. And Bourne was named after a long-forgotten politician anyway.
But it all might be irrelevant in the Battle of the Bridges.
As Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev once observed, “Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there is no river.”
Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.
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