STATE TRANSPORTATION officials say they are working with the city of Boston, Harvard University, and Boston University on a finance plan for the Allston I-90 project that should be ready to include in a federal grant application within the next four to six weeks.
At a virtual meeting with an I-90 Allston stakeholder group Thursday night, state Highway Commissioner Jonathan Gulliver said the chief reason a federal grant application for the project failed to go anywhere last year was because the finance plan lacked firm funding commitments.
To remedy the situation, Gulliver said, state officials are meeting with the city of Boston, Harvard, and BU to come up with a financing plan. Gulliver said discussions with the city and the universities stalled last year, but are now moving forward.
“We’re feeling quite a bit of confidence moving into the next stage,” Gulliver said. “We’re going to put together a much stronger application in the coming weeks.”
As currently envisioned, the I-90 Allston project would lower the section of the Massachusetts Turnpike between BU and the Charles River to ground level and straighten the roadway as it heads west.
The relocation of the roadway would open a vast swath of land owned by Harvard for development. By lowering the roadway and other transportation infrastructure in the area to ground level, the project would also knit that section of the city back together with connections over the Turnpike via road and pedestrian bridges.
State transportation officials said Thursday night they are seeking $1.1 billion in funding from the federal government for the project and $800 million from other sources.
Even if funding sources for the $800 million can be nailed down, landing $1.1 billion from the federal government may be a tall order. The federal grant program the state participated in last year gave out a total of nine grants, ranging in size from $30 million to $292 million, for a total of $1.17 billion.
Fred Salvucci, the former state transportation secretary, said the state should get more creative in developing funding sources of its own. He said the state could use a portion of the revenue from the millionaire tax as leverage to secure millions of dollars in bond funding. He also said the state could issue grant anticipation notes backed by non-grant federal funds coming to the state.
In mid-March, the state Department of Transportation moved forward with a plan to spend $86 million fixing up the badly deteriorated elevated section of the Turnpike between BU and the Charles River. The two-year fix-up is intended to make the elevated section last another 10 to 15 years.
Last month, Gulliver said he had been meeting with Harvard and the business group A Better City to discuss a different staging approach they developed for the I-90 Allston project that would build the westbound lanes of the Turnpike at ground level and then tear down the elevated section carrying the westbound lanes. Then the same approach would be used for the eastbound section of the Turnpike.”
The state had been looking at alternative approaches, including building a new elevated roadway to carry Turnpike traffic while the old elevated section is torn down.
Gulliver said state engineers met with Harvard and A Better City recently and came away convinced that their approach made sense.
“We are going to be adopting much of that,” he said, adding that the idea of building a new elevated roadway has been scrapped.
It remained unclear, however, how the new approach would be utilized. State transportation officials appear to see the new staging approach as something that would largely come into play when the I-90 project is underway.
Others see the new staging approach as something that could be done more immediately to help get rid of the deteriorating elevated section of the Turnpike more quickly rather than fixing it up just to tear it down.