Boston Secures Key MassDEP Permit Approval For Rebuilding Long Island Bridge

A City of Quincy image

— Quincy Massachusetts News by Quincy Quarry News – News, Opinion and Commentary.

I shall fight her on the beaches, I shall fight her fight in the fields, …, I shall never surrender until the last tax dollar is spent. An old file photo

On Friday MassDEP announced approval of Chapter 91 permitting for the City of Boston to rebuild the Long Island Bridge and so wrapping up a horrific week for Quincy Mayor Thomas P. Koch.

Bonnie Heiple, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, issued a final decision this week to affirm the draft Chapter 91 permit the agency approval granted to the City of Boston in August 2023.

Ms. Heiple underscored that the ruling is her “final decision.”

Heiple’s ruling underscored that “Quincy has failed to demonstrate by a preponderance of the evidence and the governing legal requirements that the draft license issued by the Department for the construction of proposed bridge replacement project was issued in violation of Chapter 91 and the authorizing regulations,” as noted by Margaret Stolfawrote in her 77-page that recommended a final decision to approve the Chapter 91 permit last fall.

Chief of Staph Pinnochio Walkbacker
A Facebook image

Needless to day, City of Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch as well as his Chief of Staph Pinocchio Walkbacker all but immediately announced that they would appeal the decision.

Granted, while there are two remaining but all but perfunctory approvals needed by Boston from the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management and the United States Coast Guard, any further actions by the City of Quincy to continue to delay things should best be viewed as akin to voiding one’s bladder into a high pressure system.

That and a further waste of local taxpayers’ money.so as placate NIMBYs on Squantum who do not care to see Boston reestablish its lawful right to but again access Long Island and which it wholly owns.

Grnated, while further legal action by the City of Quincy may not rise to ending up found to be vexatious litigation and so open to punitive sanctions, any further attempts to block the bridge are all but as hopeless as was the pugnacious Black Knight’s failed attempt to stop King Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail. 

Needless to say, Mayor Koch is surely finding it galling to yet again be bested by City of Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.

The diminutive Goliath Mayor Wu on a field trip to Long Island
A file photo

Further, Koch is surely looking at having to have find funding on his own to pay for the inevitable upgrading the East Squantum Street causeway to deal with ever-increasing high water events given ongoing climate change as at this point no way might the City of Boston care to kick in money as unnecessary mitigation payment toward beefing up the causeway should Mayor Koch all but assuredly continue to chauvinistically cast himself as David battling against the diminutive as well as currently pregnant Goliath that is Mayor MIchelle Wu.

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