Every week after Mayor Michelle Wu bashed the Kraft Group’s proposed Everett stadium and its impression on the Charlestown neighborhood, opponents of the White Stadium venture known as out what they see as an “insulting and disrespectful” double customary Monday.
“We’re asking the mayor to stop doing what she’s doing in Charlestown one time and come speak to us about how we feel and how we’re going to be impacted,” mentioned Louis Elisa, president of the Garrison Constitution Neighborhood Affiliation and Franklin Park Coalition member. “The money that she’s negotiated for this neighborhood, they found that they wouldn’t accept it in Charlestown, but they think it’s good for us. It’s not, and this is not good for us.”
Opponents of the White Stadium venture, which is at present below building by way of a private-public partnership to host an expert girls’s soccer workforce, gathered in Franklin Park on Monday to specific frustration with Mayor Wu’s communications.
Wu hosted a press convention in Charlestown final week, criticizing out the Kraft Group’s plan for a males’s soccer stadium in Everett. The mayor mentioned the group’s mitigation plan for the impacts on Charlestown is a “non-starter.”
Whereas the Kraft Group has provided $750,000 for the venture’s impression on Charlestown, audio system mentioned Monday, the neighborhoods round White Stadium are solely slated to obtain $500,000 in impression mitigation cash.
Audio system additionally famous they nonetheless haven’t seen an environmental assessment or transportation plan for the White Stadium venture, regardless of Wu’s calls for a similar data for the Everett stadium.
“We mentioned, ‘Where was the study? Where was the transportation review?,” said Dianne Wilkerson, a resident of the Roxbury and Dorchester area for 45 years. “Quiet. Crickets. Nothing. She’s demanding one for Charlestown. On a stadium that’s going to be an Everett. That is on the level the place that is indefensible.”
Wilkerson mentioned the “city of Boston and the mayor of this city has refused to even discuss it with us” they usually have “never had a meeting” with Wu.
“We’re sitting here, 98% people of color, concerned that we’re about to get completely overrun and shut down,” mentioned Wilkerson, a former state senator busted by the feds on a bribery cost.
A metropolis spokesperson responded Monday and mentioned the “process to shape the project design, lease terms, and usage agreement for White Stadium included more than 60 public meetings, over 1000 public comment letters, and many public hearings and votes by regulatory commissions.”
The White Stadium venture has had the “most community engagement that has ever been incorporated to shape a public facilities project,” the spokesperson mentioned, and “Mayor Wu has been directly and heavily involved,” together with assembly with neighborhood members and organizations “like the Franklin Park Coalition.”
“Through this engagement, the City negotiated and signed binding legal documents guaranteeing community benefits, mitigation, neighborhood involvement, and supplier diversity for the project and the park,” the town spokesperson mentioned. “The Mayor has also joined three community meetings with Charlestown residents on the proposed Revs stadium and held one press conference on that stadium.”
The press convention at Franklin Park on Monday included Metropolis Councilor Erin Murphy and council candidates Sharon Hinton, Wawa Bell, and neighborhood activist and mayoral candidate Domingo DeRosa.
Elisa said the neighborhood residents are “concerned that we’re being neglected, disrespected and treated like second class citizens in our own city.”
Mayoral candidate Josh Kraft launched an announcement on the neighborhood’s press occasion, stating it’s “clear that the Mayor has decided Bostonians don’t deserve to have any input on what happens to their beloved community landmarks, to their neighborhoods, to their quality of life.”
