As we reported in November, the project will destroy seven acres of playing fields at Magazine Beach that also serve as wildlife habitat. It will then install seven acres of chemically treated fields that exclude habitat.

Cambridge is paying to “upgrade” State parkland. In return, the DCR will give Cambridge residents privileged access to State property.

Chemical runoff from a similar project in Boston has caused algae blooms in the Charles. Despite objections, the DCR will use pesticides at Magazine Beach where none have been before.

In a January 24 letter, the DCR’s Richard Corsi suggests the project will now include a system to keep chemical runoff from the river. Corsi was responding to a letter Bob La Trémouille sent to Governor Duval Patrick last August.

The letter referred to “open” public processes for the Charles River Master Plan and Magazine Beach to dismiss objections. In fact, the public process for the Master Plan was never open.

Herb Nolan—from DCR consultant Goody, Clancy—spoke to the Cambridge, Beacon Hill, and Back Bay garden clubs in December, 2003. There he confirmed our fears of a fix by observing that “most people like the river as it is. We wish people were a little less happy with it.”

Planning for Magazine Beach has not been open. DCR managed it with Friends of Magazine Beach (FOMB). FOMB began volunteer cleanups of Magazine Beach—always just preceding B.U.’s graduation ceremonies there. In 1997, FOMB presented the first plans for Magazine Beach and the nearby goose meadow. The broad group of Cambridge residents at that meeting rejected the plans. They have continued to object.

In 1998, Corsi solicited a memo from two members of FOMB against the Charles River White Geese. The DCR used the memo to claim public support for uprooting the geese and their habitat. A Freedom of Information search revealed that this was the sole objection to the White Geese in DCR files.

DCR has not been open with the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC). Against Master Plan recommendations, and to the dismay of Cambridge residents, DCR planned big fences and night lights for regulation Little League games.

It failed to inform MHC of this. After resident complaints, MHC told DCR to reduce the fencing and cancel the lights.

Cambridge Conservation Commission (ConCom) review of Magazine Beach has not been open. In 2006, ConCom closed comment on the DCR’s request for a three-year work extension to preclude criticism at the meeting which granted the extension. It excluded comments on the danger of algae bloom from its public record. Cambridge taxpayers are buying a puddle, a bridge over the puddle that doesn’t comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and a wall of “native” plants blocking access to the water.

Corsi’s letter describes the puddle as a “detention basin… part of a system of landscaped drainage swales” that is “not yet fully functional.” A report of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority called it “ponded water” with a “large amount of algae.”

DCR has failed to observe the Wetlands Protection Act—the law protecting water quality and habitat—and ConCom has failed to enforce it at Magazine Beach.

Many people hope for swimming at Magazine Beach. DCR’s ally, the Charles River Conservancy (CRC), staged a “swim-in” in 2004 to mobilize public support for the project. Corsi now says that there is “no plan to provide access to swimming in this immediate area.”

Many people love watching wildlife at Magazine Beach. But ConCom accepts the DCR’s position that these fields are “so extensively altered by human activity that their important wildlife habitat functions have been effectively eliminated.”

Yet on one day this past November, perhaps 3,500 migrating Canada geese were observed feeding there.

In 1999, at the DCR’s behest, Boston University destroyed nesting habitat for waterfowl and red-tailed hawks. Since B.U. didn’t wait for ConCom approval, the work was doubly illegal, far beyond what ConCom later allowed.

DCR planner Julia O’Brien told me in 2000 that B.U.’s work was a “charitable contribution and the equivalent of the DCR’s own work”—it would only prevent the animals from nesting.

Cambridge will pay $1.5 million if the Governor decides to release the money. We will pay much more, in lost water quality, lost wildlife habitat, and our own lost re-creation in the natural world, with this illegal project.