THE CITIES OF BOSTON AND SOMERVILLE are claiming in court documents that the Baker administration violated state laws in awarding an environmental certificate to Wynn Resorts for its proposed $1.7 billion Everett casino, but the administration isn’t listed as a defendant in either lawsuit.
Boston names Wynn Resorts as the defendant in its lawsuit, and Somerville lists Wynn and the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. Both municipalities seek revocation of the environmental certificate. Officials in both municipalities said custom dictates a lawsuit challenging the granting of an environmental certificate must be filed against the applicant and not the agency making the decision.
Both lawsuits allege that traffic going to the $1.7 billion hotel and casino complex in Everett would make a bad traffic situation in Boston’s Sullivan Square and the surrounding area much worse. The Boston lawsuit alleges that Wynn’s traffic projections are off and the resort lacks sufficient parking.
The Somerville lawsuit is critical of Matthew Beaton, the Baker administration’s secretary of energy and environmental affairs. “The secretary’s decision that Wynn has complied with the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act does precisely what Somerville urged the secretary not to do – it kicked the can down the road, even though the road is already congested and there is no place for the can to go.”
A spokesman for Beaton said the administration does not comment on pending litigation.
Boston’s lawsuit follows closely on the heels of a meeting last week between Mayor Marty Walsh and two top executives of Wynn that both sides characterized as positive and productive. Wynn officials said they were blindsided by the lawsuit, which was dated Monday. They said the lawsuit was full of “unfounded accusations.”
Michael Weaver, Wynn’s senior vice president for marketing and communications, said: “It has become clear the mayor has decided that litigation is his way of being ‘productive.’ We disagree, but will proceed accordingly. If this is what the mayor believes a good working relationship should be, his experience is clearly different than ours. The litigation the mayor distributed yesterday will serve no one, least of all the citizens of Boston.”
Walsh, interviewed at a 20-year-anniversary celebration for the TD Garden, said he felt that he and Wynn officials could work cooperatively even as they square off in court. “We had a meeting and we addressed that,” he said, referring to last week’s meeting.
Asked if he told the Wynn officials at that meeting that he planned to sue the company, Walsh said: “We told them we have concerns around the MEPA certificate. We told them the lawsuit that was ongoing [against the Gaming Commission, challenging the agency’s award of a casino license to Wynn] we’re going to continue down that path, but we wanted to keep an open line of communication.”
Boston’s lawsuit against Wynn makes clear that Walsh has fully embraced a plan developed by the Menino administration to turn Sullivan Square and Rutherford Avenue into a residential neighborhood. The plan calls for filling in the Rutherford Avenue underpass and eliminating the square itself, replacing it with a series of streets laid out more like a traditional traffic grid.
Boston’s lawsuit said the Wynn casino is incompatible with the city’s plan for the area and criticizes the Las Vegas casino developer for its failure to address how the casino would fit into the city’s plan. Other politicians who represent the area, including US Rep. Michael Capuano and state Rep. Daniel Ryan, are less enthusiastic about the Menino plan. Capuano told CommonWealth recently that “the town is completely split on the plan.”
Wynn officials say they haven’t responded to the city’s plan because it’s a concept more than anything at this point. Secretary of Transportation Stephanie Pollack, in a letter to Attorney General Maura Healey on Aug. 21, said the city’s plan is not a “done deal.” She said the city has not produced a design for its plan yet so it’s impossible for her agency or any other to evaluate it in any detail.
Boston’s lawsuit says design work on the Sullivan Square plan is 25 percent complete.
Walsh has sent mixed messages on the redesign of Sullivan Square. For weeks, he had been calling the redesign the city’s plan, indicating it was ready to implement. But recently he started calling it the Menino plan and noted it was conceived in the 1990s before development began on a host of projects, including NorthPoint in Cambridge, Assembly Square in Somerville, and Wynn’s Everett casino. “There’s a lot of moving pieces here and there’s not a single solution,” he said recently.
