Private Planners Present Alternates for Inner Belt

Nearly 175 people squeezed into the City Council chambers Monday night as a private group of urban planners presented the grim political alternatives Cambridge faces in its fight against the Inner Belt.

The planners told the Council and the audience that they had real doubts as to the need for the eight-lane highway. But simultaneously they warned that "there's going to be a Belt Route through Cambridge" and that the City must take a forthright position on the least harmful path.

They urged that the Council officially endorse their three alternatives and oppose the Brookline-Elm St. location. This route, long favored by the State Department of Public Works, runs straight through a dense residential area just east of Central Square. All the alternatives offered by the planners would miss large neighborhoods but would take out some buildings owned by industries and M.I.T.

Council Opposes

The City Council is currently on record as opposing "any and all" belt routes through Cambridge. But members of the planning group, known as the Cambridge Committee on the Inner Belt, repeatedly argued that "saying 'No Belt route' is saying 'Put it down Brookline-Elm St.'"

Monday night the Council moved cautiously towards a change in position. It ordered that the three alternatives developed by the planners be forwarded for an opinion to the City's own private consultants, a Chicago planning firm.

At the same time, the Council asked that DPW commissioner Francis W. Sargent withhold any decision on the Belt route until the Council had reconsidered its policy. It has been reported that Sargent would pick a path before the beginning of December.

Velucci Suggestion

In designing its alternatives, the group of planners said they had attempted to come up with solutions acceptable to three groups: the City, the DPW, and the federal government which will pay 90 per cent of the road's cost. When Councillor Alfred E. Vellucci suggested that the planners ought to have recommended other routes-(including one along Memorial Drive), the planners countered that these alternatives would probably not be acceptable to either the DPW or the federal government.

"You may be able to find a number of roads that won't take houses or jobs, but they won't do the traffic job either. Therefore they won't be salable to the federal government or the DPW," Dents Blackett, one of the planners said.

Members of the committee repeatedly declared that their three routes would exact a smaller price from Cambridge than the Brookline Elm St. location would They said that a maximum of 150 homes would be wiped out on any of the three alternatives, as compared to 1000 to 1500 homes on the Brookline-Elm St. route.