Boston City Council backs recovery campus to relieve Mass and Cass drug market strain

The Boston City Council unanimously approved a resolution in support of bringing an addiction recovery campus to the area to relieve the strain from the open-air drug market that’s festered at and around Mass and Cass for more than a decade.

The Council voted, 12-0, Wednesday “in support of prioritizing a recovery campus for the City of Boston and Greater Boston area.”

Put forward by Councilors Ed Flynn, Erin Murphy and John FitzGerald, the resolution is legally non-binding and symbolic in nature, but the unanimous support from the body on its language indicates that City Council is prioritizing the open drug use, dealing and related crime that’s spilled over from Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard into surrounding neighborhoods.

“I do think we, as a city, need a structured environment such as Long Island — or another location if Long Island is not going forward — but we do need another location where people dealing with substance use challenges have the resources, the treatment, residential programs that they need and deserve so that they can get into detox, so that they can get into recovery,” Flynn said at the day’s meeting.

Two years ago, Mayor Michelle Wu reignited the city’s effort to rebuild the Long Island Bridge out to a 35-acre addiction recovery campus. Wu has cited the shuttering of that bridge and related recovery campus in 2014 as a key element that has exacerbated the city’s open–air drug market at Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, known as Mass and Cass, over the past decade.

Councilor Liz Breadon said the city needs to “push the state” and feds “to step up” and provide funding to allow for a new recovery campus that would replace long-term services that were lost from the past center’s closure a decade ago.

She mentioned that the cost to get facilities up to code and construct new buildings for a reestablished recovery campus on Long Island was last estimated at roughly $550 million, but that the federal tariffs and inflation have likely led to a higher projected cost. The Council’s resolution, which cited “recent reports,” put the new estimated rate tag at more than $1 billion.

“The loss of the Long Island campus in 2014 was a huge loss, and I know it was particularly difficult for Mayor Walsh at the time because he was a person who was open about his being in recovery and was a great advocate for support for those with addiction,” Breadon said. “So, I feel in this moment it’s time to see where we can really up the ante and get more money to make this happen.”

The city secured a key waterways permit from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection last January, but has encountered staunch resistance from the mayor on the other side of the potential Long Island Bridge, Thomas Koch, whose opposition centers around traffic and safety concerns the project may create in Quincy’s Squantum neighborhood.

Boston’s waterways, or Chapter 91 permit, was granted after MassDEP rejected an appeal from Koch, who has vowed to appeal every permit secured for the project, and explore every avenue to prevent the bridge from being rebuilt.

Councilor Benjamin Weber said the City of Quincy, after losing the MassDEP appeal for the Chapter 91 permit, filed a second appeal to Massachusetts Superior Court, and last month filed a motion to add new evidence, which he said will further delay action.

“I’d just like to remind people that, in terms of the bridge, I think the city is prioritizing that,” Weber said. “My request would be for the City of Quincy to admit when they’ve lost and allow us to build this bridge and help people instead of wasting their resources and ours on litigation.”

Mayor Wu’s office has acknowledged that appeals to the Chapter 91 permit and the two additional permitting steps required from the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management and the U.S. Coast Guard has made it “difficult to determine” when the city would be cleared to begin construction.

Councilors who sponsored the day’s resolution spoke of how the city should consider a different recovery campus location in the meantime, given that the ambitious Long Island Bridge project could be years away from completion.

FitzGerald is among the elected officials representing neighborhoods taxed by Mass and Cass spillover who have been supportive of “Recover Boston.” The concept is an interim addiction recovery campus that has been pitched by the Newmarket Business Improvement District since August 2023 as a stopgap until the Long Island Bridge can be built out to a permanent campus.

“This issue exists in all of our neighborhoods across the city, and the idea of this ‘campus’ is to help plug the gaps that are in our continuum of care right immediately,” FitzGerald said. “Whether it’s on Long Island … we’d love to see that happen, but I think that is a little bit far away. It needs quite a bit of financial investment. There could be a shorter term, more decentralized approach.”