Inner Belt Opposition Evaporates in Council

Distracted by its own political feuding, the Cambridge City Council has let its opposition to the projected Inner Belt highway Virtually evaporate.

The Belt, which was severely criticized by the Council last session, has rarely been mentioned since the beginning of the new year. A number of factors seem responsible:

* The protracted battle over the appointment of a city manager has embittered and preoccupied the councillors. Since the election of a mayor in the second week of January, debate between the five members supporting Joseph A. DeGuglieimo '29 for manager and the four backing the suspended manager John J. Curry '19 has been the only major business.

* There is an undercurrent of opinion among the councillors that the route for the Inner Belt is almost a foregone conclusion. Most believe that the State Department of Public Works will certainly select the Brookline-Elm St. location--a route near Central Square that has been long favored by the state agency and consistently condemned by city officials.

* There were no formal steps that the Council had to take on the Belt during January, and thus nothing to break its preoccupation with the manager's dispute. February will be the crucial month.

In late December, the DPW delayed announcing the Belt route to allow the City to come up with an alternative to the Brookline-Elm St. Path. Traffic consultants for Cambridge have been working for the past six weeks on a design for the highway that would run along the right-of-way of railroad tracks in East Cambridge.

However, the Cambridge Committee for the Inner Belt, a group of private planners that first prodded the Council into seeking specific alternatives, is worried about the City's approach.

Last week, it wrote the Council asking that its traffic consultants perfect a second alternative to Brookline-Elm St. route. Pointing out that the Federal Bureau of Public Roads, which will finance 90 per cent of the Inner Belt, had tentatively rejected the railroad route some years earlier, the committee said.

"If Cambridge has only a railroad alignment as an alternative to the Brookline Elm St. alignment, the DPW will be in a relatively stronger position to either reject it on the basis of the FBPR's previously stated unwillingness to accept [it]....or simply send it along to Washington to have the FBPR reject it."

The committee said it supported the railroad route, but did not want the opposition to Brookline-Elm to rise or fall on only one alternative. The second alternative, worked out in its broad outlines by the committee, runs along Albany and Portland Streets a few blocks west of the railroad