Inner Belt Foes Start Mass Campaign

Cambridge opponents of the Inner Belt have begun a last concerted effort to stop construction of the eight-lane highway. They hope to do two things:

* raise $100,000 to finance a study that will show the Belt to be unnecessary and/or ill-planned:

* create a political organization to demonstrate largescale opposition to the highway and thereby convince state and federal officials to halt it.

The State Department of Public Works has recommended the Brookline-Elm St. route for the highway. The federal government, which pays 90 per cent of the costs, must now approve the selection. The federal Bureau of Public Roads has assured local officials that it will thoroughly review the state's recommendation, and, if necessary, ask the state DPW for further justification of the selection.

But the leaders of the anti-Inner Belt campaign this week rejected the bureau's guarantee as inadequate. In a statement this week, the Cambridge Committee on the Inner Belt, a private group of planners that has vociferously opposed the Belt since last fall, said:

"The need for an independent study is clearly indicated by the glaring inadequacies and omission in previous DPW studies, [and] the probable inability of the DPW or any other state agency to objectively review a [highway] system to which the state has been committed for 30 years."

The committee is asking for a total reevaluation of the highway system for the Boston metropolitan area. It wants a halt to major highways in all parts of the system, until the

The committee joined last week with other opponents of the Belt in an attempt to create a new, larger group, called "Save Our Cities." Meeting Thursday at Simeone's, an Italian-American restaurant that would be destroyed by the highway, they constantly emphasized the need to gain mass public support for the fight against the highway.

"We have to insist that we are citizens and that the politicians have to listen to us....The trouble is that we haven't got organized enough to tell them that we want this highway stopped," William P. Homans, an attorney and ex-state representative, told the group. Homans has assumed an informal leadership role in "Save Our Cities."

Invited to the meeting were leaders of churches, civic groups, and clubs. Homans appealed to them to have their organizations join "Save Our Cities" and have their members support its goals on masse.

'Save Our Cities' Role

It was not clear immediately what "Save Our Cities" would do. A mass march of perhaps as many as 15,000 on the State House in early June was tentatively suggested. The group is also expected to provide anti-highway signs and help raise money for the proposed study. Its present empoverished financial condition was emphasized, however, when Mrs. Michael Benfield, a local community leader in the Brookline-Elm St. area, pleaded for $50 to pay the rent for "Save Our Cities" temporary headquarters.

Among those attending the meeting were Mark DeWolfe Howe '28, professor of Law. Howe said it was time that more people "in the Brattle St. area paid attention to Central Square." Steven Golden '64, who has been active in a number of anti-urban renewal campaigns, was there and indicated he intended to play a large part in the campaign against the Inner Belt. A few members of the Boston Office of Students for a Democratic Society were also present.

The possibility of tension between the different groups arose when Joseph Simeone, the restauran't owner, spoke out strongly against "demonstrators." If we have so-called demonstrators take over, we're going to accomplish nothing," he declared.