LYNN — Just one day after the City Council approved an order of taking for the Northern Strand On Road Extension project, Councilor-at-Large Brian LaPierre requested a motion for reconsideration on Wednesday.
The council approved an order of taking that would advance the project at its meeting Tuesday, with Councilor-at-Large Brian LaPierre voting in favor at the time.
“Originally, I was a little skeptical about the project itself,” LaPierre said.
However, according to LaPierre, he reconsidered his motion after speaking with officials more privy to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s roughly $11 million Northern Strand project, which would create 1.9 miles of bike lane from Western Avenue to the shores of Lynn and Nahant.
LaPierre said in an interview with The Item that, after speaking with many of the parties that have spearheaded the project, he wanted to withdraw his call for a reconsideration vote and support the project, with the hope that the vote prompted by his motion would not have to take place.
“Having all that knowledge now, I am going to withdraw my motion to have a special council meeting on Friday,” LaPierre said.
City Council President Jay Walsh, who supports the Northern Strand project, said he was initially taken aback by LaPierre’s request Wednesday after LaPierre was one of eight councilors to vote in favor of the project on Tuesday.
Walsh said he believed it was motivated by LaPierre’s opposition to a MassDOT traffic-improvement project on Broadway, which was tabled by the council on Tuesday. LaPierre, along with Councilors-at-Large Brian Field and Hong Net, voted against tabling the project.
“This has got nothing to do with anything going on with the Northern Strand whatsoever,” Walsh said. “He is making an attempt to kill the Northern Strand project because we tabled the vote on Broadway and didn’t kill it.”
Because LaPierre voted on the winning side of Tuesday’s vote, he was allowed to file a motion for reconsideration within 24 hours.
Walsh said LaPierre’s move was an egregious tactic that undermined the council’s work on the project, especially given the millions of dollars of funding for the project the city would otherwise not normally have access to from the state and federal government.
“This is dirty, old-school politics,” Walsh said. “This type of politics is what has hurt this city over the years.”
Walsh said despite LaPierre’s desire to withdraw his request for reconsideration, the council is legally required to meet Friday, though he explained that the meeting would happen either way.
“Even if I had the ability to switch it, we will not switch that,” Walsh said. “He’s going to answer for that and that’s just the way this is going to go down.”
State Rep. Peter Capano, whose district contains the area where the Northern Strand project would be built, called LaPierre’s motion a slap in the face to those who had spent years working on the project, like City Councilors Dianna Chakoutis and Fred Hogan.
He said that despite all of the interest and concern about the Broadway project, he had heard few concerns about the Northern Strand project, especially from city councilors like LaPierre.
“I didn’t hear boo of a complaint from anyone in Lynn,” Capano said. “None of the at-large councilors ever called to inquire… No one said a word.”
Capano said it was disgraceful for a councilor to use a political maneuver to tie up millions in funding that the city would never have on its own.
“This is why some people distrust government,” he said. “The best interests of the city were not in mind when that happened.”
The Northern Strand project will run through Wards 5 and 6, which are represented by Chakoutis and Hogan, respectively.
Hogan said both he and Chakoutis had been working on the project for years and that despite the threat posed by Friday’s vote, he was sure that enough of the other councilors would support the project and move it forward.
“This is something that we’ve worked on for a while,” Hogan said. “It doesn’t make us feel too good.”
Mayor Jared Nicholson said he was disappointed by LaPierre’s decision to request a reconsideration vote, especially given the opportunity that the project presents. He said he had spoken to LaPierre to express his disappointment in the councilor’s decision to use the vote as part of his opposition to the Broadway project.
“Linking them in that way doesn’t feel fair to the process that we’ve all gone through,” Nicholson said. “It feels unfair to the supporters of Northern Strand and the councilors that have worked to move that project forward.”
Walsh said he believed that the project would be moving forward as planned after Friday’s vote, which is just days before the city must meet a deadline to acquire land rights as part of the project’s timeline.
According to City Solicitor George Markopoulos, Friday’s vote to reconsider requires a six-vote majority in order for a second vote on the order of takings for the Northern Strand project to be held. The second vote requires an eight-member supermajority to decide on the vote for the order of takings, which previously passed Tuesday with an 8-2 vote, with Ward 3 Councilor Coco Alinsug absent.
