As state officials prepare to release recommendations that could reimagine the future of Boston’s inner port, a coalition of community groups is sharing its own report on how to best create a port that serves both the people and industries in the area.
The report, released Wednesday, comes from Boston Waterfront Partners, a coalition of community groups that receive funding from the Barr Foundation. It highlights a number of challenges facing Boston’s Designated Port Areas, including coastal flooding, pressure to develop waterfront real estate, and longstanding environmental justice issues in those communities, which include Chelsea, Everett, Revere and East Boston.
The report tries to balance the significant health and environmental impacts of the port with the economic needs of the maritime industry.
Four Designated Port Areas were established in Boston’s inner harbor by the state Office of Coastal Zone Management in the 1970s, with the goal of protecting and promoting maritime industries like fishing and commercial trade. The designation limits how land can be used in those areas, although increasingly, exemptions have been allowed for specific sites. Recently, a request was made for an exemption to build a soccer stadium in Everett.
The Office of Coastal Zone Management plans to publish its own report on the port areas later this year. A spokesperson for the office declined a request for an interview, saying they are reviewing the new report by Boston Waterfront Partners.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve looked at our working waterfront,” said Jill Valdes Horwood, director of the Waterfront Initiative for the Barr Foundation. “The Designated Port Area was established in 1978. Let’s have a conversation in 2025 about what it means for that program to be responsive to the many issues that we face in today’s waterfront, especially the working waterfront.”
The report outlines a number of strategies to address the ports’ challenges, including an updated economic development plan, programs to train local communities in maritime industry jobs, and electrification of infrastructure, as well as environmental remediation and climate adaptation efforts.
“We have a different waterfront,” Valdes Horwood said, contrasting the current situation with the waterfront of the late 1970s when the DPAs were first established. “We have more diverse communities. We have climate change issues that need to be addressed. We have built our waterfront up … and we need to — in a changing waterfront — talk about how our regulations keep up with that change. And the Designated Port Area program has not had meaningful change in decades at this point.”
The report comes as Massport, which controls more than three-fourths of the maritime shipping traffic on Boston Harbor, is facing pressure to reduce the public health and environmental impacts from emissions at its expanding Conley Container Terminal and cruise ship business.
Air quality sensors in East Boston have detected significant pollutants coming from those ports in South Boston .
Ensuring that equity is at the forefront of new plans for the port is a priority for John Walkey, director of climate justice and waterfront initiatives at the environmental justice organization GreenRoots, which works in Chelsea and East Boston.
“It’s a huge concern. It’s our reason for existence at GreenRoots, and for the state it’s a priority,” Walkey said. “But sometimes it’s like your New Year’s resolution, you know. Like, ‘I’m going to eat better and not drink and lose weight.’ And then somewhere in mid-January, that goes out the window.”
The state has a number of other priorities, Walkey said, including environmental and economic ones.
“But when you put all those priorities in a room, you start making compromises,” he said. “And frequently equity is usually the one that gets compromised quite a bit. And so from a GreenRoots perspective, we are really planting a flag here to say make sure equity is front and center on this.”
For Walkey, that means, in part, ensuring the state incentivizes maritime businesses that employ people living in the immediate community.
“Because the easy out is to just say we’re going to put in high-end condos or it’s going to be turned over to Massport to do something, and that would provide economic activity, and you would invest in protecting that economic asset by building up seawalls or whatever. But it wouldn’t necessarily produce jobs for the people who live in the neighborhoods,” he said.
The new report, Walkey said, asks the question of what kind of waterfront people want to see.
“Do we want to see a waterfront that that provides economic opportunity for all people? Do we want to see a waterfront that’s a playground for people with yachts? Do we want to see a waterfront that’s accessible for everybody and that is protected from the worst of the near-term flooding that we’re going to have?” he said. “And the state and the municipalities are the ones that are going to really answer those questions with the decisions they make in the coming years.”
The nonprofit group La Colaborativa, which works in several immigrant and low-income communities along Boston’s Designated Port Area, was not involved in the new report. But Alex Train, the group’s chief operating officer, welcomes its findings.
“The port has really fallen into disrepair over the recent decades, as well as remained inaccessible to community members in terms of public waterfront access. A lot of this is rooted in the economics of designated port areas,” Train said. “With the rampant increase in land values within the Boston area, many of the parcels of land in port areas can’t economically sustain the type of maritime industry that was once envisioned. So in places like Chelsea, we see large tracts of the waterfront sitting vacant as well as large tracts of the waterfront, subject to temporary licenses, which allows for non-maritime industrial uses.”
For example, Train noted a “sea of parking lots” now along the Chelsea waterfront.
“And so we’re excited to see the release of this report,” Train said. “We believe it’s a step in the right direction in terms of advancing regulatory reform to promote the types of 21st century maritime uses that are critical to our economy.”
GBH News reporter Chris Burrell contributed reporting.
