A push to develop a soccer stadium in Everett stalled out on Beacon Hill Thursday after state lawmakers chopped a proposal from a multi-billion budget bill, putting ice on an idea that had drawn support from Robert Kraft.
House lawmakers pushed for the proposal last year and the Senate included language connected to a professional soccer stadium in the city in a nearly $3.1 billion supplemental budget this session that has since become the subject of a procedural battle on Beacon Hill.
But as Democratic negotiators announced a deal on the budget bill, it became clear that the soccer stadium language was dropped. House budget writer Rep. Aaron Michlewitz said lawmakers had a “lot of unanswered questions” about what environmental impacts a potential stadium could have on the city.
“There was a lot of confusion coming from the environmental groups. Some said they supported it, some said they were against it. I think we still have a lot of things to iron out and flush out,” Michlewitz said. “I do think that the quickest manner to have this thing keep going forward would be to potentially file legislation and actually have a public hearing on it and have an open dialogue on it because I think there was a lot more at play that we were still very concerned about.”
Michlewitz batted down rumors that officials from TD Garden were pushing lawmakers to drop the proposal from the budget bill.
“TD Garden definitely had weighed in, in terms of the conversation. But I don’t think it was necessarily related to what TD Garden was doing,” he said. “I think it was about adding another major facility in a very similar area to TD Garden. So having two of those facilities at the same time, without the city of Boston having any conversation or any seat at the table in that dialogue, I think was very lacking.”
