INT: What were the names of some of the groups you had to convince?

FS: Well, certainly the environmental community is a very important set of people and they're not one community; it's many different people with a generally environmental consideration, but the environmental lobbies are very powerful and if you can't satisfy the environmental constituencies that it's a reasonably good project, chances are you're going to get stopped.

The business community, again, is not one community. It's many different communities. Obviously, the construction community is likely to be in favor of a project that going to create more construction work. But you're in the middle of the city. You're going to affect the ability to move goods. So anybody who's shipping goods to Logan Airport has a legitimate concern with whether you're gonna do this project in a way that they can continue to do business. The people who are doing business in downtown Boston have a big stake in whether they're workers can get to work. They need to be convinced that you can reasonably maintain access to the city or they're going to say, "Nice idea, but we have to fight this." The suburban residents who have to access the city either in their car or by transit need to be convinced that they're gonna be able to get to work, that this isn't going to make their life miserable. One of the things that was helpful to us was the fact that MBTA did these big subways.

INT: Describe your role in the Big Dig.

FS: Basically my role was initially as transportation advisor to the mayor of the City of Boston I became enthused about this idea and, along with Bill Reynolds, convinced the state to begin the study process to get this to be seriously considered. If I had a contribution there, it was to identify the need to maintain traffic during construction as the essential point that has to be satisfied if we were going to convince people that this was worth going forward with. So I played an important role in that technical issue and I played an important political role because, as the designee of the city and since this project is in the city, that was important in giving the project some credibility.

Later, in 1975, I became Secretary of Transportation with Governor Dukakis, and as secretary, I continued to promote the project, but also we got language in the 1976 federal law that clarified the status of the project and allowed us to continue proceeding it. Then later, we were out of government for four years, came back in 1983 and I basically had the idea of putting the two projects together, so combining the tunnel and the artery into one package was something that I helped to put together. And we had a lot of convincing to do of a lot of different constituencies. Fortunately, I think the facts were there to justify the project moving forward. So I was very active in that '83 to '90 period putting together all of environmental documentation and all of the federal financial justifications to get the project to the point of starting construction.

INT: It sounds very exciting.

FS: Yes it was lot of fun and it's something I enjoyed doing … it's fun to see it happening now.

INT: Give me sense of meeting with people and how frenetic it was for you.

FS: Oh, it was pretty frenetic. I mean at one point -- a key community is the North End and we were trying to do public meetings in the North End to explain the project and there were some project opponents who had a tactic of disrupting the meetings. So you'd go to the meeting and no communication would occur because they'd get up and they'd filibuster and nothing would happen and a lot of people would come to the meeting looking for information and go away disgusted. So we said, "Okay. This isn't gonna work." So we did coffee klatches, and basically I used to live in the North End with my wife when we first got married. I know people in the North End. We basically put the word out, "Look, get ten people together, serve cookies and coffee. The secretary of transportation'll come and explain and answer any questions you have about the artery." And I had these story boards that we had put together that basically relatively simple diagrams to explain what the process was where the problems would be, why I thought it was feasible, why I thought it would be good for the neighborhood. And then people could ask any question they had on their mind and, yes, it was fun. They're nice people. You had a nice cup of coffee and talked about it, and people could see we weren't trying to hide anything, but we were able to get the explanation out.

Somebody used the characterization it was like we did this retail rather than wholesale. We didn't go into the back room and try to convince the power brokers, "This is a great thing. Everyone shut up, we're going forward." We dealt with every constituency that had a concern, beginning with the neighbors and the people who might most reasonably have a concern that that there was gonna be problems, and there are problems during construction. There's no hiding that. So the approach was really to deal with everybody, not to try to deal with people through other people, but to deal directly with the people who had a legitimate concern and be honest. I mean where there were problems, you had to admit there were problems, but you'd explain how you would try to deal with it.

The other piece is it's got to be a two-way communication process because you literally don't understand the problem until you've heard that other person's point of view. I mean I'm an engineer. We know how to build things, but you didn't necessarily know what invisible fabric you're cutting across when you take a certain action. You get that feedback from a community meeting that says, "Hey, you guys don't understand this is what happens on this street and if you do it that way, you're gonna disrupt these three stores and my kids aren't going to be able to get to school." So the meeting process isn't a one-way selling process; it's a two-way communication process and if somebody comes up with a question you don't have an answer for you go back and try to get an answer, then you go back with that answer.

So it really is a two-way process. In my experience, that's the only way you really can get these to happen. You've got to have a great deal of confidence from a lot of people that they understand what's about to happen and to the degree there are problems, they know what they're going to be, and they know you're committed to the best of your ability to mitigate those problems, to deal with them in a way that makes them less severe.

With Governor Dukakis we had terrific support and willingness to take action to lessen the problem that we were creating. For example, in southeast expressway reconstruction when people were worried about whether they could get from the south shore to downtown Boston to work, we provided, as part of the highway project, additional bus service shuttle boat services from Hingham. We heard and understood that people were concerned about how they got to work and we said, "Look, solving your problem is as much a part of rebuilding the southeast expressway as the reinforcing rods in the concrete. You are part of this. If you have a problem, we have problem and we have to solve that problem." So you can only understand the problems with a two-way communications process and then you go back to those people and say, "Okay, here's what we've come up with. It's not perfect, but we think we can deal with most of your problem," and you know, basically that's the process we used and I think it's worked.

If you look at the implementation of the construction process, you certainly know there's something awfully big going on in downtown Boston, and the detours and can be somewhat confusing, but, by and large, you can get through downtown Boston. By and large, the project's kept -- honored -- the commitment to maintain reasonable viability in the city street system through this whole construction process.

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