Big Dig listeners know all about the National Environmental Policy Act.

Should have been required listening for everyone here tonight.

So when you're looking at a project, you have to take on what's the estimated impact going to be to communities? What's the estimated impact going to be to the natural cultural resources associated with the project? And so in this case, the opportunity presented to us was to move quickly, to be ready to move into the design phase of the project, to then get to the construction phase of the project as quickly as possible.

We had to look at do you want to take on major design changes? Do you want to consider how many lanes are gonna be on this bridge? Do you want to consider if you are going to be adding an element such as a pedestrian and bicycle connection? And while that is a consideration that we take when we're looking at all of the major bridge projects that we do, In this case, adding on another design element such as that would have taken us out of the eligibility of pursuing a categorical exclusion or a Cat X and would have pushed us to a completely different environmental process through likely an environmental impact statement, one that is worthy but thorough.

and could have easily added two or more years just to the planning phase of the project.

So while I understand the desire for that multimodal connectivity, I think there's a tremendous degree of value there.

In this case, we didn't have a bridge in place that was gonna continue to carry people from one side of the shore to the other while we worked through the planning and design process.

demolition...