MULTIPLE USES AND MANAGEMENT 
by 
Mr. Richard Delaney 
Executive Director 
Massachusetts Office of Coastal Management 
Boston, MA 
I want to extend my thanks to NOAA and EPA for hosting this forum this 
afternoon, to the scientists and fellow colleagues on the panel who have provided some 
interesting information and expertise to the session, and to the rest of you for enduring 
six hours of Boston Harbor pollution talk. We in Boston have been dealing with this for a 
while now, and, of course, misery loves company, so I am pleased to see you all here and 
interested in our problems, and hopefully part of the solution. 
I will focus not so much on the pollution aspect or the technical side, but will 
talk more about the Harbor and its multiple uses and the management challenges that it 
presents. I would say that in many cases, the management challenges are as complex and 
as perplexing as the scientific challenges. 
The message, however, will be that while the competing demands for use of 
the Harbor are increasing dramatically and the complexity of managing those competing 
demands is also increasing, I do believe we are making some significant progress. I say 
"we" collectively to mean local, state, and Federal officials, and interested groups 
working together to make some significant progress in managing these competing demands 
in a reasonable and balanced fashion. As always, there is still much more to do. 
I will start with the one use of the Harbor that has been a dominant theme 
today: the use of the Harbor as a receptacle for sewage waste which seems to dominate 
the news in Boston. In fact, it was in the news in Boston 50 years ago this week. On June 
11, 1935, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law that was basically one page long, 
saying that oil, its byproducts, refuse, and other material shall be prohibited from being 
dumped into Boston Harbor. 
Interestingly enough, almost 50 years later that same legislative body, the 
Massachusetts legislature, passed another law which you heard about this morning. That 
law created the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), the purpose of which 
was to put into place a mechanism that would have the fiscal, technical, and 
administrative capability of carrying out the cleanup of the Harbor and reversing 50 or 
150 to 200 years of using the Harbor as a receptacle for waste. I am not sure if that 
means we are making progress, going backwards, going sideways, or sinking under the 
whole thing. But it is an interesting juxtaposition. One similarity in the two bills is that 
they were passed by the same state legislature. In fact, there may actually be some 
senators and representatives who were there in 1935 who, are still there with us. 
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