The nearly $30 billion Big Dig project cost far more than expected and, for decades, the bill starved the transportation and infrastructure needs of the rest of Massachusetts. The Big Dig funding plan was a bipartisan debacle approved by Republican governors and Democratic legislatures. The real costs of the Big Dig were either wildly underestimated or intentionally low-balled and lacked sufficient revenue to pay for the project’s borrowing. Regions outside of Boston were adversely impacted for a generation.

More recently, two pieces of legislation approved at the State House underscore the influence that Boston business interests and their allies can have in advancing their agenda, sometimes at the cost of statewide needs. The $1 billion Boston Convention and Exhibition Center expansion project was approved last year but did not include the funding needed for Worcester’s $60 million DCU Center Phase III renovation, nor the $30 million for Springfield’s MassMutual garage. Other important regional projects were also not included.

Similarly, the Gateway Cities legislation (House Bill 311), seeking $475 million over five years, to invest in important projects in 26 Massachusetts cities, was significantly pared down to $88.6 million over three years. The $475 million request was considered “too rich” by Boston–based interests, which was why the bill was not publically supported by many of the Boston–based business organizations.

As we contemplate support for a Boston Olympics, it is critical that the Commonwealth‘s mayors’ regional legislative delegations, regional chambers and economic development organizations, as well as editorial boards of the state’s regional newspapers, come together quickly to ensure that history does not repeat itself with public infrastructure spending concentrated within the Boston beltway.

There are currently worthy infrastructure and economic development projects across Massachusetts that merit funding and would have a positive impact on the state’s regional economies and the Commonwealth as a whole. However, pushing Olympic–related projects to the front of the line, with only a finite amount of public capital dollars available statewide, would again direct spending in the Boston-Cambridge area for the next decade. This would further short-change and delay projects in other regions of the Commonwealth and repeat the mistakes of the Big Dig.