MFA expansion project gets key approval

The projected expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts moved forward this week when the Boston Redevelopment Authority unanimously approved the museum's site plan during a key hearing.

The approval gives the museum permission to start work on a plan that will nearly double its size, as well as reestablish entrances on the south, facing Huntington Avenue, and on the north, facing the Fenway.

The museum is a year away from breaking ground on the first phase of the expansion, which is expected to be completed by 2009. It will add galleries, new courtyards and -- its most architecturally significant feature -- a crystal spine running through and over the existing building. A planned $425 million capital campaign will pay for the project.

The BRA vote on Tuesday came three years after the museum submitted its application for a site plan approval. The agency must review and approve all major projects in Boston.

Museum officials said they attended about 200 meetings as part of the process, some as informal as sitting at a neighbor's kitchen table, hearing complaints about buses that brought visitors to the MFA yet remained parked on surrounding streets. In response, the MFA immediately started to make sure those buses were pulled into the museum's lot. The museum also dropped its plan to close off Museum Road and lowered its roofline from 75 to 70 feet to address concerns about the shadows that might be created by the new building.

Nobody spoke out against the MFA's plans at the hearing Tuesday. As part of the process, the MFA agreed to pay $3.2 million to the Neighborhood Housing Trust, $650,000 to the Neighborhood Jobs Trust, and hire a full-time public outreach director. "It was a very exciting moment for me, personally, but also for the museum," MFA director Malcolm Rogers said yesterday. "I was really touched by what people were saying, genuinely touched. . . . The fact that no one spoke in opposition and that people of all sorts came along and said, `This is something that has to happen in Boston,' I found that very moving."

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com