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Gubernatorial candidates joust over barge

Print | Comments () Posted by Martin Finucane October 28, 2010 04:29 PM

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By Noah Bierman, Globe Staff

Republican gubernatorial candidate Charles D. Baker, his hair and tie blowing in the wind, stood by the waterfront at Lopresti Park in East Boston for a press conference, attacking Governor Deval Patrick for what he called a “$91 million barge to nowhere."

Baker was seizing on a Boston Herald story published Thursday that said plans to buy a barge to place wind turbines deep on the ocean floor had been considered and then abandoned by a quasi-public agency.

“This is business as usual for Governor Patrick,” Baker said, standing in front of a placard that had a caricature of Patrick smiling from the wheelhouse of a barge, carrying stacks of money and windmills.

The Patrick administration said the plan was unrelated to the Cape Wind project, which
Baker has criticized, and that the barge would have paid for itself with fees from private industry that need to use it. The Patrick administration said it chose not to pursue the barge because the federal government is looking into an alternative that would allow deep-water wind turbines to be installed.

“He denies it’s for Cape Wind even though the paperwork says otherwise,” Baker said.
“There was certainly a plan … there was momentum.”

Robert Keough, a spokesman for the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said the vessel was only mentioned in two private consultants’ reports, not state documents, and that there has never been a claim it would be needed for Cape Wind.

Patrick’s campaign manager, Sydney Asbury, shot back with a quip about Baker’s role, when he was in state government in the 1990s, in financing the Big Dig.

"It's ironic that Republican Charlie Baker is talking about a boat that will never be built when there are roads and bridges all across Massachusetts that have not been built because of Baker's reckless Big Dig financing scheme,” she said in a statement.

In addition to criticizing the barge, Baker criticized Patrick again for raising taxes and predicted that, if elected, he will raise them again. Baker has made his “no new taxes” pledge a centerpiece of his campaign.

“Four years ago, we heard him say over and over again that he had no plans to raise taxes,” Baker said. “Whenever he had a problem, he hit the tax button.”