2011-09-28

Scattered Showers 70/60

THE TUFTS DAILY

VOLUME LXII, NUMBER 14

Where You Read It First Est. 1980 TUFTSDAILY.COM

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Boston Avenue Boloco restaurant to close by Stephanie

Haven

Contributing Writer

Boloco will likely close its Tufts branch on Boston Avenue when the restaurant’s five-year lease expires on Nov. 30, CEO and founder John Pepper told the Daily. While this location has witnessed increased business in the last year, sales continue to be the lowest of the burrito chain’s 18 New England restaurants, he said. “The hard truth of the matter is that we had expected Boston Avenue to be developed more than it has been by now,” Pepper said. “Unfortunately the recession hit and everything kind of stopped, so it remained the same as it started in 2006.” Pepper said he had anticipated an increase in sales pending the completion of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA)’s Green Line Extension Project, which would have created a stop near Boston Avenue. But the extension project has been plagued by delays, and while the MBTA and Massachusetts Department of Transportation continue to plan the new Medford T stop, now scheduled to be finished between 2018 and 2020, Pepper said the branch cannot afford to wait. “I personally will miss having the business there,” Pepper said, “but my team that works there will miss friends they’ve developed over the years.” Even though Boloco has been in jeopardy of closing for a few years, employees at the Boston Avenue location said they were surprised when they learned the company wasn’t signing another long-term lease. “It was kind of a big shocker because I feel like we get a lot of customers,” Boloco employee Lamar Walker told the Daily. “I really think they’re messing [Tufts students] up. I think that a lot of people don’t want Boloco to close.” Branches of the Boloco franchise on average serve 600 customers per day, whereas the Tufts branch only serves about 200 customers per day, making it the burrito chain’s least-profitable franchise, Pepper said.

“It’s very portable and in most cases it’s very delicious,” Pepper said. “We’ve always found that to work well on college campuses. We’re on almost every major college in Boston so we thought that Tufts made a lot of sense.” After the Tufts branch ceased its delivery service in April, however, business increased, Pepper said, making him rethink the decision not to sign another lease. “There is an opportunity that we’re working on right now to go monthto-month on our lease,” Pepper said. “But if we had something that people really loved at Tufts it would be successful and something just fell flat.” While he’s still not sure what the branch will do at the end of its lease in November, Pepper said he hopes customers will offer feedback so he knows what the Tufts community would want from the restaurant if it were to stay open. “There’s no reason to do something that people don’t like,” Pepper said. “If there’s something we can do to get people to want to go to Boloco, we’ll do whatever. We can’t go totally crazy, but we are pretty crazy.” Boloco’s closure will be disappointing to Tufts students who frequent the burrito joint, particularly those who live uphill and off-campus near the Boston Avenue location, like junior Kathryn Galasso. “It was a nice place to go and I’m definitely sad it’s not going to be there,” Galasso, who lived in Wren Hall last year, said. “If you needed food it was the closest place to go. It was pretty good with a reasonable price.” Despite the Boston Avenue location’s struggling business, Pepper said the 15-year-old business is expanding to six new locations: three in the Boston area, one in Rhode Island and two in Washington, D.C. “The head scratcher is we’ve had a great few years,” Pepper said. “We love Tufts and we’ve had so many students come to our events, but it hasn’t been enough to cause people to walk down the other side of the hill.”

Virginia Bledsoe/Tufts Daily

The Boston Avenue location of Boloco will likely close at the end of November due to an inability to generate profit.

Inside this issue

Courtesy Department of Economics

Professor of Economics Linda Loury, who passed away last week, was a leader in the field of social economics.

In Memory of Linda Loury Saumya Vaishampayan Daily Editorial Board

Professor of Economics Linda Loury died on Sept. 23 at her home in Brookline with her husband and two sons by her side. She was 59 and had been battling cancer for some time. Loury was an “intellectual and moral pillar” of the Department of Economics for almost thirty years, according to Department of Economics Chair Enrico Spolaore. She joined Tufts in 1984 after earning her Ph.D. in economics in 1978 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her B.A. in economics in 1973 from Swarthmore College. Loury was widely recognized for founding and conducting research during the

late 1970s and early 1980s in the area of social economics, which, according to Spolaore, examines the role of social interactions and networks in economic outcomes. “Now we know that those aspects are very important to economic outcomes, but it took some time and she was one of the very first to work on that,” Spolaore said. “Linda Loury was one of the most influential, interesting and path-breaking scholars of her field.” Her innovative research and commitment to academic standards were major draws for incoming faculty, according to Professor of Economics Yannis Ioannides. “When I visited the department before see LOURY, page 2

Green Line Extension Project delayed to 2018 by

Mahpari Sotoudeh

Daily Editorial Board

The Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) this summer announced that its project to extend the T’s Green Line, a project chronically plagued with delays and funding complications, will again be pushed back. Now slated for completion in 2018 at the earliest, the extension is part of Massachusetts’ legal obligation under the federal Clean Air Act to counteract the environmental impact of the 15-year Boston underground mega-highway project known as the Big Dig. Plans for the project now include seven stops, one of which would be built adjacent to the Tufts campus near Curtis Hall. A second phase of the project would extend the line further to Mystic Valley Parkway/Route 16. The most recent delays stem from complications in the state process of applying for federal funding. In addition to recently guaranteeing over 476 million state dollars to the project itself, Massachusetts has plans to apply in December for help from the federal government in paying the expected $1.2 billion cost of the project. If approved, the federal help would cover about half of that amount. Difficulties in meeting certain requirements of the federal funding application

process, though, have necessitated the completion date’s pushback, according to Tufts’ Director of Community Relations Barbara Rubel. “The most recent information we have about the cause of the delay is that... the state is going to apply for federal funding, and once they get into that pipeline, there are very rigid rules about what they can do [and] when,” Rubel explained. “Once they get into that order they can’t really… keep moving as quickly as they would like to move,” Rubel said. According to Somerville’s Director of Communications Michael Meehan, the state has been unable to secure funding from the federal level due to outstanding debts from the Big Dig. “It’s tricky in that the state supplies money, but one of the things the state has to do to get the federal money is show [the project’s] long-term viability, which is hampered by its outstanding liabilities created largely by the Big Dig,” Meehan said. “They have to figure a large portion of it out to get the funding they want to create the Green Line Extension.” Because one of the provisions of the Clean Air Act is that the extension of the Green Line be completed by 2014, the state at that time will be obligated to enact temsee GREEN LINE, page 2

Today’s sections

Under new leadership, the Tufts Republicans wish to expose a liberal campus to new political thought.

Tufts’ co-ed sailing team takes home the New England Sloop Championship.

see FEATURES, page 3

see SPORTS, back page

News Features Arts & Living Editorial | Letters

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Op-Ed Comics Classifieds Sports

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