By Bill Forry

More than three years after they first brought up the idea to neighbors in Pope's Hill, Stop & Shop is finally moving ahead with plans to build an updated store at Morrissey Boulevard and Freeport Street. In tearing down their current store and starting fresh, the Quincy corporation will add another 20,000 square feet of shopping space to its prime Neponset location. Gone, however, is an earlier plan to build a glass-enclosed parking garage, which some neighbors objected to - and which also would have added an extra one million dollars to the project's pricetag.

For neighbors, who've endured a sub-par shopping experience for years now, it's been a long time coming. But Phil Carver, who heads up the Pope's Hill Neighborhood Association, says that there is still excitement at the prospect.

"It will definitely be a very nice, new store, and a lot more modern," says Carver. "It will be on pretty much the same footprint, but will be bigger towards the boulevard."

Carver says there are still some lingering concerns about how traffic will flow through the property- and where cars will enter and exit. But he says Stop & Shop planners have been receptive to working with him and other neighbors, even as the parent company seemed to be dragging its feet on moving the project towards construction.

"I think this Stop & Shop started to slide in the pecking order for a while," says Carver. "But it bodes well for Stop & Shop to try to do the right thing in each part of Dorchester. And we need to hold people accountable. If they want to go forward in South Bay (see story, page 1), they need to be held accountable for their actions elsewhere."

The Freeport Street Stop & Shop plan goes before the city's Zoning Board of Appeals for approvals on Tuesday, March 4.

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Carver's sentiments about holding companies like Stop & Shop accountable for their behavior across the neighborhood is part of the theme behind a new effort that he and other civic leaders are launching this week. The Dorchester Neighborhood Issues Forum held its inaugural meeting last night (after the Reporter went to press). Its mission: to tackle "universal issues that permeate" Dorchester through "a new era of neighborhood cooperation in Dorchester."

The concept, of course, is not a new one. For many years, the Dorchester United Neighborhood Association (DUNA) hurled itself at big-ticket items like the siting of UMass-Boston on Columbia Point in the early 1970s. After a period of dormancy, the organization was resurrected on more than one occasion as DANA (with "Allied" trumping "United" in the acronym.) In the latter part of the '90s DANA, under the leadership of Ashmont's Mark Juaire, laid claim - and rightly so - for channeling the flurry of activism that compelled the MBTA and state lawmakers to finally address the neighborhood's decrepit Red Line stations. DANA's public forum and e-mail campaign was a compelling one-two punch that ultimately resulted in the commitment to rebuild the four stops from Ashmont to Savin Hill, a project that's set to start in earnest this spring.

DANA has since fizzled out once again. But the fundamental idea behind the group is still valid: Dorchester needs an umbrella civic group to deal with neighborhood-wide issues like transportation, student dorms at UMass, and large-scale development projects. That's not to say that existing civic associations shouldn't maintain control over their current turf. But history has shown that there's strength in unity - and in Dorchester, the city's largest section, unity can prove elusive.

The latest incarnation promises to be an "eclectic mix of Dorchester residents united together in an attempt to fuse divergent ideas into neighborhood symmetry," according to a flier sent around by Carver to civic leaders this week. "We will work together in an attempt to strike an equal balance between quality of life and city living because we realize that these issues are not mutually exclusive."

The success of the "issues forum" will likely be tested by the priorities that are laid out by the organizers. One incarnation of DANA in the mid-'90s overreached by making statewide insurance reform its chief objective. And while the campaign that resulted surely had merit, it could not produce results. Under Juaire, DANA found an issue that could be attained and did just that. If the issues forum can stay grounded in reality, stake out a small handful of concrete goals and make them happen without adding more hours of meeting time to an already jam-packed civic calendar, it will be a wild success.

For more information on the Issues Forum, contact Phil Carver at Philip.carver@popeshill.com or Ken Smith of the Melville Park Civic Association at kensmith37@hotmail.com.

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Unless you're one of those L Street wackos who like to leap into the frosty surf of Pleasure Bay for fun, your thoughts probably haven't turned just yet to the sandy shores of our new and improved city beaches just yet. But, with Pedro and Curt about to bring the heat down in Ft. Myers, it won't be long before we'll be looking to make tracks to Carson, Malibu, Tenean, and Savin Hill.

Problem is, even with all the money that's been pumped into the state-owned beaches lately, there's still a huge health risk bobbing amid the waves.

According to a report released this week by Save the Harbor, Save the Bay, the beaches in Southie and Dorchester are still plagued with unhealthy levels of human waste one out of every five days in the summertime. That's because, according to the report, contaminated stormwater and other material in sewer pipes get discharged into the shallow waters of Dorchester Bay, even during small storm events. It's happening at a rate that's unacceptable, according to Bruce Berman, a leading watchdog of the court-mandated, 10-year effort to "clean up" Boston Harbor.

"The harbor and the bay seem to be much better, but the beaches are just the same," says Berman. "And that's not what we said we would do."

Berman is pushing the MWRA to address the situation by fixing broken pipes that he says are at the root of the problem. Most of the closings, Berman suggests, are related to small storms, and not to the larger Combined Sewer Overflow pipes "that we had assumed were the problem."

"We're counting on the MWRA to come forward with a plan that addresses the real problem at the beaches," says Berman. "There's got to be a way to catch the flow on dry days and to capture it. If they can do that cost effectively, they'd be heroes."

State Senator Jack Hart agrees.

"If we don't include this somehow we will have failed in the long run," says Hart, who acknowledges that the beach closings are not a "high-profile issue" among his constituents. Since the early '70s, he says, most people in his native Southie and Dorchester have avoided the beaches, even though improvements have been made.

"Over time it's become psychological," Hart says.