Off dead center on the Surface Artery

What a difference a decision makes.

The Mayor's Surface Artery Task force, God bless 'em, met weekly or biweekly most of last year, wrestling with the existential questions: Who would own the new Central Artery land? Oversee it? And, most difficult, pay millions a year to keep it beautiful?

Thursday morning, it was a more upbeat scene when the 30 or so members (recently expanded from about a dozen) gathered, the day after Mayor Thomas Menino had spoken.

He and House Speaker Tom Finneran -- in the audience, just in case there were doubters -- have agreed on the seemingly unresolvable questions of the Surface Artery land. The ones that have been kicked around for a decade. Previously, neither state nor city officials would yield control of the 30 acres. "We paid for it," said the state. "It's our downtown," said the city. It now appears that:

Menino traded away control of a five-person board of trustees, which will set policy and make sure money isn't wasted, for a commitment that the Legislature will tax downtown businesses to pay for maintenance of roughly $4 million a year.

The state maintains ownership of the land, even though the 1997 law that transferred responsibility for the Big Dig to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority assumed the Pike would keep it. Details aren't worked out, Boston Redevelopment Authority director and task force cochairman Mark Maloney assured everyone. The big remaining questions:

• Will the Pike just roll over and give up control of the land -- even design and construction of the new parks?

• Who will control the 13-member board of directors that will take policy direction from those five trustees appointed mostly by state officials?

• What does this new organization mean for the half-dozen development parcels that will coexist with open space along the surface corridor?

As the other task force chairman, Rob Tuchmann, said, "Clearly I have things up in the air." And yet most everyone seemed to feel lifted. Because last week, after so long, there was movement.