Berkshire County — By a 4-1 vote, with Lee representative and Select Board Chair Bob Jones opposed, the Rest of River Municipal Committee approved a $15,000 expenditure on Thursday, May 25, funding its attorney’s participation in the Housatonic River Initiative and the Housatonic Environmental Action League’s federal appellate case against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Along with General Electric, the Committee is listed as an Intervenor, an interested party that has a stake in the case’s outcome, in the appeal. Oral arguments on the appeal are set for Tuesday, June 6.
The town of Lee is asking to work with a mediator to resolve whether the Committee should be filing an Intervenor brief at all, Jones said and asked that the expenditure vote be tabled until the mediation is resolved. That motion failed. “As I said when we took the original vote, we fully believe that the Rest of River Committee should stay out of the court case,” he said. “This is between HRI, the EPA, and GE, and let the chips fall where they may.”
The vote, via Zoom, was first slated for the Committee’s March 27 meeting, with the agenda listing the item as “Approval of Expenditure of Funds.” After a May 19 finding by the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General that this notice was insufficient and violated the state’s Open Meeting regulations, however, the agenda item was brought back for a revote on May 25.
The Attorney General review was prompted by a May 4 complaint filed by newly appointed Rest of River member Joshua Bloom in which he requested the Committee allow meeting recordings and public comments. Among other provisions, the Committee was ordered to post the agenda item again and discuss and vote on the expenditure by June 2.
Backstory
Created in 2013, the Housatonic Rest of River Municipal Committee includes Great Barrington, Lee, Lenox, Sheffield, and Stockbridge to advocate for the cleanup of the Housatonic River following General Electric’s devastating pollution of the area. The company has been found to have deposited industrial chemicals, polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, into the waterway from 1932 to 1977, toxic waste from its electric transformer plant in Pittsfield. In 1979, the EPA banned the production of PCBs, and in 2000, prompted by federal and other government agencies, GE began its process of cleaning up the river.
The HRI and HEAL appeal goes back to an early attempt in 2016 by the EPA to order GE to ship the PCB waste from the Rest of River area out of state. However, on appeal by GE, the remedy was later abandoned by the U.S. EPA’s Region 1 Board, and a new permit was issued pursuant to a controversial 2020 settlement agreement. The new permit required GE to ship the most highly contaminated waste out of state while disposing of other wastes containing lower concentrations of PCBs at a new facility in Berkshire County. That site is now proposed for Lee, on a pristine hilltop near Woods Pond and just past an entrance to the October Mountain State Forest.
HRI and HEAL then petitioned for a review of the new permit, objecting to its hybrid nature of disposal. That review was denied on February 8, 2022, and an appeal was filed by the two environmental groups with the First Circuit Court of Appeals in March. The Committee’s brief supports the EPA’s 2020 order and opposes the appeal.
Public comment
In a 4-1 vote, with Lenox representative Channing Gibson opposed, public comment of two to three minutes per speaker was approved by the dais at Jones’s request.
Bloom said the meeting was the third or fourth consecutive session in which public comments were excluded from the agenda “while there have been people from the public who have taken their time out of their workdays who have been interested in participating and engaging in their town’s process which we are entrusted to do.”
Anne Langlais of Lee began the public comment session by thanking the Committee for “finally allowing a public comment period after all this time; months and months we have been waiting to have a voice at your meetings.”
As with the other members of the public who spoke at the meeting, all of whom said they were residents of Lee, Langlais said she was “disheartened” by the Committee’s four other towns that aren’t listening to Lee residents who don’t want the PCB waste disposal facility, or dump, in their town. She said she was dismayed by the group’s opposition in the appellate case, a plea that aims to restore a plan to move the toxic materials out of the area. “[That] you guys are making a decision to go to court against the town of Lee and interject yourselves into a court case that is ongoing is baffling to me,” she said. “That you want to be represented, going down in history, or going against your neighbors.”
Langlais called out Chair Tom Matuszko for not putting a public comment period on the Committee’s agendas and requested that he do so for future meeting agendas.
The group’s Intervenor status in the HRI lawsuit is “hurting people,” according to Lee’s Janice Braim. “If this dump was in any of your backyards, this would be a different story, believe me,” she said.
