Lee — For Lee and Tri-Town Boards of Health (Tri-Town) officials, the path to find out if a regional emergency-management plan for southern Berkshire County exists has been fraught with twists and turns.
Lee Select Board sent in another direction
As guests at the July 1 Lee Select Board meeting, Berkshire Regional Planning Board (BRPC) executives took to the podium to respond to members’ questions regarding the agency’s use of more than $1 million of funding—specifically, whether that money was deployed to craft a regional emergency-management plan to address the roles Berkshire County towns would take in the event of a regional catastrophe (e.g., a tornado, hurricane, flood, or forest fire).
Although every municipality in the Berkshires is required under federal law to have a local emergency plan—and the town of Lee has one—local officials say a regional emergency plan makes a lot of sense since disasters don’t tend to stay within town lines.
The issue stems from the potential for a devastating event to occur during the 12-plus years of the Housatonic Rest of River remediation, a plan to clean up the waterway from the now-banned chemicals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), deposited by General Electric Company during its decades of transformer manufacturing at the conglomerate’s Pittsfield plant. That plan includes constructing an upland disposal facility, or toxic-waste repository, in Lee to house the least dense materials, while sending the more potent dredged matter out of the area, with trucks and trains used to transport the PCB-laden substances.
“With the Rest of the River agreement, I’ve had many friends, neighbors, constituents express concern about, ‘what are we going to do if a truck rolls over, what are we going to do if there’s a train wreck,’” said Select Board member Robert “Bob” Jones. “What do we do if a train derails and it’s got several tankers full of high-level PCBs?”
So, he began to investigate contingencies that exist in case those events transpire and spoke with local police and fire chiefs who, although they cited a lack of current emergency-management plans, still advocated for such a program. The heads of these public safety agencies are not trained to deal with PCBs or the cleanup of a Superfund site such as the Rest of River that involves multiple Berkshire towns, Jones said. “As far as I know, if there is an emergency-management plan, it doesn’t really cover these kinds of emergencies,” he said.
The group let BRPC know they had questions about a regional emergency-management plan. “I’m really, really worried between trucks and trains and dredging, and what do we do if aquifers are impacted,” Jones said. “These are all conversations that we have to have as a region, as neighbors, and I’d like to see something. I think that conversation has to start at some point because the odds of something going wrong have gone up substantially.”
According to BRPC Executive Director Thomas Matuszko and Berkshire County Boards of Health Association (BCBOHA) Director Laura Kittross, creating or administering such a plan isn’t within the purview of those agencies, with funds primarily allocated to staff salaries relevant to public health and boards of health. Those employees are tasked with adopting contact lists for local boards of health and sharing information; conducting monthly meetings of the seven-member BCBOHA Executive Committee; supporting emergency operations center quarterly drills; providing training for emergency food safety and shelter operations; and developing work plans with quarterly grant reporting, among other functions.
The BCBOHA is the emergency-preparedness coalition for 32 local boards of health in Berkshire County, including Tri-Town that serves Lee, Lenox, and Stockbridge boards of health. It is also known as the Berkshire County Public Health Emergency Preparedness Coalition (PHEP). PHEP funding stems from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), and allocations are made to all 50 states to prepare public health agencies on how to participate in local, regional, and national emergency-response efforts.
BRPC staffs the BCBOHA and acts as its fiscal agent, or host, for emergency-preparedness funds.
An attachment to a June 30 memorandum drafted by Matuszko to Lee Town Administrator Christopher Brittain and obtained by The Berkshire Edge indicates that approximately $1.1 million was allocated by the agency for Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) funding over the past six fiscal years, ranging from $150,909 in fiscal year 2019 and generally increasing annually to $169,656 for the current fiscal year 2025. Each year “is a separate contract,” so that “no money carries over from year to year,” a notation states.
“Our emergency-preparedness funding is specifically to bring public health issues into the conversation, not to do the wider emergency planning,” Kittross told the dais, adding that each town possesses its own plan with annual updates. “So that would be a starting place, but I think really where we need to take these concerns is to the Regional Emergency Planning Committee.” She said her team tries to attend those committee meetings but is “just a member.”
“I think your concerns are really well founded and I think that’s the group to start with [for] the comprehensive emergency management plan that you’re looking at,” Kittross said.
Tri-Town Boards of Health attempts to gain financial detail
The Lee session comes on the heels of an April 9 Tri-Town meeting during which those members, citing the funds BRPC collected annually during recent years, questioned Kittross as to what coordinated role the agency would play in the face of a public health disaster and the plans to be implemented to safeguard residents of the Berkshire community.
Kittross was invited to the session after Tri-Town received an email from the BCBOHA asking the group to create an “emergency preparedness framework” due the next month. Tri-Town Executive Director Jim Wilusz said he found more confusion than answers as he located outdated plans. Wilusz reached out to different local government agencies—police and fire departments, select boards—to see what response those officials had and came up empty handed.
Subsequently, on behalf of Tri-Town, he filed a public records request with the Franklin Regional Council of Governments (FRCOG) as record holder for the Western Massachusetts Health and Medical Coordinating Coalition (HMCC) that coordinates public health and medical emergency preparedness for Berkshire, Franklin, Hampden, and Hampshire counties. In his request, Wilusz stated that previous inquiries for information related to regional emergency preparedness went unanswered and he was officially requesting a “full, detailed financial accounting for all funding associated with PHEP and [Massachusetts] MRC [Medical Reserve Corps that supports community public health and emergency-response efforts] in Berkshire County” from 2020 to 2025 along with any documents related to emergency-preparedness planning.
However, he abandoned that request when HMCC Program Manager Alexander Sylvain responded it would take 90 hours of work to research the information at a cost of $2,250 to Tri-Town and offered to undertake a smaller research project for $200.
