On April 23, 2019, the Massachusetts Conservation Voters (MCV) testified in support of the Public Lands Preservation Act (PLPA).
The need for this bill became abundantly clear during the last session when the City of Fitchburg, the town of Westminster, and Waste Management asked legislators to late file a bill, H-4677, to take 85 acres of the Leominster State Forest for an expansion of the Fitchburg-Westminster Landfill.
When MCV learned of this proposal, a month before the session ended, we joined a number of groups in asking House Ways & Means to keep it in committee. MCV also authored an Op-Ed piece opposing the bill, which appeared in the Worcester Telegram on Dec. 14th. Some people in the area, who have problems with the way the landfill is run now, only found out about the expansion plan via that column.
The process was clearly at odds with the spirit of the Article 97 land conversion review policy in place at the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. Specifically, the land being offered in compensation had not been through the EOEEA suitability review process before the bill was filed. In fact, to this day, the compensatory land has not even been publicly identified, let alone evaluated.
The bill was not refiled in January, but we are under no illusions that this idea is dead. The PLPA would codify EOEEA’s no net loss policy and set up a public process by which these proposals could be evaluated against the public’s desire and need to keep our protected land from being forever lost.
To read MCV’s letter to the Joint Committee on Environment Natural Resources, and Agriculture, please click here: