As developments in a major Housatonic River remediation project accelerate, two candidates for state representative confront a challenging issue—and its sticky politics.
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From its headwaters near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the Housatonic River flows south for one hundred and forty-nine miles, winding through the southern Berkshires and across Connecticut until it reaches Long Island Sound near a barrier beach called Milford Point. On its way there, it more or less evenly bisects a Massachusetts House of Representatives district known as the Third Berkshire.
More noteworthy than how it splits that swath of southwestern Massachusetts—the largest, in square miles, of any state-house district in the Commonwealth—is how, over several decades, the battle to restore a polluted river and protect the health of those living nearby created sharp divisions in the legislative district’s eighteen communities.
On one side are those who vigorously oppose a pending Environmental Protection Agency-managed plan, called “Rest of River,” to remove some amount of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, from the river and its floodplains—present in large quantity after decades of dumping and spillage of toxic transformer-insulating fluids from a massive General Electric manufacturing plant in Pittsfield—and then deposit more than a million cubic yards of tainted soil and sediment in a new engineered landfill in the town of Lee.
They may oppose it for cleaning up too many PCBs or too few, for taking too long or not long enough, or for ignoring bioremediation, incineration, and other technologies they say could do the job—even if at much higher cost. Without question, many oppose the plan because it permanently saddles the historically working-class town of Lee with a toxic-waste dump—however well-built and leak-monitored the E.P.A. insists it will be.
On another side are those who see the planned thirteen-year-long project—which emerged after more than a decade of legal and bureaucratic fights between and among state and federal regulators, corporate lawyers, environmental activists, courts, everyday citizens, mediators, and local elected officials—as an overdue, necessary evil. They say an agreement reached nearly five years ago was the best that could be achieved when five small communities along the river—with a total population of less than 25,000—faced off against the wealth, political power, and bottomless legal resources of G.E., a longtime Fortune 100 company. G.E. Aerospace, which earlier this year inherited the General Electric brand name and legacy, is legally required to clean up the chemical pollution put into the Housatonic by its corporate forbears and pay a bill estimated at more than six hundred million dollars. With shareholder value at front-of-corporate mind, there’s little argument that the company is motivated to keep expenses to a minimum.
And there’s at least one more side: Those who may not like the prospect of a PCB dump in the heart of tourism-reliant Berkshire County, or who might be outraged by a still-confidential process that led to the agreement’s approval in February, 2020, but who are working to leverage every opportunity to ensure the planned remediation is done well and the new landfill is safe. At least, that is, within the confines of an E.P.A.-issued permit that a federal court last year ruled comports with the law. And besides, they say, the project is already well in motion; derailing it now could mean that probably cancer-and-other-illness-causing PCBs remain where they are for many more years, leaving little hope for a safe, healthy Housatonic River fully restored for some future generation.
Draw a Venn diagram of these groups, and at the overlapping center you’ll find Bob Jones, a seventy-one-year-old member of Lee’s governing Select Board. His voice—deep, sonorous, and made for the age of radio—has been among the most prominent heard since 2020 in nonstop wrangling over the project, its planned twenty-acre landfill site, and an overall remediation plan that, he says, shortchanges both the ecological health of the river and the human-health prospects of river-corridor residents current and future.
His skepticism starts with process. “I think the Rest of River agreement was intentionally structured to divide the [five] towns,” Jones, who was elected during a multi-year sweep that replaced all three Lee Select Board members who voted for the deal, told me recently. “Five representatives, in a closed room, trying to bang out some sort of agreement, being told there’s going to be at least one dump but there could be two or three,” he said. “Some of those representatives weren’t even elected officials,” he said, referring to members of a five-town municipal committee that negotiated with G.E., E.P.A., environmental groups, and others.
