---

In recent years, one of the biggest political battlegrounds in Easthampton have been its parks projects. A skate park, pickleball courts, a dog park, and places to play basketball have filled discussion in public meetings.

But as those parks projects advance through planning phases, some Parks and Recreation Committee members and maintenance staff workers are skeptical that the city has done all the necessary groundwork to support this expansion of maintenance demands. Facing multiple logistic limitations, including a moldy and water-logged maintenance office, staff and committee members are questioning how Parks and Recreation will be able to meet increased maintenance demands.

“It seems logical that in order for the department to successfully take on further expansion of services, basic infrastructure needs need to be met,” Parks and Recreation Commission Vice Chair Eric Poulin told The Shoestring. “The city seems to want to put the proverbial cart before the horse.”

A new skate park and a new dog park are planned for the city, both of which the Department of Parks and Recreation would maintain. In July, the Daily Hampshire Gazette reported on the loss of a public gymnasium at the former Pepin Elementary School due to a handful of municipal departments, including parks and recreation, being unable to take on the maintenance responsibility. The parks department currently maintains six parks — including the 260-acre Nonotuck Park — a playground, the Mount Tom North Trailhead, and the Manhan Rail Trail. It also operates three city-owned cemeteries.

Maintenance staff for the Department of Parks and Recreation and the cemetery department staff currently work out of a number of buildings, with some built between 1938 and 1939. All of them are facing significant infrastructure challenges.

On June 28, The Shoestring visited the department’s maintenance building, storage garage, and sheds at Daley Field, as well as the cemetery maintenance building, and spoke with staff members.

Mayor Nicole LaChapelle did not return an interview request for this article.

***

Evidence of regular significant flooding was apparent upon entering the Parks and Recreation maintenance building. In addition to a powerful damp smell, a water line on walls, equipment, and boxes was easily visible throughout the building, coming up roughly 2 to 4 inches. On the drop ceiling tiles above were large swaths of water damage and what appeared to be a significant amount of mold in several areas.

Green Environmental Consulting, a company based in Florence, conducted a “baseline mold evaluation” of the maintenance building in 2011. This evaluation consisted of a visual inspection and air and surface sampling. The report findings, obtained via a public records request, outline a significant presence of mold in the building.

“Approximately 16 square feet of suspect black mold growth” was observed on the ceiling in the bathroom and confirmed in sample testing, according to the report. The GEC report also cited water stained carpet, standing water, and mold findings from sample analysis that amounted to a level high enough to qualify as a significant health risk.

GEC’s report recommended remediation and the removal of all damaged materials and building repairs to prevent water intrusion and resampling to ensure the removal of the mold. However, GEC ultimately concluded that “the inspection techniques used are inherently limited in the sense that only full demolition procedures will reveal all building materials of a structure and, therefore, all areas of potential fungal growth. Other unidentified microbiological impacts may be located within walls, ceiling cavities, below flooring or grade, and other non-accessible areas.”

Despite the results of the mold evaluation report, maintenance staff say they are still working out of the building and no significant efforts for removal or remediation have been made.

Jeff Craig, who has worked for the Parks and Recreation Department on and off since 1986, recalled a few updates to the maintenance building he had seen during his time, some done by staff themselves, but nothing that would amount to the recommendations made in GEC’s report. He said the parks office staff did receive a much-needed new building around 2010.

The Shoestring requested records to verify what building renovations, or updates, were done in the past, as well as any future work planned for the parks department maintenance building and any building inspection records for the maintenance building. The city responded three weeks later saying that they had no records.

In addition, the city does not currently have a building commissioner and the Building Department was closed for a period of time starting June 28. The email address listed for the Building Department’s clerk is also defunct.

This situation seems to draw a stark contrast between priorities for working conditions for the Parks and Recreation Department maintenance staff in comparison to some of the other municipal work centers in the city.

In July 2023, the City Hall building on Payson Avenue, built in 1970, shut its doors to staff and the public for air quality concerns amid HVAC repairs. The air quality concerns were triggered by the presence of concrete dust in work areas from a basement wall being opened to install new HVAC equipment.

“Our primary focus is protecting the health and well-being of our  employees and residents who may enter the building,” LaChapelle said in a press release at the time. “This may be an over abundance of caution, but this decision has been made to ensure a safe working environment for all. We are committed to reopening City Hall quickly, but only when we are assured by experts that it meets the highest standards of safety and functionality.”

An air quality report conducted a few days later by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health found carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide levels, relative humidity, fine particulate levels, and volatile organic compounds to all be “undetectable” or “below range.” The state also found the temperature to be “within or close to the recommended range of 70°F to 78°F.” The report recommended implementing up-to-date contamination protocols during the renovation to avoid further potential migration of potential pollutants from the construction.

City Hall remained closed to staff until August 21, 2023. A press release from the mayor’s office that day says the building underwent “a deep cleaning by ServicePro” and that staff should “notice improved air quality and comfort within their workspaces.”

By contrast, just down the road, parks maintenance employees are still contending with many challenges in their work environment. In addition to water and mold, ventilation and heating in the maintenance building are seemingly inefficient as well.

There is one small air vent on the building’s ceiling surrounded by water damage and what appears to be mold. There is a large garage bay door that can be opened for air flow, but this is not practical in the winter and leaves staff little respite from extreme heat in the summer. In the winter, the space is heated primarily by a wood stove with a supplemental propane heater in the bathroom kept just warm enough – around 55 degrees fahrenheit – to keep the pipes from freezing. Staff said they were also responsible for gathering and splitting the wood for the stove.

Outdated electrical service in the maintenance building also added some challenges for efficiency and functionality with regular daily activities, like warming up lunch in the microwave, causing outages.

In addition to these limitations and frustrations, there is not a lot of dry storage space in any of the department’s buildings. In the garage where supplies like tractors and limestone are stored, the roof and slatted sides have significant gaps, offering clear views to the outside.

“We store all of our equipment in here, so if it gets rained on there’s a potential for damage,” Nick Laprade, an employee of the department since 2017, told The Shoestring. He recounted a few times limestone for marking the baseball fields was also damaged by rain and that it remained a challenge to keep the supply dry enough to use.

The Parks Department is also using Daley Field’s stone bathroom building, built in 1937, for storage since it can no longer be used by the public. The stone bathroom is the only bathroom on Daley Field and has not been usable for nearly a decade. It has since been replaced by a portable toilet  that has some accessibility limitations. The department does have access to three small sheds for storage. However, two of those sheds are collapsing, one of which has a caved in roof. Parks staff said the newest shed, that is in the best condition, was a donation from a private group.

The maintenance building bathroom, which suffers from regular flooding, sometimes has some uninvited guests, too.

“We’ve had a snake in there once, or I guess more than a few times,” Laprade said. He added that chipmunks, spiders of all sizes, and birds were not uncommon either.

The Parks and Recreation Department and the cemetery staff are also struggling with insufficient and unreliable vehicles, causing some to use their personal cars for work. Craig said the department has four vehicles, one donated, and two “buggies,” one of which was also donated. Craig told The Shoestring one of the department’s trucks is from 1994, and most are in need of regular repairs. He said parks security also has one “hand me down” vehicle the Easthampton Police Department donated. A new vehicle was funded in both the Parks and Recreation Department and its cemetery budget this year and both of those new vehicles arrived in mid-July.

Transportation needs for the Easthampton police, however, have seemingly dominated municipal transportation priorities in recent years.

The Shoestring was not able to get up-to-date fleet records and recent vehicle purchase records from the Easthampton Police Department (the state supervisor of records determined on Thursday the department is not complying with public records law). Records from 2022, however, show five cruisers and a “patrol boat” from 2019, three from 2018 — including two motorcycles — one from 2017, and two from 2016. At that time, the police had roughly 20 vehicles registered and in use. The police also purchased two Teslas in 2022, two hybrid vehicles in 2020, and an unspecified “police interceptor” in 2021.

What’s more, current city practices have removed the ability of the Easthampton Police Department to hand down vehicles to other municipal departments, which has historically been a main source of upgrades for those departments. Grant funding the city has used for the transition to electric and hybrid vehicles has required the trade-in of EPD cruisers.

***

The city does have a “master plan” for the Department of Parks and Recreation spanning from 2021 to 2027, and some items are broken down into phases or have accompanying cost estimates. Strong timelines, however, are missing from the plan. Renovation and re-opening of the Nonotuck Park pool, which is listed on this plan, was completed earlier this summer. The maintenance building does receive a single-paragraph mention in the plan. It references “many in-house repairs” by parks staff over the years, and includes a $250,000 cost estimate for a new building.

This is not the first time the parks maintenance building has appeared in a renovation plan. The Shoestring obtained a letter the Parks and Recreation Committee wrote in March to the City Council, which  recalled that the replacement of the maintenance building was included in a 1998 “five-year plan.” The letter says that the current parks director, John Mason, had also previously submitted a 2014 plan to replace the building and add a meeting space for youth groups. His efforts were unsuccessful.

“There is a strong consensus among members of the Parks and Recreation Commission that this Nonotuck Park Maintenance Shop is unsuitable for further use and must be replaced as soon as possible,” the commission wrote. “Funding requests to accomplish this have been submitted on each capital improvement plan since FY 2019. The FY 2023 capital plan includes a request for the funding needed to purchase a new, prefabricated metal workshop to replace the outdated structure.”

The city’s master plan for the department would add two staff positions — a $16-an-hour offsite park maintenance job and a program director with a salary range of between $30,000 and $35,000 yearly — but also comes with additional maintenance needs because of the addition of two new basketball courts. No timeline or cost estimates are currently listed on the plan for those courts. There are also plans to increase bike- trail connectivity through the park, likely leading to increased park use and maintenance needs.

Neither the skatepark nor the dog park appear on the city’s master plan; however, both have moved through several design plans and received support from the City Council. In 2021, the city approved the use of $42,500 from the Community Preservation Act for the skatepark design and site selection. Councilors also approved $30,000 for soil testing and concept designs in 2023. So far, there have been two designs proposed for the skatepark and one design proposed for a combined skate park and dog park off of Ferry Street. Another design has been made for a dog park that would be located inside Nonotuck Park — a space inaccessible to cars in the park’s off season.

Two additional pickleball courts have also been moving forward through planning stages and will be located next to the existing pickleball courts in Nonotuck Park. The parks department will be in charge of maintenance for those courts, which are not mentioned in the city’s master plan.

---

The Shoestring is committed to bringing you ad-free content. We rely on readers to support our work! You can support independent news for Western Mass by visiting our Donate page.

---

When Easthampton police followed Rocky Schulsinger back to his home on Aug. 13, 2022, they explained that he had an expired inspection sticker. The police gave Schulsinger a verbal warning and left, according to a police report on the incident. Then, days later, police informed him that his license was suspended because he had been deemed “an immediate threat.”

“How a small town destroyed autistic transgender adult life,” was how Schulsinger first described the incident to The Shoestring.

What followed next for Schulsinger — and for The Shoestring as we went about investigating his interactions with law enforcement — was a Kafkaesque journey through police and government bureaucracy. 

The Aug. 13 incident wasn’t Schulsinger’s first interaction with Easthampton police; records provided by Schulsinger to The Shoestring date back to April 2021, when an embedded clinician in the Framingham Police Department called Easthampton officers to tell them about Schulsinger’s mental health.

Over the next year and a half, Easthampton police interacted with Schulsinger at least 65 times, in incidents Schulsinger described as frequent, targeted, and abusive. He said he faced targeted discrimination due to disability-related behaviors connected to a clinically diagnosed autism spectrum disorder, resulting in the suspension of his driver’s license and causing him significant harm.   

In a complaint Schulsinger filed with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination — or MCAD — he recounted a series of documented interactions with Easthampton city officials and employees, alleging that those interactions were later used against him.

“My disability related behaviors was a pretext to publicly discriminate against me and as a pretext to frivolous and false charges against me,” he wrote in the complaint. 

According to mental-health advocates and activists calling for non-police responses to public safety, the situation Rocky faced is far from unique.

The police murder of George Floyd in 2020 renewed national calls for police reform and better crisis response to reduce aggressive and sometimes fatal interactions with police. Municipalities locally and nationally have begun to adopt various crisis-response models in answer to this mounting public pressure. A model that cities in the Connecticut River Valley are widely adopting involves a licensed clinical social worker from a nonprofit organization like Clinical Support Options, or CSO, being “embedded” in the municipal police department. 

Activists and mental health advocates, however, have repeatedly questioned how this model would prevent negative outcomes for people experiencing a crisis, like involuntary confinement or legal consequences. 

“I think in some ways it represents a denial of the fact that when we talk about policing, we think of police, but actually social workers have been trained to police people, as well,” said Sera Davidow, the director of the Wildflower Alliance, a western Mass-based peer support and harm reduction group. “And so it’s often not bringing in a truly different way of interacting with people. It often can look quite similar.”

Davidow also serves on the Massachusetts Disability Law Center Board of Directors and its Council Against Institutional and Psychiatric Abuse, as well as on the advisory board of the National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma, and Mental Health. In a 2022 article about proposed involuntary outpatient commitment legislation in Massachusetts, she highlighted how most trauma boils down to a loss of power and control. 

“Losses of power and control compound one another,” Davidow wrote. “The more experiences someone has of that type of loss, the more likely they are to struggle moving forward.” 

She also noted multiple studies have shown that people subjected to “even the perception of coercion at the point of admission to a hospital can lead to elevated suicide risk upon release.” 

“Help that hurts isn’t help at all, and certainly shouldn’t be forced on someone,” Davidow wrote.

***

For Schulsinger, his experiences with the co-responder model resulted in what he described as bullying and harassment, detailing a repeated loss of control over his autonomy.

The interactions that Schulsinger included in his MCAD complaint involve members of the Easthampton Police Department, a social worker employed by the city, executive assistant to the mayor Lindsi Mailler, and CSO co-response clinician Emma Reilly, who was embedded with the EPD. Reilly has since been hired as a full-time city employee as the EPD’s “mental health and wellness coordinator” — a position that is funded through Department of Justice grants for a two-year period, according to a city press release. The city says Reilly now “provides for the mental health and wellness needs of police officers, fire fighters, teachers, and any other city employee in need of those services.”

During the August 2022 traffic stop, police gave Schulsinger a “verbal warning for the inspection sticker and allowed [him] to leave,” according to police officer Andrew Beaulieu’s written narrative. However, Schulsinger said he was later informed his license was suspended. 

Schulsinger provided his MCAD complaint to The Shoestring, along with police reports and dispatch logs the EPD provided him via public records request. 

(Those records the EPD gave him also contained personal identifying information for six other people, including their drivers license numbers, dates of birth, and physical addresses.) 

Easthampton Mayor Nicole LaChapelle and Police Chief Robert Alberti did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

In the documents the city and the EPD provided to both MCAD and Schulsinger, the police report pertaining to the traffic stop for the expired sticker and Beaulieu’s subsequent narrative are included. The police report is dated Aug. 14, 2022, but the accompanying narrative does not include a date of creation. The top of the police report includes a “caution” that says “subject has autism and is not police friendly.” This caution appears at the top of many included police reports.

Beaulieu’s narrative says he began following Schulsinger upon seeing the expired sticker. He ran Schulsinger’s plates while following behind to identify the driver and said he was “familiar” with Schulsinger “as having significant mental health issues, including Autism.” He said the car made “slight jolts to the left and right” while he was following. 

Beaulieu wrote that after issuing a verbal warning for the expired inspection sticker and returning to the police station, he was made aware of “several other incidents with Mr. Schulsinger being a danger behind the wheel” and was “advised that EPD Clinician Emma Reilly was familiar with these incidents.” 

He then wrote that it was not until Aug. 17 that he spoke to Reilly regarding Schulsinger. He listed three prior “incidents,” the details of which Schulsinger disputed in the MCAD complaint. Records the city provided to MCAD indicate that none of the mentioned prior incidents led to any citations or written warnings.

Beaulieu concluded the narrative saying that Schulsinger had been having “melt-downs” since the beginning of July “during which he refuses to engage with police/clinicians.” He said it was due to this “history over the last few months, both on the road and off” in addition to the traffic stop involving the expired sticker, that he felt “Mr. Schulsinger is a danger on the road, due to his current mental state and the fact that he admitted that he focuses on his GPS while driving, and not the road around him.” Beaulieu then requested an “immediate threat” be issued against Schulsinger’s license.

A request form for license suspension/revocation Beaulieu issued to the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles is dated Aug. 19, six days after he had last interacted with Schulsinger.

The MCAD complaint includes details of interactions Schulsinger had with the EPD’s embedded CSO clinician and various members of the EPD prior to his encounter with Beaulieu. Some of these interactions appear to be the ones Beaulieu referred to in his narrative. However, EPD dispatch records Schulsinger provided to The Shoestring include interactions dating back to April 2021 and have further details into the scope of the encounters between Schulsinger and the city. 

In the first logged interaction between the EPD and Schulsinger in April 2021, involving officer Robert Puska, the narrative details the EPD pursuing Schulsinger’s physical location after a clinician embedded with the Framingham Police Department notified EPD dispatch. The clinician requested that the EPD conduct a “section 12” action. In Massachusetts, this is also known as an “application for an authorization of temporary involuntary hospitalization.”

The basis for this request is from statements made a day prior in a mental health support group, according to the EPD dispatch narrative. Dispatch wrote that Schulsinger did not want police assistance, and that “no threats [were] made towards PD,” but continued attempting to locate him by tracking his mobile phone. The log misgendered Schulsinger as “trans-female but presents himself as a male.” 

An hour after dispatch took the call, EPD officers began attempting to make entry to Schulsinger’s apartment and continued to track his mobile phone through his cell phone provider, T-Mobile, records show. Nearly an hour later, Puska located Schulsinger driving in Easthampton and pulled him over.

There are 65 interactions with the EPD logged between April 2021 and September 2022 in records provided to Schulsinger. A majority of these interactions are documented as some form of well-being check — many initiated by a third-party clinician — requests for police services by Schulsinger himself, or triggered by reported behavior categorized as “emotionally deranged person” or “suspicious person” in EPD records. 

Situations that fell into these latter categories included confused or disoriented behavior in public spaces, difficulty with a vehicle that did not involve erratic driving, and walking around without a shirt. Most of the logged interactions appear resolved by direct communication with Shulsinger, often provided by third-party, non-embedded clinicians. None report physical threats from Schulsinger to EPD, EMS, or third parties. Some reports specifically say that clinicians did not feel unsafe. 

Despite the use of an embedded co-responder since September 2021, the EPD made repeated attempts to involuntarily commit Schulsinger to medical facilities via section 12 order, records show.

It appears that in none of these instances was the embedded CSO clinician physically present, according to dispatch records. The EPD requested a section 12 order on two separate occasions from off-site clinicians. In both of these incidents, Schulsinger was cleared by third-party clinicians who eventually were able to evaluate him and did not involuntarily commit him to hospital stays or inpatient services. 

In one interaction on June 5, 2022, records show that Connecticut State Police evaluated Schulsinger at the request of EPD officers who had tracked his mobile phone for eight hours. The Connecticut State Police Mobile Crisis Unit cleared Schulsinger upon evaluation and let him drive away on his own accord. 

In another interaction a month later, EPD officers attempted to forcibly enter Schulsinger’s apartment in the middle of the night by removing an AC window unit on the first floor, according to police records. Officer narratives indicate a convenience store clerk informed the officers of an interaction they had two hours earlier in the evening with Schulsinger that had them worried about his mental state. As a result, the EPD requested a section 12 from an off-site CSO clinician while simultaneously attempting to enter his apartment. Another clinician at CSO familiar with Schulsinger opted to arrive at his residence after hearing about the request. The clinician arrived and called CSO, asking for the section 12 to be removed — a request that was granted. According to police narratives, the clinician felt comfortable that Schulsinger was fine to remain in his residence. 

In addition to the suspension of Schulsinger’s driver’s license, the EPD also issued two “no-trespass orders” that barred him from entering City Hall or the Public Safety Complex in October, 2022. Schulsinger believes this was retaliatory and related to his many attempts to file a complaint with the department about the conduct of Beaulieu. The EPD’s police log shows Shulsinger attempted to make a complaint — and to receive a copy of it — in numerous ways after receiving differing verbal instructions from officers on Aug. 28, 29, 30, 31 and Sept. 11, 12, and 13. 

In an email on Sept. 27 to Karen Serra — a family and autism support director with the social-services organization Pathlight  — Police Chief Robert Alberti said, “I am not entering his frivolous complaints.” He also said Schulsinger’s needs are “beyond the scope of our abilities” and “if he persists, he will be criminally charged or arrested.” 

“We DO NOT want to have to do this, we know he needs help…help we CAN NOT provide,” Alberti wrote. “From this point forward, he will only be referred to the state and your office for assistance.”

Another city employee who is not affiliated with the police department or the mayor’s office was able to successfully obtain a harassment prevention order against Schulsinger in October 2022. The order was granted by a Northampton District Court judge.  

Schulsinger said he made a concerted effort to seek help from other city officials and employees including Mayor LaChapelle and her assistant. Schulsinger said he was instead met with further roadblocks. 

“When I tried to seek help from the Easthampton Township, I was instead targeted, bullied, harassed, and faced almost daily emotional abuse and manipulation,” Schulsinger said in court filings.  

When the EPD attempted to serve notice of the harassment prevention order to Schulsinger, he made a call to 911, according to the city’s response to his MCAD complaint. Schulsinger said he believed someone was trying to gain access to his apartment. The EPD then filed criminal charges against Schulsinger saying he made a false 911 call “willfully” and “maliciously.” 

Easthampton’s response to the MCAD complaint is lengthy — 27 pages of text plus exhibits. An MCAD complaint that decided in favor of the complainant, finding probable cause of the respondent’s violation of Massachusetts anti-discrimination laws, can move forward into resolution efforts including public hearings and remedy orders. In some cases this includes damages for emotional distress and attorneys’ fees. 

The city opens their response — which asks MCAD to find a “lack of probable cause” — by stating that the city is committed to understanding autism as it relates to public safety. The response notes that 14 out of the city’s 35 police officers had “received 40 hours of Crisis Intervention Team training from Behavioral Health Network, which included a two-hour block on working with individuals with autism.” They also note that the police academy now includes four hours of training for working with people with autism so all new recruits will have this training. 

The very first exhibit provided as evidence of the city’s “commitment to provide autism awareness and inclusion” is a blue police badge belonging to Alberti with a colorful puzzle piece in the center.

The puzzle piece symbol has been a controversial representation of autism, with many people reporting negative association with the symbolism since its 1963 origin. In a 2011 article in the peer-reviewed journal College English, University of Michigan Professor M. Remi Yergeau, who has autism, wrote about the puzzle piece symbolism as “representing autistic people as puzzling, mysterious, less-than-human entities who are ‘short a few cognitive pieces,’ who are utterly self-contained, disconnected, and [who] need to ‘fit in.’”

The city provided emails to MCAD that show discussions about, and with, Schulsinger, as well as a request from Serra to city officials to schedule a meeting. This meeting appears to have taken place on Oct. 5, 2022, and included a staff member from the state Department of Developmental Services. However, Schulsinger did not attend this meeting, where it was ultimately decided to serve him the no trespass orders. The city also told MCAD that Schulsinger previously refused to meet with LaChapelle “claiming that she was racist” and that Mailler responded to “numerous emails” from Schulsinger.

The city’s lawyer also claimed “legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons for issuing the no trespass orders and issuing the criminal charge” to Schulsinger. 

“Even if [the city] was found to have technically violated the law, its actions were taken for legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons,” the city’s lawyer wrote.

***

The Shoestring found it difficult to independently evaluate the effectiveness of the CSO embedded co-responder model in Easthampton. The EPD, for example, has claimed a range of public records exemptions to withhold from The Shoestring records related to interactions with Schulsinger on the basis that they contain personal and medical information. The EPD also asked for “estimated fees” for separating and redacting records, including one estimate of $375. 

“Lack of transparency is huge in all these systems,” Davidow, the Wildflower Alliance director, told The Shoestring. 

Davidow said she has been part of conversations about transparency, information sharing, what kind of information agencies store and for how long, and who exactly has access to that information. Davidow said these systems are given too much leeway as they develop and are often “up and running” before officials figure out suitable guiding policies to put in place.

“Sometimes that means they remain unfigured out for years,” she said.

With information policy actively taking shape around embedded co-responder programs, this means that many police departments now have access to medical information about the people they interact with that they typically wouldn’t have had in the past. Davidow questioned what value this information ultimately has in these types of crisis-response systems and what kind of influence it yields on responders. 

“Does it make them more compassionate or does it make them see that person as more dangerous?” Davidow asked. She believes this question has not really been answered. 

While information sharing between agencies may be a hallmark of co-responder models, that transparency has so far not been public facing. In attempting to attain records for this article, The Shoestring met several hurdles and received some concerning statements from city officials.

In one instance the EPD responded that the department does not “maintain” dispatch recording transcripts nor posses “the technological capability to redact portions of the audio recordings which involve personal or medical information” — this despite the department’s purchase of a $270,000 “state-of-the-art public safety suite” that was slated to go live in June 2023, per previous reporting. The Shoestring asked both Alberti and LaChapelle for comment on the status of the software suite, and if IT Department Director Karin Camihort had been asked to assist in redacting the recording. Neither responded. “In one instance the EPD responded that the department does not “maintain” dispatch recording transcripts nor posses “the technological capability to redact portions of the audio recordings which involve personal or medical information — this despite the department’s purchase of a $270,000 “state-of-the-art public safety suite” that was slated to go live in June 2023, per previous reporting. The Shoestring asked both Alberti and LaChapelle for comment on the status of the software suite, and if IT Department Director Karin Camihort had been asked to assist in redacting the recording. Neither responded. 

The Easthampton Fire Department, which has also been party to some of these interactions, provided essentially blank incident reports to The Shoestring that just say “wellbeing check.” When questioned further on the incident on July 8, 2022 involving the removal of the AC unit at which two EFD paramedics were present for almost two hours, EFD Chief Christopher Norris said “the narrative on the attached fire report provided indicates it was a well-being check.”  

Norris said. “We had no patient contact as it was a police matter in conjunction with CSO personnel.” 

This seemingly contradicts police narratives that the city provided to MCAD and Schulsinger that say paramedics were actively involved. In one narrative, EPD officer Matthew Rood recalled: “With help from the paramedics on scene, I was able to move a portion of the air conditioner located in Schulsinger’s window.” 

“The air conditioner was then removed from Schulsinger’s window, and I entered the apartment,” he continued. “I unlocked the door and let the paramedics inside.” 

The EPD initially refused to provide policy documents regarding procedures related to authorizing or requesting section 12 orders, as well as CSO embedded-clinician contracts. In response to one such request, the department responded via an attorney saying they would need a significant estimated fee because the records would “require careful review prior to dissemination to ensure that investigative efforts are not compromised. As such, these records cannot be provided without redaction or segregation.” 

It took six weeks and an appeal to the state records supervisor for the city to provide a weblink to the policy documents. Those policies are called EPD 1.16 “handling the mentally ill”  and EPD 1.18 “co-response,” which was revised on Jan. 10, 2024. The original version of the “co-response” policy The Shoestring requested, and under which the department was operating during their interactions with Schulsinger, is no longer visible. In an email to Alberti on Jan. 29, 2024, The Shoestring again requested the original version of the policy.

The Shoestring was able to obtain these same requested policy documents from the Hadley Police Department in less than 10 business days. The HPD also uses the same CSO co-responder program. 

The Shoestring was also able to obtain the co-response policy and a two-page document referencing section 12 procedures from the Easthampton Fire Department within 10 business days and without state-level involvement. The two-page document EFD provided is part of a 175-page statewide policy. In this statewide medical treatment protocol, one section lists “acute risk factors for violence.” The first item listed is “male gender.” 

The only reason The Shoestring was able to review the true scope of EPD and EFD crisis response with Schulsinger was because Schulsinger himself requested the documents in which he is named and provided them to The Shoestring. 

What is apparent from the records provided, however, is the inconsistency of record keeping and records classifications. The interactions related to Schulsinger that involved some form of crisis response were not consistently categorized with such designation. Instead, the incidents were logged with various titles including but not limited to “assist person,” “wellbeing check,” “fire/ems ambulance,” “unwanted person,” “follow up investigation,” “CSO follow up,” “assist other police department,” and “emotionally deranged person.” 

This type of inconsistent categorization of records would seemingly make it very difficult for the EPD itself to track and evaluate these incidents, let alone others. Even within the dispatch log there is no clear consistency aside from police and dispatch ID numbers and time stamps. 

When The Shoestring attempted to get overview data from CSO about the co-responder program, we were met with a few short, rushed statements and empty promises. 

In a phone call, CSO spokesperson Geoffery Oldmixon explained that the CSO embedded employees within police departments are clinicians. He said that the program has “diverted about 50% of crisis from emergency departments” and said CSO had outcome data by town. The Shoestring asked for documentation of this data as well as program contracts and procedures. Oldmixon did not provide that data and did not set up an interview despite saying he would. 

---

The Shoestring can only produce labor-intensive investigations like this with the support of our community. Make a tax-deductible donation today to power more independent news for western Mass.

---

The Shoestring made multiple requests to LaChapelle and Alberti for comment on the allegations made in the MCAD complaint, to explain the goals of the CSO and EPD partnership, and whether or not those goals had been achieved. They did not respond.

“Another sort of wrinkle in all of this is, how are we measuring information shared and how are they even collecting information to measure outcomes?” Davidow said. “One of the things that often gets missed in that conversation is who decides what’s a good outcome?”

Davidow pointed out that these models of crisis response emerged from a national push to remove police from crisis response. However, many of these models have actually increased police presence in crisis situations.

“For folks in this community that I’m a part of where people have psychiatric histories, the lack of trust influences a lot of willingness to reach out for help or not,” she said. “And if everybody’s sort of goal is to put someone in a hospital or something like that, then that’s doing harm.” 

***

Schulsinger says his time living in Easthampton left a lasting imprint on his life. 

“This is the story of a town that targeted and destroyed an autistic, transgender man, with no support from any family or friends in the state of Massachusetts,” he said.

Shulsinger said he moved to Easthampton to accept a job he was passionate about. He was living independently and working as a board certified behavior analyst. He said he had recently received a raise and was making a name for himself in his chosen career field helping children with autism learn skills to advocate for themselves. Shulsinger said this all changed after he was pulled over for his expired inspection sticker, and he was scared and uncertain about how he could maintain his career with a suspended license and no friends or family support in the state.

“I did not hurt anyone or threaten anyone or try to harm anyone,” Schulsinger said. “I was just upset and crying and yelling and rocking. I told them to stop talking to me but my self advocating for my needs to prevent further escalation was ignored.”

Shulsinger said he became emotionally dysregulated from overstimulation and sensory overload during his interactions with the Easthampton’s first responders. 

“Instead of the calm and escape from noise and people, they did the opposite and surrounded me with more officers and the fire department — a whole circle of people crowding me and speaking to me all at once,” he wrote.

Shulsinger said the interactions with ambulances, lights, and sirens was a “sensory nightmare” for him. 

“It just kept getting worse and worse and for someone like me that is sensitive to noises and lights and crowds it is painful and it felt like knives being stabbed in my ears and head,” he added.

Schulsinger said advocating for himself the best way he knew how only made matters worse. He said his attendance at a local bereavement group and outreach to city officials via emails resulted in a harassment prevention order and two no-trespass orders. With a suspended license and experiencing autism burnout, Schulsinger said he found himself unable to work and without prospects of affording an attorney to represent him in the face of his newfound legal hurdles. 

Shulsinger said these legal challenges ruined his reputation in the community and put his professional license at risk. He submitted the MCAD complaint to try to get some resolution if not for himself, maybe for others’ benefit in the future. Schulsinger said he found it demeaning and condescending to see the city respond to the MCAD with the puzzle-piece police badge as evidence of non-biased policing of autistic individuals.

“Just because someone has a symbol on their badge does not give them the right to discriminate against them and then call yourself an ally,” he said.

Schulsinger moved to Easthampton during the height of pandemic precautions when many businesses and services were still shut down. He said the few autism resources he was able to get were not enough, and when he failed to respond to his support providers, they would call the police to do wellness checks. Schulsinger said these checks were typically conducted in the same manner they would be done for elderly clients: an officer or clinician would come and see that he was okay and leave — but eventually, they began escalating.

“They would not do wellness checks, they would just break into my apartment, physically grab me and drag me out of my tent, my safe place, and bring me to the hospital where I would be released a few hours later,” Schulsinger said. “It was completely traumatizing.” 

Schulsinger said he doesn’t want the city and its police to think they can intimidate him or silence him “so they continue doing this to others with disabilities.”

“No one should have to experience what I went through,” he said. “I know there are other people with disabilities in the community that have similar stories but many are afraid to speak up due to the power the town has to retaliate against them and destroy their life.”

---

Shelby Lee is a short story writer and investigative reporter. They can be reached at shelbylee12321@gmail.com.

The Shoestring is committed to bringing you ad-free content. We rely on readers to support our work! You can support independent news for Western Mass by visiting our Donate page.

---

This story was produced with support from the Markham Nathan Fund for Social Justice.

By Naila Moreira

SHUTESBURY — At the base of an oak trunk too large to wrap my arms around, a russula mushroom’s scarlet cap sprouts like a fairy umbrella, perched above clubmoss on a milk-white stem.

Nearby, mountain laurels — slow growers at just a foot a year — arch over the footpath. Rivulets hurry downslope to coalesce and join larger Adam’s Brook below. Eventually, they’ll end up in the Atkins Reservoir.

As I hike this dripping green landscape in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, on a September afternoon, a torrential rain has only just stopped. As I drove here, signs punctuated the tree-lined roadside beside mailboxes: “Solar and Forests: We Need Both. No Clear Cutting Forestlands.”

The downpour, and the cataclysmic wetness of the preceding summer, feels appropriate to my purpose. I’m here because up to 360 acres of this forest are proposed to be clear-cut for five separate solar panel arrays totaling 45 megawatts of energy capacity. The land is owned by W.D. Cowls Land Company, Inc., the largest private landowner in Massachusetts. The sites, meanwhile, would be leased by PureSky Energy, a solar company co-owned by the multinational asset management firms Fiera Capital Corporation and Palisade Infrastructure Group.

The solar project could become the state’s largest. In return, Cowls has agreed to place 5,000 acres of nearby land within Shutesbury, Leverett and Pelham under conservation restriction. Although that land can’t be developed, Cowls is allowed to log those acres.

The solar installations would help, Cowls’ president Cinda Jones has said, in the fight against climate change, which experts say is fueling weather like this year’s excessive rain and flooding in New England.

Yet reflecting activism across Massachusetts, rural residents in Shutesbury have resisted solar development on the town’s forestlands, including through a new bylaw restricting land clearing for solar. In return, PureSky Energy filed a lawsuit against Shutesbury, and recently, the state attorney general’s office struck down the bylaw. Cowls was a plaintiff in the suit.

As Massachusetts tries to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 — necessitating seven to 10 times its current solar capacity — contentious cases like Shutesbury illuminate a complex interplay of federal and state policy, grid infrastructure, and economics. Such factors can lead to seemingly counterintuitive proposals that threaten to pit activist against activist, like cutting down forestland to reduce the state’s carbon emissions.

At the same time, the state aims to protect 40% of Massachusetts forests by 2050 in recognition of forests’ ecosystem services, including but not limited to carbon sequestration. Currently, just 27% of the state’s forests are conserved.

Broad agreement exists that a balance needs to be found to minimize such conflicts and still allow for rapid green infrastructure development. But finding that balance is tricky. It will require wading through sticky questions about how we value our green space, and for what; what incentives or infrastructure will actually tip the economic scales in favor of developing solar on already built or disturbed land; and how best to work with profit-seeking corporations who, for the time being, are the parties best financially positioned to green the state’s energy grid.

This winter, a new state commission tasked with recommending reforms to hasten green energy development will encounter these questions head on. Created by executive order by Gov. Maura Healey and seated in October, the Commission on Clean Energy Infrastructure Siting and Permitting will “build consensus” (or “build serious consensus,” if you ask Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll) “on how to tackle this challenge in a way that ensures environmental justice communities don’t bear a disproportionate burden, greenspace and other development priorities are protected, and we can all share in the benefits of clean energy.”

The commission is slated to issue recommendations on March 31. But to understand exactly where this committee might steer Massachusetts’s green energy future, it’s important to understand how we got where we are now.

Solar as forest threat

To Shutesbury resident Sharon Weizenbaum, the proposed solar installations and the attorney general’s recent decision are an affront to the town’s right to govern itself, a threat to the ecosystem, and a hazard to her property. She helps run Smart Solar Shutesbury, a seven-member activist group that helped create the town’s solar bylaw as well as the signs I spotted along the road.

A creek alongside Weizenbaum’s land is located below one proposed site. It could suffer development-related erosion, runoff, and flooding, she says, especially as climate change worsens.

The concept is only barely theoretical. In nearby Williamsburg, an 18.5-acre solar array owned by Dynamic Energy Solutions, LLC, illegally released stormwater “in extreme amounts,” according to a 2020 complaint by the state attorney general’s office. The sediment-laden water damaged about 100,000 square feet of surrounding wetlands, rivers, and forest, with the company paying $1.14 million to settle the case.

“I have horses here, and I ride every day, and I forage mushrooms in this forest,” Weizenbaum says. “What the forest has done for me, I feel I owe it to the forest — I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”

For Shutesbury, the attorney general’s decision to overturn the town’s solar bylaw focused largely on technical errors regarding appropriate public notification. However, the suit also cited the Dover Amendment, a state law that prevents “unreasonable” restrictions on solar development except in the case of threats to public health and safety. The move reflects similar decisions in neighboring Wendell and Pelham that invalidated local attempts to restrict solar development, including through limits on the construction of battery storage.

Some have suggested that such local resistance comes from a “not in my backyard” knee-jerk antipathy to necessary communal change. Further, some point out that activism against large-scale rural solar may be coming largely from those with the economic and cultural capital to fight back.

Caitlin Peale Sloan, Massachusetts vice president for the Conservation Law Foundation, identifies the “dynamics of people who don’t want something to get built in their backyard because it would be different from what’s already there,” which, she says, “blends with the ability of communities to have a say in what’s happening in their community.”

Sloan will sit on the state siting committee, where she plans to bring a focus on environmental justice and equity. Some communities, she notes, have more pervasive financial and historical barriers to resisting infrastructure construction, and may need more active state protection. “It blends with historic dynamics of which kind of communities usually play host to industrial development, and which get to avoid that,” she notes.

“There can be a fine line between, ‘I’m opposing this because I don’t want it in my backyard,’ and, ‘I’m opposing this because of deeply held beliefs that have nothing to do with my backyard,’” acknowledges Sloan. However, she said, “the good faith way to characterize the opposition I’ve seen to solar projects in rural areas is concerns about preserving that particular area of forest. There are many values that go beyond the cost of losing a tree or 10 acres of trees. The health of a forest is interconnected through the roots, it’s not  just every tree for itself. It’s a state policy question, how we balance those interests and those values.”

Weizenbaum suggests that Shutesbury itself serves as an example of a smaller, less-resourced rural town being pushed around by wealthy for-profit entities.

“People try to accuse us of being NIMBY, but I really think that most of the work against huge industry is done by local people, it’s done by people who love the landscape,” she says. “Each community is fighting in isolation, but we’re connected by fighting for the environment.”

Since about 2010, solar has represented a growing threat to forestlands, according to the state’s 2020 Forest Action Plan. Statewide, the development of forested land has represented the largest threat to forests, with 13.5 acres being lost per day from 2012 to 2017. About a quarter of that loss has been due to solar development alone.

Sixty percent of the state’s 500 new ground-mounted solar arrays since 2010 have been built on previously forested land, according to the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s new Growing Solar, Protecting Nature report. And about 10 percent of all deforestation in Massachusetts has been due to solar development, state Energy and Environmental Affairs Undersecretary Katherine Antos said during a solar forum at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in September.

Given these statistics, a chorus of expert voices from conservationists to legislators and even climate activists are also saying that Massachusetts forests are not the best place for solar.

Stephen Long of The Nature Conservancy, an organization that supports both forest conservation and solar development, agrees that the state should stop converting forestland to solar. “There are buildings, there are parking lots, there are already disturbed lands, for efficient placement of solar. Definitively,” he said. Long is also serving on the state commission.

Long points to the MassAudubon report, which shows that 30 gigawatts of solar could fit on the state’s rooftops and parking lots with another 25 gigawatts on sites with low impact to nature and farms. State analyses have shown similar results, challenging prior claims that the built environment can’t accommodate enough solar to meet the state’s needs.

The state’s green spaces — including forests, wetlands, farmland, and park land — store more than 0.6 gigatons of carbon, or the last 25 years of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the state’s Clean Energy and Climate Plan. Each year, such lands also absorb 10% of the state’s new emissions, with forests alone responsible for 80% of that total.

Solar companies have been quick to point out that in terms of carbon, solar arrays provide better results than forests. “An acre of solar offsets about eight times more carbon per year than forest,” said Rayo Bhumgara of New York-based Syncarpha Community Solar, which operates ground-mounted solar arrays in Belchertown.

A calculator developed by Harvard Forest shows that after about eight years, solar panels “pay back” the carbon stored in the forest, then providing some 20 years of net emissions reduction.

However, forests provide far more than carbon sequestration, conservationists point out. Especially in their healthiest, unfragmented state, they provide ecosystem services from biodiversity to drinking water filtration to soil stability to clean air, as well as natural beauty.

“Some people are looking at a ledger of carbon. We’re encouraging people to look at a broader view,” Long says. “Forests aren’t just carbon. Forests have many, many more values than just carbon.”

This summer, in part to aid in protecting sensitive lands, a state analysis mapped out Massachusetts’ best sites for solar. The Technical Potential of Solar report, produced by Synapse Energy Economics, Inc. for the state’s Department of Energy Resources, relies in part on the state’s Biomap tool.

Biomap identifies sites of higher and lower ecological value. The tool classifies most of Shutesbury’s forest as either Core Habitat or Critical Natural Landscape, the two classifications of greatest ecological importance.

Despite the forest’s high value, however, the Technical Potential of Solar interactive map labels most of Shutesbury “mixed” in suitability for solar development. It gives the region a “C” grade for suitability in the categories of biodiversity and carbon sequestration. However, it’s marked grade “A” in categories like proximity to electric infrastructure, slope, agricultural potential, and “ecosystem services,” a category including drinking water protection.

The map’s conflation of values — some directly opposed to one another, like forest biodiversity versus agricultural potential — can confuse the issue.

“The state needs to dig more into the findings,” said the Conservation Law Foundation’s Sloan. “They apply a framework that we’ve been asking them to apply for many years, which is to assess parcels of land by their suitability, and then to be able to say statewide: Which parcels are the most suitable for solar development? Which parcels should be preserved for their ecosystem value or their high quality agricultural soil value?”

Weizenbaum says her experience “has woken me up to this assault on communities by this green-energy movement, and this contradiction between giving all this money to green energy and the downside of that on a community level.”

She says she, and possibly other members of Smart Solar Shutesbury, will stay active in the state’s solar discussion even once the Shutesbury situation is settled. The group’s website provides resources about resistance to solar development elsewhere in the state, and concatenates information about state regulatory proposals for solar siting.

Right now, though, their plans are local. They next aim to fix the technicalities on which Shutesbury’s solar bylaw was overturned. Without changes to the Dover Amendment, however, blocking the installations may remain elusive.

Why forests, anyway?

Siting solar on green lands like forests isn’t just about the availability of space.

Near one of the proposed Shutesbury solar sites, power poles punctuate a forest cut. Electrical lines vanish over the hills into the distance, carrying power to consumers far beyond view.

Alongside the poles hulks one big reason for the location of the proposed solar arrays: National Grid Substation #704, an agglomeration of concrete slabs, gleaming wiring, and electrical equipment.

Solar energy is intermittent, sometimes producing power in big surges and sometimes in trickles depending on time of day or cloud cover. It can therefore blow out existing infrastructure designed for the regular, even flow of fossil-fuel electricity.

Utilities like National Grid are required to install upgrades to accommodate any solar project. However, it’s up to the solar installer to pay for the upgrade, putting a burden on smaller-scale installers like municipalities or homeowners.

“We’re making it really, really hard for smaller solar,” says state Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa. The Northampton Democrat has proposed a bill that would provide additional subsidies for solar on canopies, rooftops, and disturbed lands. “We are incentivizing the large-scale solar, which is, you know, part of the equation, but we’re making it really difficult for people to put solar on their houses. The regulations are extraordinarily onerous.”

Big corporations can more easily pay for new transformers and utility improvements. However, it’s cheaper if they build near existing large-scale infrastructure.

Such companies are often straightforward about the importance of making money. The language of the Shutesbury lawsuit, for instance, makes it clear that profit is a primary driver.

“Ground-mounted solar systems are under extreme cost pressures and must reach a certain economy of scale in order to be profitable,” the lawsuit reads. “Primarily this is due to very high interconnection costs for these projects, which typically remain constant regardless of system size. A proposed solar project needs to be large enough to spread these costs out or the project will be uneconomic.”

Why can’t for-profit solar companies bundle multiple smaller, urban projects to take advantage of economies of scale, by building arrays on multiple parking lots or rooftops?

“It’s far cheaper to install on undeveloped land that’s flat, and they have clear access,” says Claire Chang, co-owner of Greenfield Solar, a commercial small-residential installer. “A parking lot, a roof, a building, those all require more infrastructure, more materials, more skilled labor, and sometimes more permitting is required, because you’re dealing with snow and wind loads.”

For big ground-mounted systems, labor and installation range around $2 per watt of solar power, Chang said. For residential solar, costs rise to $3.50 per watt, and up to $5 per watt for a parking lot canopy. Those costs cut into profits and discourage investors.

However, cost and available space aren’t the only reasons large-scale solar on green spaces has taken such a prominent place in the state’s solar capacity.

“If the financial incentive from the SMART program were not there for this project, would the developer be interested? I believe the answer is no,” says Ludlow’s Aaron Saunders, the state representative for the 7^th Hamden District who has been vocal in his opposition to the Shutesbury project since running to represent the newly created district last year. “We should not be subsidizing the clear-cutting of forest with ratepayer, taxpayer money.”

Established by the state in 2018, the SMART program pays solar projects a fixed incentive per kilowatt produced over a period of 20 years, nearly as long as the lifespan of an average solar panel. That state money, alongside federal subsidies, has allowed solar power to become as profitable as fossil fuels, encouraging investment by for-profit entities.

The program offers greater incentives for projects on the built environment and other more favorable siting, but those have not been enough to push development off green lands.

Moreover, due to a loophole in the SMART program, state incentives are available for solar development even on high biodiversity lands, as long as they are classified as community solar, the MassAudubon report notes. And now, even without the SMART program, solar is reaching a point where it may be cheaper than natural gas without subsidies in some areas, encouraging for-profit development.

---

Can you help The Shoestring support in-depth reporting like this in 2024? Visit our Fundrazr page to make a tax deductible donation online, or theshoestring.org/donate for instructions for donating by check.

---

A full 12 bills now coming down the pipe address solar siting. Almost half these bills are sponsored by state lawmakers from western Massachusetts, including Saunders, Sabadosa, Sen. Jo Comerford, Rep. Natalie Blais, and Sen. Jacob Oliveira. The lawmakers note that western Mass has larger swaths of undeveloped land, making it a locus for conflict.

“We’re kind of the canary in the coal mine,” Saunders says. “We see it. It’s happening here.”

Saunders, for instance, has proposed a bill that would adjust the Dover Amendment to allow communities to restrict solar for the purposes of preserving forests, farms, or wetlands, rather than only public health as now.

Despite greater installation costs for rooftop or parking-lot solar, Chang suggests it might not cost that much more for individual ratepayers to buy the energy. The electricity goes to a lot of homes, spreading out costs. Plus, she notes, over 50% of a Massachusetts customer’s electricity bill relates to distribution and transmission, not production. Any change to production costs only affects a portion of the bill, lowering the increase overall.

“Even if the PV to install it on rooftops and parking lots were a little bit more expensive, that’s a little less than half your electric bill that might go up by a penny or two,” she says.

Still, that relative cost will climb as more and more solar gets on the grid, affecting a growing segment of an individual’s electric bill. MassAudubon’s Building Solar, Protecting Nature report acknowledges that their mid-range forest conservation plan will cost $900 million more than a business-as-usual scenario, a cost that will ultimately be borne by taxpayers and utility customers.

What about farmland?

I’m in Joe Czajkowski’s battered red pickup truck, watching muddy farm fields slip by under cloud cover as he puts his cell phone on speaker. We’re driving to the half-megawatt solar array that Hypersion Systems, LLC of Belchertown has installed on two acres of Czajkowski’s farmland.

“Can I get some carrots?” comes the voice over the phone.

“Sure, you can get some carrots,” says Czajkowski. “How many do you need?”

“Can I get 160?”

There’s a pause. Then, voice mellow and calm, Czajkowski says, “Sure, I can do that.”

“How’s your crop of brussel sprouts looking?”

“You know, fair. Not perfect. There’s some black balls on the bottom because, you know, it rained so much, but we’ll just cut ‘em higher. We’re gonna start picking maybe Thursday. Ok?”

Czajkowski farms mixed vegetables on 400 acres of farmland in Hadley and surrounding towns. When I meet him, he’s just driven up with a truckload of butternut squash. His family “has always farmed,” he tells me. “We’ve farmed here since 1916. Before that, we farmed in Europe.”

This year has been tough. He lost 60 acres of crops due to the summer’s heavy rains, and, he says, “there’s been a diminishing of crops on other acres because some stuff is spoiled.”

The solar array helps defray his costs. He receives a 17.5% monthly reduction in his electricity bill, which he says can cost him $75,000 a year for needs like refrigeration and food cutting. He also receives a lease payment from the solar company. Below the panels, he has planted broccoli, which he says did well, and he’s considering planting blueberries around the poles next year.

“Climate change is making it increasingly risky and expensive to farm,” says Caro Roszell, the soil health program manager for the American Farmland Trust. “Putting some land into dual-use solar can be one of the tools in the toolbox that farmers use to keep farming, because it provides a steady source of income.”

Like with forests, however, siting solar on farmland has remained controversial. A project proposed for 76 acres of a farm owned by the L’Etoile family in Northfield, Massachusetts, for instance, received several years of community pushback, including a legal complaint that neighbor Chris Kalinowski filed with the town. The complaint argued that the project should be prohibited based on town zoning requirements, and stated that the Planning Board “failed to adequately consider the agricultural value of the project site and long-term impacts of the loss of viable farmland.” An appeal of the complaint was dismissed this September by agreement of all parties, and the project is set to move forward.

Nathan L’Etoile, who is also the national farm viability managing director for the American Farmland Trust, will sit on the state siting commission, bringing agricultural solar interests to the table.

Many climate advocates agree that solar on farmland should be approached with caution.

Greg Garrison, the president of small installer Northeast Solar in Hatfield, grew up on a farm in Illinois, farming corn and soybeans and raising chickens.

“I think that all large scale siting for solar should be carefully thought out, and we shouldn’t be using farmland unless it’s dual use,” Garrison says. His company has installed solar power on area farms, but focuses on land not in agricultural production.

“Farmland is scarce. It’s very scarce. You have to look at the long-term resiliency of communities,” Garrison says. “Most of our most productive farmland is right along the river. There’s only so much acreage that we have. The more acreage that we give up to solar, the less we’re able to produce our own foods locally.”

Working farmland offers a training ground for younger farmers, he notes, an opportunity lost even if land is returned to agricultural use once a solar array’s 20-year lifespan expires. Moreover, even dual-use solar limits farmers to shade-tolerant crops or livestock.

The debate over farmland points to the fact that good management is crucial to improved outcomes for solar on greenlands.

Farmlands and grasslands, for instance, currently sequester much less carbon than forests. In bulk, the state’s farmlands emit more carbon than they take up, according to the Massachusetts Clean Energy and Climate Plan.

However, good management can improve that equation, notes Roszell. Grasslands tend to store less carbon than forests, but for longer periods of time, because the carbon is typically bound to minerals instead of more easily disturbed surface organics. By maintaining good vegetation cover beneath solar arrays, some carbon storage can be maintained or rebuilt.

Ground-mounted solar arrays can also become pollinator havens if managed for the right plants, says Grace Shiffrin, a master’s student at Umass Amherst who studies pollinator ecology at solar sites.

“The conversation I feel is mostly about whether we should clear forest,” Shiffrin said, “and that is a valid conversation. However, I feel like there also should be [a conversation on] what is the environment’s health after the solar facilities are built?”

Who should profit? Who should decide?

Dwayne Breger, director of the Umass Clean Energy Extension, says he started in solar in the 70’s and early 80’s, before climate change became the household word it is now.

“Back then, it was really about grassroots, and local ownership, and cut the ties, and screw capitalism, and all that. It was really the motivation of all the hippies and others trying to move this forward,” he says.

“As the market has now unveiled itself in fury, in the 2000s and 2020s and so forth, not just in Massachusetts but around the country, once again capitalism has taken over and we’ve got the big players that are just crowding out everyone else.”

Breger’s program has developed a process to help municipalities decide their own trajectory when it comes to solar in their community. The Community Planning for Solar Toolkit ideally helps towns design a proactive plan before major conflicts like the Shutesbury lawsuit erupt.

In a world where we’re radically rethinking our energy production, might it not be time to rethink who profits — and who gets to decide how renewable energy looks?

“We live in America. And so, the capitalist system has brought us to where we are today,” acknowledges Breger. “We don’t want to delay solar development. We don’t necessarily want to put the brakes on this profit-motive system that’s working fairly well in getting solar out there.”

He notes that every megawatt of solar requires about $2.5 million in capital. Without substantial state assistance, that cost can put large-scale solar projects out of reach for anyone except investor-owned financial asset firms like the ones that own PureSky.

Greenbanks, which are capital accumulation programs often spearheaded by government agencies or nonprofits, offer one option to pool financial resources to allow such larger projects, including distributed solar across community members working as a group.

Unlike fossil fuels, Breger said, solar offers the opportunity to decentralize energy production across the homes and properties of individuals and municipalities. That also spreads the wealth.

When solar is owned by big, non-local corporations, the vast bulk of the economic benefits — 85% — go to the owner, according to analyses by Breger’s team. Just 15% remain local, such as through lease payments, net metering discounts, and payments in lieu of taxes.

That disparity in wealth can lead to disparities in power.

“Companies who are trying to get the government to allow them to do something, I think historically they’ve been given, like, preferred stakeholder status,” Sloan says. “Just by the way things shake out, agencies, regulators think a lot about how to solve for their problems.”

Underserved communities, like those with less wealth or affected by historical injustices like racism, should be at the forefront of our thoughts when considering solar siting, Sloan notes.

Changes to several state regulations and programs could improve the ability of individuals to take advantage of solar and its economic benefits, including in low-income communities.

First among these are net-metering regulations, or how much compensation residential owners get when their solar arrays produce more energy than they use.

Right now, homeowners are only compensated up to 15 kilowatts. Utilities receive any remaining energy for free, which returns to the grid for other customers to use. That limit decreases the financial ability and incentive for residents to put larger arrays on their roofs, which in turn shrinks the state’s solar capacity.

Valessa Souter-Kline, the Northeast regional director for the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a statement that updating the net-metering rules could help “jumpstart” what she called Massachusetts’ “stalled” residential solar economy.

A state bill passed in 2022 would increase net-metering benefits to 25 kilowatts; however, the bill has not yet been promulgated or enacted. The bill must still go through several state agencies and public comment before it can be signed into law. It could take another year before benefits are available, Chang said.

Chang also points to the now-expired state solar loan program, which used to provide 30% loan support to applicants with no tax liability, like low-income residents, non-profits, or cities. That support helped defray the cost of installing solar, especially since solar energy’s financial benefits take time to accrue.

“I want the governor and the legislature to look at refunding the solar loan program, and increase that loan support from 30% to 100% for low-income communities, so that there is a means for truly low-income folks to participate,” says Chang. “If they have a great roof to put solar on, they should be able to take advantage of that.”

The new state commission — with the participation of Sloan, environmental justice organizations including Springfield’s Arise for Social Justice, and members like Amy Stitely, chief of programs for the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities — is likely to look into these environmental equity issues. The commission, however, also includes representatives who may have competing concerns, ranging from state agencies and municipalities to utilities, clean energy industries, and builders.

Meeting responsibilities

“A community should be able to make some kind of statement about what they want their community to be like,” says Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity based in Tucson, Arizona.

Despite supporting solar power generally, Donnelly has been active in resisting large-scale renewable projects on sensitive desert lands in the West. Out of about 150 projects, he notes, his team has fought only about a half-dozen on ecosystems identified as most important.

Donnelly points out that zoning ideally offers a method for communities to plan how development for decarbonization should look. Yet Illinois has a state override of local restrictions for solar and Michigan passed similar legislation this fall.

“Many of these communities are trying to enforce limits on solar and those things are being ruled unconstitutional on the state level,” he continued. “To what extent should communities be able to control their own environment?”

Donnelly emphasizes that insufficient planning to decarbonize the economy exists on the national or state level. In relying on free-market forces to fix the problem, he said, “we’re really gambling here” that a suitable solution can be found without threatening other important values.

“Is this just enabling the growth machine to continue growing and consuming,” he asked, “rather than turning us to a greener way of life?”

With the price of solar plummeting and different levels of government becoming more interested in incentivizing it, siting policy has become the latest locus of experimentation in making necessary changes to the process of energy production while still ensuring that private profit can be derived from it.

Massachusetts may be able to take a page from other playbooks. In Australia, permitting for residential solar takes only a day compared to up to six months in the United States, writes Saul Griffith, author of Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future — a major hurdle for residential uptake of the technology and its benefits. Furthermore, regulations including permitting and tariffs lead to rooftop solar costing twice as much in the United States as overseas, argued OpenSolar CEO Andrew Birch in 2018.

“The policy prescriptions for the United States are straightforward,” Griffith writes: “simplify regulations and promote fair access to the grid, allowing every generator, big or small, to connect as equals and supply electricity and battery storage without burdensome connection rules.”

Can a set of policies be written that will “jumpstart” the currently slow residential, municipal, and small-scale commercial solar economy and allow it to thrive? That will keep Weizenbaum’s forest pristine? That will allow Joe Czajkowski’s farm to weather difficult seasons? And that will keep incentive burdens on the state light enough that nobody eventually scratches their head and asks, “Should the state itself just build this?”

Only time will tell.

In the meantime, Massachusetts consumes 17 times more energy than it produces, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Overall, New England relies on natural gas for 52% of its electricity, according to 2022 ISO New England data, with Massachusetts alone accounting for about half of that usage.

Solar versus green land therefore isn’t the only relevant comparison, points out Roszell.

“We should compare solar here in Massachusetts to electricity generated from burning natural gas derived from fracking in Appalachia, which is an environmental disaster that provides a large portion of the energy we consume here in Massachusetts,” she says.

“Because we can’t see the fracking happening in Appalachia from here, it’s too easy to ignore it, but I think we ought to include it in our thoughts when we consider the impact of scaling up solar here in Massachusetts.”

---

Naila Moreira is a science writing specialist at Smith College, where she directs the Journalism Concentration.

The Shoestring is committed to bringing you ad-free content. We rely on readers to support our work! You can support independent news for Western Mass by visiting our Donate page.