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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.

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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.”

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

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When Easthampton voters cast their ballots in 2019, there was only one contested race for city office.

But it wasn’t any of those unopposed candidates for mayor, City Council or School Committee that received the most total votes in the election. Instead, it was a ballot question asking voters to establish “a city-owned company that can provide utilities services including telecommunications systems and internet to households.” Of the 4,195 residents who voted in the election, 79% agreed they wanted Easthampton to create a municipally owned utility, which officials had begun exploring to bring city-owned broadband internet to town.

But after some five years of work toward establishing a municipal network of faster fiber optic cables to deliver broadband — including the passage of the ballot initiative, a detailed feasibility study and $150,742 in taxpayer money spent on design work for the project — Easthampton’s path toward a public utility came to an abrupt end earlier this year.

City residents are still getting fiber internet. But instead of a publicly owned utility rendering that service, a private equity-owned company called GoNetSpeed will be providing it. On May 25, the mayor’s office and GoNetSpeed announced a “partnership” to install fiber optic cables, which use light signals to transfer information more quickly and reliably than other platforms, across the city. GoNetSpeed said that it was fully funding the $3.6 million it would take to build the network citywide and may begin service as early as the start of 2024.

For some, the arrival of GoNetSpeed was a long-awaited development in a city where telecom giant Charter Communications is the only internet service provider. An advisory committee concluded in 2021 that there was “general dissatisfaction” in Easthampton with the quality and price of current internet services — issues that GoNetSpeed has promised to improve with its fiber optic cables and by providing competition to Charter.

“Through this partnership, we are able to ensure that internet connectivity is broadly available in a time when it is a necessity for our daily lives,” Easthampton Mayor Nicole LaChapelle said in that May announcement.

But for others who dreamed that a city-owned broadband utility would serve residents better than a for-profit company, the mayor’s decision to work with GoNetSpeed represents a “missed opportunity.” Several of those involved in the campaign for a public internet network in Easthampton expressed disappointment in the development, pointing to cheap and reliable municipal broadband services in neighboring communities like Westfield, South Hadley and Leverett as examples of what the city could have had.

Paul St. Pierre chaired the Easthampton Telecommunications Advisory Committee, which between 2019 and 2021 studied broadband infrastructure, market conditions in the region and what the city could do to ensure affordable and effective internet service for all. The group’s report recommended the city move forward with municipal broadband, concluding Easthampton could do so without raising property taxes.

As many as 7% of Americans don’t have adequate broadband service, according to federal estimates. In Massachusetts, census data show that 10% of the state doesn’t have access to a broadband subscription, a “digital divide” that exists in both rural and urban communities and separates those who have access to affordable, high-speed internet and those who don’t. In the Connecticut River Valley, the divide is even more pronounced; data that the state-run Massachusetts Broadband Institute recently presented at a listening session show that 28% of the 281,000 households in the region have no broadband internet subscriptions and 52% of municipalities have “little to no competition in the broadband market.”

In Easthampton, the Telecommunications Advisory Committee looked toward public ownership of city broadband as a way to address those inequities in their own community.

“It was about creating a municipal utility and kind of viewing internet service as a utility and no longer a luxury,” St. Pierre told The Shoestring. “Seeing that the private company is coming in, in a way it kind of validates what we were saying: that this is an economically feasible thing that we could have done.”

***

Nearly eight years ago, ambitious plans were moving forward to bring publicly owned broadband to some of the least-connected municipalities of western Massachusetts. But then, the project came to a screeching halt.

At the time, 40 rural towns were preparing to build out their own fiber optic network as a regionally owned cooperative, WiredWest. Then the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, under newly elected Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, suddenly pulled support from the project in favor of partnering with for-profit companies. The initiative “crashed and burned,” Berkshire Eagle investigative reporter Larry Parnass wrote in 2017, over MBI’s concerns with WiredWest’s business model — worries that the cooperative’s backers said were overstated. WiredWest still exists, but now provides services to only six member towns.

The demise of WiredWest’s initial plans, however, was far from the end of public broadband initiatives in the region, some of which have flourished in the time since. For example, western Massachusetts communities with established municipal electric utilities — known as municipal light plants — have built out their own fiber networks in recent years and worked with other municipalities to help them do the same.

Leading that charge in Hampden County is Westfield Gas & Electric’s municipal internet service Whip City Fiber, which serves some 20 municipalities across the region, from West Springfield to Wendell and including the remaining WiredWest towns.

In Hampshire County, the South Hadley Electric Light Department, or SHELD, has steadily built out its fiber network to 95% of the town and has helped both Shutesbury and Leverett build their own networks. SHELD General Manager Sean Fitzgerald told The Shoestring that although a municipal utility has to make a certain degree of revenue, it doesn’t have to operate with profits in mind like an investor-backed company. That means that public utilities’ rates tend to be lower and more stable, and their customer support more responsive, he said.

“There’s really kind of a renaissance going on with internet service providers in the United States,” Fitzgerald said. “In our region, what you’re seeing is a lot of towns, dozens of them, voting to become their own municipal light plant … The reason that’s happening is that the larger corporations aren’t investing in fiber optics in western Massachusetts.”

That is particularly true in rural communities where smaller populations are spread out across a wider geographic area, making private companies hesitant to invest because of the high costs of installation and lower customer base to recoup those costs.

Some rural communities elsewhere in New England have decided to band together to build broadband infrastructure. In Vermont, for example, 213 municipalities — representing 76% of the state’s population — had joined a “communications union district” that can issue revenue bonds to finance broadband networks as of November 2022. Maine has also witnessed the creation of two regional broadband utility districts, and last year state lawmakers there passed a bill that supports municipal broadband infrastructure.

Other municipalities in Massachusetts have considered a hybrid approach through public-private partnerships.

Last month, Northampton released a market and feasibility study of municipal broadband that it hired the firm Design Nine to conduct. (In 2021, Northampton residents voted 91.3% in favor of creating a municipal light plant.) That report suggested the city could play a key role in providing broadband infrastructure by, for example, building the fiber network and leasing it out or partnering with a private internet service provider by financing the buildout in return for guarantees the company would service all neighborhoods. The report recommended that the city not become its own internet service provider.

Elsewhere in the state, a group of 26 towns — mostly in eastern Massachusetts but including East Longmeadow, Hampden and Wilbraham — formed the Massachusetts Broadband Coalition, which has been exploring similar public-private partnerships, according to reporting from the community development-focused national nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Sean Gonsalves, the associate director for communications at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative, told The Shoestring that efforts to build public internet infrastructure picked up momentum when the pandemic began in 2020. Many people started attending school and working from home, and some communities realized that they should be treating the internet as a fundamental municipal service, he said.

“You’re looking at it as civil infrastructure much like roads and water systems, and when a municipality bonds to build these networks … you don’t need to make a lot of money and you have a longer time to pay off those bonds,” Gonsalves said.

As part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that Congress passed in 2021, the federal government is now pouring $42 billion into high-speed internet infrastructure, including $147 million in Massachusetts. Later this year, the Massachusetts Broadband Institute is expected to release a plan for spending that money, which must be used first to bring broadband to entirely unserved, largely rural communities. Only after that are states allowed to spend money on communities designated as “underserved” based on the availability of higher-speed internet — money that Gonsalves said could be used to connect, for example, low-income apartment buildings.

The Massachusetts Broadband Institute has been on an “Internet for All” listening tour of the state as it puts together that plan for spending those dollars. It remains to be seen whether the bulk of those Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment funds, as they’re known, will go to fostering publicly owned operations or private companies in Massachusetts.

Given the parameters of the program, though, BEAD money is less likely to arrive in municipalities like Easthampton and Northampton, leaving those communities looking for other ways to bring fiber to homes.

In a municipal broadband community meeting last month introducing the Northampton report, Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra told those gathered that federal and state lawmakers have said Northampton likely would not qualify for BEAD funds. Design Nine consultant Andrew Cohill said that those challenges Northampton is facing mirror those of many other municipalities.

“It’s really unfortunate the way, particularly the federal funding, has been exclusively for unserved and in some cases underserved areas,” Cohill said. “There’s a lot of municipalities in the country that do not have adequate high-speed broadband and that is also affordable. And so the financing is a big challenge.”

***

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, schools and businesses shuttered their doors. For Easthampton resident Jason Miranda, that meant he and his family had two parents working and two children learning at home, straining their internet connection to the brink. Others had it even worse, he said.

“People who didn’t have access to a reliable internet connection were having to go sit in their cars and sit in the parking lot of the schools to do their homework,” said Miranda, who also sat on the Easthampton Telecommunications Advisory Committee.

Miranda said that he tends to favor public ownership and control of vital services, and that the committee found that many other city residents were excited about that prospect when it came to municipal broadband. The project could have started in one neighborhood, using the revenues from that to expand the network out to cover the whole city.

As Easthampton began down the path of exploring municipal broadband, the city initially contracted with SHELD, South Hadley’s public utility, to build out its broadband network. But after SHELD finished the first phase of that work conducting a utility-pole survey and drawing up a complete city-wide design for the project, LaChapelle decided to move in a different direction.

This summer, shortly after GoNetSpeed and the mayor’s office announced that the company was coming to town, the City Council signed off on paying SHELD $150,742 out of the city’s reserve account for the work SHELD did instead of going to court over the breaking of the contract.

GoNetSpeed is a conglomeration of small, previously independent telephone companies scattered across the country, including in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. Originally known as OTELCO, the company was publicly traded until 2021, when the private equity firm Oak Hill Capital bought the company and took it private.

In municipalities big and small alike, GoNetSpeed is pouring millions of dollars into fiber investments in Connecticut, Maine, New York and western Massachusetts, where Amherst was the first town GoNetSpeed connected to its network in July.

“GoNetspeed is working to ensure that more communities throughout Massachusetts will soon have access to a high-speed 100% fiber internet infrastructure,” the company’s press release said at the time. “In the coming months, more communities throughout the state will join Amherst in having access to GoNetspeed’s fiber internet.”

Jamie Hoare, GoNetspeed’s chief legal counsel, told The Shoestring that while he believes there are places where a “municipal solution” is appropriate to building fiber networks, private companies can save taxpayers money because cities and towns won’t have to bond to build that infrastructure.

“I think an easier way to approach the issue, where available, is to allow private providers to build their networks and to remove the barriers that exist for that,” he said.

To that end, the company is backing legislation that would speed up the process for granting applicants like GoNetSpeed and others access to utility poles. That process is currently overseen by the companies that own the pole network, and Hoare said that makes it costly and sluggish for possible competitors to obtain the efficient access they’re entitled to on those poles. Hoare said the “intransigence” of those companies is standing in GoNetSpeed’s way, not competition from municipally run networks.

(In other states, telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast have lobbied for bills that restrict or outright ban municipalities from establishing public broadband networks. The organization BroadbandNow has identified 16 states that still have those kinds of laws on the books.)

GoNetSpeed has said that in a region where a large majority of residents only have one internet service provider to choose from, the company’s arrival in Easthampton will create competition and drive down prices.

“The profit motive is what drives us to keep our prices down to attract as many customers as we can because we understand that customers do have choices in this area and, yes, what we provide is the best service,” he said.

LaChapelle said that it was ultimately her who, after crunching numbers and looking at timelines, decided to welcome GoNetSpeed instead of possibly taking on debt to support municipal internet. She said that the city has a lot of projects in the works and that she had to choose what to spend public dollars on. GoNetSpeed said it would connect the entire city to its network, and that it wouldn’t cost the city anything, so LaChapelle signed an agreement with the company.

“I really wanted to see broadband across the city and I didn’t want to have to do it in chunks,” she said. “And I didn’t want to have to commit the city to having to bond while this [municipal light plant] was getting up and running.”

Some of those who worked on bringing municipal broadband to Easthampton, however, have questioned whether a private company will benefit customers in the long term or keep its promises to build out the entire city.

“On the one hand it’s good that we have competition now, we have more than one offering,” Miranda said. “But that said, it remains to be seen the quality of the service and what kind of price they’re going to come in at and what those prices are going to look like year over year. I certainly don’t think it’s as competitive as a municipal service could have been. Or as responsible.”

In its “joint working initiative agreement” with Easthampton, which The Shoestring obtained through a public records request, GoNetSpeed agreed to “building and deploying a fiber network city-wide to homes and businesses, without installation fees for residential customers, as soon as possible.” That, however, is “subject to supply chain and/or state agency and other third parties.”

“Sure, what a corporation puts into a letter, it’s not scripture,” LaChapelle conceded. “But they’ve made good on their promises so far.”

As part of the agreement, the company will also support the city’s efforts to educate residents about the federal Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides up to a $30 monthly discount on internet service for households at or below 200% of federal poverty guidelines. (On Tuesday, LaChapelle’s office also announced that the Massachusetts Broadband Institute had selected Easthampton to be in the first cohort of communities it will help develop a “digital equity plan” that will “outline a path for closing the digital divide.” The city and its consultants will hold a listening session of their own on Oct. 25 at 6 p.m. at Mountain View School.)

Gonsalves, the broadband expert at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said that he isn’t familiar with the specifics of Easthampton’s situation. But speaking generally, he said that private-public partnerships work best when communities are investing capital into the project too, allowing them a real seat at the table. When a municipality just plays “a support role,” he said it is very difficult, if not impossible, to have any say.

“Generally speaking, the more skin in the game that a community has, the more say they have in terms of the outcome: timeline, affordability, reliability standards,” he said. “Those are the kinds of things that can be part of a private-public partnership and can be negotiated.”

Others have expressed concern about the possibility that GoNetSpeed gets gobbled up by a bigger competitor at some point in the future.

Private equity firms invest large pools of money — from wealthy people or endowments, for example. Often, a strategy they use to make handsome returns on those investments is by buying companies, restructuring them and selling them at a higher price.

Before Oak Hill Capital bought OTELCO in 2021, the company was publicly traded and, for that reason, had to make regular disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In one filing OTELCO made to the SEC in 2019, the company pointed to Oak Hill Capital’s role in gobbling up the competition in New England.

“Consolidation in the telecom sector over the past few years has significantly shrunk the universe of Otelco’s competitors, especially in the Northeast, with the completed acquisitions of Firstlight, Oxford Networks and Sovernet by Oak Hill Capital,” the report said.

The report said that one of OTELCO’s “operational objectives” was the expansion of its fiber network, increasing revenue per customer and making the company “more attractive for targeted acquisition.”

That’s exactly what happened in 2021, when Oak Hill Capital bought the company and took it private. Now, some have expressed worries that one of the telecom giants will purchase GoNetSpeed after it builds out more of its fiber networks.

“There’s no control in the long term,” Miranda said. “It does concern me, especially since private equity is involved and when they can’t get their money back they break it up and sell the parts or it just goes away.”

Hoare, the GoNetSpeed lawyer, said that it doesn’t seem like Oak Hill Capital has plans to seek a buyer and that the company plans to stay in the region.

“It’s difficult to think about what does the future hold, but we’re not looking to join up with other companies in the area,” he said.

***

A thin blanket of fog lay draped across Easthampton last Thursday morning as workers in reflective, neon coats moved down South Street in bucket trucks. At one end of the street sat a large spool of thick fiber-optic cables, spinning slowly as workers let out the line and hung it from one utility pole to the next.

When St. Pierre learned that Easthampton had jettisoned plans for municipal fiber and that GoNetSpeed was beginning work in the city, he said it was bittersweet. The city probably could have done it better, he said, but GoNetSpeed’s arrival will mean more competition.

“I hope they’re able to deliver a quality service that would serve the people of Easthampton effectively,” St. Pierre said. And while he’s not familiar with GoNetSpeed, he said the bar is low for them. “It would be hard for them to do worse than Charter. They’d have to really try.”

Others involved with the Easthampton Telecommunications Advisory Committee described the development as a disappointment. Miranda said that when the committee handed in their report, he never heard about it again from city officials.

“We never got a follow-up, we never got invited to the City Council meeting when they discussed it,” Miranda said. It was the first time he got involved in a city committee, and he said the lack of communication has made him leery about participating in something like that again. “I think our job was done, but at the same time, it’s sort of like all the work we had done just went into a black hole.”

LaChapelle said that she isn’t under any illusions that GoNetSpeed is “the friendliest corporation in the world;” they’re not, she said. The company didn’t need Easthampton’s permission to begin the work of building its own network in town, though LaChapelle said GoNetSpeed likely wouldn’t have entered the market — which Hoare, the company’s lawyer, described as “attractive” — if a municipal utility were there to compete for customers.

“Is it disappointing that we won’t have our own broadband? Yes,” LaChapelle said. “But also, going forward and staying with a private company, I feel like the city in 10 years, in 20 years, will be more on top of technology with GoNetSpeet than with [a municipal light plant] that has to continually upgrade and improve lines in the city.”

St. Pierre said that he sympathizes with City Hall, given the administration’s long list of projects now in the works to improve quality of life in the city.

“Unfortunately, the municipality, for whichever reason, was not able to move forward and the private company saw the opportunity and jumped on it,” he said. “Even though we could have done it on a municipal level if we had moved a little faster.”

City Councilor Tom Peake was perhaps the biggest proponent of municipal broadband, moving the project through two City Council votes in order to get the question on the ballot asking residents if they wanted to create a municipal light plant. Peake declined an on-the-record interview about LaChapelle’s decision. In a statement, he said that it came down to the mayor and her team deciding to head in a different direction.

“I was opposed to the decision, but I understand why she made it,” Peake said. “This network will get built out, and it won’t cost the city anything. We also won’t own it or gain any of the benefits of owning it, which to me is a huge missed opportunity. On the other hand, it will allegedly be built much faster than the timeline we had for financing and building a municipal network.”

“Tough call either way,” he added.

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Dusty Christensen is an independent investigative reporter based in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at dusty.christensen@protonmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dustyc123.

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.

Massachusetts officials are proposing policy solutions to address a bureaucratic backlog that municipal leaders and clean energy advocates say is bogging down one of the state’s most successful drivers of clean electricity purchases.

Nineteen communities across the state are waiting for public utility regulators to rule on proposed community choice aggregation plans, in which local governments negotiate with power suppliers for lower prices or a higher share of renewables.

Some of these municipalities have been waiting for more than two years to launch their programs. Another 16 are waiting to see if the state will let them modify existing programs. As the proposals languish, municipalities are missing out on chances to save residents money and cut carbon emissions.

In response to this backlog, the state energy department has proposed a new system to streamline the process, though many advocates are highly skeptical of these guidelines.

“I’m not sure that the way they’ve drafted them is really going to address the backlog,” said Martha Grover, sustainability manager for the city of Melrose, which first adopted community choice aggregation in 2015 and has held off updating the program in recent years because of the delays.

In addition, state Rep. Tommy Vitolo has introduced a bill that would require faster response times and allow municipalities to make some changes to programs without seeking state approval.

Massachusetts was the first state to introduce these programs, as a part of electricity restructuring legislation passed in 1997. The policy allows individual cities and towns or groups of municipalities to use the promise of a built-in customer base to negotiate with power suppliers for prices. Generally, residents are automatically enrolled but can opt out at any time.

The Cape Light Compact, a group of 21 towns on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, formed the state’s first aggregation program in 2000. The idea was slow to catch on, however, until electricity prices started rising in 2013 and 2014, prompting more municipalities to seek alternatives. Today, there are 168 municipal aggregation plans active in the state, saving consumers more than $200 million annually, according to a report from the nonprofit Green Energy Consumers Alliance.

Though not explicitly an emissions reduction program, aggregation also allows municipalities to include more renewable energy in their portfolios than legally required. And many of them do exactly that: 76 of Massachusetts’ aggregation programs included extra renewable content in 2022, according to the consumers alliance. Another 40 communities let individual residents opt-in to higher levels of renewable energy. In 2022, Massachusetts’ green energy aggregation programs increased demand for renewable energy in the state by more than 1 million megawatt-hours, the Green Energy Consumers Alliance calculated.

“There is no other program in the commonwealth that produces cleaner electrons without subsidy,” said alliance executive director Larry Chretien.

The delays were first caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a statement from the state energy department. Additionally, the complexity of the rules and requirements for a successful application have also slowed things down, state officials and municipal leaders agree. Each time regulators rule on a plan, any new precedent set by that ruling must be complied with by all future applicants. This requirement makes it hard for municipalities to understand the rules and forces frequent revisions. It also makes it more painstaking for the state to ensure a proposal meets the ever-changing slate of requirements.

“There are now 168 approved plans and we are held accountable to rules and ways of operating that are buried in the footnotes,” Grover said.

The proposed solutions

The state has responded to the backlog by releasing draft guidelines that summarize and simplify the detailed requirements. It has also issued an application template and proposed an expedited approval process for municipalities that use the template.

“Addressing these delays is a top priority for the [Department of Public Utilities], and we look forward to announcing finalized guidelines that will help facilitate a timely review of applications,” said department chair Jamie Van Nostrand.

For many municipalities, however, the guidelines make no changes to the process, but only formalize the existing approach, which many say amounts to micromanagement. At least eight cities and towns have filed testimony so far arguing that the proposal erodes local control and would be unlikely to speed up approvals. The draft guidelines would make the process “more burdensome and less efficient,” testified Michael Ossing, city council president in Marlborough, which adopted community choice aggregation in 2006, saving residents an estimated $26 million over the past 17 years.

“Aggregation should be under municipal control,” said Anthony Rinaldi, an Amesbury city councilor. “We should control how we implement the program, how we inform our citizens. But they want to control every little thing.”

Vitolo’s bill offers an alternative approach. It would address the delays by requiring the state to issue a decision on aggregation applications within 90 days. If this deadline is not met, a program would automatically be approved. If regulators rejected a program, and applicants resubmitted an amended plan within 30 days, the state would then have 30 days to issue a decision.

The bill would also allow cities and towns to make certain changes — including periodic changes to prices and product offerings, means of providing notifications to customers, and sharing translated materials — to their programs without returning to utility regulators for approval. Vitolo points to Boston, which launched a community choice program in 2021, as an example: the city wants to distribute translations of its information materials, but can’t do so without getting in the slow-moving line for approval.

“It’s been frustrating,” Vitolo said. “We want to allow these aggregators to make simple straightforward changes without going to the [state].”

Vitolo’s bill had a committee hearing in late September. Now supporters must wait to see if it gains traction in the legislature.

Massachusetts seeks to streamline approvals for community choice aggregation is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

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EASTHAMPTON — At 92 years old, Bob Jensen has spent nearly all his life in the labor movement. A union bricklayer who arrived in western Massachusetts on a football scholarship at American International College, he ended up becoming a labor educator at the University of Connecticut, a negotiator with the American Federation of Teachers and an active organizer locally.

As Jensen surveys the state of organized labor in western Massachusetts and beyond, after decades involved in workers’ struggles locally and nationwide, he said there’s a lot to be optimistic about.

“Workers are fed up in every area,” he said, from airline pilots to baristas. “They’re organizing to demand what is rightfully theirs.”

Jensen was addressing a large gathering of union members, activists and organizers celebrating Labor Day at the Western Mass Area Labor Federation’s picnic in Easthampton on Sunday.

As a wave of high-profile union organizing continues to sweep across the country, including in western Massachusetts, several recent nationwide polls have found that support for unions is higher than it has been in decades. After a summer of strikes and almost strikes, from actors and writers to UPS drivers, 2023 may see the most U.S. workers walking off the job since the 2018 “Red for Ed” teacher strikes.

Western Massachusetts has had its own moment in the spotlight, too, amid all of that organizing. Since last summer, Hadley has been home to several “firsts” in unionizing large corporate chains: Trader Joe’s last July, Barnes & Noble this May and Michael’s last month. Educators across the region fought public battles for new contracts, retail workers walked off the job, nurses picketed the loss of hospital beds and daycare workers in Springfield went out on strike.

Now, as the summer comes to a close, labor organizers and union leaders around the area are reflecting on the rejuvenated state of the labor movement in western Massachusetts and the struggles they see ahead.

“It definitely feels like there’s a new energy and excitement,” Max Page, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, told The Shoestring. “So often, we’re like: ‘Everything sucks.’ Now we’re like: ‘What can we achieve.’”

Page is part of the rank-and-file, activist caucus within the MTA — Educators for a Democratic Union — that over the past 10 years has reshaped the union’s vision to fight aggressively for progressive policies inside and outside of the classroom. Last year, the MTA successfully put forward a ballot question that raised taxes on the state’s millionaires to better fund education and transportation — an initiative Page said that western Massachusetts turned out in large numbers to vote for in November, playing a vital role in its passage. The union has also supported educators across the state going out on strike, despite the fact that state law bars public employees from striking.

Now, the MTA is prioritizing two long-time goals of education activists: scrapping Massachusetts’ high-stakes MCAS testing and making public higher education debt-free for the state’s students.

“This is the year to win it,” he said.

The past year, immigrant workers have also seen some of the fruits of their longtime struggles for economic and racial justice.

In a phone interview with The Shoestring, Pioneer Valley Workers Center Executive Director Claudia Rosales said that immigrant workers and their families won a major victory this year when, in July, undocumented immigrants could begin applying for driver’s licenses in Massachusetts. After years of organizing work by the Workers Center and other groups across the state, state lawmakers last year passed the Work and Family Mobility Act — a major priority for immigrant workers and their allies across the state.

“It’s so important because it stops families from being separated by detentions on the part of ICE,” Rosales said, using the acronym for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Now, Rosales said, the next legislative priority for local farm workers is challenging the state’s minimum wage law. After a five-year hike to the minimum wage, workers in Massachusetts earn a minimum wage of $15 per hour. However, agricultural laborers are exempt from that law, meaning employers can pay them as little as $8 per hour.

“We need to get that off the books,” she said.

Those who have spent decades organizing workers locally expressed optimism that now is the time to win victories like those.

Jeff Jones first got involved in the local labor movement as a Stop &s Shop worker in the 1980s. Now the president of UFCW Local 1459 and the executive board of the Western Mass Area Labor Federation, he said those entering the workforce now are increasingly organizing for better pay and conditions.

“It’s a whole new, younger generation that has come in and is eager to learn the history of the labor movement and apply it,” he said. And western Massachusetts, he added, is “one of the most progressive pockets in the labor movement,” having an outsized influence despite the region’s small size.

Clare Hammonds, a professor at the influential UMass Amherst Labor Center, pointed to the workers unionizing at Barnes & Noble and Michael’s as an example of western Massachusetts organizers tackling big issues.

But union membership does still remain in decline, however, despite the high-profile surge in new organizing. In 2022, union membership hit a record low of 10.1%. But Hammonds said that as more workers win unions, that winning is contagious.

The issues those workers in Hadley and beyond are discussing — fair pay and decent hours, for example — aren’t new. What is new, she said, is the energy and support they feel from the community as they step up and take risks to improve their working conditions.

“It feels like we’re on the cusp of something really exciting,” she said.

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Dusty Christensen is an independent investigative reporter based in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at dusty.christensen@protonmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dustyc123.

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.

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HADLEY — Earlier this month, 24 workers at the Hadley location of the arts-and-crafts retailer Michaels announced their intent to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1459. If they win an election before the National Labor Relations Board, they’ll become the very first union recognized at any store in Michaels’ nationwide chain.

On Aug. 10, the workers filed cards with the NLRB, triggering an election. Michaels employee Peter Boots-Faubert works as a framer at the store — a job they said pays minimum wage. In a phone interview, they told The Shoestring that a supermajority of workers have signed union cards. Two of the biggest issues for those workers, they said, were low pay and a lack of staffing.

“A lot of the time, people don’t get breaks,” they said. “There’s not enough people working.”

Michaels did not return an email from The Shoestring requesting comment.

With a population of just over 5,000, Hadley is best known, perhaps, for its asparagus. But now, the town is gaining fame outside of the region for another reason: new union organizing.

Hadley has now become a town of “firsts” in unionizing large corporate chains. Last July, workers at the Trader Joe’s just down the street from Michaels formed the first-ever union at that chain. Their independent union born in Hadley, Trader Joe’s United, went on to organize workers at Trader Joe’s in Minneapolis, MN, Louisville, KY, and Oakland, CA.

Then, this May, workers next door at Barnes & Noble in Hadley voted to unionize with UFCW Local 1459. That was the first stand-alone Barnes & Noble location in the country to unionize; two weeks, prior around 70 workers had voted to unionize a Barnes & Noble College Booksellers location at Rutgers University.

Michaels now becomes the latest store on the Route 9 corridor to unionize. The spark of new organizing led the news outlet More Perfect Union to dub Hadley “Solidarity Central.”

Chase Goates, who works mostly as a cashier at Michaels, said that he and others were inspired by Trader Joe’s United and then further buoyed when they saw Barnes & Noble workers unionize in the same Mountain Farms Mall building as them. Since the Michaels staffers went public with their union, he said the other nearby unions have reached out over social media to connect with them.

“Their support so far has been very positive,” Boots-Faubert said. “I love all of the ‘Hadley is a union town’ stuff going around,” Goates added.

Boots-Faubert said that workers at Michaels are paid very little and have to deal with workplace struggles like not being able to sit down, a lack of janitorial services and difficult hours. Goates added that the company responded to the union effort with “one of the most copy-paste union-busting letters I’ve seen.”

UFCW organizers Drew Weisse and Gillian Petrarca told The Shoestring that the union will represent all non-managerial workers at the Michaels location.
Weisse said that Trader Joe’s United had a big impact on both the Barnes & Noble and Michaels workers who decided to unionize.

“Once you see retail locations start to move, other workers at smaller companies or less prominent ones say, ‘Oh, we can do that too,’” Weisse said.

Michaels describes itself at the largest arts-and-crafts retailer in North America. Filings with the NLRB show that Michaels has hired a lawyer from the firm Ogletree Deakins, which is known for the “union avoidance” services it provides clients.

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Photo by Mike Mozart

Dusty Christensen is an independent investigative reporter based in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at dusty.christensen@protonmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dustyc123.

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.

[Content warning: The video of this arrest shows police using force against a civilian. The incident is also described in the text of the article.]

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NORTHAMPTON — Last week, when The Shoestring published a video of Northampton police tackling and pepper-spraying a 60-year-old woman in April, city resident Jada Tarbutton was disturbed. As a Black woman who lives in Northampton, she said the violent arrest of a person of color reinforced her belief that the city’s progressive reputation is only true for some of its residents.

“I’m scared in Northampton,” she said. “It hurts my heart. I don’t feel safe.”

Tarbutton was one of over 70 people who showed up at City Hall on Sunday to protest against police brutality. The demonstration came after The Shoestring broke the story that on April 4, police pulled over Marisol Driouech — who was in the city working as a food-delivery driver — and within five minutes had yanked her out of her car, tackled her to the ground and pepper sprayed her. The Northampton Police Department cleared the arresting officer, John Sellew, and Jonathan Bartlett, the officer who pepper-sprayed Driouech, of any wrongdoing. So did a consulting firm the department hired to investigate the incident.

But for those gathered Monday, the incident was a clear case of police violently escalating a minor traffic stop on a woman whose first language is Spanish and who told Sellew she didn’t understand him.

“Hey hey, ho ho, John Sellew has got to go!” the protesters chanted. They called for Bartlett to be fired and for Police Chief Jody Kasper to resign over the department’s handling of the case.

Several communist and socialist groups organized the rally. John “J.R.” Rivera, a member of the Workers Party of Massachusetts, said that Driouech is from the same Holyoke neighborhood as him. As a Puerto Rican, he said her arrest is a reminder of how immigrants and non-native English speakers are at risk of police violence.

“I’ve never felt particularly protected by any police, but this moment solidified what I know now: whatever community the police protect, people like me aren’t a part of it,” he said.

There was no immediately visible police presence at the protest. However, the Northampton Police Department’s drone flew above the crowd and officers erected barricades in front of the police department.

The officers’ arrest of Driouech sent her to the hospital. Sellew wrote in his arrest report that after failing to hand over her license and registration, Driouech tried to roll up her window during the traffic stop and then put her car in drive. He accused her of resisting arrest when he ordered her out of her car and grabbing his baton from its holster as he tried to take her down.

Another speaker at Sunday’s protest, Workers Party member Dennis Moore, noted that Sellew wrote in that same report that once Driouech had his baton, he realized that he “had the ability to utilize strikes or possibly lethal force.”

“However, due to her size, I believed that I could subdue her using takedown techniques until additional units arrived,” Sellew wrote. Driouech is 5 feet tall and weighs some 120 pounds.

“Officer Sellew believed that he had the right to kill a 60-year-old woman whose only fault was having a broken headlight and not understanding English well,” Moore said. He went on to ask what might have happened if Sellew had encountered a younger, more fit person during the traffic stop. “Had he pulled over a young, male ESL person, would the incident have ended in a blood bath? I hope we never find out.”

Reacting to Sellew’s comments about lethal force, city resident Dan Cannity — the former co-chair of the city’s Policing Review Commission — told The Shoestring that the entire system is irrevocably broken and that just firing one or two officers isn’t enough. He said protesters were sending a message to city leaders: “the community is fed up with violence and policing against members of our community.”

“If an old woman can be yanked out of her car, pinned down and pepper-sprayed, who is safe?” Cannity asked.

Police initially charged Driouech with assault and battery on a police officer, attempting to disarm a police officer, resisting arrest and refusing to identify herself, in addition to the lights violation, according to court documents. But the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office dismissed all of those criminal charges against Driouech, who admitted to the broken headlight charge. 

Local defense attorney Dana Goldblatt is now representing Driouech and has said she intends to present claims to the city before possibly suing over the arrest. 

Goldblatt is currently suing the city on behalf of another person Northampton police pepper-sprayed in 2017, Eric Matlock. Another man is also suing Northampton and five police officers over allegations that they tackled him to the ground, kicked him, beat him with a baton, pepper-sprayed and arrested him during a mental-health episode in 2019.

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Dusty Christensen is an independent investigative reporter based in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at dusty.christensen@protonmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dustyc123.

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.

Every summer, people flock to Maryland to eat blue crabs. Named for their brilliant sapphire-colored claws, blue crab is one of the most iconic species in the Chesapeake Bay. The scientific name for blue crabs, Callinectes sapidus, means “beautiful savory swimmer.”

In restaurants and at home, diners pile steamed and seasoned blue crabs in the middle of a table covered in paper. Then, using small mallets, knives, bare hands and fingers, they break open the hard shells and extract the juicy meat from inside.

It is a messy experience, especially with Old Bay seasoning and beer known locally as Natty Bohs, one that is quintessentially Maryland.

Though many people know firsthand how difficult it is to pick and clean crab meat, they often don’t realize how crab is processed when it is sold in stores already picked and cleaned. Most people also may not know that crab picking is a livelihood for many, mainly poor, women.

For generations, African American women from Maryland’s rural, maritime communities labored for crab houses on the Eastern Shore.

Today, fewer than 10 crab houses are left on the Shore. The workforce consists of mainly female migrant workers from Mexico who do the grueling job of picking crab for eight to nine hours a day, from late spring to early fall. They make on average of US$2.50 to $4.00 for every pound of crabmeat they pick.

That pay is roughly one-tenth to one-twelfth of the wholesale price of one pound – or about a half of a kilogram – of the seafood they pick, which is $35 to $44. In comparison, the Maryland minimum wage is $13.25 an hour, while the federal minimum wage is $7.25.

Rise of immigration in rural America

Over 2.1 million migrants and immigrants work in jobs growing and processing food in the United States, playing an essential role in feeding Americans.

As an anthropologist and global health researcher, my work has shown that they are part of an increasing trend in rural America. Since 1990, immigrants have been moving to small towns and rural regions at unprecedented rates, accounting for 37% of the overall rural population growth from 2000-2018.

Some rural counties, like Stewart County in Georgia and Franklin County in Alabama, have experienced growth rates of over 1,000% in their foreign-born population, which have boosted their local economies and mitigated rural population decline.

Maryland’s rural Eastern Shore, for instance, has experienced a rapid rise in immigration since 2000. From 2010 to 2019, migration was the primary source of population growth, with the foreign-born population increasing by 90%.

Many immigrants come to this region to find work in agriculture, poultry and seafood processing. Some come directly from Mexico, Central America and Haiti.

Typically, farmworkers have temporary visas and arrive in late spring and early summer and stay through the growing season. Migrant Mexican women who work in crab processing also follow the same seasonal employment pattern. Others, like those working in poultry processing plants, have settled here more permanently, either as undocumented or permanent residents.

At risk of exploitation and injury

Immigrant workers in rural regions work dangerous jobs and are exposed to pollution, deplorable living conditions and limited safety training.

Additionally, immigrant workers are among the lowest paid and lack access to health information, preventive care and medical treatment. Dry skin, cuts, scrapes, rashes, chronic pain and broken bones are common among immigrants who work in agriculture, poultry and seafood processing.

These workers also suffer from numerous invisible injuries such as discrimination, verbal harassment and physical exploitation.

Challenges to rural health

Despite the daily risk of harm, migrant workers in rural regions have limited access to health care and rely on mobile clinics, local health departments and community health centers.

But these facilities are not equipped to handle specialty care or emergencies. Nor are many of them easily accessible due to location or hours of operation. In addition, many workers cannot afford to miss work or are afraid to tell their supervisors that they need care.

Some avoid health providers altogether because they are not treated well or feel misunderstood.

Essential but undervalued

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the notion of “essential” workers became part of the nation’s vocabulary as a way to describe people required to continue in-person work under lockdown conditions. They included food industry workers.

The pandemic exposed the disproportionate numbers of immigrant workers in the agriculture, poultry and seafood industries in rural America.

It also revealed how policies enacted during the pandemic to protect public health and essential workers did little to prevent people from working in dangerous workplace conditions without adequate safeguards.

Unable to self-quarantine at home, many food production workers got sick or even died as a result of working in crowded conditions without personal protective equipment and adequate ventilation.

In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the long-standing crisis of health care for immigrants in rural America.

But despite evidence that close to 2.5 million foreign-born people live and work in rural America, very little information exists on these people’s health.

This inattention by lawmakers is harmful and dangerous because it leaves health care providers and social workers with little understanding of immigrant experiences in small towns and sparsely populated rural communities.

Thurka Sangaramoorthy receives funding from The National Institutes of Health.

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NORTHAMPTON — Just last week, local farmer Courtney Whitely was staring out over the plot of land off Meadow Street where he grows eggplant and other crops. It was the best crop he has ever had, he said proudly.

But now it’s all gone.

Whitely’s Ras Farm was one of many local farms devastated when the Mill and Connecticut rivers flooded this week. After days of heavy rain across the Connecticut River Valley and in Vermont, the deluge destroyed the crops and livelihoods of farmers across the region. Now, those who work the land are assessing the damages and preparing for an uncertain future. And they’re not alone.

The floods have ravaged not just farms but homes, buildings and public infrastructure. And while the true extent of the damage is still emerging, it is becoming clear that socially vulnerable populations — immigrants, people of color, small-scale farmers, the unhoused — have experienced a heavy burden, mirroring longtime warnings from experts who have said that climate change will disproportionately impact those groups. 

“It was like someone stabbed me,” Whitely said Wednesday, gesturing to the muddy fields behind him and describing the hard work that the floods had washed away. Originally from Jamaica, he has spent some two decades farming here in the Valley. What might have been salvaged likely is unusable because of the contaminants that the flood waters brought. “If it’s not drought, it’s rain. If it’s not rain, it’s flood.”

Climate change experts say that global warming has resulted in a kind of “weather whiplash.” Years of drought can be followed by massive rain events made possible because warmer air can hold more moisture. From California to India, extreme weather events have become more intense and more frequent, punctuated by dry spells. In Massachusetts, the summer of 2021 was one of the wettest on record followed the next summer by a drought. This month, some places in Vermont were hit with 9 inches of rain in a day, an amount more typical of an entire summer.

“Warming may be leading to hydroclimate whiplash … which means wide swings between wet and dry periods,” said Michael Rawlins, the associate director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Climate System Research Center. “This is believed to be an emerging manifestation of climate warming.”

In addition to smaller-scale farmers like Whitely, farm laborers — many of whom are undocumented immigrants — are already losing their livelihoods because of the flooding in the Connecticut River Valley.

“There are people telling me that because of the floods, all of this that’s happening, they are already not working or are working just one or two times a week,” said Claudia Rosales, who heads the Pioneer Valley Workers Center and has herself been a farmworker. “They need that work to live.”

Rosales said that the Workers Center is organizing to find farm workers employment at other farms or elsewhere. The organization also runs a mutual-aid food distribution program and is working to get financial assistance to impacted workers, she said. But for farm workers who do such essential work, finding other jobs is difficult for many because of their immigration status.

“Those immigrants need that work as much as society does,” Rosales said.

People without housing were also hit hard by the flooding. In an interview with MassLive, Manna Community Center’s Jess Tilley said on Wednesday that six unhoused people had been displaced by flooding at their camp site. 

“Many folks have lost all their belongings including tents, sleeping bags and outerwear,” the organization wrote on their Facebook page. Efforts to reach Manna were unsuccessful Thursday.

Much of the focus has been on farms, though, given the heavy damage they suffered.

On Wednesday, state officials and local lawmakers toured farms across the region that had been submerged and had only just become accessible. The first stop was at the 121-acre Grow Food Northampton Community Farm, where farmers can lease low-cost land and more than 400 community members grow organic garden plots, about a third of which are subsidized. Alisa Klein, the organization’s executive director, said that 275 of the 325 plots there had been inundated.

Pat James, the group’s community garden manager, said that walking through the plots was still heartbreaking, pointing to some of the produce Grow Food Northampton gives to food pantries and other meal sites across the region. Bigger, industrial farms might have an easier time rebounding from floods, but small-scale operations will be less likely to survive, James said.

“We’re not in the same boat,” was how James described the difference between agro giants and independent, small-scale farms. “We’re all in the same water right now … But the people with more resources and access have an easier way out of the water.”

Many of the secondary and tertiary consequences of the flooding are still yet undetermined, state Sen. Jo Comerford said as she walked through a parking lot caked with river mud on her way to see some of the affected farmland. Some of those local food pantries will be missing food they had counted on, for example. And it wasn’t clear as of Wednesday whether the financial costs of the disaster would hit the necessary threshold to trigger a bigger federal response, Comerford added.

“The ripples of this are unknowable at this point,” she said.

Puddles of water were still present on the fields Comerford was visiting. There, a group of Somali Bantu refugees work the land as a cooperative: the New Family Community Farming Coop. Acting as an interpreter between the English-speaking officials and the Maay Maay-speaking farmers, Mumat Aweys explained that out of about 20 plots farmed by the coop, a handful had been flooded.

“They put a lot of work into it; they mostly plow by hand,” Aweys said. “All that work … goes to ruins.”

As the planet gets hotter, many experts have called for municipalities, states and the federal government to get more serious about updating infrastructure to become more resilient. Northampton has gone so far as to create a new department, the Climate Action and Project Administration Department, to make sure that city projects meet climate and sustainability goals — something mayoral chief of staff Alan Wolf said has now become “part of the math of municipal government in the 21st century.”

“Reducing our vulnerability to extreme hydrologic events is an important component of adaptation to climate change,” said Rawlins, the UMass Amherst researcher. He said that extreme precipitation events are increasing faster in the Northeast than anywhere in the country.

On the federal level, Congress is currently debating its “Farm Bill,” which lawmakers pass every five years. The massive legislation puts money toward the country’s food systems, and climate-justice advocates are pushing for significant investments in building more resilience and more steps to reduce carbon emissions.

“The evidence and science and everything around us clearly points to one thing: our future is going to be unlike our past and it’s becoming more difficult to predict that future,” said Omanjana Goswami, an interdisciplinary scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “What we need to do is build more resilient agricultural systems that can adapt to changing climatic patterns but also adapt to drought, to floods.”

Goswami said that from an environmental health perspective, the contamination brought by floodwaters needs to be accounted for. She said that the Farm Bill is a critical moment to further the vital work of building an agricultural model that stops harming the soil and instead works to sequester carbon and prepares for nasty weather ahead.

“This is an opportunity for … everybody to advocate for a more climate-focused Farm Bill,” she said.

One of the farmers at Grown Food Northampton was in the process of experimenting with perennial crops to figure out what could best deal with extreme weather. Piyush Labhsetwar is growing wheat and a pawpaw orchard along the banks of the Mill River, which were all five feet underwater after the floods.

“It’s a mixed bag for me,” he said on Wednesday. Nothing had been uprooted, for example. He just didn’t plan to have such an extreme event test that resiliency in his first year of experimenting.

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Dusty Christensen is an independent investigative reporter based in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at dusty.christensen@protonmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dustyc123.

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.