When the state House and Senate passed a five-year moratorium on building any new prisons and jails last year, those who had spent years fighting against the construction of a new women’s prison thought that the Legislature was finally listening.

But, in one of his last moves in office last August, former Gov. Charlie Baker vetoed the bill. Now, under Gov. Maura Healey, the new women’s prison is back on the table. What’s more, the state agencies in charge of prisons and public construction are blocking public records requests from activists opposed to the project for meeting minutes and other planning documents.

According to activists who requested those records, the state’s Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, or DCAMM, and the state Department of Correction are refusing to share information about the project’s progress with concerned citizens through a controversial exemption to the state’s public records law known as the “deliberative process exemption.” 

Organizations and people concerned about the expansion of prisons in Massachusetts have received heavily redacted copies of documents in two recent attempts at seeking public information about the project. DCAMM released bi-weekly meeting minutes dating from September to May, but most pages were completely redacted. 

“The lack of transparency and accountability is unacceptable,” said Mallory Hanora, the executive director of Families for Justice as Healing, which is leading the #NoNewWomensPrison Campaign and requested the records. 

As incarceration rates in Massachusetts continue to fall and alternatives to prison are organized and passed into law, the Department of Correction continues to insist that a $50 million new women’s prison project is necessary to eventually replace MCI-Framingham, which is the oldest continuously operating prison in the United States. Organizers fighting the project are struggling to gather information in a state with some of the most opaque public records laws in the country. Massachusetts is the only state where the Legislature, courts and governor’s office all claim to be entirely exempt from disclosure laws. Healey campaigned on the promise that she would be one of the most transparent governors in state history, but quickly backtracked on that once in office. 

Hanora and her legal counsel are in the process of appealing the redactions. The most recent release from DCAMM included the list of state employees attending the bi-weekly planning meetings. The names John Rose and Sean Foley — both listed as construction coordinators for the Department of Correction — are bad news to the project’s opponents. 

According to Massachusetts public records law, the deliberative process exemption that DCAMM is citing applies to “inter-agency or intra-agency memoranda or letters relating to policy positions being developed by the agency.”

“This subclause shall not apply to reasonably completed factual studies or reports on which the development of such policy positions has been or may be based,” the law reads. 

The exemption is one of 23 such exemptions in Massachusetts. It divides all governmental information into two categories: “fact” and “opinion.” Factual information — like whether a final decision has been made about the prison project — is not protected by the exemption and must be made available to the public. The exemption protects “pre-decisional” and opinion-based information — the initial recommendation of a policy-maker, for instance. 

“According to the Secretary of State’s Guide on Massachusetts Public Records Law, state agencies can withhold documents chronicling discussions related to ‘legal and policy matters,’ but they must reveal factual matters involved in the deliberative process,” said Catherine Sevcenko, who is senior counsel for the National Council for Incarcerated & Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, of which FJAH is a member. 

Sevcenko said that it’s unclear what the agency has redacted, but that “blacking out 90% of a document on the grounds that it reflects opinion rather than facts is concerning.” 

“Either the decision to build a new women’s prison is being taken with a scant factual basis, or the Commonwealth is withholding information that citizens are entitled to know,” Sevcenko said. “Neither is acceptable.” 

In its response to Hanora’s records request, DCAMM said that the redactions it made to the records were justified under the deliberative process exemption.

“Please note, portions of the requested records have been withheld or redacted pursuant to the Deliberative Process Exemption set out at G.L. c. 4, § 7(26)(d) (‘Exemption (d)’),” the agency wrote in its response. “This exemption applies to inter-agency or intra-agency memoranda or letters relating to policy positions being developed by the agency, in this instance, policy relating to corrections in the Commonwealth.  Policy positions being developed by the agency is ongoing and therefore exempt from mandatory disclosure at this time.” 

Hanora and other activists insist that they should have access to policy regarding women’s incarceration even as it’s being developed. FJAH is made up of, and works directly with, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women, the demographic that will be most impacted by state decisions regarding the new prison. 

Deliberative process exemptions to public information laws have garnered controversy across the nation, not just in Massachusetts. 

In 2019, for example, the Sierra Club challenged the use of a deliberative process exemption to the federal Freedom of Information Act in a case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. In May 2021, the court’s justices ruled in favor of the exemption, saying that “facilitating agency candor in exercising its expertise in preliminary agency deliberations” can outweigh “transparency and accountability concerns.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion, her first since joining the court. 

The Sierra Club’s case was the first time that FOIA exemption had been addressed by the court in 20 years. Advocacy organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed an amicus brief in the case, were hopeful the court would strengthen FOIA, but its ruling further blurred the lines. According to the Yale Journal of Regulation, the decision “furthers government secrecy.” 

Elsewhere, in Tennessee, Republican Gov. Bill Lee has drawn scrutiny for using that state’s deliberative process exemption frequently since 2019 to deny records to journalists and state representatives. 

The use of the exemption here in Massachusetts raises concerns about government transparency on a costly and beleaguered project. And it’s not the first time that opponents of the project have raised alarms about DCAMM and DOC failing to meet legal obligations around communicating with the public. The project has been shrouded in secrecy since the state failed to properly advertise its first request for proposals in 2019. That initial proposal and a second were withdrawn after administrative challenges citing improper procedures were filed with the Massachusetts Attorney General Office’s Bid Unit during Healey’s tenure as attorney general.

“This is typical of the DOC,” Hanora said. “Redacting notes about the new women’s prison project is just another example of how this rogue agency avoids accountability and the rest of the executive branch lets it happen.”

Hanora said that incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women have been clear that there is “no such thing as a safe or trauma-informed prison,” despite what the DOC claims they hope to build. 

“People are demanding that the state does something different and better for women than yet another prison where DOC’s abuse and medical neglect will certainly continue,” she added.

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Sierra Dickey is a writer and educator living in Gill. Find her on Twitter @dierrasickey.

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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By Sarah Robertson

BOSTON – Soil products derived from sewage sludge have been applied to land for decades – on golf courses, to remediate disturbed land, and even to fertilize crops. Options to dispose of wastewater sludge are limited, and much of it ends up at commercial composting facilities. In the United States, approximately 47% of all “biosolids,” an industry term for sewage sludge, end up applied to land.

While a patchwork of regulations have been aimed at ensuring pathogens and heavy metals do not end up in our food supply through land application of sludge, in recent years it has become clear that a class of harmful manmade chemicals has been spread undetected. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in our soil, food, and water have been linked to the practice, and it is likely that many farms have been contaminated unknowingly.

For some farmers, biosolids have offered an affordable alternative to traditional fertilizers. 

“I don’t think we know the extent of the problem,” state senator Jo Comerford’s office said in a statement. “This is a complex issue that deserves a lot of careful scrutiny and input from stakeholders and policy experts.”

This session, Comerford filed a bill that would protect Massachusetts farmers whose lands are discovered to be contaminated with PFAS from legal and financial repercussions. S.39, An Act protecting our soil and farms from PFAS contamination, would set up a special relief fund to test soil, water, and agricultural products for PFAS, remediate contamination, and pay costs incurred by affected businesses and individuals, including farmworkers’ medical bills. 

Additionally, the bill would require all soil products manufactured with “biosolids” to be labeled as such.  

“Enacting legislation like this would be the first step in a longer process of deciding who might receive funds and how much would be available,” Comerford’s office wrote. “We hope the bill will open up a discussion on the best policy choices…. [The] first step is to test biosolids being used on agricultural land to understand the scope of the problem, and to let farmers know about any products used in their soil so they can make decisions about their land.” 

On May 15, a hearing for S.39 and its sister bill in the House, H.101, was held on Beacon Hill by the Joint Committee on Agriculture. 

“We want to ensure that farmers are not at risk of losing their farms, losing their livelihoods, due to practices employed on their land in the past that have generally been accepted management practices – until this point,” said Winton Pitcoff, director of the Massachusetts Food System Collaborative. “We need more research, we need more education, and we need to be prepared to support farmers in understanding the risks and addressing them where that’s needed.”

Pitcoff’s organization, an association of food and farm policy organizations, helped bring the issue of PFAs contamination of farmland to the legislature’s attention. PFAS, he argued, puts the stability of the state’s food systems at risk. 

Removing contaminated farmland from agricultural use permanently, an approach taken recently in Maine, is “pretty extreme,” Pitcoff said. After several farms had to close due to high levels of PFAS found in milk, soil, water and vegetables, the state banned the land application of biosolids entirely. 

“What this bill does is make sure we’re talking about the protection for farmers,” Pitcoff said. “I think Maine talked about that way too late in their process.”

Laura Spark, a policy advocate with Clean Water Action, called Maine’s approach the “most protective.”

“The problem with PFAS contamination on farms is that PFAS are persistent – they last, essentially, forever,” Spark told legislators. “They are bioaccumulative: the more we consume, the more they accrue in our bodies. And they are toxic at very, very low levels.”

Assessing the Impact

The state Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) currently regulates and permits the land application of biosolids, and determines whether products are fit for agricultural use, or for other uses such as capping landfills. No state or federal limits have yet been set on PFAS levels in land-applied biosolids, but this is expected to change. In Massachusetts, wastewater treatment facilities have been required since 2019 to test for the presence of the chemicals in their sludge.

In 2018, after a review of the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Office of the Inspector General released a report titled EPA Unable to Assess the Impact of Hundreds of Unregulated Pollutants in Land-Applied Biosolids on Human Health and the Environment. This report detailed, among other things, that the agency does not have the data or resources necessary to assess the safety of 352 pollutants found in biosolids – 61 of which are designated as “hazardous” or “priority” pollutants by other EPA programs. 

These chemicals include PFAS, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals. The federal agency only sets limits for nine heavy metals in sludge.

Janine Burke-Wells, executive director of the Northeast Biosolids and Residuals Association, said that the farms in Maine with the most potent contamination had applied biosolids originating from a facility that processed high levels of industrial waste, including waste from paper products manufacturers.

“We need to just take a step back and have some more conversations about the risks of various sources,” Burke-Wells said, adding that she would support legislation relieving public water treatment facilities from liability for PFAS contamination, and exempting them from federal Superfund laws in such cases.

Burke-Wells praised Montague Clean Water Facility superintendent Chelsey Little for piloting a town-owned biosolids composting program. “There are others out there that will push this down the pipeline,” she said of other wastewater treatment plant operators. “They’re all deers in the headlights… They don’t want to move until this all shakes out.” 

Movers and Shakers

Casella Waste Systems, one of the largest waste management companies in New England, recycles or disposes of most of the municipal sludge produced in Franklin County. A number of towns coordinate with the Franklin County Solid Waste Management District to ship their sludge to a facility in Lowell, where it is treated further and then trucked away by Casella for either disposal or recycling. 

In the past, Casella contracted directly to dispose of sludge from both the Montague Clean Water Facility and POTW#2 plant in Erving, where residential and paper mill wastewater are treated by ERSECO Inc., a subsidiary of Erving Industries. Casella ended its contract with ERSECO in 2021, citing concerns over “emerging contaminants” such as PFAS, forcing the paper company to procure a more expensive contract sending its sludge to Canada.

“In the absence of federal regulations concerning biosolids management,” said Casella director of communications Jeff Weld, “ states will be introducing unique approaches based on the volume of biosolids production vs. available landfill space, incineration capacity, and suitable land for treated biosolids application purposes…. Our charge is to work within the regulatory framework of each state in which we operate while providing solutions that are economically and environmentally sustainable for our customers and the communities we serve.” 

In recent years Casella has been responsible for most of the biosolids application on farmland in Hampshire and Franklin counties. A public records request filed by this reporter found that between 2010 and 2021, five farms in Greenfield, Hatfield, Sunderland, and Northfield and a parcel of land in Orange were spread with biosolids-based soil products. 

In five instances, the product in question was Casella’s Biomix, produced using sludge from the Erving plant; the Northfield farm contracted with a different company that composed sludge from Nashua, New Hampshire. None of the landowners responded to requests for comment.

“We will continue to engage with all stakeholders concerning the emerging science around PFAS, and will be proactively providing comment and feedback on H.101/S.39,” Weld said.

How Much Farther?

Mickey Nowak, executive director of the Massachusetts Water Environment Association, which represents wastewater operators, said that in his opinion a complete ban on the land application of biosolids would have serious repercussions on an already precarious and expensive waste stream. The state, he said, needs a master plan for biosolids. 

“Anything else will result in chaos,” Nowak said. “If land application is greatly reduced or banned, where will these biosolids go? Incineration and landfill capacity is full. How much farther to distant locations can we ship our biosolids?”

Asked for comment on S.39, Nowak said that “the key to a long-term solution” is the reduction of PFAS at its source. “The bill addresses the concerns of farmers,” he argued, “but says nothing about the concerns of the 120 publicly owned wastewater treatment works in the Commonwealth.”

Last year, Senator Comerford introduced another bill, An Act restricting toxic PFAS chemicals in consumer products to protect our health, which would have banned PFAS in child car seats, cookware, fabric treatments, cosmetics, and furniture. It did not pass. Comerford sat on the legislature’s PFAS Interagency Task Force, which helped to draft both pieces of legislation.

Senator Comerford’s office said groups such as the American Farmland Trust, Northeast Organic Farming Association and Sierra Club brought the issue of farmland application of biosolids to her attention, and that she has yet to engage in conversations with Casella over the issue. “We have not talked with them yet, but would welcome discussions with them,” the office said.

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A version of this article was published in the Montague Reporter. Mike Jackson contributed additional reporting.

Sarah Robertson is an independent journalist living in western Mass.

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.

For the 20th time since 1933, Congress is writing a multiyear farm bill that will shape what kind of food U.S. farmers grow, how they raise it and how it gets to consumers. These measures are large, complex and expensive: The next farm bill is projected to cost taxpayers US$1.5 trillion over 10 years.

Modern farm bills address many things besides food, from rural broadband access to biofuels and even help for small towns to buy police cars. These measures bring out a dizzying range of interest groups with diverse agendas.

Umbrella organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Farmers Union typically focus on farm subsidies and crop insurance. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition advocates for small farmers and ranchers. Industry-specific groups, such as cattlemen, fruit and vegetable growers and organic producers, all have their own interests.

Environmental and conservation groups seek to influence policies that affect land use and sustainable farming practices. Hunger and nutrition groups target the bill’s sections on food aid. Rural counties, hunters and anglers, bankers and dozens of other organizations have their own wish lists.

As a former Senate aide and senior official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, I’ve seen this intricate process from all sides. In my view, with the challenges in this round so complex and with critical 2024 elections looming, it could take Congress until 2025 to craft and enact a bill. Here are four key issues shaping the next farm bill, and through it, the future of the U.S. food system.

The price tag

Farm bills always are controversial because of their high cost, but this year the timing is especially tricky. In the past two years, Congress has enacted major bills to provide economic relief from the COVID-19 pandemic, counter inflation, invest in infrastructure and boost domestic manufacturing.

These measures follow unprecedented spending for farm support during the Trump administration. Now legislators are jockeying over raising the debt ceiling, which limits how much the federal government can borrow to pay its bills.

Agriculture Committee leaders and farm groups argue that more money is necessary to strengthen the food and farm sector. If they have their way, the price tag for the next farm bill would increase significantly from current projections.

On the other side, reformers argue for capping payments to farmers, which The Washington Post recently described as an “expensive agricultural safety net,” and restricting payment eligibility. In their view, too much money goes to very large farms that produce commodity crops like wheat, corn, soybeans and rice, while small and medium-size producers receive far less support.

Food aid is the key fight

Many people are surprised to learn that nutrition assistance – mainly through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps – is where most farm bill money is spent. Back in the 1970s, Congress began including nutrition assistance in the farm bill to secure votes from an increasingly urban nation.

Today, over 42 million Americans depend on SNAP, including nearly 1 in every 4 children. Along with a few smaller programs, SNAP will likely consume 80% of the money in the new farm bill, up from 76% in 2018.

Why have SNAP costs grown? During the pandemic, SNAP benefits were increased on an emergency basis, but that temporary arrangement expired in March 2023. Also, in response to a directive included in the 2018 farm bill, the Department of Agriculture recalculated what it takes to afford a healthy diet, known as the Thrifty Food Plan, and determined that it required an additional $12-$16 per month per recipient, or 40 cents per meal.

Because it’s such a large target, SNAP is where much of the budget battle will play out. Most Republicans typically seek to rein in SNAP; most Democrats usually support expanding it.

Anti-hunger advocates are lobbying to make the increased pandemic benefits permanent and defend the revised Thrifty Food Plan. In contrast, Republicans are calling for SNAP reductions, and are particularly focused on expanding work requirements for recipients.

Debating climate solutions

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act provided $19.5 billion to the Department of Agriculture for programs that address climate change. Environmentalists and farmers alike applauded this investment, which is intended to help the agriculture sector embrace climate-smart farming practices and move toward markets that reward carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services.

This big pot of money has become a prime target for members of Congress who are looking for more farm bill funding. On the other side, conservation advocates, sustainable farmers and progressive businesses oppose diverting climate funds for other purposes.

There also is growing demand for Congress to require USDA to develop better standards for measuring, reporting and verifying actions designed to protect or increase soil carbon. Interest is rising in “carbon farming” – paying farmers for practices such as no-till agriculture and planting cover crops, which some studies indicate can increase carbon storage in soil.

But without more research and standards, observers worry that investments in climate-smart agriculture will support greenwashing – misleading claims about environmental benefits – rather than a fundamentally different system of production. Mixed research results have raised questions as to whether establishing carbon markets based on such practices is premature.

A complex bill and inexperienced legislators

Understanding farm bills requires highly specialized knowledge about issues ranging from crop insurance to nutrition to forestry. Nearly one-third of current members of Congress were first elected after the 2018 farm bill was enacted, so this is their first farm bill cycle.

I expect that, as often occurs in Congress, new members will follow more senior legislators’ cues and go along with traditional decision making. This will make it easier for entrenched interests, like the American Farm Bureau Federation and major commodity groups, to maintain support for Title I programs, which provide revenue support for major commodity crops like corn, wheat and soybeans. These programs are complex, cost billions of dollars and go mainly to large-scale operations.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s current stump speech spotlights the fact that 89% of U.S. farmers failed to make a livable profit in 2022, even though total farm income set a record at $162 billion. Vilsack asserts that less-profitable operations should be the focus of this farm bill – but when pressed, he appears unwilling to concede that support for large-scale operations should be changed in any way.

When I served as deputy secretary of agriculture from 2009 to 2011, I oversaw the department’s budget process and learned that investing in one thing often requires defunding another. My dream farm bill would invest in three priorities: organic agriculture as a climate solution; infrastructure to support vibrant local and regional markets and shift away from an agricultural economy dependent on exporting low-value crops; and agricultural science and technology research aimed at reducing labor and chemical inputs and providing new solutions for sustainable livestock production.

In my view, it is time for tough policy choices, and it won’t be possible to fund everything. Congress’ response will show whether it supports business as usual in agriculture, or a more diverse and sustainable U.S. farm system.

Kathleen Merrigan is a former Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture

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By Sarah Robertson

CHICOPEE – Food banks across the state are experiencing unprecedented levels of demand as inflation pushes the cost of food higher and emergency aid programs initiated by the pandemic come to a close.

“Food insecurity is on the rise in Massachusetts, and across the country for that matter,” Andrew Morehouse, executive director of the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, said at a press conference at McKinstry Farms in Chicopee on Monday. “It shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone that food inflation is hammering families that are trying to make ends meet.”

Since the pandemic began the number of Massachusetts residents receiving help from food banks has doubled. In 2022 the state’s four major food banks – the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, the Greater Boston Food Bank, the Merrimack Valley Food Bank, and the Worcester County Food bank – served more than 800,000 people every month. These nonprofits distribute food to hundreds of food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, senior centers, and other organizations across the state.

Representatives from the four food banks attended Monday’s press conference along with an assortment of Hampden county politicians to request more government aid to address hunger. Morehouse told the small crowd that the coalition of food banks is requesting $41.5 million in funding from the state for the Massachusetts Emergency Food Assistance Program (MEFAP) in the next fiscal year. That is over $10 million more than what Governor Maura Healey’s administration is proposing in the 2024 fiscal year budget.

“We’re requesting – we’re imploring – the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to invest in MEFAP $41.5 million at this point in time, when people need the food most,” Morehouse said.

Growing Needs

According to data analyzed by the Greater Boston Food Bank, food insecurity in Massachusetts has increased by 70% since the pandemic began. One-third of adults in the state experienced food insecurity in 2021, as well as half of all households with children.

The late state representative Peter Kocot introduced legislation that established the MEFAP in 1995. The program paid for about 26.4% of the food purchased for the four major food banks in the 2022 fiscal year. The rest mostly comes from donations and federal funding.

“That program has been essential in times of crisis and need,” said state senator Adam Gomez, whose district includes parts of Chicopee and Springfield. “We’ve seen it when Hurricane Maria hit.”

Last year MEFAP received an additional $10 million in emergency funding, bringing it to about $30 million. This year the governor is proposing $31.2 million for MEFAP.

Meanwhile, a slew of other pandemic-era supports either have ended or are ending, including supplemental food stamp benefits, extra unemployment benefits, stimulus payments, and the federal child tax credit. State and federal grants meant to offset pandemic-related financial challenges, such as the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER), are also temporary measures that have helped address food insecurity but are not expected to come back.

“It’s a serious problem,” Morehouse said. “And to make matters worse, COVID-era federal benefits have dried up, and national supply chain obstacles are preventing the United States Department of Agriculture, the single-largest recent supplier of food inventory for food banks, from purchasing and delivering that food to us.”

Before the pandemic, the federal government typically paid for about 25% of the food distributed by the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts. According to public policy manager Laura Sylvester, that figure is now closer to 17%. To fill the gap, the food bank’s board of directors recently approved spending $500,000 in emergency funds to purchase food.

“We’re blowing through our rainy-day fund,” Sylvester said. She added that due to inflation, food banks are also paying more money for less food.

Managing Costs

The backdrop chosen for Monday’s announcement was McKinstry Farms, a fifth-generation family farm locally famous for its sweet corn.

The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts is relocating from its longtime Hatfield headquarters to Chicopee, about three miles from the farm. The new $26.3 million building is expected to open in September, The Reminder reported.

Monday’s event began with the farm’s matriarch and patriarch, Nicole and Bill McKinstry, sharing some of their family history. Standing in a nearly finished packing garage, the couple talked about how they have recently built a new farm store, and are expanding their growing operations.

For the past two years the McKinstrys have taken part in the MassGrown Initiative, a pandemic-inspired program funded by MEFAP to promote intra-state exchanges among food businesses, intended as a way to protect against supply chain disruptions. Through this initiative, the farm has provided tens of thousands of pounds of food to the Food Bank.

Ashley Randle, commissioner of the state Department of Agricultural Resources, called MEFAP a “shining example of a public-private partnership.”

“Today’s farmers are facing so many challenges… with inflation and the rising costs of inputs such as feed, fertilizer, and fuel on top of climate change,” Randle said. “We’ve witnessed that certainly in the last few years.”

Grants have helped offset the cost of other recent investments at McKinstry Farms, including a walk-in refrigerator and the new packing shed where the press conference was held.

At the peak of the planting season. McKinstry Farms hires around 45 farmworkers, many of whom work under temporary agricultural worker visas, known as an H-2A. The business is currently advertising seasonal positions on their farm on the US Office of Foreign Labor Certification website. Last year, the pay was advertised at $15.66 per hour, working 48 hours per week. This year it is listed at $16.95 per hour.

Will McKinstry, a recent college graduate taking over management of the family farm from his parents, said the farm is spending lots of money on fuel for tractors. The family owns fields in Amherst, Hadley, Granby, and Belchertown, and often drive tractors from town to town.

“Managing a crew can be a challenge,” McKinstry said. “Sometimes our guys need to start in the morning and pick corn in Hadley, and then have to go pick broccoli in Granby…. It’s a lot of time on the road – a lot of fuel, too.”

The Big Picture

Senator Gomez, who represents parts of Chicopee and his hometown of Springfield, told attendees he is advocating for increased funding for the MEFAP program so that “food reaches the communities that I grew up in.”

Gomez said that he has experienced periods of financial hardship. When his family lost their home, he said, they had to rely on institutions served by the Food Bank.

During the last legislative session, Gomez introduced a bill to protect the rights of people working seasonally on Massachusetts farms, who tend to be migrant workers. “An Act establishing fairness for agricultural workers” would have mandated a minimum 24-hour rest period every week, and a maximum work week of 55 hours, but it died in committee.

“We’re still negotiating with the farms as well, to try to give them an incentive to pay farm hands an appropriate wage,” Gomez told the Reporter. “A lot of the resistance we’ve had is from farmers who own farms. They say that it’s going to hurt them, but at the same time you’re overworking individuals – you’re not paying them retirement, you’re not paying them overtime. They’re basically working six days a week with no breaks, and they’re not getting a fair wage.”

US legislators are also pushing for more funding for food systems at the federal level. Massachusetts representative Jim McGovern signed a letter encouraging the House subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration to fully fund The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP)’s administrative grants account at $100 million, and is requesting $15 million for the Emergency Food Program Infrastructure Grant Program.

Global food prices hit record highs last year, according to the United Nations, partly due to extreme weather events and the war in Ukraine. To counter increased pressure on the food system and the scarcity of workers who maintain it, federal legislators tried to pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act last session. The bill would have expanded access to the H-2A visa program and established a system to verify farmworkers’ legal immigration status. It passed the House, but Republicans in the Senate rebranded it as the Affordable and Secure Food Act, and ultimately declined to include it in an omnibus spending package.

“In Hampden County, we know that we have the most impoverished county in the state of Massachusetts,” Gomez said. “It’s unfortunate that we have to go that route, but I think the truth is evident: without the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, a lot of people would probably starve.”

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A version of this article was published in the Montague Reporter. Photo courtesy of the author.

Sarah Robertson is an independent journalist living in western Mass.

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.

A Holyoke cannabis worker’s jobsite death points to safety issues in the booming industry.

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By Dusty Christensen

Editors note: This article is a joint publication with The Nation magazine, where the piece appears on the cover of the May 15/22, 2023 issue.

There’s a memory that haunts Laura Bruneau, like a video playing over and over. She remembers the unremarkable “Have a good one” she gave her only child, Lorna McMurrey, as she dropped her off at the cannabis-processing facility in Holyoke, where she worked. It was January 4, 2022—the last day Bruneau saw her daughter conscious.

Later that day, Lorna texted her that she was “having a hard time walking and breathing at the same time.” Bruneau raced to the facility, but by the time she arrived, ambulances and fire trucks were already there. She watched as paramedics wheeled her daughter out on a gurney, one of them “straddling on top of her, just pounding on her chest.”

“I’ll never fucking forget that sight,” Bruneau said. “I lost it. I just started screaming, ‘Oh my God, save my baby!’”

Lorna was brain-dead by the time she got to the hospital. She died three days later of cardiac arrest due to an apparent asthma attack—a condition that Bruneau said she never had until she started working at the large-scale grow facility, which is owned by the multistate cannabis giant Trulieve. Lorna was 27.

“My whole world was just annihilated. She was my only child. I can never have another child. I’m not a mother anymore,” Bruneau told me.

Nearly six months later, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Trulieve $35,219 for safety violations related to Lorna’s death. Then, in December 2022, Trulieve reached a settlement with OSHA, which reduced the company’s fine to $14,502 and withdrew two of the three citations against it. (Trulieve, which posted revenues of $1.24 billion and gross profits of $682 million in 2022, presumably had no trouble paying.) In return, Trulieve agreed to study whether ground cannabis dust should be classified as a hazardous chemical in occupational settings, according to the company.

As marijuana moves from a banned substance to a legal business—21 states, along with Guam and Washington, D.C., have already legalized recreational cannabis use, and more will surely follow—job opportunities in the industry have exploded. (One study found that there were 428,059 people employed in the industry nationwide in January 2022—a 33 percent increase over the previous year.) So have profits; if cannabis is ever legalized on the federal level, the industry could become a $100 billion behemoth, according to some financial analysts and industry insiders.

Behind those profits are workers who—like most of the country’s laborers—have no union and no power at their jobs, and there is mounting evidence that Lorna McMurrey’s death could be part of a systemic problem with working conditions for many in the cannabis industry.

In many cases, workers, union organizers, and activists say that exploitation, abuse, and low pay are part of the job. That is concerning enough, but the trouble, it seems, extends to the very air that many cannabis workers breathe.

In December, a Los Angeles Times investigation identified at least 35 workers who died on cannabis farms between 2016 and 2021, mostly from carbon monoxide poisoning tied to substandard greenhouses and housing conditions. At least two cannabis companies have themselves discovered significant levels of mold and particulate matter after hiring environmental consultants to test their buildings, according to internal documents reviewed for this story.

The response by federal regulators, as OSHA’s handling of McMurrey’s death shows, has mostly been to levy relatively inconsequential fines. Some cannabis workers, though, have begun their own resistance, whether through organizing or simply through telling their stories.

***

Holyoke’s officials have worked hard to revive some of the city’s past manufacturing glory by attracting cannabis operations to its former factories and mills. Cannabis growers are drawn to Holyoke’s cheap electricity, which is the largest expense for indoor growers. Holyoke was one of the country’s first planned industrial cities, and it can provide power at low rates because of its municipal dam and canal system.

As of February, the state’s Cannabis Control Commission has granted 83 licenses for retail, cultivation, manufacturing, and testing facilities operating in Holyoke, according to CCC data. That’s more than any other city in Massachusetts by a wide margin—Boston, for instance, has just 51. Fifty-two of Holyoke’s licenses are for cannabis cultivators and manufacturers, though not all of those represent viable businesses.

Three cultivating operations have opened in the city. In addition to Trulieve, which is licensed to grow up to 80,000 square feet of canopy, the cannabis giant Green Thumb Industries, which made nearly $504 million in gross profits in 2022, has set up shop in Holyoke and is licensed to grow 100,000 square feet.

Cities find the cannabis industry alluring for a reason. Apart from the jobs, municipal governments have bolstered their beleaguered budgets with the tax revenues and “impact fees,” which are assessed to cover the effects on local infrastructure from the cannabis industry. The Holyoke city budget projects cannabis tax revenues of $566,803 for this fiscal year. The city also collected roughly $3.2 million in impact fees as of February, a large portion of which was recently allocated to road paving, street safety improvements, and public art installations.

But Holyoke is also dealing with some of the entrenched problems in the cannabis world. The CCC’s “social equity” program, which was designed to give a leg up to entrepreneurs from communities that were heavily criminalized when marijuana was illegal, was slow in providing any actual funding. It wasn’t until August 2022 that the state Legislature created a loan fund for the program. And in a business with significant barriers to entry, that meant that it was typically giant, white-owned firms that got a head start. Holyoke’s residents—more than half of whom are Latino, one of the highest concentrations in the country—have noticed.

“We have people that are not even from around here able to come and set up shop off the clientele that me and the people that came before me built up,” said Israel Rivera, who was elected to the Holyoke City Council in 2021. Police raided his home in 2006 because, Rivera said, he was selling dime bags; there, they found a gun and cocaine, and Rivera did a five-year prison stint. “A lot of us got penalized…but [white-owned companies] are able to capitalize and get rich on it.”

“This is not an easy-access industry at all,” said Aaron Vega, a former state representative from Holyoke who is now the city’s director of planning and economic development. Vega said that the state and local bureaucracy surrounding cannabis can be hard to negotiate, and that hiring consultants, lawyers, and architects was beyond the reach of smaller entrepreneurs. “That’s why you have the big companies being able to navigate that; they’ve done it in other states and had the resources to bring the right people on board.”

Vega said that Holyoke’s becoming a “mecca” for cannabis has created around 450 jobs, many of them entry-level—a significant number for a city of just under 38,000 people. In that respect, he likened cannabis to tobacco, another crop that once provided a lot of, as he put it, “low-entry jobs” on farms in western Massachusetts.

“Unfortunately, what we saw with the tobacco industry was that being on those fields—not just smoking tobacco—was bad for your health,” Vega continued. He added that more research needs to be done on the health effects of working around cannabis, but that the federal prohibition of marijuana has stymied those efforts.

Cannabis companies have also rehabilitated industrial properties in the city that have failed to attract other manufacturers, saving old buildings from destruction.

But workers don’t always benefit. A new report from Vangst, a hiring platform for the cannabis industry, found that in 2022, trimmers, “post-harvesters,” and packagers made between $16 and $20 an hour nationwide for that physically demanding work. Vega acknowledged that any job paying below $22 an hour is not paying a living wage in western Massachusetts.

“It’s part of our fabric now,” he said of the industry. “Is it the silver bullet? No. Has it helped? Absolutely. Without question.”

In addition to concerns about low wages, allegations of poor working conditions have surfaced in Holyoke. In an interview with The Shoestring, Danny Carson, who worked as a supply chain supervisor with McMurrey at Trulieve’s Holyoke facility until a few months before she died, described a verbally abusive workplace where higher-ups would yell at their subordinates.

At the time, there were basic Covid-19 masks but no respirators available for workers who toiled in the shop’s tiny weed-grinding room, he said.

“They pack multiple people inside of that room because they want things done, as in traditional manufacturing, as quick as possible with as limited loss as possible,” Carson said. “The dust that’s created from it is not being ventilated out…. You can imagine what it’s like to breathe that in.”

In response to these allegations, Trulieve said in a statement that, upon learning of “possible allergen concerns,” it “acted to conduct research” and implemented an “industry-leading Cannabis Allergen Awareness Program.” The company has said that personal protective equipment was available at the site when McMurrey died.

A Trulieve spokesperson said that OSHA tested the air quality throughout its facility and that “the samples were all well [within] acceptable ranges,” noting that the fines the company received were related to communications standards. An OSHA spokesperson did not respond to numerous requests for an interview.

In a press release announcing the company’s settlement with OSHA over McMurrey’s death, Trulieve CEO Kim Rivers said the company is “proud of the many protections” in place for its workers. She added that Trulieve is rolling out a “temporary training program” alerting workers to the potential allergic reactions they might have in the workplace.

“Increased-scale manufacturing in our industry is a relatively new endeavor,” Rivers said in her statement, “and we are determined to continually ask questions and seek answers to make our workplace the safest and healthiest it can possibly be.”

Rivers, who has, as of this writing, successfully stalled unionization attempts by workers at several Trulieve facilities in Massachusetts, made over $8 million in total compensation in 2021, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Vega said that Holyoke requires companies to ensure good air quality in their workplaces. But it’s the state that has the expertise and resources to enforce those safety standards, and the CCC could be doing a better job to support cities like Holyoke, he added.

“As a municipality, we’re not equipped with the experts who go in and inspect these companies to know where the air filtration system should be or what should be done correctly or not,” Vega said. “We’re sort of relying on the CCC for their guidelines.”

In a statement to The Shoestring, the CCC said that it had already begun to investigate Trulieve’s Holyoke facility after workers had complained to the state agency in the fall of 2021, months before McMurrey died. The CCC has not announced the results of that probe.

***

Although Holyoke has become home to one of Massachusetts’s biggest “cannabis clusters,” there wasn’t much local scrutiny of the industry before McMurrey’s death. The city’s newspaper shuttered in 1993, and fewer and fewer reporters have covered the city full-time in recent years.

McMurrey’s death at the Trulieve facility went unreported in the press for most of 2022, until Mike Crawford broke the story that September on his podcast The Young Jurks. It was hardly the first time that Crawford, a veteran cannabis activist whose podcast covers the politics of the industry, has reported on such workplace concerns. “Just talking to these workers, their safety is not the priority,” he said.

Crawford noted that weed workers have told him about health concerns ranging from rashes to respiratory problems. “When the new workers come into the shop, the first thing that they have to tell them is, ‘Be prepared. You can go get some antihistamine, go get some [over-the-counter] medication, or go to the doctor,’” Crawford said. “Some people are sticking paper towels up their noses.”

McMurrey’s death also set off alarm bells among researchers who study occupational hazards in the marijuana industry. “It has increased the urgency of doing additional research,” said Coralynn Sack, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences.

Sack and her colleagues received federal funding to study workplace exposures and health symptoms experienced in one indoor grow facility in Seattle. A report they released in 2020 found “a high prevalence of work-related allergic and particularly respiratory symptoms” in the facility’s employees. However, high levels of recreational cannabis use among the workers complicated the results. So the researchers designed a new study that included both cannabis users and those who don’t partake. Their paper has not yet been published, but Sack said it came to the same conclusions about occupational hazards in the cannabis industry.

“We found elevated risks of respiratory symptoms, of decreased lung function, and of increased sensitization to cannabis,” Sack said. “That increases our suspicion that this is occupationally related.”

Sack said that the researchers are now beginning a five-year study, in which they’ll visit an array of cannabis grow operations and talk to a much larger group of workers. “There’s a really pressing need, especially given how fast this industry is growing, for there to be funded research,” she said.

Cannabis is still illegal on the federal level, creating “significant barriers” for the federal funding of such research, she added. “I think that needs to change.”

***

Cannabis workers themselves are also taking action to change their workplaces.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers have begun organizing workers in the industry, leading them to speak out about poor pay and working conditions.

In Santa Rosa, Calif., cultivation and post-harvest workers at Floris Terra Cannabis voted to unionize with Teamsters Local 665 in October, becoming some of the few cannabis cultivation workers in the country to organize.

“We unionized because there were a lot of problems going on in the facility,” Anthony Benavides, a post-production trimmer, said in a phone interview. “Everything from the treatment from the higher-ups wasn’t respectful and it wasn’t appropriate for the workplace, to being exposed to mold, to working conditions always being changed. Not even being allowed to sit.”

Benavides said that he and his coworkers were paid poorly and also worried about their health on the job. He said that after work, he can feel the cannabis dust in his lungs—a sensation he knew well from having previously worked in construction. “It feels a lot like when you breathe in the dust or sand from sanding or painting…. It has that same gritty feeling,” Benavides said. He added that when he gets off work, he hops in the shower to loosen some of the congestion. “It’s black mucus and boogers,” he said.

Drew Weisse, an organizer at United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1459 in western Massachusetts, recently told me that cultivation workers often face workplace dangers. “You’re doing farm work in a factory, so you have the health hazards associated with both farm and factory settings,” he said.

Trulieve has been the company most under the spotlight following McMurrey’s death, but it is not the only cannabis company where concerns have emerged about potential lung hazards and other occupational dangers.

In the fall of 2019, just down the road from Holyoke in the western part of the state, the company INSA, which also has operations in Pennsylvania and Florida, commissioned the health-and-safety consulting firm Cashins & Associates to test the air quality in its grinding, flower-packaging, and trimming rooms in Easthampton. The firm found “notably high” levels of volatile organic compounds, dust, and mold in parts of the building, according to its report, which was viewed by The Shoestring. Those levels didn’t violate OSHA safety standards, but INSA’s final report stressed that those standards “are not specific to the materials we handle in the cannabis industry and worker discomfort should be taken seriously.”

“Additionally, the air quality in certain rooms, particularly relating to particulate matter and mold, failed other established standards that do not necessarily relate to the indoor air quality of the workplace,” the report says.

INSA did not respond to multiple interview requests for this article. In 2022, the company hired the union-busting consultant Katie Lev to dissuade workers from organizing, according to federal filings. In January, a National Labor Relations Board judge issued a decision that found that Lev’s firm, Lev Labor, broke the law during its union-busting work for Amazon at two of its warehouses on Staten Island.

The environmental report commissioned by INSA noted that the company later installed an air filter in the trimming room. It also said that the facility does have HVAC ventilation with a carbon filter for exhaust, but that the CCC does not allow any “odor” to leave the building and that the exhaust “runs on a timer to reduce costs of forcing air through odor-absorbing carbon filters.”

Another cannabis giant, Holistic Industries, also had air-quality issues in 2021, resulting from a mold infestation inside the company’s cultivation and manufacturing facility in the western Massachusetts town of Monson.

At the time, I was a reporter at a local newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Somebody at the company anonymously mailed internal documents to me and other local reporters that summer showing that, over a five-day period, the consulting firm EnviroMed Services had found mold contamination “throughout the facility,” including “significant areas of concern” with heavy mold-spore estimates. The inspectors also found both common and toxigenic mold in the building.

The CCC conducted only a remote inspection of the facility. (The agency told The Shoestring that the investigation was still pending and declined to answer further questions.)

In a statement, Jeremy Manning, Holistic’s regional vice president of operations, said that based on the consultant’s report, the company did a “large-scale remediation project” and passed a follow-up test that EnviroMed also conducted. “Throughout the remediation process, we took an approach that had as little impact on employees as possible, made mold safety education available for all team members, and continued to provide PPE, including masks, for anyone with sensitivities or concerns,” Manning said. “We are pleased to report that the Monson facility is clean and operational, and we continue to focus on risk assessments, processes, and training to keep employees safe.”

Holistic has also brought in high-dollar anti-union consultants. Federal filings show that the company, like INSA, hired Lev in 2021 to “educate” workers at its retail location in Springfield.

OSHA reports from other states indicate that Trulieve’s safety problems are not limited to Massachusetts. In February, OSHA fined the company $16,073 for alleged violations related to walking-surface and PPE regulations at a grow facility in Tampa, Fla. In 2022, Trulieve settled at least two other OSHA cases: one in Monticello, Fla., where it was accused of failing to adequately protect workers from the hazards of moving machinery, and another in Reading, Penn., where it was cited after an employee in the “flower room” reportedly touched an exposed live wire and had to be hospitalized. And in 2020, OSHA cited the company for violating respiratory protection and hazard communication regulations at its grow facility in Quincy, Fla.

Other large cannabis companies have also been cited by OSHA. Last year, for example, the agency fined the mammoth Curaleaf because an exit was blocked at a New York grow facility. And Green Thumb Industries was fined after an ethanol explosion hospitalized a worker at a facility in Toledo, Ohio.

In 2021, Curaleaf paid an anti-union consultant $35,000, according to federal labor records. That same year, Green Thumb fought the ultimately successful effort of workers at its Holyoke cultivation facility to unionize. In Massachusetts, agricultural workers—who are frozen out of many labor protections at the federal and state levels—can unionize through card check, which means that an employer can’t force workers to hold an election if a majority of them have signed union cards.

Occupational dangers and workplace exploitation are also prevalent outside the world of legal weed. In Holyoke, across town from Trulieve’s grow facility, police and federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided a house in a quiet neighborhood a little more than a month after McMurrey’s death. There, they discovered a scene that by that point had become common in the region: a home turned into a marijuana grow operation. It was at least the eighth such raid by police in western Massachusetts; in most of those cases, they arrested Chinese immigrants living and working in appalling conditions.

Court records and interviews with prosecutors indicate that the people growing the marijuana are often “front-line” workers toiling in homes that straw purchasers had bought with backing from someone higher in a criminal enterprise; in several cases, the workers were declared indigent and appointed public defenders as well as Cantonese interpreters. One man, Haolin Yu, wept at his arraignment as his lawyer explained that he and his wife, who were poor, had a 2-year-old child and were about to have another, according to the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

Joseph Webber, an assistant DA in the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, which covers two counties near Holyoke, prosecuted several of those cases. He said one of the houses was “covered with mold and mildew” and “the area of the house where the suspect was living or residing was not heated, insulated, or well taken care of.”

“The cases we saw were dangerous living situations for the people doing it,” Webber said, adding that fire hazards abounded in the homes, creating the potential for a major catastrophe.

Law enforcement officials have raided similar operations nationwide, including many that allegedly involved human trafficking.

Trulieve says that it is scheduled to complete work on its OSHA-mandated study of ground cannabis dust by May 29.

But Laura Bruneau wants far more accountability for the death of her daughter, whom she described as sweet and caring to everyone around her. Before she got the job at Trulieve, McMurrey had worked at Walmart, preparing grocery pick-up orders. But that wasn’t a good job, Bruneau said, and so McMurrey went online and found the job opening.

At first it was a better situation. “When she started, she really loved it—she liked it a lot,” Bruneau said. “Until she started realizing she couldn’t breathe.”

Many of those working in the cannabis industry get into the business because weed is their passion; they might be frequent marijuana users or longtime growers who find the work exciting, or they may have benefited from the plant’s medicinal properties in the past.

That’s the case with Christopher Smith, a former “budtender” at a cannabis dispensary in Romeoville, Ill., who, with his coworkers, unionized with the Teamsters in 2021.

A medical-card holder who now works as the business agent for Local 777, Smith said people are trying to find a career, not just a throwaway job, working in cannabis. But as at-will employees, he added, they’re not finding it.

“Before the corporate takeover, when it was more mom-and-pop, it was a more family-oriented feel and vibe,” he said. “With the unionization efforts, this is the way we are going to try to bring back that family vibe.”

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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.

Photo by Aphiwat chuangchoem.

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