Here’s a paraphrase from StateHouseNews of her speech:
Sen. Wilkerson said, In Massachusetts, we have over 30,570 Department of Environmental Protection waste sites. Ten percent are on the Superfund list. Lower income communities average more than 19 hazardous waste sites per square mile. High income communities average 4.6 hazardous waste sites per square mile. Low income communities have over four times the number, and the disparities are consistent with the more serious hazardous waste sties. Itâs not a fair fight, and weâre supposed to make it a fair fight. You want to make it easier for developers to put more of that into communities that are dying â literally dying â of the waste. My goal is to put a process into place in Massachusetts where black people and brown people start dying of old age. Look at the obituaries, the drastic difference in the ages of the people that have died, almost could be determined by color.
By Senate rules, she could not yield the floor to any other Senator, sit down, or do much else other than stand and talk. She told stories about her constituents who suffer from asthma, cancer, leukemia, and other environmentally-related diseases. At midnight, the Senate recessed because of rule 38A 1/2 and reconvened at 12:05am (5 minutes later) when Senator Wilkerson no longer had the floor. The Senate President refused to recognize Senator Wilkerson and Senator Barrios, who loudly shouted “Mr. President” requesting to be recognized. A vote was taken on the permitting bill and it passed 24-12. Unfortunately the roll call is no available yet [update by David:] posted in the comments.
I can’t link the State House News transcript of the session without a subscription, but here is their brief report of it:
WILKERSON TALKS TO THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT: Sen. Dianne Wilkerson spoke for nearly four and a half hours, railing against the Senate’s decision to drop a provision for “environmental justice” from its expedited permitting bill, and was abruptly cut off at midnight exactly, when Sen. President Robert Travaglini gaveled the session closed, as required under chamber rules. Travaglini adjourned the Senate until 12:05 am, prompting a waiting time of five minutes, all of which Wilkerson spent standing at her seat in the chamber. With House members looking on, Wilkerson repeatedly called for attention as soon as Travaglini gaveled in the new session, but he ignored her. The Senate receded from its amendment, bowing to the House’s firm stance on its own version of the bill, and then engrossed it, tightening the seal with a failed move for reconsideration by bill support Minority Leader Brian Lees. After enacting the “sales tax holiday” bill, the Senate adjourned, again, this time not planning on returning until Monday at 11 am. Speaking with reporters later, Wilkerson said she had left a fundraiser for herself to speak on the bill. She said she was disappointed that, ultimately, only 12 senators supported the provision that she said would help end stark disparities along racial and economic lines in terms of environmental health factors. Telling reporters the bill was “abominable,” Wilkerson said, “We did damage to poor people and people of color in the Commonwealth tonight in a major way — probably worse than we’ve ever done.”
If you want to learn more about what she was talking about, read Daniel Faber’s “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts”
and the legislture was wrong not either include the EJ bill in this legislation or in a separate bill.
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But the expedited permitting bill is also nowhere near close to “abominable.” Regardless of whether one lives in Rowley or Roxbury, one of the keys to getting things jumpstarted here in MA is being able to compete, and allowing additional housing and commercial development to proceed at a swifter pace than it does now is a crucial element. By passing this bill, we won’t be scrapping environmental reviews; those already occur and will continue to do so. We also have some of the most abutter-friendly appeal rights in the region, and oftentimes it takes only one person to stop a project, or at least severely delay it due to court appeals. And that’s fine and it’s not going away. But what this bill does do, for example, is say: hey, you can appeal if you don’t like the project, but you better have a meritorious appeal because now we’re going to let developers build their projects even if the appeal is taken. (This is a change from prior practice whereby a developer couldn’t build in the face of an appeal of a special permit.) If the abutter wins, the building has to come down. Another layer of protection for citizens: cities and towns have to choose to adopt this new provision allowing construction in the face of an appeal.
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So, this bill is not as good as it should be because it doesn’t include EJ provisions we all know need to be addressed. But no bill is perfect; that’s the legislative process at its best. Let’s hope this bill can be one of the catalysts (along with electing new leadership to the corner office) in making us top of the heap where we ought to be.
Very well-written piece, I must say. Any disclosure necessary here?
I do not work nor have I ever worked for Dianne Wilkerson, anyone in her family, etc. Sorry but because of who I work for I am not comfortable saying much more than that. I’ve never spoken to Senator Wilkerson for more than 3 minutes and never had any dealings with her campaign.
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I’m one of those people who wouldn’t be able to freely post her opinions without getting in trouble because of my job if I were more specific. If that means you’re not going to trust what I’m saying, then so be it. I am firmly in the camp of making your own decisions anyway, hence I tried to provide the links that were possible without paid registration.
🙂
is here.
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voted no. What does a 12 circled mean? That she was the last to vote no and for some reason was out of order?
The number is the order in which the vote for that column came, and any vote “out of order” is circled. Check the other column; you’ll see the same thing for “out of order” votes.
if for some reason the Senator doesn’t answer when the Clerk calls the roll (usually because the Senator is out of the chamber), they go back when the Senator reappears and record the vote out of order.
She first voted yet and then switched her vote out of order (at the end). She actually passed a note to Wilkerson during the session saying that she would switch her vote, Wilkerson referred to it in her speech saying that she would stop talking just as soon as she had 21 of those notes.