Officials and residents in three eastern Massachusetts communities spent the weekend dealing with cleanup and recovery after natural gas problems triggered fires and explosions.
Massachusetts has had a lot of debate over pipelines for natural gas and its role in the state's energy future. Did these explosions affect that debate?
Matt Murphy, State House News Service: Well, they're not going to make people eager to expand natural gas infrastructure, or convince opponents of expanding natural gas infrastructure that now is the time to bring more in, certainly.
But I think more importantly than that, you're likely to see lawmakers – depending on the cause of these explosions – take another look at the state's protocols for holding gas companies accountable for repairing leaks, and also for the emergency preparedness plans that they are required to have on hand. [Lawmakers will also likely look at] how this response played out – once we can take a step back and review how Columbia Gas responded to this disaster, and what may have led up to it.
Sam Hudzik, NEPR: And, of course, politicians want to avoid looking really crass when you've got these big disasters like this – especially fatal disasters like this. But Governor Baker initially called Columbia Gas's response "adequate." Then his Democratic opponent, Jay Gonzalez, put out a release that didn't specifically criticize the governor's comment, but said Columbia’s response was "anything but adequate." What's the fine line that politicians walk in a situation like this?
I think it is certainly ripe to become part of the campaign – maybe too soon in the day or days after, but it's certainly there. And I can't help but think back to 2010 when Governor [Deval] Patrick was running for re-election against then-challenger Republican Charlie Baker.
There was a major water main break in Weston that knocked out water service to some two million people in the Greater Boston metro area. And that became a key leadership moment for [Patrick] that helped kind of turn around some of his numbers, and a string of bad headlines that [Patrick] was trying to overcome at that time.
Time will tell whether [Baker] can capitalize on this moment, and show what kind of leader he can be, or whether it will backfire on him, and give an opening to someone like Jay Gonzalez.
And Baker got some good news courtesy of his primary rival's decision to take a long winter vacation to Tennessee.
That's right. Scott Lively had been flirting with the idea of raising money and campaigning against the governor after losing the Republican primary to Charlie Baker. He is not going to do that after all. He's now looking to just kind of retire his campaign debt and move on.
But that whole episode sort of highlighted the problems that the governor has with the right wing of his party -- the conservatives. I mean, some hundred thousand people did vote for Scott Lively.
And we've heard from some people like the head of the Massachusetts Republican Assembly, Mary Lou Daxlin, who told The Boston Globe that she doesn't know any of Lively's supporters who will pull the lever for Charlie Baker in November. The governor certainly is in a different position than he was in 2014, but having won that election by just 14,000 votes, he perhaps can't afford to lose large chunks of Republicans or conservative independents and still hope to win a second term.
Let's turn briefly to the latest on marijuana in Massachusetts. There's still no retail marijuana stores open in the state, now 2 1/2 months after the target date for that. But the industry got some welcome news when a credit union based in Gardner decided it would work with marijuana businesses. How big is this?
This is a pretty big development, I think, for marijuana in Massachusetts, with the Republican administration in Washington signaling a reversal of the Obama-era policy that turned a blind eye to states that had legalized marijuana.
The Trump administration and Jeff Sessions have said they intend to enforce federal law, and that had scared banks away from doing business in states like Massachusetts and Colorado and California, where voters had opted to legalize marijuana.
But with this credit union agreeing to take a step in this direction, and work with retail shops, that means these businesses don't have to operate all cash. Consumers will be able to use credit to make their purchases. And it kind of changes the whole dynamic of what this industry could be in Massachusetts.
