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Lee voters approve nonbinding question to rescind agreement allowing PCB dump in town

A stretch of the Housatonic River.
Nancy Eve Cohen
/
NEPM
A stretch of the Housatonic River.

About 60% of voters in Lee, Massachusetts, have approved a nonbinding ballot question to rescind an agreement to build a PCB disposal site in town. They also voted to return to a one person - one vote town meeting government — a shift away from representational government.

Residents also chose a new selectman, Gordon Bailey. He takes Pat Carlino's seat, who stepped down after serving on the board for 24 years.

Bailey was a selectman a decade ago, from 2000 until 2012. He said he wants the board and residents to meet with attorneys to discuss the option of walking away from the agreement.

“Let the entire town know what the potential is for good or bad, should we rescind. And are there other paths we could take legally that would get us where we want to be — which is no dump in Lee," he said.

Bailey's election means there is no one on the select board now who has voted for the toxic waste disposal site.

A previous select board approved the agreement two years ago to build it in. The agreement was reached in a closed door mediation with the Environmental Protection Agency and General Electric to clean up the Housatonic River. GE's electrical transformer factory in Pittsfield contaminated the river with PCBs from the 1930s until the 1970s.

Selectman Bob Jones said he wants to find out if the agreement is "even legal."

"Basically what you had in Lee were three select board members making a decision for over 5,000 people to put  a toxic waste dump in an ecologically sensitive site," Jones said.

On the select board's agenda this week is whether Carlino, who represented the town of Lee during the negotiations which led to the agreement, should continue to serve on the Housatonic Rest of River Municipal Committee. The committee, which represents Pittsfield and five towns along the river, is focused on the cleanup of the river from Pittsfield downstream to Great Barrington.

Nancy Eve Cohen is a former NEPM senior reporter whose investigative reporting has been recognized with an Edward R. Murrow Regional Award for Hard News, along with awards for features and spot news from the Public Media Journalists Association (PMJA), American Women in Radio & Television and the Society of Professional Journalists.

She has reported on repatriation to Native nations, criminal justice for survivors of child sexual abuse, linguistic and digital barriers to employment, fatal police shootings and efforts to address climate change and protect the environment. She has done extensive reporting on the EPA's Superfund cleanup of the Housatonic River.

Previously, she served as an editor at NPR in Washington D.C., as well as the managing editor of the Northeast Environmental Hub, a collaboration of public radio stations in New York and New England.

Before working in radio, she produced environmental public television documentaries. As part of a camera crew, she also recorded sound for network television news with assignments in Russia, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba and in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia.
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