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A Suffolk County Superior Court judge is set to decide on whether a controversial waste transfer station proposal at 100 Duchaine Blvd. will go through after seven years of reviews and legal challenges.
Attorneys representing South Coast Renewables, the company proposing the transfer station, and Board of Health attorney Adam Brodsky argued for over an hour before the Hon. Jackie Cowin in Boston Thursday afternoon. Attorneys from the Conservation Law Foundation also intervened on behalf of a group of New Bedford residents in support of the Board of Health.
The Board of Health denied South Coast Renewables’ proposal last September citing concerns about the project’s impacts on traffic, vermin, air quality, and fire safety. South Coast Renewables appealed the decision in October.
Depending on the judge’s ruling, South Coast Renewables will either be allowed to go through with the waste transfer station without the Board of Health’s input, or the Board of Health’s decision will stand. The Board of Health also has the option to appeal the Superior Court decision.
At the Sept. 3 hearing, attorneys’ arguments hinged on whether the Board of Health had the right to base its decision on environmental justice principles — the idea that lower-income communities already overburdened with environmental pollution should not take on additional risk. In 2021, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts designated 2,604 environmental justice neighborhoods. Most neighborhoods in New Bedford are environmental justice neighborhoods.
South Coast Renewables attorney Peter Durning argued that in last summer’s hearings, environmental justice was used as a “trump card” to ignore the facts of the project, which multiple expert witnesses said would comply with federal air quality and noise pollution standards. Durning also argued that because environmental justice policies were originally written with state agencies in mind, local entities with no similar laws of their own had no right to use them.
“The board was adopting that mantra as a seemingly unassailable justification,” Durning said. “The board simply says at the end, ‘Well, because of environmental justice considerations we are against this.’”
Board of Health attorney Brodsky, along with CLF attorneys Suhasini Ghosh and Jillian Aicher, argued the board was well within its jurisdiction.
“What’s the point of advocating for environmental justice principles if, at the end of the day, the burdened community can’t consider those in their own site suitability criteria?” Brodsky said.
Judge Cowin is expected to release a written decision in the coming weeks.
Outside the courthouse, nearly two dozen activists — many of whom had fought against the proposed waste facility since its inception — gathered to reflect on the multi-year saga. Tracy Wallace, vice president of the advocacy group South Coast Neighbors United, recalled her childhood growing up near a landfill in Connecticut, finding rats in her backyard and smelling the compacted trash on her way to the grocery store.
“When we got notification of [the proposed transfer station] in 2019, all of my alarms went off,” Wallace said.
Wallace and South Coast Neighbors United President Wendy Morrill said they are prepared to appeal the Superior Court judge’s decision if necessary.
“The first campaign we fought, we fought for five years, and with this one we’re going on seven years,” Morrill said. “So if they think they’re going to just come into our community and exploit and pollute and do whatever they want and they’re not going to be met with resistance, they really need to do their homework.”
South Coast Renewables also does business as Parallel Products, which operates a bottle recycling facility in New Bedford.
Email Brooke Kushwaha at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.
