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Hadley shopping mall fined for dry cleaning chemical release

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The owners of the Campus Plaza Shopping Center in Hadley have been fined $24,430 for failing to report, properly handle and identify the release of contaminated water to a nearby wetland, according to the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

Mass DEP staff discovered the problems during an audit of an ongoing cleanup project at the 36-acre site of a large release of tetrachloroethene, or PCE. The manmade chemical is often used in different types of cleaning products—for example, it can help clean clothing and degrease metal.

The PCE was traced to a former dry cleaner at the center, located at 454 Russell Street. It’s unclear what the exact impacts are to the environment, although the center, which includes a grocery store and retail shops, has been deemed safe enough to allow the mall’s continued use.

The company, E&A/I&G Campus Plaza Limited Partnership must pay $15,000 of the fine and must fix its storm water system, among other actions. The remainder of the fine will be suspended on condition that E&A/I&G complies with the order.

“We are pleased that through this agreement, E&A/I&G will be completing changes to the storm water system to reduce the potential for discharge of contaminated groundwater to the wetland,” said Michael Gorski, director of Mass DEP’s Western Regional Office in Springfield.

Gorski added that, “increased monitoring and controls are needed to ensure protection of the public health and environment.”


Real estate developer reimburses buyers for homes never built

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By Regine Sarah Capungan

A Foxborough real estate developer has repaid $525,000 to more than a dozen home buyers for advances he took for new homes he never built, according to the state Attorney General’s office.

Michael Intoccia allegedly took up to $55,300 each from buyers to build a 29-home development called Bella Estates in Sharon even though construction was prohibited in the area. After his company did not build the homes by promised deadlines, Intoccia refused to reimburse the buyers, according to a press release by the Attorney General's office.

Intoccia also agreed to an additional $100,000 judgment, with $30,000 paid to the Commonwealth and the rest suspended as long as he complies with the terms of the judgment.

“This developer took thousands of dollars in advance payments from new homebuyers for houses he never delivered,” Attorney General Martha Coakley said in a press release. “We are pleased that this settlement ensures that all affected consumers have received restitution, and that the developer can no longer accept unprotected deposits in the future.”

Coakley's office temporarily suspended Intoccia from accepting advanced payments from consumers, unless their money was put into an escrow account. He is now prohibited permanently from taking any unprotected advance deposits.

Intoccia said that he fulfilled his promises to consumers upon the settlement of his case.

“On the day that the Attorney General’s Office filed the civil action in my case, I assured those involved that my goal had been and remained to facilitate where possible the completion of the homes that were planned or to reimburse my customers for the deposits they paid to my companies,” Intoccia said. With the settlement "I have now been able to complete what I promised.”

Mass. Legislature among states that pass the fewest bills

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Massachusetts representatives met in this chamber as a full body for the equivalent of 69 8-hour days over the last three years. (Photo by Lauren Owens for NECIR)

Massachusetts representatives met in this chamber as a full body for the equivalent of 69 8-hour days over the last three years. (Photo by Lauren Owens for NECIR)

By: Rupa Shenoy
New England Center for Investigative Reporting

Listen to the radio version of this story

It was a rare moment on Beacon Hill.

Just 31 hours after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that state law did not specifically ban taking photos up women’s skirts, the House and Senate unanimously passed a bill outlawing the snapping of covert sexual photos.

That speedy passage stands in stark contrast to what happens to the overwhelming majority of proposed bills in the Bay State: they go nowhere.

From January 2011 through last month, the Massachusetts Legislature enacted 945 bills – just 5 percent of nearly 17,600 proposed. Only New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota passed a smaller percentage of proposed legislation in that time, according to data compiled from the LexisNexis website Statenet.com.

Percent-bills-enacted

“It’s more of a top down process in Massachusetts which, as a consequence, cannot handle as much volume,” said former Republican Massachusetts House member Dan Winslow, who resigned last year to take a better-paying private sector job.

Typically, he said, bills move through a legislature “like a pipeline – stuff comes in, stuff comes out; but in Massachusetts it’s more of a funnel, where it gets down to a choke point, where only a handful of people – the leadership in the House and the Senate – really get to decide what becomes law ... and they have priorities.”

State legislators defend their record, saying it’s unfair to zero in on the percentages of bills passed. Instead they say focus should be on what substantive legislation has been passed in recent years, noting successes such as municipal health reform, an anti-bullying act and a 2012 economic development bill.

“The success of a legislature is not measured numerically like a scorecard but on the basis of groundbreaking, substantive pieces of lawmaking that save cities and towns money, preserve and create jobs, and improve peoples’ lives,” House Speaker Robert DeLeo said in a statement.

But an analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting shows the vast majority of bills passed in Massachusetts have no statewide impact. Since the beginning of the last full legislative session in January 2011, only 21 percent of the enacted bills impacted residents throughout the state. The rest had strictly limited scope, including 466 that applied to one community, 158 that created what’s called a sick-leave bank for a single state worker and 78 that granted liquor licenses.

Some observers say the Massachusetts legislature is slowed down in part by time-consuming archaic traditions. These booklets were created for a session in which the senate convened for less than two and a half hours. (Photo by Lauren Owens for NECIR.)

Some observers say the Massachusetts legislature is slowed down in part by time-consuming archaic traditions. These booklets were created for a session in which the senate convened for less than two and a half hours. (Photo by Lauren Owens for NECIR.)

Few other states deal with local issues to that extent, said Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association.

“We would certainly want to have more local authority to make these decisions and not have to go to the state,” he said. But as things are, Beckwith said, Massachusetts’ cities and towns must go to the state legislature for “relatively routine but distinct and frequently complex issues.”

Meanwhile, some statewide legislation gathers dust in committees, like the so-called “Bottle Bill.” Groups from the Sierra Club to the state Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs have pushed for years to expand the law to include redeemable nickel deposits for bottles of water, sports drinks, and other non-carbonated beverage containers, to no avail. Similarly, bills to establish an interagency child welfare task force, protect the privacy of consumers’ financial information, and increase penalties for the illegal possession of firearms have been in committees for more than a year.

In Washington, the legislative gridlock is blamed on an impasse between Republicans and Democrats. But in Massachusetts, where Democrats rule, critics say the reasons for the slow passage speaks more to arcane legislative traditions and in recent decades a concentration of power among just a few elected politicians.

Winslow said the Massachusetts Legislature isn’t efficiently passing meaningful bills because, within the walls of the State House, there's an institutionalized culture of complacency, in which members act only with the approval of Democratic leadership. Winslow said he and other Republicans were often shocked when they would sit down to vote next to Democratic colleagues who appeared “completely in the dark” about the legislation they were considering.

"All they really needed to know was which way the speaker was going to vote on a given bill," he said.

Peter Ubertaccio, director of the Joseph Martin Institute for Law & Society at Stonehill College in Easton, agrees and says that power has concentrated around the House Speaker and Senate President over the last 30 years. Chairs of legislative committees, meanwhile, have gotten weaker, he said.

"Instead of having multiple centers of power in the legislature, we tend to have now two," Ubertaccio said.

Measures of inefficiency

Elsewhere in New England, legislators can and do move more swiftly. Maine passed 40 percent of its 3,757 proposed bills in the last three years. In New Hampshire, legislators proposed 3,297 bills, enacting 26 percent of them.

Critics say that archaic traditions in Massachusetts are one factor contributing to the slow pace of passage. For example, any citizen can propose a bill – but there's no way to know how often that happens, since residents send proposed bills through their legislator.

The commonwealth’s legislators also formally read bills on the floor up to five times, while, in other states, it can be as little as two.

"We're a very traditional state that likes its traditions that were formed in our early years when we were the cradle of liberty,” said Pam Wilmot of Common Cause Massachusetts. “So the chances of the legislature saying ‘we're going to modernize and get rid of this stuff’ is fairly insignificant."

Total-time

Politicians also do not appear to be overly deliberative. From January 2011 through the end of March, the House met in floor session for an equivalent of 69 8-hour days, while the Senate met for 43 8-hour days, according to information compiled from legislative journals. On more than half the days they met, legislators were in session for less than a half an hour.

Massachusetts’ legislators earned a base yearly salary of $60,033 as members of one of the 10 full-time state legislatures in the country. Only 10 states pay legislators more, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Nearly 42 percent of representatives and senators in Massachusetts receive an additional stipend for leadership positions, totaling more than $1 million, according to an analysis of figures provided by the State Treasurer’s office. The largest stipends of $35,000 each go to the House Speaker and Senate President.

The Chairmen of the Ways and Means Committee receive a $25,000 annual stipend; Majority and Minority leaders take home $22,500 on top of their salary; while assistant floor leaders, division chairmen, and a handful of committee chairs, vice chairs, and ranking minority members earn $15,000 each. All other committee chairmen are paid $7,500 stipends. Representatives and senators also can claim as much as $100 a day in reimbursable travel expenses and more than $7,000 a year for office costs.

Highest-earners

In all, taxpayers spent $57.2 million in fiscal 2013 and $40.5 million through March of fiscal 2014 to run the legislature and employ 1,102 people in the House and Senate, according to the Massachusetts Executive Office for Administration and Finance.

There is no discernable pattern in the amount of time it takes to pass legislation. Of the 198 bills enacted since January 2011 with statewide impact, about a fourth took a month or less for the legislature to do its work and the governor to sign; another fourth waited 16 to 24 months for approval; and the rest fell somewhere in between.

Once a bill is proposed, its fate is often determined in a committee that is supposed to analyze, debate and ultimately decide if the bill should move forward for a full vote. But some legislators complain that the House Speaker and Senate President control what happens in committee.

“The chairs feel accountability to the people who've appointed them," said Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr.

By controlling when a committee goes into executive session to vote on a bill, Tarr said chairs essentially determine which bills make it to the full floor.

"You actually have to convince the chairs, one, to hold an executive session, and, two, to take up the matter you're interested in at that executive session,” Tarr said. “And in that scheduling function there is a tremendous amount of power either to move legislation or to delay legislation."

Tarr said committees also delay legislation by committing bills to indefinite "study." Committees must deliver bills to the floor by a certain date, but Tarr said chairs regularly ask for extensions. For example, last month the House voted to extend until June 30 the deadline for the Judiciary Committee to report on 800 bills. Tarr said he often tries to find out why a bill's time in a committee has been extended, and is simply told it’s “stuck.”

“I suspect that very frequently from the beginning the fix is in, and that the time that it takes is simply used up with routine attempts to gather information that are never going to yield anything other than the predetermined outcome,” said David Tuerck, executive director of the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University.

But the Speaker and President can’t snap their fingers and get legislation passed, said former Massachusetts Inspector General Greg Sullivan, who served in the legislature for 18 years. They still need cooperation from members, he said. Consequently, Sullivan said, delay has become one of the most powerful tools individual legislators can yield.

"They want to delay,” Sullivan said. “They use delay as a means of defeat of legislation. And that's always in play."

Lawmakers achieved the feat of passing—in one day—a ban on covert sexual photos because there was virtually unanimous support for the measure and it didn’t require funding, Common Cause’s Wilmot said. And she believes it might be a good thing the Massachusetts legislature doesn’t usually move that fast.

“I think we sometimes underestimate the difficulty of this undertaking… Many of these decisions are not easy – there are many competing interests to balance,” she said. "Are there things that I’d like to see? Absolutely. We’d like to have more citizen participation in the process. And speed would actually make that more difficult. If everything passed in a day, there would be no way in.”

The New England Center for Investigative Reporting (www.necir.org) is a nonprofit news outlet based at Boston University and WGBH TV and Radio in Boston. NECIR interns Rebecca Lee, Madelyn Powell, Selina Wang, and Michael Bottari assisted with the research for this story.

This story has also been published in the following sources:

The Sun Chronicle

WGBH

Worcester Telegram

NECIR co-founder, senior reporter, honored for journalism excellence

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by NECIR Staff
The New England Center for Investigative Reporting received two prestigious awards from the New England Newspaper and Press Association on Oct. 9.

Joe Bergantino, NECIR director and co-founder, won the 2014 Yankee Quill Award by the Academy of New England Journalists, a group of previous Quill winners and representatives from regional journalism organizations.

Jenifer McKim won an award for her work on child fatalities.

NECIR

Jenifer McKim won an award for her work on child fatalities.

 The Yankee Quill Award  recognizes the “lifetime  achievement of those who  have had a broad influence  for good, both inside and  outside the newsroom.”  Given annually for more  than a half century, it is the  highest honor for  journalists in New England.

 Bergantino was chosen  because of his 22 years as  the I-Team reporter for  WBZ-TV in Boston, as well  as his role in co-founding NECIR.

The center also was honored with a 2014 “Publick Occurrences” award for two stories focusing on child fatalities in the state’s child welfare system. They include senior investigative reporter Jenifer McKim’s reports: “Massachusetts children under state protection die from abuse with alarming frequency” and “Explosion of drug-dependent infants reveals weakness in Mass child protect.”

The stories were published in The Boston Globe and on the NECIR website. NECIR staff writer Michael Bottari contributed to the report on drug-dependent infants.

Judges said the stories were, “A heartbreaking, critical look at the failures of the state's DCF....  These stories deftly blended hard data with compelling narratives. They explored questionable calls made by the agency and how its policies are affecting children in the state. Despite the painful personal realities described by those interviewed, the reader still walks away informed of larger questions related to the child welfare system as a whole and its management.”

The Publick Occurrences awards were created in 1990 to mark the 300th anniversary of the founding of America’s first newspaper, Publick Occurences, which only published a few days before it was suppressed by the British royal governor.

 





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