Blue Hills Reservoir bill dies in committee

On June 30 the legislature's Joint Committee on Natural Resources met in executive session and voted 4-0 to "send to study" House Bill 4914, An act relative to the protection of certain wetlands in the Blue Hills Reservation.

This was a polite way of killing the bill.  According to the statehouse website, "the vast majority of bills sent to a study order do not progress any further in the legislative process."

House Bill 4914, which we helped draft last year, was intended to offset major and permanent damage to the Reservation that will occur if MWRA spends $33 million in public money to construct concrete water storage tanks in the Blue Hills Reservoir on Chickatawbut Road in Quincy.  The bill would have required MWRA to replace the 8.7 acres of protected wetlands that will be lost.

Since 1990 or earlier, every public agency that has sought to fill wetlands has been required to replace them.  It is unclear why the state Dept. of Environmental Protection, which is charged to protect wetlands on our behalf, chose to award MWRA an unprecedented exemption from state law.

Since the bill was sponsored by three of the four state representatives whose districts include portions of the Reservation--Bruce Ayers of Quincy, William Galvin of Canton, and Walter Timilty of Milton--we hoped that the Resources Committee would respect local opinion and give the bill a favorable recommendation.  But after the vote an aide to the Committee told us that the exemption granted to MWRA was legal and that the no net loss of wetlands policy that the bill sought to preserve does not exist.

The no net loss of wetlands policy was introduced with great fanfare by Governor Weld in 1990 and as recently as 2004 was called the "cornerstone" of the state's approach to wetlands protection.

The MWRA tank project is the largest construction proposed anywhere in the Reservation since the nineteen-sixties. We thank the legislators who supported the bill and the individuals who contacted the Joint Resources Committee on our behalf. 
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