Editor’s note: As part of the Greenfield Recorder’s end-of-the-year features, we are publishing our choices for the top 10 newsmakers of 2020 today and tomorrow. They are listed in no particular order.
Phoebe Walker, director of community services at the Franklin Regional Council of Governments (FRCOG), said her job has changed in every possible way this year.
“While my focus had been on public health more generally, I basically became just about COVID, all the time,” she said.
Over the last 10 months, she has served as the “COVID affiliate” to the state, working to get resources — financial and otherwise — to all the towns in Franklin County. She was also instrumental in setting up the system for contact tracing that public health nurses use for identifying “close contacts.”
“The public health nurses are working unbelievably — seven days a week,” Walker said. “It’s really astounding to see how hard everyone is working.”
More recently, she’s been working on public messaging, in terms of how to get reliable information to people, as well as improving FRCOG’s COVID-19 dashboard.
In October, Walker was named one of 16 people from across the state to be part of Gov. Charlie Baker’s Vaccine Advisory Group. The group is comprised of medical professionals, public health experts, elected officials, community leaders and infectious disease specialists, and will advise the governor and his administration on communication, distribution and equity issues relating to the vaccine.
“Being on the advisory group has been really interesting,” Walker said. “It feels like a real honor and a pretty heavy responsibility.”
Her work with the advisory group has been “much more local,” she said, working to determine how vaccine distribution will work, who will distribute to first responders or home health aids, for example, and finally, how the general public will get the vaccine.
Through all this, she’s still continued with non-pandemic-related projects, including the Community Health Improvement Plan.
“We spent this year coming up with goals for the next three years,” she said.
Walker said for all the challenges 2020 presented, she’s seen “what a great region” Franklin County is.
“People are working so well together to meet various challenges,” she said. “Whether it’s long-term things like improving access to housing, or a short-term case where somebody needs to be brought food because they’re isolated for COVID.”
— Mary Byrne
Two bills championed by U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern made progress toward becoming law.
The Democrat representing the 2nd Congressional District of Massachusetts, who was re-elected in November, had introduced H.R. 4331 to update and strengthen the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 and address what he called the Chinese government’s ongoing oppression of Tibetans as well as a bill authored to permanently authorize the Wounded Warrior Service Dog Program within the U.S. Department of Defense Health Program.
The Tibet bill, aimed at updating the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002, passed in the House of Representatives by a 392 to 22 vote in January and, according to a recent email from McGovern’s office, is set to become law after being included in the omnibus spending package agreement Congress just passed.
Communist Chinese troops invaded Tibet in 1950 and the region has since been rife with accusations of human rights abuses. Spiritual leader Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, fled Tibet to northern India in fear for his life in 1959.
According to information from McGovern’s office, if the bill is signed into law, it would support democratic governance in the Tibetan exile community, direct the U.S. State Department to begin multinational efforts to protect the remote Tibetan plateau’s environment and water resources, and require that no new Chinese consulates be established in the United States until a U.S. consulate is established in Lhasa, Tibet’s traditional capital.
It would also “establishes as U.S. policy that the succession or reincarnation of Tibetan Buddhist leaders, including a future 15th Dalai Lama, is an exclusively religious matter that should be decided solely by the Tibetan Buddhist community.”
McGovern reintroduced the service dog program bill in June 2019 as part of the national defense authorization bill. It passed the House in August and if it passes the Senate, the bill will move on to president’s desk for his signature to become law.
McGovern had crafted an unsuccessful freestanding bill in 2013, but he and others were able to get some line items passed to fund what was essentially a pilot program. The bill is bipartisan, as it was also introduced by U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind.
— Domenic Poli
Members of the grassroots organization “formed to protect the health, diversity and ecosystems of our commonwealth’s state forests” are discussing piecing together legislation to address what they consider state law deficiencies exposed when a superior court judge dismissed their lawsuit alleging several state laws and regulations were broken with the logging of 100-year-old oak trees on an 80-acre stand in Wendell State Forest in the summer of 2019.
Franklin County Superior Court Judge Richard Carey dismissed the Wendell State Forest Alliance’s case in November.
“The judge said the public has no … private right of action when it comes to our public lands,” said alliance member Glen Ayers. “So we think that is a deficiency in the state law that should be corrected through legislation.”
He said the alliance has meetings with the Office of Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and U.S. Sen. Edward Markey’s office scheduled for January.
Twenty-nine members of the alliance were co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit, arguing that the logging exacerbated the effects of climate change and that a lack of any meaningful due process for citizens to appeal decisions regarding public forests made it unjustly difficult to challenge the work.
The logging was completed about a year ago.
The 29 co-plaintiffs are also defendants awaiting sentencing in an Orange District Court case. The Wendell State Forest Alliance’s protests began in the fall of 2018, when demonstrators held signs along Route 2 protesting the then-proposed logging project. Protesters held rallies at the forest, circulated petitions and sent letters to the governor over the following year.
Once logging began that summer, many protesters tried to physically stop the project by standing in the way of loggers and equipment, and by chaining themselves to trees. This led to more than 30 arrests.
— Domenic Poli
In mid-March, anticipating problems that were going to arise from the initial shutdown, Rep. Paul Mark, D-Peru, filed a package of emergency pandemic-related bills he had worked on with Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, D-Northampton.
One bill expanded unemployment benefits and allowed business owners, gig workers, sole practitioners and others not traditionally eligible for unemployment to receive benefits during this unique economic crisis. Another bill appropriated funding to the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA )and other state agencies to address homelessness and set up emergency shelters.
Additionally, Mark and fellow legislators helped steer Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act money through a supplemental state budget to local communities, including $250,000 for the Greenfield Emergency Operations Center.
This session, Rep. Natalie Blais, D-Sunderland, filed and actively co-sponsored legislation that she said reflects the priorities of the 19 rural communities of the 1st Franklin District. She also introduced more than a dozen pieces of legislation to help the district’s communities with their municipal priorities, and advanced the Office of Rural Policy and the Rural Jobs Act in the economic development bond bill — both of which are currently pending in conference committee.
“Not only have I brought the voices of Western Massachusetts to Beacon Hill, but I have also brought advocacy organizations, legislators and committee staff here to better understand the challenges we are facing,” Blais said.
Blais worked with local communities to identify and fund municipal building repair and development, and enhance emergency communications systems. On the statewide level, she secured funding for the Buy Local program, Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program, and sexual and domestic violence prevention and treatment.
Reflecting on the year, Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, noted “the ability of the Western Massachusetts delegation, replete with new faces, to lock arms to support existing and new regional rail initiatives like the Valley Flyer pilot and proposed Route 2 rail study.” She also noted the delegation’s demand for “regional equity in education funding” and solutions to the problems facing rural schools.
The biggest accomplishment of the last year, however, has not been legislative, according to Blais.
“It has been the level of support that our office has been able to provide individuals who are struggling in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said. “A constituent recently reached out because she heard that we provided ‘customer service for government.’ My legislative aide, Lily Wallace, has done a tremendous job advocating on behalf of 1st Franklin District residents on a day-to-day basis and I want to recognize her tireless efforts to prioritize a high level of services for our constituents.”
Comerford said she was grateful to serve as chair of the Senate’s COVID-19 Working Group, which played a key role in passing laws to expand mail-in voting and unemployment insurance, prevent evictions and foreclosures, and support small businesses.
“The COVID-19 pandemic and state of emergency impacted everything we did this year in the Legislature,” Mark said. “It forced us to work differently and pull together to get as much targeted legislation done as possible, but it also sidetracked a number of other important bills that got pushed to the back-burner.”
— Zack DeLuca
Brieanna Arsenault felt called to action earlier this year after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis in May. She went to Greenfield officials and asked them to “defund the police” and reallocate the money to areas it could be most useful in an effort to fight racism.
She organized a march from the Greenfield Common to the Police Station in early June, where about 2,000 protesters chanted “Black Lives Matter,” and organized a rally on the common. She then organized a second march in Turners Falls.
Arsenault, who grew up in Greenfield, said she experienced racism in its schools when she was younger, forcing her to leave the school system and go elsewhere.
She said the Police Department needs to be reorganized and demilitarized.
“The community must create a shared vision that works safely,” she said when interviewed this past spring. “We’d like more community centers. When I was younger we had a teen center, skate park and arcade. Now, youths have nothing to do.”
She continued that she wants more resources for mental health and more opportunities for youth, not more police. Arsenault said she and others would like increased police accountability and to have “qualified immunity” end, and she’d like police personnel records to be made public and for officers to receive no pay while being investigated.
“We’d like details about arrests, and immediate, actionable steps when there are issues within the force,” she said at the springtime events. “We need an independent police review board to take citizens’ complaints and administer discipline.”
Arsenault could not be reached for comment this week.
— Anita Fritz