Press Releases

For Immediate Release

In a letter released today, two leaders on climate policy in the Massachusetts State Senate took sharp exception to particulars of a draft of a new net zero stretch energy code proposed by the Baker Administration.  The Legislature ordered the Administration to write the new code to drive down greenhouse gas pollution in the building sector, second only to transportation as a generator of emissions in Massachusetts.

The Legislature’s Climate Act directs the Executive branch to promulgate a “municipal opt-in specialized stretch energy code” for newly constructed buildings that includes “net-zero building performance standards and a definition of net-zero building.”

In their letter to Pat Woodcock, head of the state Department of Energy Resources, Senators Mike Barrett and Cindy Creem wrote, “If implemented well, the new specialized stretch code will be a game changer — a leap forward for climate policy in Massachusetts. That’s why we’re so disappointed that the Baker Administration’s straw proposal comes up short.”

The Legislature ordered DOER to hold five hearings around the state in order to give exposure to the concept of net zero construction, the defining feature of the Act’s new stretch code provision.  “By crowding all five hearings into a single seven-day period, beginning tomorrow and including this Friday evening,” Barrett and Creem wrote, “the Baker Administration is depriving the public of a full opportunity to participate.”

Barrett and Creem are also unhappy that the straw proposal would bar a city or town from mandating all-electric new construction, even after local officials allowed for vigorous analysis and debate.  “For municipalities in Massachusetts and other progressive states, all-electric construction is the favored strategy for decarbonizing new buildings.  Barring communities from employing it would be a significant setback.”

The senators wrote Woodcock, “We ask you to put into writing, early enough in the process to allow for public review, the legislatively mandated meaning of ‘net-zero building’ and key features of the legislatively mandated ‘net-zero building performance standards.'”

According to Barrett and Creem, the Baker draft would result in new buildings adding to the state’s problem with greenhouse gas emissions, “a dismaying prospect, and all the more so in light of the Administration’s emphasis on the difficulty of reducing emissions in the building sector.”

“We agree with the letter sent to you recently by Massachusetts municipal officials,” the two senators wrote.  “Both the statute and the urgent need to combat climate change call for a true net-zero stretch code.  This means the new code must, at the very least, provide interested municipalities with clear authority to prohibit on-site combustion in new construction and in major rehabilitation.”

“What the Legislature is mandating will be optional for cities and towns.  No community will have to move forward.  The municipalities that opt in will have chosen, after hearing from their citizens, to serve as climate laboratories for the Commonwealth.  Please let them serve — ideally, with your agency supplying a framework.”

Barrett and Creem concluded, “We look forward to seeing substantial revisions to the net-zero stretch energy code promulgated by your agency.”

The schedule of the five hearings is as follows:

 

Western Region	March 2, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Metro Boston and Northeastern Region	March 3, 9:00 am – 11:00 am
Environmental Justice Communities	March 4, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Central Region	March 7, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Southeastern Region	March 8, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm

At the Thursday morning (March 3) hearing for Metro Boston and the northeastern suburbs, Barrett will testify, along with representatives of five towns that are seeking legislative authority to go further than the DOER draft would otherwise allow.  

For Immediate Release

The Legislature’s Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy (TUE) holds a hearing tomorrow, at 10 a.m., on S.1333 and H.2167, companion bills to allow cities and towns to require that new residential and commercial buildings built within their boundaries be “all-electric.”

The bills’ definition of an all-electric building says it must involve “no natural gas, heating oil or propane plumbing or equipment.”

S.1333 and H.2167 were heard originally by a separate legislative body, the Joint Committee on Municipalities and Regional Government, which earlier this month discharged the bills to TUE without recommending either approval or rejection.

“To reach our climate goals, we need to begin constructing buildings that do not rely on fossil fuels for heating,” Senator Mike Barrett and Representative Jeff Roy, TUE Co-Chairs, said in a brief statement.  “To this end, the 2021 Climate Act obligates the Baker Administration to promulgate a new ‘municipal opt-in stretch energy code’ that includes a set of ‘net-zero building performance standards.'”

“EEA told the public to expect a draft of the code by last fall.  But something’s happened.  It’s not seen the light of day, and we hear some developers want it weakened.  On the off chance the stretch energy code either does not emerge soon or emerges but departs from legislative intent, we’re looking at contingency steps the Legislature may want to take.  Tomorrow’s hearing is sure to touch on these issues.”

In addition to S.1333 and H.2267, which would mandate an all-electric municipal opt-in process statewide, TUE will hear testimony on five home rule bills — submitted by Acton, Arlington, Brookline, Concord, and Lexington — that seek to do the same for their respective jurisdictions.  Several other late-filed and referred bills will be heard, as well.

Below is the link to the hearing notice and to where a recording of the hearing will be posted afterwards.

https://malegislature.gov/Events/Hearings/Detail/4169

END

For Immediate Release

Senator Mike Barrett, Senate Co-Chair of the Legislature’s Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy, is asking Governor Charlie Baker to drop his Administration’s push to lift price caps on offshore wind deals.

“The cap protects everyone in Massachusetts who pays a monthly electric bill,” Barrett writes. A Baker bill that abolishes the cap, among other things, is set to be heard tomorrow by the Committee.

“I strongly support clean energy in general and offshore wind in particular,” Barrett writes. “I take exception, however, to your proposal to abolish the cap. … I think you were right the first time, in 2016, when you supported legislative language imposing just such a cap, and the
second time, in 2019, when you suggested lifting the cap for just a single round and reimposing it for later rounds.”

Barrett, a legislative leader on climate issues, is concerned that “ratepayers could be confronted with unnecessarily steep electricity bills, associate them with climate policy, and rebel against
both.”

“To respond to global warming,” he says, “we need to go all-electric with respect to both our cars and our heating systems. Which means we need to boost our overall consumption of electricity, in the teeth of the region’s high per-unit costs. It’s a sensitive time to be asking legislators to drop a legal safeguard for their constituents.”

“Thanks to last month’s announcement on third-round contracting,” Barrett adds, “we now know the cap has prevented neither the developers nor our coastal cities from coming out of contract negotiations as winners. Importantly, the cap ensures that families throughout the state win,
too.”

As for the job implications, he writes, “Though it’s extremely early in the industry’s build-out in Massachusetts — preparations for the first project, Vineyard Wind I, have only just begun — it’s possible to take a preliminary tally of associated economic development activity,” Barrett writes.
“Judging from the positive reactions from all around Massachusetts, including your office, it’s hard to argue that the price cap has stifled job creation.”

Barrett’s letter also lists the wholesale electricity prices set in the Massachusetts deals shaped by the cap and compares them to the prices set in comparable deals struck in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, none of which featured price caps.

“The numbers make the Massachusetts approach look very good,” Barrett concludes.

 ###

For Immediate Release

Senator Mike Barrett, Senate Co-Chair of the Legislature’s Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy, is asking Governor Charlie Baker to drop his Administration’s push to lift price caps on offshore wind deals.

“The cap protects everyone in Massachusetts who pays a monthly electric bill,” Barrett writes.

A Baker bill that abolishes the cap, among other things, is set to be heard tomorrow by the Committee.

“I strongly support clean energy in general and offshore wind in particular,” Barrett writes.  “I take exception, however, to your proposal to abolish the cap. … I think you were right the first time, in 2016, when you supported legislative language imposing just such a cap, and the second time, in 2019, when you suggested lifting the cap for just a single round and reimposing it for later rounds.”

Barrett, a legislative leader on climate issues, is concerned that “ratepayers could be confronted with unnecessarily steep electricity bills, associate them with climate policy, and rebel against both.”

“To respond to global warming,” he says, “we need to go all-electric with respect to both our cars and our heating systems.  Which means we need to boost our overall consumption of electricity, in the teeth of the region’s high per-unit costs.  It’s a sensitive time to be asking  legislators to drop a legal safeguard for their constituents.”

“Thanks to last month’s announcement on third-round contracting,” Barrett adds, “we now know the cap has prevented neither the developers nor our coastal cities from coming out of contract negotiations as winners.  Importantly, the cap ensures that families throughout the state win, too.”

As for the job implications, he writes, “Though it’s extremely early in the industry’s build-out in Massachusetts — preparations for the first project, Vineyard Wind I, have only just begun — it’s possible to take a preliminary tally of associated economic development activity,” Barrett writes.  “Judging from the positive reactions from all around Massachusetts, including your office, it’s hard to argue that the price cap has stifled job creation.”

Barrett’s letter also lists the wholesale electricity prices set in the Massachusetts deals shaped by the cap and compares them to the prices set in comparable deals struck in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, none of which featured price caps.

“The numbers make the Massachusetts approach look very good,” Barrett concludes.

END

For Immediate Release

State Senator Mike Barrett, Senate Chair of the Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy of the Massachusetts Legislature, will attend COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland.  The Conference is a once-a-year gathering of representatives from every part of the world and the pre-eminent forum for coordinating joint action against global warming.

“Here in the U.S., with all the hiccups happening in the Capital around climate strategy, a lot of responsibility is shifting back to state-level government,” Barrett says.  “Several years back, in 2015, the summit in Paris was about the role of nations.  This year, the summit in Glasgow is about all hands on deck — nations, for sure, but also states, provinces, cities, businesses, and citizen activists.”

State-level actors have been included in previous U.N. Climate Conferences, Barrett says — he took part himself in the 2017 meeting in Bonn — but such “subnational” efforts have been in and out of focus.  This year, due in part to the scaling down of climate policy making in Washington, interest in state-level initiatives is high.

The Conference runs two weeks, from Sunday, Oct. 31, through Friday, Nov. 12.  Barrett is attending the Conference’s full second week.  He says he’s looking forward to joining the day of meetings set aside to discuss climate options for cities, states, provinces, and regions.  Other Week Two sessions will address policies on (1) transportation; (2) the built environment; (3) science and innovation; (4) women’s rights and gender equality; and (5) adaptation.

Back in Massachusetts, Barrett is also the author of a bill to establish the “Massachusetts Fund for Vulnerable Countries Most Affected by Climate Change.”  The idea is to create a new “checkoff” option on state income tax forms, one that would allow, but not require, taxpayers to donate money, over and above taxes owed, to a special account set up to aid those nations of the world that are especially vulnerable to severe drought, rising ocean levels, desertification, and the other most devastating effects of global warming.

A special Week Two session will be devoted to questions of assistance to these nations, and this is where Barrett hopes to discuss his proposal.

END

For Immediate Release

The State Senate has passed a major voting reform bill to expand voting access, making permanent COVID era initiatives like mail-in ballots and expanded early voting.

“At a time when states like Texas and Georgia are making it tougher to vote, Massachusetts is going the other way and expanding access,” said local Senator Mike Barrett.  “This is deeply satisfying news.  I’m proud of the Massachusetts State Senate.”

When it comes to early voting, the bill requires two weeks (including two weekends) of in-person early voting for biennial state elections and municipal elections held on the same day.  It would allow municipalities to opt in to early voting in person for any municipal election not held concurrently with another election.

For vote-by-mail, the bill requires the Secretary of the Commonwealth to send out mail-in ballot applications to all registered voters in July of every even-numbered year.

Barrett says he’s pleased that the Senate included a same-day registration provision, which allows individuals to register to vote during early voting periods or on the day of a primary or general election.  Twenty other states, Barrett says, already use same-day registration.

Importantly, given the range of new measures, the bill instructs the Secretary of State to conduct a comprehensive public awareness campaign to highlight the new voting and registration options.

The bill expands access to voting in other ways as well.

Currently, people held in correctional facilities on misdemeanor convictions or as they await trial are eligible to vote.  The Senate bill ensures that individuals who are incarcerated, who are currently eligible to vote, are provided with voting information and can exercise their right to vote in state primaries and general elections.  An amendment adopted during debate ensures that people who are incarcerated are notified of their right to vote upon release and given the opportunity to fill out a voter registration form.

The Senate unanimously approved a provision to streamline ballot access for U.S. service members overseas by allowing them to cast their vote electronically.

For local officials, the bill provides flexibility to accommodate the increased election logistics of each town in the state.  For example, Barrett says, the bill allows election officials to pre-process mail-in and early voting ballots in advance of election day.

The VOTES Act now advances on to the Massachusetts House of Representatives for further consideration.

###

For immediate release

Family members, students, researchers, and legislators testify today in support of new legislation to establish a special commission on the history of state institutions for people with developmental and mental health issues.

Over the course of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, a handful of institutions founded in the mid-1800s expanded into a network of state hospitals, state schools, and farm colonies.  While providing good care and services to some, institutions such as the Fernald School in Waltham also served as sites for medical experiments involving residents, experiments that today are recognized as gross violations of human rights.

By the 1970s, thousands of people with developmental or mental health challenges were housed in at least 27 large- and medium-sized institutions in the Commonwealth.  The ’70s saw the burgeoning of awareness about civil rights and a spate of lawsuits over the treatment of residents, clients, and patients.  What followed were a series of landmark rulings by federal district court judge Joseph Tauro that prompted significant improvements in the care provided, managed, and overseen by what is now the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services and the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health.  Yet comprehensive and consistent records and histories of these institutions are still unavailable.

“We live in a time of historic reckonings,” said State Senator Mike Barrett, a longtime advocate for people with disabilities.  “With respect to Massachusetts citizens with developmental and mental health challenges, and as regards our better understanding of human rights and humane treatment, the past can be a guide — but only if we truly know it.  This commission will add impetus to the acknowledgement and restoration of these hidden Massachusetts lives, to the same degree and in the same ways that we’re able to know about the lives of everyone else.”

The commission idea was inspired by a local initiative.  In 2019, Barrett met with students and teachers at Waltham’s Gann Academy who had launched a project to research and write the capsule biographies of 298 people who had resided in state institutions in Waltham and Lexington and who, upon their deaths, were buried in graves that bore no names and were marked only by number.

“As a person with mental illness who was briefly committed twenty years ago, I am keenly aware that in another time, I would have spent my life in a state asylum instead of having the great privilege to teach at the Harvard Kennedy School,” said Alex Green, the teacher who led the effort at Gann Academy and an advocate of the bill.  “Not a week passes without a former resident, employee, or family member reaching out to me in the desperate hope that they can find answers to the unsettled issues that remain in their lives.  Now is the time for a state-supported commission, led by disabled people, to do just that, and I think that it will provide immeasurable benefit to helping understand this history.”

While nearly all the state’s large institutions have closed, there has not been a concerted and systematic effort to excavate their histories.  Documents are scattered across state agencies.  Former residents have rarely been asked to tell their stories.  Family members face a maze of bureaucracy as they try to learn what happened to loved ones.

“The people that are going to sit on this commission are vitally important because they’re someone who lived there, a family member.  We need these kinds of people to be the eyes and ears for all the people who lived in these institutions.  We really haven’t had that before,” said Pat Vitkus, the wife of the late Donald Vitkus, who was a Vietnam combat veteran, born in Waltham, and incarcerated at Belchertown State School in the 1950s.

“Families have a right to find their loved ones’ records,” she said.  “I know that Donald and his son searched for years before they could get all theirs, and those kinds of things should be readily available to someone who’s looking for them.”

The commission would seek to —

• Locate or better organize records and documents involving former state institutions and the individuals who lived in them;
• Make the records and documents available to former residents, their family members, and the general public, an effort that would be balanced by the protection of privacy;
• Identify the burial locations of residents who died in the care of the Commonwealth;
• Assess the likelihood of, and possible location of, unmarked graves at the site of former institutions;
• Collect statements and recollections from former residents; and
• Provide a “human rights framework” for understanding and assessing the state’s role in running the institutions.

Along with Barrett, who filed the bill in the Senate, State Representative Sean Garballey has filed the bill in the House of Representatives.  More than dozen leading disability and historical advocacy groups have made the legislation a priority for this session.

“As a mother of two sons with autism and an advocate for the disability community, my work throughout the covid-19 crisis has amplified the already difficult uphill battle for equity.  The Disability Commission bill will enable the Commonwealth to study the true history of the era of institutions.  We need to learn from that history and honor those who were forgotten,” said Maura Sullivan, Executive Director of the Arc of Massachusetts.

“Progress toward equity and inclusion depends on our deeper understanding of those who lived through this period.  The Arc of Massachusetts supports families who want to know about their loved ones who lived in segregation or were buried without names on their graves.  We support the idea that people with disabilities should lead this effort.  Being home to 27 institutions once in existence, this commission offers an opportunity for Massachusetts to provide a first of its kind, innovative model for memorialization, for the nation to follow.”

The hearing will be taking place virtually at 1 p.m. here:   https://malegislature.gov/Events/Hearings/Detail/3790

###