Green movement pales in Bay State

[ckramer]

Massachusetts was once a favorite of the national environmental movement, passing some of the country's strongest laws to protect its air, water, and land. But today, after 15 years of budget cuts, it is failing to deliver key services.

Across the state, the results are apparent: almost $800 million in deferred park maintenance, a shortage of rangers and environmental police officers in state parks, and less attention to identifying hazardous waste sites, keeping streams and rivers clean, monitoring mercury contamination, and cutting levels of acid rain.

Spending on the environment has fallen, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $253 million a year in 1989 to $169 million this year -- a 33 percent drop that "cannot be sustained without significantly increasing risks to public health and the environment," according to an internal state document. The federal government recently fined the state $92,000 for a policy it said encouraged contractors to ignore contaminated waste.

gb

Well, that's what you get when people in MA kept electing Republican governors.

[Warpy]

1. Pretty much.

The GOP in New England is still pretty much the GOP of Teddy Roosevelt, at least at the grassroots. That's the problem. They don't quite realize that the party left them a long time ago, and hasn't been recognizable at all since 1980.

About the last pubbie in New England that was really an old line pubbie was Jim Jeffords. Snow and Chaffee are in between.

Nobody who gets to the upper reaches of the pubbies anywhere in the country is going to be on our side, and certainly they won't be in the same progressive tradition as Teddy Roosevelt, whether or not they're in New England.

That's what the old line pubbies in New England need to wake up and realize.