New England Public Radio

In Springfield, Gambling Officials Brush Off East Windsor Casino Plan

Gambling officials in Massachusetts are brushing off news this week that Connecticut’s two Native American tribes are moving forward with a casino plan in East Windsor to compete with MGM Springfield.

“Will it impact some of our visitation if it ever comes to fruition? Perhaps, but as you know, we’re putting up a really unique product here as an urban resort,” said Mike Mathis, head of MGM’s Springfield project, which is scheduled to open in 2018.

Despite that confidence, MGM is suing to block Connecticut’s third tribal casino.

Regardless, Steve Crosby, head of the Gaming Commission, said he believes MGM can handle any potential competition.

“If circumstances change, if the competitive environment changes significantly, then we’ll have to take a look at that,” Crosby said. “But at this stage of the game, we’re proceeding on pace, and think they’re pretty well situated to deal with whatever they have to deal with.”

The Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot tribes signed an agreement Thursday with East Windsor. It still needs the approval of the Connecticut legislature.

What Could Another Connecticut Casino Mean For East Windsor And Springfield?

This week, Connecticut’s two federally recognized Native American tribes picked East Windsor as the site of a third casino in the state. The gambling complex would be just 13 miles from the MGM casino that’s under construction in Springfield, and that’s not an accident. The Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot tribes are looking to fend off the new competition.

The new casino could be built right off Interstate 91, at the site of an abandoned movie theater. That’s where we spoke to the First Selectman of East Windsor, Bob Maynard.

Listen to Henry Epp of New England Public Radio interview Maynard by clicking the audio player above.

 

Conn. Legislature Starts New Session With A Senate Tie And A Big Budget Deficit

New legislative sessions begin Wednesday in both Massachusetts and Connecticut. In Connecticut, the action begins with the State of the State address from Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy.

The session will likely be dominated by a steep budget deficit for the next fiscal year — more than $1 billion.

For more, we spoke to Chris Keating, the Capitol Bureau Chief for the Hartford Courant. He said legislative leaders and Governor Malloy are likely to fix the budget problem through cuts, not taxes.

Click the audio player above to listen to Henry Epp’s interview with Chris Keating of the Hartford Courant.

Not An Ordinary Class: Women And Chainsaws In The Berkshires

Curious adults — with enough time and money — have seemingly endless opportunities to gain new skills every day. In the Berkshires, a small group gathered for a class on chainsaws offered by the Trustees of Reservations — specifically for women.

Instructor and arborist Melissa LeVangie knows from her own experience in the trees in the Northeast that women are well in the minority when it comes to using chainsaws.

We are so minuscule, in terms of a large population of who uses this tool,” LeVangie said. “It’s sad but true. “

A demonstration at a chainsaw class in the Berkshires. (Carrie Healy for NEPR)

Even preparing a PowerPoint presentation for the class, LeVangie had a hard time finding appropriate pictures.

Chainsaws, and their users, have changed. New chainsaws have technology and safety features that helped reassure many of the women in the class.

“[There are] some kinds of equipment I’m perfectly comfortable with, but chainsaws — I had little to no experience with them,” said Carol Terry of Lee, Massachusetts..

“When I would watch other people with chainsaws, someone would say, ‘This is the way that I do it,’ and someone else would say, ‘Well, this is the way that I do it,'” said Liz Allen of Caanan, Connecticut. “And I wanted to learn the right way, so that I wouldn’t get any bad habits or have any accidents.”

One universal frustration that women and men all have to overcome? Starting the chainsaw. At the class, there was lots of laughing, and a joke that maybe an electric chainsaw would be the better option.

Ana Maria Spagna wishes there was a class like that when she got started. She knows a thing or two about chainsaws. Spagna, who wrote an essay for the book “From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines,” used a chainsaw as a trail crew member for the National Park Service in the Northern Cascades in Washington state.

Spagna said that over her fifteen years operating chainsaws, gender wasn’t usually a big deal for her.

“When I would go to the shop to pick up parts, the guys at the shop would be sort of delighted to have a young woman come in who obviously knew the tool and knew how to speak the language,” she said. “And — on occasion — they’d even say things like, ‘We wish more gals would come in.'”

In her essay, Spagna wrote about her relationship with her chainsaw — and how it’s a hard tool for both women and men:

Even if you’ve never run a saw, you can hear when someone is forcing the issue, fighting the wood, revving past the time for an undercut. The grain is tightening and the sawyer doesn’t know enough, or is not paying enough attention, to pull out the bar and saw upwards to meet the downward cut. It’s rare to cut in only only direction and make it work.”

“There’s an awful lot about running a chainsaw that can be a metaphor for life,” Spagna said.

Chainsaws used during a class in Sheffield, Mass.
Chainsaws used during a class in Sheffield, Mass.  (Carrie Healy for NEPR)

Months after the chainsaw class in the Berkshires, Pam Rooney of Amherst, Massachusetts, said her skills have come in handy.

“When my neighbor’s limb broke off…we were able to go clean it up for her. And [we] also brought into service our wood splitter to help a neighbor and we spent an afternoon splitting up wood for them,” Rooney said. “We’ll keep the skills sharpened and the saws sharpened.”

Rooney and her husband also own land in Southern New Hampshire covered in beech, maple, hemlock and oak trees.  That’s where, she said, she does her more serious chainsawing.

 

 

Farm Animal Welfare, Before And After Massachusetts Question 3

Food Politics Bang Into Citizen Initiatives

In the U.S. eggs, measured by the number Americans eat and changing industry standards, are big ticket items. A ballot question in Massachusetts would make it illegal to sell veal, pork or eggs from animals who’ve been confined to crates or cages of a certain size. Other New England states have already adopted some farm-animal welfare regulations concerning pigs or calves. But not regarding chickens.

The arguments on both sides of this issue can be compelling. In a recent NEPR debate on Question 3, Diane Sullivan from the group Citizens Against Food Tax Injustice said her opposition is to the ballot question is about protecting consumer rights.

“I’m encouraging the voters of Massachusetts to look at the other side of Question 3,” Sullivan said. “What are the social injustices here? And what will the economic impact be?” Sullivan asked. It will be dire, she said, answering her own question.

The cost of eggs will go way up, according to the opposition group’s website, citing a Cornell University study which projects the cost of eggs, along with pork, will increase by hundreds of millions of dollars in the first year after the law would be enacted. It will be devastating for low-income families, Sullivan said in the debate.

In 2015, California was the first state in the nation to enact a cage-free egg law. Initially in the first year, according to the USDA, the average price of a dozen large eggs in California in a one month period increased 71 percent. Egg prices are historically volatile, according to the USDA, and prices also went up nationally last year, as more than 35 million hens in the Midwest had to be killed after a an outbreak of Avian Flu. Regardless of fluctuating costs, egg producers said it will cost more to raise cage-free animals.

Paul Shapiro of the Humane Society, a major financial backer of Question 3 in Massachusetts, disagreed with the Cornell study about how high the cost of eggs would go, and said his mission is to better the welfare of farm animals.

“Imagine a chicken,” he said during the NEPR debate. “She’s stuck inside of a cage, inside a windowless warehouse. She can’t even spread her wings. Every day, day in and day out,” Shapiro went on, “she sleeps, eats, defecates, and lays eggs for human consumption all in the same space.”

Eggs Eaten In New England

The majority of whole or “shell” eggs in the U.S., and those sold in New England, are laid in cages, in facilities mostly outside this region.

But the state of Maine does have commercial large-scale egg production, and at one facility, its owners have no plans to go cage-free.  That may be because Hillandale Farms doesn’t have to. It’s one of the largest egg providers in New England, has customers and egg production facilities around the country and is building at least one new cage-free facility in New England by 2017, in Bozrah, Connecticut.

Hillandale’s Melanie Hilt said while more consumers want cage-free eggs, not everyone does.

“We also have to keep in mind consumers who are looking for a lower price and don’t want to have a food tax pushed on them that gives them no choice,” Wilt said, adding that the bulk of eggs supplied to Massachusetts consumers are currently raised in “a caged environment.”

Hillandale may not renovate its older hen houses in Maine, Wilt said, but new complexes coming on-line in the U.S. will be constructed as cage-free.

Change Driven By Marketplace Demands

One unknown in the egg industry’s transition is if California becomes harbinger of things to come. The attorneys general in six major egg producing states have taken California to court.  The majority of egg producers in Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama, Kentucky and Iowa can no longer sell eggs in California. That’s a couple of billion eggs a year.

If Massachusetts voters approve Question 3, would those states then come east?  Would Rhode Island, the smallest state in the nation, also see legal action if a cage-free law is enacted there? Earlier this year, Rhode Island legislators introduced a bill that would “make changes to and clarify the definition of what constitutes unlawful confinement of a covered animal.”  The U.S. Humane Society is paying for television commercials in support of the bill.

Rhode Island has one commercial egg-laying facility that would be directly impacted. Neighboring Massachusetts isn’t home to any large-scale egg farms. Only one family farm in Wendell, Mass., would need to change housing for its 3,000 birds. The push for cage-free is driven not by the states going cage-free, but by the marketplace. Food corporations like Burger King, McDonald’s and Starbucks, supermarket chains including Trader Joe’s, Stop and Shop and Safeway, other producers like Kraft, Unilever and Nestle have pledged they will serve and produce products made only with cage-free eggs in the years to come.

Still, economist William Masters at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy said other states that produce relatively small numbers of eggs could be next for groups like the Humane Society to promote farm animal welfare legislation.

“They would be looking for places that, like Massachusetts, have a strong animal welfare concern in their electorate and not a lot of caged animal production,” Masters said.

If an industry has to face regulations state by state — up to 50 different sets of rules, Masters said it heads to Washington to demand federal standards.

“It’s excessively costly to have different standards in different states, when you’re trying to have a national distribution program,” Masters said.

Congress was already involved, in the years before the USDA’s 2014 Farm Bill became law.  The 2012 Egg Products Inspection Act could have set federal egg-laying hen housing standards that would have doubled the size of cages, and added other “enriching” aspects to hen facilities. It was introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, and was backed by the unusual alliance of United Egg Producers, the largest egg industry group in the U.S., and the U.S. Humane Society.

Food Politics And Citizen Initiatives

In the end, the act never made it to the floor for a vote. The opposition came from, among others, pork farmers who were worried stricter regulations for hens could lead to similar rules in their industry. The National Pork Producers Council was among the agricultural groups that lobbied Congress to reject the bill. The Pork Council is also among the top financial backers of a Massachusetts committee urging voters to reject Question 3. Forrest Lucas, the co-founder of an oil products company in Indiana, is the other top financial donor. The farm bill comes up again in 2019.

What’s happening in agriculture may be akin to what happened earlier this year with GMO labeling, said Tuft’s William Masters. Vermont enacted the first-in-the-nation law mandating foods made with GMOs be labeled. Connecticut and Maine had passed similar laws. Then in July 2016, with industry at its door, Congress stepped up and made its own regulations, weaker than Vermont’s, and the state law was nullified two weeks after it went into effect.

Question 3 on the Massachusetts ballot has a good chance of passing. According to a recent WBUR poll, two-thirds of likely voters support the animal cage bans.

 

For The First Time, Massachusetts Voters Can Make An Early Move

Why Isn't Every State Doing Likewise?

Louisiana and Texas permitted early voting in 1921. It’s a slow moving trend, but it’s definitely taking hold. Thirty-seven states now provide some kind of of opportunity for registered voters to cast ballots before Election Day. Massachusetts is the newest kid on the block with in-person early voting starting Monday, October 24.

In Springfield, Massachusetts, the city’s election commissioner, Gladys Oyola, said she’s been preparing for “the election before the election” since 2014, when then-Governor Deval Patrick signed early voting into Massachusetts law.

Elections office staff in Springfield get ready for early voting.
Elections office staff in Springfield, Mass., get ready for early voting. (Jill Kaufman for NEPR)

Last week, Oyola was surrounded by staff answering phones and stuffing envelopes, their desks set up in no particular pattern. Boxes of blank ballots (white labels for early voting, yellow for absentee) were piled almost to the ceiling, along with piles of voter information and voting equipment.

“What you see here is [usually] our back office,” Oyola said, pointing around the crowded room. Just days before the state’s first-ever election with early voting, staff offices are under renovation. This is where people will come to cast their early ballots.

“I’ve been sounding the battle cry for the last two years, and I don’t think [anyone] believed it was coming until…” Oyola drifted off. “So here we are.”

Oyola opened a door onto a still somewhat raw public space. The front counter is being rebuilt, made longer for crowds expected during the 11 days of early voting.

Will Voters Show Up?

Despite the construction underway, Oyola said, “We’ve gotten great support,” and volunteers and staff would work through the weekend to get ready.

“We’re building it,” Oyola said. And like elections officials around Massachusetts, she wondered, will the voters come?

State officials told Oyola to expect about 15 percent of the total number of people who usually go to the polls on Election Day. In Springfield, that’s about 9,000 early voters. Oyola said the ballots are put in a vault and tallied November 8th.

Early voting procedures and potential complications were a big topic earlier this year when Springfield hosted a statewide conference for election clerks.

“As a group, the clerks and commissioners have been a little trepidatious because it is new, we’ve never done this before,” Oyola said.

Elections office in Springfield was under construction days before early voting begins.
Elections office in Springfield was under construction days before early voting begins.

There’s a redundancy in Massachusetts, with absentee and now early voting, Oyola said. She’d like to see it become one “animal.”

A Look At Other New England States

Looking around at other states, it’s evident how early voting can reduce long lines on busy election days. Some voters like it, so do some politicians. Many election officials say government should do whatever it takes to get people to the polls.

So why isn’t every state allowing for an early vote?

In New England, for instance, states may not technically offer early voting, but there are other ways to vote early. Rhode Island and Connecticut don’t have early voting laws per se, but over time the definition of who qualifies for an absentee ballot has broadened. Voters no longer need a complicated reason to get one, said Wendy Underhill, who tracks election policies for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“In the case of Rhode Island, it can be simply that the voter is not able to go to vote at the appropriate place on Election Day,” Underhill said.

For Connecticut, Underhill read the requirements out loud: “It says, ‘Will you be out of town during all the hours to vote on Election Day?'”

Still, when an early voting question made it to the 2014 state ballot, Connecticut voters rejected it.

Further north, Underhill said the state of Maine has been back and forth on early voting since 1970. Elections officials have now settled on in-person absentee voting. So has Vermont.

One state stands out as showing almost no interest in an early voting law. Election officials in New Hampshire, so proud of its first in the nation primary, have for years been saying that early voting is not for them. New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner told New Hampshire Public Radio that it’s not needed in a state where voter turnout is high.

“You have a country to look at with 50 different laboratories and what I’ve seen [in New Hampshire] just affirms the process that we have here, and the turnout that we get here,” Gardner said. “And that’s what it’s all about.”

For some, including Gardner, early voting diminishes the significance of Election Day itself.

The Voters Themselves

On the streets of Springfield, Massachusetts, some registered voters felt likewise. But some weren’t even aware they could vote early. George Cannon, who works and lives in Springfield, said for this year, he’s voting November 8th.

“I’m gonna go on the regular day just because I want to have the longest time to think about everything,” Cannon said. “Although I already know basically what I’m going to do. ”

Cannon said he is definitely in favor of early voting. Anything that helps people get out to vote, he said, is a good thing.

New England Public Radio’s Hanna Krueger contributed to this report.