New Haven Independent

In 2006 the network played an important role in convincing the Hospital of St. Raphael to commit to burning cleaner fuel, even though the hospital initially claimed that it couldn’t afford to. It supported tenants at Farnam Court housing development in Fair Haven in their ultimately successful, years-long struggle to get a noise barrier erected between their apartments and I-91, where vehicles rush by almost close enough to touch. Two of its members got a grant to conduct a survey of Fair Haven residents’ attitudes toward environmental pollution “” finding that they are aware of sources of pollution, but don’t associate their exposure with adverse outcomes in their own health (and thus pointing to the need for public education on the issues).

Some of their members have been working to get the regional Water Pollution Control Authority to phase out the burning of sewage sludge. “We got the Board of Aldermen to pass a non-binding resolution saying the WPCA needs to find another way to deal with the sludge by 2015,” Bonnett says, adding that the director of the WPCA doesn’t seem interested in moving in that direction, but is actually moving to take in the sewage sludge from West Haven in addition to the six towns it already processes.

After pizza, juice and some free-flowing discussion, in which member Lee Cruz (pictured) urged everyone to think outside the box, the Network settled on three priorities for 2007:

1. Promoting green building in the affordable housing market. Only “It’s now called the workforce market,” Bonnett said, “because even those earning the median income for the region have been priced out of the housing market.” The Network wants to sponsor an open house at Barnard School to showcase the benefits of green building “” such as good insulation, solar technology and a literally green roof covered with moss “” which saves money by being energy-efficient and reduces exposures to toxic building materials at the same time. They also plan to urge legislators to adopt green building codes that all developers would be required to use.

2. Working with its parent group, the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice, to support environmental justice legislation that would provide help for communities “overburdened” with environmentally damaging facilities, like power plants and incinerators (a community like Fair Haven). “The DEP doesn’t want to change the permitting process to consider the totality of pollution generated by all the facilities in one area,” Bonnett said. Currently, if any one facility can meet the permitting requirements, it will get a permit to operate, even though, taken together, a number of polluting facilities have a disproportionate impact on the health of community members, especially children and elders. Bonnett pointed to the New Haven Toxics Inventory, which was put together by the City Plan department with a federal grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, as an important tool. “It categorizes and quantifies which pollutants come from which sources. We use it all the time.”

3. The third priority will be to keep an eye on English Station, a dirty old power plant that operated for many years in the Mill River in Fair Haven and that the Network helped to keep from reopening. The state’s two power companies, UI and CLP, have both put through huge rate increases. “They’re saying, ‘If you want lower rates, let us generate power again, not just distribute it as is now the case under deregulation,’” Bonnett says. “We feel like if they got the go-ahead they would start [English Station] up in a heartbeat.”