WHMP's Bill Dwight began a recent radio interview with Northampton Mayor Clare Higgins with an odd reference to the disgraced governor of Illinois.
"You don't seem to have the same vision that Gov. Bagojevich, or whatever his name is, had&" Dwight told Higgins, mangling the now notorious name.
"Blagojevich?" the mayor asked. "BoyGeorgevich?"
"BoyGeorgevich!" cackled Dwight appreciatively. Calming himself, the radio host continued: "But he's politically savvy when he wants to run for re-election. You're running for re-election. Right now you're dealing with [the] panhandling ordinance, you're talking about an override during that and then, of course, there's the landfill, which is also a hot-button issue. Some other more savvy politicians might avoid those things with the prospect of an election…"
"I'm just not that bright," said Higgins.Dwight guffawed, then tried to restore a sense of gravitas: "Anyway, so the landfill is a hot-button issue for many obvious reasons…"
Why, you may wonder, the invocation of Gov. Rod Blagojevich? Dwight appears to have been contrasting Noho's reputedly progressive, honest mayor with the current poster child for political corruption. Clare Higgins, he seemed to be saying, is no Rod Blagojevich. And that's certainly true—to a point. Higgins hasn't been caught in a career-ending scandal, hasn't made any attempt that we know of to peddle Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat. But if Dwight was suggesting that Higgins is, unlike Blagojevich, incapable of twisting the truth out of shape in the service of her own agenda, he was a bit premature.
"Well, you know, the landfill is certainly a contentious issue," Higgins said when it was her time to talk. For several minutes she talked generally about the landfill, how the city has been "more and more responsible" running it, how the decision to expand it was made "under the previous mayor." Eventually she emerged from her history lesson. The city, she says, is still on track to expand the landfill.
"Now, neighbors have been concerned, there certainly have been some lawsuits filed. I'm not going to comment on any of that," she said. Dwight didn't push the point.
"The bottom line is, citizens in the city of Northampton generate trash and it needs to go somewhere," Higgins said.
Now Dwight, who'd been silent for several minutes, pushed the point: "Is the threshold—the bottom line, as you say—is it financial or health, when push comes to shove?"
"Health is clearly not something we're going to jeopardize," Higgins said.
That much Higgins has said before. So have many of her allies on the City Council. What comfort the public might take from such a pronouncement, however, should be measured against the whopper she uttered next: "DPH (Massachusetts Dept. of Public Health) did an epidemiological study and found no need to explore any further whether or not there are any issues and I know that some people in the neighborhood dispute that, but I'm comfortable with DPH's findings. We're doing a little bit more work on that. They asked us to look at a couple parameters, but they were comfortable where we were."
In point of fact, DPH was not comfortable, either with the applicability of its study to the important question about an expanded landfill—will it jeopardize public health?—or with the way Higgins and her allies have used the study.
"Is the landfill causing health problems today and will it cause health problems if it's expanded? Our study didn't answer those questions," said Suzanne K. Condon, DPH's Director of the Bureau of Environmental Health, referring to her agency's Oct. 2 letter to Northampton health director Xanthi M. Scrimgeour. The letter called for "more comprehensive environmental monitoring" of the landfill and was signed by Jan Sullivan of DPH's Community Assessment Program. Condon said in an interview in mid-October that DPH had sent the letter as a warning to the City of Northampton against trumpeting the DPH study as evidence that the city's landfill poses no threat to public health.
If Higgins got DPH's message, it didn't cause her to clarify the issue in her radio interview. Instead, she simply pulled out the scare tactics.
"There are consequences to not having a landfill," Higgins said gravely. "People will be dumping their trash all over the city, quite frankly, if we don't have a landfill, I believe."
