Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has chosen former Westfield Mayor Richard Sullivan to replace departing Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Ian Bowles, who recently announced his resignation from the post. The appointment gives Sullivan oversight of the Commonwealth’s six environmental, natural resource and energy regulatory agencies: the Departments of Environmental Protection, Public Utilities, Energy Resources, Agriculture, and Fish and Game, and the Department of Conservation and Recreation, which Sullivan most recently headed.
While Sullivan boasts a fair record of environmental protection and may approach the position with a fresh optimism, the shoes he’s stepping into may already be mired in a complex bog of ongoing energy legislation and the impacts it has on real-world situations.
A graduate of Bates College and Western New England Law School and mayor of Westfield from 1994 to 2007, the 49-year-old Sullivan now finds himself charged with implementing many of Patrick’s recent wind and solar energy initiatives, including the controversial 130-turbine Cape Wind project proposed for Nantucket Sound. He will also inherit the task of keeping a steak on the black eye from recent criticism of the administration’s support for Marlborough-based Evergreen Solar, Inc. After receiving $58 million in state aid, the company announced it would move many of its jobs to China, where production and labor costs in the solar industry are significantly lower. The announcement was a slap in the face for Patrick, many of whose renewable energy policies were sold on a platform promoting “green jobs” for Massachusetts.
Sullivan will also be left to sort out whatever remains of the state’s biomass initiative, which, though initially enthusiastically supported by the administration, now languishes in the wake of a critical analysis known as the Manomet Report, and is additionally hampered by the opposition of environmental groups who fear that proposed biomass plants would cause deforestation, air pollution and river contamination.
For good or for ill, Sullivan’s appointment marks a welcome increase of Western Mass. influence on Beacon Hill; any additional voice in state and/or national politics will likely be embraced by the region, which has diminished in population and may find itself losing one of its two U.S. congressional seats after the state’s 2010 redistricting maps are drawn. Patrick, whose family owns property in the Berkshire County town of Richmond, has been acknowledged by some as being more in touch with the western part of the state than previous governors, and Sullivan’s appointment is viewed as probably the most significant change in a second-term shuffling of the administration’s senior staff.
Sullivan was one of the founders, in 1998, of Hampden County’s Winding River Land Conservancy, which has protected 1,700 acres of land in the county. Under the departing Bowles, a number of open space preservation initiatives were implemented, and he leaves office sporting the green badge of having acquired 1.2 million acres of Massachusetts land that are now permanently barred from development.
