Time-sensitive: before the House Ways & Means vote
S.3064 has the right name but the wrong fine print. Late Senate amendments would gut local wetlands & septic protections and weaken the rules that keep raptors alive. Ask the House to fix it.
The House Ways & Means Committee, chaired by Rep. Aaron Michlewitz, is reviewing S.3064, An Act to build resilience for Massachusetts communities, known as the Mass Ready Act. Several amendments added in the Senate would override local laws that exist precisely to keep homes out of dangerous, flood-prone, and environmentally vulnerable places, and to keep our water clean.
These provisions were meant to speed up affordable and transit-oriented housing. But they do it by erasing local protections and weakening Home Rule, working against the very resilience goals the bill is named for. A few targeted edits in committee can fix this.
Don't take our word for it. Read the bill.
We encourage you to check the sections we reference and decide for yourself.
These amendments would weaken the local laws that keep homes out of harm's way and our water clean. Three targeted fixes, not the whole bill.
These sections let "Priority Housing" projects skip local wetlands bylaws. Those bylaws set the no-build buffers around rivers, vernal pools, and flood-prone land. Take them away and you get more flooding and dirtier water downstream.
Ask: Strike Sections 68 & 69.
These let projects bypass stricter local septic & wastewater (Title V) rules, a leading cause of contaminated water, and penalize towns that keep strong water protections by cutting their access to state grants.
Ask: Strike Sections 60 & 108.
Reject the amendment that forces town-by-town rodenticide rules. Instead, strengthen Sections 74 & 75 with the language from Rep. Hawkins' H.5217 to phase out anticoagulant rodenticides statewide.
Ask: Adopt H.5217's statewide phase-out.
Eagles, hawks, falcons, and owls keep rodent populations in check naturally. Anticoagulant rodenticides poison them, and a patchwork of town-by-town rules leaves them exposed wherever protections lapse.
A raptor that eats a single poisoned rodent can die from internal bleeding.
Predators eat many poisoned rodents over days, leading to slow, painful deaths.
A mother feeding a poisoned rodent to her chicks can kill the owlet or fledgling.
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