Far North End neighborhood fights South Coast Renewables in all-American battle - The New Bedford Light (2025)

If there is a more all-American neighborhood in New Bedford than Pine Hill Acres in the Far North End, I don’t know what it is.

Begun in the 1960s, the 350 or so ranch-style houses are all about equidistant from each other, with well-tended, but not overly sculpted lawns and shrubs. Over the decades, some folks have added second floors to the ranches, or a tucked-away addition out back.

Pine Hill Acres is not an affluent community. It’s not the renovated Victorians outside Buttonwood Park where the city’s professional class lives. And it’s not the McMansions along the tip of the South End peninsula that are home to successful business owners among others.

But neither is Pine Hill Acres a triple-decker neighborhood, like the ones that are home to the latest wave of immigrants in the city. And it’s also not a street of humble cottages like the ones on Kempton and Mill streets in the West End.

No, Pine Hill Acres is very much the middle of the middle class in New Bedford.

The people who live in Pine Hill Acres are the kind of folks who hold blue-collar jobs at the few good-paying manufacturers that are left around town, maybe work as medical technicians or nurses at St. Luke’s or teachers or media specialists in the public schools. They are not doctors or lawyers or well-off entrepreneurs.

But through their sheer grit and hard work the folks who live in Pine Hill and the surrounding Ward 1 residential neighborhoods have earned their way into this suburban-like, and largely crime-free, part of the city. And like most middle-class Americans, their life savings are largely invested in the value of their homes.

But the good folks of Pine Hill Acres are scared these days. Very scared.

They are scared that everything they have worked hard for their whole lives is on the line. And they believe it is on the line because of the financial ambition of a business-type who doesn’t live in their neighborhood, doesn’t even live in New Bedford. They believe the business guy, whose name is Tim Cusson, wants to exploit their neighborhood with an “experimental” regional trash recycling operation, a transfer station for separating out grimy stuff for whatever recyclables may be left. And they feel he’s taking advantage of the New Bedford Business Park’s proximity to state highways and railroads while ignoring the quality of life of the hundreds of single family homeowners that surround him. Some of them claim Cusson, who has run a business park bottle recycling operation for most of the last decade at the business park, is looking for a big pay-day bringing trash from outside New Bedford into the city. Most heartbreaking of all, they believe the state bureaucracy may be looking to solve a statewide solid waste issue, and their neighborhood will end up as road kill on the way to getting there.

“Think about that for a minute. Don’t be selfish,” said Lydia Genereaux Poulin at a recent public hearing, looking squarely at the Department of Environmental Protection officials who have the neighborhood’s future in their hands. “Think about everybody in this room. This is all of our money. This is a residential area.”

Lydia Poulin was one of about 40 Far North End residents who pleaded with the DEP officials back on Nov. 13 at a long overdue public hearing on Cusson’s proposal to build a $30-million trash recycling center that will process up to 1,500 tons of solid waste a day.

The residents are desperate. They have the entire state legislative delegation and most of the City Council on their side. But not so much Mayor Jon Mitchell, whose lawyers seem to fear that the city can’t legally keep South Coast Renewables out.

Mitchell has settled for a deal that will at least prevent sewage sludge from being trucked into the site and processed. His agreement with Cusson will annually bring at least t $1 million a year in what amounts to tipping fees, starting in the first year, money that would help address financially strapped New Bedford’s own growing sludge and trash disposal fees.

Mitchell willingly took the slings and arrows of the Far North End at a Ward 1 neighborhood meeting a few months ago, but he has not been deterred from his position, which he believes is the best that could be achieved for the neighborhood and for the good of the entire city,

I tried to have one of my heart-to-heart talks with His Honor for this column but he was not available the latter part of Thanksgiving week. In any event, his office only offered an eventual prepared statement, not the heart-to-heart.

Mr. Cusson, some of his residential neighbors observe, is a businessman. Nothing wrong with that as long as he does things responsibly without hurting others. Nothing even wrong with Cusson’s proposed business, some of them say, as long as the city and state governments are strong enough to well regulate the operation. Pine Hill Acres wants a fair regulatory decision on whether a transfer station that processes 1,500 tons of trash per day should be located just a few hundred yards from some of their homes.

At the public hearing, dozens of residents were mad as hell and determined not to take it anymore, as the cliche goes.

The problem, as I see it, is that the working-class folks of the Far North End live in a New Bedford, and indeed in an America, where people have lost confidence in both the business and government classes. They have lost confidence that everyone from Mr. Cusson to Mayor Mitchell to the state DEP will do the right thing by them. The Far North End of New Bedford where they live is very much the city heart of the blue-collar worker, where some have felt abandoned by the country’s ruling class in recent years. On Nov. 5, the ward voted for Donald Trump by more than 500 votes even though Kamala Harris won the city by almost 2,700 votes. Interestingly, the precinct where Pine Hill Acres is located voted for Trump by just 10 votes.

The history of all this includes the following: The Pine Hill Acres residents’ futures are on the line because of decisions made by the mayor, the City Council and a city-appointed Economic Development Council some half dozen years ago. They allowed Mr. Cusson’s company — named Parallel Products but whose local operation is now rebranded South Coast Renewables Project — to locate at a separate site in the Business Park, even giving him a tax break called a Special Tax Assessment Agreement. They allowed the recycling operation in despite the park’s former executive director, Tom Davis, saying it should not have been approved. According to Davis, he had seen their work in Taunton and deed restrictions could have prevented the debacle; the EDC, on the other hand, has argued that the business purchased property that was largely a private transaction that they were powerless to stop it.

Mr. Cusson subsequently announced his plans to change a bottle recycling business into a regional trash and sludge processing operation. The city at one point even had an agreement with Fall River and Brockton to bring a sludge-type operation at a different location on Shawmut Avenue.

Sure, the residents of Pine Hill Acres have heard Mr. Cusson’s promises that he’ll keep a close eye on any odors or contamination coming from the trash station across the street from their housing development. Sure, the state Department of Environmental Protection has assured them they want all the facts. But they wonder why the DEP waited an entire year on their request to hold the public hearing earlier this month.

The bottom line is that the folks in Pine Hill Acres believe to their very bones that a sprawling residential community like the Far North End of New Bedford is not the right place for a regional transfer station.

The South Coast Renewable site is also adjacent to several low-income housing developments, and residents pointed out that a mile-and-a-half away is a pristine, federally protected cedar swamp, whose water table might be endangered.

They cite the example of the odors from the SEMASS trash recycling plant in Rochester, the stale beer smell from some of the bottles already at South Coast Renewables and the fact that the city has already suffered its share of environmental injustice with two Superfund sites, a closed landfill, and jointly operates a landfill with Dartmouth.

With diesel trucks delivering 190 to 270 truckloads of trash a day, they say, both air quality and traffic will be compromised. The nearby Pulaski School is already gridlocked with cars every day at opening and closing times.

The Far North End residents have thought of everything that could go wrong — including the possibility of a hard-to-put-down fire at the transfer station from disposed lithium batteries. There is no way out of Pine Hill Acres development except to travel toward the fire and the adjacent Phillips Road throughway.

Perhaps no speaker for Pine Hill Acres is more moving than Mike McHugh.

An avid hunter and fisherman, McHugh wears a ball cap with an American flag whose stripes are composed of fish. When I visited him at his Ridgewood Road house, he was putting together a new video camera that will alert him when wildlife comes by one of his stands. You can tell he’s a guy who’s close to the natural world, but it’s a world that no longer exists in the idyllic neighborhood he grew up in.

McHugh’s family moved into Pine Hill Acres in its early days, and he recalled a childhood of roaming through unblemished woods catching turtles and snakes in the area where a Polaroid film plant was eventually located, and which is now the site of the South Coast Renewables operation.

When he was growing up in the days before air conditioning, McHugh told the DEP he remembers the smells of the Polaroid plant — which he said discharged high pressure steam at night — wafting through the windows. The cars would be covered with a white film in the morning. Years later, the neighborhood was decimated by folks dying of cancer, McHugh said.

“Tragically, I lost six friends within 200 yards of my house, who lived right on my street,” he told the public hearing. “Due to cancer — all 48 to 60 years (old). Is that a coincidence? I think not.”

McHugh was not the only one who was suspicious of environmental contamination and a possible connection to cancer.

Ward 1 City Councilor Leo Choquette, who grew up in Dartmouth on the other side of the business park, and adjacent to the Crapo Hill Landfill, spoke angrily of what he said was the common occurrence of cancer in that part of town.

“I challenge anyone here to start at 568 High Hill Road, go and knock on every door up the street, all the way to the Freetown line. There’s at least one person with cancer in every one of those houses,” he said.

To applause, Choquette decried the city and Business Park officials for putting the neighborhood in the current circumstance.

“In all due respect, we shouldn’t even be here tonight,” he said. “This issue should never even have happened.”

Alluding to the nearby Acushnet Cedar Swamp, a federal landmark, he said the neighborhood will take the case to the federal government if the state passes off on Southcoast Renewables’ plans.

I know of no scientific study as to whether there is a cancer cluster in the Pine Hills Acres neighborhood or anywhere around the Crapo Hill Landfill. But it seems like the DEP might want to look into whether there should be one.

McHugh told the DEP officials he believes the negative effects of Southcoast Renewables’ plans go far beyond the residents of the Far North End.

“We have a situation where there could be a transfer station, which would come with a lot of odor and noise, traffic and pollution. With runoff (to) the wetlands and cedar swamp from the dripping poisons while the trucks are cued up to tip their loads,” he said. “Their project would affect basically all the city.”

Are the neighbors being alarmist? I don’t know. I think of how I might react if this kind of operation was opening up down the street from me.

For their part, the homeowners feel they have provided more than evidence for the DEP to shut the plans down.

While I was at the hearing, I couldn’t help feeling that DEP may not have been entirely hearing these folks. Regional head of DEP Gerard Martin rattled off the names of six state officials in the audience, no fewer than three of them having jobs tasked with overseeing environmental justice.

But the DEP’s “third party” moderator also made a point of saying that the agency would take no questions as this was just “a listening session.” It didn’t seem like a give-and-take at all, and the residents seemed frustrated by that.

The neighborhood activists told DEP what they believe is indisputably the right thing to do.

“Mass DEP has an opportunity here to show that it does what it was designed to do, to protect the environment, and to protect the community by issuing a negative decision,” said Tracey Wallace, a longtime leader of CAPPP, Citizens Against the Parallel Products Project. “We have supplied the DEP with enough evidence to do that.”

I couldn’t help feeling there was more than just the transfer station issue going on here. Another audience member who spoke about the collapse of citizen confidence in government and officialdom may have said it best.

“It has become increasingly evident that government officials have abandoned the working class,” said Christina Lambert-Gorwyn. “And the very communities they are meant to serve.”

Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.