Editorials from around New England

CONNECTICUT

The New Haven Register

July 20

Connecticut has some of the toughest gun laws in the country - and still, bullets find their mark in Greater New Haven.

Multiple bullets found Tyriek Keyes Sunday during a shooting on Bassett Street.

He died Thursday at Yale New Haven Hospital.

He was only 14 years old.

That bears repeating: He was only 14 years old.

Tyriek’s death marks the fifth homicide in the city this year, the fourth by gunfire.

And now, another family grieves, and a community mourns the death of another life cut short.

As Police Chief Anthony Campbell said, 14-year-olds should be at camp or playing on the beach in the summer.

We agree. This killing - as is the case with so many others - makes no sense at all.

If ever there were a time for the community to stop and take a serious look at what it could do as a collective, now is the time.

“We’ve got to stand together as a community to stop this,” Campbell said.

Tyriek was a student at Fair Haven Middle School and was about to enter ninth grade.

We know a little bit about him from community members and former teachers.

He was a member of Ice the Beef, an anti-violence group for kids in New Haven. The group’s president, Chaz Carmon, said Tyriek had been involved as a dancer for the education and stage arts part of the program for about a year-and-a-half. Ironically, Tyriek had taken part in a performance piece against gun violence.

“He loved to dance,” Carmon said. “I don’t understand how this could happen when he wasn’t out there like that.”

That’s what we know of him as a teen.

We will never know his promise as a man. We will never know if he had something to contribute to society.

What can be said about that?

Not enough.

Gun violence affects every community, but black children and teens are 17 times more likely to die from gun homicide than white youth, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is the leading cause of death for blacks 10 to 24 years old.

Tyriek, like many before him, is a grim reminder of that statistic of which New Haven has too many. Remember Jajuana Cole, who was shot to death near her Dickerman Street home? She was 13. How about Justus Suggs? He, too, was 13, when he was shot and killed at Sylvan Avenue and Orchard Street as he rode home from a neighborhood carnival.

And who can ever forget Danielle Taft, who was just 7 months old when she was killed in a shooting in 1994? Three years ago on her birthday, her mother released white balloons into the air to honor the daughter who would have turned 21 that day.

Twenty-one years later, and the pain hasn’t gone away.

And there are so many more.

Something must be done - and that has to come from inside the communities where gun violence lives and thrives.

Police can only do so much to protect us.

We are pleading: Stop the gun violence.

As Campbell said, “We cannot have the children of New Haven dying in the streets.”

We agree, but it is the community - not police - that must continue to work together to curb gun violence.

Online: https://bit.ly/2uGrFgQ

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MASSACHUSETTS

The Cape Cod Times

July 18

A recent report from the social policy researchers at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole shed some light on what happens to local fish after it’s caught by commercial fishermen.

The report is part of ongoing research, and has yet to be finalized in an academic paper, but the early findings indicate that most of the groundfish landed in NOAA’s Northeast region is sold and consumed locally. And it’s no surprise that most of the scallops landed are shipped around the country and the world.

Trucks carry much of the groundfish landed between Maryland and Maine, hauling along the coast and inland for 75 or 100 miles. Some is frozen and shipped far away, but the fish we buy locally is frequently locally caught.

Cod, haddock, pollock and different flounders find their way into local restaurants, fish markets and grocery stores, then onto local plates.

The local consumption of this groundfish is a function of the difficulty of NOAA Fisheries’ management of the multispecies fishery that includes about 20 different species. The complex interplay between abundant and scarce species that intermingle has thwarted attempts to harvest the Total Allowable Catch of the abundant species and confounded attempts to avoid the scarce ones. Groundfish landings today are a shadow of those from the early 1980s.

Even as traditional regional species have become harder to harvest, new species have moved into warming state and federal waters managed by the Northeast Fisheries Management Council, which is the management arm of federal fisheries management in this region. Skate and spiny dogfish have become the abundant species, and their harvest is less complicated than those from among the traditional groundfish stocks. But skate wings don’t get the price at the dock of those other species. For example, at a recent seafood auction, skate wings fetched 30 cents a pound; flounder, cod and haddock were all paying 5 to 10 times that at the dock, some 20 times more.

Efforts to spread the word about the culinary quality of these low-price fish have been ongoing. There have been test projects and special events aimed at exposing more potential consumers to these species, including one held in the UMass Dartmouth cafeteria and various cook-ins and sample shows around the commonwealth. Last month, an Orleans restaurateur did just that, thanks to NOAA’s Saltonstall-Kennedy grant to boost marketing and familiarization with the “under-loved” species.

NOAA’s work on fisheries has proven to be nimble - relatively speaking, for a federal agency - in adapting to the complicated multispecies fishery. Its science, regulations, data-gathering, industry cooperation and funding all reflect an effort to ensure fish stocks are healthy, fishermen are working, and fishing communities are sustainable.

One of the pieces missing in this particular puzzle is the consumer demand for the under-loved fish. Considering customer responses to taste tests, it should take only a little bit of an adventurous spirit to discover the value of these species that mostly answer robust demand from across the ocean. Why not expand your palate? The truck routes can start carrying spiny dogfish along with the cod, and the under-loved fish can find a little love right at home.

Online: https://bit.ly/2tN4zR1

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RHODE ISLAND

The Providence Journal

July 20

We are tempted, today, to paraphrase the late Rodney King: can’t they all just get along?

“They” are, as ever, congressional Republicans and Democrats. As the experience of recent years has shown, hyper-partisan governance just doesn’t work. Nowhere is this fact more clear than on the issue of health care.

Back in 2010, Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act - better known as Obamacare - without a single Republican vote. While expanding access to health care was a great thing, that approach proved to be problematic.

For one thing, it meant that no conservatives were there to rein in the sprawling nature of the bill. Democrats quite sensibly wanted to expand access to health care. But rather than do this in a simple, modest way - Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle notes they could have expanded Medicaid to achieve that end - they instead sought to remake the entire American medical system.

They outlawed many forms of private insurance - hence the mass cancellations of insurance policies that people suffered, despite President Barack Obama’s repeated, false claims that if people liked their plans, they could keep them. And they remade the individual insurance market, introducing the Obamacare exchanges. (You’ll recall the major technical snafus that the federal exchanges suffered when they first came online.) What could have been a very simple fix aimed at getting more coverage for poor people turned into a sprawling, Rube Goldberg contraption. It didn’t have to be this way.

Another consequence of 2010’s partisan legislation is that it ensured that the bill never gained popular support, even if Americans liked some of its individual provisions, such as protections for people with preexisting medical conditions and health insurance coverage for children up to age 26. Loyal Democrats celebrated it as a legislative victory; independents and Republicans fought it tooth and nail, and got elected by running against it, rather than trying to make it work. This clearly demonstrates that ramming through a bill on a party-line vote was not - and is not - a way to generate wide popularity.

Unfortunately, the Republicans have manifestly failed to learn the lessons of the foibles of their Democratic counterparts. Indeed, if anything, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pursued an even more partisan approach to health care than the Democrats did in 2010. After the House of Representatives passed its attempt at a health-care bill this spring (notably, without a single Democratic vote), Senator McConnell held a series of secret meetings for select Republican senators - there were no public hearings - and then simply released the bill. He solicited no feedback from Democrats.

Now that bill has evidently collapsed, with four Republicans saying they will oppose it. (McConnell could only afford to lose two votes.) Moderates, including Maine’s Susan Collins, viewed it as too severe and blanched at the Medicaid cuts it included. Doctrinaire libertarians such as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul lamented that it didn’t go far enough in dismantling Obamacare.

The unfortunate truth is, despite the fate of the Republican bill, Obamacare does need reform. As we noted earlier this month, many of the individual exchanges are tottering. Because customers have tended to be older and sicker than insurance companies originally bargained for, premiums and deductibles have skyrocketed. Consumers need relief and the markets need stabilization. Now is the moment for modestly scaled, bipartisan legislation that aims to achieve those ends.

Health care is far too important an issue to be left to partisan game playing.

Online: https://bit.ly/2uPLfb4

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MAINE

The Portland Press Herald

July 21

After President Trump’s Election Integrity Commission met for the first time Wednesday, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the 12-person panel, told the Portland Press Herald: “Let’s see where it takes us before we condemn it.” He’s welcome to withhold judgment, but we’re not going to.

Vice President Pence tried to set a nonpartisan tone for the first meeting of the commission he co-chairs by declaring that the panel has “no preconceived notions or preordained results.”

But Pence’s efforts were nuked into orbit when commission co-chair Kris Kobach said in an interview with MSNBC that “we will probably never know” whether Trump’s 2016 rival Hillary Clinton really won the popular vote, because “even if you could prove that a certain number of votes were cast by ineligible voters, for example, you wouldn’t know how they voted.”

Just to refresh your memory: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote for president by nearly 2.9 million votes. Voter fraud is vanishingly rare: 31 credible allegations nationwide out of over 1 billion votes cast in all primary, general, special and municipal elections between 2000 and 2014, according to a study by Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt. So it’s ludicrous to assert that there could have been more than a handful of illegal ballots cast in last fall’s election - let alone millions.

Not that this will stop Kobach, who’s also Kansas secretary of state, and other true believers from trying to smoke out fraudulent voting. And they’ve used their groundless concerns to justify mandatory photo-ID laws and other regulations that keep likely Democratic voters from casting ballots.

Now these state-level crusades are going national. Vice President Pence’s office has confirmed to ProPublica that the voter fraud panel intends to run the state voter rolls it has requested against federal databases to check for potential fraudulent registration.

Citing Washington Times coverage, ProPublica reported that the commission may check the state rolls against the federal database of noncitizens. This move bombed in Florida in 2012, according to ProPublica: Many legitimate voters were errantly flagged for having the same names as green card holders, people with temporary visas and undocumented immigrants who had been arrested. The effort was scrapped, and Gov. Rick Scott apologized.

The implications of taking this unicorn hunt nationwide are staggering: Thousands more people could end up disenfranchised through no fault of their own. This is an attempt at voter suppression, and there’s no disguising it as anything else.

Online: https://bit.ly/2vJ6x6k

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NEW HAMPSHIRE

Foster’s Daily Democrat

July 16

A New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services official recently said contaminants from the Coakley landfill are migrating from the Superfund cleanup site and measures must be put into place to stop it.

Thankfully, a government official at long last acknowledged the environmental impact of the 27-acre landfill in Greenland and North Hampton. Hopefully, this will compel the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, lead agency for management and oversight of Coakley, to take immediate action to stop the environmental degradation.

The problem dates to the decision 20 years ago to choose the least expensive form of remediation, natural attenuation, which means the landfill was capped and the waste was left to seep into the ground slowly over time. The problem is the approach isn’t working safely.

Michael Wimsatt, director of the NHDES Waste Management Division, said the original remediation for the site involved a pump and treat system of shallow groundwater at the landfill, but that was not implemented.

Discovery of PFCs and 1,4-dioxane in groundwater and surface water at varying levels should be more than enough evidence that the cap and natural attenuation is not working. Furthermore, the natural attenuation remedy called for institutional controls such as deed restrictions to prevent the addition of wells around it. This did not happen, further risking the spread of the plume the NHDES has been trying to map. The EPA stated 23 years ago that groundwater was moving away from the landfill primarily to the southwest, west and northwest, which is toward existing and new residential development.

Those who argue the levels of contamination are less than an almost arbitrary number are probably not drinking the water or willing to on a daily basis.

The most pressing question is how PFCs are leaching from the landfill and getting into Berry’s Brook, instead of seeping into the ground.

Plans are in the works to extend municipal water to homes along Breakfast Hill Road in Greenland with the help of New Hampshire’s $300 million fund from ExxonMobil for MTBE groundwater contamination. Extension of those lines was always paramount to reduce the most immediate risk while determining what to do with the failed remediation.

It took a DES official to properly move this forward as the Coakley Landfill Group, which is responsible for paying for remediation and led by the city of Portsmouth, was apparently unwilling to take further action. The CLG includes Portsmouth, North Hampton, Newington, the U.S. Air Force and several private companies, mostly trash haulers and generators. According to the EPA, the landfill from 1972 to 1982 accepted an estimated 120 tons of municipal and industrial waste from the Portsmouth area each day. Giving the CLG the ability to resist investments to fix the failed remediation may create a conflict of interest.

Too much time has already been wasted and those water lines need to go in as soon as is reasonably possible. Concurrent with this should be the development of a true remediation plan, which a cap really isn’t, not when considering the type of industrial waste tossed into ground at Coakley.

Wimsatt said “actions need to be implemented at the site to provide additional removal or containment of the contamination in order to mitigate these surface water quality impacts.” But he added the actions are yet to be determined. Revisiting the EPA’s 1994 Record of Decision is a good place to start.

Online: https://bit.ly/2tnP8zC

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VERMONT

The Times Argus

July 20

It will come as a huge relief to millions of Americans that Republican lawmakers have struck out in their attempts to destroy the Affordable Care Act - at least for now. But this ideological exercise in futility has already done great damage to the health care system.

First, the good news, which came in two installments: No. 1, the Senate’s health care bill - which would have stripped 22 million people of their health insurance and increased premiums for older Americans and those with pre-existing conditions - collapsed Monday. Then, Tuesday, Mitch McConnell’s plan to repeal much of Obamacare without a replacement also fell apart as senators defected.

Now the bad news: While the Affordable Care Act is not collapsing, the Senate and House health bills and President Donald Trump’s promises to sabotage the ACA have destabilized some of the health insurance marketplaces created by that law. Nearly 40 counties in Indiana, Nevada and Ohio are at risk of having no insurers participating in the marketplaces next year; other counties will have only one company offering policies.

In addition, policies sold in the marketplaces could cost a lot more if the Trump administration carries out its threats to stop providing subsidies to insurers to lower deductibles for low-income and middle-income people. It can do that through administrative action. House Republicans sued the Obama administration to block the payments on grounds that Congress had not voted separately to appropriate the money, even though the ACA had authorized them.

So far, Trump is viewing health care policy through the same narrow lens he uses for everything: his political standing. On Tuesday, he blamed Democrats for obstructing repeal and said that Republicans should “let Obamacare fail” in order to have another shot at replacing it, as if the health of millions of Americans wasn’t at stake. Compare that to what Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said about her decision not to support a repeal-and-delay bill: “I did not come to Washington to hurt people.” The question now is which approach Congress will take.

Under the humane approach, with a stronger health care system a shared goal, Republicans and Democrats would work together to fix the marketplace problems and restore confidence among insurance companies. In counties with no insurers, Congress could require the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program to offer coverage. State governments, working with the Trump administration, could create reinsurance programs to reduce the risk that insurers would lose money because of a few very sick patients. This could lower premiums and encourage insurers to operate in sparsely populated parts of the country.

If it chooses to set partisan point-scoring aside, the Trump administration would continue subsidy payments to insurers, House Republicans would drop their lawsuit and, going forward, Congress would appropriate money for these payments so that they could not be used to undermine the health care law. Quick action is needed on all fronts because insurers and state and federal regulators must finalize rates and policies for next year in the coming weeks.

In the longer term, the 19 states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA ought to reconsider. The program helps lower-income, older and disabled people, with positive results for beneficiaries and the economy. It reduces uncompensated care at hospitals, and the people who receive treatment are healthier and more productive. About 4 million people could gain coverage if these last states expanded Medicaid, making it a big win for the country.

Online: https://bit.ly/2tnR76Z