AHCC Climate Action Group Talks to State Legislators
Some of the topics they discussed:
- The status of the Super Pollutants Act
- Tailpipe pollution and fuel economy standards, and rolling back energy efficiency regulation for dishwashers, showerheads, and gas stoves
- The Alaska wilderness to oil and gas drilling and mining
- Rubberized/plastic turf for playgrounds and sports fields
- Neonicotinoids in seed coatings
- The creation of the PFOS chemical class
- Radioactive deicers on roads
- And the MIRA recycling plant near Brainard Field
Rep. John Larson’s office was particularly interested in learning more on MIRA.
In the winter of 2022, former AHCC moderator Bart Halloran spoke at a GHIAA House Meeting of the long history of pollution and health impacts imposed on some of the region’s poorest residents from the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority (MIRA) trash-to-energy plant in Hartford. Owned by the State but located in Hartford, for decades the plant had burned trash from numerous suburban Connecticut towns and converted it to electricity. While in its day it was state-of-the-art technology, this process generated air pollution and substantial toxic waste at the property, adding to the buried contamination left by the electricity plant which had previously occupied the property. By 2022, the MIRA plant was outdated and no longer economically feasible, so it was closed. Many towns then contracted with private companies to truck their trash to out-of-state landfills at lower cost, but some continued to rely on MIRA’s more expensive contracts and subsidies. Despite the closure, the MIRA board was still operating and spending the plant’s multi-million-dollar reserve fund, partly on salaries and mostly to subsidize the cost of trucking the waste of those remaining towns out of state.
GHIAA chose this as its first campaign against environmental racism, and partnered with the City of Hartford to advocate for 1) the dissolution of the MIRA board, 2) its replacement with a board that would include Hartford residents to remediate the property, and 3) the preservation of the MIRA reserves to fund a cleanup of the property. In 2023, the Connecticut Legislature passed a bill intended to accomplish those goals, but it soon became clear that the appointed Hartford residents (including one GHIAA member) were deemed “non-voting” and many of the same individuals sat on the new board, still advocating subsidizing of the remaining towns. The fight continued.
As of winter 2025, GHIAA remains engaged in the debate of how to protect the Hartford residents who are living with the health impacts of decades of pollution, remediate the property and support the efforts to find a new use for the river-front property that will benefit the City of Hartford. Bart Halloran has been a valuable resource to the project and AHCC member Sandy Wood Forand is a member of the GHIAA Task Force working on this issue.