Read the full article by Drew Himmelstein (Midcoast Villager),
“Last August, a caravan of 40 Massachusetts lawmakers, officials and staffers crossed through New Hampshire and made their way to Maine. Over the course of a day, they visited a dairy farm in Arundel and journeyed to the state capitol in Augusta, where they met with legislators, policymakers and farmers. Their mission: to learn from Maine’s multi-pronged, proactive response to PFAS contamination and find lessons, policies and strategies that they could take home to Massachusetts.
‘Maine was one of the first states in the country to address this. Kudos to them, but they also learned some things in the way they did it,’ said Massachusetts Rep. James C. Arena-DeRosa, who was one of three state legislators on the trip. ‘That’s why we wanted to go up to Maine, because Maine has this arc of experience.’
Mainers have heard a lot about PFAS in the last few years, and the news usually sounds pretty bad. Dozens of farms have had their businesses upended by the discovery of PFAS on their land since 2019, when the state began to test sites where PFAS-contaminated sewage sludge had been spread after after the potential risks of the once widely used practice came to light. With so many of the affected farms in Waldo County, the bad news has seemed especially prevalent in the Midcoast.”…