Community involvement in ProvPort Master Plan is vital and needs to be the top priority
Ensuring clean and livable neighborhoods around ProvPort is the best way to ensure a livable future. This is where our advocacy needs to be.
The first thing everyone in the room realized as the first community meeting for the ProvPort Master Plan got underway was the need for amplification. The 40 or more members in attendance struggled to hear the speakers, and each other, as the people in charge and their hired consultants spoke about their vision for the future of ProvPort. The consultant firm hired by ProvPort, GZA, also had trouble with their projector and the small print on the slides they showed. Print so small and dark even the woman who wrote some of the slides had trouble reading and understanding them.
The organizers were properly apologetic and promised to do better next time, but it did seem to denote a lack of seriousness when it came to engaging with the public on this vitally important issue. The future of ProvPort is intimately tied to the future of Providence and all of Rhode Island. It's important to to the future of our local environment, regional energy generation, and climate change writ large. It's important to the health of our children in the neighborhoods surrounding the Port, a population of mostly lower-income people of color suffering from some of the highest rates of asthma in the United States.
Getting it right changes everything. Getting it wrong sets us on a 30-year course of doom and gloom that won't be seriously renegotiated until the year 2053 becuase Providence established a 30-year contract with Waterson Terminal Services to run the Port. Many of the older people (like me) reading this will likely be dead by then, those with young children will be new grandparents, and those being born will be well into their professional careers.
Why a 30-year lease? The negotiators maintain that Port upgrades are so expensive that they can only pay for themselves over a 30-year timeline. As part of the lease agreement, ProvPort promised a robust program of public interaction that includes at least five public meetings to create a Port Master Plan that carefully comports itself to the Providence Comprehensive Plan. The point is to create a Port Master Plan that works alongside Providence's Comprehensive Plan, but that plan has not yet been finalized. I asked Christopher Waterson, President and CEO of Waterson Terminal Services if this first meeting was jumping the gun.
Waterson didn't think so. The Comp Plan is presently with the Providence City Council, which will be making some last-minute changes to it, before being submitted to the state for final approval. The plan is for the Port Master Plan to be in alignment with Providence's Comp Plan, whatever final form it takes.
This undoubtedly means that the Comp Plan won't be too dissimilar to what it is already and that any changes made to it by the City Council will likely be minor. In truth, Providence’s Comprehensive Plan means little ProvPort. What they need is Port Master Plan approval, and soon, because they need to apply and qualify for Federal port upgrade money that may run out or be unavailable if the application deadlines are missed. The Master Plan is needed for the application process.
The consultant team, GZA, wanted to control the meeting flow, but the public, which has suffered the pollution and depredations of polluting industries in and around the Port for generations, had other ideas. Before the consultants could start their presentation, Monica Huertas, Executive Director of the People's Port Authority, stood up and interrupted.
“I know you all are here not because they told you all, but because we told you,” said Huertas. Most of those attending the meeting were there because of community action to spread the word. “You all know who you are - community folk, people who have been doing this work for years and years and years, people who put this at the forefront when it almost got taken out from under us - [when] folks at City Hall decided what they wanted to do with the big pot of money and we said ‘No, no, no, remember, there's a whole community process behind this.’
“We forced their hand and now we're here.
“Please, please please, let it rip. Tell everybody how you feel and what you feel. Tell them what you want to see. Don't hold anything back. They've got tough skin. They deal with it all the time.”
For more on the community battle to have a say in the future of ProvPort, follow the footnote.1
Beyond the details and issues raised - which will be hashed out and either incorporated into the Master Plan or ignored - was a general sense of distrust from the community. Despite the promises and kind words of city and corporate officials, the health, welfare, and safety of the surrounding community is not the pre-eminent concern of ProvPort. Such considerations are at best a contractual obligation and at worst words on paper to be ignored in the pursuit of the massive profits that the green energy revolution and the blue economy are promising.
One of the more interesting graphics to be found at the meeting were maps of ProvPort, identifying which companies currently occupy which plots, and a greater map of the Port area in general that shows those industries not within the ProvPort management area.
Waterson Terminal Services would like to expand and purchase some of the adjoining properties shown in the second map. To do that, the industries there would likely have to close up shop. “Some of the tanks on some of these properties could be converted to hold synthetic biofuels,” said Christopher Waterson, when I suggested that ProvPort buying land occupied by a fossil fuel company could allow ProvPort to expand into fossil fuels, and not violate the agreement with the City, by simply buying the property with the existing business grandfathered in. Waterson acknowledged the possibility but not the likelihood of such a thing.
Though Providence's 30-year deal with ProvPort forecloses the possibility of establishing new fossil fuel industries in the part of the Port managed by Waterson Terminal Services, the City has declined to include a prohibition against new fossil fuel developments in its comprehensive plan. As the Brown Daily Herald reported, when I spoke before the Providence City Council about the Comp Plan:
Resident Steve Ahlquist echoed similar sentiments, arguing that environmental justice is key to addressing climate change.
“We need to empower communities to reject industries that poison their children,” Ahlquist said, pointing to how more affluent and politically engaged neighborhoods — such as the East Side — have more power to do so than neighborhoods near the Port, for example.
In his testimony, Ahlquist also called for “no more fossil fuel development of any kind in Providence.”
“The language around environmental justice and climate change in the Plan needs to be tightened” to prevent people and industries from exploiting any possible loopholes in its current phrasing, Ahlquist added. “I would like to see us do better.”
Environmental Justice is the point of the spear when it comes to saving the planet. Small battles, like Morley Field in Pawtucket, or larger battles, like clean and livable neighborhoods around ProvPort, are the best way to ensure a livable future. This is where our advocacy needs to be.
Me? I'll be taking my cues from people like Monica Huertas, Linda Perri, Ellen Tuzullo, Julian Drix, Jesus Holguin, Chandelle Wilson, Vatic Kuumba, Justice Ameer Gaines, and so many others who are fighting for their right to clean air, clean water, clean land, and a healthy environment for their children. Where they lead, I will follow. Join me.
2022-11-23 ProvPort lease renewal appears to be fast-tracked to avoid negative public input
2022-11-25 Providence Sustainability Commission opposes current ProvPort deal
2022-11-29 Providence Finance Committee ignores large outcry, passes ProvPort resolutions
2022-12-02 In a victory for environmental justice rushed ProvPort ordinances tabled indefinitely
2022-12-15 Providence City Council takes up ProvPort resolutions amid promises made to the community
2024-04-23 A community discussion about the future of ProvPort and environmental justice
It would behoove East Side residents to be involved on the side of environmental justice, clean air, health children and health neighbrhoods. In a small city like ours the issues affect us all. If you don't believe it, just drive by the Port on 95 some days and it can make you gag.
YES‼️