Same thing happened in Raynham, MA over the drought period this summer. PFAS is nasty stuff

No, you are trying to troll me into a stupid argument with you. Guess what….you are not that slick nor bright enough to tempt me.

Your ignorance of basic civics is astounding, dragging the Jim Crow era into this, belies how much you do not understand how the government works.

No, people are absolutely losing it.

So what, 3/5ths of a vote maybe? Democrats loved that in the past!

Thank you for that, though the only ones I come up with are a cell phone tower in Hatfield and a canceled tower in Worthington. :-/ Unless there's another structure of that height in the area. Perhaps one of the warning lights on McGuirk Stadium at UMass?

So if you are a “vulnerable user” you can get the plate # of the offender and call it in?

I’ve never known cops to follow up on these kinds of complaints.

I’m guessing someone has to get hurt before the law works. Sigh…

That’s laughable because all I ever hear rural people say is how they could never commute into the city everyday for work so really it’s us doing the work rural folks can’t and won’t.

> > 1. They don't have enough high-speed internet > > Valid point.

It's certainly a valid complaint, but it's not like the lack of internet is because the state has ignored them. It's often an issue of the fact that it's really expensive to wire up rural areas for high speed internet. In fact, many towns in Western Mass have fiber because the state funded MassBroadband and offered a lot of grants to communities to subsidize it. MassBroadband has done last-mile projects in 46 towns with 7 more partly done: https://broadband.masstech.org/sites/default/files/2022-11/TownSolutionStatus-KeyCategories_Lit_8x11_20221201_300dpi.pdf

> 2. Less populated towns have small town office staffs that can't complete the paperwork the state requires them to complete

I think the answer to this is that there are functions that should simply be taken away from towns. I'm not talking about taking away local autonomy. I'm saying that there are things no one cares about that need to get done by someone and maybe we should have a county or regional office that administrates that. The towns can't complete the paperwork because their small tax base doesn't support hiring enough people or qualified enough people to do it. Even simple things like sending out tax bills become costly when you're doing it for so few households. Even if the towns continue to set tax rates, it probably makes sense for the county or even the state to collect the taxes. There's no reason why the town should be hiring someone to deal with collecting the taxes or putting out an RFP (request for proposals) for an electronic system for residents to pay their taxes. That cost should be spread among lots of people, not few people.

No one is saying, "You know what I love about my town? The property tax payment system!" Yes, people do care about a lot of things that come with local autonomy. There's also a lot of stuff people don't care about. We should be regionalizing those things or just delegating them to the state.

Honestly western MA should just have its own governor, because any governor looking to do the most good for the most people, will inevitably have to focus on the side of the state that has 6 million people.

I’m sorry is this r/thingsyousaytopeopleatparties?

Because land doesn’t vote, People do. Giving each county equal say would be giving every resident of Franklin county 22 times more voting power than every resident of middlesex county.

I think one issue that doesn't get talked a lot is that rural areas make it hard to offer a modern standard of living.

Ok, a place wants high speed internet, but the company is going to have to lay 500-1,000 feet of wiring per home instead of 20-50 feet. That's going to cost a lot more, but people think it's unfair for things to cost more. Trash pickup: in a rural area, it's going to mean a lot more miles driven per resident which increases time and fuel usage. Someone to call about issues: if the town has only 1,000 people, how many staffers can they have to take your calls? If you want a staff of 5 people, that's basically $500,000/year including benefits and office space, possibly more. Assuming around 300-400 households, that would be $1,250-$1,667 per household in taxes needed.

The US already subsidizes fuel which makes driving $3,000/year cheaper. The US puts a universal service fee (it'll likely be around 9% of your wireless bill) on telecommunications to pour billions into rural phone and internet service - a 9% tax to fund rural telecom. We mandate that the postal service deliver to all addresses for the same price - so urban people pay much higher postal rates and higher prices for goods shipped to them since the USPS needs to charge extra for their shipping to subsidize rural delivery.

I agree that the needs of rural people often aren't being met, but it's often due to the fact that rural life is expensive and the more advanced we get as a society, the more heavily we'll need to subsidize rural life to keep it up to a modern standard.

150 years ago, rural life wasn't missing out on much. You couldn't have a cathedral or a theater, but there wasn't electricity or internet or trash pickup. Today, there's so much stuff that just costs a lot more to offer rural (and suburban) areas.

Part of this might be solved by reconstituting counties or creating regional authorities. Instead of having each town deal with tax collection, maybe the county should do that. That way, they can hire people who know what they're doing and spread that cost among hundreds of thousands of people instead of between a few thousand people. I know that Massachusetts has a big history of independent towns with self-rule and this doesn't need to throw that away, but it probably makes sense to start sharing certain administrative costs. Each town trying to run its own website, tax collection, etc. seems a bit much in many cases. If you're Mount Washington, you have 36 families in your town and 5 people for emergency services (police/fire/etc.). You have an animal inspector, building inspector, Board of Assessors, Board of Health, Tax Collector, Town Clerk, Town Office Manager, Treasurer, Tree Warden, Webmaster, Electrical Inspector, etc. I'd have to guess that most of these are part-time jobs that they do on the side of another job. It probably makes a lot more sense to have a larger body (like a county) handle a lot of that. You're not going to be able to offer a full-time person to call about tax stuff in a place with 36 families.

Other things are harder to overcome. It's simply going to cost more money to provide trash pickup in rural areas. It's going to be harder to convince doctors to want to live/work in rural areas where there might not be enough patients to keep them busy enough - and lead to lower earnings.

Rural life is going to have trade-offs and some of those are going to get worse over time. A lot of infrastructure just becomes really expensive when supporting rural areas and we don't just want to subside off the land anymore - we want all the advancements of the past 150 years of human progress.

Seriously! Electoral power really should be apportioned according to something sensible like individual contribution to GDP or floor area of the livable space in your primary home.

What’s next from these pinko commie libtards? Jeez!

I bet you're real fun at parties

The gas tax indexing was before Baker. Gov. Patrick is the one that vetoed the original bill, and it was subsequently over-ridden by the legislature and passed into law, then was repealed by ballot measure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Massachusetts_Question_1

My point was the licensing board doesn’t have that many levers it can pull to influence that. I don’t think the cost of licensing is a big enough incentive to change any doctors behavior

Fix the T first.

I know Uber is a private company. But it would help the situation. I could be content with a private option instead of nothing. As far as the pre requisite goes, I understand why there is a lack of funding. But maybe we could offer some financial or tax reduction for those with no options. Rural MA is a different life than Springfield, Worcester and Boston. That's what I think the article is getting at. We need a different type of Assisi stance. Representation is the wrong word. It's what we get out of our representation that needs to be different.

haha love your downvotes the city rats be mad

*so many rich communists in boston metro area who think they know what it’s like to live outside of it…

> Aside from that this sounds like some electoral college bullshit like “we want this 20% of the population to have 50/50 say with the other 80% because they choose to live in the woods.

How is that any different than the packed urban areas saying they should have a bigger seat at the table (via Popular Vote for President) because most of the country chooses not to live like sardines with them?

Those are some bad ideas you have. I would suggest discounted licensing fees for practitioners who serve rural communities, even part time. Or maybe limit the number of licenses given per county, but that seems unlikely.

I don’t know, speed limits are already strangely low in many areas

We’ve given up on watching any games outside of Thursday Night Football.

right, we had to wait like six extra years for new red line and orange line cars because we had to build a factory in western MA to build them in order to get support from the rural electeds. and Baker vetoed indexing the gas tax because it wasn’t popular amongst rural voters