Massport should pay for the completion of a nearly ten year study about the impact of the airport on local health because the state has no money to do so is a good idea.
About $200,000 is needed to complete the study, which seeks to measure the effects of planes flying overhead on everyone’s health in this neighborhood.
The health study should be finished in order to assure residents that life here may be a bit grittier, and the air dirtier, but that cancer rates and rates of sickness in general are not above the norm for neighborhoods of this kind.
The state has not shown much spine in canceling the study.
And no one is presently ready to come up to the plate.
As this is a public safety issue of the first order, perhaps our state delegation – Senator Anthony Petruccelli and Representative Carlo Basile – and our Boston City Councillor Sal LaMattina – should lobby for funding in order to finish the study.
A recent television news report on the cancelled study by the noted Boston Channel 7 investigative journalist Hank Phillipi Ryan caused widespread concern that something was being covered up.
Why else cancel the study so near to completion?
Ryan’s report seems reason enough to move forward with the study.
If she questions its findings, then we should.
Ryan is not a lightweight like others in the television news business pretending to be investigative reporters.
She’s won dozens of Emmy Awards and even the prestigious Peabody award during 30 years of on air broadcasting and news reporting.
We urge the state and or Massport to provide the funding to complete this important study – if for no other reason but to put people at ease about health impact that comes from living here.
If there is a serious health issue in this neighborhood, it is the duty of government to identify it and then to rectify it.
Anything short of this is the failure of government to live up to its responsibility to the citizens of East Boston.
1 comment for “Finish It – Residents deserve a completed health study”