Also on today’s menu:
House Recognizes Casella’s Hand In Landfill Bill
AG Investigating Former Carroll County Commissioner
French Police Officer Charged In Teen’s Death
“This decision in no way changes Dartmouth’s fundamental commitment to building a diverse and welcoming community of faculty, students, and staff, as articulated in our institutional values,” said Sian Leah Beilock, the new college president, reacting to the U.S. Supreme Court Decision ending the policy of affirmative action. “Diversity, including racial diversity, is vital to our mission of knowledge creation in service to society.”
Polls show that 60 percent of the American public supports the elimination of affirmative action as a way of determining college admission. The majority of the justices agreed that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War intended only that it would make men of all races equal before the law, and that considering race in college admissions undermines that principle by considering race. “Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” the majority opinion states.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
In her letter to the Dartmouth community, Beilock said, “In anticipation of today’s ruling, Provost David Kotz has been meeting regularly with the admissions deans from across the institution, and other institutional partners, to discuss how to comply with the ruling and adapt their holistic admissions processes to this new legal landscape. In coming weeks and months, you will hear more about opportunities for all of us to learn, examine, and work together on the broader impact of these rulings in our community and beyond.”
House Recognizes Casella’s Hand In Landfill Bill
After learning that Bryan Gould, the former lobbyist for Vermont-based Casella Waste Systems, had worked behind the scenes with officials in the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services on a bill that would have imposed a two-year moratorium on new landfills and hired a consultant to rewrite the solid waste regulations governing the siting of landfills, the House rejected Senate Bill 61 on a 238-134 vote, killing it before the Senate could act on it.
The information about Gould’s influence on the legislation became public through a right-to-know request by environmental activist Jon Swan of Save Forest Lake. Swan has been pressing the state to acknowledge the cozy relationship between Casella, which has been trying to site a new solid waste landfill near the state park in Dalton, and the leadership in the DES Solid Waste Bureau. Mike Wimsatt, the bureau chief, had helped to torpedo a different bill that would have used science-based tests to make sure that contaminants from new landfills would take at least five years to reach a water body, providing enough time to deal with leaks before they polluted the state’s waters.
Representative Kelley Potenza (R-Strafford) said, “This bill needs to be thrown in the trash. It not only kicks the can down the road, it kicks it in the wrong direction.” She also questioned why the DES needs to spend $150,000 to hire a consultant to help rewrite its rules.
Representative Jonah Wheeler (D-Peterborough) commented, “Born and raised in New Hampshire, I’m going to be damned if I’m going to let our water be controlled by an industry which has no qualms whatsoever for destroying our land, our environment, and our lakes. … This is not Casella’s body, we are New Hampshire’s body. We can non-concur and say we protected our water.”
Wimsatt responded to the testimony by saying, “We work with legislators who are on different sides of the issue in both chambers. We work with folks who are advocating a particular position. We work with industry. We provide technical assistance and comment on legislation to really all of our stakeholders. None of that is hidden. There’s no attempt to fool anybody about that. So I really don’t understand the accusation.”
This morning, Swan wrote to Wimsatt, saying, “While I can read from the commentary you provided in the various news reports that you feel you did nothing wrong, I do hope you and leadership will take a moment to reflect and recognize just how poor the optics are, and have been, for the department. We have certainly not had the access, nor enjoyed the familiarity, which Mr. Gould apparently was afforded by the department. In fact, over the past four years plus, those of us who have been working diligently to protect not only Forest Lake, but our homes, families, neighbors, and state from the harm posed by threats to our environment, have been made to feel like intruders, unwelcomed, with our concerns dismissed as seemingly trivial, told to trust in the process and rules, etc. We have proposed numerous pieces of legislation, only to helplessly watch, and in great disappointment, as you would appear to provide oppositional testimony on numerous occasions before the various House and Senate Committees. So frustrating to us. There has grown a strong distrust of NHDES as a result. That should not be the case.”
AG Investigating Former Carroll County Commissioner
The New Hampshire Attorney-General’s Public Integrity Unit is investigating a complaint against Matthew Plache, who was serving as a paid consultant for the Carroll County Communications District Planning Committee and advising the county on its broadband strategy while serving as a county commissioner.
Plache resigned as Carroll County Commissioner in March, shortly after being indefinitely suspended from practicing law in front of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and the Supreme Court of Maryland as a result of his failure to file necessary documents or respond to the court and the opposition in a personal injury case brought by New Hampshire resident Sarah Geschwindner. He also allegedly neglected to communicate with Geschwindner as the case proceeded. In one instance, the court presiding over the case did not hear from Plache for eight months, from late October 2020 until June 2021.
Although Plache has never been a member of the New Hampshire Bar, Plache’s application for his consulting contract said he could provide legal expertise and “serve as a legal liaison” with the Attorney-General’s Office. The Carroll County Commission of which Plache was a member approved the spending of $30,000 from the American Rescue Plan Act to allow the Carroll County Communications District Planning Committee to hire a consultant for broadband expansion — the position Plache ultimately filled.
French Police Officer Charged In Teen’s Death
As 40,000 police officers were deployed across France to deal with riots over the death of 17-year-old Nahel M, the police officer who allegedly killed the teenager during a traffic stop on June 27 has been charged with homicide and is in custody.
In a third night of unrest across the country, police arrested 667 people. Shops in Paris were ransacked and cars were set on fire overnight. In the town of Nanterre, where the teenager was killed, a huge fire engulfed the ground floor of a bank building.
A largely peaceful march on June 29, calling for justice, attracted more than 6,000 people, followed by an afternoon of violence in which police officers were injured. Nahel’s mother said she did not blame the police in general, or the system, for the killing — only the officer who fired the lethal shot.
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