For nearly a decade, I have fought a culture on Beacon Hill that hands corporations tax breaks first and asks questions about our communities later. That fight has run from leading oversight of the Governor's no-bid OpenAI contract to demanding utility accountability while your bills climbed.

Now the corporate push for data centers has brought the same choice to Massachusetts: cities like Lowell and Holyoke are organizing to protect themselves, the State House remains ambivalent, and the Governor championed tax breaks for data center developers, pulling some back only after communities rose up and made the political cost too high.

This is why we need the kind of Democrat who pushes her own party to do the right thing the first time, not after it is already safe. That's why I'm running for State Senate.

If you have opened a utility bill this year, you already know what our neighbors across the district are living with: costs that have soared year after year, families struggling to stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter while the utilities collect guaranteed profits. In this context it is unbelievable that our Governor moved to incentivize data centers, facilities so energy-hungry that a single proposed campus in Westfield would draw 274 megawatts of power. That is more than three times what that entire city uses on its hottest summer day. When facilities like that strain the grid, we're the ones who foot the bill for new energy transmission and generation and pay the cost of their diesel backup generators with our health. And we know that communities of color and working-class neighborhoods will be expected to absorb the impact disproportionately.

In Lowell, a data center towers directly over the Sacred Heart neighborhood, where nearly every resident lives in a state-designated environmental justice community. When the state approved more diesel generators next to their homes, those residents had to organize and sue just to force answers about the polluted air they were expected to breathe. In Holyoke, neighbors packed City Hall and won the first municipal data center ban in Massachusetts! Everett moved to cap the construction of any future facility before a developer even filed plans. These communities are leading the fight for their health and future while the do-nothing State House waits and sees. I refuse to accept that our most marginalized neighbors should have to organize city by city and sue permit by permit for protections the Legislature could guarantee tomorrow with the stroke of a pen.

Our communities know exactly what happens when the state rams infrastructure through working-class neighborhoods and spends the next half century slow-walking the cleanup, because we live alongside I-93, McGrath Highway, Mystic Avenue, and the Fellsway, some of the most polluted corridors in Massachusetts.

In 1970, East Somerville families stood in front of bulldozers, marched with a casket reading “Bury I-93,” and demanded the highway be routed underground because they knew it would poison their neighborhood. They lost that fight, the highway opened in 1973, and it took forty years for the studies and data to catch up to what working class activists already knew.

Researchers at Tufts drew blood samples from 700 of our neighbors living near I-93 and produced some of the first evidence in the country that the ultrafine particles pouring off highways drive heart attacks and strokes, on top of decades of research linking life near major roadways to asthma in children, reduced lung function, cardiovascular disease, and lung cancer. Today, air pollution still causes an estimated 2,780 deaths in Massachusetts every single year, along with more than 15,000 cases of childhood asthma, and those deaths occur at pollution levels the law currently deems acceptable.

And what has the State House done with a half century of evidence gathered in our own backyard?

In 2022, the Legislature killed a bill that would have required air filtration in homes and schools within 200 meters of congested roadways, an intervention proven to work in a study conducted in public housing right here in our community. The response to that failure was a pilot program to study the air a little more – to wait-and-see a little longer – as if Tufts had not already drawn the blood samples, as if Harvard had not spent fifty years proving the harm, as if Chelsea residents had not been forced to install more than eighty air monitors themselves because the state would not. We have decades of documented harm, but all the State House could give us was another pilot study nobody asked for, to tell us what we already know. This wait-and-see culture treats our lungs as an acceptable cost of doing business.

This month I filed legislation to put guardrails on AI and the data centers behind it, and in the Senate I will do the same, by fighting for corporate accountability with real teeth. Because any corporation that finds it cheaper to pollute first and clean up later will keep doing exactly that until we make it unprofitable. True accountability means we assess the impact and possible harm before a single permit is issued. It means penalties large enough to make pollution a losing business model, cleanup costs bonded up front rather than billed to taxpayers after the damage is done, and the power for communities and the Attorney General to enforce every one of those protections in court.

Our movement has already won public committee votes, passed the broker fee ban, and dragged the OpenAI contract into the light by pairing structural reform with organized neighbors, and that is exactly how we will win this fight too.

As your State Senator, I will fight to make our communities the first beneficiaries of every energy decision, not the collateral damage. It means ending corporate handouts to data center developers and making every facility pay its own way on grid upgrades so the costs never land on your utility bill. It means improving air quality, which the Legislature has slow-walked for decades, including air filtration for homes and schools and upgrading infrastructure along existing highways like California did, with solid sound walls and lush roadside vegetation to reduce fine particle pollution.

It means investing in what Paris has already proven possible, cutting air pollution roughly in half through public transit, protected bike lanes, and streets designed for people, paid for by taxing commercial real estate and parking. And it means grounding McGrath Highway, bringing the elevated overpass down to street level at last which our neighbors have been demanding for over a decade while the state studies and stalls.

We have deep lessons to learn from the half-century fight for clean air before we let any project like these data centers move forward on the industry's terms. The neighbors who stood in front of bulldozers in 1970 were right, the residents packing city council chambers in Lowell and Holyoke today are right, and the job of a State Senator is to stand with them from the beginning and write their demands into law.

This is the fight I am running to lead. I will fight for these solutions the way I have fought for every structural reform we have won together, from the inside and the outside at once, and I'm asking you to join our team as a volunteer in these final weeks before the September 1 primary. Knock doors with us, make calls, send texts, and help us prove that when our communities organize, we do not wait and see, we win.

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Paid for by Committee to Elect Erika Uyterhoeven · Somerville, MA
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