The first woman to ever hold the 1st Hampshire District seat, Lindsay Sabadosa has her AB from Wellesley College (‘02) and her MSc from the University of Edinburgh (‘06). She was the recipient of the Wellesley-Yenching Program Fellowship, which led her to spend a year in Nanjing, China as a fellow at Ginling College at Nanjing University. She then moved to Italy where she worked in Marketing & Communications at CUP2000, a company in Bologna that strives to improve access and delivery of health care and provide telemedicine solutions throughout the European Union. In the same period, she opened her own small business, a translation firm, specializing in Italian and French legal and financial translation with a focus on international litigation, contract law, and finance. She ran this firm, with over 300 clients on six continents, for nearly 17 years until her election.
In 2001, Dr. Daniel Faber, Director of the Northeastern University Environmental Justice Research Collaborative, and his colleagues released a report that found that communities of color in Massachusetts bear over twenty times the environmental burden of predominantly white communities. This report prompted then Governor Paul Cellucci to introduce the state's first Environmental Justice Policy, but a second report released in 2005 found that the disparities were actually getting worse. In 2014, responding to the failure of policy to precipitate action, Governor Patrick Duval issued an Executive Order on Environmental Justice, which requires state agencies to dedicate efforts toward protecting communities most endangered by environmental hazards.
Even so,, a report by Clean Water Action dated October 25, 2017, states, “Unfortunately, despite a solid Executive Order on the books, progress on environmental justice has been almost invisible in Massachusetts.” Bills S426 and H2913, which constitute the Massachusetts he Environmental Justice Act, continue to languish in committee.
I will work to get these bills out of committee and into law so that the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs is given a deadline for creating an actionable plan to carry out the state’s Environmental Justice Policy. I will closely monitor their execution of that plan as well as the actions of other relevant agencies such as the Departments of Environmental Protection, Public Health, Public Utilities, and others, to ensure that they are in compliance. I will work to make sure that the state takes long overdue action to protect our most vulnerable communities from environmental hazards..