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Business Group Backs Gas Pipeline Projects

Pipeline Map
Kinder Morgan

The largest business organization in western Massachusetts has endorsed controversial pipeline projects to bring more natural gas to the region. 

Springfield Regional Chamber of Commerce President Jeff Ciuffreda said the cost and availability of energy is now the top concern of the organization’s membership.

"When we looked at the renewables, and we are very supportive of that and will be, it just won't produce, in our estimation, the energy we need to grow in a relatively short period of time," Ciuffreda said.

The chamber called for development of the Kinder Morgan pipeline project in Massachusetts and the expansion of an existing natural gas pipeline by Spectra Energy in Connecticut. 

Environmentalists and landowners fiercely oppose both projects.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.