Court Opinion

ID: 9708004
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 02:27:15.110764+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:41.194004
License: Public Domain

*473O’Connor, J.
(dissenting). Like Justice Lynch, I agree with the Appeals Court that the regulation at issue exceeds the authority of the Board of Fire Prevention Regulations and therefore is invalid. The reasoning of the Appeals Court is right on the mark. As the Appeals Court stated, the board’s “assignment” under G. L. c. 148, § 9 (1984 ed.), is to protect “the public and property generally against danger and injury from fire and explosion.” Tebo v. Board of Appeals of Shrewsbury, 22 Mass. App. Ct. 618, 627 (1986). “Study of the organic statute as a whole is persuasive that its preoccupation is safety; the Department of Public Safety has the over-all responsibility for that subject matter. Fire prevention, explosion prevention, and blasting regulation have the common objective of controlling phenomena which have an inherent potential for disaster. . . . The fire board’s writ to promulgate safety regulations of general applicability is surely very broad. [However] the regulation in question . . . does something quite different from protecting against hazard in the conventional sense. It proscribes blasting in certain locations irrespective of safety concerns. The blasting may threaten no lives, cause no rocks to fly, and impair no buildings. It is enough that it is within a certain distance of an occupation that wants a high degree of protection from vibration and dust. In a most attenuated way ... the insulation of calibration equipment from vibration is a form of protection of property. The property concerned, however, is discrete and peculiarly vulnerable. The protection afforded by the regulation is not of general, but specially directed applicability. Seen realistically, what the fire board’s new regulation does is to favor one form of economic activity, manufacture of microelectronic components, over another form of economic activity, quarrying rock and grading land for development. It is quite apparent that economic choice, rather than safety, underlies the regulation. The regulation tolerates existing vibration velocity; it tolerates blasting with vibration velocities in excess of specified limits if incidental to utility construction in public ways, roadwork, or infrastructure construction, and, significantly, it tolerates existing quarries even though they increase vibration velocity. Were any of those *474activities unsafe, [it would be reasonable to] expect the fire board would forbid them.” Id. at 629-630.1 The board was not authorized to promulgate a regulation, such as the regulation in question, the purpose of which is to promote one company or industry at the expense of another. The judgment should be reversed, and a new judgment should be entered declaring the invalidity "of the regulation.

The last paragraph of 527 Code Mass. Regs § 13.11 (1) (e), reads as follows: “Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in 527 CMR 13.11 (1) (e), active quarries which have conducted blasting on a regular basis predating the effective date of 527 CMR 13.11 (1) (e) shall be exempt from all the requirements contained herein, as well as roadwork quarrying operations and temporary quarries, a temporary quarry being an operation that has been granted a three-month permit which may not be renewed without approved site development plans from a planning board.”