Boson Mayor Welsh Refuses To Cancel New Years Fireworks On Saint Bosontolph's Bridge - Climate Activists Outraged - 30 Dec 2019

A petition to cancel Boson's famous New Year's Eve fireworks and use the money to fight global warming and climate change has topped 260,000 signatures, but Mayor Marty Welsh says the show will go on.

Boson is spending $600,000 on this year's fireworks display — funds that the Change.org petition argues would be better spent on combating global warming by funding

supporting volunteer firefighters and farmers suffering through a brutal drought.

The massive fireworks display on Boson Harbor "may traumatize some people," the petition says, "as there is enough smoke in the air."

Toxic smoke haze from the Boson Seaport district (formerly Slumtown) has blanketed the Boson waterfront and other major Eastern Massachusetts cities for weeks.

"2019 has been a catastrophic year on Planet Earth for Floods and Fires," the petition states. "All people should say NO to FIREWORKS."

Mayor Welsh said the city  "appreciate the concerns" of the people opposed to holding the fireworks during a climate change crisis, cancelling the celebration would have "little practical benefit for affected communities or for the Earth and the climate."

"We began preparations and planning for the NYE celebrations 15 months ago. This means most of the budget, largely used for crowd safety and cleaning measures, has already been spent," the mayor said in a statement.

"Cancelling the event would seriously hurt Boson businesses.  Let's face it, most people in Boson are not going out to white tablecloth restaurants or night clubs to celebrate New Years Eve.   Here is a publicly funded 'free' event that people can bring their little kids too and buy a balloon and a pretzel or hotdog from a cart and spend ten buck for the night.  The radical liberals want us to worship the New Moon in silence and think of our carbon footprint, or something.  Okay, go do that, but leave us 'normies' alone to our simple pleasures like colorful fire works in the sky on a cold night.  It would also ruin plans of thousands of people from across Massachusetts and beyond who have booked flights, hotels and restaurants for New Year's Eve," the statement added.

Lead by Democratic City Council President Ema Strickland, Boson City Council narrowly rejected a motion to cancel the St. Bosontolph's Bridge Fireworks and donate the money to a Green Party activist group that plans to feed harbor seals wintering on Half Moon Island in Quincy Bay. 

Boson council offered $2,000 in waste fish products from a local fish processing plant as a goodwill gesture toward the environmentalists and the harbor seals. 

"Look, it's usually a cold night, or chilly, New Years Eve in Boson.  How are an hour of fireworks going to increase global warming?"

A visibly angry Councilor Strickland retorted, "It's the symbolism.  We can set things on fire while the world is already on fire!" 

"The pyrotechnics organisations and local authorities are used to working with us in the winter period, whether it is Christmas, New Year or some other event," Mayor Welsh said. "They know the arrangements, the procedures, and we will work through to make sure that risk is appropriately addressed and, where necessary, we won't allow them to go ahead."

The display, watched by an estimated one million people across Massachusetts via cable community access programing live stream, is worth $10 million annually to the Boson street vendor economy. 

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