Great Barrington — The Finance Committee may soon get their way with the Berkshire Hills Regional School District’s administration, if the voters of Great Barrington agree. Tuesday night (January 20) the committee unanimously decided to propose a change in the town charter bylaw that would force both the town and the district to go beyond standard financial reporting and create “special and regular reports” for the committee to analyze.

The proposed bylaw would be added as an article to the warrant, for a vote at Annual Town Meeting May 4.

Committee member Leigh Davis was absent.

Chair Sharon Gregory has been relentless in her pursuit of the district’s books, organized in a manner that she says would be easier to examine at the granular level. “I think this [bylaw change] will help to focus on [the district’s] business of developing reports and recommendations,” she said, and to “not spend so much time researching where the information is or if the information exists.”

Finance Committee member Michael Wise who remains “skeptical” of the need for a revision to Town Charter bylaws.

Gregory said the town “has been very forthcoming” with their reports, but still, she would like to see more tailored reports generated “as a matter of course.”

The issue was lit to a simmer during the Monument Mountain Regional High School renovation controversy, which threw the district’s finances and related policies under a magnifying glass and created pockets of fomenting distrust in the district amid cries of “transparency.”

For example, Housatonic resident Michelle Loubert Tuesday night remarked that if the finance committee was having so much trouble gathering district financial information, “imagine what it’s like for the average citizen whose paying the money for all of this. I don’t think our websites are being utilized to the full capacity and maybe sometimes that’s intentional.”

The issue hit a rolling boil last month when Gregory, after making numerous requests for more complex reports, was finally told by Superintendent Peter Dillon and School Committee Chair Stephen Bannon that constructing some of those reports was so time-consuming that it dragged Dillon and business manager Sharon Harrison away from the job of running the district. All the state-required financial reporting, Dillon and Bannon said, is available from the district office, the state Department of Education’s website, and the budget is posted on the district’s website. Bannon added that he welcomes a large showing at the district’s budget meetings.

But Gregory, and now the committee as a whole, say that it isn’t enough. Gregory said she has found a number of reports “online and in different places,” but said she “would like it to be part of the habit that we receive these reports.” Gregory, for instance, complained that while she did receive a recent audit report from the district, she got it the same day as the audit meeting.

The original bylaw in the town charter, and adopted in 1974, assigns a budget advisory role to the committee. The new bylaw asks for more from the town and extends the role to the school district:  “Regular and special reports and statements concerning the Town’s financial situation and operations, including its enterprise and other funds, and similar reports for the regional school district shall be transmitted to the Finance Committee…”

“I am skeptical that we need a bylaw to do this,” said committee member Michael Wise, though he voted in favor of the proposed change, and has taken his own interest in the district’s finances. He expressed concern about “ratifying it in the bylaw right now when there isn’t a problem,” but also said “it is easier than doing it in the middle of a problem.”

“But I don’t want it to be cast that we are solving a serious problem,” he added. “Because I don’t think we are. When we’ve discovered there’s information we’ve needed, we’ve gotten it, and I think cooperation has been good.”

“Obviously I don’t agree, otherwise I wouldn’t have made the motion,” Gregory said, and pointed out that the school auditor said “there is little documentation in the [district’s] business managers office about the procedures and such…so this helps to establish more formally the processes between the finance committee, school committee, and the municipality. I think it’s for the common good, and part of the transparency principle.”

It is still unclear, however, whether as a separate quasi-municipal entity that also includes Stockbridge and West Stockbridge, Berkshire Hills can be forced to comply with the measure, which, as stated, could demand any manner of reports at the finger snap.

Finance Committee Chair Gregory is insisting that school district reports should be sent directly to her committee.

Thomas Blauvelt asked Gregory what specific reports she thought were important, and whether the drafted change was specific enough. Gregory said that Wise had suggested it be written broadly, and Wise said this was to prevent limits on what reports could be requested.

Blauvelt suggested financial documents live on one town website where anyone can see them. Gregory said it would be helpful to have a special “finance committee website where we would put those things.”

Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin pointed out that the Finance Committee does have a website on which to post documents. She also noted that whatever reports the town receives from the School Committee are forwarded to the Selectboard and Finance Committee.

But Gregory expressed frustration that reports didn’t go directly to the committee. “It’s just much too complicated,” she said. “Why don’t we just get it?”

Michael Wise wants it, too, and sees the bylaw as a prudent measure. But he stressed that its creation was not in response to a problem. The proposed bylaw, he said, “describes good practice and current practice.”

The post Town Finance Committee seeks role in regional school district budget process appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington – I once loved a man who lived in a log home in the far reaches of rural Colorado. It sat snug and content amid crooked miners’ cabins and western Victorian architecture, in a town where Butch Cassidy once fired off his six-shooter as he left my favorite saloon in a hurry, leaving a bullet hole in the wall.

Or so everyone said.

And I was a kid when my Uncle George retired, and built his big log home deep in the woods outside Nashville. I’ll never forget the chiggers. But I recall the magic of that house, the frontier sensibility in the way those logs were fitted together. I remember Uncle George’s pride when the house was finished, handmade quilts on the beds, his joy at giving directions to the house by terrain — an endearing Southern habit –– and his giggle at how hard it might be for us eccentric city folk to find the place and get up the rough road.

A classic country log home, such as would have been prepared by timber supplied by New England Log Homes.

There’s something about a log home that strikes peace in the American heart. Log homes once meant hardship. Later, they meant tranquility, simplicity. The building concept is simple, especially with a kit of pre-cut logs; after all, we played with Lincoln Logs as children. Even if you’ve never handled a saw, you could build yourself a house — the glory of the idea fueled, in part, by an abundance of mouthwatering magazines like Log Home Living. In the 1970s and 80s, the log home dream was contagious.

Amid all this romance, it is hard to make the connection between what New England Log Homes Incorporated (NELHI) in a 1985 advertisement in Log Homes magazine, called “simple elegance, snug comfort, and carefree living,” with the carcinogenic mess it left behind on Bridge Street here in Great Barrington. The soil of the 8-acre site — presently frozen — is partway through a revolutionary, $2 million bioremediation process that, if successful, could forever change the way industrial pollution is managed.

It all began innocently enough. Vito M. Vizziello of Connecticut started the Hamden, Conn.-based company in 1970 using the Bridge Street site – which included an 80,000 square foot building — as a sawmill. The following year he purchased the entire property for $85,000 from Great Barrington Manufacturing, a textiles company.

A 1990 edition of Log Homes Living said Vizziello located the sawmill in Great Barrington for its proximity to “a source of the plantation red pine that the company used for its signature hand-peeled log.” The company, said the article, also used fir and western red cedar in “six log styles” featuring “milled tongue and groove and fully precut mortise and tenon corners to improve the energy efficiency of its homes.”

A 1972 classified ad placed in The Berkshire Eagle by the company’s production manager, Charles A. Bouteiller, then of Great Barrington, tells that part of the story: “Red and white plantation pine. Highest prices paid.”

By 1973 the log home industry couldn’t keep up with demand. NELHI competitor Vermont Log Buildings of Hartland, Vermont, had a “six-month backlog,” according to an article in the Eagle that year. For NELHI in Great Barrington, the situation was “equally bullish.” It looked like there was enough business to go around, but Vermont Log Buildings sued NELHI for “stealing its production techniques.”

Altogether possible, according to The Eagle, since Vizziello was once “Berkshires franchise representative” for Vermont Log, and the NELHI logs looked almost identical to those made by Vermont Log. NELHI sued back in federal court, but it is unclear how the matter was settled.

Vizziello and Boutellier jointly filed a patent in 1974: “Feed and guide apparatus for angle end cutting.” In 1976 Vizziello developed an “Insulated Wall Log,” a log grooved then filled with foamed plastic, “having thermal insulating properties which are superior to those of solid wood.” Yet another sawmill equipment patent was filed by a group of workers at the company.

By 1977 the sawmill was so busy that it had become an unruly neighbor at its residential Bridge Street location. According to The Eagle, the Board of Selectman received a petition signed by 30 residents over a new second shift at the plant. There were truck lights, revving engines and foul-mouthed workers shouting in the wee hours between “7 p.m. and 7 a.m.” But Selectmen were reluctant to discipline the company over fears of discouraging business. “We spend fortunes trying to induce industry into the area,” said Selectman A. John Tuller.

NELHI soon had around 70 dealers nationwide, according to Log Homes Living. In 1983 the company built another sawmill and sales office outside Sacramento, California. At some point Cedardale Homes in Greensboro, N.C., was acquired. NELHI had even started to ship overseas.

Business was rolling along and NELHI grew into a massive enterprise. According to the 1985 Annual edition of Log Homes, a guide to building, materials, and maintenance, the company had more than 100 dealers in the U.S. and Canada, and installed sawmills in Virginia and Missouri. There were 40 different house models from $6,800 to $56,000, and logs were “dip-treated in an EPA-sanctioned preservative” and certified to be free of beetles and borers by Terminix International. Customers were given a package that included limited “on-site assistance,” a warranty and technical blueprints.

Since thousands of pieces of precisely cut and processed logs were quickly assembled into a “kit” to be shipped to the customer’s home site, working at the Bridge Street sawmill could be brutal, especially if you were a “peeler.”

Until the parcel was cleared, all that was visible from Bridge Street of the 8-acre site were the walls of storage sheds.

NELHI specialized in the “hand-peeled” log, which unlike its machine peeled counterpart gave logs a more authentic look. In 1986 plant manager Dennis Prutzman, a wood technology graduate from the University of Massachusetts, told the Albany Times Union: “In this job, lost time is lost money. It’s the only ‘incentive’ job in the plant. A peeler starts at $4.75 an hour. It takes a few weeks to build up your back and the stamina to keep going. After that a guy gets good, and he’s paid by the foot. A good man can peel 3,000 feet in eight hours, and that works out to around $11 an hour.”

In the 1980s Vizziello grew ill and asked a Connecticut banker and future state senator, Len Suzio, if he would take over the publicly held company. In 1987 both Suzio and Kevin Wise, a businessman who Suzio described as “a wealthy man,” acquired NELHI.

In 1989 the New York Times reported that NELHI was one of the three largest log home manufacturers, second only to the Hartland, Vt., company. The entire industry was selling $476 million in kits, according the Times, up from $440 million in 1987.

In the 1980s NELHI ran this advertisement in Log Homes: “Your NELHI advantage: Every NELHI log is fumigated with an EPA approved substance and certified to be free of wood boring insects prior to delivery to the homesite.”

That “substance” was a “solution of zinc and water solution…to retard mold,” Prutzman told the The Times Union.

To clear the site for redevelopment that will begin next year, a network of pipes and storage tanks had to be removed.

It was zinc naphthenate, to be more precise. Zinc naphthenate is on the Pesticide Action Network’s list of “bad actors.” Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection documents show that at the moment Suzio and Wise took ownership, a walk through the NELHI site would have revealed multiple sections of corroded drums leaking both zinc naphthenate, copper-arsenic, and pentachlorophenol (PCP) into the soil, according to a 1989 Phase I environmental assessment Suzio said he initiated. A later telephone conversation log recorded by MassDEP shows Prutzman saying that, indeed, Suzio had commissioned the study “prior to his purchase of the company to find out what his responsibilities were if any.”

According to the study, zinc naphthenate was also considered hazardous waste due to its “low flash point,” meaning it could easily ignite. The PCP, or penta, as it was is known in the industry, was another story; it was NELHI’s earlier use of penta that started most of the trouble on Bridge Street. The assessment had also located buried drums of the chemical. Penta was used as a wood preservative and pesticide, and it would drip off freshly dipped logs and onto the ground. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, penta is “extremely toxic to humans…”

“We’ve never used pentachlorophenol,” Prutzman told The Times Union.

The fire in 2001 leveled the dipping tanks where logs were soaked in preservatives.

It was true; by 1987 the EPA had restricted penta for any use other than as a preservative for utility poles and railroad ties. According to the environmental study, NELHI had stopped using penta even earlier, in 1978, the year a study in The Lancet called it a carcinogen. The EPA says borate, a naturally occurring mineral, has “low toxicity,” and is effective at managing insects. As the company transitioned to a borate compound in 1990, the company used methylene bromide, an Orkin product, to fumigate the wood.

“The only reason you get insects is from moisture,” said the owner of a large log kit sales company in the Northeast. The owner, who declined to be identified, also said that a fumigation process only “gets rid of bugs, but won’t keep them out.” His company uses a stain that incorporates a citrus-based insect repellant.

So why would a company mess with nasty chemicals if they didn’t have to? “Money, time,” said the anonymous log home manufacturer, of what he thinks may have been NELHI’s practice: quickly peeling and processing green timber for shipment rather than keeping “stockpiles of dried timbers.” His company, he said, uses “air-dried timber” – some companies use “kiln-dried” — and that another key to avoiding moisture is to build the house “raised off the ground,” on “12 to 16 inches of foundation.”

Until the site was cleared for reclamation, charred structures dotted the Log Homes site.

A 1977 report from the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service Laboratory about “Protecting Log Cabins From Decay,” said the Department “has vigorously opposed the use of both pentachlorophenol for residential use and warned that this product should never be used inside . . . for any reason.”

Problem was, while penta created indoor exposure for homeowners, workers who handled penta didn’t fare so well, either.

A few lawsuits rolled in over the years. According to California personal injury attorney Richard Alexander, a cancer cluster in Northern California was linked by a physician to the Simpson Lumber Mill where workers applied penta to logs — through a product called Woodlife –sometimes spraying it on. Alexander successfully litigated wrongful death cases on behalf of some Simpson workers who died of rare forms of leukemia. He said he had to go after the manufacturers and sellers with a “defective product” claim, having taken fat samples from workers that revealed the chemical was present. “It sits in fatty tissue,” Alexander said.

There is at least one case of a homeowner suing a log home manufacturer over health problems linked to indoor exposure to penta-treated logs. Log homes treated before the ban may still be a threat to its inhabitants, especially children, who put their hands in their mouths. On Long Island, there is presently a class-action suit over penta-treated utility poles leaching into private property, and two Long Island, N.Y., lawmakers have proposed a ban on continuing to use penta on utility poles. There have been mini battles across the country over newly treated poles, which are said to smell like intensified lighter fluid. One town on Long Island passed a law requiring warning labels on treated utility poles.

The housing recession of the late eighties eventually put NELHI out of business. “I came along at the wrong time,” Suzio said. And it was true; in 1990 Log Homes Living reported that from 1988 there was a “decline in unit sales due to the soft market for new housing in general.” By 1994 NELHI had gone out of business.  In 1999 NELHI gave Community Development Corporation of Southern Berkshire a $1 option to take control over the 100 Bridge Street site, and the CDC began the task of cleaning it up for redevelopment. To support this, the town forgave NELHI $300,000 in back taxes, and TD Bank, a $1 million mortgage, only after working closely with the CDC for several years, said CDC Executive Director Timothy Geller. The property sat vacant, and a 2001 fire scorched or leveled the remaining structures.

Connecticut State Sen. Len Suzio who won re-election two years ago claiming to be an advocate for the environment.

The 8-acre brownfield along the banks of the Housatonic River became campaign fodder for Suzio’s opponent during Suzio’s run to keep his Connecticut state senate seat in 2012. “A search and destroy mission,” Suzio called it. Suzio, founder and president of GeoDataVision, a bank consulting company in Meriden, lost his second attempt at a Meriden/Cheshire senate seat by a slim margin last November 4.

“My opponent neglected to mention that [NELHI] was [polluting the site] 15 years before I got there,” he said, adding that the League of Conservation Voters gave him a “100-percent” rating during his first year in the senate, back in 2011. Suzio said that the Bridge Street site was polluted even before the company’s penta dipping days, when several other industries, including a 19^th century textile factory and Trinity Steel, producers of propane tank cylinders, were on the site.

“We can’t undo what was done by people,” Suzio said of the industrial pollution problem that is “everywhere, not just in Great Barrington.”

But it appears the contamination was so bad at the site that Suzio couldn’t ignore it. He “initiated an evaluation,” he said. “If you had knowledge, then you had certain responsibilities. If you buy a property that’s contaminated then you are liable for it…I came after that history, but tried. Maybe we could have done something.” As it progressed, “the evaluation got very expensive, and the company wasn’t in a good financial situation then.”

MassDEP files show a torturous path through the environmental remediation maze, one that threatened to deal a deathblow to an already floundering company. In a 1991 letter to MassDEP, for instance, Suzio asked for a 60-day extension for soil testing until “a substantial contract for Israel” had commenced, “to provide us with the funds we need to conduct the testing.”

The entire 8-acre pace has now been cleared and the dioxins permeating the soil are being neutralized by a bioremediation process.

Suzio, who as senator “found and eliminated a hidden gas tax,” he said, and whose key platform position was to fight the early release of violent criminals, said he sees pollution cleanup as one place where the government has to get involved. “I don’t know what choice there is,” he said. He isn’t a fan, however, of hyper-involvement. “It becomes unsustainable when you rely [on government].”

He said he is excited about bioremediation at the site, and called Great Barrington “a wonderful, beautiful, idyllic place.”

The deals to redevelop the brownfield into 100 Bridge, a mixed-use development with a newly expanded Berkshire Cooperative Market, are in their advanced stages. Groundbreaking should begin summer of 2015, and by summer of 2016, we’ll be able to shop for organic food, and take a stroll along the banks of the restored Housatonic River, without risk to our health.

Neither Kevin Wise, Suzio’s business partner at NELHI, nor Dennis Prutzman, could be reached for comment.

And Vito Vizziello, said Suzio, died of leukemia, right around the time the company went bankrupt.

The post Vito’s toxic venture: The story of New England Log Homes appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — The Planning Board last week (January 22) voted unanimously to send a strong recommendation to the Zoning Board of Appeals to uphold a town code that protects a vital reservoir, and to support Building Inspector Edwin May’s most recent order on that basis to stop a Long Pond Road property owner from cutting trees close to what is the water source for the Village of Housatonic.

Planning Board members, from left, associate member Jeremy Higa, Malcolm Fick, Brandee Nelson, and chair Jonathan Hankin. Photo: Heather Bellow

A ZBA public hearing on the legality of Lynn Hutchinson’s new, state-sanctioned Forest Cutting Plan is scheduled for February 10. Hutchinson appealed May’s order to stop clear-cutting within the town’s Water Quality Protection Overlay District Zone A, an area within about 500 feet of the Pond at 263 Long Pond Road, an “extremely fragile” water supply, according to Conservation Commission Chairman Andrew Mankin.

The land in question also falls under Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) regulations that prohibit working land within 100-feet of a reservoir and wetlands, and the town’s rules that put a 500 foot buffer between a reservoir and any permitted activity.

Swimming, boating and fishing are prohibited on Long Pond, as well.

An aerial photograph from 2011 showing the a nearly grown over path to Long Pond from the cleared area where a house stands.

Hutchinson, who is married to real estate speculator Brian Schwab, has been served with three separate cease and desist orders since purchasing the 35-acre property in July 2013 for $700,000, and commencing to cut a large swath of trees all the way to the Pond — ostensibly to clear a view.

The property was briefly for sale last fall for $1,290,000.

It is more than a town zoning and environmental issue, as well, since trees were cut on properties owned and maintained by the Housatonic Water Works, and the other neighbor, the Pfeiffer Arboretum, a nature and wildlife preserve with trails owned by the Great Barrington Land Conservancy.

Hutchinson admitted to violating wetlands protection regulations, and the Conservation Commission approved a restoration plan to the area. That plan was accepted by Building Inspector May. According to Mankin, Hutchinson and Schwab undertook the plan and planted everything she was told to, but the Commission will still have to closely monitor the area. “The key is to make sure that what they planted grows,” Mankin said. “That it doesn’t die or get taken over by invasive species…”

In 2014, an aerial photograph reveals clearcutting on the property, including a corridor to Long Pond.

Still, Hutchinson appealed last summer’s ZBA ruling that she could not do forestry work on that part of the property. Hutchinson has an appeal with the state on that finding, and it is not yet settled.

This most recent installment involves the third cease and desist order; it appears Hutchinson and Schwab have now attempted another route to cutting by hiring a licensed forester to prepare a “Forest Cutting Plan” for a 9- to 10-acre area on the property, which, explained Town Planner Christopher Rembold, “primarily allows those forestry practices to take place without having to go through the Conservation Commission process.” The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (MassDCR) and Mass DEP have “a kind of interagency agreement” that allows this when wetlands are involved, if the forester follows “best forest practices,” he added.

The plan was filed with the MassDCR and approved by the agency, and included invasive plant removal and some cordwood cutting, Rembold said.

But that interagency agreement deals only with wetlands, and not zoning, Rembold noted, and the section of property in question sits in a highly regulated zone. A zone, according to Mankin, that would still require Conservation Commission permitting for a Forest Cutting Plan.

Building Inspector May said the Forest Cutting Plan would violate the zoning rules of the water quality protection district, and violate the ZBA’s last ruling, where Hutchinson argued that the area was “historically cleared,” and that the sellers of the property had never told her that Long Pond was a public water supply, according to ZBA minutes.

An aerial photograph from 1997, showing a swath cut to the Long Pond waterfront.

Planning Board Chairman Jonathan Hankin said the swath was first cut by previous owner Andrew Humes in the mid-1990s, and the area near the Pond was “in the process of growing in,” when Hutchinson began to cut. Indeed, aerial views of the property show that many trees have been felled since 2013.

“Only uses related to the operation and maintenance of the public water supply are permitted,” says the code, and, reading it again, board member Malcolm Fick said it was “pretty clear…”

Rembold agreed. “The Zoning Board said as much in their order last summer.”

The Forest Cutting Plan, said board member Brandee Nelson, “was put together to, in my opinion, look for an opportunity for an end-around.” Nelson noted that member Suzie Fowle had written an email to the board expressing “concerns about the impacts to animal species that use these buffer zones.”

And Fick noted that Mass DEP is relying on the town’s zoning to protect the water resource.

“Our code speaks for itself,” Nelson said.

Planning board members Suzanne Fowle and Jack Musgrove were absent. New associate member, Jeremy Higa, was present.

The post Planning Board encourages ZBA to protect Housatonic water supply appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — It is the winter of our disillusionment here in the cold north, given the mega hike in electricity rates, and the possible — some say, likely — motive behind higher rates.

Great Barrington resident Edward O’Malley heard last fall about National Grid’s coming 37-percent rate hike from the previous year “for a typical customer,” and wanted to know why his per kilowatt cost rose 62 percent. How can this be, he wondered, “with the price of oil dropping and gas prices holding?”

O’Malley inquired of National Grid directly, innocently stepping into the ring of curious consumer versus customer service Jiu Jitsu master. Why the 62-percent increase, O’Malley wrote National Grid in an email. Someone named April, wielding boilerplate, wrote back that the increase is “due to higher power supply prices (the cost of the electricity National Grid buys for customers and passes on without a mark up).”

Using National Grid’s own residential rate table, O’Malley calculated a different rate for his usage than April, and asked why. April dropped from the thread and was replaced by “Customer Service,” who sent a longer email stating that the 37-percent was just an estimate – rates could be lower or higher — and cited as a culprit, the dependence on natural gas during a “gas-constrained” time. The email contained four references to “continued constraints on natural gas pipelines,” leading one to reduce it to basically saying this: If only there were more natural gas pipelines, we wouldn’t have to charge so much.

It is the energy industry’s refrain this winter. The Institute for Energy Research’s (IER) website says: “These high winter electricity prices are likely to continue in New England until new pipelines are built, which could be three to four more years, as heating markets compete with electric generators for limited natural gas supplies.”

It just so happens that pipeline giant Kinder Morgan Energy, through subsidiary Tennessee Gas Pipeline, is developing the Northeast Energy Direct Project to expand pipeline in five states, including Massachusetts, where a new path will run from Hancock, up into New Hampshire, then back down to a hub in Dracut before it runs up to Nova Scotia. Kinder Morgan says the project will lower gas and electric prices for consumers.

Yet few want pipes with highly pressurized, hydro-fractured (“fracked”) gas flowing through their backyards, and many are making the case that it will not lower prices, but only cause a great deal of harm. This battle is underway, and it has set many industry public relations machines into overdrive. An attempt at infiltration of local organizations is one strategy: Kinder Morgan is a leadership circle investor in 1Berkshire, an economic development alliance meant to synthesize business, art and tourism to strengthen the Berkshires economy.

IER says the problem is the increase in natural gas use due to low prices, but without a corresponding infrastructure increase. Also, Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant and aging coal-fired and oil-fired plants are in the process of being shuttered, and now, “environmental opposition is slowing the process for getting new pipelines approved and built. In the mean time, New England families need to pray for warm weather.”

Environmental lawyer and Edge correspondent Mary Douglas calls the rate hikes blackmail. She says there is time to put together alternatives, “such as a mix of renewables.” Douglas says that there truly is a shortfall, “but not an insurmountable one.”

Rich Kinder

Yet Kinder Morgan, whose co-founder and Chief Executive Rich Kinder is worth $9 billion, “would realize a 10 to 14 percent annual return on its investment as a regulated monopoly for the life of the pipeline — 100 years or more,” Douglas wrote.

What if the industry mantra is true, and we really do need more pipeline to lower prices?

Conservation Law Foundation’s Greg Cunningham called it a “faux crisis,” based on a combination of issues from last year including high natural gas spot prices. He said the industry is, indeed, “trying to take advantage of the hysteria over prices now.” Cunningham, who is Director of CLF’s Clean Energy and Climate Change Program, says the Northeast Direct Project may be unnecessary in part because two smaller build-as-needed pipeline projects ready by 2016 — the Algonquin Incremental Market pipeline and a Tennessee Gas project in Connecticut — will infuse the system with increased gas capacity that will lower prices.

The Northeast Direct pipeline will bring hydro-fractured natural gas from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania to New England — through western Massachusetts.

“Relief only a year from now is in the offing,” he said, and will “obviate the need for this larger build-out,” that wouldn’t be ready for another four or five years. It would also remove the prospect of having to pay the tariff for a new pipeline that would be added to ratepayers’ bills, he said.

There are also signs, even from within the industry that this pipeline might not be necessary to lower prices. A May 2014 National Grid presentation shows a slow natural gas demand in New England over the next five years.

According to New Hampshire Pipeline Awareness, the proposed pipeline will carry much more gas than will be used in New England — 68 percent will exported; the rest is for New England. There is also the argument that with proper maintenance of the existing pipeline system, gas flow and availability might increase without the new infrastructure.

It is possible that the connection between this winter’s rate hike and pipeline peddling is not the paranoid dream of conspiracy-loving environmentalists. O’Malley noticed, he said, the close timing of Pittsfield Mayor Dan Bianchi’s vocal support of the pipeline project and National Grid’s 37-percent rate hike announcement last September.

Gov. Charlie Baker speaking at the Berkshire Museum.

On a recent trip to the Berkshires, new Gov. Charlie Baker said he wanted to find ways to expand capacity for delivery of natural gas as a result of the rate hike.

Then we have Gordon van Welie, President and CEO of ISO New England, a non-profit company that oversees the New England grid and electricity markets, making his “State of the Grid” address on January 21. Van Welie said low natural gas prices have increased demand for which gas infrastructure has not kept up. He concludes that these pipeline constraints need to be addressed, though he doesn’t endorse the Kinder Morgan pipeline. He doesn’t altogether dismiss renewables, either, but says they aren’t moving along quickly enough to keep the lights on affordably into the future.

Another possible wrinkle is this: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston wrote a prescient story last May about how electricity prices might soar if Wall Street succeeds in its attempts to manipulate power supply. New England will be a “test-case” for “Enron-style price-gouging,” which is “making a comeback,” Johnston wrote. “Under the rules of the electricity markets, the best way to earn huge profits is by reducing the supply of power.”

O’Malley is not one to sit still for a consumer shakedown; he signed on with Verde Energy’s Low Cost Power Program, which uses all renewable sources. The company is charging $0.1299 per kilowatt hour at the same time that National Grid is charging $0.16273 per kwh.

O’Malley is also joining Community Energy, a company that is credited for power generated from their solar farms, which they are continuing to build; as a result, they can give discounted rates through a billing mechanism called net metering. The Town of Great Barrington and Berkshire Hills Regional School District recently entered into a similar agreement with a solar farm owner that will save thousands in annual municipal electricity costs.

O’Malley says that under this solar agreement, which will take effect this summer, his rate should be reduced by 35 percent. He hasn’t heard back from National Grid about the rate calculations, and it all makes him wonder, he said, “who is watching the store here, besides the fox.”

The post Rising electricity rates explained: Blackmail for gas pipeline appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Pittsfield — An energy giant in the midst of developing and seeking regulatory approval for a controversial $5 billion gas pipeline project that would run through part of northern Berkshire County is a recent investor in 1Berkshire, the not-for-profit, economic development organization composed of Berkshire Chamber of Commerce, Berkshire Creative and the Berkshire Visitors Bureau, and which encompasses 1,500 local businesses.

1Berkshire spokesman and Berkshire Chamber of Commerce President and Chief Executive Jonathan Butler said Kinder Morgan Energy approached 1Berkshire, asking at what level they could become a “leadership circle investor.” The leadership circle is the highest level of investment, Butler said, and requires a $20,000 annual donation, which Kinder Morgan gave around “late summer, early fall.” Kinder Morgan is one of nine investors in this category.

“We don’t turn people away,” Butler added. “We welcome anybody’s investment. If they are doing legal business, we accept it just as we would for those organizations who are opposed to the pipeline.”

“It’s not to our advantage to take positions on things,” he added.

1Berkshire’s mission, Butler said, is to create a “healthy environment for businesses and entrepreneurs. The idea is to align all the critical pieces that make up economic development.”

The proposed path of the Kinder Morgan natural gas pipeline, that would convey fracked gas from Pennsylvania, through the Berkshires, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, to eastern New England.

Kinder Morgan subsidiary Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company is developing the Northeast Energy Direct Project, or NED, a 429-mile pipeline expressway using both existing and new infrastructure and corridors. The system would carry hydro-fractured gas from the “fracking” fields of Pennsylvania up through New York, into northern Berkshire where it would then swing up to New Hampshire and come back through Massachusetts to a hub in Dracut. From there it moves northeast up to Nova Scotia. The company says the project will increase availability of natural gas in New England and lower prices for consumers, but pipeline opponents say much of the gas will be for export, and will mostly benefit the industry.

A related controversy is the theory that the hike in this winter’s electricity prices is a form of blackmail by an industry that wants an excessive pipeline build out to carry that extra gas for export. Others have suggested we may be witnessing “Enron-style price gouging,” the possibility of which U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York) urged a federal inquiry last May.

1Berkshire does not take political stances, Butler said, “unless there are issues that affect the business landscape in the Berkshires — then we get involved.”

But Butler has only been with the Berkshire Chamber and 1Berkshire since last September. In January 2011, 1Berkshire quietly received $300,000 from General Electric and then proceeded to develop a public relations and social media campaign to oppose dredging GE’s PCB pollution from the Housatonic River. The 1Berkshire support of General Electric appeared as a Facebook campaign called Smart Clean Up Coalition, which recommended a minimal clean up, and hasn’t had a post since 2012. Later that year, then-1Berkshire Chairman Michael Daly (and CEO of Berkshire Bank) admitted that GE was a 1Berkshire founding partner and had, indeed, been a backer. The donation, and the pressure on 1Berkshire directors to support GE’s position, sparked the resignation of two directors, both members of Berkshire Creative.

Though GE is still pushing its weight around in the ongoing river cleanup drama, Butler said GE is no longer a part of 1Berkshire. “There is no [GE] presence, no formal relationship between the Chamber and GE at this point,” he claimed.

“When issues like [the pipeline] pop up, we don’t really take a side,” Butler continued. “We act as a convener and educator with controversial issues. We don’t try to make [people’s] minds up.”

But it appears Kinder Morgan’s presence as an “investor” on 1Berkshire’s website has led to speculation that both 1Berkshire and the Berkshire Chamber of Commerce are “pipeline supporters.”

“It’s not true,” Butler said, “and I am the spokesman for both organizations. We have consciously not taken a position.”

So what does Kinder Morgan stand to gain from the alliance?

“Kinder Morgan has provided 1Berkshire with information to pass their perspective along,” Butler said. “Education is our role. Their investment did not entitle them to making us advocates for their project.”

A compressor station along the route of the pipeline is planned for Northfield, Mass.

1Berkshire isn’t alone; Kinder Morgan gave The Berkshire Museum $2,500 in 2013. And a quick perusal of CitizenAudit.org reveals the Kinder Morgan Foundation’s many donations to schools and art organizations across the country, often in potential pipeline project areas. The Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Mass., for instance, also received $2500 in 2013. According to FracTracker Alliance’s map, Kinder Morgan plans to build a gas compressor station in Northfield. These stations help move the gas and pressurize it, and involve an infrastructure of turbines, engines and motors.

Kinder Morgan is attempting to educate the public on its own, as well; the company is holding open houses in towns near its proposed pipeline route. One is scheduled for Feb. 9 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., at the Junior-Senior High School in New Lebanon, N.Y., 14665, Route 22; another on Feb. 10, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the Berkshire Community College cafeteria, 1350 West Street, Pittsfield.

Pipeline opposition group, Stop NY Fracked Gas Pipeline, is holding a “Pipeline Public Forum” on Feb. 5 at Town Hall in Stephentown, N.Y., 26 Grange Hall Road.

“The pipeline is one of multiple potential solutions,” to what Butler called a “capacity issue, and however it is solved, it is an important issue for businesses here.” He said businesses have come to them with concerns “mostly about the cost of power.”

“We get calls in my office every day about the cost of electricity,” said Rep. William “Smitty” Pignatelli (D-Lenox).

While Pignatelli said he wouldn’t “make too much” of Kinder Morgan’s local influence, Pignatelli does see the connection between high electricity prices and the industry cry for more pipeline. He said the Department of Utilities approval of these rate hikes amounts to “corporate collusion,” and are “eerily familiar” to rate hikes of about 10 years ago that “broke the camel’s back,” at the Schweitzer-Mauduit paper mill in Lee, driving them out of business, and nearly doing the same to Crane Paper Company in Pittsfield.

The Northeast Energy Direct Project would take about five years from now to get up and running after all was said and done, Pignatelli noted. “So when I hear that a lack of natural gas is justification for exorbitant rate increases, my question to Western Mass Electric and National Grid is, where were you five years ago? If we need more natural gas here, where is your corporate planning?”

Berkshire Creative Director Julia Dixon declined comment for this article, asked that its board members not be contacted, and referred all questions to Butler.

The post Pipeline giant, Kinder Morgan, invests in 1Berkshire business, cultural alliance appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — David Magadini, the itinerant inhabitant of downtown, has been placed on pre-trial probation for his two most recent trespassing violations, and, according to his appeals attorney, will “surrender” Thursday, February 5 in Southern Berkshire District Court to serve 30 days in the House of Corrections for his conviction on seven counts of trespassing last fall. (Previous local news reports that he had been convicted for the new trespassing charges were incorrect.)

Magadini, however, may not go to jail if appeals attorney Joseph Schneiderman makes a successful appeal in single justice Appeals Court in Boston today (February 4) on “meritorious legal issues, including about necessity,” in order to stay his sentence, Schneiderman said.

His larger appeal on the previous conviction is still pending, according to his trial attorney, Jedd L. Hall.

Magadini, 69, has adopted a homeless condition of living. He was convicted on September 29 for seven violations over the previous year in Great Barrington that occurred during the cold months, and for which he received a 30-day jail sentence that was set to begin on January 5.

But Schneiderman had secured a stay in the sentence until January 29, pending appeal, and then a second stay until February 5.

David Magadini at the Mason Library computer, accompanied by his bags of materials.

Since his conviction on those seven counts of trespassing, Magadini picked up two new charges, one at the Great Barrington Post Office, the other at the Day’s Inn on Main Street and Taconic Ave./St. James Place. According to the police report, Magadini said he had gone inside the Post Office to fix his gloves. In a recent interview, Magadini explained that he hadn’t been allowed in the Post Office for “non-post-office-related business” since 2013. His Post Office box expired around that time.

Last month, Magadini applied for a new box, he said, but his request was rejected for lack of proper photo identification. He tried to use a newspaper article containing his name and photo as ID, but the postmaster said that did not qualify.

The second charge was brought by the Day’s Inn, where Magadini had been previously banned. The police report said Great Barrington Police were called on November 29 when Magadini “forced his way inside the main lobby of the motel and was demanding a room.” Magadini had not been allowed there, since, according to the report, “he caused an excess of $2,000 in damages,” the last time he was rented a room. The Day’s Inn owner also owns Monument Mountain Motel, Mountain View Motel and the Comfort Inn & Suites. Magadini is prohibited from entering all of these properties.

Magadini’s pre-trial probation conditions are that he abide by no-trespass orders at the above named hotels and the properties he was convicted of entering, and that he enter the Post Office only on “official Post Office business.”

If Magadini meets these conditions for three months, the two new charges will be dismissed. If he violates them, the matter will proceed to trial.

The post Magadini to ‘surrender’ in District Court, unless appeal succeeds appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — The Berkshire Hills School Committee is attempting to address Monument Mountain Regional High School’s failing infrastructure amid a challenging economic and political landscape after Great Barrington voted down the $51 million renovation project last fall.

It is a puzzle of state regulations and compliance codes up against taxes and inflation.

Had the vote succeeded, Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) would have thrown in $24 million, Great Barrington would have been responsible for $19 million–Stockbridge and West Stockbridge the remainder.

One of the barrels in high school hallways stationed under roof leaks.

“There are seven to eight active leaks in the roof,” said Berkshire Hills Facilities Director Steven Soule at an official School Committee meeting the following night. Soule said he would hire someone to patch them.

But Band-Aids only last so long, and therein is the heart of the committee’s struggle over the building; do they fix the roof to hold out for five years, or do they fix it to last 20? And whatever work is decided upon, there are those murky waters of when code compliance, such as ADA (American Disabilities Act) or Seismic, gets tripped by the repairs themselves.

“We owe it to the community and ourselves,” said committee chair Stephen Bannon, at an informal “Meet and Confer” last Wednesday (January 28) in the Monument library, “to get some expert to tell us when we trip, or when we’ve gone too far and have to meet complete code in this building.”

The building and grounds subcommittee began meeting last fall to prioritize the list of urgent issues that need repair. That list began with the most critical: security and safety, and moved on to the roof, boilers, and other systems.

It is an expensive list. The roof alone, for instance, is roughly estimated to cost between $5 million to $9 million.

School Committee member Bill Fields.

Bill Fields said he wanted a plan for urgent repairs to be undertaken immediately, and appeared frustrated by the inherently slow pace of making large repairs and overhauls to the building. “Students are in this building now,” he said.

“But the urgent repairs are such big ticket items,” said Richard Dohoney, “and once you start any one of these big ticket items, we’re being irresponsible by not addressing others all at the same time…by doing them incrementally, it costs so much more.”

“What needs to be done so that students can be safely educated in this building for the next 20 years?” Dohoney wondered.

“If we’re doing anything for less than 20 years,” Daniel Weston said, “we’re not doing a service to the taxpayers.”

Soule said that with a list of the exact repairs to be undertaken, an expert could likely determine at what point in the work code compliance becomes necessary. He added that the work is “eventually going to trip this mysterious line [code] line…” As a result, he said, when the roof is overhauled, all the work on the roof such as trusses and insulation will be done.

“…The whole shooting match — that’s roof for the next 20 to 25 years…and it will meet every code that applies to a roof structure.”

Committee Chair Stephen Bannon pointed out that there is “no budget for an architect and engineer,” and said that to keep this process going, that would have to go into the budget.

“It’s silly to do all this work [to last] 20 years and not take care of science labs,” said buildings and grounds subcommittee member Richard Bradway, referring to one of the more notably antiquated areas of the school that was to be modernized had the renovation been approved.

“The community has told us that we have to live with them,” Daniel Weston reminded him.

Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee.

And Frederick Clark went a step further, reminding the committee of what last fall’s renovation battle royal was all about. “We need to start at a more basic analysis of what has happened — re-examine our charge, what the task and goals of the school committee are and should be. Physical solutions are obvious, but I don’t think they are the beginning of the discussion.”

Clark was referring to fairness issues that, last fall, sparked the voter meltdown, and that upon greater analysis, may have an impact on how big the high school should really be: school choice and tuition, the regional agreement between the three towns in the district, and declining population projections are among a host of issues. All of it has led to soul-searching among school officials, with some steps taken towards rectifying the problems.

“In the meantime, the building get’s worse and worse, and it gets more expensive to do the work,” Fields said. Clark said he didn’t disagree “at all,” but that “we have to change something.” He wondered if minimizing the size of the building in general would reduce costs, but noted that it would require a cut to the student population.

Weston said the idea was worth consideration. “A smaller population might give us flexibility,” he said. And Dohoney said he is “a proponent of expanding the district.” He asked if this idea could be pursued on a separate track than addressing the physical plant, and noted that the MSBA gives “incentives to districts who want to expand their district and do a renovation in conjunction with that.”

It is a labyrinth: “We have choice and tuition [students] not just for the finances,” Bannon said. “We have it so we can offer more to the students. We offer AP [Advanced Placement]…” He said he wasn’t sure how voters would feel about cuts to such programs.

“We can talk this to death,” Fields said, noting that recently it was 57 degrees in Monument science labs and that several more barrels had appeared in the hallways to catch leaks. Indeed, students report several space heaters in a biology classroom where the teacher recommended they wear hats and fingerless gloves to class for Friday’s predicted bitter temperatures.

“We have a building that needs to work right now,” Fields said.

And Clark, despite wanting to sort out strategic planning issues first, said there was value in a “systemic” renovation from an education standpoint, and that “there is something more that we could gain…that we should reach for and be striving for. It isn’t as simple as boilers and roofs…”

Bannon noted the limitations of the MSBA, with its stringent requirements for projects, and how challenging it is to come up with a solution that will both receive state funding and not set taxpayers on edge. “Maybe we don’t need the MSBA,” he said.

“I don’t think [the committee] will ever design a project that the MSBA and the voters of Great Barrington will agree on,” Dohoney said.

Monument Principal Marianne Young.

“It always came back to money,” said Monument Principal Marianne Young, referring to the renovation vote. She spoke passionately about the robust educational vision of the high school, and agreed with Clark’s assessment that a systemic overhaul is crucial to that vision. “No one (voters) ever said those kids aren’t worth it,” she added. “People agreed on the educational vision. They said we’d love to have those classrooms for our kids. We just can’t afford it.”

“The failure of the project wasn’t about schools,” Superintendent Peter Dillon said. “The high school was the last of seven major projects in Great Barrington after years of bad planning and people kicking the can down the road. If the high school had come before the fire station, [the vote] might have passed.”

At Young’s suggestion, the committee ultimately decided to pursue separate tracks of planning simultaneously, for the building and its physical needs, as well as the tangential financial issues like the district agreement. Dillon and Bannon have scheduled a three town meeting for February 17 to discuss the possibility of amending the district agreement between Great Barrington, Stockbridge and West Stockbridge. But Dillon didn’t think it sensible to “hang our hopes” on changing the allocation formula between the towns. He is clearly willing to try, however.

But for all the talk of how to fix the aging high school, Dillon wants to make sure this year’s operating budget, one “that supports teaching and learning,” does not come to harm, “as pressing as these capital projects are.”

The post Berkshire Hills struggles with plan for aging Monument High building appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

A welcome to two new police officers

Police Chief William Walsh introduces Officers Dalton Griffin and Ryan Storti.

Great Barrington — Police Chief William Walsh introduced two new police officers to the Selectboard Wednesday (February 4), and said Ryan Storti and Dalton Griffin were “two great additions” to the local force of 17 full time officers (including patrolmen and Chief Walsh), and 8 part-time reserve officers.

Great Barrington native Ryan Storti graduated from Monument Mountain Regional High School and got his Associates Degree in Criminal Justice from Berkshire Community College. He is a recent graduate of the Western Massachusetts Police Academy, and trained in the reserve academy as well as the department’s “in-house field training program,” Walsh said. Storti started in 2012 as a part-time reserve officer, and was appointed to the full-time position last March, after “a lot of hard work and dedication.”

“He’s ready to go, and he’s been out there already,” Walsh said.

Walsh noted that the Police Academy program in Springfield is a rigorous, 6-month “long haul…no-nonsense environment,” with long days that begin at 7 a.m., as well as weekend and evening work. “Any slip-ups at all,” Walsh said, “and they’re gone.”

Lee native Dalton Griffin is a Lee High graduate with a Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice from Westfield State University. Griffin had already been through the reserve academy when he came to the Department, where he then completed the in-house training.

“We are really proud of both these young men, and we hope they have a long career with us,” Walsh said.

Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin praised the culture of the Department set by Chief Walsh, and the “environment of people teaching each other, training each other.” She said the dedication to the rigorous, competitive process required to join the department was “inspirational,” as well as the commitment to “community policing,” a style of policing that involves building ties with the community and working with residents to solve crime issues and other related problems.

*     *     *

Department of Public Works update

Tabakin praised the DPW and Director Joseph Sokul’s “resourceful” action during a salt shortage “due to a trucking issue.” Sokul, Tabakin said, worked with other municipalities and even the governor’s office in order to wrangle enough salt for the recent storms.

And Tabakin and Sokul met with some residents who live on and near Taconic Avenue in the Castle Hill neighborhood, about “speeding issues and some questions or requests for crosswalks and or traffic stops,” and said the group would work on some ideas that they would bring back to the Selectboard in order to “propose some reasonable solutions that balance everybody’s needs.”

*    *     *

Park Street bridge replacement hearing

Tabakin announced that a public hearing is scheduled for March 10 at the State Road Firestation by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) about the upcoming replacement of the Park Street Bridge in Housatonic. The bridge is owned by the state, and will take about two years to complete. “It is a long project,” Tabakin said. She said a formal agenda about the hearing, as well as the time of the hearing (likely 6pm), will be forthcoming.

*     *     *

Local contractor/tradesman training for government work

Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin. Photo: Heather Bellow

This might be just the ticket for local contractors who want to bid on future state or municipal building projects such as…a local high school, perhaps?

The state Division of Capital Asset Management, the agency that manages the Commonwealth’s building real estate, will hold a training session on March 18 at the Firestation, 37 State Rd. from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. The session is aimed at explaining the requirements for such bidding, and “how to get your company up to speed to be able to bid competitively on government work,” Tabakin said.

Tabakin said she asked the agency to come here, noting that their training sessions are usually not in the area. “They were very happy to meet our request to come. We want our local workforce to be able to get in the loop and know what they need to become part of it,” she explained.

*     *     *

Wastewater study update

David Prickett Consulting out of Longmeadow was hired to do the first phase of the Wastewater Treatment Plant rate study, now underway, to determine “the rates and financial issues, and to understand how our operation works,” Tabakin said.

Prickett is being paid $3,230 for his services, and was the most economical choice, Tabakin added.

“What we began with is looking at the assessors data…and sewer billing data to identify the properties that are currently billed for sewer, and updating the building codes to current standards,” Tabakin said. The first phase will also determine which properties are either on sewer or water, or both, she added.

The town met with both town water companies, the Fire District and Housatonic Waterworks, to determine whether sharing data would work. Tabakin also said that the town is also looking at what is most efficient from a billing and administrative perspective, as well, and that this would be considered before the question of “how to implement and how to deal with the rates themselves.”

*     *     *

Selectboard supports protection of local water supply

This corridor clear cut to the shore of Long Pond prompted a cease and desist order from Building Inspector Edwin May.

The Selectboard voted unanimously to recommend that the Zoning Board of Appeals rule in support of Building Inspector Edwin May’s cease and desist order for the Forest Cutting Plan at 263 Long Pond Road, which violates zoning laws that protect Long Pond, the water supply for entire Village of Housatonic.

Property owner Lynn Hutchinson has been served three cease and desist orders for cutting next to the water supply since she and her husband, Brian Schwab, purchased the 35-acre property in July 2013 for $700,000. The house was on the market briefly last fall for $1,290,000 and is now being advertised for $1,375,000, with a listing that boasts “breathtaking westerly views.”

It was the desire for a view of Long Pond that led to the trouble.

Attorney Richard Dahomey

Attorney Richard Dohoney represents both May and the ZBA in the matter, and was on hand to answer questions before the issue is heard by the ZBA on February 10, 7:30 p.m. at Town Hall. Dohoney explained that this latest exploit of a protected area, part of which is owned by Housatonic Waterworks, is strictly a zoning matter, and that activities unrelated to the management of the water supply are in violation of code. He further explained that this is a “public safety issue through zoning,” though there are other overlapping state environmental regulations as well.

Tabakin wondered what other methods municipalities could use besides zoning to protect a public water supply.

Dohoney said his knowledge of that was only anecdotal, but that it was unusual to see a private water supply that serves such a large population not be fully under the water company’s control. Typical tools of municipalities, he said, are “eminent domain and put up a fence, but that is extreme in this situation.”

The post Great Barrington Town Hall briefs appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — The Selectboard last night (February 9) voted unanimously to give Berkshire Hills Regional School District(BHRSD) permission to form a three-town committee that would work to bring the district’s regional agreement up to date, and, if all three towns can agree, possibly amend it to change the way each town pays for the schools.

Selectboard member and school committee chair Stephen Bannon brought the motion and discussion to the table, since Superintendent Peter Dillon had arrived late from a Stockbridge Selectboard meeting where that Board also approved the formation of the committee.

Selectboards of all three towns in the district must first agree to form the committee before going any further in the amendment process. West Stockbridge is to vote on the matter at their meeting next week.

Bannon said the school committee wants to open up the regional agreement for amendment to both clean up an “antiquated,” 1965 agreement that hasn’t been modified since 1990, and “we want the towns to take a look at the funding formula.”

Berkshire Hills Superintendent Peter Dillon addressing the Great Barrington Selectboard.

While the agreement could use a basic update, it is the formula that is driving school officials’ action now, since it was a primary factor in the failure of a vote — a second year in a row — to renovate Monument Mountain Regional High School. Great Barrington was to foot the bulk of the renovation bill, $19 million of the $28 million net cost, had the project passed last November, but the town’s taxpayers revolted partly over what was perceived to be an unfair district agreement formula that shunts most of school costs onto Great Barrington.

Each town, however, is assessed based on how many students are enrolled in the district. The official October 1, 2014 (updated in early December) enrollment numbers show 690 students from Great Barrington, 145 from Stockbridge, and 148 from West Stockbridge.

For fiscal 2015, the towns were assessed as follows: Great Barrington, 69 percent; Stockbridge, 14 percent; and West Stockbridge 17 percent. Fiscal 2016 assessments are to be close to 2015 assessments.

It is unclear how the agreement might be changed. Neighboring Southern Berkshire Regional School District, for instance, is on a statutory system, which means that “the state determines how the pie will be cut up,” said Superintendent David Hastings. The two largest variables in the calculation, he added, are “relative wealth in each community and the proportionate enrollment in each community.”

Southern Berkshire is made up of five towns, Sheffield being the largest, and bearing the highest percentage of all, which now is at 53-percent.

He said there can be “a winner and a loser each year because in a small town like Monterey, two or three students can make a significant difference” in the assessment. For this reason he said it is a “volatile” system.

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” he said of the calculations. “Suddenly rates go way up or way down.”

Of the “intense calculation,” made to determine how much a town pays, Southern Berkshire’s Business Manager (and Egremont Selectboard member) Bruce Turner said “the main driver is student population.”

“No matter what changes,” he said, “Sheffield is still the biggest community, they have the most kids and the most property value. There’s not much you can do about that.”

Some Great Barrington residents are trying to figure out what can be done to take some of the weight off the town in order to afford a renovation, since there is nearly unanimous agreement that the high school is in dire straits. In a widely circulated analysis and letter by resident Chip Elitzer, written while the town was still sorting through the wreckage from the contentious battle over the project, he states: “I found that GB has only 53 percent of the combined $2.5 billion assessed property values (residential, commercial, industrial, and personal property) of the three towns, but because it provides almost 70 percent of the resident student population, it gets hit with almost 70 percent of the BHRSD assessment.”

Fairness, Elitzer said, “would include allocation based on each town’s share of total assessed property value rather than on its student enrollment, and reimbursement for the true average (not marginal) cost of choice and tuition-in students, which is approximately three times greater than the current rate.”

The regional agreement was one of several taxpayer irritants –– along with school choice and tuition-in students –– that sunk the renovation of the deteriorating high school. After the vote failed, a group of Castle Hill neighbors formed a petition called GB21, a list of actions the group insists be undertaken before any further attempts at a renovation project are made. One of those was to renegotiate the district agreement for “equity” between the three towns. As of two weeks ago, GB21 had more than 150 signatures. Several of its members have presented the petition to the Selectboard, Finance Committee, and School Committee.

Stephen Hemman from the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools speaks to a packed house in the Stockbridge Selectmen’s meeting room last November.

Amending a regional agreement is a “strict process” with a number of steps, Bannon said, that, according to Stephen Hemman, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools (MARS), can take up to a year or more. Bannon added that Hemman suggested a facilitator and legal help throughout.

Dillon had asked Hemman to come to Stockbridge last fall to give a presentation on the process, which begins by forming a “Regional Agreement Amendment Committee.”

Dillon said last night that he had received numerous letters from people who want to join the committee, which could have as many as 30 appointed members, since MARS suggests that it have a member from each the School Committee, Selectboard and Finance Committee from each town; a town administrator or town manager from each town; and the “public at large” from each town, as well as the Superintendent and business manager.

The committee then must agree unanimously to changes, otherwise the existing agreement remains in place “unlike a labor agreement,” Dillon said. He added that he sees a committee forming this spring and convening in September to come up with changes to the agreement to be voted on at the three town meetings next year. The school committee, the Commissioner of Education, and all three towns would then have to agree to adopt the amended agreement.

The post Barrington Selectboard approves plan to revise district school agreement appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — In a packed, tension-filled Town Hall meeting room the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) last night (February 10) voted 6 to 1 to uphold Building Inspector Edwin May’s December 2014 order directing property owner Lynn Hutchinson to stop cutting trees on her land next to Long Pond, a public water supply, in violation of town zoning code.

ZBA member Michael Wise voted against.

Attorney Richard Dohoney gestures toward his client, Building Inspector Edwin May.

Hutchinson, along with her husband Brian Schwab, had been served a third cease and desist order to halt work as part of a state-sanctioned Forest Cutting Plan on about 10 acres at 263 Long Pond Road, because the work was to be undertaken within a water protection overlay zone. Town code prohibits any work not related to “operation and maintenance of the water supply” within 400 feet of Long Pond, which is the water source for the entire Village of Housatonic and is also under Department of Environment Protection regulations. Swimming, boating and fishing are also prohibited on Long Pond.

Hutchinson and Schwab had already begun to cut a slot down to the Pond so that they could see it from the house that sits nearer the road on the 35-acre property. The area had been cut in the past by previous owners, but had started to grow in. Hutchinson received two previous orders from May since purchasing the property in 2013, and this third order was in response to an attempt to use a Forest Cutting Plan approved by the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) to sidestep local regulations.

Hutchinson and Schwab have undertaken some restoration to the area they altered as dictated by the Conservation Commission.

The property was recently put back on the market for $1,375,000 after being pulled last fall when prospective buyers learned in newspapers of the owners’ trouble with the town. An appeal of an earlier cease and desist order and subsequent ZBA ruling is still pending in Boston.

Hutchinson attorney Frank Di Luna addresses ZBA members Kathy Kotleski and Michael Wise.

Hutchinson’s attorney, Frank Di Luna of Woburn firm Murtha Cullina, argued that the state-sanctioned Forest Cutting Plan “trumps your local regulations.”

“I think what we have here is a clash of statutes,” Di Luna added. “The underlying principal is that the Forest Cutting Plan is an agricultural pursuit.” He cited a state law that prohibits “unreasonable restriction of agriculture.”

That was the meat of Hutchinson and Schwab’s appeal, and for which forestry consultant Edward Denham of New England Woodland in West Stockbridge, and Tom Ryan, a state service forester, were present. Denham, who has 40 years of consulting experience, explained that the agricultural plan is to make a sugar bush stand at the site, and that to do so, the understory and deadwood must be removed. He said the plethora of invasive species in the area eventually get up into the tree canopy and kill trees unless removed.

Denham further said that he had consulted numerous times about properties next to public water sources, and that it would be disastrous for both him and Ryan to “propose something that would damage a water supply.”

Forestry consultant Edward Denham of New England Woodland points to map of overlay zone.

“If I thought there was going to be a problem I would tell Lynn, I’m walking from this project,” Denham said.

Ryan, whose district includes 18 towns at the southwest corner of the state, said he “had never seen a cutting plan being scrutinized to this degree,” and noted the right-to-farm bylaw. He said that altering the land for agriculture is “something that’s been happening around this water supply for decades.” He was “puzzled as far as how it got to this degree.”

Michael Wise reminded him. “It got to this place because of how all this got started,” he said, referring to earlier, unapproved cutting near the Pond, and the two cease and desist orders that followed. Also, some of the cutting trespassed into land owned by the Great Barrington Land Trust and Housatonic Water Works, which pumps water from the Pond into the water supply.

“There is no room for error when you’re dealing with a public water supply,” said May’s attorney, Richard Dohoney.

Dohoney said that May was using the only tool in his power when he issued the order, and noted that there was “insufficient regulation around public drinking water in Great Barrington until this zoning code was put in.”

“A lot of compelling evidence was heard today,” Dohoney said of both foresters’ explanation of the cutting plan, which he said was thoughtful, “but not sufficient to meet this very high standard.”

However, that thoughtful plan, in which good forestry practices can actually help a water supply if done properly, appeared to have moved Wise. He wondered, “is this unreasonable regulation of agriculture? That the landowner has made an effort to hire a forester and go through the DCR makes a difference.”

Ryan pointed out that in 1985 Housatonic Water Works had made this same proposed cut through the forest on a section of nearby land next to the reservoir and harvested 40,000 board feet of white pine. Later, by phone, Ryan said a cutting plan is designed to protect water quality. “But I can see why people are scared,” he added, noting that the situation is unusual because the town doesn’t own the land and the Water Works does not control the entire area around the reservoir.

ZBA members Madonna Meager, John Katz and Donald Hagberg.

ZBA member Madonna Meagher was concerned about the use of chemicals to deal with invasive species, but Ryan assured her that had not been proposed, and Denham said, “I do not believe they have any intention of using chemicals.” Indeed, the cutting plan says the invasive species will be removed “by physical/mechanical means.”

And in response to a question by member Kathy Kotleski about the effect on water quality, Ryan said the effect would be “neutral.”

“The town agreed that we needed this extra band of 400 feet as a zone of protection,” said Vice Chair Carolyn Ivory. “I don’t see how we can disregard that.”

“It opens the door,” said ZBA alternate Donald Hagberg.

ZBA alternate John Katz wondered if the work could be done out of the water protection zone, but forester Ryan said that most of the proposed work falls within that zone. Di Luna said the entertainment of any such plans is “not going to take place tonight.”

The Board read statements in support of May’s order by the Selectboard, Planning Board, and Conservation Commission. The Board of Health’s statement indicated concern for the effect on the water supply.

Yet there was a struggle to make the deciding motion and no one wanted to do it. Everyone turned to Wise, who said the motion he might make, to allow good, supervised forestry practice in the protection zone would not be popular, given that the four other boards had voted to uphold May’s order.

“I’m sticking my neck out here a bit,” he said.

Brian Schwab and Lynn Hutchinson depart the ZBA meeting after the vote.

Finally, Katz made the motion to uphold the cease and desist order, but a second to the motion was slow in coming, and right before the vote, the ZBA had circled back to the reason they were there: the water supply.

“I can also imagine a lovely forest practice,” Meagher said. “On the other hand, we’re here because of where we are with the owners of the property, and I lost a little bit of trust there.”

Katz also said he was “concerned about the track record of the petitioners in the past.”

“It’s scary,” said Kotleski, “because if something goes wrong, then where are we? And that’s why the original 400 foot buffer was put there.”

Chairman Ronald Majdalany had recused himself, and John Katz was an alternate in his place.

The post Great Barrington ZBA upholds order protecting water supply appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — The Berkshire Hills Regional School District, faced with unavoidable increases in insurance rates, salaries and benefits, utilities and transportation costs and confronting fierce taxpayer resistance in Great Barrington to any increase in education expenditures is set to propose eliminating teacher positions and certain programs across its three schools in order to achieve a savings of $248,626.

“Nobody wants to cut $250,000 from a budget,” said Superintendent Peter Dillon. “The principals and I agree…it’s a bad thing for kids.”

But the district’s proposed budget, having been targeted as the millstone around Great Barrington taxpayers’ necks, appears to have been fashioned to satisfy that town’s disgruntled taxpayers by keeping the  assessment increase at 5 percent.

The roughly $860,000 increase in this year’s proposed $24 million (gross) budget is due almost entirely to factors the district has little control over, many of which are mandatory expenses. Salaries and benefits eat up 74 percent of the budget, for instance.

“It was determined with a lot of heavy hearts that we did not find a level program budget to be viable this year,” said finance sub-committee member Richard Dohoney at the Thursday night (February 12) unveiling of the proposed budget in Monument Mountain Regional Middle School’s auditorium. In its first year, the finance sub-committee, along with the principals of the three schools looked at “line by line” costs to find the savings, he said. The committee ran three budget options, but the one the committee chose to recommend was the one that would keep the increase to the towns’ assessments at 5 percent, and that included cuts.

School Committee member Richard Dahomey. At right, BHRSD Business Administrator Sharon Harrison.

“It’s not anything anyone is happy about,” Dohoney said.

The proposed cuts at Muddy Brook Regional Elementary include elimination of the Early Kindergarten (EK) class, one paraprofessional and two teachers (one through attrition). At Monument Valley Regional Middle School one retiring Computer Technology teacher will not be replaced, and stipends for some after school programs and other program development work will be cut. Monument Mountain Regional High School will reduce one math position, and lose an art teacher and a paraprofessional.

Dillon, along with all three principals — Mary Berle of Muddy Brook, Ben Doren of Monument Middle and Marianne Young of Monument High — said these cuts were as far as they could go without savaging the integrity of their schools.

“We’re starting from a place where there’s not a lot to work with,” Berle said. “I think we’re really tight at Muddy Brook.”

Muddy Brook elementary School Principal Mary Berle.

“There’s no where else to cut,” Doren said. “Whatever I cut will have a significant effect.” Doren said the cuts would “slow the pace and depth” of some middle school programming.

With the loss of the high school art teacher, “the art program won’t be as robust or flexible for students’ schedules,” said Principal Young of a historically popular program, that she said “has kept any number of students in school,” and inspired many to go on to art schools and careers. Beyond these cuts, she said, “we’re talking about eliminating programs — we are at a real tipping point with this high school.”

“I don’t believe our parents want a program that’s any more diminished,” Young added.

Neither do students. Reports from the high school say a petition to save the art teacher are circulating, preparing for the February 26 public hearing on the budget to be held at the middle school auditorium.

“To go one round deeper would cause irreparable harm,” Dillon said, noting that the principals worked with deep honesty to determine what cuts wouldn’t do serious damage.

The total net change for assessments to all three towns is a 4.64 percent increase. Great Barrington will see a 5 percent increase, Stockbridge, 7 percent, and a .31 percent reduction for West Stockbridge because fewer students from West Stockbridge are enrolled in Berkshire Hills.

Business Administrator Sharon Harrison addressing the School Committee.

All these numbers could change on March 4, however, when Gov. Charlie Baker’s “House 1” budget is released, much later than the usual January release with a sitting governor explained Business Manager Sharon Harrison. This is inconvenient since the School Committee votes on their budget March 5. Another wait-and-see variable is the state-imposed, complex formula called “the minimum contribution,” which is the minimum amount any town has to pay to support its schools.

It’s been “radio silence” from Boston, Harrison added.

“We were building this budget absent some important information,” Dillon said. “If [the governor] makes dramatic changes there, then that will ripple through the budget. This net assessment could dramatically change one way or the other.”

Given the focus on and criticism of the district this past year, particularly during a controversial high school renovation debate, the number of empty seats in the Middle School auditorium for this budget presentation was surprising. Apart from town or school officials and staff, along with three members of the press, not even a full hand of residents could be counted, though it is possible many watched from their living rooms on the local CTSBTV.

Housatonic resident Michelle Loubert braved the cold, however, and asked whether eliminating more clerical-type positions, or merging positions rather than cutting educators, had been entertained.

Housatonic resident and school critic Michelle Loubert.

Dillon said the committee had analyzed what was necessary for the economical functioning of the district in “fine detail.”

“The place is operating pretty much with a skeleton crew,” he added, and went on to explain how the loss of certain staff is not always a savings and that some seemingly unnecessary positions actually help the district save money and make it possible to effectively educate the children.

“We are very, very lean,” he observed.

“I personally feel…these cuts go too far,” said committee member Jason St. Peter. He said he thought the cuts might affect the “educational integrity of the district.”

School Committee member Richard Bradway said the budget represents the “cost of doing business.” But, he added, “If we don’t want to pay those costs of doing business then we need to change how we do business.” He said the more “difficult and time-consuming discussions about things like consolidation,” are “pushed down the road” to the extent that talking about these cuts are “easier to consume.”

“If we don’t see the writing on the wall,” Bradway said, “we’ll find ourselves in the same position next year, and we’ll be probably hearing about much more painful cuts.”

Frederick Clark said he agreed, and that budget was “unsustainable,” and that “if we think we can’t afford this and we can’t sustain this…then we need to look at how we do things differently.”

Harrison said that part of what is making the budget so unmanageable is that state-funding “is not keeping pace [with expenses].” Harrison cited a study by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education that determined that the Foundation Budget, the minimum the state determines is necessary to adequately educate children, is “underfunded by $1 billion.” Also, she pointed out, “in 2003, almost 19 percent of our budget was covered by Chapter 70 (state education money). Now it’s 11 percent.” She said the issue may be one the school committee and the towns want to try to do something about.

The state has its own budget problems, and the hits, it is said, are taken by those with less clout: “The irony is not lost on me that the amount we’re talking about cutting is almost exactly the same amount the state short-changed us this year on regional transportation,” Dillon said. An automatic cut to transportation reimbursements made by outgoing Gov. Deval Patrick underfunded the district by roughly $258,000 this year. The district, along with other regional school districts, may take legal action to recover that loss.

“I found this meeting to be incredibly depressing,” said Chuck Gillett, a Stockbridge Selectboard member who earlier had expressed concern about unfunded pension liabilities. “I didn’t think that I was going to see these kinds of cuts.” Gillett went on to say that his two grown daughters had been through Monument’s renowned art program, and both became art majors in college; one is now an architect, another the head of a high school art department in New Mexico. Without the program, he said, “I don’t know where they’d be today…I owe an enormous debt to the high school at that time.”

He said both the cut to the art teacher and the Early Kindergarten class to be “incredibly troubling,” and urged the committee to “put that $248,000 back into the budget. I don’t think this is a huge number. I don’t think we’re going backwards, and I think we ought to at least tread water if not go forward.”

“Going backwards to me is unacceptable,” he added.

“Ditto,” said Selectboard member Ed Abrahams. “I think you’ll find a lot of support for that. I don’t think you should be afraid to put forward a budget that actually pays for the education we need to give our kids.”

School Committee Chair Stephen Bannon, left, and Committee member Rich Bradway.

“You put [the cuts] back in you have a no from me…I can’t afford it,” Loubert said, noting the burden on Great Barrington taxpayers.

“It seemed a little dishonest to me,” Dohoney said, “but the measure of the effect on the Great Barrington taxpayer came up at every single meeting. That’s not fair, and that’s evidence of the flawed system that we’re working in.”

“Until the system changes,” said committee chair Stephen Bannon, “this was the best we could come up with.”

Great Barrington Finance Committee Chair Sharon Gregory, who earlier, along with Gillett had expressed concerns about unfunded liabilities, said she thought taxpayers might be willing to digest “short-term” bumps if the committee could present time-frames for things like consolidation, or other potential cost-saving measures, “about changing the way we do things.”

“It is the unanimous passionate position of, I think, this entire community that sharing costs and services and consolidation is what needs to happen,” Dohoney said. “But it involves a lot of forces so far beyond our control, a lot of hard work and a lot of luck.”

“The pie is the pie,” he added, “and we have to change it otherwise it’s going to keep getting cut up.”

A public hearing on the Berkshire Hills Regional School District budget is scheduled for Thursday February 26, in the Monument Valley Regional Middle School auditorium.

The post Berkshire Hills to cut teaching staff, programs in 2016 budget appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — The Great Barrington Farmers’ Market has announced a new, central downtown location for the 2015 season after one season at the Great Barrington Fairgrounds (GBFG), and many previous years at the old train station on Castle Hill Avenue.

The fresh, local food and farm-to-table institution will set up shop at 18 Church Street, in a parking lot owned by Jane Iredale, founder and president of Jane Iredale Mineral Cosmetics. The company’s international headquarters are now stationed in the renovated Bryant School building down the street.

Snow now covers the parking lot at 18 Church St. that will be the new home of the Great Barrington Farmers’ Market

The move is in response to merchants’ requests to bring the market back into the downtown commerce hive, according to Market Manager Howard Lefenfeld. Some business owners said they saw a fall-off in Saturday business when the Market was held at the Fairground off Route 7. The Market runs mostly during the height of the tourist season, and for years, those with young children have made it a tradition to go to David Grover’s concerts behind Town Hall, before or after going to the Market. Many would continue on into town for shopping or lunch.

Lefenfeld said the Market had “worked an amicable agreement with Iredale,” for the space after it hadn’t been able to agree on the terms of a contract with the Fairground, though last year was a good year for vendors at the site.

Lefenfeld would not comment on what financial arrangements had been concluded between the Farmers’ Market and Iredale, or whether the parking lot would be rent free, but he did note that Iredale had always been “generous,” with the community. “This is a win-win for everyone,” he said.

Indian Line Farm’s Elizabeth Keen, who is also on the Market’s Steering Committee, said she had “the utmost respect for what [the Fairground] is trying to do with their property.” This move, she added, “doesn’t say that we don’t support the Fairground. We weren’t able to come out with a contract that was mutually beneficial to both parties.”

“We as a group want the Fairground to succeed, and we believe in their mission,” Keen added.

Customer parking has always been a thorny issue for the Market, and Keen says the downtown Market will be no different from other downtown markets. “We will educate people about where they can park, and people will have to be creative,” she said. On the flip side, the Market will get “walk down traffic” from the neighborhoods, she noted.

“Parking is going to be the biggest challenge,” said North Plain Farm’s Sean Stanton, who is also a member of the Selectboard. Stanton said he is “excited” about the new location, and he hoped that any money saved on low or nonexistent rent at the new space would be used for increased advertising. His vendor fees have not changed, he said.

Berkshire Grown Executive Director Barbara Zheutlin said her organization, which supports all farmers’ markets and holds its own winter and holiday markets, “hopes the move is good for both the Market and the Fairground. We hope both continue to thrive. We’re big supporters of both.”

GBFG issued this statement: “The success of small scale producers, and consumers’ access to their good food, is central to the quality of life for the community and to the mission of the Fairgrounds. We wish all the local markets good success in supporting farmers and customers. We welcomed the GB farmer’s market because we believed our missions to be in good alignment and worked hard last year to support a mutually successful season.  We looked forward to continuing to be a partner this year, and learning of their decision to move, we wish them well in their new location. We are planning a full summer of opportunities for the community to engage with the all-volunteer effort to restore the Fairgrounds.”

The post Great Barrington Farmers’ Market returns to downtown appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — In an effort to free up downtown parking for shoppers during the coming spring round of the Main Street Reconstruction Project, a parking task force has come up with a voluntary program that it thinks will help by giving merchants and their employees, as well as residential tenants, spaces to park outside the center of town.

When the snow finally melts, signs will be installed for the “Spot Saver” program, brainchild of an informal task force working for several years under the guidance of Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin. The task force included about 15 local merchants and several town officials, and now consists of Jennifer Clark, Betsy Andrus, Bill Cooke and Robin Helfand.

This Wednesday night (February 25) the task force — with generous help from Castle Street Café owner Michael Ballon — will host a launch party at the Café at 5 p.m. to explain the program and answer questions. The public is welcome.

Once installed, blue parking signs will indicate 4-hour parking areas (see map above) Monday through Friday between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. in the three public lots on the west side of Main Street: At the end of Castle Street, at the end of Railroad Street, and the Taconic lot between the Triplex Theater and Main Street businesses.

All-day, no restriction parking will be located in the following lots:

–RBC Wealth Management, in the old train station complex on Castle Hill Avenue and Castle Street, at the top of the railroad underpass;

– Day’s Inn at Main and St. James Place/Taconic Avenue;

– The former Searles School lot on Bridge Street;

The GB Spot Saver sites for downtown merchants, tenants and employees.

– Congregational Church and TD Bank shared parking lot at 271 Main Street;

– St. Peter’s Church, 213 Main Street;

– St. Peter’s Community Center, 16 Russell Street;

– The Lamplighter, 162 Main Street.

The paid rental lot on Bridge Street behind the southeast block of shops (the “Foster’s lot”) is also an option, as well as another behind Wheeler & Taylor Insurance/Realty on Main Street.

Spot Saver participants will get decals for their car windows and a poster to put in their window, as well, to explain how they are helping the community during the reconstruction project, which, according to Town Planner Christopher Rembold, is slated to begin at the end of March, but “depends on the snow melt.”

“The schedule and phasing are extremely weather-dependent right now,” Rembold added.

The $5.8 million state-funded project has always been a long-dreaded affair to replace sidewalks, trees, road surface, lights, crosswalks and traffic signals from St. James Place/Taconic Avenue to Cottage Street. The town got its first taste of it when work began last summer, with some parking challenges, traffic flow issues and one known mishap: a severed Verizon line that shut power down to a number of homes and businesses. Downtown merchants have been concerned about disruptions to a steady stream of commerce, particularly during the peak summer months. As a result, the work will simmer down in July and August with “no or extremely limited work between Castle Street and Elm Street, the core of downtown,” Rembold said.

But after the tourists and second homeowners have high-tailed it back to the city, the work will continue in full force until another winter sets its teeth into Great Barrington.

For further information, contact Betsy Andrus at the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce: 413-528-4284.

The post GB ‘Spot Saver’ parking program for Main Street Reconstruction launches this week appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Sheffield — Special town meeting dates are set for each of the five towns in the Southern Berkshire Regional School District to vote on spending up to $7.7 million for the replacement of Mt. Everett Regional High School’s 23-year-old leaky roof and failing boilers, projects that will be eased by sizable state reimbursements.

If one town votes no, however, the projects die.

According to Superintendent David Hastings and School Committee Chair Carl Stewart, $7.7 million is a high estimate that includes the possibility of overruns.

The current boilers at Mt. Everett are failing, putting the heating system at the high school at risk.

The Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) will kick in 39 percent of the cost, or $2,612,552 through the Authority’s Accelerated Repair Program, though the school may qualify for more funds.

The project will also receive $360,000 from the Department of Energy Resources SAPPHIRE Program, since an economical and environmentally friendly wood pellet boiler system will be installed. According to the district’s feasibility study, the pellet system is estimated to save the school 67,600 gallons of fuel oil per year, and $76,631 in annual fuel costs. Upfront, the pellet boiler will cost $808,000.

Stewart said that the town meeting system may not be the “most democratic” way to “express the will of the majority of the people in the district.” Stewart noted that a town with a small population like Alford, for instance — one with under 10 students in the district — could “subvert the will of the overwhelming majority” if the town voted down the projects.

Stewart said not acting on the roof and boilers would not make economic sense, as both are failing, and projects get more expensive over time.

The school committee, he went on, “believes this is a good and necessary project, but we have different interests…some people in the towns are legitimately concerned about an increase in taxes. There are a fair amount of people in the Berkshires who are strapped.”

The meeting dates are as follows:

Monterey: Monterey Fire House, Thursday, February 26, at 7 p.m.

Sheffield: Mt. Everett Auditorium (TAC PAC), Monday, March 2, at 7 p.m.

Egremont: Undermountain Elementary Cafeteria, Monday, March 2, at 7 p.m.

Alford: Alford Town Hall, Thursday, March 12, at 7 p.m.

New Marlborough: New Marlborough Town Hall, Monday, March 16, at 7 p.m.

For more information about the projects or the meetings, call (413) 229-8778 x300 or x303 or visit the district’s website at www.sbrsd.org

The post Five Southern Berkshire towns to vote on $7.7 million in repairs to high school appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — When zoning came to the Village of Housatonic in 1960, three-quarters of the village’s properties were suddenly thrown out of compliance with zoning regulations, making it expensive and difficult for people to invest in their properties. The zoning bylaws, still in effect, also opened the door to retail box stores, according to town officials, the building of which runs counter to what residents of the village say they want.

But if Great Barrington voters agree, this will all be fixed at the May 4 Town Meeting.

The Planning Board has developed four proposed zoning amendments in an effort to not only correct what Town Planner Christopher Rembold says is “an existing problem” of non-conformity to zoning regulations, but to help the village continue to grow in vibrant ways and expand its economy by allowing mixed-use properties. Rembold says this, along with the protection of its charm and character, is the key to a thriving village.

Main Street North in Housatonic. Photo; Heather Bellow

“When something is non-conforming it basically tells the world that it’s not what we want,” Rembold said. “The regulations are working counter to what we know people want Housatonic to be.”

Rembold says current downtown zoning is a deterrent to making changes to one’s property or investing in it. “It most likely would involve an application through the Zoning Board of Appeals, which takes time, legal expertise, architectural drawings — time and money — and in the end the ZBA’s opinion is discretionary. That’s not a situation that we believe is conducive to protecting the existing character of the village.”

Zoning for the former mill town, which is a village within and governed by Great Barrington, was scrutinized during Master Planning, and even earlier, Rembold said. The proposed changes come “out of at least a decade of meetings and community task force sessions. Time and again, people say this is a great small village, a great place to live. People say: ‘We’d like a few more places of business.’ So we want to encourage all of that.”

Pleasant and Main has become a very popular restaurant in a historic building in the village. Photo: David Scribner

The Planning Board also wants to protect the spirit and charm of the place, but current regulations might allow something unwelcome. “What we have is zoning that allows Stockbridge Road [in Housatonic]. We’re trying to fix that,” Rembold told the Selectboard at their February 9 meeting, upon presenting the proposed amendments.

The village is slowly making a comeback, with two new eateries, Pleasant & Main and a restored Housie Market, as well as a new home for Berkshire Pulse dance and creative arts center. Another mill building has been privately restored, and the old Housatonic School is on the market. And two recording studios call Housatonic home.

But all of the downtown village, as well as the section in the North Plain Road area where Country Carpets sits, is zoned “similar to the size and density of what currently exists on Stockbridge Road,” which “encourages medium and large scale box retailers,” according to the proposed zoning amendment draft. Current zoning, says the draft, “allows retail stores of up to 20,000 square feet, the size of a medium-large box retailer.”

Proposed zoning map for the village of Housatonic.

The proposed amendments will prevent retail larger than 6,500 square feet in that area, with special permits required for retail use of between 6,500 and 10,000 square feet, and nothing permitted beyond that size.

“We think we found a way to recognize the commercial potential of that area but make it sized to where it fits into that character of North Plain Road,” he added.

Areas like the neighborhood around the Rising Dale Café on Route 183, Rembold said, will be zoned as “small scale retail mixed with residential zoning.”

“We want to create zoning that better reflects the fabric of the village,” said Planning Board Chair Jonathan Hankin. The hope, he added, is to have “less hoops to jump through if people want to invest money in their property.”

A re-zoning of the village center will allow for mixed use and small restaurants, with a retail square footage cap at 6,500, because “clearly people like the feel and fabric of Housatonic Village,” Rembold said. However, with a special permit from the Selectboard, retail up to 10,000 square feet would be permissible. In the case of an historic structure such as the Housatonic School, a permit for up to 20,000 square feet could be applied for. This re-zoning would also create more parking flexibility, he said.

Another amendment would create a village Overlay District for parcels fronting Main Street, Meadow Street and Depot Street.

“Overlay keeps the underlying residential zone, but puts overlay on top in case anyone wants to use it,” Rembold explained. The original regulations stay in place, but the overlay allows mixed uses only by special permit, on a “case by case” basis.

Current zoning map for Housatonic that was adopted in 1960.

Hankin explained that this overlay looks to the future, “assuming that the village itself has made a comeback.” He said this zoning is intended to give flexibility to someone who, for instance, wants to live above their art gallery or artist studio, and noted that there are a few “huge houses” in that area, making it ideal for such usage. “It’s not likely that we will see anything there yet,” he said, “but it’s creating some possibility of someone coming in with a really good idea and not being stifled by the zoning.”

“Mixed use encourages the sort of activity that makes a place lively,” Rembold said. “That’s what we want to happen.”

Another residential zoning proposal aims to “better reflect the existing development pattern that is there,” Rembold said, of an area that does not allow multi-family housing. Hankin said this amendment would be a “miniscule difference” and “unnoticeable.” It would simply “bring a small percentage of property into conformance with zoning regulations,” in a completely developed area.

“We need to make sure our regulations are really fostering what people want,” Rembold said.

The Planning Board is holding a public hearing about the proposed amendments at Town Hall on March 12 at 7 p.m. And Town Planner Christopher Rembold will be at the Ramsdell Library in Housatonic to answer questions the next two Wednesdays (February 25, and March 4) from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. He can also be reached at crembold@Townofgb.org.

The zoning proposals can be found here, on the town’s website, and more information is available on the Town Planner’s blog.

Two other, smaller changes to the zoning bylaws are also slated for the Town Meeting warrant.

The post New bylaws to free Housatonic of outdated, restrictive zoning appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Petitions for school changes ‘Advisory Only’

Great Barrington — Five petitions submitted to the Town for inclusion on the May 4 Town Meeting warrant, and which pertain to the Berkshire Hills Regional School District’s finances and organization, can be inserted in the warrant, but are to be advisory only, according to the Town’s attorney.

Two of the petitions were submitted by former Selectboard member Andrew Moro; one requests that the district be required to report, in the town’s annual town report, all payments of $5,001 or greater. The other asks that the school budget be decided upon by the majority of the combined votes of all three towns in the district. Presently, one town’s vote can be bound to the other two towns’ votes.

The other three petitions were submitted by GB21 co-founders Karen Christensen, Ron Banks and Vivian Orlowski, and repeat sections of an original petition by the group.

Christensen’s petition requests “transparency on finances” from the district, asking for “openness, cooperation, and communication” with voters about financial matters, including submitting financial reports in a “timely and regular basis” to finance committees of the three towns and made available to the public. It also asks for a system of “accurate measurement” of operating and capital costs per student, and that smaller, urgent repairs to Monument Mountain Regional High School be undertaken right away with the use of local contractors.

It just so happens that the state agency overseeing municipal projects is holding a certification workshop for local contractors who want to learn how to bid on such projects, on March 18 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the Great Barrington Fire Station.

Banks submitted a petition that asks for “equity among towns sending students to schools” in the district; and Orlowski, a petition requesting “proactive planning” that includes the community in developing a “Master Plan” for the district.

All five petitions have as little as two, and as many as eight signatures.

Selectboard members, from left, Deborah Phillips, Sean Stanton and Stephen Bannon. Photo: Heather Bellow

According to town counsel, said Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin, all issues described in the petitions are governed by the school district’s regional agreement. Reading from town counsel’s opinion, Tabakin said that “in order to adopt a formal requirement affecting a regional school district…an amendment of the applicable school district agreement would be required.”

Selectboard member and School Committee Chair Stephen Bannon said the district has already begun the process of reviewing the district agreement between Stockbridge, West Stockbridge and Great Barrington. West Stockbridge is the only town that has not yet agreed to the formation of a review committee. Later, by phone Bannon said Superintendent Peter Dillon had met with the West Stockbridge Selectboard, which told him that “they are going to do more research and get back to us; they didn’t say no, but they are first going to talk to the Massachusetts Association of Regional Schools (MARS).”

“Anytime citizens petitions are brought they should be reviewed,” Bannon said at the meeting, noting that he didn’t know the petitions were school related when he made the motion to have them reviewed. It would have been the case regardless, he said, since town counsel reviews every proposed item for the warrant before inclusion. “To me this is common sense,” Bannon added.

*     *     *

Town urged to divest from fossil fuel companies

350ma Berkshire County coordinator Gary Stoller. Photo: Heather Bellow

Great Barrington — Members of the Berkshire County chapter of the climate action group 350ma came to Monday night’s (February 23) Selectboard meeting to ask the board to pass a resolution urging the state pension fund to divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies.

The Selectboard voted unanimously to review and to create a resolution to be voted upon at the May 4 Town Meeting.

The goal is to make “Massachusetts the first state in the union to divest its pension funds of fossil fuel holdings,” said 350ma Berkshire County coordinator Gary Stoller, who went on to explain that of the $60 billion in the state pension fund, $1.6 billion is invested in fossil fuel companies.

The grassroots organization is supporting State Senator Benjamin Downing’s (D-Pittsfield) bill to divest public funds from such corporations. Stoller explained that the idea is to wean portfolios from those investments over a five-year period. In this case, the Pension Reserves Investment Trust (PRIT), which is the target of Downing’s legislation, would divest at a rate of 20-percent per year, and not purchase any new fossil fuel holdings, with a floor for a return decrease of 1.5 percent in which case, Stoller said “all bets are off,” and investments are “reformulated.”

The Berkshire County Retirement Fund invests with PRIT.

There is also a bill under consideration in the state House of Representatives by Rep. Marjorie Decker (D-Cambridge).

350Mass works on a number of campaigns, all concerning climate change, including opposition of Kinder Morgan’s proposed pipeline, much of which will run through the state.

The point of 350Mass’s request, Stoller said, is about aligning with the principles of “clean energy and having the planet survive.”

He noted that 11 towns and municipalities have passed similar non-binding resolutions, including Boston, Cambridge, Truro, Provincetown and Amherst. Hampshire College has divested, and Williams College is in the process. A full list of organizations that have divested can be found at the 350 Mass website.

According to literature crafted by state Sen. Benjamin Downing and Rep. Decker, “independent studies by the Associated Press and several major asset management groups have shown that a carbon-free portfolio would have outperformed a standard portfolio over the past decade.”

“You can’t damage the fossil fuel industry by doing this,” Stoller said. The idea, he said is to “stigmatize these companies…like tobacco [companies] and apartheid” divestments.

“Even the Rockefellers are divesting.”

The post Great Barrington Town Hall briefs appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — Lamenting poor turnout at meetings, Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee Chair Stephen Bannon once said that when the committee proposes budget cuts that affect students, people will come.

And come they did.

An unusually large audience turned out for the BHRSD budget hearing. Photo: Heather Bellow

Faced with possible teaching and programming cuts amounting to nearly $250,000 in savings — including the lay off of a popular high school art teacher and the shut down of the Early Kindergarten program — the community Thursday night (February 26) packed Monument Valley Regional Middle School’s cafeteria for a public hearing on the Berkshire Hills Regional School District’s 2016 budget, and pleaded for a restoration of the cuts, along with future planning and action to avoid such crises in the future.

Close to two dozen former and current students, parents, teachers, school staff and town officials — and even outspoken critics of the district — addressed the school committee with mostly passionate pleas to reconsider such cuts to a $24 million capital and operating budget with an increase of roughly $860,000 caused by what the committee says are mostly unavoidable expenses due to rises in insurance rates, salaries and benefits, utilities and transportation costs.

The budget, which is still dependent on the March 4 release of the state’s budget, was admittedly fashioned, say committee members, to keep Great Barrington’s assessment from rising above 5 percent, so its taxpayers would not grow downright militant. Before the cuts were proposed, Great Barrington’s rate would be up 7 percent.

As critics assailed proposed budget cuts, the School Committee listened. Photo: Heather Bellow.

Passions were fierce: Monument High student journalist Jacob Robbins had helped collect over 200 signatures to save the beloved art teacher, Krista Kennedy, from losing her job. “People feel safe and loved inside her classroom,” which he described as a “sanctuary” for many students. Also, he said, “we are concerned this [cut] will further exacerbate schisms between youth and the higher authority.”

The artist Simon Ban, a former Monument art student and Pratt graduate, even traveled from Brooklyn to protest a cut to the art department, a place where he found “solace,” he said, and received “the best therapy I ever got.”

Monument High Art teacher Neel Webber said the art department was about much more than teaching art. “This is a central focal point for our school community and our school culture, which significantly reflects our local community,” and added that art draws business and tourism to the area, affecting our “quality of life.” He said he thought allowing school choice students on the waiting for the high school, for a three-year period, would increase revenue without costing the school anything.

MMRHS Guidance Counselor Sean Flynn

And Monument High guidance counselor Sean Flynn invoked the broader theme of the overall culture in the community and schools, and “the conscious choice we made to stay here or come back here to raise our families, specifically in this school district, knowing that the quality of education…is going to be as top notch as you’re going to find. With that comes a responsibility to pay for it.”

And Krista Kennedy, who, if she loses her teaching position, will be installed at Muddy Brook Elementary School, where she will replace another art teacher, Alexandra Benton. “I want you to realize the cascading effects of me getting bumped,” she said.

Bill Cooke, who recently announced his candidacy for an opening on the Great Barrington Selectboard, said the cuts will harm education but not “make a difference with voters [at Town Meeting].”

“It’s less than two percent,” he added. “Just keep it.”

Debbie Brazie, appealing to School Committee to restore cuts to programs.

“Costs go up every year,” said Great Barrington Selectboard member Ed Abrahams. “It’s not realistic for taxpayers to expect that taxes won’t also go up.” He knows taxes are high, he said, “but who should pay these extra costs? Should it be the taxpayers…with dollars, or should it be the students of our district, with a poorer education?”

“I’m not rich,” said CTSBTV’s Debbie Brazie, speaking on behalf, she said, of her new grandchild’s educational future. “But I will find a way to pay for this [increase]…I will get another job if I have to.” Brazie said she had been listening over the last 18 years as she recorded school committee meetings, and recalls many a conversation about the importance of early childhood education, and the district’s “conscious decision to have Early Kindergarten,” and other programs. “We might lose savings,” she noted, if those children choice out of the district and into another, which costs the district around $5,000 per student.

Muddy Brook Elementary kindergarten teacher Jack Curletti. Photo: Heather Bellow

“What concerns me is the message we send when cutting our youngest learners,” said Muddy Brook Elementary kindergarten teacher Jack Curletti. “Learning from birth to age five is critical,” especially now, he added, when the number of children qualifying for free lunches is growing.

Even critics of the district, who grew strident during and after last fall’s disquieting and tumultuous battle over the proposed renovation of Monument Mountain Regional High School, said the cuts should be restored to the budget.

“I simply can’t support this type of cutting,” said Karen Christensen, who co-founded GB21 with other Castle Hill residents who also want to see changes in the operation of the district. She said the district should not assume that all costs will go up. She asked the committee to consider more sustainable “creative” financial planning. The cuts to programming, she said, “appeals to the emotion…it seems manipulative.”

School and School Committee critic Karen Christensen. Photo: Heather Bellow

Finance Committee Chair and GB21 co-founder Sharon Gregory, who has been trying to slide the district’s finances under her committee’s microscope, said that the proposed cuts should be restored, but wanted to see movement with sharing services and consolidation, with “stated milestones that cover the next three to five years.”

“The budget will continue to increase at about the same rate in the face of a declining population,” she added.

Michelle Loubert of Housatonic, a Monument High graduate, didn’t like the cuts either. But before she votes on the budget at Town Meeting, she said she wants to see evidence of any analysis made to cut administrators instead of teachers and programs. Like Loubert, Selectboard member Dan Bailly — who is opposed to the cuts — wondered: “If the total of salaries at the administration level — excluding secretarial — is about $1.2 million — if they all took a 7 percent pay cut…that saves the Early Kindergarten program or art teacher.” He also suggested possibly removing the vice principal position from Muddy Brook Elementary, since it was relatively new.

“This is a political decision,” Stockbridge Selectboard member Chuck Gillett said of the cuts.

It was true, admitted committee members Richard Dohoney and Dan Weston, who are both on the finance sub-committee, saying the unpopular decision — even among themselves — was “a response to pressure on the school committee,” as Weston put it, to ease some of Great Barrington’s tax pain.

After proposing the cuts, Weston said, he “had buyer’s regret.”

Dohoney said it was “terrible” that the committee had to be put in the position of having to mostly consider the effect on Great Barrington. He called it a “dishonest” approach to the decision making process. But, he said, “I believed [the cuts] were necessary evils.”

Rich Dohoney, center, laments the budget cut decisions. To his left, Fred Clark, Bill Fields, Dan Weston; and to his right, business administrator Sharon Harrison, Superintendent Peter Dillon, and Committee Chair Stephen Bannon.

Dohoney firmly shot down the idea that administrators are somehow awash in high pay at the expense of teachers or taxpayers. “The silent cut in this budget is that administrators who now have grown to be underpaid in the market are not getting well deserved salary increases,” he said.

As for staffing, Dohoney said one could see it was “skeletal” by “walking through district offices [midday]…and doing the same thing at Town Hall in Great Barrington, and counting heads…this [district] is a bigger financial organization, more regulated, with a more challenging mission than the town, and the level of staffing is shockingly different.”

“If the residents of Great Barrington want to relieve their tax burden by cutting administrative expenses, they can do it at the town level, because it’s easier to do it there.”

On Dohoney’s last point, committee member Bill Fields, who is also on the finance sub-committee, was scathing, and it was clear that there was finally a large enough audience, and perhaps some traction, for the committee to fight back after a year of sharp criticism.

“Our budget is 51 percent, the town’s…is 49 percent…what is the town of Great Barrington doing with regard to its economics? I don’t see anyone in the town saying, ‘do we really need 17 policemen, with a decreasing population in the town?’ Why aren’t we looking at a regional police department…or fire department? Why aren’t we contracting out plowing?” He also wondered why Finance Committee member Michael Wise’s tax reform ideas aren’t being discussed anymore. “I see everybody coming to Berkshire Hills saying ‘change your way of doing business.’ ”

“Someone said the school is the favorite punching bag of the town,” he said. “Well that’s got to stop sometimes…the school committee is trying to juggle three balls: school choice, the equity arrangement…and the consolidation issue.”

“I’m just getting this off my chest,” he added.

And Dan Weston railed against the fecund innuendo against the district, generated during the high school renovation wars last fall, a strategy possibly designed to foment continued distrust in the schools and open the door for voters to flay the school budget at May 4 Town Meeting, as was attempted last year.

Committee member Bill Fields. Photo: Heather Bellow

“I am tired of being the punching bag” Weston said, “and I am tired of general, vague suggestions… that are almost like sound bites, and they post things on the web that are inaccurate…you can suggest that we’re hiding funds or that there’s a secret agenda…we don’t have the option of being vague, we don’t have the option of the sound bites…we have to make a real budget.”

He said strategic planning was a challenge in Massachusetts, unlike some other states, where multi-year budgets can be crafted. “A big part of strategic planning is budget, but we can’t budget for more than one year.”

Dohoney, however, said he was uncomfortable with several capital projects in the budget, like repairs to the high school track, which is already a year older than its 8 to 10 year lifespan. He wondered if there was another way to generate revenue from the community and other schools who use the track, or perhaps use Community Preservation Act funds to pay for repairs.

This raised Fields’ ire once again. He thinks the capital budget should be higher, he said. Fields has recently expressed frustration over the lack of timely repairs to the 48-year-old high school. “I’m tired of fiddling and diddling with the building…we could be guilty of kicking the can down road.”

That “can” is the deferred maintenance that has beleaguered both Great Barrington and Monument High over many years, and which has, in part, made the town’s taxes rise dramatically over the past 10 years due to the renovation or replacement some of the town’s infrastructure. Ironically, it was the fear of tax hikes that prevented timely management in the past. So when the $51 million high school renovation project came around for a vote, Great Barrington taxpayers said they couldn’t shoulder it, even their $19 million share of the price tag.

Committee member Christine Shelton said that cuts should be made “farthest away from the kids.” Undaunted, she said Great Barrington should be presented with a budget that keeps programming intact. “I don’t think we should run scared from voters now just because of the renovation vote.”

Finance Committee member Leigh Davis had made the same point earlier: “Trust the democratic process, and let the town decide.”

To watch the hearing, go to, CTSBTV: http://www.ctsbtv.org/iframe-2/

BHRSD’s proposed budget can be found here: http://www.bhrsd.org

The post In budget decisions, BHRSD School Committee between a rock and Great Barrington appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — I’ve never given much thought to fire hydrants beyond noting those tender moments when my dog is wooed by their charms. Yet I take comfort in knowing we have them. In fact, I am so comforted by them that I forget all about them until spring, when a few people fiddle with the one across the street. As it turns out, they are testing it to make sure it will work in the unfortunate event we all need it to.

I didn’t give much thought to the matter of hydrants, pressure, or gallons per minute until last week, when, at one of a series of joint meetings where the town’s 2016 budget was unveiled department by department, section by section, line by line. We came around to the Fire Department; one quarter of its budget goes towards “the right to use hydrants,” as Fire Chief Charles Burger put it.

And midway through the Chief’s discussion of his budget, he brought up hydrants and how the largest increase in his budget this year is for hydrant rental costs, up to a projected $93,000 ­­from $92,279 spent last year. The reason, he said, is that Housatonic Water Works Company (HWWCO), the private company that pumps water into Housatonic proper, may ask the Department of Public Utilities for a rate increase of 15 percent this year.

At that moment, Selectboard Member and Housatonic resident Dan Bailly casually asked the Chief who maintained Housatonic’s hydrants. The Chief said it was the responsibility of HWWCO, but that the fire department did not have a “written contract” with the company for maintenance.

Quasi-municipal Great Barrington Fire District Water Department takes care of Great Barrington’s hydrants, for instance, making sure they are clear of snow, maintained and tested. But as for Housatonic’s hydrants, the Chief left enough of a question mark wafting through the fire station meeting room that it prompted Bailly — with a nervous grin — to ask the Chief, “can we get some sort of maintenance agreement with [HWWCO]?”

Great Barrington Fire Chief Charles Burger addressing the Selectboard and Finance Committee last week.

Burger said his department encouraged Housatonic residents to “adopt a hydrant,” making those present wonder — and worry — about orphaned hydrants, and what that might mean if there were a fire.

It was enough to make me pick up the phone.

Chief Burger said he would only say this: “I think the maintenance of hydrants, and making sure they are working, is extremely important for the protection of the community.”

He was also willing to say this: Housatonic hydrants flow at a rate of 500 gallons per minute. Great Barrington hydrants push out 1,500 to 4,000 gallons per minute.

Offices of the Housatonic Water Works Company, on Maple Avenue in Great Barrington.

“You can’t compare the two towns,” said Jim Mercer, president of HWWCO. “They are different systems designed for different pressures.” He said most mains in Housatonic were installed in the 1890s to1900s during the industrial revolution and in response to the Great Chicago Fire, a conflagration that lasted for two days and killed hundreds.

There is a good reason why a Housatonic resident might fret about hydrants. Housatonic’s Central Block was decimated — for a second time — by fire in April 1960, according to Bernard A. Drew’s Great Barrington: Great Town, Great History. The property loss from the fire hit the $100,000 mark, even after “seven fire companies fought the blaze, which started in the store of William Lennon and spread to an adjacent structure,” all right across the street from the fire station, according to Drew.

“Fireman experienced water flow problems…water had to be drawn from the Housatonic River,” Drew wrote. And the Deputy Fire Chief at the time, Paul M. Baumann Sr. said “that fire was a doozer…we could use only one hydrant. If you used more than one, it stole from the first.”

“Fire Chief Edward C. Vigeant decried the lack of water in Housatonic,” and HWWCO was criticized, Drew said, “for maintaining too-small lines in the village and not meeting insurance rating standards.”

According to Drew, Baumann later said that water problems in the village “had been eased somewhat in recent years by the installation of dry hydrants at the river near the Macano Inn and near the old Monument Mills complex. Another is planned near Rising Paper.”

The Housatonic Fire Station.

When asked how much trouble it would be to replace the mains to hold more water, Mercer said increasing pressure is a complicated issue with profusion of variables to consider. “We have 16 miles of pipe of all different sizes, and different pressure out of different sizes of pipe…it is a long-term issue.” Right now, he said there is 110 pounds of pressure throughout the system.

As for hydrants, “we paint, check valves, exercise them, replace parts.” His company does the maintenance in the spring when they also flush the mains. Given the winter we’ve had, I asked about freezing. Mercer explained that when the hydrants are deactivated, the water drains off the stem, so there is no potential for freezing. “Periodically, we had ones that didn’t drain,” he said, and those can freeze.

Mercer also said that there are regulatory standards for hydrants. “There are standards for everything,” he said. “Waterworks is a very regulated industry, as it should be.”

The age of Housatonic’s hydrants varies. Some date back to 1900, Mercer said, but his company replaced hydrants on a number of streets in the 1980s to late 1990s.

HWWCO charges the fire department $575.40 annually for each of its 58 public hydrants producing a flow of 250 GPM or more, and $462.96 for hydrants with a flow of 150 GPM and less than 250 gallons or more per minute. The Great Barrington Water District charges $57.75 per quarter for each of its 250 public hydrants.

Housatonic still has a fire station. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder, is the lesser water flow from Housatonic’s hydrants still a problem during a fire? Does that mean the department has to bring in special equipment?

“We use an engine regardless,” Chief Burger said. “For a minor fire [Housatonic’s] gallons per minute is adequate — for anything major, they’re not. It would require thousands of feet of hose and multiple engines, and a delayed response. It would require a lot of manpower and laying in from the [Housatonic] river.” Using river water is something Burger said would be necessary in Great Barrington only if there were “a catastrophic water system failure.”

The Park Street hydrant, serving the Rubin Mill and the former Barbieri Lumber Co. office.

And what would it take to increase the gallons per minute flow of Housatonic’s hydrants?

“It has little to do with hydrant itself,” Burger said. “It has to do with water pressure and size of water mains. In Housatonic, the static water pressure is fine, but flow through the system is not adequate.” Burger said the same thing Mercer did about replacing water mains to increase pressure: “Upgrading that can be fairly complicated.”

When asked about the rate hike Burger had budgeted for, Mercer said it would be “premature” for him to comment on it. “I don’t know the exact number yet. It’s been 7 years since we set a rate increase.” Mercer said the 15 to 20 percent hike would account for “basic inflation.” Mercer said he’d “have better numbers in the next couple of months.”

Aside from regular overhead costs, Mercer said his company has “substantial electric usage because of our pumps.” Also, he said, “there have been changes and new testing for safe water rules.” The state he added, “is making a push to look at infrastructure, prioritize projects, and start programs to upgrade mains…we’re looking at funding.”

The only mystery left is that no one knows who is officially in charge of plowing and clearing snow around a Housatonic hydrant. Chief Burger didn’t know, Mercer didn’t know, and when asked, Department of Public Works Director Joseph Sokul said he didn’t know, adding that the DPW does not involve itself in water company-related business.

I got in the car and drove around the village; it was clear that someone was removing snow from around hydrants, and unless some were buried, the hydrants I saw appeared to have been adopted.

I mentioned all of this to Dan Bailly. “I saw a volunteer fire-fighter clearing one,” he said, possibly solving the great mystery.

The post The hydrants of Housatonic: Are they adequate in case of fire?   appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Sheffield — There is something endearing about a robot. Perhaps the delightful R2D2 from Star Wars has sunk into our consciousness; it is not hard to see why one could form an attachment to such a thing, especially if one has built and tinkered with it — sans instructions and under tight regulations — and nurtured it through robotics competitions.

It turns out there is world of robotics beyond what I had ever imagined. That was until last Tuesday, when I found myself in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) classroom at Mt. Everett Regional High School, surrounded by a group of passionate, bright-eyed teenagers, articulate beyond their years (not a “like” was uttered), who explained robotics and competitions to someone like…well, me.

“They get very attached to the robot,” said one robotics team member, of how a robot created by the Mt. Everett team for one year of competitions with specific tasks and criteria must eventually be disassembled or modified for next year’s new challenges.

Mt. Everett is the 2014-2015 FTC (FIRST Tech Challenge) state champion. The team has won three state championships in a row, and with alliance teams from Lenox and Lincoln, they are off to Scranton, Pa., for the East Super Regional on March 19 – 21, which will include 72 teams from Maine to Virginia.

Here is a video at the state competition of the team’s winning demonstration of Higgs Bots 3085:

“We won’t disassemble it until summer,” he added. And that will only happen after Team 3085, nicknamed “Higgs Bots,” demonstrates its robot’s moves. The team started building the robot last September, and began competing in November. The robot evolved over the first several competitions as the team made adjustments.

The base of a robot can be left intact with “tiny modifications,” said another team member, and used the following year, but “this team has redone a robot every single year.”

The competitions are hosted by FIRST, a New Hampshire-based nonprofit with the core mission, says their website, of inspiring young people “to be science and technology leaders,” and also to “foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.”

Lead Higgs Bots programmer Max Lowenstein. Photo: Heather Bellow

FIRST robotics competitions are known as a “Varsity Sport for the Mind,” and include rules, time, tasks, points, and resource limits for building the robots. The teams “are challenged to raise funds, design a team brand, hone teamwork skills, and build and program robots to perform prescribed tasks against a field of competitors…”

“It takes 880 lines of [programming] code,” said senior Max Lowenstein, lead programmer and competition coach, describing what goes into the robot’s little brain, a Lego Robotics NXT Brick that rides “on board.” The brick is first attached to a laptop, where it gets programmed before it is slid into the robot’s infrastructure.

The code is created for the specific tasks, Lowenstein added. In this case that includes picking up balls and depositing them in upright tubes to score points, which means the robot needs to extend an arm way up high, “a big issue this year,” said senior and head engineer Ben Webb.

Team co-captain and main driver, senior Kosta Casivant, got the controls and the team demonstrated the robot’s prowess in the arena, its size and course specified by competition rules for matches that last two-and-a-half minutes. The size of the robot is specified, too; it must fit inside an 18 x 18 inch wooden cube. Every year the team must build the robot and write new code for new actions, after the new “game” is released to teams in September, Webb said. Last year, he added, the team had to figure out how to “lift the robot up on a bar.”

A sketch from the engineering notebook for the Higgs Bots 3085 robot.

There are no instructions.

For that reason, Mt. Everett’s Technology Coordinator, Chris Thompson, who oversees the group and monitors independent studies, calls it “the ultimate in project-based learning…the kids have to think creatively as well as technically, and then communicate their ideas and work in a group environment. These are all top level 21^st century skills.  They have to build, wire, and program all while facing a competition deadline.”  The 10 team members meet every Friday after school.

How do they figure it out? Lowenstein, for instance, said he learned programming from the person before him. Aside from their volunteer mentors, students can also take online classes in the room’s computers, like a Python programming language class through Virtual High School (VHS). “Programming education has really opened up,” said a team member. That, he said, has led to an “explosion of interest in the robotics team.”

The team also won awards this year: the Rockwell Collins Innovate Award for best overall robot design; and runner-up for the Inspire Award, which is the highest FTC award granted, and judged across all categories. It is given to the best overall robotic program in the state.

To see the winning demonstration of Higgs Bots

I asked if everyone present was inclined towards the sciences. A lot of heads nodded, but some started shaking. “It’s not so much a requisite for being interested,” said one young man.

Then I expressed some awe at this approach to learning programming plus the engineering, and all of it sorted out by “trial and error,” as one student said. And, I thought, also accomplished through desire and passion.

“The basics are extremely intuitive, but you can add more nuanced things,” said robot programmer, senior Alex Dunn, who said he’d been programming “for as long as I can remember.”

“It’s an organic process,” said another student, of what is a collaborative creation in which the whole team contributes to some aspect. Some do fund-raising for the team, others, social media and web design for the team’s site.

Paul O’Brian, who taught STEM for 34 years and is now retired, serves as mentor to the team and oversees the group with Thompson. O’Brian has been with the seniors in this group for four years, and said their robot reflects their dedication to details, and “sets them apart from other teams.”

The state robotics champs.

He said the team’s “can do attitude” makes them winners. “They believe they can and will succeed in every competition…the mentors of the program believe in this group of young people, we believe they can do anything they set their minds to, and they come through every time.”

Ben Webb said teams at competitions “get paired at random” and an “alliance” is formed, sometimes with people they’ve competed against. As a result, he said, a good part of the whole undertaking, including the competitions, requires “communication and collaboration.”

“This year could be our year,” said someone, as the robot raised its extension mechanism. They hope to be one of the top 25 teams to make it to the April FTC World Championship in St. Louis, Mo.

“Today it happens to be the robotics competition,” O’Brian observed. “Tomorrow it’s the model UN, the soccer program, the band performance, the play. Their attitude transcends everything they do; they are fun to be around.”

The post Mt. Everett robotics team wins 3rd state championship appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.

Great Barrington — The high school art teacher and the Early Kindergarten program are among a number of proposed programming cuts that are back in the game after the Berkshire Hills Regional School District School Committee reversed itself, voting 9-1 last night (March 5) to approve a budget that restores the nearly $250,000 in program and staff cuts that the committee had proposed just two weeks ago.

District voters in Stockbridge, Great Barrington and West Stockbridge must now agree to it at their town meetings this May.

Andrew Potter, center, and Dan Weston, right, listen as Fred Clark urges the committee to retain cuts to programs.

Committee member Frederick Clark was opposed; he thought there should be more cuts to avoid any hikes whatsoever in a budget that had already gone up around $860,000 from last year due to mostly unavoidable expenses like insurance and transportation cost increases.

The committee voted to approve a gross operating and capital budget of $24,611,728 (net $24,138,728), which for Great Barrington is a 7 percent increase ($911,342) from last year, and totaling $13,524,504. Stockbridge will see an 8 percent increase, and West Stockbridge, a .17 percent decrease due, in part, to enrollment declines.

Budget information can be accessed here, at the Berkshire Hills website.

Restored programming includes paraprofessionals and a classroom teacher to the Early Kindergarten program at Muddy Brook Regional Elementary School; the art instructor at Monument Mountain Regional High School; and the computer instructor at the Monument Valley Regional Middle School.

The finance subcommittee had, only a day earlier (March 4), learned that the district would receive $12,000 less in state aid than what the district had thought it would get.

“We did very well,” Superintendent Peter Dillon said, referring to the state’s reduction, “but [the Gov.] cut a whole range of grants.”

One of those was a $55,000 kindergarten grant, and the approved budget includes covering that cost.

Both finance subcommittee member Richard Dohoney and committee chair Stephen Bannon were the only two members who voted to approve the originally proposed budget that included the cuts.

“What was cut out of the budget would have stayed in at any cost if we thought there would have been a detrimental effect [on education],” Dohoney said, noting how carefully the cuts had been made with input by all three principals.

Some members of the finance subcommittee admitted flat out that the cuts were a politically inspired effort to lessen the blow to Great Barrington bank accounts. Yet an emotional public hearing on February 26 drew a crowd of parents and former students to support the district and rally against the cuts, while asking the committee for systemic changes to the operation of the district so it might avoid proposing similar programming carnage — or worse — in the future.

But a restoration of the cuts won out last night after that first vote failed and member Richard Bradway made a motion for a level program budget. “I’m done cutting for the sake of cutting,” he said. He wanted the committee to “start thinking about how to make fundamental changes in the district.”

Dohoney defended the cuts. “We have never sent a 7 percent increase to Great Barrington,” he said. “We’ve never gone over 5 percent. It was to address the unique set of numbers we were presented with this year.”

Yet after consideration, Dohoney was in favor of Bradway’s motion. “I think it does what we are charged with doing, delivering quality education to our kids without wasteful spending,” he said. “There is no wasteful spending in this budget — not a dime of it.”

“I agree with the role of the committee,” Fred Clark said, “but balancing it with available resources.”

A divided School Committee: Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee Chair Stephen Bannon (left) would have preferred trimming the 2016 Berkshire Hills school budget to placate Great Barrington voters; Rich Bradway (to his left), representative from Stockbridge, favored retaining programs that might have been eliminated.

“These last two years that balance is almost impossible,” Bannon said, noting cost escalations and reduced funding. He said he would “reluctantly” support restoring the cuts. “Fred is right. We need change. I’m not sure how we change this…this is a very scary time. I thought last year was bad — this is worse.”

“We’ve done a lot, but there was no way we can do enough to affect this year’s budget,” Bannon said of the movement the committee has made to address issues like tuition agreements and the district agreement.

Finance subcommittee member Bill Fields, a retired Monument High social studies teacher, was uneasy with the cuts from the get-go. “I think we send a message by passing this budget that we care about the community. It’s a tight budget, but it’s one I can support. We can stand by it and it defends our mission.”

“I feel we should send a message: we support quality of education,” he added.

The $1.8 million capital budget — which includes the outstanding debt for the construction of the elementary and middle schools — was voted on separately and received unanimous approval. It includes some borrowing for repairs and replacements, and the borrowing of $325,000 for repairing the track, tennis courts and 14 doors at the high school, among a few other things.

Dohoney didn’t like the idea of a fixed up tennis court next to “a high school in that condition,” and has said before that it may be prudent to find a way to have the track become a source of revenue. Yet he also acknowledged that both were in need of repair.

Bill Fields didn’t want to defer maintenance. He also said that the track and tennis courts were a “vital part of the physical education…life, sports…” and the idea of charging the community to use them would be tantamount to “quadruple taxation.”

The post Community push-back saves art, kindergarten programs at Berkshire Hills — for now appeared first on The Berkshire Edge.