INTRO TEXT COMING TOGETHER IN WESTERN MASS. To municipal administrators these days, the word “regionalization” is what “plastics” was to The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock: an easy, but just a little distasteful, buzzword that sums up the promise of the future. Like it or not, regionalization of services among the state’s 351 cities and towns now […]
B.J. Roche
Posted inEconomy
What works
LOCAL GROWERS COMPETE IN COLLEGE CAFETERIAS It used to be a source of frustration in small towns in western and central Massachusetts that the contract for school milk would go to out-of-town dairies because the cost was lower. But over the past five years, Dining Services at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst (where I teach) has […]
Posted inEnvironment, Politics
Dispatches
HISTORIC HANGAR AS THE NEW WALDEN POND? Ah, the civilized village of Concord. Home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and historic landmarks like the Old North Bridge, Walden Pond, and… Hangar 24? Yes, Concord town meeting voters recently won a skirmish with Massport without firing a shot. They added the decrepit (but, they […]
Posted inPolitics
Dispatches
THE $15 MILLION PARKING SPOT It’s one thing to figure out the tax bill for a homeowner’s new deck or rehabbed kitchen, but the board of assessors in the town of Rowe faced a more unusual valuation conundrum last year: Just what is the property value of 244 tons of nuclear waste? The waste is […]
Posted inPolitics
Dispatches
Pay up—and shut up? Under one school of thought, second-homeowners are a major asset to the Massachusetts economy. They pay property taxes, constantly renovate those second homes, and buy up all the heirloom tomatoes and artisanal goat cheese the natives can crank out, without requiring much in return in the way of services. But there’s […]
Posted inEconomy
Pleas for highspeed and wireless Internet await broadband chief
INTRO TEXT when teresa martin, head of the Cape Cod Technology Council, moved from Palo Alto, Calif., to become chief operating officer of a South Shore software company six years ago, she was eager for a new challenge, but not for the one she found when she got here. Her office was equipped with the […]
Posted inUncategorized
Second Act
Growth & Development Extra 2006 It took a year, back in the early part of the 20th century, to build the four-story, half-million-square-foot headquarters of the General Electric transformer division on the outskirts of downtown Pittsfield; now it’s expected to take a year to tear it down. GE chief Jack Welch earned the nickname “Neutron […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
Under Control
Consultant Carroll Buracker (left at microphone) gives the Springfield Finance Control Board his grade of the police department: “Dysfunctional with a capital ‘D.’” It was nearly a year after the city of Springfield, on the brink of bankruptcy, received a $52 million state loan, and the five-member Finance Control Board imposed by the state in […]
Posted inEducation
Preschool Promise
Everybody has them, but (it’s just a theory) women of a certain age may have them more than men do—those moments in life when you stop and ask yourself: “How did I get here?” Margaret Blood, who is now 46, had such a moment several years ago, the afternoon she met with Chad Gifford, then […]
Posted inHealth Care
First, do some good is the motto at this Berkshire agency
INTRO TEXT When Fran Alibozek of Adams learned she had colon cancer three years ago, she didn’t know which was more frightening, the fight she had ahead of her or the bill she’d undoubtedly run up in the process. Alibozek, who was 63 at the time, was working as a bagger at Stop & Shop, […]