THIS DOCUMENT WAS PRODUCED WITH CLAUDE AI USING A TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY COMMUNITY TELEVISION FOR THE SOUTHERN BERKSHIRES, AND HAS BEEN CORRECTED, EDITED AND AUGMENTED.

Corrections or suggestions for improvements may be included in comments below or sent to 413villagegreen@gmail.com.

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Meeting convened 6 pm, adjourned 6:52 pm

Link to CTSBTV video of meeting

The Berkshire Hills Regional School District School Committee closed out its school year at its final meeting of the season, approving a marine biology research trip to the Bahamas in April 2027, accepting two revised job descriptions, renaming an internal subcommittee, and formally accepting Superintendent Peter Dillon’s annual evaluation — unanimously on every vote.

Bahamas Research Trip Approved

The meeting’s presentation was by two Monument Mountain Regional High School biology teachers, Elsa Hernandez and Lucas Kisiel, who made a proposal to take 14 students to a shark research station in the Bahamas in early April 2027.

Hernandez, who attended the lab as a teacher fellow four years ago, described a daily rhythm of lectures — covering shark evolution, marine diversity, and conservation — followed by in-water fieldwork alongside working research scientists. Students would observe lemon shark nurseries, coral reef ecosystems, and a shipwreck site, with hammerhead sharks expected to pass through during the April window. The island is so isolated, she noted, that the lab brings in its own food and supplies.

The trip costs approximately $2,500 per student. Applicants must submit essays, parental confirmations, and teacher recommendations, and demonstrate strong swimming ability — with Superintendent Dillon suggesting an in-water swim test, “given recent local events.” Kisiel noted that students who participate will be expected to bring their learning back to the school through presentations and video documentation.

The committee voted unanimously to approve the trip. Chair Stephen Bannon praised the teachers’ willingness to take on the logistical burden. “If you listen to alumni at our school over the years, they always talk about experiences other than in school,” he said.

Principal Reports

Muddy Brook Elementary Principal Cynthia Carey offered an enthusiastic end-of-year report spanning every grade level. Her fourth graders wrapped up the year with a first-ever culmination trip to the Connecticut Science Museum, hosted the annual US Regions Fair and participated in a traditional "clapout" ceremony before a certificate celebration with families. Third graders took field trips to the Norman Rockwell Museum and The Mount.

First graders completed "Box Town," a project in which students built and ran their own miniature town out of large cardboard boxes then connected it to a walking field trip through downtown Great Barrington. Kindergartners attended a Monument Mountain High School performance of The Wind in the Willows, a cross-school connection Carey highlighted as particularly meaningful.

The building's new chiller system is installed but not yet commissioned, and two days of significant heat tested the school; Carey credited quick action — extra fans and ice pops for students — with getting them through it, alongside the middle school's offer to take in several classes on the hottest day.

Superintendent Dillon offered additional context later in the meeting on the chiller, saying they are still waiting for Carrier, the HVAC company through whom the district has the warranty for the chiller system, to come and officially start it up.

WEB DuBois Middle School principal Jake McCandless, retiring after two years at the helm, delivered a warm end-of-year report.

Eighth-grade graduation was a highlight: student speakers were singled out for praise, and McCandless noted with affection that within minutes of the ceremony ending, roughly 50 graduates in their dress clothes were shooting hoops in the back playground.

The Philadelphia trip for eighth graders was another success, with McCandless crediting parents who fundraised to ensure every student who wanted to go could attend regardless of financial circumstances. Fourth graders from the elementary school visited the middle school for a move-up day, where fifth and sixth grade chorus students performed and conducted what McCandless described as "serious recruiting" to keep chorus numbers strong.

McCandless also noted that the district has been conducting tours for prospective families interested in enrolling in Berkshire Hills, and that interviews for the incoming middle school principal, Seth Levin, are underway with a goal of ensuring a smooth handoff before the new school year.

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Monument Mountain Regional High school principal Christopher Barnes reported a successful end-of-year season including prom, senior barbecue, awards, and commencement, thanking senior advisers Brian Leslie and Casey Wilton. He highlighted a meaningful data point: the school’s chronic absenteeism rate dropped from 33 percent last year to 28 percent this year, a 16 percent reduction. Barnes credited Pete Lergio and Nicole Cast with driving consistent implementation of the attendance tracking effort, while acknowledging more work remains.

Superintendent Dillon recognized several retirees, including two staff members — Matt McDermott and Doreen Twiss — who had each logged more than 40 years of service to the district.

Dillon noted that the August 13 school committee meeting has been cancelled; the next meetings will be in July and late August.

He also previewed a detailed post-secondary placement report for the following meeting, describing promising student outcomes across college, trade schools, the military, and employment.

Superintendent Evaluation

Andy Potter, presenting on behalf of the evaluation subcommittee, moved to advance Dillon’s completed annual evaluation to the full committee.

The evaluator summary described the year as “remarkable,” citing the November 2025 passage of the $89 million Monument Mountain high school building project as “a generational achievement in community leadership,” along with a new evidence-based elementary literacy curriculum secured through a grant. The summary flagged continued challenges in chronic absenteeism and MCAS results in ELA and math at the high school, and identified four areas for forward focus: instructional recovery at the high school, earlier budget engagement with elected officials, launching building-based advisory structures in 2026–27, and investment in administrative development.

The committee voted unanimously to accept the evaluation. The subcommittee indicated it plans to add a midyear review component in January and recruit one additional member ahead of the November reorganization.

Other Business

The committee voted unanimously to accept a donation from the middle school student council — a wall-mounted monitor for the main hallway to display announcements, achievements, and daily messages, fully funded by the council through revenue from dances and school events.

Two revised job descriptions — district maintenance supervisor and skilled maintenance worker — were approved unanimously. Changes included removing a contractor’s license requirement for the supervisor role and deleting a uniform storage duty from the skilled maintenance position, now obsolete after storage space above the high school theater catwalk was decommissioned.

The committee voted unanimously to rename its finance subcommittee the “Budget Planning Working Group,” resolving longstanding confusion with municipal finance committees in member towns. Vice Chair Dohoney, who proposed the change, noted the group functions as a working session for the superintendent and district finance staff — not a formal oversight body — and that community members in Great Barrington in particular had been arriving with mismatched expectations.

Dillon encouraged committee members to attend the Massachusetts Association of School Committees annual conference November 4–6 in Danvers, noting a new state education commissioner will be present and describing the gathering as an opportunity to build advocacy connections across the state on education funding.

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Praise for Jake McCandless:

Chairman Steve Bannon: “We appreciate what you did for our district, by coming in, and the school is in great shape for the next principal.”

Jason St. Peter reiterated thanks, especially for McCandless’ “stabilization” of the middle school, and said he could not overstate his gratitude.

McCandless, for his part, closed his final report with a personal note: “I don’t think many people get to honestly say that the last two years of their professional career were the best and most meaningful years of their career. I get to say that.”

Next meeting:

Summer vacation has begun.

The committee’s next meeting will be in July, and the August 13 meeting has been cancelled.

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“Touch grass” is a reminder to urbanites to get outside, as though that brief interlude of natural air and sun and greenery were a cigarette break for the soul before heading back inside, where real life happens.

It ain’t me.

I’m a country girl, the kind who, on a best kind of day, lies in the grass so long I forget to touch the computer. I am at home in the natural world thanks to my urban transplant parents, especially my dad. Before I was born he chose land in Egremont based on its potential for siting a house that would overlook the clear, cold Green River.

I’ve only recently come to understand the extent to which my imaginative early life centered around the river. It was the setting for my most memorable games, make believe and birthday parties, for my most beautiful dreams and scariest nightmares.

As for Dad, he was Brooklyn through and through, so when he landed on the river, in the middle of the fields and forests, it brought out of him an oddball paranoia as well as a particular kind of outdoorsmanship.

Our house was set at the center of four massive corn fields, and it was the only one visible for three hundred acres, but each night at dusk he made us lock the doors and pull tight the curtains. Woe to the family member who left the house open to fetch the mail. (The neighborhood norm, as exemplified by my two closest friends — one two miles away and one six miles away — was to not know where the house keys were.)

With mother nature he behaved as a sort of steward/ conquistador. First and foremost, he took enormous pleasure in trees. On our walks around the land, always taken with a superfluous walking stick, he’d point out the shimmery quaking aspen, the loveliness of the word ‘sycamore,’ and, of course, his own contributions to the flora of the place.

He hated the idea of wantonly killing a tree, so for many Decembers in my childhood we had in our foyer a live white spruce, balsam fir or fraser fir, its root ball carefully wrapped in burlap sacks and placed in a big barrel. After the holidays he’d have them planted at intervals along the western side of our long driveway, and he tracked their growth through the years, keeping a detailed map of them with their Latin names, along with a binder full of leaves to identify the property’s deciduous trees.

Some other forms of Dad’s grass-touching, however, involved premeditated murder.

On warm summer evenings he’d take the jar of formaldehyde he kept on a shelf just outside the front door and stroll leisurely around, plucking Japanese beetles one by one off the bushes and shrubs and flowers that lined the edge of the house and pool fence. He’d crush his victims between his fat thumb and forefinger and silently count them as he dropped them in the liquid, filled with his other victims. An announcement of his kill total completed the ritual.

To destructive nests of tree caterpillars he took a blowtorch. To deal with mosquitoes he was an early adopter of the electrified zapper, which he kept on his deck, the back porch, and at the pool, in both standing and swatter forms. When squirrels bullied the birds away from the bird feeder he put a baffle on top of it. When that didn’t work he put on another baffle, then another, and another, always believing the next one would do the trick, until finally there was nothing left to do but shoot the bastards. He did this at least once from the blind he’d set up for his rifle on the desk in his upstairs office, between the word processor and photocopier.

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The Green River was, to me, a bottomless container of delights, the best playground a child could ask for, but when I was ten Dad hired the nearest neighbor on our “block” to blast away the ledge that was getting in the way of his backyard pool. Once that was done and the concrete poured and the chemical water inserted, the pool came unnaturally alive, buzzing and gurgling and making switching on and off sounds, like an alien with sleep apnea.

My job was to check the filter, and each day I steeled myself to face a bucketful of dead and dying creatures. Always frogs, toads and grasshoppers. Often salamanders, less often a mouse, chipmunk or squirrel. If I’d gone a few days without checking I might find several grotesquely bloated mammal corpses swirling in the grass. Once a raccoon drowned and got stuck half in and half out, as though it had gone exploring through a magic filter portal, and found its butt was too big to fit through. (I called in Dad to deal with that.)

I felt most sorry about the waterlogged toads. Sometimes I’d put them out on the dry boards of the deck, hoping the sun would revive them.

After 1982 I left the river, and my summer life revolved around that pool and its splintery deck, slide, and yellow plastic lounge chairs. Our birthday and end-of-school-year parties moved there and remained there. When I was an ESL teacher, I hosted groups of international students there. My babies learned to swim there. The night of my sister’s wedding in 2009 we floated little candles on the pool water.

But for many years now thoughts of my past do not bring the pool to mind. Nor the house, nor any other manmade thing. I think of the matching river rock islands my sister and I played on, the crawfish like mini-lobsters that I looked for under rocks, the miraculous apparition of a school of minnows in the shallows, and water striders gliding impossibly on top of a stagnant pool. I remember rainbow trout shimmying side by side in the current, and stopping on the bridge to watch them, every day. My God, what a lucky girl I was.

If my father had decided to remain at St. John’s Law School instead of Albany Law School, if he and my mother had decided to be second home owners in Egremont rather than first, who would I be today? There is no me without the river. Life becomes, eventually, a litany of loss. There’s no recouping the friends and parties of my childhood and young adulthood, there’s no finding again a carefree, childish approach to life, but the river flows, and the rainbow trout shimmy, apace. I just saw a crawfish along the shore at Hurlburt Road last week.

I’m a pilgrim at the river because of Dad.

I miss him, and I love him for all of him, the visionary part and the controlling part, the violent and the gentle, but especially, this summer, for having set my life’s scene. He was a city boy who kept a map of 11 Brooklyn addresses alongside a map of majestic trees. He was not a humble man generally, but he could not help but adopt the posture when he stood under a tree, and looked up, and took note of its particular grandeur.

His legacy is a textbook for lawyers, and also a daughter who loves sycamores, quaking aspen, mountain laurel, sweet fern and roadside forget-me-nots, who’s learning to distinguish the veery’s song from the vireo’s, who swims in the Green River all year long.

Corrections may be included in comments below or sent to 413villagegreen@gmail.com.

CONVENED 5:00 PM, ADJOURNED 8:17 pm

LINK TO VIDEO OF MEETING

LINK TO AGENDA AND MEETING DOCUMENTS

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Article 1: Citizens’ Petition — VOTE RESULTS

Finance Committee

Lifeguards (Lake Mansfield) — $61,285
Unanimous positive (02:39:42–02:39:54)

Skate Park Monitor (Railroad Street Youth Project) — $32,679
Unanimous positive (02:40:10–02:40:35)

Co-Responder Program — $100,000
Unanimous positive (02:41:19–02:41:41)

Parking Enforcement Officer — $20,000
Passed, 3-1 (02:41:43–02:42:09)

VFW Property Lease — $30,000
Unanimous positive (02:42:11–02:42:32)

American Legion Property Lease — $23,000
Unanimous positive (02:42:32–02:42:53)

Housatonic Water Works Legal Fees — $75,000
Failed, 2-2 tie → negative recommendation (02:44:31–02:45:07)

Select Board

Housatonic Water Works Legal Fees — $75,000
Passed, 3-2 (02:40:46–02:41:11)

Lifeguards (Lake Mansfield) — $61,285
Passed, 4-1 (02:43:02–02:43:33)

Skate Park Monitor (Railroad Street Youth Project) — $32,679
Passed, 3-2 (02:43:54–02:44:29)

Co-Responder Program — $100,000
Passed (02:45:42–02:45:57)

Parking Enforcement Officer — $20,000
Passed, 3-2 (02:46:01–02:46:53)

VFW Property Lease — $30,000
Unanimous positive (02:47:02–02:47:11)

American Legion Property Lease — $23,000
Unanimous positive (02:47:11–02:47:42)

Article 2 — $1 million free cash set-aside for Marais litigation against the town for unpaid invoices, the subject of the forensic procurement audit. VOTE RESULTS

Select Board:

• Original $1 million motion fails outright — 02:54:23–02:55:36, recorded as a unanimous “negative recommendation” vote (all members voting “yes” to the negative motion)

• Motion for $900,000 made — 02:56:36–02:56:55

• Amendment to reduce to $500,000 — 02:59:21–02:59:54, passed

• Main motion at $500,000 — 02:59:54–03:00:50, passed 3-2

Finance Committee:

• $500,000 motion and vote — 02:51:54–02:53:39 — passed 3-2

Article 3 — $200,000 legal/consultant fees from stabilization- VOTE RESULTS

Finance Committee:

• Amendment proposed to cut to $100,000, then withdrawn — 03:03:08–03:03:09

• Vote on original $200,000 — 03:03:28–03:03:42 — passed (recorded as unanimous “yes”)

Select Board:

• $200,000 motion, no recorded second initially, then resolved — 03:03:42–03:03:59 — passed unanimously

Article 4 — Southern Berkshire Ambulance Squad funding request, $86,899 - VOTE RESULTS

Finance Committee: 03:04:18–03:06:08 — passed 3-1

Select Board: 03:11:13–03:11:28 — passed 4-1

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MEETING SUMMARY NARRATIVE

The Great Barrington Select Board and Finance Committee, meeting jointly on June 16 to set recommendations for the June 29 Special Town Meeting warrant, voted down a proposed $1 million free cash set-aside tied to the town’s ongoing litigation with contractor Marais Construction, instead approving a reduced $500,000 reserve after extensive debate over the CBIZ forensic audit findings, the town’s bond rating, and the fallout from May’s failed Proposition 2½ override.

This, Article 2, was the most consequential vote of the night, the largest dollar figure on the warrant.

The Finance Committee approved $500,000 by a 3-2 vote.

Correction & Addendum — Article 2, Free Cash Set-Aside

A previous version of this summary reported the Select Board’s vote on the Article 2 free cash set-aside as passing 3-2 at $500,000, without detailing the motion sequence. Select Board member Eric Gabriel has since clarified the record.

According to Gabriel, he made the original motion to set aside $900,000. Fellow Select Board member Phil Orenstein then moved to amend that figure down to $500,000. Gabriel and Garfield Reed voted against the amended $500,000 motion — not because they opposed reserving funds, but because they believed the town should set aside the full original amount owed in connection with the Marais litigation; Reed had pushed to hold the figure at $1 million.

Town Manager Liz Hartsgrove had recommended setting aside funds from free cash rather than borrowing, citing the town’s already-strained debt capacity and warning that further reliance on borrowing would compound the budget pressure created by the override’s defeat.

Town Counsel David Doneski confirmed that if the town loses or settles the Marais lawsuit by court judgment, the remaining balance could be financed through a multi-year borrowing authorization similar to one recently used by the Town of Dedham, but cautioned the board not to assume a favorable repayment term.

Article 3, a related $200,000 appropriation from stabilization for legal and consultant fees tied to the litigation, passed with both boards’ support. The Finance Committee briefly considered an amendment to cut the figure to $100,000, which was withdrawn , before passing the original $200,000 figure. The Select Board passed the same figure shortly after.

On Article 1, the citizens’ petition covering seven separate funding requests, both boards largely aligned, though they voted on each line item separately. (Voters at the June 29th meeting will have the option of taking each line item separately as well.)

The Finance Committee gave unanimous positive recommendations to lifeguards at Lake Mansfield, $61,285, the Railroad Street Youth Project skate park monitor, $32,679, the co-responder mental health program, $100,000, the VFW property lease, $30,000, and the American Legion property lease, $23,000.

The committee split on the parking enforcement officer line, passing it 3-1. The Housatonic Water Works legal fees request, $75,000, failed on a 2-2 tie, producing a negative recommendation.

The Select Board then took up the same seven items, approving lifeguards 4-1, the skate park monitor 3-2, the co-responder program unanimously, parking enforcement 3-2, and both veterans’ organization leases unanimously.

Notably, the Select Board passed the Housatonic Water Works legal fees request 3-2, directly diverging from the Finance Committee’s negative recommendation on the same line item — leaving the two boards’ official positions in conflict heading into the special town meeting.

Article 4, the Southern Berkshire Ambulance Squad’s supplemental request for $86,899 to bring its assessment back up to the originally requested $414,000 level, passed both boards: Finance Committee 3-1, Select Board 4-1.

SBAS Chief Kevin Wall noted the squad is the only paramedic-level provider south of Lee.

Tension ran highest during discussion of the forensic audit, which several board members said they had only received the day of the meeting. Select Board member Michelle stated flatly that she would not support either Article 2 or Article 3, calling the underlying procurement failures due to ignorance of procurement law. Finance Committee member Phil Orenstein and others pushed back on assumptions about the town’s good odds of winning in litigation against the contractor, noting the forensic report did not review email correspondence between staff and Marais that would likely impact their legal position.

Town Manager Liz Hartsgrove emphasized, in response to a question from Finance Committee member Reo Matsuzaki about how to prevent such debacles in the future, that she has already implemented new sign-off and procurement tracking systems.

The boards had entered this budget cycle with a stated goal — first laid out at the June 9th joint meeting — of weaning the town off reliance on free cash and borrowing, targeting a healthy free cash band of roughly $817,000 to $1.14 million. Board members acknowledged that the Marais litigation reserve runs counter to that goal, since the town is now drawing down free cash and discussing new borrowing in the same breath it had hoped to avoid both.

Public Comment

Public comment was divided into two phases.

Before the votes, Erica Jaffe of Berkshire South Regional Community Center spoke in support of lifeguard funding, citing the program’s 20-year safety record at Lake Mansfield. Former Police Chief Paul Storti spoke in support of the co-responder program and noted the parking program’s modest net revenue. A VFW Post 8183 representative described the post’s role supporting veterans and community organizations. Eric Bruun and Ananda Timpane of the Railroad Street Youth Project spoke in support of skate park funding.

Jim Bailly asked first about year-end budget rollover figures during board discussion.

Later, during Citizens Speak, Bailly called for ending the Community Preservation Act and alleged he had been given a false answer by a former town official regarding excavation costs at the Prosperity Way project, asserting a documented pattern of poor procurement practice. Ananda Timpane returned during Citizens Speak to clarify that ending the CPA would not free funds for the operating budget without a separate override vote, and to clarify the history of the prior Housatonic Water Works town meeting vote. Peter Most spoke against setting aside Housatonic Water Works legal fees and argued the town holds a strong legal position in the Marais litigation, urging the boards to leave the funds in free cash rather than reserve them. Ken Schumacher suggested the town raise the full amount needed and return any unused funds to taxpayers via a reduced tax rate. John Breasted defended suspended Assistant Town Manager Christopher Rembold, saying responsibility for the procurement failures lay with a former town manager, not Rembold. James (Garzon) echoed support for Rembold’s performance as interim town manager.

What happens next

The warrant article recommendations, including the divided vote on Housatonic Water Works legal fees, head to Special Town Meeting on June 29, where voters can amend dollar amounts downward but not above the figures set on the warrant. Hartsgrove indicated free cash certification is now targeted for November, which will inform the FY28 budget process. The Prosperity Way project in Housatonic was flagged for a second audit review.

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Agenda for the meeting

Link to video of meeting

Convened 7 pm, adjourned 7:33 pm

Full selectboard in attendance: Lee Buttala, Chair, Patrick Silk and Robert Kilmer

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Key decisions (with timestamps):

• 0:00 — Meeting called to order; items 6, 8, and 10 removed from agenda.

• 0:28 — Meeting minutes approved (two sets for 5/5/26, one each for 5/14/26, 5/18/26, 5/19/26).

• 1:06–4:03 — Three National Grid pole hearings opened, discussed, and approved: Home Road (midspan pole between poles 35/36), South Under Mountain Road (midspan pole between poles 157/158), and Sheffield Plain Road/Route 7 (new pole to serve an ADU at 616 Sheffield Plain Road). A resident, David Klein, raised a safety concern at the S. Under Mountain Road hearing about dead trees along the road that National Grid and MassDOT have each disclaimed responsibility for; board noted the concern but took no action.

• 10:56 — Board accepted Lee Buttala’s resignation from the Ashley Falls Historic District Commission, with thanks for his service.

• 11:48–24:39 — At 12:11 Selectman Patrick Silk moved to accept SEK’s service quote of $18,500 for cyclical assessments.

  Approved at 24:39 (after lengthy, pointed pushback) a $18,500 contract expansion with SEK for 75 additional cyclical property inspections. Board of Assessors members Robert Fire and Lou Levine objected that they hadn’t been formally notified or consulted, calling for the item to be deferred for a joint meeting.

  The Select Board acknowledged a communication breakdown but declined to delay, citing state-mandated cyclical assessment requirements and prior informal discussion three weeks earlier.

  Motion passed; Town Administrator authorized to sign.

  * See below for further detail on the assessment question.

• 25:05 — Approved $6,000 contract with Crowley Associates for three easement appraisals related to the Kelsey Road Bridge project.

• 27:08 — Declined to opt into extended alcohol sale hours under the new ABCC option, citing no demand; one member recused.

• 27:08 — Approved FY2027 board/committee/commission appointments as read (long list, ~25 positions).

• 29:08 — Reviewed current vacancies across boards/commissions (agricultural commission, conservation commission, ZBA, planning board alternate, etc.); residents encouraged to apply.

• 31:17 — Approved contract with Berkshire Regional Planning Commission for the town’s comprehensive plan (grant-funded, $5,000 town match).

• 32:35: Buttala announced a pancake breakfast at Dewey Hall in support of the Fire Department. $10 for adults and $5 for kids, from 8 am to 11 am.

• 33:13 — Public comment: resident of Foley Road followed up on easement plans for the Kelsey Road Bridge project, requesting full-size copies; staff to provide by Wednesday.

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* ADDITIONAL CONTEXT FOR FUNDING MOTION FOR CYCLICAL ASSESSMENTS, THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL DISCUSSION OF THE MEETING:

Issue: The town assessing department is behind on state-mandated reassessments due to staffing turnover and a rocky software migration, with the proposed fix surfacing tension between the Board of Assessors and Selectboard on process and communication.

The “serious problem” being referenced around minute 18 is the town’s backlog on cyclical property assessments. Sheffield, like all other Massachusetts towns, is required by state law to reassess every property on a 10-year cycle, and the board acknowledged it has fallen well behind on that schedule.

Several threads compound the problem:

• The assessor’s office has had ongoing staffing/personnel turnover (”a lot of different employment issues right now”), which both sides agree has hampered the work.

• A software transition went poorly, which appears to have disrupted or delayed assessment records and contributed to the backlog.

• This came to a head when the office had to process 85 abatements, exposing how far behind the cyclical schedule had slipped.

  Analysis:

  What started as a routine contract vote turned into a pointed airing of grievances once Robert Fire, a Board of Assessors member, stood up and said he had no idea what was being discussed or why he hadn’t been notified. Lou Levine — who introduced himself with, ”I believe that I’m a chair of the board of assessors” — pressed harder, arguing the proposal should have gone before the full Board of Assessors first rather than arriving at the Select Board as a done deal.

  Town Administrator Rhonda LaBombard acknowledged a meeting had happened three weeks earlier touching on this, but Fire and Levine maintained that informal conversation didn’t constitute proper notice to the board as a body — and at one point, the Select Board remindED them that with both of them present and discussing it, they were arguably constituting an unposted quorum of their own board.

  Both sides agreed the underlying assessment backlog is real and serious; the friction was over whether the fix had been run through the right hands before money moved.

  The Village Green News is a reader-supported publication. To support hyperlocal news, please become a subscriber today, and share this summary with your Sheffield neighbors.

June 11 SBRSD School Committee Meeting:

Is there actually a $2.5 million surplus? Plus parents ask if New Marlborough Central School have to eliminate its 3rd grade.

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*

FROM THE GAZEBO #6

Here’s Episode #6 of From the Gazebo, an interview with local independent journalist Bill Shein about his recent reporting on 347 Main Street, Great Barrington.

And here’s Bill’s Reason Gone Mad article expanding on the same subject, also published June 10th.

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SUMMARY OF GREAT BARRINGTON SELECTBOARD AND FINANCE COMMITTEE MEETING

Here’s our AI-assisted summary of the June 9 meeting, which previews a larger discussion that will take place on June 16th on the results of a forensic audit into a DPW contract that has the town on the hook for $1 million.

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SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT FOR THE WEEK OF JUNE 8-12: THE COMMON PUB

Enjoy our most popular story of the week, an inside look at the reinvigorated Common Pub in Housatonic, which is buzzing with activity.

World Cup fans, check out their Instagram for updates on upcoming games.

Corrections may be offered in comments below or sent to 413villagegreen@gmail.com.

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SBRSD School Committee Meeting — June 11, 2026

Convened 6:01 p.m, adjourned 8:00 pm

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LINK TO CTSB TV RECORDING OF JUNE 11 SBRSD MEETING

KEY DECISIONS

• School Committee calendar approved (with amendment): The FY 2026–27 meeting calendar was adopted with the August meeting moved from the 27th to the 20th, ahead of the first day of school. Carl abstained; all others voted yes. The committee also agreed to explore adding a second July meeting to support governance training and team-building.

• Next regular meeting rescheduled: The June 25th meeting was moved to Monday, June 22nd at 6 p.m. to allow committee members to attend the Monterey Special Town Meeting that same evening. Passed unanimously.

• Superintendent goals amendment approved: A retroactive change to Goal 3, Objective 4 was approved — language was amended from “support the superintendent” to “support the leadership team” in providing training and resources. Kim abstained; all others voted yes.

• Incoming business administrator stipend approved: The committee approved up to six days of pre-start compensation for incoming Business Administrator Myers to overlap with outgoing contractor Open Architects before their contract expires June 30th. Passed with apparent unanimity after Bonnie withdrew her initial objection.

• Special town meetings confirmed: Alford (June 23), Monterey (June 25), Sheffield/Egremont/New Marlborough (June 29), all at 6 p.m.

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  SBRSD School Committee Meeting Summary:

The Southern Berkshire Regional School District School Committee met Thursday, June 11 for what Chair Julie Hannum hoped would be a routine session.

It was not.

Is there actually a budget surplus?

A possible $2.5 million year-end budget surplus surfaced with no business manager present to explain it.

[00:24:28] Committee member Kim Alcantara raised the alarm during the business manager’s report, citing a roll-forward document she had requested since April and only recently received.

Based on those figures, she said, the district appeared to have roughly $2.5 million unspent with only weeks left in the fiscal year — potentially more than the $1.7 million in reductions in force (RIFs) that destabilized the district this spring.

“Why the heck did we RIF people?” Alcantara said.

No business manager was present for questions so the question was not resolved. Both Board Chair Julie Hannum and SBRSD Superintendent Brian Ricca acknowledged the concern but said they could not provide answers that evening.

The committee discussed whether a special meeting might be needed before the town meetings to resolve the discrepancy. (It is not clear if the newly-scheduled June 22 meeting would serve that purpose.)

Status of New Marlborough Third Grade

[00:16:03] Public comment opened with two New Marlborough parents raising urgent concerns about the school’s future. Kristen Mallory, a New Marlborough Central School parent, told the committee she had learned through a school choice projection chart included in the meeting packet — not through direct communication — that the 3rd grade at New Marlborough was listed at zero enrollment for FY27.

“I am deeply concerned about the future New Marlborough school in light of the decisions that have been made with respect to staffing and budget cuts…. I feel compelled to ask for more clarity.

She was referring to a chart in the meeting packet with a list of projected enrollment numbers for all the grades in all the SBRSD schools, and the 3rd grade at the New Marlborough school indicated 0 students. “Given that there are currentst sts enrolled in 2nd grade expecting to matriculate into 3rd grade, we don’t understand why this is here.”

Mallory offered that the New Marlborough PTA had funds it believed could cover the cost of a paraprofessional salary to help retain students.

“I feel like this is a huge fail….I just ask that you be honest with us.”

She ended her comments with, “I am deeply saddened that I had to learn this through a packet that is buried in an attachment at a School Committee meeting.”

Later on in the meeting Elizabeth Evans, a Monterey parent of a 2nd grader at New Marlborough, echoed those concerns and asked whether the committee would bring any formal elimination of the grade before the full board for a vote, as was done when fourth grade was previously restructured. She reiterated that the PTA was prepared to help with funding a position if that were allowed.

“If transparency is truly a priority, families deserve clear communication when decisions are being considered that could fundamentally alter their children's educational experience.” Evans said.

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[01:12:41] When the committee reached the FY27 school choice projection chart on the agenda, Superintendent Ricca confirmed the third grade reduction had been contemplated in the budget, with five students currently projected. He said no final decision had been made and that any decision would be communicated to families, staff, and the committee. Alcantara pushed back on the process, arguing that structural grade-level changes have historically come before the school committee first.

The exchange grew tense.

“This school committee this year — the division is about the fact that all the processes are being ignored over and over and over again,” Alcantara said.

[00:11:26] Public Comment and Conduct

Before public comment opened, Hannum addressed the committee and community directly, disclosing she had consulted outside counsel about the chair’s authority to maintain civility during public comment after recent meetings turned personal and, in her words, “distasteful.” She apologized to colleagues for not intervening sooner and said she has been encouraged to use the gavel going forward.

Public commenter Kevin Fish commented twice. In the first comment he said he had lost confidence in district leadership over the past six months, citing “chaos, divisiveness” and what he described as a pattern of prioritizing administrative positions and raises over classroom staff. With the second, toward the end of the meeting, he was more upset, and pleaded with the committee to come to clarity around their budget, saying, “We need to decide if we can stay here, if this is in the best interest of our kids!”

[00:38:20] Alleged Staff Incident

During the superintendent’s report, committee member Carl Stewart raised an allegation that a district faculty member used a “rude and sexist word” in front of a student approximately two weeks prior, and that he had witnessed the child’s distress afterward. Stewart asked whether an investigation had been opened.

Superintendent Ricca said he had not witnessed the incident and was only aware of it third-hand, and that no investigation had been initiated. He offered to consult counsel “to see if it’s appropriate to investigate that” and report back at the next meeting.

[1:09:22] School Choice Projections

Superintendent Ricca presented the FY27 school choice projection chart, which shows projected enrollment and available openings across the district’s schools pre-K through 12. The chart had already become the focus of public comment due to the zero listed for New Marlborough third grade, which Ricca acknowledged was a contemplated reduction but not a final decision.

The broader school choice discussion that followed covered several practical questions: whether the committee formally approves school choice placements (only pre-K requires committee approval), how class size maximums are set (based on current staffing, not a formal policy), and whether the district adequately advertises its available openings to prospective families.

A related question emerged around whether SBRSD schools are actually attracting out-of-district school choice students.

Alcantara raised the issue, noting that the projection chart appeared to show all enrolled students at some schools — including Egremont — as in-district residents, with no outside choice students. Ricca said he would follow up with specifics but noted that Egremont draws heavily from within the southern Berkshire district.

The committee reflected on the fact that there was a time when Egremont's pre-K program drew roughly a 50/50 split between in-district and out-of-district students — a balance that has apparently shifted significantly. The concern underneath the discussion was pointed: a district facing enrollment decline and budget pressure is not actively marketing itself to families who could choose to enroll, and the projection chart suggests it may not be drawing them either. No action was taken, but the committee flagged proactive school choice outreach as something to address going forward.*

Other Business

The committee approved a stipend of up to six days’ pay for incoming Business Administrator Myers to overlap with outgoing contractor Open Architects before their contract expires June 30th. Bonnie Silvers initially questioned whether the overlap should be uncompensated but withdrew her objection. The motion passed.

The committee retroactively approved a minor amendment to superintendent Goal 3, Objective 4, changing “support the superintendent” to “support the leadership team” in providing staff training and resources.

Alcantara abstained; all others voted yes.

The FY26-27 school committee calendar was adopted with one change: the August meeting was moved from the 27th to the 20th, ahead of the start of school. The committee also voted to move its June 25th meeting to June 22nd to allow members to attend the Monterey special town meeting. Both motions passed.

The district received preliminary approval for a genocide education grant supporting curriculum mapping for grades 5–12 in partnership with UMass Amherst. Director of Curriculum reported positive early results from the Ignite phonics tutoring program serving K–3 students below grade level, which the district plans to continue next year. Director of Student Services Jonathan Bruno reported a successful all-schools field day held earlier that day.

Enrollment district-wide stands at approximately 590 students, down from 764 eleven years ago.* The committee flagged enrollment trends as a priority topic for a summer retreat.

What Happens Next

The committee meets Monday, June 22nd at 6 p.m., with a negotiation subcommittee session at 5 p.m.

Special town meetings in district towns run June 23rd through June 29th.

The committee has flagged that no business manager will be available to cover the Sheffield and New Marlborough/Egremont simultaneous meetings on June 29th; coverage plans are unresolved.

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* Additional Context: 18 SBRSD students have applied in recent months through school choice to attend schools in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District for the 2026-27 school year, according to Superintendent Peter Dillon.

In the wake of the release of a forensic audit report on a Great Barrington Department of Public Works contract, along with a related lawsuit filed against the town by Morais Contractors out of Springfield, both the Town Planner Chris Rembold and DPW Superintendent Joseph Aberdale have been placed on paid administrative leave.

Eric Gabriel, Vice Chair of the Selectboard, confirmed the news to the Village Green.

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READ THE REPORT OF THE FORENSIC AUDITOR HERE

(The report begins on page 5 of the materials, which were provided in anticipation of the June 9th joint meeting of the Selectboard and Finance Committee.)

THIS DOCUMENT WAS PRODUCED WITH CLAUDE AI AND HAS BEEN CORRECTED, EDITED AND AUGMENTED.

Corrections may be included in comments below or sent to 413villagegreen@gmail.com.

MEETING CONVENED AT 6 PM AND ADJOURNED AT 7:11 PM

1) Summary of Meeting

2) Summary of CBIZ audit report

*

1) Summary of Meeting

Great Barrington Boards Vote Unanimously to Set June 29 Special Town Meeting Warrant

Forensic audit findings, a contractor lawsuit, and town finances on the edge dominated a tense joint session

LINK TO MEETING DOCUMENTS, WHICH INCLUDE WARRANT AND CBIZ AUDIT REPORT

The Great Barrington Select Board voted 5-0 Monday evening to place three articles on the warrant for the June 29 Special Town Meeting — but not before a joint session with the Finance Committee laid bare the town’s precarious fiscal position, surfaced sharp disagreement over litigation strategy, and produced some charged exchanges.

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The vote came approximately 53 minutes into the meeting. Select Board Chair Steve Bannon called for the motion after public comment; it passed on a roll call with Phil Orenstein, Garfield Reed, Eric Gabriel, Ben Elliott, and Bannon all voting aye. (No Finance Committee recommendation on any of the three articles was made Monday night; both boards agreed those recommendations will come at a joint session June 16, because, as Bannon noted, the articles are financially intertwined and cannot be evaluated separately.)

What’s on the Warrant

Town Manager Liz Hartsgrove walked both boards through the three articles at the top of the meeting.

1. A citizen petition — the one that triggered the Special Town Meeting itself — to appropriate $341,954 from free cash to reinstate seven budget items cut after the Proposition 2½ override failed: lifeguards at Lake Mansfield, skate park monitors, Housatonic Water Works legal costs, the co-responder program, a parking enforcement officer, and leases for the VFW and American Legion properties.

2. A citizen petition to appropriate $86,899 from free cash for Southern Berkshire Ambulance Service, also cut after the override failed.

3. A Select Board-sponsored article to set aside $1 million from free cash and $200,000 from the general stabilization fund to cover potential payment obligations, legal costs, and related expenses tied to the town’s forensic procurement investigation into a 2024 street reconstruction contract with Morais Contractors Inc.

Hartsgrove noted that citizen petition language cannot be altered by the town before it reaches voters — what was submitted is what goes on the warrant. She also clarified, in response to a question from Finance Committee member Michelle Loubert, that voters at town meeting can amend articles on the floor, change the sequence in which articles are taken up, or exclude individual line items from a bundled article.

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The Math Doesn’t Add Up — At Least Not All at Once

[~7:47 into meeting] The most clarifying moment of Hartsgrove’s presentation came when she stated the arithmetic plainly: the town’s current certified free cash balance is $1,390,923.95. The total proposed appropriations across all three articles are $1,428,863. Town meeting cannot legally vote the fund into deficit.

“There’s no possible way you can approve all three the way they’re written,” Hartsgrove said. “There’s no legal way. It cannot be done. Something’s gotta give.”

She presented scenario tables showing what various combinations of approvals would leave in reserves, noting that the state Department of Revenue recommends municipalities maintain free cash at five to seven percent of their general operating budget. Some scenarios would push Great Barrington as low as 1.86 percent.

“That makes me very nervous,” Hartsgrove said.

The stabilization fund picture is already troubled. Its current balance of $780,509.49 represents 4.78 percent of the operating budget — already below the DOR floor. Withdrawing $200,000 for the procurement article would drop it to 3.55%. Hartsgrove recommended that if free cash is certified at a healthier level later this year, the town adopt a formal policy for FY2028 of depositing $200,000 annually back into the stabilization fund to begin rebuilding it.

Select Board member Ben Elliott raised the town’s bond rating, asking whether depleting free cash further risked another downgrade. Hartsgrove said she couldn’t speak to what rating analysts would do, but acknowledged that demonstrating instability “doesn’t look favorable” — and that analysts look specifically at free cash, stabilization reserves, liquidity, and financial flexibility.

Great Barrington’s bond rating was reduced in October 2025, from AAA to AA+. The town had held an AAA rating for nine consecutive years prior to the downgrade. Hartsgrove said the cause was partly a reconfigured rating matrix and the town’s broader economic situation.

The Procurement Scandal Takes Over

Although Selectboard Chair Bannon had tried to defer conversation about the audit report until the June 16th meeting, it was the elephant in the room, and soon intruded.

[~29:25 into meeting] Finance Committee member Michelle Loubert, who said she had been studying the CBIZ forensic audit, was blunt.

“We wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for this procurement fiasco,” she said. “People we trusted to do their job and do it right didn’t do it. This is a creation by town government — not by the taxpayer. And I’m really upset by this.”

She urged residents to attend the June 16 joint meeting when both boards will examine the audit in detail.

[~33:26 into meeting] The most consequential public comment came from attorney Peter Most, who challenged the premise of the Select Board-sponsored warrant article.

“This entire meeting is predicated on the thought that the town owes $1 million and needs to set aside $200,000 — and that’s not so,” he said.

Most argued the contracts as signed by then-DPW Superintendent Joseph Aberdale may be unenforceable under the legal doctrine of “ultra vires,” who he said did not have the authority to bind the town. Most said the change orders were 138% above the authorized contract amount. Drawing on his own experience litigating a $1.6 billion contract case for Orange County — in which he said the county recovered 98% — Most told both boards:

“I have confidence this town council would win this lawsuit. You should not be setting aside these dollars now.”

Hartsgrove did not agree.

“I am recommending, as your town manager, that this is a smart thing, a common sense thing to do,” she said. “If that purpose turns into something different, we put it back into free cash — win for us. But if we’ve already spent it and then a year from now there is a decision that requires us to pay something — they don’t care.”

Finance Committee member Jeffrey Rothenberg sought to separate the two threads.

“I don’t think we’re in any way able to make an assessment here about whether we might win or lose,” he said. “That requires a lot more information and legal advice. But purely as a municipal finance matter, we need to decide how we want to address our financial risk.” He also flagged that the legal fees allocation within the warrant article is “by far the least understood item on this laundry list” and asked for more detail before June 16 — as well as a clearer picture of what happens to town finances if the article fails and the town subsequently loses in court.

Finance Committee member Michelle Loubert, noting she had also been part of the marijuana settlement decision and regrets not pushing back harder, said: “I’m not going to go gently into the good night. I think we should battle it.” She also confirmed, and Bannon acknowledged, that there had been at least two executive sessions related to the procurement matter — sessions the Finance Committee was not part of and whose contents were not disclosed publicly.

Finance Committee member Reo Matsuzaki argued for prudence over optimism: “There’s no such thing as a lawsuit you 100 percent will win. The prudent thing is to not speculate. The best-case scenario is we set this money aside, we win the lawsuit, and it goes back into free cash.”

Public Comment

John Breasted referenced an ongoing procedural complaint he filed in March and escalated in April, accused the board of governance failures that predate the current membership, and closed with: “I don’t trust you anymore.”

Claudia Shapiro of Egremont Plain Road delivered a detailed statement about the Great Barrington Airport, raising concerns about a 2023 permit she says denied her input as an abutter.

Ron Bisiewicz of Housatonic argued that the ambulance squad and veterans organizations should not be grouped in the same warrant article as skate park monitors and lifeguards, saying both deserve to be treated as core community obligations rather than discretionary line items.

Kate Van Olst of Hart Street, Housatonic, asked for confirmation that the procurement warrant article is a set-aside, not an immediate payment — which Hartsgrove confirmed: if the money is never needed, it reverts to free cash.

James Garzon of North Plain Road praised former DPW Superintendent Joe Aberdale’s service, then argued that the town has systemic budget process failures that recur because past warnings from people like Loubert and Jim Bailly went unheeded.

Jim Bailly of Housatonic asked about the payment timeline for outstanding prior-year bills and separately asked where interim DPW Superintendent Chief Storti was paid from — Hartsgrove confirmed it was contracted services, outside the free cash line.

Sharon Gregory asked about litigation strategy for the Housatonic Water Works acquisition. The challenge is that the historical financial records are incomplete or missing — you can’t easily establish what HWW has earned in revenues or spent in costs over the years, going back to the original ownership. That documentation gap is being used, in her view, as a reason to accept an unfavorable valuation or settlement rather than fight for a better one.

Her argument is that there’s an established methodology in utility acquisition cases — she says she’s reviewed 15 to 20 comparable cases — where even when the paper trail is incomplete, an expert can impute the historical costs and revenues. Meaning: you reconstruct what the financial picture should have been, based on industry standards, comparable utilities, regulatory formulas, and other available evidence, rather than relying solely on documents that may not exist.

What Happens Next

Both boards meet jointly again on Monday, June 16 to review the completed CBIZ forensic audit in full, hear staff analysis of all three warrant articles, and make formal recommendations to voters. Bannon suggested the meeting may need to start at 5 p.m. given the volume of material.

The June 29 Special Town Meeting is at Monument Mountain Regional High School.

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2) CBIZ Forensic Audit: Summary of Key Findings

Great Barrington Street Reconstruction & Related Work: Phase One Report of William Scally, CFA, CBIZ Forensic Consulting Group — June 9, 2026

What this investigation was

CBIZ was hired in February 2026 by the town’s outside counsel, KP Law, to conduct a forensic accounting review of procurement activities in the Department of Public Works, the Community Preservation Committee, and the Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

This report covers only one DPW street reconstruction contract, covering January 2020 through June 2026.

It is the first of what will apparently be multiple project-specific reports.

The contract at the center

On July 18, 2024, the town entered into a contract with Morais Concrete Services (now Morais Contractors Inc.) for street reconstruction and drainage work on Gilmore Avenue and Hart Street.

The contract value was $1,097,075. By the time of the final payment application, the total completed work claimed by Morais had grown to $2,379,772 — more than double the original contract.

Morais filed suit in Hampden Superior Court on April 7, 2026, seeking $869,395.61 in unpaid invoices plus interest.

Who was authorized to do what — and who did it instead

This is the heart of the report. Under the town charter, the Town Manager is the sole purchasing agent and the sole authorized signatory on contracts and change orders on behalf of the town as “Owner.”

During the period in question, that meant either Mark Pruhenski (Town Manager through December 31, 2024) or Chris Rembold (Interim Town Manager January 1 through November 2, 2025).

CBIZ compared the signatures on the change orders against signature authorization cards on file. Their finding: on seven of the eight change orders — #1, #2(#1), #2(#2), #3, #4, #6, and #7 — the “Owner” signature appears to be that of Joseph Aberdale, the DPW Superintendent, not the Town Manager or Interim Town Manager.

Aberdale had no contractual authority to sign on behalf of the town as Owner.

This is the basis for Peter Most’s “ultra vires” argument at the June 9th Selectboard meeting. But the report does not render a legal opinion on enforceability — that’s explicitly outside CBIZ’s scope — but it does document the signature discrepancy clearly.

Change order findings — a catalog of errors

The report identified problems across virtually every dimension of how the change orders were handled:

Change Order #5 had no Owner signature and no Engineer signature, despite having signature date fields filled in. Change Order #5 also had no reason stated, no attachments, and was issued out of chronological sequence — it’s dated November 7, 2024, but Change Orders #3 and #4 are dated November 15.

Change Orders #1 and #3 were retroactive — the work described in the attachments was already underway before the change orders were formally issued, reversing the required sequence of authorization before work begins.

None of the seven executed change orders contain the required attestation and certification of funds — the Town Accountant’s handwritten notation confirming available appropriations. A draft of Change Order #2 did show this notation, but the attested amount ($145,000) was actually less than the change order value ($153,652.81). The final executed version contains no such notation.

Change Order #4 references work at “Cottage Street” — a location outside the project’s defined geographic scope of Gilmore Avenue and Hart Street — with portions of the cost breakdown appearing crossed out or whited out.

The cumulative dollar tracking across change orders is a mess.

CBIZ found variances of up to $523,828 between what the change orders reported as the running total of prior change orders and what the actual running total should have been.

Purchase order findings

On multiple purchase orders, the Requisitioner signature — which should be the Town Manager — is blank. One purchase order lists the department as “Planning” rather than DPW. The same purchase order uses vendor number “77777” and vendor name “Dummy” as placeholders — and was never updated on the paper form, though the correct information was eventually entered in the town’s accounting software (Munis).

Two purchase orders reference work at “Mason Library” — which is not within the scope of the street reconstruction project. No contract amendment or change order expanded the project to include the Mason Library.

Payment application findings

The project generated 12 payment applications between September 2024 and April 2026. Problems include: missing notarial stamps on two applications; inaccurate cumulative change order totals reported on three applications (with the correct figure as of November 15, 2024 being $727,165.61, while the applications reported amounts as low as $81,157.80); mathematical errors in retainage calculations across six applications, with variances reaching as high as $72,505; and four applications showing inaccurate “balance to finish” figures, with a $231,157 unexplained variance on the final payment application. The Mason Library reference also appears in four payment application line items.

What the report does NOT say

CBIZ is explicit and careful on this point: they are forensic accountants, not lawyers. The report makes no determination about whether the town owes the money, whether the contracts are enforceable, or whether any individual acted with fraudulent intent.

Their mandate was to document what happened, not to adjudicate it. Any legal conclusions about ultra vires, contract validity, or liability will require separate legal analysis.

Recommendations

The report closes with eight categories of systemic recommendations: adopt written procurement policies; establish clear authority and approval controls; standardize procurement forms; implement formal appropriation controls; enforce documentation completeness requirements; implement controls against unauthorized scope expansion; and strengthen the town’s financial system practices.

The cumulative picture is of a procurement system that lacked written rules, lacked enforcement of the rules that existed, and lacked any meaningful oversight of the DPW Superintendent’s activities on this contract.

This week’s episode features local independent journalist, philatelist (you’ll have to listen to find out what that means), muckraker and editor of Reason Gone Mad, Bill Shein.

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He tells us about meeting the Postmaster General at a recent stamp convention, and he gets in the weeds on his latest reporting on the complicated history of 343 Main Street in Great Barrington and its adjacent plot of land, which now looks quiet, peaceful and serene little park, but is actually a brownfield site, and has a $2 million state lien against it.

Bill notes in our interview that both Ian Rasch and Chris Rembold declined to comment for his reporting.

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SHOW NOTES

This is the full MassWorks application referenced by Bill in our conversation.

This is Bill’s story that references the application, called A Tale of Two Sidewalks, from March 8, 2024.

“Any neighborhood space is a canvas for people to write their own experiences on... and everybody gets to leave with a shared experience, to actually be physically in the same space doing different things, which feels, in the wake of COVID, kind of revolutionary.”

Eric Goulange, co-owner, The Common Pub

Sundays means free pool all day. Wednesdays is 50% off for kids 12 and under, wings are $1 from 3 to 5 from Wednesday to Friday, karaoke alternate Thursdays with trivia, and Thursday is also dart league night. The pool room is available for parties, and this summer it will be the place to catch the Men’s World Cup.

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If you’re getting the impression that that list hints at the energetic new life recently breathed into the riverside Housatonic mainstay formerly known as the Macano Inn, the Brickhouse Pub, the Common or Garden Pub, and now, simply, The Common Pub, you’d be correct.

New owner Eric Goulange has more plans for summer expansions, too, with regular open mics, a revamped menu that may include pizzas (it’s a big ask, no promises made) and new gluten-free and vegetarian options. As for beers, Goulange has decided to keep European Tower and Guinness, which enjoys a huge following at The Common, which boasts four shelves of Guinness glasses. He’s added Fat Orange Cat IPA, is bringing on Rhythm Brewing’s blue light lager from New Haven (owner Alisa Bowens Mercado is a friend) as house lager, and has expanded the cider lineup to four styles.

Local resident and dart league member Andreas Engel has lived in Housatonic since 2017, partly, he says, because of the Brickhouse Pub.

“It was full of creative poeple. When it closed it felt like a big void, and when Krissy reopened she was still on the cusp of the pandemic, and people had gotten into the habit of not going out. Now people are reintroducing themselves to the public mingling environment. It feels like the momentum is going the right way, and it’s starting to go back to its former glory.”

Summer plans for The Common include a Saturday and Sunday brunch menu starting at 10 AM, an open kitchen late into the night, and live music on Friday/Saturday evenings.

“For background energy,” says Goulange, “not a concert.”

Eric Goulange grew up in Toms River, New Jersey in a plumbing family, and still does contracting work between restaurant gigs. He started cooking for beer money while a student at Penn State University, starting out as a sous chef and moving into an executive chef role at 23, and spent a decade working front-of-house in kitchens across central Pennsylvania.

How did he land in Great Barrington? Via college friend and then-local resident Brian Johnston, in 2007, and started out sous chef’ing at Local 111 in Philmont, New York before bartending at what was then Napa (now Fuel), which is where he met his wife Cecily, who grew up in Otis.

From here they adventured to Key West for a winter, then to Portland for two years, and New York City for ten. Along the way Goulange’s career evolved, as he puts it, “to multi unit/brand management, immersive bar theater, large scale event production and consulting.”

The couple went on to live in Portland and then New York City, where Goulange managed 2 Boots Pizza, among other roles.

Their family — including daughter Clementine - returned to the Berkshires during COVID and moved to Sandisfield in 2023. Before landing at the pub in Housatonic Goulange worked as the General Manager of the hotel and restaurant at Old Inn On The Green in New Marlborough, and most recently as a consultant at Fuel Kitchen & Coffee.

Local restaurant owner Vern Kennedy of Number 10 and The Morgan House found his resume from a catering payroll list, and connected him with then-co-owner of Common or Garden, Krissy Willams. Goulange came in for a few months, and presented his vision for a reboot of the bar, which led to his eventual buyout of Williams’ share. He is now a 50/50 owner with Kennedy.

With that reboot weekly sales have been gradually picking up steam as the busy season kicks into gear. For Goulange the most satifying part of that is faciliating human connection among strangers.

“I’m seeing people talking with people they don’t know,” he says. “They’re putting down their phones. They’re talking across the U-shaped bar.”

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The Common Pub hours currently:

Monday/ Tuesday closed

Wednesday 3 pm - 11 pm

Thursday 3 p - 11 pm

Friday 3 pm - 12 midnight

Saturday 3 pm - 12 midnight

Sunday 11 am - 9 pm

Stay tuned for summer brunch hours!

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Corrections or suggestions for improvements may be included in comments below or sent to 413villagegreen@gmail.com.

______________________

Start time: 6:00 PM | End time: 7:06:00 PM

Link to full CTSBTV video on Youtube

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Key Decisions & Votes

Minutes (May 21, 2026) — Approved unanimously.

School Choice continuation — Motion to continue accepting students through the school choice program. Approved unanimously.

New Preschool Tuition Account — Motion to create a new tuition account for Mountainside Preschool revenue and transfer funds accordingly. Approved unanimously.

Policy GBE – Personal Use of Technology — Passed 8-1 (Jason dissented), with an amendment to define “staff” as including all paid employees and volunteers. Policy subcommittee directed to continue refining the communication-to-subgroups language, with input from the athletic director and principals.

Policy IHBF – Homebound Instruction — Approved unanimously.

FY26 Student Activity Accounts — Accepted unanimously for the record.

Other Business

School Reports — Principals and the superintendent highlighted end-of-year events:

Principal Cynthia Carey of Muddy Brook Elementary School commented on the recent band/orchestra concert, grades 2–4 spring concert, and BTG playwriting residency culmination

Peter Dillon presented for middle and high schools.

WEB DuBois Middle School trip to Philadelphia, Broadway Night and upcoming 8th grade graduation (June 16)

Monument Mountain Regional High School awards day (with over $700K in community scholarships distributed), prom, and Sunday, June 7th graduation.

Facilities — Facilities director Steve Soule reported on the big news of the arrival of a new chiller at Muddy Brook; summer projects include dishwasher upgrades (to eliminate disposable plates/ware), a middle school bus loop repair, and ongoing heat pump and lighting replacements.

The buildings and grounds subcommittee, via Bill Fields, flagged longer-horizon needs and expenses: a new scoreboard (~$75K installed), track resurfacing, tennis court repairs, solar array panel/inverter replacement (~$275K, with ~$82K rebate), and potential roof replacements to Elementary and Middle Schools within the next 10 years.

District Improvement Plan — Superintendent presented an early draft three-year plan organized around three goals: district/professional culture, high-quality instructional materials, and vertical alignment/systems of support. Committee feedback included removing a reference to school committee obligations (inappropriate for this document) and strengthening the student voice objective to explicitly include curriculum decision-making. Final version to be presented after a summer administrative retreat.

(See further detail below.)

Superintendent Evaluation — Andy Potter reported that the evaluation committee was on track to bring a final narrative to the full committee within two weeks, in time for the next School Committee meeting.

Public Comment — James Garzon (84 North Plain Road) congratulated Dr. Dillon on winning the Massachusetts President’s Award.

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District Improvement Plan (DIP) – Detailed Summary

The superintendent presented an early draft three-year plan (a shift from the prior year-to-year format), developed with building principals and the admin team. Committee members were invited to email feedback before a summer retreat, after which a more finalized version will return to the committee.

Three Goals

Goal 1: Improve District and Professional Culture

Focused on trust, transparency, shared accountability, communication, visible leadership, and collaborative decision-making. The main initiative here is the superintendent establishing occasional building-based “superintendent councils” in each building — a direct response to the problem of school-based budget feedback arriving just days before a budget vote, too late to be useful. The idea is to create structured, earlier channels for staff input.

Goal 2: Support High-Quality Instructional Materials and Collective Effort Toward Student Mastery

The superintendent acknowledged uneven curriculum quality across the district — strong in some places, “quite loose” in others. The goal is to tighten and focus curriculum work. This goal also addresses tier 1/2/3 intervention structures: tier 1 being classroom-level instruction, tier 2 being push-in or pull-out support, and tier 3 being dedicated intensive support for students with the highest needs.

Goal 3: Structured Vertical Alignment and Coherent Systems of Support

Currently the district does grade-level work and some building-by-building department work, but the gap is cross-grade vertical alignment — thinking not just about the 4th-to-5th and 8th-to-9th transitions, but tracing backwards: if a student needs a skill in 7th grade, what must be built in 3rd and 4th? Budget support to restore Instructional Learning Team (ILT) positions in the elementary and middle schools was noted as an opportunity to redefine teacher leadership roles in service of this goal.

The goal also includes expanding student voice — building on the extensive work done through the year to give MMRHS students a meaningful say in their school’s policies, and to have them work with middle schoolers through Monument’s Student Adult Advisory Board (SAAB) model, while elementary student voice work would stay within the building.

Proposed Annual Cycle of Reflection

Rather than ad hoc check-ins, the plan proposes a structured calendar:

• October — MCAS results and outcome data

• December — Budget priority discussions

• February — Summer planning begins

• Late April — Year-in-review

• July — Admin/principal retreat and reset

Committee Feedback

On student voice (Bill Fields): Praised the inclusion of student voice as a district goal — noting it’s rare among school districts — but pushed for it to be more specific. He drew on his own teaching experience at Monument, where a curriculum steering committee included voting student members who debated new courses over months before decisions moved up to the principal and school committee. He wants the SAB explicitly involved in curriculum decisions, not just advisory in a general sense.

On school committee references (Jason St. Peter): Flagged that a reference in objective 1.2 directing the school committee to begin school visits was inappropriate — the school committee is an independently elected governing body, not a subordinate part of the district improvement structure, and the DIP should not create mandates for elected officials. The superintendent agreed to remove it. Separately, the committee discussed reviving formal school committee goal-setting, which had lapsed.

On surveys: A committee member asked about survey references in the document. The superintendent explained that the state had encouraged community/staff surveys tied to superintendent evaluation and student/family surveys tied to teacher evaluation, but backed off due to concerns that surveys become “popularity contest” and that respondents often lack the context to answer meaningfully. The superintendent floated replacing surveys with focus groups or listening committees as a more reliable alternative.

Next Steps on DIP

• Committee members have approximately one month to email feedback to the superintendent

• Superintendent and principals will discuss at a summer retreat

• A refined version returns to the committee in late summer, distributed at least a week in advance

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This summary was produced with Claude AI assistance from a meeting transcript available FROM THIS PAGE on West Stockbridge’s website,and augments and corrected and edited for accuracy.

Comment with your corrections, or send them to 413villagegreen@gmail.com.

Meeting convened at 6 pm and adjourned at 7:42 pm

Key Decisions

• Kathleen Keresy elected Select Board chair

• National Grid pole approved for 15B Cross Road (new service connection)

• Betsy Gross appointed to Zoning Board of Appeals as third associate member

• Annual board and committee appointments approved as presented, with noted changes

• Shared animal control contract with Lee approved; Casey Hatch as officer, John as assistant

• EV charging station grant — board authorized proceeding with East Coast Renewable Energy reapplication at no financial obligation to the town

• South County Connector FY27 budget and service levels accepted; West Stockbridge’s assessment level-funded

Links to key moments in Youtube video of meeting:

• 6:00 — National Grid pole presentation, 15B Cross Road

• 8:55 — Betsy Gross appointed to ZBA as third associate member

• 12:03 — South County Connector presentation begins (Tate Coleman)

• 34:41 — Connector : West Stockbridge-specific data: 22% unmet ride rate revealed

• 43:30 — Connector: MCOA grant proposal: dedicated vehicle stationed near West Stockbridge

• 1:02:18 — EV charging station reapplication authorized, no financial obligation to town

• 1:19:00 — Within the context of water and sewer rates going up, and the spikes coming as a surprise, Keresy suggests that the town might work out a better communication system so town boards and committees all know what each other is doing.

• 1:35:00 — One-Stop grant application described: ~$2 million for Swamp Road infrastructure, underground utilities, sidewalks

• 1:37:52 — Workforce housing vision behind Town Hall introduced, linked to fire station staffing challenge

Select Board Reorganization

The meeting opened with the annual reorganization of the Select Board. Kathleen Keresy was nominated and elected chair by unanimous vote. The recording of the full reorganization was partially cut off at the start of the transcript.

Administrator’s Report

Town administrator Marie Ryan reported the town has a new website and asked for patience as she learns the new posting system. She also met with Elaine Markham and Bob Salerno to finalize warrant articles for a Special Town Meeting planned for June 29th — four articles are being drafted, to be posted by June 15th. The board’s Regional Transit Authority Advisory Board seat was reassigned to the chair in place of the previous representative.

National Grid Pole — 15B Cross Road

Steven Hayward of National Grid appeared remotely to request approval of a new utility pole on Cross Road to establish electrical service at a newly subdivided lot at 15B Cross Road (previously part of a property at 15 Cross Road). The landowner Tom Ruffing was present and confirmed the address clarification. No public objection. Approved unanimously.

Zoning Board of Appeals — Betsy Gross Appointed

ZBA chair Randy Thunfors introduced Betsy Gross, a longtime attorney, as the proposed third associate member of the ZBA. The board had been seeking a third associate for four to five years, as conflicts of interest — particularly in cases involving downtown West Stockbridge properties — frequently eliminate multiple members at once. Gross noted that with her children grown she was glad for the opportunity to contribute again.

Appointed unanimously.

South County Connector — FY27 Presentation

Tate Coleman, Director of Public Transportation for the Town of Great Barrington, presented a comprehensive update on the South County Connector, the regional on-demand transit service that includes West Stockbridge among its seven member towns.

Performance highlights:

• May 2026 was the highest ridership month on record: 2,624 rides, tied with August 2024

• 21,324 rides provided year-to-date

• Ridership up over 60% since October 2025

• 95.6% on-time performance (industry gold standard is 95%)

• 99.3% five-star rider satisfaction rating

• Nearly half of all May rides were shared with another rider, up from 28–29% before new operations software was installed in late April

• ~600 unique riders served since July 2025

• Cancellation rate dropped from 25.7% to 18.5%; no-show rate cut roughly in half

West Stockbridge specifics:

• 30 unique riders, 343 total rides since July 2025

• 64% senior and disabled riders (rising to ~85% in April)

• Average trip distance 12 miles; most rides go to Great Barrington

• Most common destination in May: Fairview Outpatient at 10 Maple Avenue in Great Barrington (dialysis, physical therapy)

• 22% of ride requests from West Stockbridge cannot be met — higher than the system-wide 15% — due to distance from the Great Barrington dispatch hub

Fiscal Year 27 plans:

• Core service unchanged:

  6 AM–9 PM, 7 days a week

  

  $3 in-town/$6 multi-town, and free for veterans, thanks to Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation

• Two new Ford electric transit vans added to fleet; West Stockbridge contributed the local 15% match (~$18,000) for one replacement vehicle

• $600,000 MassDOT microtransit and last-mile grant awarded for FY27 operations

• Massachusetts Council on Aging grant application pending — if successful, would station a dedicated vehicle in the West Stockbridge/Stockbridge/Richmond area during weekdays, significantly reducing the 22% unmet ride rate

• Planning to add Lee and Lenox as Pittsfield Flex service destinations

• BRTA schedule integration coming to app within weeks — will allow riders to connect seamlessly to regional bus routes

Phone: 413-591-3826 | Website: sccride.org

Town to put link to the Connector on the new website for residents.

EV Charging Station Grant — Reapplication Authorized

A board member reported that East Coast Renewable Energy (rep: James McGrath) has contacted the town to reapply for EV charging station grants under revised federal/state criteria released in early 2026. The town had previously gone through the full application process but funding dried up. The new application carries no financial obligation to the town. Up to four sites were previously identified: the Main Street parking lot by the old town hall, the Moscow Road lot by the post office restrooms, a lot between the parking area and the library, and Card Pond Road. The Main Street lot is the most likely candidate but would eventually require paving to meet ADA compliance — a project the town had previously agreed to undertake anyway. The board authorized proceeding with the reapplication. The W9 has already been submitted.

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Vision Committee Report

A Vision Committee member reported on recent activities:

• A meet-the-candidates night co-organized with the committee was held this year and deemed a success

• A community marketing guide promoting West Stockbridge is on hold following the departure of two committee members to jobs out of state

• Working with the cultural council on a photo scrim project — large-format images of townspeople and community life to be displayed on existing mounted frames around town, building on the 250th anniversary displays

• Exploring a physical suggestion box to solicit public input, possibly housed at Town Hall

• The committee meets the second Tuesday of each month; website: weststockvision.com

Annual Board and Committee Appointments

The full list of annual appointments was approved as presented, with noted changes including the departure of Kaitlyn, who is taking a break. The board discussed implementing a new system requiring boards and committees to report to the Select Board on a rotating basis. Board member Tobias Casey noted the West Stockbridge Select Board had been essentially blindsided by the Berkshire Hills Regional School District budget process, drawing a parallel to the water and sewer situation — both cases where a lack of regular communication between autonomous boards and the Select Board allowed problems to build undetected. He argued the new committee reporting system being discussed was directly relevant to avoiding a repeat.

Member Andy Krauss proposed a specific mechanism: rather than going through the full appointment list sequentially, the board should cherry-pick four committees at random to report at each meeting — keeping all committees on their toes and ensuring no board can predict when it will be called in. “Joe [Roy], we want to hear a report from you next meeting,” he said, illustrating the point. The chair built on the idea, noting the goal is not just to hear from committees but to give them guidance — to make the relationship two-way rather than purely supervisory. The board cited the recent water and sewer rate crisis — where rates went unaddressed for decades without Select Board awareness — as the cautionary example that made the case for the new approach.

No formal vote; consensus to develop and implement the system.

Shared Animal Control Contract

The board approved signing a shared animal control services contract with the Town of Lee. Casey Hatch serves as animal control officer; John Drake as assistant. Both were included in the annual appointments approved earlier in the meeting. Brief discussion about how the arrangement preserves some town input while Lee serves as lead town.

Select Board Announcements

• Kudos to Lisa Parker for her work beautifying the town with flowers, which she plant and waters through the season. Several residents have offered compliments.

• A time and HR tracking software platform (cost ~$350/month) is being evaluated to replace paper-based systems across town departments; a demo will be arranged for the board

  It will offer:

  1) Digital time-off requests via app instead of paper forms

  2) Centralized storage of employee contracts and HR documents

  3) Consistent time tracking across all departments (replacing a patchwork of spreadsheets, loggers, and sticky notes)

  4) Department-specific data export (the police department example is given)

• A One-Stop grant application (~$2 million request) is being prepared ahead of the June 3rd deadline, developed with help from Jennifer Tabakin. The grant would fund water main work, underground utility burial, repaving, and sidewalk improvements on Swamp Road and Windsor Road. Two additional feasibility study applications are also in progress: one for potential workforce/affordable housing development on land behind Town Hall (including ~8 acres currently in tax taking), and one for a potential new public works facility on a 32-acre parcel between the two cemeteries, with a possible workforce housing component on the rear portion.

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  Next meeting is Monday, June 8th at 6 pm

This summary was produced with AI assistance from a Youtube meeting transcript available and augmented and corrected and edited for accuracy.

Comment with corrections or clarifications, or email them to 413villagegreen@gmail.com

____________

Meeting convened at 6:30 pm and adjourned at 8:47 pm

Posted Agenda for the meeting

CTSB Video of the meeting

Opening

Chair Julie Hannum opened by recognizing CTSB videographer Quinn Butler Carlson, who was missing the senior awards ceremony to film the meeting. She also called a moment of silence for a tragic incident in Ashley Falls that affected district families.

Public Comment (Pre-Budget)

Five community members and school employees spoke, all urging the committee to pass the budget:

Connie Cooper, Sheffield: Called on all members to vote yes regardless of personal differences. Noted the committee had met its 6% assessment cap goal and needed to show it could function as a body before the towns would trust it with future budgets.

Sarah Siket, SBRSD mother: Delivered a detailed critique of budget priorities. Questioned $55,000 in non-contractual admin raises proposed by a former superintendent who no longer works there; noted no administrators were RIFFed while classroom positions were cut. Cited a long list of unfilled positions — high school math, high school English, a single K-12 nurse — that predated this year’s cuts and aren’t counted in the official reduction numbers. Argued the 7.1% budget increase is still far better than the 11.4% the district would be facing had it merged with Berkshire Hills.

Amy Murray, SBRSD Teacher: Called out the previous meeting’s two-and-a-half hour runtime for accomplishing only two items. Questioned why a February memo from the departed superintendent recommending admin raises was being treated as authoritative given that superintendent’s track record of accounting errors and mismanagement.

Alexis Kennedy, SBRSD Librarian: Kennedy identified herself as one of the positions being cut. She framed the moment historically rather than personally: difficult moments define communities, and the children who had come to previous meetings with "voices quavering" asking the committee to protect their arts programs had delivered a clear, simple, unanimous message. She asked the committee to also think of younger children — too young to speak at a microphone — who need PE, chorus, and music. "They are watching us," she said. "How we communicate with each other, the decisions we make, how we vote — that is how they understand how to live their lives." She urged a yes vote, calling the budget imperfect but the committee's best opportunity to define its values.

Mari Enoch, Monterey: Asked the committee to pause before voting and ask questions — specifically about $80,000 moved from capital that didn’t appear in operating, benefits lines that hadn’t moved despite staffing changes, and FY26 capital figures that had disappeared from the budget.

Kevin Fish, Sandisfield: Raised two specific financial questions: whether fringe benefits (~$375,000–$450,000) had been factored in when staff were cut, and whether approximately $400,000 in school choice revenue (~80 students at $5,000 each) was visible in the budget. Said premature Reductions in Force (RIFs) had cost the district the ability to answer these questions calmly.

Open Meeting Law Disclosure

Before the budget vote, the chair read into the record an email sent by committee member Miguel Mir on May 29th to all committee members — a violation of the Open Meeting Law, which prohibits deliberations outside of public meetings. Mir’s email had argued for using more E&D (Excess and Deficiency) funds to restore cut positions and identified potential savings of ~$230,000 in school committee and superintendent line items.

Committee member Carl Stewart responded that town counsel’s guidance was insufficient and that the attorney general could potentially void any budget vote found to have been influenced by the illegal communication. He proposed each member publicly affirm the email had not influenced their vote. All nine members did so individually, with Kim Alcantara noting she had stopped reading the email as soon as she recognized it as an OML violation.

The chair acknowledged the error, noted it had been disclosed per counsel’s guidance, and announced that governance and ethics training through MASC would be scheduled for their July retreat.

FY27 Budget Discussion and Vote — First Vote: FAILED (5–4)

Superintendent Dr. Ricca presented the reinstated positions agreed to at the previous meeting, using funds set aside by the committee.

FTE = Full Time Equivalent

Positions proposed for reinstatement:

• PE/Health (the only individual with professional teaching status, or tenure meant a guaranteed reinstatement)

• Elementary FTE (grade level TBD)

• Library FTE

• Music FTE

• Two secondary FTEs (ELA and Science)

• 0.5 administrative assistant (elementary) + 0.5 (secondary)

• Data Coordinator

• Early College Coordinator (grant-funded)

Total budget: $21,371,399.

Total assessment to towns: $16,808,548.

Assessment increase: 6%.

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Discussion was contentious. Key points of disagreement:

• Bonnie Silvers and others felt they still lacked sufficient information and had been shut out of the budget process.

• Kim Alcantara raised circuit breaker funds, IDEA 240 grants, benefits savings on RIFFed positions, and school choice revenue as potential sources of additional savings — enough, she argued, to restore more positions.

• Julie Hannum, chair, pointed out that this year’s budget was the first in many years that included the explicit line items that she’d been wanting to see for years.

• Carl Stewart raised a separate governance issue: a staff member had made a vulgar comment about a committee member’s daughter outside the May 28th meeting, leaving the student in tears. The chair ruled the matter off-topic for this session.

• Amy Bainbridge-Jordan and Nanci Worthington urged moving to a vote and addressing other concerns at a future meeting.

The question was called 5–4. The budget vote was 5–4 in favor — failing to reach the required 7 votes (two-thirds of the full 10-member body, including the vacant seat).

Public Comment (Post-Failed Vote)

Reaction from the audience was sharp:

• Connie Cooper called the failure a “total embarrassment,” predicted the 4–5 split would never change regardless of the budget presented, and urged the committee to “let the school district do their jobs.”

• Josh King said nine people who could have been brought back now had to start job hunting, and called the failure a failure to care about kids.

• Courtney English (band/theater teacher): Urged a revote.

• Tara White, New Marlborough: Warned that delay risks state takeover, teacher departures, and declining enrollment — a death spiral for a small district that had already voted against a merger with Berkshire Hills Regional School District.

• Joanne Duval (special education teacher): Said her daughter, a third-grade teacher who had received a RIF notice, could no longer be asked to wait. “You cannot put your life on hold.”

• Elizabeth Enoch, Monterey (Mount Everett class of 2020, Wellesley College student): Said she had come home struggling with her mental health, found strength in her former teachers — and left the meeting feeling the school no longer made her proud.

• Maddie Caruso (laid-off chorus teacher): Very disappointed. Said she had expected the budget to pass.

• Sarah Siket, parent: Called the behavior at the table appalling, saying: “We wouldn’t allow it in our classrooms.” Accused committee members of letting their personal issues get in the way of what was good for children.

• Amy Murray, SBRSD teacher: Questioned whether Carl Stewart’s response email to Miguel Mir’s open meeting law violation was itself a violation — noting that responding to an illegal deliberation with a reply to all members could constitute a second violation, and that Stewart’s tone in the response was “degrading and embarrassing” toward a colleague. She said if he was going to point out someone else’s mistake, he should consider reporting his own action as well.

  Second, staff who had received RIF notices were already interviewing for other jobs. “You cannot hold your life on hold,” she said. If the committee thought it could fail the budget tonight and still recall those teachers in a month, it was wrong — they would be gone. She also warned that declining enrollment was a foreseeable consequence of the committee’s visible dysfunction: families were already telling her they were leaving the district.

  [EDITOR NOTE: 12 new students from SBRSD towns have used school choice to move to Berkshire Hills Regional School District since April 1.]

• Bob Kilmer, Sheffield Select Board member (speaking as a resident): Urged the committee to “hit reset,” stop relitigating the previous administration, and recognize that volunteers trying to do a decent job had gotten “down in the mud.”

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Reconsideration — Budget PASSED (9–0) with amendment

Following public comment, Amy Bainbridge Jordan moved to reconsider the vote. The motion passed unanimously (9–0).

Bonnie Silvers re-introduced the motion to approve the budget.

Kim Alcantara moved an amendment directing the administration to find funding for two to four additional staff positions by examining benefits savings (on RIFFed positions not returning), E&D funds, admin raises, circuit breaker, IDEA 240 Special Education supplemental funding, and school choice revenue.

Superintendent Ricca indicated he could work with the amendment, focusing primarily on benefits, and would not recommend drawing E&D below $200,000.

The amendment passed 9–0.

The full budget as amended passed 9–0.

Final Budget (Adopted)

Operating expenditures $18,667,822

Transportation $2,245,927

Capital $156,750

Capital bond repayment $300,900

Total expenditures: $21,371,399

Total assessment to towns: $16,808,548

The budget now goes to the five towns (Great Barrington, Sheffield, Egremont, Monterey, New Marlborough) for a vote.

Four of five must approve it before July 1st.

A Special Town Meeting in Sheffield is already planned for this purpose.

Context for Readers

The district has been without a passed budget since the process began in February, has gone through at least five budget versions, lost its previous superintendent under a cloud of accounting errors and financial mismanagement, and faces a structural deficit that the superintendent and business administrator confirmed will recur next year regardless of this year’s decisions.

The committee has a vacant seat (representing Egremont), requiring seven of ten votes — rather than a simple majority — to pass any budget.

On the Conflict

The argument at this meeting was a proxy war between two views of what had gone wrong and who was responsible.

One faction — roughly Bonnie, Carl, Kim, and Art — believed the administration and superintendent had mismanaged the budget process for months, withheld information from the committee, and was now asking the committee to ratify a product they hadn’t been allowed to meaningfully shape. Their no votes were partly a protest against being treated as a rubber stamp. Carl in particular repeatedly framed the issue as institutional — lack of transparency endemic to how the district operates, not a one-time failure.

The other faction — Nancy, Amy, Miguel, Jim, and chair Julie — acknowledged the process had been flawed but argued that voting no on the budget punished the kids and staff rather than the administration. Their frustration was that legitimate grievances were being used as leverage in a vote that had human consequences for teachers waiting to find out if they had jobs.

The deeper tension is that both factions were largely right. The process had been a failure, and the budget vote was an emergency.

The 9-0 final vote was less a resolution than an exhausted truce, brokered by Kim Alcantara’s amendment and the weight of public testimony.

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Several years ago, when Mary Berle stumbled upon a single herbaceous peony growing in the far corner of an unused field, it evoked the same joy she felt picking daffodils with her sister as a child. The discovery also got her thinking about how flowers might complement the food and fiber she was already raising at Lila’s Mountain Farm, the 420 acres spanning Great Barrington, Alford, and Egremont she took over tending in October 2020. Legend has it that another local named Mary, who grew up at the once-working dairy farm on Rowe Road, had planted the rugged root on her wedding day in 1983. Berle’s mother Lila, who died in early April, began stewarding the land eight years later and was well aware of its presence. After deciding the surrounding terrain was too rocky to make hay, she mowed around the peony and marveled at its resilience from atop her tractor for more than three decades. In 2021, her daughter started digging holes.

“I didn’t even have a tiller, and Anthony Nordoff was the only person who didn’t think I was out of my mind,” recalls Berle of the early days. Slowly but surely, with her neighbor’s unwavering support and hours of physical labor, Berle’s vision—for a space of her own—began to take shape.

Steeped with Intention

When she was a little girl, Berle begged her parents to put tires in the backyard so she could grow flowers. From a purely esthetic perspective, they demurred. Still, she grew up surrounded by beautiful blooms. Her mother loved peonies and enjoyed thinking about design on a large scale; both grandmothers had a shared passion for the lush, fragrant, early-summer stunners. Berle’s own affinity stems from the deep connection the plants provide, given their longevity. With proper care, a single peony plant can live for 100 years or more.

“One person in your family can take care of a peony and then share a root, providing a connection to the previous generation,” says Berle, returning to the plants’ resilience. She is certain there were many years her mother mowed right over the original peony that continues to thrive in the shade of a willow tree that has grown up around it. The field’s perfection has revealed itself over time. Berle loves how it undulates, boasting both wet and dry spots.

“I just wanted a space [to myself],” recalls Berle, whose latest passion project has given her just that. According to her mother, it is entirely in keeping with who Mary has been since day one. Berle’s love of flowers is evidenced by the thousands of daffodils and dahlias that thrive alongside abundant rows of peonies. In recent years, the panoply of blooming things has grown to include crabapple, cherry, and ginkgo trees as well as dozens of deciduous flowering shrubs from hydrangea, forsythia, and lilac to ninebark, bridal wreath, and astilbe. A pollinator strip, which remains unmowed, is aimed at attracting and protecting bees. In keeping with Lila’s approach to all things, the Field of Dreams is both regenerative and sustainable.

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Next-Level Home-Grown

“We operate in a completely closed loop, which is really significant,” explains Zoe Cronin, pointing to a sustainable system aimed at recycling resources and eliminating waste which puts the flock and the flowers in concert with one another. After two seasons spent lambing, Cronin has been crowned the farm’s flower lead—which has required her to learn as much as possible about the long-lived, hardy perennials.

“I started out by really getting to know each peony,” says Cronin who weeded nearly every single one; then she moved on to fertilizer. At a time when many local farmers face challenges in both finding proper soil amendments and knowing what is in those they can find, Cronin has had to look no further than the land surrounding her.

“Our own composted sheep manure is the finest amendment around,” she says, underscoring the benefits of having a closed loop. Each peony and flowering shrub in Berle’s Field of Dreams began as a bare root which means it was dormant and soil-free when planted. Given that most plant-based disease is transmitted through the soil, bare-root planting avoids the risks associated with non-native soil, ranging from foreign weeds to fungal and bacterial threats and dozens of others in between.

“It’s why we make our own hay, even though it’s historically more expensive,” says Berle, pointing to the costs associated with having a land base, maintaining equipment, and keeping the operation running. From her perspective, there is no alternative. Amidst widespread use of human sludge as fertilizer on farms across the midwest (a practice the EPA not only allows but also promotes), Berle continues to problem solve at home. This season, she and her team are raising chickens to amend the soil in their hardest-to-improve field.

“Chicken litter is very effective at growing grass but, unless you raise the animals yourself, there is no way to know what is in it,” says Berle, who is tackling the issue head on. The decision to add 480 total broilers in six batches positions her to naturally improve the soil. When left to forage, chickens regenerate ecosystems and support healthy pasture growth by aerating soil, controlling pests, and enriching the ground with fertilizer. When moved in proper rotation—using chicken “tractors” and mobile fencing—the farmer avoids tilling and retains species diversity while controlling the input (certified-organic feed from Canada in Berle’s case). Given their rapid rate of growth, meat birds require extra calories to reach market-weight in a short timespan, just 8-10 weeks for the variety she is raising.

Amidst increasingly fragile supply chains across the board, it’s a wonder Berle ever rests.

Looking Ahead

Five years after breaking ground, 2,000 peonies in different stages of maturity are getting ready to burst into bloom in Berle’s Field of Dreams—just a stone’s throw from the decades-old specimen that inspired it all. In fact, Berle recently shared a root with Mary Brazie, the aforementioned bride, who she met at Egremont Town Hall while paying taxes.

Despite tough economic times, Berle is in it for the long haul. She remains committed to her sheep, a beautiful flock of 400 that produces excellent wool and meat and has grown strong on her land for five decades. When she began planting trees to combat climate change, Berle knew she would not live to see them mature.

“But I probably have a few cycles of peonies in me,” she says, pointing to the seven-year cycle required to do so. The American Peony Society is booming and interest in breeding is on the rise. Meanwhile, cut-flower peonies are making a strong comeback. While off-season production is happening around the globe, the Slow Flowers Movement (modeled after the Slow Food Movement) encourages folks to buy flowers from sources closer to home. Berle’s full- and half- CSA Peony Shares are sold out for this season, but in her mind the sky is the limit. In coming years, she envisions providing cut flowers for local weddings and, the following fall, sharing a root or two with each bride for the sake of posterity.

“This farm was my mom’s space, and she was very protective of it,” says Berle, underscoring the challenges Lila faced as a woman of her vintage while maintaining it. Berle proudly continues the tradition, simultaneously shepherding the next generation of female farmers into the fold while pursuing her own dream.

You have to make this field your own, Lila told her daughter.

And so she did.

“I just wanted a space to do my thing,” says Berle who, in the final days of May, was hopeful enough peonies would have bloomed to have on hand for her mother’s Celebration of Life on May 30.

“And isn’t that really what all of us want?”

Link to CTSB RECORDING OF JUNE 1 MEETING

Meeting brought to order by Chair Lee Buttala at 6 pm and adjourned at 6:55 pm. All three members in attendance.

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Approval of Minutes

Minutes from April 1st, 21st, 28th, 29th, and 30th approved unanimously.

Three Public Hearings — Berkshire Mountain Distillers LLC / Two Lanterns Brewing (356 South Main Street)

Three related permits were approved in sequence, all involving Chris Weld of Berkshire Mountain Distillers. With the closure of Big Elm Brewery — which had previously occupied an adjacent space — Weld is adding a brewery operation called Two Lanterns Brewing Company to his existing distillery. Massachusetts law requires a brewery and distillery to be separately licensed and to occupy distinct physical spaces, even though federal law does not. The solution: carving out 100 square feet of the distillery footprint on paper for the brewery.

The three permits approved:

1. Alteration of licensed premises — removing 100 sq ft from the existing distillery pouring permit

2. Cross-pouring permit — allowing spirits and beer to be served in the same facility (Berkshire Mountain Distillers / Two Lanterns jointly)

3. Farmer Brewery pouring permit — the standalone 19C state license for Two Lanterns

All three passed unanimously with no public opposition. Weld noted the process has taken three years to navigate.

New Board of Health Member — Tom Taylor

Tom Taylor was introduced as a new Sheffield Board of Health member. He has a background in state government health and human services, including senior roles at the Massachusetts Department of Medicaid and the Executive Office of Health and Human Services. He and his wife have lived in Sheffield full-time since 2020. He also serves on the Community Preservation Committee, Sheffield Land Trust finance committee, and the Bridge finance committee, which he disclosed proactively as potential conflicts to watch. Board welcomed him warmly and joked they’d likely want him on additional committees.

Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce — Sheffield Fall Festival, October 17th

Betsy Andrus, Executive Director of the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce, presented a proposal to create a new annual Fall Festival on the Sheffield Green, targeted for Saturday, October 17th.

Key details:

• Timeline: Jack-o-lantern drop-off 9:30–11 AM; vendor load-in 1–3 PM; festival 3–7 PM; adult/music programming after 7 PM including possible bonfire and bands at Dewey Hall

• Centerpiece: A pumpkin tower modeled on Keene, NH’s jack-o-lantern festival, lit at dusk with a judging ceremony

• Route 7: Would remain open to traffic; parking on road shoulders with coned lanes and flashing speed signs (5 mph) during peak hours

• Fire Department: Fire Chief approved a plan keeping trucks on-site, with a barriered corridor allowing emergency egress

• Beer garden: Possible, using a COVID-era law still on the books allowing to-go cocktails at outdoor events

• Funding ask: $2,000 from the town as lead sponsor; town name/seal on all branding; Select Board members invited to judge the pumpkin contest

• Year 1 attendance estimate: ~1,000 people; expects 3 years to reach full scale

• One building owner (Gilligan block) has not yet been reached; all other green businesses and tenants consulted and supportive

Board approved the $2,000 sponsorship unanimously, with funding coming from the Berkshire School Fund, which is made up of payments in lieu of taxes by the Berkshire School.

FY27 Appointment Announcements

A lengthy list of board and committee vacancies and nominees for three-year terms (unless noted) was read into the record.

Complete list:

Amelia Conklin (Agricultural Commission), Lou Levine (Board of Assessors), Sari Hoy (BRPC Delegate and Housing Commission), Rania Markham (Commission on Disabilities), Daniel Patel and Don Ward (Conservation Commission), James McGarry (Council), Nadine Hawver, George Milukas, and Michelle Harwood (Council on Aging), Kathie Loring (Council on Aging Executive Director), Dorothy Maffei (Cultural Council), Michael Leining (Electrical Inspector), Robert Krupski (Gas and Piping Inspector), Robert Gennari (Gas and Piping Inspector Alternate and Plumbing Inspector Assistant), Michael King (Historical Commission), Robert Krupski (Plumbing Inspector), Rick Paul (Recycling Coordinator), Scott Smith (Sanitation Inspector), Thomas Beasley (Veterans Agency), Allison Lasso and Eric Carlson (Zoning Board of Appeals), Pat Levine (ZBA Alternate), Ken Smith (Zoning Enforcement Officer), and Lauren Goldberg of KP Law (Town Counsel). Police officers Michael Ovitt and Jake Newton put themselves forward for reappointment.

Positions with no nominee named: Animal Control Officer, Animal Inspector, Ashley Falls Historic District Commission alternates, Board of Health, Building Inspector, BRPC Delegate Alternate, Conservation Commission alternates, Fire Chief, Five Town Cable Advisory, and Planning Board alternate.

Comprehensive Plan Committee — Chris Weld Appointed

Chris Weld (of Berkshire Mountain Distillers) was appointed to the newly forming Comprehensive Plan Committee, which is beginning work on a strategic plan for Sheffield. Approved unanimously; board noted the importance of getting him involved in early discussions.

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ADU Zoning Bylaw Amendment

The board briefly discussed a draft accessory dwelling unit (ADU) bylaw required under new state law. The draft has been reviewed by the Planning Board but has not yet returned from town counsel.

A public hearing is scheduled for June 10th. Board expressed general support — noting ADUs could provide both housing supply and income for property owners — but agreed to await legal review before taking action.

Hydration Station — Held

An agenda item on a hydration station proposal was tabled; the presenter was unavailable. Will return at a future meeting.

Library Elevator — Bid Awarded

Two bids were received for the library elevator modernization project. Alpine Elevator bid $180,500; the competing bid came in at $145,655 but carried an additional $120,000 in charges, bringing its true cost to approximately $265,000. Board awarded the contract to Alpine Elevator at $180,500, unanimously.

ZBA Resignation — Nadine Hawver

The board accepted the resignation of Nadine Hawver from the Zoning Board of Appeals with thanks. She remains active on two other town committees.

Regional Transit Authority Representative — Patrick Silk Reappointed

Patrick Silk was reappointed as Sheffield’s Regional Transit Authority representative, unanimously.

One-Day Alcohol Permits

• Jaclyn Scuri, Dewey Memorial Hall, October 10th (wedding) — approved pending certificate of insurance

• Dewey Memorial Hall (on behalf of Priscilla Cote and Rene Wood), June 14th, 1–3 PM (memorial service) — approved

Massachusetts Housing Partnership Conference — Sari Hoy

Board approved $250 from the budget for Planning Committee member Sari Hoy to attend the Massachusetts Housing Partnership conference. Vote was unanimous.

Door-to-Door Solicitation Permit — Declined

Ion Solar (applicant Corbin Asher Coco) requested a door-to-door solar solicitation permit. Declined unanimously, consistent with the board’s policy of declining all such permits.

BRPC Comprehensive Plan Agreement

Board approved signing an agreement with the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission for comprehensive plan development, contingent on a revision to the indemnification clause. Town administrator authorized to accept the revised language and execute.

Public Comment

Kerry Douglas, 805 Barnum Street: Reported monitoring the transfer station over 11 days and finding that 26–42% of vehicles entering lacked visible dump stickers, including vehicles with New York, Connecticut, and Michigan plates. Estimated the town may be losing up to $140,000 annually in unpaid sticker fees. Noted that DPW, the police chief, and an officer all confirmed enforcement is within the board’s authority but that police staffing during dump hours is limited. Suggested a targeted enforcement presence on a Saturday or Sunday at the start of the sticker season. Board acknowledged the concern, said they would take it under advisement, and noted they plan to revise sticker placement instructions to make verification easier.

Katherine Miller, 801 Clayton Road, Ashley Falls: Announced that the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission is holding public meetings in South County to explore extending the rail trail from Lenox to Sheffield. The Sheffield meeting is June 9th, 5:30–6:30 PM at Christ Trinity Church on the Sheffield Green. DOT and BRPC representatives will be present seeking public input. Brief discussion followed about whether the trail would follow old trolley rail beds. Miller encouraged at least one Select Board member to attend.

Pat Levine, 261 East Main Street, Ashley Falls: Noted that the Sheffield library already has a hydration station in its lobby, available to the public during library hours, in advance of the pending hydration station agenda item.

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NOTE: Feel free to comment below, but please also send corrections or clarifications to 413villagegreen@gmail.com.

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Meeting called to order at 6 pm and adjourned at 8:57 pm.

Announcements

1. Special Town Meeting set for June 29, 2026, 6 PM at Monument Mountain Regional High School.

Citizen petition window for the meeting is open June 2 (8:30 AM) through June 5 (4 PM). A joint Select Board/Finance Committee review of the warrant is scheduled for June 9 at 6 PM.

The petition seeks to use approximately $342,000 of the town’s ~$1.45 million in certified free cash to restore the following items that were contingent on the passage of the Prop 2 1/2 override.

Lifeguards (Lake Mansfield): $61,2857

Skatepark Monitor: $32,6797

Housatonic Water Works legal fees: $75,0007

Co-Responder Program: $100,0007

Parking Enforcement Officer: $20,000

VFW Property Lease: $30,0007

American Legion Property Lease: $23,000

Total: $341,964

2. Party in the Park, Housatonic, June 13, rain or shine.

Applications still open to become a vendor at this community event.

3. BEAT (Berkshire Environmental Action Team) community dinner and conversation about Old Maids Park on June 18, 6–8 PM, at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire at 1089 Main Street.

   Dinner will be provided and childcare will be available as needed.

   From BEAT: “Everyone who enjoys Old Maids Park, join us for a community dinner and conversation about the future of the park. We’d love to hear your ideas, memories and hopes for the space. Together we’ll discuss accessibility, ecological health, water quality, the dam, recreation and long-term steweardship of the park. Please register and let us know about any childcare or dietary needs.”

   Registration is required, and you can register here.

   Learn more about the BEAT Old Maids project here.

4. Relay for Life, Monument Mountain, June 27, 12 noon. Selectboard member Garfield Reed, a two-time cancer survivor, encouraged donations.

5. No town manager’s report.

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Public Hearing — Liquor License, The Well (312 Main Street)

Attorney Kathleen McCormick presented on behalf of Air Hospitality LLC. The Well’s ownership has restructured: co-owners Emily Irwin and Nick Rhodes are departing; longtime bartender Emily Thomson (there since 2016) is buying in at 45%, matching co-owner Lisa Ake at 45%, with Josh Irwin stepping back to 10%. The board approved changes to manager, LLC officers/directors, and ownership percentages unanimously (Ben Elliot recused due to his employer’s financial relationship with the applicants).

Joint Select Board & Planning Board Workshop

Seasonal Communities Designation Update

Town planner Chris Rembold briefed the boards on next steps following the town’s acceptance of the Seasonal Communities designation.

Key points:

• Preference for essential municipal employees (police, fire, teachers) to access year-round housing units is written into the applicable law (the 2024 Affordable Homes Act); nonprofit workers (nurses, ambulance staff) are currently excluded. Board discussed advocating to state legislators to broaden eligibility.

• Zoning bylaws are close to compliant with the designation’s requirements, but need tweaks. Berkshire Regional Planning Commission (BRPC) has granted technical assistance starting July 1.

• Two main zoning changes are needed: allowing housing development on underutilized commercial lots for households earning 250%+ of median income, and permitting tiny homes as year-round units.

• A new Year-Round Housing Trust (distinct from the existing Affordable Housing Trust) would need to be established by town meeting vote. It could be town-specific or regional. No existing model for a regional version exists yet.

• Timeline: aim to bring zoning changes to the next annual town meeting in May 2027, with BRPC assistance through fall/winter.

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Strategic Priorities Review with both Selectboard and Planning Board

Key discussions:

Infrastructure — Complete Streets Plan accomplished:

The 2018 Complete Streets plan was seen as largely accomplished. Planning board agreed to review it and identify new priorities, including multi-use paths, e-bike infrastructure, and new development hubs. A BRPC-hosted bike path meeting is scheduled June 9 at the Mason Library.

Sidewalk Plowing Policy: Shift to property owner responsibility?

The town’s current practice of plowing a wide range of sidewalks generated a large bill this past winter, with staffing already stretched. Discussion of whether a policy requiring property owners to plow their own sidewalks (with a ticketing mechanism) might be appropriate. No resolution; flagged as a budget and municipal services priority.

5G Antenna Regulation: Need for new bylaw to protect public right-of-ways.

The town currently has no bylaw governing placement of 5G antennas in the public right-of-way. Without one, carriers can install equipment on light poles with little town control. Staff agreed to bring examples of comparable bylaws from other towns for the board’s review.

Extended discussion of need for traffic calming on East Street, South Main Street, Division Street:

Options discussed: speed humps/elevated crosswalks, intersection narrowing, increased enforcement (limited by staffing), and better signal timing on Route 7. South Main Street has a capital improvement project approved for crosswalk upgrades. BRPC is considering a corridor study that would include Great Barrington. Staff asked to return with recommendations.

Childcare:

The Childcare Accessibility Committee is still in fact-finding mode after attendance challenges this winter. Chair to bring findings back to the Select Board soon.

Housing — Collaboration & Zoning: Need for more combined sessions and less “siloing.”

Planning board member Pedro Pachano called for more joint meetings with the Affordable Housing Trust and Select Board during development reviews, noting that abridged presentations and siloed processes produce worse outcomes. General agreement to move toward more joint sessions and a less siloed permitting process.

Reid Cleaners Parcel (contamination site): EPA funding in place but timeline for cleanup unclear.

Remediation has removed significant contaminated soil. New EPA grant funding is in place for continued work. Timeline to readiness for redevelopment still uncertain. It is a complex, expensive cleanup that has been underway for over a decade. Discussion of activating the vacant storefront windows in the meantime to signal activity; Design Advisory Committee noted sightline constraints near the post office driveway.

Cook’s Garage (426 Park Street in Housatonic): RFP for redevelopment

An RFP for redevelopment is ready to be drafted. Boards discussed reducing parking requirements as a barrier for developers on this site.

Parking Strategy: Paid downtown parking?

Wide-ranging discussion about whether to pursue paid parking downtown and at Lake Mansfield.

General consensus: the idea has merit for managing demand and generating revenue, but requires a full study (estimated ~$70K based on a Barnstable precedent), stakeholder outreach to businesses, and enforcement capacity the town lacks. Suggested as a candidate for a future capital improvement plan item and grant funding. Board member Ben Elliot raised the equity issue of downtown workers being ticketed while residents of Barrington House lose summer parking to restaurant outdoor seating.

Hotel Room Cap: Raise the 45-room cap?

Orenstein raised revisiting the town’s 45-room cap on new hotels (set in 2008 to protect bed-and-breakfasts from chain competition). Modern hotels typically require 60–80 rooms to pencil out financially. Three board members expressed interest in a formal reassessment; the planning board agreed to explore it with the hospitality industry.

Master Plan Update: Funding not passed, but still priority.

Town meeting funding for Phase 1 did not pass, but both boards agreed it remains a top priority. Grant funding will be pursued. The 2013 plan is seen as badly out of date.

Public Visioning for Simon’s Rock property? ULI Design Exercise suggested:

Town manager Liz Hartsgrove and planner Rembold disclosed they have had preliminary conversations with MassDevelopment about a possible Urban Land Institute (ULI) panel process — a public brainstorming/visioning exercise for the campus — to help shape community expectations before a developer arrives. No commitments were made; talks were described as exploratory.

A board member compared the ULI idea to the charrette process used for to guide the process of repurposing the old Housatonic School, which ultimately connected an architect at the charrette with a contractor and is leading to its re-development.

Simon’s Rock / Bard College Campus — Taxation: Town to send letter to the college before July 1 informing it of intention to get property onto town tax rolls.

The most substantive new action of the evening related to the imperative to get the 271-acre former college campus (17+ parcels, estimated current book value ~$63M, very likely overstated) onto the town tax rolls.

As it is the property remains on the tax-exempt rolls as a nonprofit, despite the college having closed. (Only one building is still actively occupied by Bard/Simon’s Rock staff.)

Town assessor Emily Schilling reported that property record cards are severely out of date — buildings are not correctly matched to parcels, sketches are missing, and a full reassessment cannot be completed before the July 1 FY27 deadline. She estimated the work is feasible for FY28 if begun now.

Selectboard member Phil Orenstein proposed sending a letter to Bard/Simon’s Rock as soon as possible and before the end of this month, putting them on notice that the town intends to treat the property as taxable, with details to follow — preserving the option to act in FY27 without committing to a specific assessment value or timeline. The board voted to direct the town manager and assessor to draft such a letter, to be reviewed by town counsel before sending.

Other Business

• Malcolm Fick was confirmed by unanimous vote as an alternate to the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission.

Citizen Speak

• John Breasted: Raised a grievance about the handling of a complaint he filed in March, which he said took five weeks to receive a response to and was addressed inadequately. He called the process “flawed, unfair, and in violation of town bylaws.” Said he would continue to press the matter.

• James Garzone: Praised the traffic calming discussion; asked that it be extended town-wide. Cited collisions at Route 41 and Division Street, and the upcoming Prosperity Way development in Housatonic. Endorsed the Simon’s Rock taxation idea and referenced a prior successful tax case involving the fairgrounds. Called again for action on the Searles School property which has been vacant since 2005.

• Michelle Loubert: Described near-miss collision leaving her driveway due to speeding on Division Street, much of it from New York-plated vehicles. Asked why two bridge-open signs are still flashing on Division Street weeks after the bridge reopened and suggested repurposing the flashing lights as traffic calming elsewhere. Also flagged a developing crack and dip on the opposite side of the Division Street Bridge to where a sinkhole recently developed, and urged DPW monitoring given truck traffic.

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THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY GREENAGERS

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Conservation, Agriculture, and Trades training programs pay youth ages 14-24 to build trails, grow food, and build and repair local infrastructure. All programs are educational, by paying youth for this work we ensure young people have summer work options that feel meaningful and can lead to future opportunities. And the work done by Greenagers youth crew members is high quality - improved trails, nutritious food, fine building techniques.

Greenagers is hiring now for this summers Trails, Farm, and Build Crews. Apply here!

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SHOWNOTES:

May 19th story in the New York Times on how deportations have impacted the construction industry, and how no Americans are applying to take the available jobs.

SHEELA’S PAST WRITINGS ON THE SUBJECT OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND SUCCESS

Link to Sheela’s FAQs piece on The Berkshire Edge, in 2023.

Link to Sheela’s June, 2025 piece on the Center for Educational Progress

Sheela’s letter to the Atlantic editor from 2025.

Sheela’s letter to the New Yorker from 2016

A college degree cannot be the only option that we, as a nation, value. Atul Gawande notes that the seventy per cent of Americans who lack a college degree have been forsaken. That’s because we’ve created a college-for-all culture, where alternatives to “professional” work are not respected or encouraged, instead of supporting programs that would give high schoolers vocational paths strategically aligned with both evolving and steady workforce needs. College for all has resulted in an inadequate education for most. We’ve boosted high-school-graduation rates at the expense of rigor, resulting in sixty-eight per cent of community-college students requiring remedial classes, and most of them dropping out. Meanwhile, all over the country we have aging plumbers earning a good living, with few prepared to take their places. The path to the American dream needs to be rerouted.

Sheela’s letter to the editor of the New York Times, April 6, 2019

To the Editor:

I read the story on the early days of affirmative action at Columbia mindful of the recent cheating scandal that laid bare the myth of merit as the primary factor in admission to elite higher education.

I’m left thinking that the street musician and Columbia dropout Les Goodson does not deserve to be held up as the exemplar of what went wrong with affirmative action, while his classmates the corporate lawyer, neurologist and financial officer are understood to be the successes. We should not use earning power and professional badges to judge a life.

Mr. Goodson’s neat apartment is adorned with his own artwork. Hegets to play music weekly with his own band and daily on his own terms. I know a fair number of “successful” professionals who dream of that sort of freedom.

While we’re smashing the sacred cow of elite higher education, let’s also revisit our cruelly limiting ideas about who gets to be called a success.

Sheela Clary

Sheela’s letter to the New York Times on March 10, 2018

To the Editor:

Nakesha’s story was written compellingly and with great compassion. I was especially touched by all the kind people who befriended and brought her gifts over the years.

But something disconcerted me. What if, rather than Williams College, she’d attended Berkshire Community College, an excellent but unfamous and less selective school, whose campus is about half an hour south of Williams? Was she a “bright light” by virtue of her humanity, or by virtue of her association with Williams, which accepts about one out of five applicants? If so, what does that say about us, the tiny minority of elite-educated Americans, that you need to scratch our competitive itch in order to get us to pay attention to the story of a homeless New Yorker?

SHEELA CLARY
HOUSATONIC, MASS.

The Library Trustees are in the market for a new member, and both the Trustees and the Friends of the GB Libraries group are looking for volunteers to help out with weekend book sales at Mason Library over the summer vacation.

Twenty years ago Mason Library in Great Barrington went through an extensive renovation, and, having doubled its size and become fully accessible, was rededicated and reopened in early 2007 with a new children’s room, teen reader room, private study spaces, a classroom, a historical documents room, as well as its large, bright main reading room.

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Mason’s sister library is the Ramsdell in Housatonic, which is in the midst of seeking support for a big renovation project. The Library Trustees oversee both libraries, and their meetings are available to join or view after the fact thanks to CTSB.

According to Library Director Dawn Jardine, as of the end of April in Fiscal Year 2026 there have been 66,829 total patron visits, with 60,692 to Mason and 6,137 to Ramsdell.

Below is a first person narration about the Friends’ work by one of its three members, Ed Abrahams. (The other two are Holly Hamer and Michelle Hanna.)

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In addition to the events Ed mentions, the town libraries host many other ongoing activities, a list of which can be found here.

The day we talked, Rob of Rob’s Records and Audio was combing through huge stacks of donated records for the choiciest picks, and we helped to cart them across the street to his store. The rest of the records, along with many hundreds and hundreds books, will be available for sale on the Mason Library’s front yard every weekend throughout the summer.

***

From Ed Abrahams, of Friends of GB Libraries

For a long time [the Friends of the Libraries group] was all but defunct. It was revived when the renovation happened [in 2007] to raise money for some things that weren’t in the budget.

One day Holly came and knocked on my door because they needed my driveway for something with the renovation, to make it easier and cheaper. I started volunteering with them. We’re a nonprofit, and we were formed by the library trustees as an independent organization, so people can make donations and deduct them from their taxes.

The Library Trustees are an elected board just like any other town board. The Friends’ mission is to raise money for programming for the library. All of our efforts raise $10,000 a year. There a comparable fund there, the Library Fund.

[On Housatonic’s Ramsdell Library] When I was running for selectboard in Housatonic somebody came up to me and said, “What are you going to do to lower taxes? You’re gonna protect this library, right?” But the two don’t go together. This town was able to have two libraries during the Great Depression. As long as I’m President of the Friends of the GB Libraries, I’m supporting Ramsdell.

Part of the mission of the Friends is to get people out of their houses and out from behind their keyboards and talking to each other. We used to do a documentary film series. We stopped during COVID and never started up again because the Triplex does it. People loved it. People still ask us to do it.

We now do a poetry reading once a month, and can do more of that.

I called the new bookstore [Lakeville Books] when they came here and asked, ‘Is there anything we can do?’ He said he get calls all the time for authors who want to do readings of their books, and they don’t have the space. So I did do one here. It was not a well attended. It was a young adult writer.

On the other hand, there was a 12-year-old girl who came with her mother, who almost got a one on one experience. It was, I think, worth it for just that kid. She was just in heaven. She was trying to write a book, at age 12.

The libraries have never asked for more than we had. We’ve never had to say, “We can’t do that.”

The library doesn’t have it in their budget to stay open late. Holly and I have keys, and they trust us, so almost anytime somebody wants to do something at night, one of us does it. For the poetry series, we have food and beer and wine. (Holly and I took bartending classes, so we’re certified and don’t have to hire a bartender.)

The library has museum passes, and the Friends pay for those. You can go to the Rockwell Museum for free through the your library card. Mass MOCA. They’re not all free, some of them are discounted. You used to have to come in and get the physical pass, and now you just reserve it online. I think that’s about $1,500 this year. And the tent out back we bought. Somebody gave us money to do that.

One goal of the book sale is to raise about $10,000. We used to charge a dollar a book, Then we started giving them away for free during COVID, because it was all day, we didn’t want to sit there. We just put a cash box, and we got rid of more books and raised a lot more money when there’s no price on it.

No one wants to throw away a book. I’ve got books in my house that were written in 1861 that should have been thrown away in 1862. Nobody wants them. I haven’t read most of them. They’re not worth anything. I donated a bunch to Shakespeare, probably for props.

We have a book seller who goes through all the books to make sure they’re not worth a fortune, and he takes the ones that are himself for us.

With the book sale, we started doing it during COVID, putting them outside. I cover them up when it rains, and try and leave them out at night. I want them out on Friday. If it’s going to be clear Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, I leave them out.

This summer, I’ll be away, so I need to get people to help do this work.

We’re doing rolling carts, about 60 boxes. It would take several people working together to put them out and take them in, and then people who are just around on days where the rain is iffy to cover it up if it starts to rain. Sometimes when rain’s not in the forecast until all of a sudden it is, I come around to cover them up. Ideally this would be like four or five folks who can communicate with one another who are close enough to downtown so they can be here very quickly. I tend to get them out in the morning by 9 or 10, and if it’s going to be a nice night, you just leave them out.

I’m tied to the neighborhood, which I love. Sometimes I just sit out there and read.

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Giving away books is so much fun if you love books. You see people come by and you hear them say, “I’ve been looking for this book.” People are sometimes really generous, which is nice. Asking for a suggested donation is much more effective than putting a price on something. We don’t even give a suggestion. We just say, “What you wish.”

We normally take more book donations but we’re about to stop, because I got 50 boxes of books. It does break my heart that we can’t accept more books right now until we start moving them out of there over the summer.

NOTE: This is a departure from our usual coverage. It’s a personal essay about media and politics and why I think the end of the Late Show matters beyond entertainment.

I hope you'll read and enjoy it.

I was one of nearly seven million people who tuned in for Stephen Colbert’s final night as the Late Show host on May 21st.

We broke records that night, but it was a one-off. For my part, I had not watched for three years, and returning for the finale I found myself thinking both fondly and regretfully, not just about Colbert’s television trajectory over the past twenty years, but about something more uncomfortable: whether the thing that made him great had also been one of the things that made us all worse.

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For a long time, up until 2023 or thereabouts, I was one of those who could only take my news on the rocks, with the dilution provided by late night comedians. I say “they” but for me there was really only Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. From the early George Bush years through the Trump years and Covid, the two of them — through the Daily Show and the Colbert Report — were invariably how I made sense of the world, and assured me that I was part of a unified, like-minded community.

To understand why we flocked to Stewart and Colbert is to remember the profound vertigo of the post-September 11 landscape. The government was addressing us with weaponized certainty, delivering catastrophically wrong conclusions and outright lies with a straight face. Mainstream journalists failed to call them out, and social media and the era of citizen journalism were not yet a thing. In that vacuum, late-night comedy transformed from a pleasant bedtime routine into a civic life raft.

We didn’t turn on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report for entertainment.

We needed them to get through the day.

On his own show Stephen Colbert fully inhabited the conservative blowhard alter ego he’d developed on the Daily Show — a character custom-made for the moment. He gave me and so many others a vocabulary and a container for our bewilderment. It was a sanctuary where, for thirty minutes a night, the chaos of the world was satisfyingly organized, where fearlessness lived. We willed him to mock the liars into repentance, and sometimes it felt like he had the power to do it.

But satire by definition requires a shared premise — you and the satirist have to agree on what’s being mocked for the joke to land. The Colbert Report was never such a national agreement, though I was under the impression that it was. It never occurred to me to consider that my virtual “like-minded community” was self-appointed, self-contained, and blinkered, talking only to itself, for itself.

What felt to me like the whole world was in relative terms just a few people. At its height the Colbert Report reached barely over a million viewers per night, translating to less than 1% of the American population.

I was first schooled on my error in 2012, when I used a clip from the show to illustrate the concept of satire for my tenth-grade English students. Most of the kids laughed, but one boy kept earnestly nodding his head, saying, “I love this guy. Who is this guy?” I chalked up his failure to get the joke to a rural, unsophisticated background, and moved on.

I keep coming back to that kid, and that moment. In my idealized memory, I imagine stopping the lesson to launch a grand, democratic classroom debate. But now I know why I didn’t. I wanted to scoot as fast as possible past an uncomfortable truth he was informing me of, which was that we don’t all speak the same political language. Instead of finding a way to ask him what he was hearing that the rest of us were not hearing, I moved us on.

And so we all moved on, night after night, to the next segment, the next punchline, the next satisfying evisceration.

The Colbert Report was transgressive, original, and hilarious. For some of us. But a joke that by definition excludes half the room is, in the end, something other than a joke. It’s like a magic wand that renders people invisible.

Colbert’s genius was for inhabiting and exposing the logic of a certain kind of American resentment. But inhabiting it did not diminish it. He did not mock the targets of his mockery into repentence. At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006, he declared:

“Every night on my show I speak from the gut.”

“I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the No Fact Zone. Fox News, I own a copyright on that term.”

“I don’t like books. I don’t trust ‘em. They’re elitist.”

The jokes were premised on a common agreement: that responsible leaders don’t speak from the gut, that they do filter the truth with rational argument, that they respect facts and read books. But for millions and millions of voters, we know now, Colbert’s satirical nonsense was their own man’s real-life manifesto. That man is ruling our world now.

I saw on social media that that student of mine went on to be a loyal Trump supporter, along with millions of other young men who’d been alienated by the cultural values that late night comedy both reflected and reinforced.

I am in no way making the argument that Colbert led to Trump. But his show, like so many others, did not see itself for what it was: a component of a sense-making apparatus for a minority of the population, increasingly organized around performance for the already-converted, where the goal was not to persuade but to affirm and comfort.

In 2015 Colbert moved to CBS to play himself, and I followed loyally, attending live tapings in 2017 and 2019. But over time, the Late Show’s bread and butter — the relentless lampooning of MAGA world — made that underlying problem unavoidably plain. The turning point for me came sometime in 2023, by which time the nightly monologues had ossified into a predictable ritual: a setup, a Trump or Trump-adjacent impression, Pavlovian applause from the studio audience, and... nothing else. I realized I wasn't being challenged or even informed, but tucked into bed with the same unvarying lullaby. I turned it off, and I didn’t look back until the finale.

What happened was less a culture war than a co-dependent relationship. The insatiable media machine needed Trump to be monstrous; his supporters needed the progressive media to be contemptuous. Everyone got exactly what they needed. Nothing changed.

For millions of Americans who have consistently identified with Trump through thick and thin, he represents something like Prometheus — the figure from Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods to give to the people, and whom Zeus punished by chaining him to a rock and sending an eagle to devour his liver, every single day, forever.

But Prometheus’s liver grew back. It always grew back.

The late night hosts and their audiences like to think they are eating Trump for dinner every night, but they are an integral component in his myth-making.

The Late Show, while defiant to the end in the face of an authoritarian government and spineless corporate bosses, also saw itself as a national campfire. Colbert said on his final night that his job had been “to feel the news with you.” But he didn’t acknowledge that “you” was not “you all” but really “you few.”

On PBS NewsHour, host Geoff Bennett asked on May 21st whether the Late Show finale portended the end of late night’s “shared national conversation.” The answer is yes, but only because the idea that any one show was carrying on a shared national conversation was illusory. This is not to say that the political forces pulling at the two halves of the country are identical in their aims or their ethics. But the two sides’ media diets are indeed symmetrical in their dysfunction. Each side curates a custom version of reality designed not to seek truth, but to protect the psyche from the discomfort of being wrong.

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But I see room for hope here.

If late night as a whole really is dying, it may be the most clarifying thing to happen to our civic life in years. At root we don’t really need or want to be confirmed in our priors; we’re just too demoralized at this historical moment to recognize what we’re missing. We’ve been waiting for someone — a comedian, a journalist, a politician, a show — to have the tough conversations for us. But Superman is not on his way. We need to show up as our own heroes.

Few of us will ever get the chance to perform for millions. But nearly all of us will get the chance to speak directly to the people in the classroom, at the dinner table, across the fence. Those conversations are smaller, slower, and there’s nothing funny about them. They are also the only kind that have ever actually made a difference to change a heart or mind.

For me with the student in my classroom, the one who didn’t get the joke because the joke wasn’t built for him, I was afraid to engage. I would not be afraid now, and I would recognize the golden learning opportunity his reaction to the Colbert Report represented. Not just for him, but for those of us who got the joke.

Our work is not to seek out the next reassuring savior. It’s to stop the class or the dinner or the chit chat and start a difficult discussion. It’s to turn to the one nodding at something that makes you wince, or wincing at something that makes you nod and ask, with real curiosity, what they’re hearing.

Not to correct them.

Not to win.

But because that is a shared conversation.

Becket : 10:30

Parade starts at 10:30 a.m. at North Becket Cemetery, ending at Ballou Park for ceremonies at 11 a.m. Lineup at 10. Reception to follow at Federated Church. Rain plan: ceremony inside the church.

Egremont (South Egremont): 12 noon

Parade begins at noon at the South Egremont fire station and marches to the village green for a short ceremony. Ice cream served afterward at the fire station. Veterans wishing to participate can contact Tom Gage at 413-528-0076.

Great Barrington: 11 am

The parade starts at 11 a.m. and goes from Dresser Avenue to Bridge Street, with a ceremony in front of Town Hall.

Volunteers are needed to carry posters of deceased veterans.

Housatonic: 10:30 Memorial Service

NOTE: There will be no Housatonic parade this year, but there will be a memorial service at the cemetery at 10:30

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Lee: 10 am

Starts at Main Street at 10 a.m., proceeds to Fuller Street, and concludes with ceremonies at Fairmont Cemetery.

Lenox: 12 noon

The parade begins at noon at the Church on the Hill, then proceeds to the War Monument for a ceremony. Veterans wishing to march should arrive at the Church on the Hill by 11:45.

Veterans needing rides can call Sean Ward at 413-822-4343

Rain plan: remarks at Town Hall auditorium at noon.

Lenox Dale: 8 am

Parade sponsored by the Lenox Dale Fire Company begins at 8 a.m. at Veterans Memorial Park on Walker Street, proceeding to St. Vincent de Paul Church for a Mass at 8:30 for deceased and living veterans, then continues through the village back to the park for concluding services.

Monterey: 10:30 ceremony/ 1 pm parade

10:30am Memorial Day Ceremony, Veterans Memorial Park, Corner of Blue Hill Rd and Main Road

12:30pm Marchers Line Up, Rt 23 and Sandisfield Rd

1:00pm Parade Begins, March to the Firehouse with a stop at the Monterey Meeting House, Wreath Laying Ceremony, Reflections, Band Performance

Hot dogs at the Firehouse provided by Hume New England

Sheffield (Ashley Falls): 8 am

March begins from the village green in Ashley Falls at 8 a.m. with observances at the Clayton Road cemetery; refreshments to follow at Trinity United Methodist Church. Rain plan: ceremony inside the church.

Stockbridge: 11 am ceremony, 12:15 parade

Gather at Congregational church at 10:45 am for benediction, taps, and a firearms salute beginning at 11 a.m. (transportation available).

Gather at Town Hall at 12 noon to line up for parade which steps off at 12:15.

Children are encouraged to decorate bikes and scooters; refreshments and activities follow.

West Stockbridge: 8:30 am ceremony, 9:15 parade

Ceremony at 8:30 a.m. at the War Memorial at Town Hall.

Parade steps off at 9:15 a.m. from the Congregational Church.

Bike decorating begins at 8 a.m. at Town Hall with Parks & Recreation; decorated cars, trucks, and floats welcome.

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