Voters in a handful of Massachusetts cities head to the polls next Tuesday for preliminary elections. Both cities in Berkshire County have contested races for mayor. New England Public Radio’s Berkshire County reporter Adam Frenier sits down with Henry Epp to take a look at the candidates and issues in Pittsfield and North Adams.
Pittsfield Mayoral Candidates Take Part In Forum With A Week To Go Before Primary
With a week to go before the primary election, four candidates for Pittsfield mayor took part in a forum Monday night.
TWEETS FROM THE DEBATE: @AdamFrenier, NEPR’s Berkshire County reporter
The candidates took turns answering questions, but were not given the chance to offer rebuttals. A tense moment happened when water systems analyst Craig Gaetani veered off topic and addressed criminal charges pending against him. He’s accused of harassing and threatening a fire department employee, something Gaetani says he’s innocent of.
“I have to turn right to Mayor Bianchi because Mayor Bianchi and the police chief tried, well they actually did do in Mrs. Walto in her last bid for mayor and they’re trying to do me in,” Gaetani says.
Gaetani is referring to another candidate, Donna Walto, who was arrested on disorderly conduct charges the last time she ran for mayor in 2011. Also running are incumbent Mayor Dan Bianchi and City Clerk Linda Tyer.
Part Of Housatonic River In Pittsfield To Get A Makeover
Decades after General Electric stopped improperly disposing industrial chemicals into the Housatonic in Pittsfield, the 150 mile river remains contaminated. and the EPA continues to ban fishing. But one part of the river is getting a makeover.
Other than the occasional sound of a freight train passing over the west branch of the Housatonic, it’s pretty quiet here. The river’s cloudy water inches slowly toward an old dam. Along the eroded banks, broken glass is all over the place, and someone dumped a couch here too. There’s little vegetation, but plant by plant Michael Piantedosi from the New England Wildflower Society is trying to change that.
“Our effort is to scour the area in order to find what is present for native species,” Piantedosi says.
And Piantedosi adds, to restore a healthier eco system in the water and the along the banks, landscapers will take this on, almost seed by seed.
“We circle out from the immediate project area to find locations for common seed collection of native and locally-adapted plants that are appropriate for this type of habitat.”
A variety of grasses, trees and plants–such as Asters and Goldenrod will be replanted here. It’s a process that Piantedosi says requires great care. And there’s no robbing from Peter to pay Paul.
“Our species that we collect from have to be abundant enough to collect from them without doing any harm to the present population,” Piantedosi says. “So we want large populations of these common, native plants but also within proximity to the project area.”
Bringing back native plants is only one step in restoring this part of the Housatonic. Tearing down an unnecessary century-old dam is another. Tim Purinton from the Massachsuetts Division of Ecological Restoration says dams, in general, cause a negative impact on fish and wildlife.
“They typically hold back water,” Purinton says. “That still water is exposed to sunlight, temperatures are elevated and water quality typically is very poor in impounded waters behind dams.”
With state funds, The dam, which was also the site of a drowning two years ago, is scheduled for demolition next year. The seed gathering, and eventual planting, paid for through a federal grant, gets underway then too.
As for what this part of the river could will look like when everything is completed? Purinton offers this vision:
“It should look like a natural river system that’s full of riffles, pools, complexity, woody debris.
And people would be able to enjoy just that as the city is planning a path for bikes and walking along this part of the river stretching about a mile upstream.
Brien Center, Employees Reach Agreement Avoiding Strike
A strike has been avoided at Berkshire County’s largest mental health and substance abuse treatment center.
The last minute deal between the Brien Center in Pittsfield, and its workers kept 350 front line clinicians and others on the job. The tentative contract includes wage increases and reduced health insurance costs and wraps up months of tense negotiations. The Brien Center treats about 10-thousand people a year, and staff say they are seeing a substantial increase in heroin addicts coming for treatment . Raya Kirby is a coordinator in Brein’s intensive care unit.
“We want to be able to provide the best quality services for the families we serve,” Kirby says. “In order to do that, we really needed to make the agency a place where people want to stay and a place that good people want to work.”
Kirby says the agreement should help solve the problem of employee turnover, which sometimes disrupted client care. Christine Macbeth is Brien’s CEO. She says the new deal will help both employees and the people they treat.
“The better they feel about how they’re being treated by the employer, and in this case, that’s the Brien Center, ultimately, it’s the people of Berkshire County that are going to benefit”, Macbeth says.
A Debate Over How Much Of GE’s Legacy Should Remain At Housatonic’s Bottom
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has given people until this Monday to comment on a $613 million plan to finish a toxic waste clean up of the Housatonic River.
General Electric would foot the bill. The company had a factory on the river in Pittsfield where, up until the 1970s, it released PCBs, a chemical compound now linked to cancer. In 2000 GE signed an agreement to clean it up, and there’s a debate over whether removing the PCBs will protect the environment or hurt it.
First two miles finished
At one time it seemed like PCBs were everywhere in Pittsfield. In the mid-1990s resident Barbara Cianfarini learned dozens of backyards were contaminated. Walking above the Housatonic River today she points to a stretch south of the old GE plant that’s been cleaned up.
“So if you look right in there you can see a little patch of water, you can see it running down there,” Cianfarini says.
Congress banned PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyls in the late 1970s. Up until then, for decades, G.E. used them to make electrical transformers. Cianfarini, who helped start the group Citizens for PCB Removal, remembers smelling the PCBs.
“It’s a very heavy, dank, oily smell,” Cianfarini says. “I jokingly referred to it as Pittsfield’s bad breath.”
Pittsfield is cleaner now. Cianfarini says in the seven years since the EPA and GE dug up PCBs from the first two miles of the river, the plants and animals have returned.
“Mother nature has taken over and camouflaged it very well,” she says. “So we’re very pleased with the results.”
Regulators scale back ambitions for ‘Rest of River’
Today, downstream, a very different stretch of polluted river has yet to be cleaned up. The EPA’s plan covers 15 miles that flow past a state forest, an Audubon Sanctuary and the town of Lenox, home to Tanglewood.
Back in 2011, as the EPA was working on its plan, the state of Massachusetts criticized the federal agency for proposing to dig up PCBs where there are rare species. Curt Spalding, who heads up the EPA in New England, says the EPA’s plan has shifted.
“We were going to do more. We’re doing a little less, but we’re still meeting the criteria,” Spalding says. “What I mean by a little less; a little less digging and capping in sensitive areas that the state was concerned about, but overall it meets the criteria and that’s the bottom line.”
He’s referring to the federal criteria designed to protect human health and the environment.
Spalding says the plan removes enough PCBs so that, eventually, the fish will be safe enough to eat. PCBs, which settle in the soil, are ingested by insects, which are consumed by fish. Other animals, including humans, eat the fish and get exposed to the toxin.
“We don’t see a future at this point where pregnant women or children can just eat the fish freely,” he says. “What we’re shooting for is one fish a month for healthy adults and teenagers and above.”
The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection declined to be interviewed at this point in the process. General Electric released a statement referring to “significant flaws” in the plan.
No easy answers, no consensus
Six towns in the area are concerned about the economic and social impacts. In Connecticut, where the Housatonic flows into Long Island Sound, a state biologist says the plan does a good job addressing the reduction of PCBs that come down stream.
The public is also divided.
Jeffrey Cook has lived in the Berkshires near the river for decades. He acknowledges removing PCBs could help wildlife.
“But the human health risk is enormously overstated and most of us really think it’s a lot of baloney,” says Cook, who leads a group that’s concerned about the EPA’s plan.
Cook lives in a house overlooking an expansive floodplain and miles of tangled wetlands. He says the landscape will be destroyed.
“You’re now walking through the most beautiful area and the most sensitive,” he says on a walk through the woods. The path stops at the river’s edge. “They’re dredging the whole river in this area. So everything you see bank to bank is going to be dug out,”
“It’s not the lady’s garden club with LL Bean boots and little wheelbarrows digging up the river. It’s heavy equipment loading 20-ton trucks.”
South of here, Tim Gray of the Housatonic River Initiative, is paddling past October Mountain, admiring the fall colors.
“It does make you think, ‘Why should we clean the river?’ because it’s beautiful,” Gray says. “But down below this river, although it looks beautiful, lies a deadly toxin.”
Gray has been fighting for a thorough clean up for nearly 40 years. He says the EPA’s plan doesn’t clean up enough PCBs.
“We find it absurd that we want to leave super-high levels of PCBs in there that are not good for these state-listed species, especially the animals,” Gray says.
Gray admits a clean up is a construction project, but he points to the PCB removal in Pittsfield as proof that the river can recover. He wants the EPA to slow down and test new ways to treat and destroy PCBs without hurting habitat.
“It took them 70 years, whatever it is to pollute the river and start cleaning it up,” Gray says. “And guess what? I’m not in a hurry. And the bottom line is maybe we put that off until we can figure out really the best thing to do for it.”
Once the EPA finalizes its plan, GE has the right to dispute it. Either way, it could be years before the cleanup begins.
Pittsfield School Recovering From Internet Attack
The schools superintendent in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, hopes to have the district’s internet all up and running this week. That followed what he describes as a “denial-of-service” attack.
With the start of the school year, superintendents like Jason McCandless have enough things on their to-do list. Add this: deal with cyber attack.
“Our network has been jammed up by just really useless, meaningless data that has been purposefully sent to our part of the internet pipeline,” McCandless says.
The attack, essentially, clogged the email systems, websites and network software.
McCandless says the district is working with police, but didn’t want to speculate on who would target Pittsfield schools.
Most of the network was working again as of Friday,except parents were not able to access student grades and attendance information. And he does see a silver lining in his internet headache.
‘This has forced us to do more face-to-face conversation, and more conversations where we’re actually speaking to one another rather than exchanging emails,” he says.