BCC Granted $21.1M For Hawthorne & Melville Halls

By Andy McKeeveriBerkshires Staff
04:25PM / Wednesday, October 03, 2012Print Story | Email Story

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The two main academic facilities at Berkshire Community College will receive a $21.1 million facelift.

Gov. Deval Patrick announced on Wednesday that $21.1 million in capital funds are heading to the Berkshires to renovate Hawthorne and Melville Halls. The projects include exterior masonry repairs as part of the renovations.

"This is the first investment in those buildings since they were built," college President Ellen Kennedy said of the 40-year-old academic halls on Wednesday. "There is no air conditioning here, which makes it difficult for us to run summer programming, the laboratories are the old style and they don't reflect the way our faculty want to teach."

Kennedy said the funds will include renovation of the school's science labs and the majority of the classrooms. The renovations were initially detailed in a mid-2000s master plan but school officials have been waiting for the state to fund the repairs since.

"This will be transformative," an excited Kennedy said only a few hours after she received the phone call from Patrick informing her of the funding.

The money comes from a $2.2 billion higher education bond bill signed in 2008, which authorized the governor to increase the percentage of state bond-funded capital projects for colleges from 3 percent to 10 percent. Those bonds have included similar projects like the Center for Science and Innovation, which is under construction at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

"Berkshire Community College is full of talent and promise and potential," Patrick said in a press release. "These funds will help the students and faculty seize the opportunities before them."

Kennedy said the school will soon begin working with the state Department of Capital Asset Management to start the design stage. A timeline beyond that is still unknown.

BCC was one of five community colleges to be awarded funding for capital projects in this round. MassBay Community College was granted $22.1 million; Mount Wachusett Community College was granted $37.9 million; Springfield Technical Community College was granted $6.8 million and Roxbury Community College was granted $20.7 million.

"Our administration is committed to maintaining Massachusetts’ reputation for world-class educational facilities,"said Lt. Gov.Timothy Murray said in the release. "By investing in Berkshire Community College and our institutions of public higher education, we are ensuring the commonwealth remains at the forefront in educating our students to meet the demands of a changing and competitive job market."

The 2013 Capital Plan includes $298 million for community colleges over five years. Read the press release here.

Tags: BCC, capital projects, higher education,

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Lee Wants Bioremediation in Housatonic River Vernal Pool Study

05:24AM / Thursday, September 03, 2026

LEE, Mass. — The town has asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and General Electric to include PCB bioremediation in its vernal pool study on the Housatonic River.

Lee officials are urging the EPA to require GE to add a bioremediation treatment arm to the vernal-pool study or provide the public with a clear explanation for why such testing is being excluded.

"This is exactly the kind of question EPA and GE should be asking before final remedy decisions are locked in," Select Board Chair Bob Jones said in a statement released to the press. "The town is not asking to slow the cleanup. We are asking EPA and GE to make the cleanup smarter, less destructive, and more protective over the long term."

An open house was held in Pittsfield earlier this summer for the Vernal Pool Pilot Study on Reach 5A of the Housatonic River, a five-mile stretch between the river's confluence and Lenox border.

EPA has required GE to conduct a Vernal Pool Pilot Study as part of the Housatonic River Rest of River remediation, comparing excavation and restoration with activated-carbon-based treatments, including a product called SediMite and powdered activated carbon, the town said.

Ten vernal pools will be cleaned of polychlorinated biphenyls in total, five with excavation and five with active carbon, and seven additional vernal pools will be monitored as controls. Construction will be complete around October, but the pools will be left to their natural processes and monitored with surveys and sampling for three years.

The Lee PCB Advisory Committee wrote a letter calling for the 21st-century approach it said could reduce long-term toxicity, avoid unnecessary destruction of sensitive habitats, and improve the effectiveness of the cleanup.

It states that Lee supports the study's purpose and agrees that EPA and GE must understand how cleanup activities affect sensitive vernal-pool ecosystems.

"The current pilot includes 10 treatment pools and seven control pools, while local officials understand that roughly 100 vernal pools may occur in the broader remediation corridor," the Aug. 27 letter reads.

"That makes the pilot study consequential: the methods tested now could shape how many sensitive wetlands are excavated, reconstructed, treated, or left with PCBs managed in place."

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