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Lisa Blackmer, a city councilor in North Adams, is running for the 1st Berkshire District. She is one of four Democratic candidates interviewed by the Williamstown Democratic Committee.

Q&A: Blackmer Takes Her Turn at Williamstown Candidates Forum

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Lisa Blackmer hopes to bring strong values and an open mind to the 1st Berkshire seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
 
"I generally try to listen to people from different sides, educate myself about the issue and make the decision to the best of my ability," Blackmer, a North Adams city councilor, said recently. "There are things that are very important to our community that may not matter somewhere else that I will advocate strongly for."
 
Blackmer was the fourth and final Democratic candidate interviewed to fill the unexpired term of deceased state Rep. Gailanne Cariddi, D-North Adams. 
 
On Aug. 9, she participated in a series of forums hosted by the Williamstown Democratic Committee and recorded by the town's community access television station, WilliNet. Blackmer was interviewed for about an hour by committee chairman and Williams College political science professor James Mahon.
 
 
iBerkshires.com transcribed those sessions. This is the second in a series of four Q&As sharing the thoughts of the four candidates, who will share the same stage on Sept. 18 in Lanesborough.
 
Opening Statement: I am a North Adams City councilor, and I have been involved in government and seen what government can do right and do well. There are a lot of reason I'm running. Part of it is my history and my story. I was born in Pittsfield. We moved to Chester, a tiny little town in Hampden County that had a lot of unemployment and issues because the quarries had closed.
 
My dad was a milkman. He delivered milk for Fairdale Farms. A lot of you out there may remember those days. One day he got hurt at work. He came home, went to bed for the weekend, but, like people do, on Monday he went right back to work and hurt his back really bad. When he did that, it left the family without an income. He had some worker's compensation and the GI Bill. He went back to school, and, in the meantime, my mother was raising my two younger sisters and I. And life was hard. We qualified for programs, like one of the original predecessors to food stamps.
 
I remember my mom mixing powdered milk to feed the cats and maybe cutting it with a little regular milk. I remember the peanut butter and things that they had. I know people talk about these issues, but I actually lived some of them.
 
But the one thing that always stays with me is my parents always wanted to do better for other people, wanted to help other people. … In school, I had a lot of friends who had older brother and sisters, and these kids came to school, and they say, 'There's no such thing as Santa Claus.' I said, 'What do you mean, there's no such thing as Santa Claus? Your brothers are lying to you.' … I said, 'They're wrong. I know they're wrong because my parents don't have any money. I know we don't have any money. And I have this wonderful bear that Santa brought me for Christmas last year.' So, I convinced the whole class there really was a Santa Claus. Years later, I found out my mom made the bear. That's the kind of things that make me want to help other people. I grew up in a family where, if someone in the family needed help, if they needed a room to stay or food or needed someone to help with their kids, my mom and I did that. We hosted a Cambodian refugee family in the early to mid-80s.
 
That's where I came from. I know what government can do and what it can do well.
 
But I'm running because Gail has big shoes to fill, and I feel I'm the best person to do that. She worked on a lot of projects. She had some legislation going on, and I know I can step in and continue that legislation: Things like a cultural corridor from Williamstown to North Adams. Things like she was doing a lot of work with the Baker Hill Road District, which is the mall; I had some experience when I was a temporary accountant filling in in Lanesborough, so I'm familiar with that project. She signed on to legislation to develop a task force on child welfare. She signed on to a bill to create a coaching program for young parents who could use some extra help. She advocated for Northern Berkshire the entire time she was in the House and even before that — things like the bike trail, things like the environment. And I know her big thing was the do-not call list, something we all can identify with.
 
Those are the kinds of things that matter. We can't get to Boston without it being a long commute, whether it's to see a doctor or to work, so I think we need to work on high-speed rail. The economic development issues in this area are transportation and job training. We have jobs available, but there's a mismatch between the needed skills and the actual skills. So we need to make sure training is funded and people know about the programs and can get to the programs.
 
Education. Obviously, as a city councilor and the past president of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, I've advocated for funding for cities and towns, which includes funding for government but also funding for roads and funding for the schools. We need to make sure we have funding, and we need to make sure we get rid of some of the unfunded mandates. We need to make sure we have proper funding for special education, and we need to have proper funding for regional transportation and regional voc-tech transportation. And those are all things that, if the cities and towns can make that happen it will help everybody's life.
 
I'm running because I want to make lives better for the residents of the areas, and I want to make it so they can live, work and prosper in North Berkshire. It's a beautiful place to live. Let's make it a place to live where everybody has a good quality of life.
 
If you talk to people who have businesses in Berkshire County, one of the first things they'll tell you about the difficulty of doing business in the county is electricity is really expensive here. So, what can we do to bring down electricity rates in our neck of the woods?
 
Blackmer: I think solar is part of the equation. I know in North Adams, we signed onto — and several communities in the area signed on to — an aggregation, which is a lower rate because it's a guaranteed amount of business. I was instrumental in working on that on the City Council. We also brought that in in Sandisfield.
 
I do think we need to have renewable energy sources. We need to lift the solar cap, and we need to either get rid of it or lift it significantly so we are not, constantly, every year, every other year, asking the governor to lift it — whether the governor is Deval Patrick or Charlie Baker. We're constantly fighting that battle.
 
We're gonna run out of oil at some point, so we need to have other options. And it will lower the cost if there is enough of it for everybody.
 
I'm going to follow up now. I'm going to pretend I'm from the utilities. Look, we pay for the lines that go to everybody's houses. We built this huge distribution network, and people aren't even using the distribution network. If people go off the grid and generate solar at their house and put it back on the grid, and we're supposed to pay for it. And they're not even using the grid except keeping it there just in case their battery goes out or something, then basically, we're everybody's backstop. And we can't survive that way. We can't pay for the distribution network unless we charge a lot more just to have it connected to your house. … What about them? They have a point, don't they, when they say there has to be a cap on net metering?
 
Blackmer: I think, the first thing you have to look at is they're guaranteed a profit. That's part of the deal that goes back to the last century when we put in rural electrification and all that. But the first place is look at the salaries of the executives. … Maybe it shouldn't be publicly owned as a corporation so you don't have to have a return on investment to your shareholders. Maybe it needs to be publicly owned or held in some manner so that we are all the shareholders.
 
Another utility question: Broadband. Everybody's talking about broadband. There's a lot of hilltowns. I'm sure you face it in Buckland. You probably faced it in Sandisfield before. Now, it's a really hot issue. People are talking about it in Williamstown, too, even though Williams College has a pretty good connection. So, what can we do? What can the state do?
 
Blackmer: I think there are two separate issues. First, there are the people who don't have any. There are neighborhoods in Buckland, places in Sandisfield, places in the hilltowns. I think there are 41 towns in Western and Central Massachusetts. They have expanded it in some places. They have been connected to another town — so they made a deal as part of the merger. Lanesborough got it, and I think Windsor is getting some. So the issue is, the towns that don't have any of it or they have parts of their towns that aren't reached.
 
There's the other issue, which is the quality and speed in the towns that do get it isn't acceptable. I know everybody's been talking about trying to open files and it takes forever. … I remember back when the T3 line went into Mass MoCA, that was a big deal. It's a business issue. It's an economic issue.
 
I think broadband needs to be treated like rural electrification was, and it needs to be a right for everybody. They're using it for telemedicine. Broadband is more than just getting the internet at home. You need that to build the business base. But if you're using it for telemedicine, if you're using it for a lifeline, you have to have that.
 
Sometimes, they spend so much time studying issues and having so many people in the middle, that the money never quite gets down to where it's supposed to go.
 
I have a related issue. One of the things that makes Berkshire County so desirable is the fact that we have these wonderful hills and these wonderful valleys and relatively sparse population. When you have relatively sparse population, however, it doesn't pay a lot of people to run broadband out here. It doesn't pay somebody to run a big trunk line and some grids so you have maybe competition for your electricity. And it doesn't pay to run buses all over the place for the schools. So we've been really falling behind on Chapter 70 funding, the reimbursement for transportation. So that's one more thing that comes on other side of the coin for Berkshire County's desirability or quality of life. The other thing is when you're sparse, people in Boston don't pay a lot of attention to you. So what can we do?
 
Blackmer: Well, people in Boston tend to pay attention to me. I don't make it easy for them not to. I've been doing that for the past six years on the policy committee for the [Massachusetts Municipal Association] and as the vice president and then president of the MMA.
 
Yes, it's sparse. But we have good representation. We work as a group out here. We work as a delegation. The other thing is, you find natural allies — people with the same issues. Sometimes it's the Cape and islands, although they have somewhat a different economy and a different home ownership/property issue. They have some of the challenges we have with regionalization and regional schools. The northern tier, along Route 2, where the factories have closed, the mills have closed, and they're trying to reinvent themselves.
 
So what what you do, is you find collaboration with other senators and House members who have similar concerns.
 
I've done that. One of the issues was the veterans issue. When I got on the City Council, we were paying $80,000 for veterans benefits. Then at one point it maxed out at $600,000 of our budget. I totally support the veterans' programs, but it was an issue with the funding mechanism. At the City Council, we said, 'We need more money in that account because someone's moved, someone's gotten sick, and they need benefits.' We could make that vote in the City Council. If you're in a town, and you go over, you had to call a town meeting. You had to find where you were going to fund it from. And then you had to vote it. There's a cost to having a town meeting, and the budgets are tighter — the smaller the town, the tighter the budget. What we did on the policy committee was we started talking about it. The people in the eastern part of the state were really concerned about the training and the qualifications of the veterans agents; I explained what we were running into out here in the smaller towns, and they were totally unaware. One community had an $80 million budget and an $80,000 veterans budget. When I explained my numbers and those of the towns around me, it changed the discussion. We got it changed. We still have to pay for it, but the state has been much better at reimbursing its share, and they do it more timely. But we also do it like snow and ice; so we don't have to have a meeting to move the money, we can deficit spend.
 
That's an example. Obviously, regional transportation is an issue, and there's the whole thing going on with the collaboration and the task force going on for Berkshire County schools. I know, originally, the state years ago wanted the schools to consolidate and regionalize, so they offered them transportation aid, which they have since backed off and very seldom fully fund that.
 
The other thing is it ties back to broadband and how much of the education can we do remotely if we don't have the internet in our homes? How are they going to be able to use that kind of program to fix the situation that is Berkshire County regionalization.
 
There are a couple of things that are out there and the Legislature has been dealing with. You mentioned things like the cultural corridor. Do you care to talk about any more of those?
 
Blackmer: I hit some of Gail's issues. I think my role would be first to really push for and advocate for and build alliances that I might not already have to get some of her legislation through — working not just with the delegation but some of the other representatives I know who worked with Gail.
 
There are 16 pages of bills she's signed on to, and then there are the ones that were her legislation. … I know the bike path, that's not in that pile of legislation, but it's something she wanted to do. Another thing is the Hoosic River Revival, there's some funding there that is in limbo right now because of the issues that happened with the sale of some property — another entity buying some property near the river. I would push to give [the Hoosic River Revival group] an extension on spending that money so we can make sure we do what we need to do with the money we were allocated for the river.
 
Here are a couple of things I could also mention as Gail's legacy, in a way. There's a group called Raise Up Massachusetts, which has strong representation from some of the unions, that went in to talk to Gail a few months before she passed and asked her about two big issues they're focused on. One is the $15 minimum wage, and the other one is paid family and medical leave. … This is something she signed on to, and I'm wondering if you'd be willing to follow up on that.
 
Blackmer: I would sign on to the $15 minimum wage. I think it's gradual. I think the way we started moving it up, a dollar an hour a year, is a responsible way because there's an impact on smaller businesses. I'd support that. I think a gradual approach is the way to do it. And it's been successful from moving it from $8.25 to $9 to $10 to $11. I've worked in [human resources], and I understand the challenges when you're doing that for a small business.
 
I'm in favor of paid family leave. As I've always said, the devil's in the details. If you have a mom and pop shop and maybe one employee, having that paid family leave becomes more of a challenge. I think there's usually a minimum number of employees, so depending what that number is, I'd definitely be for that. It's not just paid family leave, because if the parents can be home with the children, the children are going to have a better start, which will save us money in the long term.
 
Here's an H.R. question. Health care. Mass Health takes, I think, 37 percent of the commonwealth's budget. What would you do with that? Would you say: Maybe we can save some money with a single-payer system? There are two pairs of bills in the Legislature right now, one to study it and the other one to move right toward it. Are you in favor of single-payer? Do you think it's a way to save some money or at least to simplify the system so people can navigate it?
 
Blackmer: I don't think we can do it immediately. [State Sen. Stanley Rosenburg, D-Northampton] talked about this in June when he had a forum with [Sen. Adam Hinds, D-Pittsfield] and the public down in Pittsfield. He talked about the fact that it would be an immediate cost. It would be billions of dollars that we're not in a position to spend right now. I think health care spending is actually over 40 percent [of the state budget].
 
I think one of the things I would bring up is the fact that if you want to bill the state of Massachusetts, I forget how many entities there are. We had a forum at Mass MoCA with Gov. [Mike] Dukakis back in 2001. … The hospitals said, 'If you can just make billing the commonwealth one entity instead of all these different entities, that in itself would save time, energy and money.' I think there are ways to do that.
 
I think we need other options because in this area we don't have a lot of doctors. There's a constant challenge if you move to the area and you're looking for a doctor who is taking on new patients. I think some of the solutions are having physicians' assistants and the other levels of staffing that can help you with the basics. If you have the flu, if you have strep, if you've fallen and cut your finger and someone needs to tape it — I think a lot of those services can be provided at a lower cost. We also have to learn to use the ER properly. It needs to be a real emergency. It can't be, 'My back hurts today, and it's 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and I don't want to have to wait until tomorrow morning.' You've got to redefine what an emergency is and maybe have urgent care doing some of that. I know Williamstown Medical is offering extended hours until 6 or 8 p.m. I know they're doing that in Pittsfield. I'd like to see more of that because it would be a cheaper way to provide service. It would be much more convenient and a much more pleasant experience to walk in and wait a little bit and see a physicians' assistant rather than sitting in the ER with ambulances coming in and out. … I think it's a better way to treat when possible, and I think it would save some money.
 
I guess the upshot is the things that would be great for the hospitals would cost the commonwealth more money. Do single-payer, and it's great for the hospitals, but it would cost the commonwealth.
 
Blackmer: But I do think there's a way. We need to move to a Medicare for all system, but we do that by lowering the age. So we're at 65, do we lower it a year each year or do we lower it to 62 and then 60 and then 57? Obviously, that takes time, but most people don't appreciate and believe in and don't have a problem with Medicare unless they're ultra-conservative. They've used the system, their grandparents have used it, their parents have used it, so they understand it. I think that's the natural succession at the federal level, too.
 
We're talking about a lot of things that cost money: broadband and school funding and so-on. We have a budget difficulty right now. Where would the money come from?
 
Blackmer: One of the places would be the millionaires tax. I think money needs to go into the schools and needs to go into transportation, the Chapter 90 funding. MMA has determined it takes about $600 million a year to keep all of our roads in a state of good repair. That money goes up every year. Every year you don't fix a road, the more expensive it gets to fix it when you finally get around to it. I know we're seeing that; New England's hard on roads. So the money from the millionaires tax would cover that. It also hopefully would alleviate some of the budget problems.
 
And I know we have a healthy population, but while we have access to great health care, that comes at a cost, and I know there has been work to try to lower the costs, the reimbursement levels at some of the high-end hospitals. We need to make sure we have proper reimbursements for our community hospitals. We don't need to lose community hospitals; that shouldn't be the trade off for the great care you can get by driving to Boston.
 
Speaking of health care, tell me about how you would approach the opioid crisis.
 
Blackmer: I've kind of watched the Franklin County model because they were a little ahead of us on this issue. They have the sheriff involved and the health-care providers and the schools and the courts and government. We have a hospital here, we have some space that's not being utilized. I'd like to see if it's possible for that to be used for treatment at different levels. There are different levels of treatment. There's the immediate detox, then there's the next couple of weeks after where people are very at risk of reusing. And then you work and work and work and you're sober and you go back in your community and all of a sudden all of your triggers are still there. So we have to find ways to work that out. Halfway house, I hate that phrase, but some kind of shared living would be a model of integrating people from the medical into the societal. And making sure there are efforts to hire people. If you have a job and you have somewhere to be, maybe you're worrying less about money and you also have something to occupy your time.
 
You did have an interesting position on marijuana, and I want you to talk about the law that is in and the tax rate and all the rest of it.
 
Blackmer: I do not have a problem with medical marijuana. I do not have a problem with someone sitting in their backyard smoking a joint. My problem was with the legislation and the way it was written. It was written by the industry, so they did everything they wanted. It wasn't good for cities and towns. It took away control from government to make decisions. On every other issue a government decides, not a Prop 2 1/2 override or a bonding of some sort, those decisions are made by legislative bodies. In a city, it's the city council, and in a town, it would be town meeting. With this law, it was set as a ballot initiative. It had to be on the ballot if you wanted to ban marijuana [retail sales]. That's been tweaked, so if your town voted against [the public question in November 2016], then you can use your legislative body, and if your town voted for it on the ballot question, then you have to have a ballot question to ban it.
 
To me, the devil was in the details: zoning; issues of whether you were going to have smoking cafes; they've banned public smoking, so you can't smoke in the park but you can smoke pot in the park; or there's a cafe — you can't smoke at the Hub, but you can smoke pot in some other place. How are we going to regulate that?
 
My other issue is there's no medical way yet to determine if somebody's under the influence of marijuana if they're driving or whatever situation there might be. That's a concern. I know that necessity is the mother of invention and with more and more states passing it, eventually there will be a test that can prove whether somebody is or is not under the influence of marijuana. The tests that are out there are drug-related, they require a lot of training, and there's only one person in Berkshire County who is qualified to administer that. And even if they testify, there's no guarantee the judges will accept that testimony in court.
 
So I'm concerned about the issues around under the influence. I'm concerned about the edibles; they came out with gummy bears and "Pot Tarts." That's going after an under 21 population, so I had some issues with that.
 
I think we're working the kinks out. The tax rate was around 12 percent, and we've got it up to about 20. People think that's too high, but Colorado's is, I think 28 percent, so I don't think 20 percent is too high.
 
Right now we have some controversy about to what degree local governments and the state should be cooperating with the federal government, particularly ICE, with regard to people's immigration status. … We have a ruling from the Supreme Judicial Court that says there's nothing in state law that permits local authorities and state authorities to cooperate with ICE and hold somebody simply on a detainer request — doing it out of courtesy to the federal government. Gov. Baker has decided he wants to come up with something that's a middle ground, I guess, where if someone is considered dangerous or suspected of terrorism, which seem to be somewhat elastic definitions, they can be held for a certain period of time. So where do you stand on this? It looks like it's going to hit the legislature pretty soon.
 
Blackmer: I think that being an illegal immigrant is not an act that warrants a detainer, that in and of itself. If someone is held for a violent crime — rape, murder, gang-related activities, things like that. If they've been convicted and sent out of the country … in those cases, if they've come back in and that's why the detainer is there, we should be able to hold them and verify that. But I also think ICE should get more involved with legitimate warrants. That way there's been some sort of evidence presented somewhere that this person needs to be held. That's the solution.
 
There are not that many cases where a [an undocumented immigrant] has reoffended in our everyday lives. The problem is when they do and it's an illegal who just got out of jail … it's sensationalized. There have been a few crimes committed, violent crimes. There's not that many, but it hits in everybody's gut.
 
Let's talk about county government. That's what everyone points to when they say we have to have regionalization, we have to have cooperation among towns. Do you think there should be something at the state level where county government gets a new push from Boston and it really encourages the sharing of services, or do you think it's something towns can work out on their own?
 
Blackmer: We'd have to redo it because I think Barnstable County is the only one that has a legitimate county government left in the state. We got rid of it a while ago and all those county employees became state employees.
 
I think the towns around here have been pretty successful in some regionalization efforts. We've done it with the veterans services. Adams and North Adams have done it with the dog officer. There has been discussion — at one point Williamsburg and Chesterfield in Hampshire County were looking at regionalizing their police departments. … Particularly with the schools, and that's a good place to start, we could start regionalizing some of the back offices, things like the accounting, the business manager, the personnel, things like that — things that don't impact the students. It doesn't matter if the bills are being paid in Lanesborough or the bills are being paid in North Adams or if the bills are being paid in Sandisfield. As long as the bills are being paid, no one pays attention to who is doing it.
 
The other thing with some of the schools as far as regionalizing is because we have shrinking resources, we are cutting programs. Most schools have limited foreign language programs. If we can regionalize some of those efforts so that we can still have staff members who have full-time if that's what they want but they end up teaching in different schools — that way it increases the opportunities for our students. Maybe it's languages. Maybe it's advanced math or advanced science or maybe it's music or art or some kind of literature class. If it's not being offered because we don't have the teacher, maybe we have a class that that person can teach at Drury, teach at Mount Greylock, teach at PHS. I think those are some of the ways that we could save money and actually improve services and improve opportunities for our students.
 
As far as the government, I know at one point there was talk between Lanesborough and Cheshire about sharing a highway superintendent, and I think that's another one that's going to move that way. The problem is everyone is afraid: If there's a big storm, who gets who? And the same thing is equipment. We had a lengthy discussion about a street sweeper in North Adams last night. But other communities do that because they're smaller and have fewer roads. I think it's something that needs to be left to the towns to work out, at least now. I think the state can play a role by providing incentives for whether it's the study or maybe the startup costs of doing some of the regionalization.
 
Where are you standing on the charter school cap, the ballot initiative from a couple of years ago?
 
Blackmer: The MMA's position was we were against the expansion of charter schools. My concern with charter schools is not charter schools themselves, individual charter schools. My issue is the funding because, yes, you may take seven kids from the school system, and you take out that chunk of money. But you're not taking all seven of those kids out of one class. So you're not saving the money; you're taking one kid from each grade. So economies of scale are lost when you do that.
 
Also, I know that there are some concerns that they're non-union, they don't have local elected representation. But the whole point of charter schools was that they were going to be innovative, and the things that they discovered that worked were going to be shared with the [traditional] public schools. That really hasn't been happening. I know there was just a grant they just got to work on something. But I know BArT has a really great program for students in their junior and senior year looking at colleges and how to be college ready with more than just the academics. And they also identify at-risk students who are qualified to go to school but maybe aren't going to go because they're not surrounded by other college graduates. They have a mentoring program and things like that. We had something similar at Drury, but it got cut because we didn't have the funding. So I would like to see those programs that they talk about actually make their way into the public schools.
 
Proponents of charter schools would say it's not just that they're innovative and the innovations will be shared. It's also that they're doing things more efficiently and effectively, and that's going to put pressure on administrations of public schools to use their resources more wisely and to be better schools at pain of losing some of their students. The problem, from the standpoint of someone who advocates charter schools, is they get the students, they do a good job with the students, they can't really have more students because there's not more room for them. Meanwhile, the public schools are going to get funded no matter how many students they have, so they really don't suffer if their quality decreases, so they don't have that pressure to innovate and follow the charter schools in some of the good practices. Meanwhile, the charter schools are short of funding and can't expand. So what would you say to that argument?
 
Blackmer: I think there are costs public schools incur, including, for most of them, the big special ed costs, including the residential programs or even some of them are quasi-medical placements. The charter school doesn't have to share cost. … What's happened in some small towns is your special ed budget goes up because someone moves to town or has an injury or something that causes them to need special services. That has a real impact, and I think we need to fund those programs, but I almost feel some of that stuff should be funded at the state level and not at the town level because a community has a student move in or out, and I've seen it in all the communities I've worked with … Although they do provide services at BArT, they do not cover the costs of the residential treatments that the town is.
 
I also know people who have looked at BArT and gotten the cold shoulder and not gone back. Public schools can't do that. Maybe legally BArT's not supposed to do that, but there's definitely a feeling of being welcome or not welcome. Those stories were early on; I can't say it's happened more recently. I think BArT does a really good job. They get private money. They have a board of directors. They don't have unions. … I do think that because you have to apply to BArT you're already self-selecting, just like students who are part of school choice are self-selecting.
 
Again, it's the funding, and I think the public schools meet an entire population. They're also larger, so it's a little different. The idea that, 'If they were doing a better job, people wouldn't leave,' a lot of that is individual. It's an individual experience. My kids went to public schools. They went through the whole North Adams school system, and one went to Boston College and one went to MCLA, and they both got their college degrees. They both had good experiences. They both put a lot into it. They joined the band and joined drama and they joined and they joined and they joined. They took advantage of opportunities, but they also had the support at home, and not everybody has that.
 
People ask: 'What does it mean to be a representative of a district?' And one answer to that question is, 'I'll try to figure out what an aggregate of the population believes and try to represent that as faithfully as I can so I'm a true voice of the people of my district.' Another answer is, 'I have a lot of detailed knowledge, and I've been around the block a few times, and I'm wiser than the typical person on the street and I'm going to apply that wisdom to the public issues that come across my desk.' Sometimes, that may be at odds with what people back in the district think. Where would you come down on this?
 
Blackmer: Yes. [Laugh] I've done both. I've been an elected official on the City Council. I research issues. I make decisions. Sometimes I change my mind. On numerous occasions, I've walked out the door telling my husband how I'm going to vote on a particular issue. And the discussion happens and you start talking and listening other people, and you think about it, and I've changed my mind.
 
It depends how big the issue is. Tip O'Neill was one of the first congressmen to come out against the Vietnam War. Somebody had to say it was wrong, because until someone said it was wrong, everyone thought it was right.
 
I have no idea what that issue might be, but if I'm going to be in the Legislature for any length of time, there's going to be an issue like that. But I generally try to listen to people from different sides, educate myself about the issue and make the decision to the best of my ability. There are things that are very important to our community that may not matter somewhere else that I will advocate strongly for.
 
But being a rep is also constituent services. Half the time, the people who come to your office for help — you're not really helping them directly. What you're doing is guiding them toward the resources they actually need. Maybe they need the Social Security office. Maybe it's a federal issue. Maybe it's a housing issue. So you put them in them in touch with the people who can help them. That's a large part of constituent services.
 
Then there's the legislative part. There's the budget part. In theory, they're two separate things, but unfortunately you can't do a lot unless you have the money.
 
I don't think I know everything. I don't think I know better than anyone else for the district. I don't have this 'Father Knows Best' attitude. I would say I know a lot about municipal finance, because that's what I do. I know that when I talk to people — when I was talking about running and I was getting ready, I sat down and talked to someone from BArT who deals with the youth population. It's not something I've done. So I will talk to the people who deal with the issues that I may not personally be aware of and try to get several sides of the issue because there are usually more than two sides, never mind more than one side.

Tags: candidate interviews,   Democratic Party,   election 2017,   special election,   state representative,   


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Macksey Updates on Eagle Street Demo and Myriad City Projects

By Tammy DanielsiBerkshires Staff

The back of Moderne Studio in late January. The mayor said the city had begun planning for its removal if the owner could not address the problems. 
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The Moderne Studio building is coming down brick by brick on Eagle Street on the city's dime. 
 
Concerns over the failing structure's proximity to its neighbor — just a few feet — means the demolition underway is taking far longer than usual. It's also been delayed somewhat because of recent high winds and weather. 
 
The city had been making plans for the demolition a month ago because of the deterioration of the building, Mayor Jennifer Macksey told the City Council on Tuesday. The project was accelerated after the back of the 150-year-old structure collapsed on March 5
 
Initial estimates for demolition had been $190,000 to $210,000 and included asbestos removal. Those concerns have since been set aside after testing and the mayor believes that the demolition will be lower because it is not a hazardous site.
 
"We also had a lot of contractors who came to look at it for us to not want to touch it because of the proximity to the next building," she said. "Unfortunately time ran out on that property and we did have the building failure. 
 
"And it's an unfortunate situation. I think most of us who have lived here our whole lives and had our pictures taken there and remember being in the window so, you know, we were really hoping the building could be safe."
 
Macksey said the city had tried working with the owner, who could not find a contractor to demolish the building, "so we found one for him."
 
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