Letter: DeMayo-Wall Running for Planning Board

Letter to the Editor07:00PM / Sunday, May 08, 2022Print Story | Email Story

To the Editor:

Dear Williamstown Voters, My name is Carin DeMayo-Wall and I am running for the Williamstown Planning Board. I ask for your vote on May 10.

I grew up right here in Williamstown. I attended Mount Greylock High School ('89) and Williams College ('93). I originally left to work at the State House in Boston and I returned to Williamstown 10 years ago. Williamstown was, and is, a wonderful place to live and raise a family. I have seen how my hometown has changed and I have a vision for its more inclusive future.

I was moved to run for Planning Board when I witnessed several families, whose kids were in my own child's classroom at Williamstown Elementary School, make the agonizing decision to move away due to a lack of available housing. Through my volunteer work with the Williamstown Food Pantry, I see the stress that the high cost of housing puts on our most vulnerable populations.

We are becoming a town with a "missing middle." Those at the high end, with significant wealth, can afford to buy the scarce market-rate housing. And a few at the low end might find spots within one of our too-few affordable housing developments like Photech and Highland Woods. But we are losing the middle and Williamstown is left impoverished by their absence. How many of us could buy here today? How many MGRHS grads can choose to stay? How many of their teachers can live in the town they teach in? I say too few. We can come together to solve this housing challenge.

The Housing Trust and Habitat for Humanity have done some incredible work. But their effect can only be felt one family at a time. The Planning Board can address the challenge from the regulatory side, asking, "can our code allow for more inclusionary outcomes?"

At the same time, our open space and farms are core elements of Williamstown's identity. I grew up on my family farm, Bonnie Lea Farm, on North Street. I appreciate the critical importance of open space and farming. With the changing nature of agriculture and the threat of climate change, we cannot afford to lose farmland and we must be creative in how we help existing and new farmers survive here.

Through my work on the Planning Board I will strive to balance the humanitarian and environmental issues we face. I ask for your vote on May 10.

Carin DeMayo-Wall
Williamstown, Mass.

Tags: election 2022,

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Discrimination Against Muslim Americans Persists 25 Years After 9/11

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
07:00AM / Saturday, September 12, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Dozens of Muslim Americans were among people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Untold numbers of Muslim Americans have suffered countless acts of discrimination in their aftermath.

"Of course, you'll find several accounts of Muslims from all over the U.S. describing how they went from the unknown kids in the school to being stereotyped or ridiculed for their Muslim names," Sidra Mahmood recalled recently. "However, many Americans forget that the victims of 9/11 were also Muslim Americans.

"I can't forget the time when a classmate broke down in sobs when 9/11 came up in our classroom at the Islamic seminary I went to in Texas, because her father's best friend who was like an uncle to her, died on 9/11."

Today, Mahmood is a chaplain at Williams College. In 2001, she was growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, when terrorists forced two passenger jets into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and another plane into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. A third plane, which terrorists hoped to crash into a D.C. landmark, was brought down in western Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

The attacks, which ultimately claimed 2,976 lives, horrified people around the world, including in Mahmood's native land.

"I remember being aghast like anyone who witnessed the fall of the Twin Towers in real time," she said. "However, even as a child, fear gripped me about the possibility of war, especially once we learned that Afghanistan, right adjacent to Pakistan, would be attacked by the U.S. My mother had told me about the 1971 war between India and Pakistan when she remembered hiding in the dark after bomb sirens would go off in Punjab after intentional blackouts.

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