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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Williamstown Preservation Panel Pulls Surcharge Hike Proposal

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:19AM / Friday, February 20, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Community Preservation Committee on Tuesday voted to backtrack on a plan to ask town meeting to increase the town's Community Preservation Act surcharge on local property tax bills.

And it heard arguments that the town should be asked whether to pull out of the CPA program altogether.

Earlier this month, the panel voted 6-2 to develop an article for the May annual town meeting warrant that would have asked whether the town should increase the current 2 percent surcharge (with the first $100,000 of property value excepted) to 3 percent, the maximum allowed under the CPA.

Committee members argued that raising the local surcharge to the maximum would unlock significantly more in matching funds from the commonwealth. Hypothetically, for example, the town would have received nearly twice the state funding for CPA projects in FY24 (the most recent year available) had it charged a 3 percent surcharge instead of the current 2 percent.

After hearing two members of the town's Finance Committee, a former Select Board member and one member of the public question whether the CPA surcharge makes sense at all for the town, five members of the CPC at Tuesday's meeting voted not to put the surcharge increase warrant article to a vote at the annual town meeting.

Nate Budington, one of four members to flip their votes from the Feb. 4 meeting, joined others in saying he was on the fence on the issue in light of the ever-increasing tax burden faced by property owners to support town and school operations.

"As to the surcharge, like other people, I went back and forth. I've had a couple of conversations with people on Spring Street about the demise of the [Williamstown Theatre Festival] and what that's meant to their business," Budington said. "And I don't think that's going to get any better. If anything, it's going in the wrong direction. And that's ominous to me.

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