Letter: Delay Vote on New Williamstown Fire Station

Letter to the Editor01:50PM / Wednesday, January 25, 2023Print Story | Email Story

To the Editor,

There is no question that the Williamstown Fire District needs a new modern facility to replace its antiquated 73-year-old Water Street station. While a new fire station is long overdue, the proposed $25 million building is challenging to justify.

In response to concerns about the size and cost of the project, the district recently released a "Comparison of Size of Proposed Williamstown Fire Station to Other Fire Stations" study on its official website and Facebook page. However, the comparison study overlooks several details and, when thoroughly examined, provides the best evidence why the Feb. 28 vote should be postponed so a re-evaluation can occur, and a new design can be presented for consideration.

In summary, a breakdown of the comparison study reveals the following:

• Every community listed has a population greater than Williamstown, excluding Wellfleet (Armonk, N.Y., is a hamlet of North Castle, population 11,765.)

• Every community is a full-time agency, or a full-time department complemented by call or volunteer firefighters, excluding both Armonk and Putnam Valley.

• Every fire department provides ambulance service to their community, excluding Newton (7,500 fire calls for service) and Putnam Valley, N.Y., (472 fire calls for service), both fire service-only agencies.

• Every fire department listed receives more calls for service compared to Williamstown (less than 300 a year) and, in almost every instance, by several thousand.

• Williamstown has seven pieces of equipment. All the communities listed that only have a single fire station (as proposed in Williamstown), has more equipment, sometimes doubling Williamstown (e.g., Foxborough 14, Plainville 13, Wellfleet 10)

• The new Plainville Fire Department was constructed as a combined municipal complex that accommodates the new police department and town hall. The construction cost for the police, fire, and town hall was $34 million.

The district provided regional data on new fire departments but curiously bypassed a local project. On Dec. 8, 2022, voters in Lenox unanimously approved a $20 million public safety complex to house their police, fire, and ambulance. The Lenox FD is a full-time department complemented by reserve/volunteer firefighters and responded to 1,873 calls for service in 2021. It is fiscally irresponsible to ask the Williamstown voters to approve a $25 million stand-alone fire station without studying how Lenox can build a public safety complex for $5 million less.

Williamstown requires a new fire station; however, the project must be realistic to our community and not jeopardize current government services and future projects.

Scott E. McGowan
Williamstown, Mass.

Tags: fire station,

iBerkshires.com Text Ads

Greylock Youth SummerFest

Come join in on the wealth building fun! August 3-8. Click for event details. Insured by NCUA.

www.greylock.org

rk MILES Blding Materials

Are You Ready to Update Your Home? Start With rk MILES. 4 Locations (800)670-7433

www.rkmiles.com

If you would like to contribute information on this article, contact us at info@iberkshires.com.

Mount Greylock School Committee OKs Updated Policy on Seclusion, Restraint

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:57AM / Tuesday, August 25, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock School Committee recently approved an updated policy on time-outs, seclusion and the physical restraint of students.

The policy is based on updated state regulations that came down last winter. Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the panel at its August meeting that his office waited on recommendations from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees that were released in May and ran the proposed changes past the district's legal counsel.

That timing — and an expectation from the commonwealth that districts have the updated policy in place for the start of the 2026-27 academic year — led to an expedited process for the School Committee, which did not do a first read with a vote at a subsequent meeting as is its practice.

"Policy JKAA speaks to the ways the school district and our procedures shall abide by the updated state regulations," Bergeron said. "We're not going to have a lot of leeway.

"Nothing about the way we interact with our students on a day-to-day basis is being shifted by this."

For example, the commonwealth does not allow schools to use "seclusion," or, "the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area, with or without adult supervision," except some extreme cases, like when, "when student behavior poses an imminent threat of assault, or imminent serious physical harm to self or others, but only if safeguards are accounted for," the updated policy reads.

"From the state's perspective and my perspective, the idea of locking a child in a room without adult supervision is something we've never done," Bergeron said. "And it's something the state wants to make explicitly that nobody ever does."

View Full Story