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Only 180 voters cast ballots in the Prudential Committee election on Tuesday, held in the Williamstown Elementary School cafeteria.

Williamstown Fire District Voters Choose Moresi, Reynolds

By Rebecca DravisiBerkshires Staff
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WILLIAMSTOWN — Voters on Tuesday chose David Moresi for an 18-month term on the Prudential Committee and Richard Reynolds for a 30-month term.

Only 180 ballots were cast out of about 4,800 registered voters in town, Town Clerk Mary Kennedy said, or barely 4 percent.

Moresi received 137 votes to the 39 received by his opponent, Gerald Smith. Reynolds notched 114 votes to the 64 votes of his opponent, Bruce MacDonald.

Eventually, the two new seats on the expanding committee will be three-year terms, like the current three spots on the committee, which oversees the Williamstown Fire Department

Moresi and Reynolds join incumbents John Notsley, Ed McGowan and Ed Briggs on the Prudential Committee. One of the big near-term challenges for the town's Fire Department is a pending project to build a new station on a Main Street parcel district voters agreed to purchase in 2017.

Moresi is the principal of Moresi & Associates, a North Adams-based real estate development firm; among its highest profile projects are 296 Main St. in Williamstown, a site once eyed by the town as a potential public safety building location. Reynolds, is a program manager at Hewlett Packard with a track record as a volunteer firefighter as an undergraduate at Rutgers University.


Tags: election 2019,   prudential committee,   


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Williamstown Affordable Housing Trust Hears Objections to Summer Street Proposal

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Neighbors concerned about a proposed subdivision off Summer Street last week raised the specter of a lawsuit against the town and/or Northern Berkshire Habitat for Humanity.
 
"If I'm not mistaken, I think this is kind of a new thing for Williamstown, an affordable housing subdivision of this size that's plunked down in the middle, or the midst of houses in a mature neighborhood," Summer Street resident Christopher Bolton told the Affordable Housing Trust board, reading from a prepared statement, last Wednesday. "I think all of us, the Trust, Habitat, the community, have a vested interest in giving this project the best chance of success that it can have. We all remember subdivisions that have been blocked by neighbors who have become frustrated with the developers and resorted to adversarial legal processes.
 
"But most of us in the neighborhood would welcome this at the right scale if the Trust and Northern Berkshire Habitat would communicate with us and compromise with us and try to address some of our concerns."
 
Bolton and other residents of the neighborhood were invited to speak to the board of the trust, which in 2015 purchased the Summer Street lot along with a parcel at the corner of Cole Avenue and Maple Street with the intent of developing new affordable housing on the vacant lots.
 
Currently, Northern Berkshire Habitat for Humanity, which built two homes at the Cole/Maple property, is developing plans to build up to five single-family homes on the 1.75-acre Summer Street lot. Earlier this month, many of the same would-be neighbors raised objections to the scale of the proposed subdivision and its impact on the neighborhood in front of the Planning Board.
 
The Affordable Housing Trust board heard many of the same arguments at its meeting. It also heard from some voices not heard at the Planning Board session.
 
And the trustees agreed that the developer needs to engage in a three-way conversation with the abutters and the trust, which still owns the land, to develop a plan that is more acceptable to all parties.
 
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