Adams Approves Nov. 15 Town Meeting Warrant

By Brian RhodesiBerkshires Staff
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ADAMS, Mass. — The Board of Selectmen has approved the Nov. 15 special town meeting warrant, which primarily serves to appropriate an additional $2.37 million in funding for improvements to the wastewater treatment plant.

The board met briefly on Wednesday to approve the warrant, with the Finance Committee voting to recommend it in a meeting shortly after. Article 1 would appropriate the funding for the plant, as the town's bond counsel requires an additional two-thirds approval from town meeting.

Construction is already ongoing, as the project went out to bid earlier in the year.

"They're about 10 percent through. The project should be done by December of 2023. So they're working," said Town Administrator Jay Green to the Finance Committee. "... We had everything we needed, administratively, except the formal town meeting vote."

Town meeting gave the OK to just more than $5 million for the plant in 2021. The plant was built in 1968 and had only a partial upgrade in 2006.

The total cost of the project is an estimated $7.42 million.


Article 2, if approved, would transfer $15,000 from Cemetery, Parks and Grounds' Master Plan account to its capital account. The funds, appropriated in 2016, were leftover for a project that is now complete.

Article 3 would release free cash from two projects that had leftover funds. The first, for a water meter replacement, totals $9,583.04 and the second, for equipment in the assessor's office, totals $8,696.74.

Article 4 would authorize the Board of Selectmen to accept an easement to install drainage lines from Lower Linden Street to Commercial Street. The area has been prone to flooding with the currently in-place drainage system, and the easement will come at no cost to the town.

The new drainage system has already been designed and engineered by Hill Engineers.

In other business, Selectman Joseph Nowak reminded residents of the weekend's Halloween festivities, asking them to use caution.

"There's going to be kids on the streets. So if you're driving, please be careful," he said.


Tags: special town meeting,   wastewater,   

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North Adams School Project Awards $51M Bid

By Tammy Daniels iBerkshires Staff
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The School Building Committee has awarded the Greylock School project to Fontaine Bros. Inc. of Springfield. 
 
Mayor Jennifer Macksey said she could "breathe a little better" with a bid contract that comes in nearly $2 million under budget.
 
The committee approved a bid of $50,498,544 on Thursday night that includes two alternates — the rebuild of the Appalachian Trail kiosk and the relocation and reconstruction of the baseball field. 
 
"I will say, all in all, for us to have overall the number of bidders that we had interested in our project, and especially to receive the GC bids that we did, the team Colliers and TSKP certainly did a good job attracting people to us," she said. "But this project ... really shows the testament of the good work that Colliers and TSKP and all of you have been doing throughout this process."
 
Fontaine had the low bid between Brait Builders of Marshfield and J&J Contractors Inc. of North Billerica.
 
The project had been bid out at $52,250,000 with three alternates: moving the ballfield, the kiosk and vertical geothermal wells. 
 
Committee members asked Timothy Alix of Collier's International, the owner's project manager, about his impressions of the bidders. He was most familiar with Fontaine, having worked with the company on a half-dozen school projects and noted it was the contractor on the Mountain View Elementary School in Easthampton that the Massachusetts School Building Authority has held up as an example school. He also had some of his colleagues call on projects that he had not personally worked on. 
 
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