Lanesborough Selects Assistant Building Inspector

LANESBOROUGH, Mass. –— The Select Board appointed an assisting building director on Wednesday.

Tim Sears submitted his resume to the board and said he heard about the position and reached out to Building Commissioner Brian Duval.

"It can be a tough position. And if you followed recent activities here in Lanesborough, I'm not stating the obvious, but can you talk a little bit about because you've done the work before, right?" asked member Michael Murphy.

Sears started as a housing inspector in Pittsfield and then became building commissioner there and a health official. He was also director of buildings and grounds for the Mount Greylock Regional School District. He currently works at AC Wood Contracting.

"I've had a lot of experience, and as someone who's in the construction industry, also, it can be challenging. If Brian knows someone, or if I know someone you know, we have to excuse ourselves and be very forthright about that," he said. "But in the end, the building code is a little different from some of the other code enforcement and law enforcement, where we have to be able to write down what the violation is, so it either is or isn't. You can't really, oppress someone because you need to write it down. You have to cite the code. So I think it's just very black and white.

"The challenge can sometimes be, you know, if a town feels a certain way about certain subjects, then my attitude has always been to look through the code to try to find a way to make something happen." 

Sears said he has already talked with the owner of AC Wood Contracting and would be available to do an inspection during the day if needed.

The board moved to appoint Sears as the assistant building inspector.

In other notes, Town Administrator Gina Dario reminded the board of the joint meetings with the Finance Committee, which is something they are doing for the first time. Department heads will be invited to the meetings to go over their budget proposals to keep residents as informed as possible before the annual town meeting.

Monday, March 2, is the first joint meeting.

"We're always just trying to be as transparent as we can as we go through this kind of the crux of the budget season for the next three months, as we approach town meeting," Dario said.

Berkshires Jazz: New Leadership Continues Founder's Passion

By Sabrina DammsiBerkshires Staff
07:33AM / Saturday, February 28, 2026

Chuck Walker, left, found Berkshires Jazz a year after moving to the Berkshires and shared his enthusiasm for the musical form with Ed Bride, not realizing he was the founder. It eventually led to Walker become the organization's president.

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Berkshire County is jazz, said Chuck Walker, the newly appointed president of the nonprofit Berkshire Jazz. 

 

Jazz embodies freedom way of thinking, improvisation, and a distant respect for the rules, Berkshires Jazz founder Ed Bride said. 

 

It is an emotional refuge from today's atmosphere. The Berkshires, too, is like that, a place to escape and clear your head, which is why so many artists over the years have visited the area, the duo said. 

 

"You need a place to escape from that in order to, as we all used to say back in the '60s, to get your head right. The Berkshires are a place where you can get your head right," Walker said. 

 

"The way that you just described jazz as improvisational … as being out of lockstep with  whatever the prevailing society is. That's what makes jazz jazz. That, too, is what makes the Berkshires the Berkshires." 

 

For the last 20 years, Bride has been rejuvenating jazz in the Berkshires, a genre that was once alive thanks to venues such as Music Inn and The Lenox School of Jazz, sometimes called the Music Barn, active from 1950 until the late '70s. 

 

Bride said when he started the Pittsfield City Jazz Festival in 2005, which became the Berkshires Jazz nonprofit in 2009, you could go months without hearing jazz, with only one place in the county that would regularly play it: Castle Street Café in Great Barrington, which closed in 2016.