It was a year of big change at town hall and hesitancy to make major changes at town meeting.

 

For the third straight year, the Village Beautiful dealt with an ugly national legacy of racism as ongoing work to increase diversity, equity and inclusion drove much of the public discourse.

 

And while some long-term projects reached some resolution in 2022, other issues ring in 2023 with questions still to be answered.

 

The top story of last year took more than a full year to resolve but finally concluded in April when the Select Board selected Robert Menicocci to serve as the new town manager.

 

In keeping with the job requirements the board stressed since the search effectively began in February 2021, Menicocci came to the job with an agenda that centers issues of equity.

 

"I think what is good about that is, from a very broad sense, the town itself is not the only government entity," he told iBerkshires.com on his first day in the office. "There are hundreds and hundreds of government entities across the nation and across the world. And everybody is really thinking long and hard about this.

 

"What I think we can bring is from the work that we do, we can bring back to the town what our colleagues are doing. We can share the wealth of effort that is happening, whether that's here in the commonwealth with what the state is looking at doing, what other cities are looking at doing – but across the country, and bringing those perspectives in."

 

Menicocci implemented DEI training for all town employees, completed an overhaul of the town's human resources policies that began before his arrival and joined his colleagues in North Adams and Adams in hiring a new human resources director for a shared position among the three North County municipalities.

 

The Planning Board attempted to address long-standing inequities by proposing the town scale back the single family, large-lot residential zoning requirements that advocacy groups characterize as "exclusionary zoning."

 

Attendees at the annual town meeting voted to take no option on a suite of Planning Board proposals that included reductions to the minimum lot size, frontage and setbacks for homes in the town's residential districts.

 

The meeting did overwhelmingly pass a bylaw amendment that adds to the Planning Board's purpose a call to "promote a diverse and affordable mix of housing types."

 

But attendees stopped short of following the Board's recommendation that reducing dimensional requirements is a tool that town should use to "promote a diverse and affordable mix of housing types."

 

Instead, the meeting voted 181-68 to refer five articles on the warrant back to committee. At the time and subsequently, some residents argued there was not enough time -- particularly toward the end of a long meeting -- to fully understand and evaluate the potential impacts of the proposed zoning changes on the table.

 

The Planning Board that convened after the meeting re-evaluated all the 2021 proposals and, after considerable study, determined that two ideas are worth sending back to town meeting in May 2023: a dimensional change in the General Residence district that reduces the frontage requirement (without addressing lot size and setbacks) and provisions that would allow three- and four-unit homes by right in GR.

 

A third proposal, which would remove barriers to less-expensive manufactured homes, also is moving toward the town meeting warrant, and the Planning Board plans to use the months of January through April to reach as many people as it can to educate voters on the proposals and get feedback before the warrant article language is set in stone.

 

Those words are at the heart of a job description for the new Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging for the Mount Greylock Regional School District.

 

The town's largest municipal employer has been focused on the need to make all of its students feel like they belong since Superintendent Jason McCandless came on board in 2021.

 

The second budget he prepared for the two-town district includes a new administrator to oversee programming, training and recruitment efforts in the district's three schools, Lanesborough Elementary, Williamstown Elementary and Mount Greylock Regional School.

 

The proposal was not without detractors but did have strong support from the regional School Committee. And the budget, with a $100,000 appropriation for the new DEIB director, passed overwhelmingly at town meeting in both the district's member towns.

 

As the district hits the midpoint of that FY23 budget year, the director position remains unfilled. This summer, McCandless told the School Committee that the district already had to repost the position after an unsuccessful initial search.

 

"We are very committed to running the best process we can, getting the best applicant pool we can and choosing the best individual to serve this role that we can," he said. "The timing, to some degree, has to come second place to those aims."

 

Speaking of Mount Greylock, that athletic field project that has been a topic of discussion in the district for years may finally come to fruition.

 

The year began with a 5-0-1 vote by the School Committee to move ahead with a natural grass multisport field surrounded by a track.

 

A subcommittee of elected officials, district staff and residents was formed to shepherd the new project, which is slated to go to bid as soon as January, one year after the 5-0-1 vote ... and nearly seven years after the Mount Greylock district received a $5 million capital gift from Williams College from which the School Committee hopes to fund the project.

 

Speaking (still) of Mount Greylock, it was the site of 2022's 4-1/2 hour annual town meeting, the latest in a recent spate of four-hour sessions.

 

Although those marathon meetings are not necessarily the rule over the last decade, the 2020 and 2022 sessions prompted the Select Board to take a long look at how the town conducts its business each spring.

 

A working group including two board members and the new town moderator elected in May met to look at ways to make town meeting more efficient and more inclusive.

 

Among the ideas to emerge: secret balloting, moving the meeting to a weekend day, planning for multiple meetings to address different sections of the warrant and establishing a time limit with a "date certain" to continue the meeting if it exceeds the limit.

 

It looked like 2022 would see a final decision on a municipal project debated even longer than the Mount Greylock playing fields.

 

But after setting a December special Fire District meeting to decide whether to bond a new station project, the Prudential Committee switched gears.

 

The new date for that momentous vote is Feb. 28, by which time district officials hope to have more information on the projected cost (initial estimates came in around $18 million for construction alone) and sources beyond taxation to defray that cost.

 

2022 had plenty of reminders why the town needs to do all the diversity work mentioned earlier.

 

The most unsettling example came in the spring, when members of the town's Diversity, Inclusion, Race and Equity Advisory Committee received a threatening email.

 

The message prompted an immediate and strongly worded statement of support from the Select Board, which created the DIRE Committee in 2020. But although the identity of the emailer became known to authorities, it was determined that no criminal charges could be filed.

 

Police warned the perpetrator that, the letter "was sufficiently threatening to be charged as criminal harassment if additional harassment continues," according to a joint Select Board-DIRE statement at the time.

 

Throughout the year, there were reports of students in the town's schools who were harassed on racial grounds. One widely reported incident involved an adult using inappropriate language at the middle-high school.

 

And in the fall, a spate of racially-charged incidents on the Williams College campus caught the attention of the DIRE Committee. The most public of those incidents, the vandalism of a Civil War monument on Main Street (Route 2) was resolved by the college, which determined it was committed by, "a visitor to the area, who admitted responsibility," according to a campus message from Williams President Maud Mandel. 

 

While the college informed that individual that they are no longer welcome on the campus, Mandel stressed that more work needs to be done to confront hate speech. "This should be a community where each of us can be our fullest selves, living well and without fear," she wrote.

 

After months of discussion between the two bodies, the Select Board and DIRE Committee agreed to language on a new charter for the advisory panel and a charge that it devote time in 2023 to developing a "Diversity Strategic Plan" for the town.

 

It took several continuations of a hearing before the Zoning Board of Appeals, but Williamstown Recovery Realty LLC finally was granted a special permit to operate a chemical dependency rehabilitation center at the former Sweet Brook nursing home on Cold Spring Road.

 

A request that the town assign its right of first refusal on a 10-acre parcel in South Williamstown and allow the land to go into conservation prompted several weeks of discussion by the Select Board, which ultimately assigned the right to Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation.

 

Years after it last operated as a retail location, the historic Store at Five Corners at the junction of Routes 7 and 43 reopened in August with a new owner, the nonprofit Store at Five Corners Stewardship Association.

 

The owner of the former Grange Hall site on Water Street (Route 43) has teamed up with a couple of developers on a plan to build sustainable mixed income housing at the site. The plan, which could create five income-restricted units, still is in the development stage.

 

Further down the development track is the third and final stage of the Cable Mills development on Water Street. The developer received a $400,000 grant of town Community Preservation act funds at annual town meeting in June and federal low-income tax credits from the commonwealth in December. When finished, Phase 3 will have 54 new apartments, 27 of which will be restricted t households making 60 percent or less than the area median income.

 

The Williamstown Police Department in March hosted a public forum to brainstorm ways to rebuild trust between residents and law enforcement under the auspices of the federal Strengthening Police and Community Partnerships program. The event led to the creation of an SPCP committee that is recommending steps the department can take.

 

The Planning Board's Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee worked through the year on creating a successor to the 2002 Master Plan. The committee hopes to write the successor to the 2002 Master Plan in the summer and early fall of 2023.

 

2022 ended with the resolution of a story that began in 2020. Menicocci, in his first high-profile decision, opted to make interim Police Chief Mike Ziemba the town's permanent police chief.