Ideas

Check out Mike's idea for attracting even more people to our beautiful downtown:

A Grand Promenade surrounding beautiful Nashawannuck Pond. Spectacular views mixed with expanded recreational activities and new opportunities for street vendors, arts and craft shows and outdoor community festivals.

Ample free public parking near the Municipal Building, public wireless and a thriving boat rental operation make downtown Easthampton the place to be in the summer.

And for those who want to bring their own boats to water, a reconfigured Boat House recreation area off of Water Lane providing off-street parking, grassed terraces, a paved boat launch and a sandy beach along the shore.

The Loudville Road landfill is capable of producing up to 300 kW of solar energy.

The Oliver Street landfill is capable of producing up to 2 megawatts of solar energy!

Bringing issues to the table in Easthampton:

Mike has been a leader in Easthampton since 1976. He has written laws and applied for grants. He has lead the community and the region in protecting the Barnes Aquifer and has been in the forefront of issues ranging from farmland preservation to energy conservation. He has organized and empowered people and neighborhoods to work for ideas and issues that they believe are best for Easthampton. He has forged alliances to better our community and he has never been afraid to introduce and talk about opportunities and ideas that could benefit the taxpayers. He was a hard-working Town Meeting member for nearly 20 years and an accomplished Selectman for seven years. As Mayor, he continues to be the leader who makes a real difference in our community. He provides information to citizens and businesses alike and initiates virtually all financial and operational initiatives in city government. He develops policy and introduces new issues, new ideas and appropriate operational changes to City Council for action. He does not follow the crowd or wait to see which way the political winds are blowing. He leads and encourages others to do the same. No one in Easthampton government has accomplished what Mike has accomplished and no one is more confident in the future of Easthampton.  

More recently, after speaking with local residents concerned about the issue, Mayor Mike worked with State Representative John Scibak to establish legal protections in state law that target voyeurism and protect citizens from being improperly videotaped or photographed.

He has also initiated changes in local law that allows the establishment of small scale solar energy facilities without unnecessary zoning hurdles and sets special permit standards for larger projects to protect the rights of those neighbors who might be affected.
 

The impact of difficult economic times has been very hard on all facets of our economy but local government seems to have fared the worse over a much longer period of time. Starting in 2002, and with only a brief leveling off in 2008, a large part of the revenue needed to support the services our citizens expect and deserve has been in decline. While local real estate taxes have been steadily rising, financial support from the state has been falling and operating budgets have been shrinking. This revenue problem has led to many difficult decisions related to cutting budgets and fostered some very creative ideas about how to save money. One such money-saving idea relates to the simple streetlight.

In 2004 Mayor Mike began a conversation with Western Massachusetts Electric Company about the cost of lighting city streets. He examined the way the utility billed the cost of operating and maintaining city streetlights and analyzed a little known option that allowed the city to acquire the lights, reduce operating costs and eliminate the need to shut off streetlights as was done in response to a recession in the late 1980's. After many meetings that involved the utility, members of the City Council and concerned citizens a decision was made to buy the lights from the utility and eliminate the high cost of renting the fixtures. In 2006 the city officially became the owner of its own streetlights, saving nearly $40,000 annually.

In 2010, with encouragement and support from city residents and officials alike, Easthampton became a Massachusetts Green Community. This designation provided yet another opportunity to extract further savings from street lighting, the introduction of high efficiency, long-lasting light emitting diode (LED) light fixtures. Using a grant from the state and energy conservation payments negotiated with the utility Mayor Mike wrote the bids for the purchase and installation of LED fixtures. The contracts were awarded in July of 2011 and installation began in August. This effort was among the first in Massachusetts and will save an additional $36,000 per year, reducing energy consumption by more than 175,000 kilowatts annually, preserving the level of lighting currently in place and eliminating light pollution caused by the older style lamps.

About Route 10 development:

Easthampton has a local zoning law that encourages retail development along the length of the Route 10 corridor, from Groveland Street to the Northampton city line. The law is appropriate because such commercial construction brings jobs and added property tax revenue to the city.

When legitimate inquiries about a large retail development on Route 10 began to come to the city in 2003, Mayor Mike spoke with the proponents about what kind of projects the local law allowed. At the same time he initiated discussion with local business owners and residents about the potential impacts to our community if a large retail complex were to be constructed. These thoughtful discussions were extended to the City Council and to the local newspaper, providing timely information to the community about the possibility of such a construction project.

Within a few months many individuals in the community were contemplating the probable impact of a large development and some were considering a means to mitigate the negatives that may result from such a project. In March of 2004 a citizen petition requesting that the City Council enact lawful controls over the size of such projects was submitted for their approval. In response to that petition, Mayor Mike wrote the City Council (see July 2004 memo) requesting that "the Planning Board be provided the authority to deny such large scale projects... based on their merit". A new law that would address the concerns raised by the citizen petition was not enacted and the suggestion made by Mayor Mike was ignored by the City Council.

The Truth about Aquifer Protection in Easthampton and why we need Mayor Mike to continue to protect it:

The wells providing Easthampton with a clean and abundant water supply have been an important issue to the community since the first test well was driven into a field off of Hendrick Street in 1905. This underground drinking water source eventually replaced supplies pumped from the Manhan River and Bassett Brook. Easthampton's groundwater supply has been expanded over the years to include the Nonotuck Park, Pines and Brook Street wells at the South end of the city, and the Maloney Swamp well (near the Manhan River at the end of Pleasant Street) in the northern part of the city. In all but the latter location, a pure and uncontaminated water supply was produced.

In the mid 1970's Mayor Mike became a member of the Conservation Commission and a Town Meeting member. At the time there was no specific scientific data identifying the source of our water or the bounds of the Barnes Aquifer.  Mike contacted the University of Massachusetts and eventually spoke with Professor Ward Motts, who had written extensively about the geology of the region. This contact led the mayor to initiate a long process to identify the bounds of the aquifer. He worked with many others to facilitate protection of our primary drinking water supply and is widely known to be the most knowledgeable person on the subject to ever serve in local government. His accomplishments are well documented and his passion for the wise stewardship of this irreplaceable resource remains strong and unwavering. Mayor Mike is a true champion for our drinking water and would not put it at risk for any reason!

In 1993 and 1994  then-Selectman Mike was probably the city's strongest advocate to build a water treatment plant to remove the TCE contamination that had entered our aquifer in the 1940's and 50's from the Holyoke area. If Mike hadn't been so persuasive about the need for this facility there's no telling what kind of treatment plant would've been built. He was able to convince the citizens of Easthampton to vote in favor of it and the TCE is no longer in our drinking water.

In the 21st century Mayor Mike continues to champion water supply issues, encouraging conservation whenever possible, proposing a long-term plan to install more efficient metering systems to better track consumption and providing consistent funding to the fullest extent possible.

Here are the facts of the matter:

Mayor Mike did not support the proposed landfill expansion in Northampton and encouraged our neighbors to fully explore all of the options available for the disposal of solid waste. He met with scientists, engineers, regulators and ordinary citizens to discuss their ideas, to hear their concerns, to understand their research and to review their findings. He believes that water quality issues need to be better understood, that existing pollution makes the affected aquifer undesirable for drinking water purposes and that contaminants already in the potentially impacted well should not be introduced into our water supply. The City of Northampton ultimately decided that they would cease to provide landfill facilities when the current operation closes.

If the current landfill did expand it would have taken place in an area that already has several existing landfills, long ago built with no barriers or other environmental protections. The groundwater that could be remotely affected by the possibility of pollution from a new lined and monitored landfill is already in more danger from the existing landfills than it would have been from the proposed expansion. If the new landfill was built it would have been double lined with an active pollution collection system.  The probability of any sort of release to the groundwater would have been extremely low. A computer based Contaminant Transport Model, which was mandated by DEP, found that if a catastrophic release did occur at the landfill, any pollutants which might reach the little used Maloney Swamp well would be of such a low concentration that it would be below the acceptable limits for safe drinking water.

There is no possibility that the drinking water at the Hendrick Street, Nonotuck Park, Pines or Brook Street wells could have been impacted by the proposal. These are the wells from which we get our drinking water and they are upstream and a great distance away. It is highly unlikely that any new landfill in the proposed location would have increased the risk of groundwater contamination. The only public well remotely connected to the Northampton expansion proposal is already polluted with arsenic and high levels of manganese, and is used only in an emergency to provide water pressure in case of a major fire in the old mills along Pleasant Street. The last time this well was pumped into the water supply was in 1995 & 1996, when the Hendrick Street water treatment plant was being constructed.

As a matter of fact, a real estate agent wanted to buy prime water supply land  for a development which could have put all of our southern water supply wells in jeopardy (Daily Hampshire Gazette 1/18/2000). Fortunately for all of us, Mayor Mike and many other concerned citizens were there to stop him. Today that 70 acres of land on the slopes of Mount Tom is permanently protected from the threat of any real estate developer. Thanks to the insight and passion of Mayor Mike, that land is now owned by the city and protected from any future development.