To the editor:
Great Barrington is a great place to live. There are beautiful neighborhoods, ample shopping opportunities, friendly people. And there is an activism in the community that is almost unheard of today.
The most current divisive issue in town is the proposal by Vijay Mahida to flout the statutory limit on hotel rooms in his effort to buy the old Searles school. Town rules call for lodging establishments no larger than 45 rooms. Mahida “needs” 95.
Nonsense. If Mahida needed so many rooms, he should have bought a different property. There is a reason for the town limit on hotel rooms, and profit to the developer is not one of them.
It is very painful to see the Town enact a bylaw for a 45-hotel-room limit, only to have our elected officials identify a loophole in that bylaw so that they can permit a conference center with 95 rooms and 1.6 acres of parking. I find it doubly painful that it was first necessary to deem the Searles School as “historic” in order to use that loophole, and then knock the building down. The Berkshire Hotel project has begun in very bad faith. Please stop it.
Laurily Epstein
Great Barrington
