West Stockbridge — Wayne Cooper, candidate for the West Stockbridge Select Board, isn’t a hard man to track down if you know where to look. And, most days, that place is the town’s Transfer Station on Day Farm Road, where he has served as its attendant for seven years.
“For the last four years, five years, I’ve been the ‘Bitch Board’ in town,” Cooper said of the reason he is campaigning for a seat on the dais. “Everyone’s been bitching to me about what’s going on in town. Finally, back in January or February, people asked me to run [for office].”
He said his supporters reasoned that he “has common sense” and can act to “benefit the whole town and not a certain few.”
Should Cooper come out on top against incumbent Andrew Krouss in the May 13 election, he said his priority would be to curtail the town’s spending habits. “It’s out of control,” he said. For Cooper, that means nixing the $70,000 police cruiser the residents approved at the recent Town Meeting. He said the town wastes money by plowing a parking lot that belongs to two different restaurants in town, adding that the practice constitutes “taxpayer money going to private entities, [and] that’s illegal.”
According to Cooper, included in the wasteful funding list for the town is the proposed dog park to which voters recently appropriated $25,000 as a match to the project’s $250,000 grant. “Okay, we’ve got to put up $25,000, but we’ve got a plot of land,” he said. “An acre of land in West Stockbridge goes for a minimum of $70,000. You’ve got to have two acres—that’s $140,000 of the taxpayers’ money. That’s the way I think.”
Cooper voiced concern about the high price of living in West Stockbridge. “If West Stockbridge keeps going the way it is, all the senior citizens in town who were born and raised here won’t be able to afford to live here,” he said. “Their kids can’t afford to live here.”
Calling himself “an even-keeled guy,” Cooper said he would sum up his life’s work as “help[ing] the needy.”
A native of West Stockbridge, he first lived on Baker Street in a home his family lost due to fire. In his youth, Cooper moved to Lenox Road and has lived on that street ever since, except during his service in the U.S. Marines at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune, as well as Newport, R.I., and Norfolk, Va. He currently serves the town as its constable and has taken positions with other local departments in the past such as the highway department.
Cooper said he has been employed in the trucking business, including owning his own company, and is proud of his work as a substance-abuse counselor, with 40 years of sobriety under his belt this August. “I’m a graduate of the school of hard knocks,” he said.
