Recently retired magazine art director, Bill Cooke, says he now has plenty of time to tend to town business and cultivate economic development. Cooke, 62, a Connecticut native who has lived in Denver, and came to the Berkshires via Boston, plans to step into the ring of at least one Berkshire Hills Regional School District issue. Cooke, a 25-year resident, and husband to outgoing Selectboard Chair Deborah Phillips, thinks the regional agreement needs changing. He said that working out a more equitable arrangement with Stockbridge and West Stockbridge, the other two towns in the district, “will take a lot of individual attention and meetings.” He said that “meeting one on one” will “bring the whole town together.”
Cooke was referring to the tumult of last fall’s town-wide dust up over the Monument Mountain High renovation project, voted down for the second time in November.
“As a retirement community,” he told The Edge in February, right after he had announced his candidacy, “Great Barrington is not sustainable. But for a new generation to live here, we have to have housing that’s affordable and more rental properties.”
Cooke, who ran his own art direction business, wants to encourage “young families and new businesses to set up shop” in town. He said he had been to the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation’s recent Housing Symposium at Crissey Farm, which focused on ways to address the disconnect between rural regional economics, and housing that workers can afford.
He is exploring the idea of using Community Preservation Act money in conjunction with Berkshire Taconic’s HousingUs funds to build “entry-level housing” on town lots, “duplexes to keep things affordable, similar to Forest Row in Great Barrington, where residents pay taxes to the town.”
He is “concerned that the town has become less and less affordable for young families.” Michael Wise’s tax reform ideas “would make housing and entry on the lower end more affordable,” he said. “I think we can turn around a declining young population. I stayed in Great Barrington because I liked it here…it’s not as easy to do that these days. You can’t buy a house for $125,000 in Great Barrington anymore.”
Cooke would like to leave the commercial rate alone, however, especially given the disarray and lost income as a result of the Main Street Reconstruction Project. If raised at all, he said, it should be “nominal.” As an “old-line Democrat,” Cooke said that he wanted to help those who are crushed by the property tax anvil, which, according to Wise, is so heavy in town because local incomes can’t keep up. It’s important, Cooke said, to keep the town “affordable for people who live and work here.”
Under the possible tax reform options, a residential exemption would progressively shift the tax burden to those with the more expensive homes — many of them second homes.
Cooke says he has a number of friends who are second homeowners in town. “None of them are concerned about a property tax increase,” he said, adding that second homeowners “have brought a lot” to the town.
How to solve the challenges of rural economics? Cooke thinks the town should “start thinking on a more regional level…there’s a lot we can do that will bring more people in the area together and a savings there.” Cooke said some ideas were sparked in the course of a recent conversation with Rep. William “Smitty” Pignatelli (D-Lenox). Pignatelli, who has also advocated the sharing of services for the school district, suggested spreading costs for Great Barrington, “a hub for a lot of communities.”
“We have a lot of services that these other communities use, but we can’t charge them for it,” Cooke said. “We have mutual aid agreements in place,” he added, noting that a friend who is a firefighter in Egremont said that Great Barrington’s $2.5 million ladder truck had been called to service in that town “a half dozen times over the last year. But I haven’t seen Egremont’s truck come over here.”
“We put more out than we get in return.”
It was Pignatelli’s idea, he said, to form a public safety district. “If we had done this before we built the new fire station, we might have had some help building it.” He didn’t know if other towns could be convinced to provide that help, however. He suggested that like Berkshire Hills Superintendent Peter Dillon, who has regular meetings with other regional superintendents about sharing services, the Selectboard should consider occasionally meeting with boards from other towns to discuss the same.
While the town’s budget, he told the forum, “has been level-funded for the last 6 years…at the rate of inflation…the school budget is a different story.”
“We need to find something palatable to the voters in Great Barrington for an upgrade to Monument Mountain Regional High School. We need to get that fixed.”
Cooke thinks the way each town is assessed to pay for the school district should be “adjusted,” and said he thought resident Chip Elitzer’s — now tabled — proposal to change the assessment formula was “interesting,” since it would base the assessment on “real estate rather than [number of] students. I’d support that, but I don’t think Stockbridge would go for that.”
Still, he wants to try by “meeting individually with boards of those towns,” and “one on one, and getting to what it is that’s keeping them from helping us out.”
Cooke would “rather see 50 other smaller businesses” than just one like Iredale Mineral Cosmetics, he said. Jane Iredale’s relocation of her company’s world headquarters into the old Bryant School turned the company into the gold standard for local economic development. “But what if Jane decides to retire and sell the business to Revlon?” Cooke said. “We need more little industries.”
Cooke thinks high-speed Internet is one key to economic development. “We need to get the last mile completed,” he said.
“The quality of life in Great Barrington is a draw,” he added, noting that the town’s Master Plan “is a tool that the Selectboard should refer to on any decision.”
“I want to keep Great Barrington a real town, where people of all ages and economic levels can afford to live here.”
