Great Barrington — The Selectboard interviewed two candidates for the town manager position at its meeting on Tuesday, April 15.
Chris Remold has been serving as interim town manager since Mark Pruhenski left the position at the end of last year to become the town manager of Middlebury, Vt.
Earlier this year, the town hired Community Paradigm Associates, of Plymouth, Mass., as a consultant to lead a search for a permanent town manager, and the town formed a Town Manager Screening Committee.
Out of the 15 candidates who applied by the February 18 deadline, the committee eventually whittled the candidate pool down to two people: Angie Lopes Ellison and Marc Strange.
Both Ellison and Strange were at the April 15 meeting, and members of the Selectboard spent an hour interviewing each candidate.
The board first interviewed Ellison, who previously served as the chief administrative officer of North Adams from November 2020 to February 2022 and as the town manager of Uxbridge, Mass., from January 2017 to May 2019.
Ellison also served as the town administrator of Fairhaven, Mass., from February 2022 to December 2024. According to South Coast Today, however, Ellison left that position in late October despite the town’s Select Board renewing her contract until April 2025.
Ellison told the Selectboard that, while she started her career in higher education, “my true passion is municipal government.”
During her career, Ellison served as the dean of student affairs at the University of Massachusetts and an assistant dean at Framingham University.
“While being a stay-at-home mom for some time, I got involved in my local town [government],” Ellison said. “I was on the Select Board and the school committee, and I was on the regional school committee and got involved in the municipality and some of the functions. I realized that my [college] degrees suited more into that line of work.”
Ellison did not state in which towns she served on the Selectboard and school committee.
“I love the Berkshires, and this opportunity is great because I feel like I’m coming back home to the area,” Ellison said. “If you could capture the quintessential New England, it’s the Berkshires. Everybody talks about Boston and all of the things in Boston and the tourism, but it’s really the Berkshires.”
Selectboard member Ben Elliott posed the first question to Ellison: “Did you Google us?” “Are you aware of all of the different [town] issues?” Elliott asked. “You mentioned that you might have some sort of outside experience with some of the issues we’ve been facing—is there anything that’s on the top of mind?”
Ellison responded that the main issue she saw in her research was the town’s continuing struggles with Housatonic Water Works. “It was one of the biggest things that every video [about Great Barrington] showed,” Ellison said. “Every single shot [in the videos] I saw somebody with a bottle of brownish colored water. I have had experience, even in the community that I lived in, Sturbridge, where we do have a water [system] run by the town, but we don’t manage it because it’s a third party. I do have a few ideas in regards to [Housatonic Water Works] because I worked in municipalities that have their own system.”
“The water issue, I think, is not a challenge for me, it’s more of a process,” Ellison added. “It’s about what has been done, what needs to be done, where are you moving forward with as a community, besides wanting clean water or clear water,” Ellison said. “[It would be about] letting you move from there and [determining] the next steps.”
Selectboard member Eric Gabriel asked Ellison what she foresaw as the greatest challenge if she became town manager. “I think the greatest challenge would be because I get so vested in the community, but I’m an outsider,” Ellison said. “I’m looking forward to moving here and being part of the community, but I think the challenge will be convincing people that I do care, even if I have been here for six months, two years, I could be here for 10 years. But I’m an outsider, and that’s going to be a challenge.”
Later on in her interview, Ellison said. “I think that the government needs to be open and transparent.” “I may not have the answer [people] want to hear, or I may not have the answer right away,” Ellison said. “You, the Selectboard, determine the direction, the policy, and the vision for what I do. If I’m doing something that’s against that, I would want someone to say, ‘Hey, that’s not our intention. This is where we want to go with it.’ Someone may not want to go in that direction, but I’m open.”
Selectboard Chair Steve Bannon asked Ellison about issues pertaining to affordable housing. “The state requires a 10 percent affordable housing threshold,” Bannon said. “The rising cost of housing and lack of inventory is a detriment to those seeking to live and work in this town. As more housing units are developed, there’ll be increased demand for municipal services. How would you balance the need for more workforce and affordable housing with the impact on the community?”
“If I had that answer, I’d be sitting [someplace else],” Ellison said. “Without sort of sounding cliché, it’s really about trying to prioritize what are the most important services in the community and what it is that you’re looking to do. In one aspect, having more housing is a new growth opportunity. With taxes, it’s new growth. But at the same time, when I first started my career there was a study, which was ridiculous, that ultimately said that if you really want new housing, don’t have anybody that has kids. This is because you’re spending more money on the kids than what people are putting into it. You don’t do that because you want the community to grow. I look at it in the aspect of what is the community goal? What is it that you want to accomplish? What is it that the goal in the vision of the community is, and that aspect, and then focusing on those, and how do we move forward towards that, and what we can do as a community? Something might be a priority today, [then] a crisis happens, and then tomorrow, you’re like, all right, maybe we can hold off on that.”
The second candidate, Strange, is the current town manager of Ludlow, Mass. Strange previously served as a Select Board member in Ludlow from June 2019 until March 2022 when he became the town manager.
According to The Community Advocate, he was most recently in the running for the town manager position in Northborough, Mass.
“[In Ludlow,] for the last three years or so, we’ve been going through each department, looking at where the town could achieve some more efficiencies,” Strange said in his opening remarks to the Great Barrington Selectboard. “In my first full budget year in 2023, we cut about $700,000 in the town’s budget. There was so much there to cut. The downside of that is that now while we’re really efficient on the town’s side [of the budget], when you run into a year kind of like this, there isn’t really too much more to find places to cut.”
Strange said that while he has enjoyed serving as Ludlow’s town manager for the past three years, he “think it’s time to pass the baton to somebody else in my field.”
“From my perspective, I’m looking for a town with strong board leadership,” Strange said. “I talked to [former Town Manager Pruhenski] before I applied, and he spoke very highly of both the board and the team. In my experience in Ludlow, it’s a make-or-break thing as the town goes.”
Strange spoke further on why he felt it was the right time to move on from his town manager position in Ludlow. “It just seems like after three years of going through and evaluating departments, holding people accountable that have not previously been held accountable, there comes a point in time where I feel like you’ve sort of done as much as you can,” he said. “I guess I’m super proud of everything we’ve done. There’s a linear thing that I could list the people you hold accountable, particularly if they live in town, that becomes a critical mass of people who sort of feel free to [give you] backlash on Facebook. When you get maligned in public like that, you have no recourse. We’ve come to a point in Ludlow where it’s time for me to look elsewhere.”
“I’m trying to discern whether or not you felt like you have gone as far as you could [in serving as town manager in Ludlow] or you felt that you had enough of where you were?” Selectboard member Garfield Reed pressed. “How are your adversity skills? I’m just hearing that it sounds like things got a little ugly, and it’s going to be ugly here [in Great Barrington].”
“There are different kinds of ugly,” Strange said. “I don’t mind ugly. I don’t mind ugly with the ‘public.’ That’s democracy to me, and that’s part of what I love to do. The ugliness is employees who you held accountable going on Facebook and making slanderous comments about you. And I really don’t want to get into the details here, but we’ve had to terminate employees because they’re running rumors about me personally that were harmful, completely untrue. I’ve had people send me things from Facebook that typically there’s like, maybe 10 percent to 20 percent of what people post is true. But I had people send me stuff that is completely false, and my reputation is everything.”
When Bannon asked what Strange would see as a typical day as Great Barrington’s town manager, Strange said, “There is no typical day.”
“It’s insanity, and it’s just, like, crazy,” Strange said. “But I love the job for multiple reasons. It’s challenging, and challenges motivate me.”
While Ellison said she would relocate to Great Barrington if the town hired her, Strange, who lives in Longmeadow, said that he would ask the town to waive its residency requirement if he was hired as town manager.
The vote to pick between the two candidates will be on Tuesday, April 22, at 5 p.m.
