Lee — From her office on the second floor of Lee’s Town Hall, Brooke Healey speaks as though she has been a longtime fixture at the municipality. However, it may come as a surprise that the Nashville-turned-Litchfield, Conn., native was installed as Lee’s first town planner only a few months ago.
As superintendent of the New Milford Department of Public Works, Healey’s father influenced her decision to ultimately move into a career in local government. At the ripe old age of 18 years old, she joined the Litchfield Wetlands Commission as an alternate, becoming the youngest member ever to serve on one of the town’s volunteer boards. “I wanted my voice to have an impact,” she said.
Since then, Healey’s path to serving as an official member of a local government has been filled with educational experiences that have transcended classroom walls.
A love for the outdoors
Healey’s lifetime passion for the outdoors fostered her attendance at an agricultural vocational high school in Litchfield, and she touts a Wildlife and Conservation Biology degree from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) where she also minored in forestry.
Sporting earrings depicting cute squirrels, Healey said she is always “thinking about the world around us and what we can do to improve things.”
Since her days at UNH, she has been highly involved with organizing the New Hampshire Outing Club (NHOC), a group that advocates for students to get outside and on outdoor adventure trips. That experience—along with serving her high school as Future Farmers of America chapter president and field hockey varsity athlete—helped shape her leadership abilities.
Healey’s role with the campus club led to a summer position as an ecosystem intern for the university, sparking her commitment for UNH to gain a Bee Campus Certification, a sustainability award that shows the facility is working to conserve native pollinators by increasing native plants, creating nest sites, and decreasing pesticide use. Connecting the dots between the university administration and its use of pesticides to perfect the look of campus grounds as well as collecting data related to pollinators meant Healey was solving a lot of complex problems before her 20th birthday. Due to her efforts, the campus finally achieved that certification last year and Healey has already put Lee on the path to becoming a Bee City.
Getting from there to here
Following her 2023 UNH graduation, Healey served as a Cadillac Mountain park ranger at Acadia National Park in Maine, a coveted position she deemed “amazing” but one of her most challenging jobs.
Visitors could access the site by reservation only, with Healey having to turn away excited vacationers who didn’t take the requisite steps online for their adventure. “It was a lot to do with conflict resolution, de-escalation, while also helping people find other beautiful gems on the island that aren’t the most tourist-packed areas,” she said.
When her seasonal employment ended that fall, a phone call from Lee Town Administrator Christopher Brittain—who coincidentally taught a Natural Resources course at Healey’s high school—led to a six-month Land Use Assistant position in Lee from November 2023 through April 2024. In addition to producing meeting minutes from the Planning Board and Zoning Board of Appeals, Healey suggested uses for the town’s Stockbridge Road property that included creating an interpretive path showcasing the area’s unique ecosystems and grasses, identified areas where trees could be planted to honor veterans, and had a bird’s-eye view to the town’s Master Plan process, the town’s road map to 2040.
The role was intended to be temporary, with officials eventually rolling the job into a town planner position, Healey said. As luck would have it, timing was everything. In the later months of 2024, Healey’s U.S. Forest Service employment studying spotted owls in California’s Sierra National Forest was in jeopardy due to funding cuts and Lee’s pick for a town planner didn’t work out. Once again, Brittain called on Healey to apprise her of the opening. Her first day on the job as a town planner was December 2.
“The people in Lee are very, very special,” Healey said. “I have some of the best co-workers I’ve ever had.”
Her hiring was sparked by the completion of Lee’s Master Plan. When it was adopted by the Planning Board in May, there wasn’t a municipal employee assigned to achieving the document’s goals. Enter town planner.
“I knew the job of the town planner was going to be a tough ask,” Healey said. “We’ve never had one, and the Master Plan identified almost every task for the town planner to complete.”
She helped point out some of the goals within the plan while serving as Land Use Assistant and attended the relevant committee meetings. “So, I knew exactly what I was applying for,” Healey said.
Looking forward
The role is huge for Healey, who is tasked with putting the Master Plan vision into play, from finding project funding sources to serving on local committees. “It’s so much information gathering of what do people want to see, when do they want to see it, what projects should be moving first, who is my contact person for that project,” she said. “[It’s] creating a path to success.”
Healey has hit the ground running since the end of last year, submitting a MassTrails grant application last month to design a shared-use path for the Stockbridge Road property to connect it to the Villas areas. She has also delved into easing the affordable-housing situation Lee is experiencing, along with the rest of the Berkshires region, an issue of which Healey, a Stockbridge resident, has intimate knowledge. “I couldn’t find a place in Lee,” she said of her house-hunting efforts. “I felt that firsthand, the frustration of wanting to get a place nearby, and waiting and waiting and waiting to find the perfect place.”
Healey is currently working on the issue with nonprofit housing foundations, and the town is on a path to creating an affordable housing trust, one of the articles set for the March 20 Special Town Meeting. She has also reached out to directors of Hearthway, formerly Berkshire Housing, who are partnering on the Eagle Mill multiuse project that includes creating affordable and workforce housing in Lee. “Eagle Mill is such a big talk of the town, such a big project,” she said. “They’re expecting housing to be done at the end of the year, people moving in.”
Serving as the Lee representative on the Berkshire Brownfields Program coordinated by the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission (BRPC), Healey is involved in environmental cleanup assessments, especially at Eagle Mill. “That was a very big topic of conversation before the Master Plan was actually started, and that is something the residents want to see finished,” she said.
Healey attended the February 27 Boston rally in conjunction with bringing awareness of the Housatonic Rest of the River remediation plan to State House media and has participated in Lee PCB Committee meetings. “There’s so much history with that, there’s a lot to learn,” she said. “I’m still working up to speed. Coming from an environmental background, I definitely want to see the Housatonic [River] cleaned.”
With recent openings such as Lee’s Corner Kitchen and The Station, she sees her role as including finding answers to the vacant storefronts identified in the Master Plan. At their last meeting, the Select Board signed off on a Direct Local Technical Assistance (DLTA) grant from the BRPC to gather more information about the town’s open commercial spaces as well as other tax incentive grants “to make sure that we’re addressing that,” Healey said.
“We know we have these problems,” she said. “How can we help, not only making sure we have tax incentives but also identifying where these are in town… We don’t want any vacant storefronts in town if we can help that. We want everyone to be successful.”
Although Healey’s sanctuary has always been among the trees, she is learning to enjoy the rewarding feeling of an office, often stepping outside to take a stroll past the local stores or investigate the Eagle Mill project’s progress on foot.
“From a job description, it seems like a desk job,” she said. “But it’s really not. It’s getting out there and being involved in the community and becoming an integral part of solving all these problems they identified in the Master Plan. It’s so much more than a desk job.”
