Whether your family is vacationing or “stay-cationing” in the Berkshires over the February school vacation, there are events to keep you entertained and inspired all week long!
The project will revive and expand the historic mill site in downtown Lee into a combination of office space, both market-rate and affordable rental units, a hotel and a "public market" with multiple restaurants and food kiosks.
The Eagle Mill project reached perhaps its most important milestone last month when local and state officials, including Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, visited the mill to announce a $4.9 million MassWorks Infrastructure Program grant to upgrade water lines and support residential and commercial development.
“The opportunity to leap forward into the next generation of what advanced manufacturing and life sciences is going to be all about, and to be able to build on a history and a knowledge base that already exists here … is a very real and significant one.”
-- Gov. Charlie Baker, during the presentation of the future Berkshire Innovation Center in Pittsfield
"This is going to be a radical change for all us. Everybody’s talking about it."
-- Mount Washington resident Eleanor Tillinghast
"People may have ruled Mount Washington out before. But we just catapulted ahead of other towns in terms of amenities."
-- Brian Tobin, chair of the Selectboard
The goals of the Community Compact are to improve town and school services, and provide tax relief, while maintaining each town’s identity and sense of local control.
“A market dominated by the major cable and telephone companies has failed to provide these citizens with what is fast becoming a basic need like electricity or water.”
-- The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, in report recommending the WiredWest 32-town cooperative as the vehicle for providing essential broadband Internet connectivity for rural Western Massachusetts
“We are charting a new course that recognizes that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for the un-served towns in Western Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Broadband Institute will therefore be moving to a more flexible approach.”
-- Peter Larkin, new chair of Massachusetts Broadband Institute
Gone are the days, it appears, when every little rural town could afford to have its own separate everything. The idea of the Compact is to improve town and school services, provide tax relief, and still keep each town’s identity and sense of local control intact.
“You lose the culture, lose the history...but maybe we say to hell with that and clear the whole site — we have six acres on the water in a nice area of town.”
--- Renaissance Mill LLC developer, Jeffrey Cohen
Local business leaders, innovators, educators, and town and state officials, say that Broadband — also called high-speed, high-capacity Internet connectivity –– is deemed critical for the Berkshires economy to stay afloat and expand.
