West Stockbridge — Select Board Chair Andy Krouss and member Kathleen Keresey unanimously approved a contract on behalf of the town with previous consultant Tech Environmental during an August 28 special meeting via Zoom. The group is down one member following last month’s resignation by former Select Board member Andy Potter, and no plans have been announced to move forward with his replacement to date.
A copy of that August 28 agenda can be found here.
Although the action may be in conjunction with complaints by residents of West Stockbridge and nearby Richmond over alleged odor and noise emanating from cannabis-growing facility Wiseacre Farm, no information about the contract—including its terms, relevancy, or cost—was presented at the session or indicated on the agenda.
At the three-minute meeting, no discussion on the vote occurred as the contract was confirmed.
Canceled meeting, new posting, agenda questions
The West Stockbridge Select Board special meeting agenda for August 25 at 9 a.m. included a “Vote to approve contract with Tech Environmental.”
A copy of that August 25 agenda can be found here.
The Berkshire Edge made three separate email requests from town officials—each day on August 25, 26, and 27—for the video or tape of the August 25 session but did not receive a response until August 28. That response came after the last two requests were sent to Select Board members—the August 26 request was sent only to Town Administrator Marie Ryan—and The Berkshire Edge had filed a formal records request for the contract identified in the agenda.
According to Select Board member Kathleen Keresey, in an August 28 email response sent at 11:25 a.m., Ryan had been on vacation and Keresey was “on and off the grid.” She said the August 25 meeting had been canceled and another one scheduled for the same day, August 28, at 1 p.m. via Zoom, and attached a copy of that meeting notice to her response.
As of 1 p.m. on August 28, however, the town’s online calendar did not reflect the August 25 meeting cancellation, and it did not specify the Select Board’s August 28 meeting.
A screenshot of the West Stockbridge Select Board calendar (taken 3 p.m. on August 28, 2025) can be found here, and a screenshot of the town calendar (taken 1:58 p.m. on August 28, 2025) can be found here.
An executive session meeting of the Select Board was also listed on the calendar for August 26 at 2 p.m. but without an agenda. Since January 1, the group has met in seven executive sessions—February 26, March 13, April 9, May 8, June 10, August 8, and August 13—regarding Wiseacre, specifically “to discuss strategy with respect to litigation, as an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the litigating position of the public body and the chair so declares.” However, Wiseacre representatives confirmed the entity is not involved in a lawsuit with West Stockbridge or members of Neighbors Advocating for Fresh Air (NAFA), and a NAFA representative stated he was unaware as to what those sessions entailed.
Backstory
The effort comes on the heels of a recent Planning Board meeting in which Wiseacre dropped its filing to renew the facility’s special permit as the group acknowledged a state law that provided an automatic two-year extension of state permits, including the three-year permit issued to the cannabis farm in 2022. As a result, Wiseacre’s special permit will not be up for renewal until November 2027.
The Select Board had previously engaged Tech Environmental in February 2024 to review and comment on a 2023 plan presented by Wiseacre and developed by specialist Byers Scientific that uses an agricultural fan and odor-neutralizing agents to deter the negative effects of the smells from its facility. At that time, the Massachusetts-based firm charged West Stockbridge $4,500 for a site visit and initial review.
Wiseacre responds
For Wiseacre attorney Aaron Dubois, who attended the August 28 Select Board session via Zoom along with the cannabis facility’s co-owner David Jadow, the prior meeting’s notice reflected “an intentional attempt to avoid debate or disclosure taken by the two people currently operating the West Stockbridge Select Board.”
“The meeting was utterly pre-textual, involved no discussion or disclosure of the contract being voted on and was an apparent fait accompli before anyone had signed on,” he told The Berkshire Edge in an email. Dubois said that the only online notice his team could locate for the August 28 session was that of the August 25 session.
“The meeting today [August 28] likely lacked effective notice and may therefore have violated one or more aspects of the state’s Open Meeting Law,” he said. “Either that or the Select Board is now in the habit of hosting Zoom-only meetings while posting only analogue notices in the Town Administration building.”
Massachusetts’ Open Meeting Law governs Select Board sessions, with that regulation requiring a certain specificity as to the listing of topics in a meeting agenda. “The listing of topics must contain enough specificity to give the public an understanding of each topic that will be discussed,” Mass.gov provides. “It is not sufficient to list broad topic categories, such as ‘Old Business.’ For example, when the Chair of a Board of Selectmen reasonably anticipates a discussion about on-going traffic improvement projects in town at the next Board meeting, it would be appropriate for the Chair to list that topic in the notice as: ‘Discussion of Traffic Improvement Projects at the intersection of Main and Pleasant Streets; and at the intersection of Elm and Oak Streets.’”
Regarding discussions over the odor-control system Wiseacre installed to combat concerns from neighbors, Dubois said his client had previously been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with town counsel in the spring, but those interactions were “apparently and abruptly ended without conclusion about three weeks ago.”
Wiseacre’s odor-mitigation plan using a fine-misting odor-control system and agricultural fan was presented to the Select Board by its co-owner Jon Piasecki in January 2024. The project also employs air testing, a messaging site for owners to advise Wiseacre personnel of smells, and a weather station to determine the winds directing the odors.
“Wiseacre Farm is a properly permitted, sited, and operational business directly overseen by a state agency,” Dubois said.
According to Dubois, Wiseacre, in addition to its landlord Baker Flower LLC, isn’t aware of any third-party representatives acting on behalf of the town or Select Board “intruding” onto the property for testing purposes and that activity won’t be allowed. “This testing is unnecessary and follows on the heels of previously conducted testing, done by a truly independent third-party, not the town-retained Tech Environmental, which the Selectboard appears to wholeheartedly ignore,” he said of the possible text within the group’s August 28 contract.
