Residents of the roughly 2,000-strong community gathered in the town offices to approve a 21-article warrant in under two hours, including a $12.2 million operating budget for fiscal year 2025 — up over $583,000 from the year prior.
One of the most discussed items on the warrant was the use of over $150,000 in the Community Preservation Budget to be used by Berkshire Waldorf High School for its restoration of the old town hall.
“Obviously, we all know that the town hall has been a relic and an albatross for the town for a long time. It suffered a great deal of damage due to lack of having anything going on in there. We've had to reroof it, it's been a really expensive thing, and I feel that we were very fortunate for the Waldorf school to come forward and take over this piece of property for the town," said Stockbridge Community Preservation Committee Chair Sally Underwood-Miller. “The reason that we chose to fund this part of – it’s only a very small part of the renovation – is that the area that they have requested the funding for is the public meeting space upstairs, and that will be accessible now by an elevator that they're going to be putting in. So, it will be ADA accessible, which it was not before, which is why it was abandoned as town hall in the first place. And understand that many of these buildings that we see in town that we're funding through this Community Preservation have to meet certain standards that are set forth by the Secretary, and beyond, the Historic Register. So, they have to meet that hurdle before we even consider what we're going to recommend to town meeting to fund. Town hall has certainly met all of those, all of those criteria. And we always look at what the public benefit of anything that we recommend funding for this. This space will be available to the citizens of Stockbridge for meetings and gatherings, and I don't know, weddings and bar mitzvahs. I don't know what it's going to be available for, but it is going to be a public space.”
“The total project budget is $8 million. It started off at $4 million. Construction inflation has roughly doubled it last five years. Tomorrow there’s press release going out about a, anonymous donor that has donated an additional $4 million to close the gap, and the project is still approximately $100,000 short, so we're doing better," said Patrick White, who is both a Stockbridge select board member and the Chief Financial Officer of Berkshire Waldorf. “Had you guys needed to tear that building down because it was full of asbestos and lead paint, you would have been looking at a million-dollar expense to either the church or the town or both or whoever is going to fight over paying for it. I am standing over here because I am not unbiased in in stating this, but I believe that the town got a really good deal by having the incredibly generous folks who put up the money, the vast majority of this $8 million dollars, to keep those kids in this town, buying lunches, and putting that building to use has been here since 1839.”
Water Superintendent Michael Buffoni was asked to explain a $50,000 expenditure on a geological survey of the Lake Averic water supply.
“In the last few years, we've been really trying to pin down a number for our water supply, our single water supply we have for our town," he said. "It's called the safe yield number, and we're trying to really pin down how much water is really available in our reservoir.”
Buffoni said that the town had been working with The Massachusetts Geological Survey at UMass Amherst on the project.
“They’ve got some really amazing study and technology they can use to really help us find this number we've been searching for a while," he told the meeting. "We've- it's been really tough. But this is the last, hopefully the last part of the puzzle to know what our reservoir is really capable of.”
Other items approved by town voters included setting a Net Zero Carbon Energy objective by 2050 and enshrining a 25-mph speed limit in thickly settled parts of Stockbridge into law.
You can find the full 2024 Stockbridge town meeting here:
