CHARLEMONT — The distance from Charlemont to Boston may be only 111 miles, but it feels like light-years away for town officials here and in surrounding hill towns.
After a mere eight people (from six towns) came to the latest Small Town Summit at the Hawlemont Regional School, those present began strategizing on how to gain the ears of legislators from the eastern part of the state who don’t know much the rural life in sparsely populated western Massachusetts.
State Sen. Adam Hinds attended last week’s meeting and was asked what town officials could do to make their issues known in the State House, where only about 500 bills out of the 7,000 filed last session were enacted.
Charlemont Selectmen Beth Bandy and Toby Gould spoke of two bills crucial to their town that died in the Legislature, despite testimony given at hearings and many letters sent to state leaders. These were the town’s proposed 3 percent recreation tax and a bill reducing the number of EMTs required to respond to each ambulance call. The first bill was intended to raise money for the town ambulance service, which is shared by Hawley and is used by commercial outdoor recreation businesses when someone is injured on ski slopes or in the river.
“About 170 towns out of 351 (towns and cities) are rural,” said Bandy, “and about half the towns are struggling with the same issues.”
One idea was to invite the staff of local legislators to meet with town officials and give them an idea of which bills might have the best chance of passing and which would most likely be rejected.
“It would be a good idea to meet with staff to find out early which ideas are dead-in-the-water,” said Gould.
Bandy said she would like to know when a bill is foundering and why. “Where is the breakdown?” she asked. “Maybe we need to be doing something different. We’re seeing legislation that comes across that affects other places aside from here. Small-town voices are not being heard.”
“We have almost no growth, and we’re reaching our (tax) levy limit,” Selectman Bob Armstrong of Conway remarked. “In a few years, some towns are going to be in serious trouble.”
Among the Small Town Summit legislative priorities, reached by the group in December, was a rule requiring legislation to be reviewed for its impact on towns of less than 7,000 people and changed to be equitable for those communities.
Other priorities included: more broadband funding for last-mile build-out; rural school aid and redevelopment funds for towns with closed school buildings; a boost to “payment in lieu of taxes” (PILOT) funding for towns with high percentages of untaxed, state-owned land; and not using ZIP codes to derive data about town income (since many small towns have addresses in multiple ZIP codes.)
The Mohawk Trail Regional School District will host a Massachusetts (MA) Rural Communities Summit on Thursday, Feb. 9 at 6:30 p.m. in Mohawk.
The meeting was organized the MA Rural Schools Coalition to discuss potential areas of collaboration with rural towns, on such issues as access to high-speed broadband and school funding.
For more information on this summit, call the superintendent’s office at 413-625-0192, ext. 1010.