GREENFIELD — Write-in mayoral candidate Brickett Allis, who has been serving in public office for 19 years, has emphasized on thing above all else in his campaign: affordability for all city residents.
Allis lost in the Sept. 10 preliminary election to Roxann Wedegartner and Sheila Gilmour, but said he decided to move forward with the write-in campaign because of “the supporters that contacted me and the messages I got from people (who) live in Greenfield, who I didn’t even know. That was the driving force. I really felt that people were counting on me to be in the race.”
He acknowledges, however, that being a write-in candidate “puts you at a disadvantage, it forces you to be more careful, more methodical, more strategic.”
As a resident of Greenfield, Allis graduated from Greenfield High School and did one semester at Greenfield Community College before going into his family’s business of communications and opening an AT&T store, where he worked for 11 years.
Allis and his partner, Danielle, own Arts & Antiques on routes 5 and 10 together, and they have a 2-year-old daughter, Lily.
To set the tone as mayor, Allis said he would want to “focus on our people.”
“As someone who would be in charge, I’d try to foster things that unite versus being on the side of things that divide,” he said. “The council currently appears very divisive when in reality most are not. We’re all friends outside of the council, most of us. When things are brought up simply to be divisive, like a lot of measures lately, that’s what happens.”
When it comes to “things that come up that are specific to Greenfield that the council deals with, they tend to pass, typically unanimously,” according to Allis.
He said that at his core, he wants to focus on affordability.
“If you really want to get down to solving the homelessness problem, the opioid addiction problem, you have to focus on the ability for people to affordably live in Greenfield,” he said.
“If we don’t focus on the most vulnerable and focus on what the city really needs to provide for people, you will never start to get to the bottom of other important issues in the city,” Allis added. “I believe the majority of people that support me in Greenfield are supporting me because they see their tax bills going up and they see their water and sewer bills going up. ‘I keep paying extra and I’m getting less and less for it, yet we have a $20,000 banner on the parking garage.’”
Allis said he believes the city has “chased after grants,” causing it to spend money with no results.
“This election has morphed into a library or not, and that really shouldn’t be the focus of the election because there’s a heck of a lot more than that we have to deal with in Greenfield,” Allis said. “My philosophy, in general, is that Greenfield tends to chase after grants and do things, not specifically the library, but other grants we’ve gotten. We’ve put money into things simply because there was a grant available to do it and then we didn’t actually use it.”
One issue Allis wants to clarify his stance on is the library project.
“I believe that the library could be smaller than what is proposed,” Allis said. “Based on other projects in Greenfield that we’ve paid for, we could get 10,000, 12,000 or 13,000 square feet — 13,000 would be about 2,500 more usable square feet than we have in the current library –- on one story with no elevator. We could build in the same spot without displacing the firehouse for now. It would be between $5 and $8 million.”
Allis said he feels the fire station is a bigger problem.
“We’re going to put it on Beacon and Riddell,” Allis said. “We don’t know what’s in the soil. We know there is a collapsing culvert, we know that it floods. But we are going to move forward on moving the Fire Department there. That to me, gets to the point — we are literally just building the Fire Department on that site so we can get a library?”
When it comes to being criticized, Allis said he’s no stranger to both giving and receiving criticism.
“It comes with the job. If you do your job well, you can handle constructive criticism,” Allis said. “Being open and transparent is the best way to deal with criticism.”
Reach Melina Bourdeau at mbourdeau@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 263.