Copyright berkshireeagle
North Adams voters face a stark choice for mayor: an incumbent with relevant experience and the record to show for it vs. a challenger with strident critiques but little to back them up. That is an easy choice by our lights, and we believe this community at the heart of Northern Berkshire would do best to keep Mayor Jennifer Macksey in City Hall’s corner office. In so many ways, North Adams is a city on the cusp, seeking a sustainable path out from under the familiar challenges facing so many post-industrial communities in our region. Those challenges are many: maintaining and improving critical infrastructure beset by decades of deferred upkeep; preserving quality public services like schools and emergency response with a relatively small tax base and regional population stagnation trends; building on the Berkshires’ strengths of tourism and cultural sector offerings while courting new streams of economic development and investment. Those are tough nuts to crack for any community, but especially so for the commonwealth’s smallest city. Yet we can see small but real steps of progress in this scrappy city. Slowly but surely, long delayed infrastructure improvements are beginning to take shape — not the least of which is the massive undertaking of long overdue repairs for Hoosic River flood chutes. A sizable but wise investment in the city’s elementary schools has been secured, with the plan to build a new Greylock Elementary School buoyed by a $42 million grant covering more than half the cost. A preliminary but wise exploration of regionalization opportunities with neighboring communities could reduce long-term spending while preserving crucial services in education and other domains. The steady progress on those elements is not only a testament to the Macksey administration’s managerial and planning prowess. It’s also good reason to avoid a needless shake-up of City Hall while those projects are midstream. That’s especially true as challenger Scott Berglund brings little to no experience in the realms that matter most for governance of North Adams and in general. In a city whose $52 million annual budget is heavily dependent on state and federal partnership, Mayor Macksey has proven adept at forging critical connections and securing critical grants for North Adams. Further, her past experience in higher education informs North Adams’ partnership with the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, which is still recovering from a COVID slump while facing a fast-approaching transitional period that will come with a new president. While MCLA is part of the state college system and therefore not under the city’s control, its standing and future as an institution is directly tied to the future of North Adams — which makes Mayor Macksey’s relevant acumen all the more valuable. Mr. Berglund, with a professional background in marketing but no prior public service record, does not appear to have any such experience in his resume. We therefore see considerable risk and little potential reward when he asks North Adams voters to exchange Mayor Macksey’s record and experience for his lack thereof. Mr. Berglund clearly cares about the city his family calls home. We appreciate his focus on transparency as well as any citizen willing to step up and give voters a choice. Still, we don’t think this challenger’s campaign has given a compelling reason for the state’s smallest city to give up its biggest assets: experience and know-how in leadership. Only the incumbent in this race has those assets, and nothing about her record warrants discarding them. The Eagle editorial board endorses Jennifer Macksey for mayor of North Adams.
