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By AL NORMAN

There are elderly and disabled individuals in Greenfield who are struggling to pay their property tax bills. At-large City Councilor Wahab Minhas wants to keep them out of the foreclosure pipeline, and in their homes.When property owners fall behind...

By AL NORMAN

Our rural Franklin County landscape has attracted large energy companies — from Tenneco in the 1970s to FirstLight today — seeking to own our woods and rivers to make electric power. Each of these corporations has green-washed their mission....

By AL NORMAN

Decades before Ben & Jerry’s, the Blake brothers of Springfield slipped some magic ingredient into their ice cream products that stimulated longevity. Pres Blake lived to the age of 106, and his brother Curtis lived to 102. According to Friendly’s...

By AL NORMAN

‘It’s really messy. And I don’t like messy.”Greenfield City Council President John Bottomley was chairing his first council meeting on Jan. 17. Three hours into the meeting, Marianne Bullock, new chair of the Economic Development Committee, wanted to...

By AL NORMAN

“The greatest threat to our national security is our nation’s debt,” said Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson in his first speech in November after being elected Speaker of the U.S. House. “Tough decisions will have to be made, but the consequences if...

By AL NORMAN

On Sept. 29, 2021, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey sent a letter to the town of Shutesbury disapproving one sentence from a bylaw passed at their annual Town Meeting. The Shutesbury bylaw allowed associate members of the town’s Planning...

By AL NORMAN

Property tax relief for senior citizens in Massachusetts has never been better. In early October, Governor Maura Healey signed into law a wide-ranging tax relief bill, including a provision more than doubling the refundable property tax credit known...

By AL NORMAN

On April 19, 2019, a HAZMAT team was called to an energy facility in Surprise, Arizona. A large metal container was leaking milky white smoke. It was a 2-megawatt battery energy storage system (BESS). According to one account, “Hundreds of the...

By AL NORMAN

On Oct. 12, state Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, invited me to testify on legislation she filed to allow spouses to be paid caregivers for the elderly and disabled in the Medicaid program. In Massachusetts, you can hire any friend or relative to be...

By AL NORMAN

Over the past six months, tax collectors in 14 Franklin County municipalities have purchased legal ads in this newspaper announcing their “intention to take” 146 parcels of land/homes for non-payment of taxes. Greenfield had the longest list of...

By AL NORMAN

On Sept. 12, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised “everyone 6 months and older to get an updated COVID-19 vaccine to protect against the potentially serious outcomes of COVID-19 illness this fall and winter. ” The updated...

By AL NORMAN

Citizens on Turnpike Road jammed the Montague Planning Board hearing on Aug. 22, opposing a town plan to rezone 15.6 acres of forest land for an undisclosed Franklin County industrial user. On a 3-2 vote, the Planning Board supported the rezoning.It...

By AL NORMAN

‘We just got some great news, but Jeff Bezos is going to HATE this.”The president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) wrote that on Aug. 28 — almost one year and five months after Amazon workers in a Staten Island warehouse voted to form the first union...

By AL NORMAN

On May 11, the federal government announced the end of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE). That announcement — which should have been good news for millions of Americans, instead turned into “a quiet health care emergency,” according to one...

By AL NORMAN

Around midnight on March 20, 2019, the Greenfield City Council voted 9-3 to authorize borrowing for a new library. The Recorder wrote that this ended “weeks of wrangling that culminated by swapping relaxed commercial development rules for library...

By AL NORMAN

The Benderson company of Buffalo, New York bought 6.7 acres on the edge of Greenfield roughly 20 years ago, behind the Mohawk Trail McDonald’s. At a July 6 state hearing, Benderson presented plans for a 19,482-square-foot Aldi’s grocery store with a...

By AL NORMAN

In 1753, Greenfield was incorporated as a separate town, cut from Deerfield cloth. But the industrial connections between these two communities have been interwoven ever since.According to Paul Jenkins, author of “The Conservative Rebel,”...

By AL NORMAN

One good way to prevent older homeowners from falling behind in their property taxes, and losing their home at public auction plus all their equity is to give them better property tax exemptions instead.The average single family tax bill in Greenfield...

By AL NORMAN

One year ago, I wrote a Pushback column about “home equity theft.” My neighbors, Joan Marie Jackson and Mitch Speight had almost lost their home — assessed at the time at $275,100 — because of a property tax debt of $35,621, plus interest and...

By AL NORMAN

I spent two hours on the phone recently listening to a Greenfield Conservation Commission Zoom meeting reviewing an application from Benderson Development of Newtonville, New York, “one of the largest privately-owned development companies” in America....

By AL NORMAN

Two months ago, an elderly homeowner in Maplewood, New Jersey, burned down her 18th century home, which she had lived in for 60 years, rather than let an investor acquire it from the township for back taxes. The elder went to the basement and stabbed...