Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Maroulis named UMass PR Guru


Tony Maroulis Amherst Chamber of Commerce Director (supporting St. Baldrick's)


Tony Maroulis, my favorite guy in public service, has been named "Director of Community Relations" for our number one community builder, UMass/Amherst.

Good for him. Good for UMass.  And great for our community!


Tony, Town Manager, Sam

16 comments:

  1. Ha ha! He does have hair you know!

    ReplyDelete
  2. A logical and terrific place for Tony. Good on ya man...you will bring in some new ideas. plus,

    I hope your pension is awesome!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. surprised Ms Geryk hasn't created a similar position for ARPS, just give her time....If she keeps it up, soon we will have more in admin positions than teachers.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Will you knock it off with your off topic Geryk bashing.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I think this shows the writing on the wall -- UMass will appease Amherst at the expense of all else. That's good on a short term basis but fatal long term because UM's money doesn't come from Amherst...

    ReplyDelete
  6. We need to be appeased?

    Who knew?

    I guess we'll have to look the part, walking around town snarling and growling.

    The stuff that turns up in the comments section always makes for good laughs.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "UMass will appease Amherst at the expense of all else."

    You can always tell Ed's comments. They are always negative and wrong. Tony was just the best person for the job. Bully for him. Congrats!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Huh? A week ago you were criticizing Umass and its "luxurious stable of Public Relations folks." Now here you are praising a new PR hire there, and elevating Mr. Maroulis to "Guru" at that.

    ReplyDelete
  9. What I meant by "appease Amherst" can be perhaps be better expressed by the calculus expression dy/dx=-0. This is the tipping point, and then the institution goes downhill fast.

    Someone from UMass needed to say "There's 20,000-25,000 young people here, and they're a hell of a lot better behaved than you folk were when you were their age. UMass is neither a cloistered convent nor Bob Jones University -- and you'd not like it if it was."

    "20,000-25,000 young people are going to be loud, drunk & obnoxious at times, that's as much a fact of life as that at this latitude, snow, ice and other fun stuff will fall from the sky in the wintertime."

    If you choose to live in New England, accept that we have something called 'winter', and if you choose to live in a college town, get used to something called 'students'."

    They didn't do that, they won't now, and that's why I say it really is all over.

    Folks, UMass is an industry -- it could instead be a paper mill and you were to complain about the logs going in (by rail or truck) and the paper coming out (again, by rail or truck), they'd say "folks, how the hell do you expect us to make paper if we can't get stuff in & out of here?"

    ReplyDelete
  10. Tony is a big believer in UMass and a big booster of Amherst, (Both downtown and elsewhere.) He's a big supporter of the arts and business, as he was an art gallery owner. Perfect choice.

    ReplyDelete
  11. And he knows karate.

    I may take him on a late night weekend ride along when the weather warms up.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Actually, speaking of paper, there is the mill up in Irving -- they make high-quality napkins (and such) out of recycled office paper.

    (Irving is between Orange and Greenfield on Mass Route 2.)

    I don't know how it came to happen but Route 2, the primary east/west road for that region, ran adjacent to the mill -- it essentially went around the mill and was really close to it, with the river on the other side.

    The bales of recycled paper had to get into the plant and the napkins had to get out -- and this involved "18-wheel" tractor/trailer rigs with the standard 40 foot trailers. These would (just barely) clear the road when docked, but to get there the trucks had to back down the middle of Route 2 (blocking traffic in both directions) and worse trucks approaching from the west, the nearest interstate highway, had to back into their blind spot.

    (If you back to your left, you can see where your rear wheel is going, if you back to your right you can't.)

    Now this kinda disrupted the town, and they were upset with the truck drivers the way you folk are with the UMass students.

    But they didn't try to deal with it the way you folk are -- no, instead they got a new road built. The mill gave up a parking lot, there was a great deal of blasting & filling, and the road now runs above the mill.

    In addition to not dealing with the trucks, the hairpin turns are gone and it is posted at 45 MPH rather than 25 MPH, and the old road is used as an access to the mill.

    It may have helped that the mill in Turners' Falls had just closed, but people in Irving accepted the fact that trucks needed to get to the mill and created a "win-win" situation where everyone came out ahead.

    People in Amherst need to understand that young people will be loud, drunk & obnoxious -- and that managing this is easier than attempting to prevent it. It's called "compromising" and I don't see any willingness on the part of the town to do it.

    A compromise would be a noise ordinance where the police say "sorry, m'am, they are under the decibel limit, as measured from the property line" or "it isn't midnight yet" -- "and we can't do anything about it."

    That's not what you have now - instead you are either warned or arrested if anyone complains -- that's like back in the 1050's when the Registrar of Motor Vehicles could (and did) revoke anyone's drivers' license for anything he thought they ought not have done. That was thrown out on due process grounds years back....

    Do the Amherst Police even OWN a decibel meter???

    They have radar guns and certified speedometers for a reason -- they are going into court with a specific allegation of HOW fast someone was driving, not just "fast." Yet they are going into court with allegations for loud noise without any specific indication of how loud the noise was.

    If the ACLU actually believed in "CL", they'd be raising hell about this. And if the Liberals of Amherst were truly "liberal", they would too.

    ReplyDelete
  13. "Actually, speaking of paper, there is the mill up in Irving."

    Who was speaking of paper? Thank you for your non sequitur rant.

    ReplyDelete
  14. just to stay off topic.

    IF there was a mill it would employ lots of people like umass, it would bring lots of traffic, like umass, it would expand, like umass, our air would smell different one thing umass does not bring, except during parties. The other and more important thing the mill would bring that umass does not property tax. Must be nice to grow your business when your prop taxes don't increase. I bet every business owner would love that.

    Back to topic. Tony will make a great PR guy. He really does care about the town. So while people may disagree over some of what he may do in the future his heart will always be in the right place. Good luck Tony

    ReplyDelete
  15. The other and more important thing the mill would bring that umass does not property tax.

    Military bases don't either -- and yet communities that have them very much don't want to loose them. Wonder why?

    ReplyDelete