From Green To Glass

 

Amazing maze:  Allard Farm, Amherst/Hadley border 

If you loved the view off Mill Valley Road in the summertime, a sea of green corn soaking up the sun under a radiant blue sky, you will probably not be pleased with this latest development. Yes, unlike Amherst, when Hadley announces a solar farm deal, it actually happens.

Allard Farm, yesterday

Of course it doesn't hurt that the prime instigator is the Hampshire Council of Government, a vestige of years gone by where small towns became members to use the power of co-op buying for discounts.

But now those discounts are more easily available on the Internet, without the high membership fee to HCOG. 

So the HCOG has found a new service niche by morphing into a one stop discount energy provider.

This project by Nexamp will, on days when Mother Nature cooperates, generate 3 megawatts of energy.  The deal with Hadley (besides the private deal hatched with Allard Farms) will provide a discount coupon worth 21 cents on the dollar payment towards their current electricity consumption.

In addition to this Nexamp project, BlueWave Capital has three solar arrays on the drawing board in Hadley.  BlueWave you may remember is the company Amherst aligned with to construct a 4.75 megawatt facility on the old landfill off Belchertown Road, which would be the largest in the state.

That project came under heavy fire from nearby abutters, and has since gone dark.

Well Bully For The Blog!

I have to wonder if Amherst School Superintendent Maria Geryk said she was going to jump off the Calvin Coolidge Bridge at the end of this month, would the Gazette and Bulletin put that on the front page? 

At the very least, since it taps into this powerful newfangled Internet, Ms. Geryk probably should have asked her fake Twitter doppelgangerr to first break the news about her, as yet, unnamed blog.

The Bully breathlessly reports

UMass Sober Shuttle Scuttled

 Sober Shuttle 1:15 AM Amherst Town Center

After less than a one-year trial run the much ballyhooed Sober Shuttle is no more.

The late night program used PVTA buses that ran after the bars closed in an effort to keep drunk drivers off the road and to cut down on waves of students walking through residential neighborhoods to get back to their beds in the dead of night.

But it seemed to duplicate already existing runs of the PVTA and never seemed to gain traction.  A uniformed UMass police officer assigned to every run could also have acted as a popularity deterrent.

The $50,000 program was a Student Government Association project paid for via student fees.

UMass administrators were not overly enthusiastic in promoting the endeavor because they did not wish to be seen condoning/enabling excessive alcohol consumption.

But at the same time they used it to demonstrate the University and students were doing something about rowdy behavior.

Fear not, however, the good intentioned safety program has been replaced with a more cost effective answer.  Yeah, there's an app for that: Sobrio. 

SGA President Zac Broughton reports

Liquor License For Rent

The average person probably thinks a beer/wine permit in a college town like Amherst is a license to print money.  And to some extent that's true.  So it will be interesting to see who applies for the only open on-premise Wine & Malt license (out of eight) currently available, at the annual bargain basement price of $1,000.

The Select Board will award the golden ticket to one lucky entrepreneur at the their regular Monday night meeting March 17.  Yes, St. Patrick's Day -- not to be confused with the "Blarney Blowout" held the Saturday before the official holiday to allow the downtown bars to tap into the "college aged youth" who abandon Amherst for Spring Break just prior to March 17.

Considering the mayhem that occurred at the last two Blarney Blowouts the Select Board should probably also post a set of suggested guidelines for potential liquor permit seekers on expected business practices.

As in not hyping immature events that promote ethnic stereotyping, while encouraging bad behavior.

 

Souper Bowl went out of business in June, giving up their Wine & Malt permit

DUI Dishonor Roll

226 Children died in drunk driving accidents in 2011

The New Year started out badly for Brenda L Sanchez, age 30, and Sylwester Malejczyk, age 22, both arrested for Driving Under the Influence on January 1st (early morning hours of course).

Particularly bad for Ms. Sanchez, since the charges also include child endangerment while under the influence. 

Justin Timmons, age 23, attracted attention by speeding, 50 in a 35 MPH zone, also in the wee hours of the morning when traffic is light -- probably made even lighter by the "polar vortex."

 

Welcome 2014: Three DUIs down, another 125 or so to go.

Torpedo Tintin?

Jones Library:  The people's living room

I guess Bill Clinton would say it depends on how you define "censorship".

Clearly Jones Library Director Sharon Sharry subscribes to the American Library Association's definition:  "A change in the access status of material, based on the content of the work and made by a governing authority or its representatives. Such changes include exclusion, restriction, removal, or age/grade level changes.

The group of concerned parents who want to relocate the "Tintin" series of colorful comics believe there's a "principled middle ground" that would allow for "placing material that uses derisive portrayals of a racial group that has been historically discriminated against purely to entertain the reader, as is the case in the comics, to areas for older readers."

 But clearly, that would be a "Change in the access status of the material, based on content ..." Or in the eyes of the ALA, censorship.

And of course the concerned parents "drive this point home" using the racially offensive book "Simple Additions by a Little Nigger," as an example of a historically dated work targeted at children they would expect not to find in the Jones Library.

And last I looked (this morning),  the book "Simple Additions by a Little Nigger" was NOT available at the Jones.

But I'll let the two opposing sides speak for themselves:

Request for Reconsideration 

Jones Library Director's response presented to Trustees 

Gazette Internet Poll

 

Busy As Ever

If only your personal investment portfolio went up like this

Last year call volume handled by the Amherst Fire Department went up 3.64% ... which may not sound like a lot, but when you are already running beyond capacity it becomes a bigger burden.  Like adding a few teaspoons of water to a glass already filled to the brim.  

A patchwork measure of adding extra staffing on weekends paid for by UMass/Amherst -- AFD's number one client (after the town itself) certainly helped, but even then a mutual aid ambulance had to be called 49 times --almost once per week.

Meaning if you or your loved one had an emergency requiring quick transport to a hospital, you would have to wait until an ambulance from a surrounding community managed to find you.

And yes the new contract just signed by the town and Union 1764 allows for a minimum staffing of 8 on duty personnel when the schools are in session; but a ten year old town study recommended 9 minimum on duty by Fiscal Year 2005.  And just look at the lead graph above to see how call volumes have increased since then.

Total calls (medical and fire): 5,690, or an average of 16 per day

Sure "substance abuse" (drunk) runs to our Colleges and UMass get a lot of press -- as well they should, since it is 100% preventable -- but they only make up 10% of total medical emergencies.  The top two are still classic emergencies that you expect trained professionals to handle, "general medical" (for an aging population) and "trauma."

The town has been negligent with public safety departments for a generation now. 

Central Station is long past due for replacement (that too from another town study done in 2006) and the current staffing problem is a disaster waiting to happen.  As in a major structure fire in one part of town while four ambulances are tied up over the far flung five towns the AFD serves. 

Help delayed is help denied.