BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, TUESDAY, OCT. 13, 2015) — Even under the most harmonious of scenarios for a city strapped with debt, a shrinking tax base, a falling and aging population, $5 million lost each year through school choice, and a government addicted to spending, the timing for building a new school was suspect at best, damning at worst. Now, of course, the scenario has drastically changed for the worst with the news that 300 of the best paying jobs in Pittsfield would be leaving. By the time the loss ripples its way through the local economy, 500 jobs will vanish and between $150 million and $200 million.

Healthy economies have trouble absorbing hits like that. Sick economies, such as the one in Pittsfield, have only one chance at survival, and that is to check profligate spending, eliminate duplication, curtail waste, and drive efficiencies in the municipal budget. Pittsfield, however, has a brand of politics even sicker than its local economy. The realistic assessment at this point, therefore, is that the city is on its death bed.

Getting Pittsfield Off the Death Bed

What could revive the dying patient? What could be applied as an equivalent of electroshock to stimulate a still heart? How could the city get such a treatment? Answer: By taking the building of a new Taconic High School off the drawing board and the table. In doing this, the city immediately saves at least $121 million in new borrowing and sends a shot across the bow of all the Special Interests who have selfishly lusted over this project. The city would send the message that it’s no longer “business as usual.”

The Suits, already anticipating such a call, have sent their messengers out and about with the fatuous claim that the Sabic loss makes it more imperative, not less, to get a new THS. That’s like saying applying ice and snow is the best treatment for frostbite. The Suits perpetuate this lie because they have too much riding on the construction, too much gravy promised, and too many of the “connected” banking on this albatross going through. THE PLANET tells you, however, that any cold, objective look at the financials facing the city not only recommends but demands that the project be canceled.

Is such a scenario even plausible, given the cast of characters now holding, seeking to retain, or clamoring to achieve office?

Someone besides school committee hopeful Irwin Moiseff, please, tell THE PLANET, “Yes.” It can be done.

Total Hit from Sabic: 500 Jobs, Up to $200 Million

In a fine second-day “follow” story, Phil Demers in The Berkshire Eagle wrote about the “total hit” to the local economy stemming from the loss of Sabic. He quotes Williams College economics professor Stephen Sheppard’s estimate of a “total job loss” of about 500 “after factoring in the ripple effect on other industries.” Sheppard says the loss of Sabic will take $166 million form the local economy — a little more than the new THS will cost taxpayers. THE PLANET‘s own estimates, derived prior to learning of Sheppard’s, put the cumulative loss at between $150 million and $200 million — each year. We think it will be on the high side of that range, because with situations like this, there are almost always costs that couldn’t be anticipated or foreseen.

To put this in perspective, in five years, the Sabic move will cost Pittsfield almost $1 billion dollars.

The Suits and others with their finger in the pie and hands in the cookie jar continue to preach the fiction that the new high school will be an “economic engine.” It won’t be, any more than the previous multi-million dollar school renovation program (on which Pittsfield taxpayers still owe $23 million) revived the local economy.

Formula for a Certain Mayoral Win

These ruminations point the way to sure victory for whichever of the two mainstream mayoral candidates dares to take it: First one to say they will put a halt to the new school Pittsfield can’t afford wins the corner office in a landslide.

The Kapanskis never wanted that school, which is why The Suits didn’t dare give them a voice in the process. Sabic’s move will take a couple hundred kids out of Pittsfield already declining enrollment. The city not only doesn’t need a new school. It can’t afford on. It’s time, finally, to tighten the belt …

… or die.

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“The play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’ / And its hero, the Conqueror Worm” — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Conqueror Worm,” (1843).

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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