BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

First in a Two-Part Series

[ED NOTE: THE PLANET has just learned that O’Connell Convenience Plus has sold all of its stores to Global Partners LP. The firm, which employs or employed former mayor Dan Bianchi (it is not clear whether past or present tense is appropriate), has been agressively growing its convenience-store presence in the Northeast. Global last year purchased 147 Xtra Mart stores throughout the region. Still too soon to tell if the O’Connell news is in any way related to the following story].

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, DATE, 2016) — “Puff, puff, puff that cigarette.” — song lyrics, “The Smoking Song,” Les Paul and Mary Ford and a lot of others, including Pittsfield teenagers.

If we follow the logic of making birth control available free for teens because they’re going to have risky sex, Pittsfield should make free cigarettes available for school kids because teens are going to smoke — no matter how much we try to convince them otherwise. That way, after they graduate from Pittsfield schools with their worthless diplomas, they won’t have to learn the disgusting habit that provides the perfect adjunct to drinking, drug taking, lottery ticket purchases, EBT cards, criminal activity, and welfare checks.

But no.

Pittsfield wants to create more social engineering programs certain to fail. City officials want to punish selected small entrepreneurs for selling a legal product, while other competitors sell the same product without challenge. We’re talking cigarettes.

Over-Regulation, Under-Intelligenced

Pittsfield’s Board of Health (BOH) has foolishly taken grant money as part of a “me-too” band-wagoner to the Tri-Town Health Department. Taking grant money enables the state to dictate what should be exclusively a local issue. It may be politically corrupt, but it’s politically correct. That’s likely the appeal to Pittsfield’s chief enabler of the draconian crackdown on cigarette sales, BOH chairwoman Bobbi Orsi, a publicity hog and darling of the Totalitarian Democrat Left who has among her many talents the ability to get her picture in the paper every other day.

So came the news that Orsi and her board have denied licenses to sell tobacco products to two Pittsfield businesses, Zuke’s Soups and Variety, and the owners of a new gas station and convenience store at the site of the former O’Connell Convenience Plus Mobil at Lyman and East streets. They’ve done it in the name of The Children. Fewer cigarette licenses = less teen smoking in the BOH’s Common Core-Big Brother math. It probably has nothing to do with providing and protecting the competitive advantage of already established convenience-store chains that may or may not be among The Suits “favored Sons.”

The law to cap tobacco licenses will do nothing to reduce smoking among people who make the bad (but free) choice. This being Pittsfield, the board implemented to new law in an obtuse, secretive manner. As reported by THE PLANET‘s colleague Jim Therrien of The Boring Broadsheet, Pittsfield BOH director Gina Armstrong admitted her deparmtnet failed to properly inform other city departments or any other interested parties of the new regs. Was this done deliberately or through stupidity? What was it, Gina?

Pittsfield to Entrepreneurs: ‘We Don’t Want Your Business’

The owners of the two businesses, Elizabeth Zucco of Zuke’s on West Street, and Naveed Asif and Zameer Alhaq of the East Street business (not yet open), detailed how the city kept them in the dark. Asif and Alhaq, for example, told to board at a hearing last week that no one from the city informed them of the new restrictions on the number of tobacco licenses before they bought the property and made the investment. The entrepreneurs have invested heavily in remodeling the site. (ED NOTE: The city now las 51 tobacco licenses. It wants to reduce that number to 25. North Adams, a city a fourth the size of Pittsfield, has 26 tobacco licenses).

John Benoit, who brokered the deal for Asif and Alhaq, said he went to the Office of Community Development (OCD) to obtain the permits the new business would require. Benoit said no one at OCD knew that new tobacco licenses had been capped. OCD, therefore, did not inform Benoit that there would be trouble in getting a tobacco license.

At the BOH meeting, John Barry, project architect for the new gas station and convenience store, said he, too, was never made aware of the requirement. All Armstrong could muster for the rightly frustrated businesses was, “In hindsight, more information should have gone out about the regulations.” You got that right, honey. Meanwhile, Orsi preened for her close-up.

 Tomorrow in Part Two: Councilor and State Rep. candidate Chris Connell, leading the charge for small business owners, blasts BOH as “really out of control.” 

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“Really don’t mind if we sit this one out.” — Jethro Tull, “Thick as a Brick.”

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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