BY DAN VALENTI

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Happy Thanksgiving to all especially the sidewalk plow person driving down the street with his plow up on Thanksgiving , earning double time while there was no snow!! Who is paying for that? Now the Mayor wants to fine elderly people who can’t shovel their sidewalks while when citizens cars breakdown due to poor road conditions they say we didn’t know about those issues so we aren’t paying for the fix your car needs?? I also say a plow truck going up and down the street on Thanksgiving with the plow up earning double time on the Kapanski’s not dime but c notes!! Where are the auditors with the scissors for this cities budget and the leaders with the big boys pants??

Remember when doing your Christmas shopping President Porkchop Voltron appreciates kiddie dolls, Voltron Hats and gift certificates to downtown bars and restaurants

November 30, 2024

Hello blogger Dan Valenti,

The letter, below, about Pittsfield’s post-WW2 past era criticizes James Shulman for trying to help the now distressed city in the 21st Century. But I agree with the letter writer’s pleading to the 2-Pete’s who run Pittsfield’s city government to spend the tax dollars more wisely.

I do not understand why the Senior Citizens who remember Pittsfield from their youth are often criticized by their younger counterparts. Seniors have often told me and my brother that when they were growing up in Pittsfield, it used to be a nice city back then.

I do not know what happened to Pittsfield over the past 60 years to go from a productive industrial-based economy to a polluted postindustrial, poverty and social services-centered economy, and corrupt city that cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars more per fiscal year than similar small cities, such as Westfield.

Pittsfield has had Jimmy Ruberto as its past Mayor, but he never owned, nor rented, a residence in Pittsfield in his entire life, and he always lived in Florida, and now has a $490,000 condo unit in Lenox. Then there is State Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier, who sent her children to the Lenox School District. Then there is former State Rep. Peter Larkin, who lived with his Medical Doctor wife in a suburb town near Worcester, while he went on to make millions of dollars as GE’s lobbyist who sold out Pittsfield. Then there is the disgraced former State Senator Andrea Francesco Nuciforo Junior, who always spends most of his time in Boston, but always had an extraordinary influence in Pittsfield politics. There are many more examples of city and state leaders who represent Pittsfield in state and local government, but they don’t really ever walk the walk in Pittsfield.

I don’t like how it is “All in the Family” when it comes to Pittsfield politics. I am related to Mayor Peter Marchetti, but I see him as a failed leader in Pittsfield who collects his 6-figure city public pay plus perks, will serve one or two mayoral terms, and then he will collect his 6-figure city public pension plus perks, which will be on top of his 35-years bank pension, and his monthly Social Security beneficiary checks. To be clear, the taxpayers lose, while my relative Peter Marchetti gains financially. That is the exact opposite of good governance, but it so Pittsfield politics.

Pittsfield politics is predictable, especially when it comes to its municipal finances. They always increase city spending by at least 5 percent (or higher) per fiscal year; they always have hundreds of millions of dollars in municipal public debts and unfunded liabilities that will never be paid off in our lifetime; they always play the same irrational financial shell games with the state bureaucrats in Boston that most people don’t begin to understand; they always use the city’s level 5 public school system’s tens of millions of dollars in state-administered federal aid, the welfare and social services state-administered federal funds, and generations of poverty in the city as revenue sources instead of using them to invest in the people and community for a hopeful middle-class family structure that would support small businesses and pay taxes; they always play inside baseball to give their already wealthy and connected campaign contributors businesses huge tax breaks, while in 2024, they are now charging the average Senior Citizen tax- and fee-payer over $6,000.00 per fiscal year, while the likes of millionaire Andrea Francesco Nuciforo Junior recently received a pot settlement from the city in 2024 for $341,000 from the city’s “FREE CASH” account(s).

The city’s voter turnout is around 20 percent in some elections, or around 15 percent in other elections, because the common people know that the city is really a fiefdom instead of a democracy. When someone such as “Jon Melle” questions the likes of someone like “Luciforo: Pittsfield’s Pot King (of lawsuits)” in state and Pittsfield politics with his lucrative marijuana business on Dalton Avenue (& another in east Boston), then I face harsh retribution – even from my residence in Amherst, New Hampshire, over the past 21 years of my 49-year-old life.

I just described Pittsfield in 2024, and I am scared to think of my native hometown in 2034, 2044, 2054, but after that, I will be a memory like the Pittsfield of old that the Seniors of today yearn for from the days of their youth.

Jon Melle

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Letter: “Pittsfield can’t afford to look to both the past and the future”
The Berkshire Eagle, November 30, 2024

To the editor: Besides James Shulman (who doesn’t even live here) and those who helped create the Berkshire Carousel who seem only to pine for the days of their youth, the days of General Electric, Thursday nights and diagonal parking, who wanted this to be done? (“Will the Berkshire Carousel horses ride again? That depends on what Pittsfield City Council decides,” Eagle, Nov. 12.)

I enjoyed going to Wahconah Park back in the AA baseball days, but those days are also gone. Is spending millions of dollars to renovate the park for a college summer league wise spending?

Stop trying to bring back a past that can no longer be sustained in contemporary times. I plead to the leaders of Pittsfield to spend our tax dollars more wisely (perhaps on our own infrastructure) or try to create something more useful for the future instead.

Scott Thompson, Pittsfield