By DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI News and Commentary

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, TAX DAY, APRIL 15, 2015) — How appropriate! On Tax Day, The Suits got their Ca$h Cow with last night’s move to approve borrowing $120.8 million dollars, all on the shoulders of bedraggled taxpayers! But that’s not news. THE PLANET predicted this Done Deal years ago.

Come with us now, as THE PLANET harkens back to the time when councilor-at-large Barry Clairmont tried to get funding removed  from the budget for the mayor’s corrupt move of city hall offices to 100 North Street.

The move, as you all know because THE PLANET was the one medium to tell you, was to an office building where the mayor had for many years paid rent for the Global energy suite on the third floor. The building and deal was agented by a personal friend of the mayor. No conflict of interest there. That’s how it works in this politically debauched city.

To get around Clairmont, Dan Bianchi made a secret deal with union reps. The deal precluded Clairmont’s funding maneuver. The city has kept the pact tightly under wraps. Bianchi didn’t post it on the city’s web site, and he ordered that no copies be given to the press. The secrecy continues.

Bianchi, however, didn’t count of THE PLANET‘s Secret Squadron, whose members walk the expensive floors of City Hall, right under the mayor’s long and growing Pinnochio nose. We obtained the document, and in another exclusive, we publish it here. It’s the first time it has seen daylight.

The Voodoo Math Adds Up

Put 2 and 2 together. For decades, city employees had offices in the basement at 70 Allen Street, and not one grievance was filed about the conditions. As soon as Clairmont starts making noise about 100 North, the Pittsfield Supervisory and Professional Employees Association files — not its nials but a grievance. How utterly convenient, another one of those “Pittsfield coincidences.”

Here’s a copy of the pact. Remember, Bianchi and the union don’t want you to know this exists, so don’t tell anyone you saw it here!

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MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT

The City and the PSPEA agree to resolve the pending grievance to the basement [of City Hall] (scheduled for hearing on 12/2/14) on the following basis:

1. All bargaining unit employees working in the City Hall basement (and their successors) will be moved to other locations outside the basement by February 1, 2015, reasonable documentation of a reasonable basis for delay of this date, the date may be adjusted to and including March 31, 2015.

2. No employees will be required to work in the basement after the move-out date described above, unless:

a. An HVAC system has been installed which [sic] both meets all applicable Codes and has been approved by a Massachusetts-registered Design Professional.

b. Radon levels in the building have been reduced to and are maintained at federally-established [sic] safe levels, and the City tests said basement space for radon at least bi-annually.

c. Asbestos remediation in the basement continues, and any friable asbestos found is forthwith removed.

3. The substance of the above provisions will be incorporated by amendment, as soon as reasonably possible, into the PSPEA contract.

This Memorandum Signed and Sealed by the parties December 2, 2014.

The document is then signed by Patricia Mayhew for the PSPEA and Bianchi for the City of Pittsfield.

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Sign it, Or Else

Duplicity, thy name is Bumstead.

The pact only says that workers are to be moved out of the basement by March 31, 2015. It doesn’t say where. Cute, because long before that date, the mayor had engineered the move to 100 North Street.

Sources say the mayor instigated with the union to get them to agree to the deal. One union member, who asked not to be identified, said the mayor threatened “a union head” (presumably Mayhew) with “some form of punishment” if the union didn’t agree to the contact. THE PLANET requested comment from the mayor on 100 North Street, and he did not respond. Mayhew would not comment because city employees are under threat from the mayor if they speak with members of the press without the mayor’s office vetting.

A member of PSPEA who asked not to be identified told THE PLANET that (s)he heard the mayor threatened Mayhew with “a job action” if she didn’t sign on behalf of the union. Asked what “a job action” meant, the source said, “I took it to mean she’d lose her job or face, I don’t know, getting written up. It wouldn’t be good, that’s for sure.”

And that, ladies and gents, is how they do business in this lovely town. And you’re paying for every cent of it.

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New School In, Unanimously … A Case of The Bland Leading The Blind

Of course, you knew this would happen. The school has been a Done Deal since Day One. It wasn’t a question of “if” but by how much. In there end, not one of our Right Honorable Good Friends on the city council sided with logic. They went with the emotions, bowing to the pressure (and to the “human shields” and school department employees who packed the chambers last night).

There was simply too much heat for any councilor or other elected official to withstand. It was the perfect murder. We congratulate all at whose hands taxpayers will now shed their costly blood. Now all that is left is to sit back and wait for the “economic engine” to do as backers promised, which is to solve All Known Human Ills.

Bet the itchy fingers can’t wait to stick the opulent public-fund plum pie, which leads to idle food for thought. Gee, you don’t think the Mass and Northern New England Laborers District Council in Hopkington … the Mass. Association of Realtors POL Action Committee in Waltham … Perri Petricca and Jim Maxymillian in Pittsfield, to name a few, all were large contributors to Tricia Farley Bouvier just to put on their resumes, do you? Sweetums took the money, promising, of course, “complete independence.”

So we pop a bottle of Dom (for you) and pour two fingers of Johnny Walker Blue (for us) in salute to this latest totem to impoverished excess.

When the city breathes its last financially independent breath prior to receivership (coming soon!), THE PLANET shall be continue to bathe in residuals from our multi-syllabic work.  Of course, we shall have left poor Pittsfield to its own long before that …

… for the bees in Essex are particularly productive!

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“Daddy is sleepin’ when momma ain’t around. Yeah daddy’s just sleepin’ when momma ain’t around. We’re gonna twist and twist and twist till we tear the house down.” — Chubby Checker, “The Twist,” (1961)

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.