BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2016) — Pittsfield School Committee chair Kathy “Lady Boots” Yon and her group had it.

School superintendent Jason “Jake” JIV McCandless and his team had it.

School Building Needs Committee co-chair Kathy Amuso and the clan had it. So did the mayor, the city council, and most of the other city officials.

They had it, but they sat on it.

They knew of a report by New England Expansion Strategies (NEES), a consultant hired by PEDA, that documented the shocking decline of manufacturing jobs in the city. Between 1969 and 2000, the city lost 60% of its jobs. From 2001 to 2011, manufacturing positions declined another 40% for an overall fall of 78%. NEES then projected the expected loss from 2012 to 2022. NEES said that for those 10 years, the city would lose 3.54% each of those years. However, the pullout of SABIC Plastics took care of the total expected loss for the entire decade, with another five years of decline still to come. [NOTE: The SABIC jobs are counted in the study as R&D positions, which is seen as the “manufacturing” of technology].

Bottom line is that virtually all the city’s prime manufacturing jobs will be gone by 2022. That’s devastating news in its own right, but when you add that this report was done while Pittsfield school officials (SBNC, PSD, city council, and mayor) were proposing the spending of $200 million for a foolish construction project, it becomes morally reprehensible.

And yet …

… and yet, city officials, led by the duplicitousness of Yon, Bianchi, McCandless, and Amuso did nothing to highlight NEES estimation that Pittsfield’s economy would essentially implode by 2022. That damning report alone would have, should have, led to an immediate cancellation of the THS building project — a project, THE PLANET reminds you — concerning which these same officials and the Vested Interests who control them denied you a say. In fact, they did everything they could to assure that Mary Jane and Joe Kapanski would never get to mark a ballot up or down on the advisability of building a large new school in light of a continuing decline of students in the Pittsfield system.

This same corrupt and underperforming system last year lost $5 million due to school choice, an indictment of the scam now in place in city schools. The scam pretends kids are getting an education and that their diploma is a guarantee of preparation for either higher education or the Dreaded Private Sector. We know that is not true. This knowledge is why they didn’t want you to vote on the gigantic building project: They knew you would reject as unneeded, unnecessary, and too expensive. There were too many “promises to keep” to allow that to happen.

The NEES report, which came to light when former school committeeman Terry Kinnas dug it out from 147 pages of supporting documents of tonight’s council agenda, highlighted the “significant evidence to support the continued rate of decline” in manufacturing jobs. NEES identifies four key factors:

1. Prolonged Decline — The study, released Dec. 15, 2015, calls the loss of jobs “sustained, persistent, and not driven by one particular event.” Chilling words, those, but they describe a reality that city officials — by their unsound pushing of the THS construction — refuse to face.
2. Empirical Evidence — NEES cites the pullout of SABIC.
3. Presence of Risk Factors — The study mentions the danger of having 75% of the city’s manufacturing jobs in one basket (GE for all those years).
4. Manufacturing Cluster Tipping Point — As THE PLANET mentioned yesterday, the tipping point is when the local economy “becomes too small to sustain itself because of the lack of available skilled workforce and supply chain.” This is when the whole shabang collapses into receivership or worse. NEES suggests this will occur no later than 2022.

NEES then spits in the face of every sunny-day, “Everything is great” pronouncement made by city officials, ad infinitum ad nauseum, regarding the local economy, for example, when Mayor Linda Tyer and others oversold the painting of eight downtown electrical boxes as something like an economic Second Coming. Citizens and taxpayers get this insulting “sell” every time something or someone from the arts sneezes and puts pastel on it.

The NEES letter says that a turnaround in the Pittsfield economy “seems highly improbable and would buck every prior trend and indicator.”

In other words, Jake, the Pittsfield “Renaissance” didn’t happen and it ain’t going to happen, especially with the current “tipping point” of “sloppy seconds” leaders now in place. The economic engines were never started up. They were never built.

What’s the answer? The first necessary step is for city officials from the mayor on down to start leveling with citizens and taxpayers. Don’t keep saying everything is great and getting better. Admit it: The city is going down the flusher. Unless there is a radical new approach (tax cuts, for example, and elimination of fat in the school department), you can all start singing “Aloha” on the steel guitar.

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“Tiny bubbles in the wine make you happy, make you feel fine.” — Don Ho

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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