weston To Regis College, it seemed like a win-win proposition. The 362-unit retirement community the college wished to build on its campus would reverse the school’s financial fortunes and bolster its educational mission, while also providing a valuable resource to the town. But when plans for the development were unveiled in 2005, many residents of […]
Ray Hainer
Posted inPolitics
Treatment discontinued
medfield When it opened in 1897, the Medfield Insane Asylum represented the latest thinking in psychiatric care. Huge institutional buildings had been the norm for state psychiatric hospitals, but the Medfield asylum looked more like a prep school than a prison; the three-story brick buildings, on several hundred acres of farmland and forest bordering the […]
Posted inEconomy
Devens advances toward independence
devens This former US Army base has turned into limbo for the 250 or so people who now live here. Depending on their address, they vote in Ayer or Harvard, two towns that contributed land for the base in 1917. Because the Devens community is too small to support its own school system, their children […]
Posted inPolitics
Upscale Medway teeters on the brink of financial ruin
Medway On a Monday night in late February, several hundred residents of this small town on Interstate 495 gathered in the high school auditorium for what was said to be the first-ever “State of the Town” meeting. As everyone already knew by then, the state of the town was not good. Two-thirds into the 2006 […]
Posted inPolitics
Local officials warned against chatting about town business online
Winter 2006 ROWLEY—The Internet has made shopping, paying bills, reading the newspaper, and, it turns out, breaking the state’s Open Meeting Law more convenient than ever. Fifteen years ago, if town officials wanted to circumvent the law, which prohibits a majority of a municipal governing body from discussing public business in private, they would have […]
Posted inPolitics
Walpole tackles football bleachers and the Patriot Act
WALPOLE – “I know some people don’t want to hear this, but I just don’t see the greater benefit to the entire population of the town,” says Lee Ann Bruno, a lifelong Walpole resident and a thirtysomething mother of two, on a Tuesday evening in early May. She’s talking about new bleachers for Walpole High […]
Posted inEconomy
Telecom companies are wary as towns built their own wireless networks
PEPPERELL—This small, hilly town along the New Hampshire border is rural enough to boast that it doesn’t have a single traffic light (town officials don’t count the ones that constantly flash red), but this summer Pepperell quietly became the second municipality in the state to link all of its government buildings by means of a […]
Posted inPolitics
Was the political deck stacked against a new library in Framingham
FRAMINGHAM—Route 9 slices the state’s biggest town almost perfectly in two, and the two halves have come to resemble each other less and less. If you live on the north side, chances are that you make more money than the average resident on the south side. You’re also more likely to own your home and […]