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Longtime Burlington, Vt. Mayor Miro Weinberger will not seek re-election

Meeting Planned On Status Of Underground Infrastructure

crews work to repair a hole in a street
WAMC

A conference is scheduled Monday in Springfield, Massachusetts on the state of the city’s underground infrastructure.

Members of the city council’s Maintenance and Development Committee are looking for information on plans to replace aging infrastructure, what it would cost, and how it could be paid for.

Councilor Kateri Walsh, the chair of the committee, said the issue came to a head last month when a water main break knocked out power to a downtown office building and a hotel for 24 hours, and closed a major traffic intersection for a week.

"It is a very serious and crippling effect on businesses and people," said Walsh.

Environmental activists have voiced concerns about hundreds of un-repaired natural gas leaks in Springfield reported to state utility regulators.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.