With Mayor Linda Tyer not seeking a third four-year term this year, one of her most vocal detractors is gunning for her seat. People who’ve watched Pittsfield City Council meetings for the past decade will be familiar with details of Craig Gaetani’s professional biography.
“I studied biology, chemistry, and physics when I went to college and I am an active biologist, chemist, physicist," Gaetani told WAMC. "I want to work with my two friends, Dr. Milos Krofta and Dr. Lawrence K. Wong, and we invented a new way to treat water, and we had the city of Pittsfield scrap their idea of building a $150 million facility and come along with what we had invented for $32 million, saving the city $110 million. This was in the mid-80s.”
Much of Gaetani’s fury at municipal leadership derives from Tyer’s long, arduous fight to secure the city council’s approval for EPA-mandated $74 million improvements to Pittsfield’s wastewater plant. While the plan was approved in 2018, Gaetani maintains his expertise could still save the city millions.
“The biggest issue beyond any question of any doubt is taxes, okay?” he said. “The property taxes are very, very high. They're inflated. We saw that we had assessments go through the ceiling. The tax rate went down, but the thing of it is, because of the assessments, the property taxes have rose. And of course, right now, we see that we're doing updates at the water plants and sewer plants for a cost of $165 million, something that I myself could have done for between $40 million and $50 million. It's it looks as though it's too late or people say it's too late right now. But I say that we can still save probably $70 million by halting the work on the water plants at the present moment and letting me get before the city council and tell them what I plan to do to save another $75 million for the city of Pittsfield.”
If elected, Gaetani says he would halt work on the plant, assemble a commission of technically minded individuals to handle water and sewer decisions, and fire the current head of Pittsfield’s Department of Public Utilities.
“I would get rid of Mr. [Ricardo] Morales, the DPW commissioner,” Gaetani told WAMC. “I was successful in getting rid of the last three commissioners by putting pressure on them at city council meetings until they decided to resign, okay? They couldn't withstand the pressure anymore.”
Gaetani says he also would have attempted to remove Police Chief Michael Wynn.
“But he's retiring, so I can't get rid of him,” sighed the candidate. “But he was another one that I thought didn't do a very, very good job. I'm very disappointed with the number of murders and so forth that have occurred in Pittsfield.”
The candidate was ahead of the curve on calling on the Pittsfield Police Department to adopt a body camera program.
“They recently signed a contract with Axon for body cameras for the policemen, okay?” said Gaetani. “Five and a half years earlier, I contacted Axon and asked them about putting a body camera on every police officer in the city of Pittsfield for free. And they agreed. And I came to the city council for maybe two and a half years mentioning, and I think you were there on several occasions when I talked, that I found somebody that's willing to come into the city and put the body cameras on the policeman and do the job for free, including the analysis of what's on the tapes. So, we have a, Chief Wynn dropped the ball completely there.”
Gaetani is a Pittsfield lifer.
“I'm a Pittsfield boy,” he told WAMC. “I'm 75 years of age and I've been here in Pittsfield my whole life with the exception when I was in the military, including 17 months of hard time in Vietnam.”
WAMC spoke with Gaetani in the sunroom of his home, replete with pool and spacious lawn.
“I live here in ritzy house on West Street, but my heart is on Robbins Avenue. My mom spent 75 years there. So did my dad. And my sister still owns the home on Robbins Avenue. So, we're the probably the longest people living on Robbins Avenue in the history of the city of Pittsfield, 90 years.”
Robbins Avenue is in the heart of the West Side neighborhood, a community subject to decades of redlining and home to disproportionate amounts of crime. Gaetani’s memories of growing up there reflect a very different chapter in the city’s history.
“When I was a young boy, it was a wonderful place,” he said. “The parks were at that time not controlled and cleaned up by the city. What would happen is that people playing in the parks like me and my brothers and my friends that would play baseball during the baseball season, football during the football season, we'd mow the lawns and everything all by ourselves. And the thing is this, taking care of the parks now is a very expensive, expensive situation in the city with the city doing the work. So, I think that when I was a young boy, I had a much better life than some of the young people have today with the way things are in the city of Pittsfield. Remember, at that time, we had three or four movie theaters and the Boys Club was an active place for all the young boys in the city of Pittsfield. And, of course, they had the drum corps. We had a drum corps in the city at one time. I was in one of them, the Cavaliers. I played drums. And the thing is this- I would love to see the city of Pittsfield come back to something like that. However, it probably is a long shot, because people today, the mindset of the young people is very different than the mindset of people when I was my age.”
WAMC asked Gaetani to reflect on contemporary conversations about systemic racism in American life.
“Let's take a look at Robbins Avenue,” he began. “I would say that three quarters of my friends on Robbin Avenue are people of color, okay? And we can along fine, we don't seem to have any difficulties whatsoever. And I think that there's more of a problem created by the talking about racism than really exists. Would I be afraid to – of course, I grew up in the West Side – would I be afraid to walk down to any place in the West Side at three o'clock in the morning? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And my preference, to be honest with you, as far as living, you can see here I got everything. Swimming pools, blah, blah, blah, the whole ball of wax. But I prefer living on Robbins Avenue than here. That's just the way it goes, you know?”
Gaetani is no fan of his two biggest competitors for mayor, current city council President Peter Marchetti and former city councilor John Krol.
“Two failures, okay?” he told WAMC. “And they’ve been, both of them have been rubber stamps for the mayor. Mr. Marchetti, especially, he's been very irresponsible. Anything Mayor Tyer wanted, even many things which were very, very wrong, he initiated the other five that go along with him, which is called the six rubber stamps on the city council. Neither one of them have any management experience. I'm a seasoned manager.”
Gaetani is slightly more bullish on at-large city councilor Karen Kalinowsky, a mayoral candidate he said seems to be concerned about the taxpayers.
Gaetani says revitalizing Pittsfield’s downtown is one of his top priorities, and that he opposes the bike lanes installed in city’s core by the Tyer administration.
“The city is still loaded with blight,” he told WAMC. “If you take a look at the city, especially some places down on the lower West Side, blight is probably worse than it was when Tyer even came in. So, we have a severe problem there. And of course, the thing that I’d like to tell all the people listening to this is that in order to change this type of situation that we have right now with a dying city, that people must come to the polls and vote in the next election for perhaps a clean sweep. so that we can get some people who are more interested in saving taxpayer money than spending it.”
The first time he ran for mayor in 2015 – the election that Tyer won to begin her tenure – Gaetani secured less than 4% of the vote in the preliminary election, fewer than 200 ballots.
The perennial city council critic and candidate has also had his share of legal troubles.
In 2017, he was found guilty of breaking into a vehicle and witness intimidation and sentenced to two and a half years of probation. The same year, he was also found guilty of making harassing phone calls and threatening to shoot a city employee in 2015. He received additional probation and a court-ordered mental health evaluation. Gaetani has also been arrested in Pittsfield’s city council chambers for allegedly causing a disturbance.
Despite his checkered past, Gaetani says he’s undaunted in his continued efforts to influence Pittsfield’s management.
“When I make up my mind to do something, I generally succeed,” he said. “I have failed in getting the city of Pittsfield to listen to me to reduce the water and sewer taxes by $165 million. And you know because you've seen me many times, seven and a half years, I don't quit. I'm still working on it.”
Gaetani says that despite his raft of complaints about Pittsfield, he’s optimistic for the city’s future.
“I'm not a fatalist in any way, shape, or form. I have a few medical issues that I'm facing. I had a minor stroke here several months back and I have some little limitations that I'm working on. But the bottom line is this, I don't let it get me down because 99% of the time I'm doing paperwork, okay? So, I'm sitting at a table and I'm writing, I'm calling people and so forth and so on. My outlook is good and my outlook for the city of Pittsfield is wonderful- If I'm mayor,” he chuckled.
Gaetani has also pulled papers for the Ward 6 city council race, which would pit him against incumbent Dina Lampiasi if he opts to focus on that contest.
