On Tuesday, North Adams, Massachusetts Mayor Jennifer Macksey cruised to a second two-year term by a more than 10-to-1 margin against rival Aprilyn Carsno. A close ally of Democratic 1st Berkshire District State Representative John Barrett III – city mayor between 1984 and 2009 – Macksey served as treasurer during his tenure in city hall. The last months of North Adams first female mayor’s first term saw the city roiled by storm damage from heavy rain, the suspension and firing of the police chief, and unheeded pleas for state funding to repair crumbling infrastructure. WAMC spoke with Macksey about her priorities for the coming term and her takeaways from Tuesday’s win.
MACKSEY: It says that I'm doing things right in my first term, and it tells me that I need to continue on the path that I am, and it says that I have the confidence of the majority of the city. I am really excited about the results, and I think it just proves that my work as paying off.
WAMC: Let's look into your second term, which begins in January. You've got to find a new permanent police chief, you're still pleading with the state to help supply funds to repair the crumbling infrastructure of the city after these heavy storms in July- What's on the top of your list for your second term?
Well, definitely, you know, Josh, everything is important. So, there's nothing that is more important than the other. Still moving forward with the public safety complex. As you know, we completed a needs assessment in my first term, and we're ready to kind of move forward and put that out to an RFP to get some engineering and architectural services performed for what we think we want the building to be. We're still saddened that we haven't received any money that was promised to us many, many years ago, but we need to still move forward and figure that out. Infrastructure is always there, Josh, it's not going away. We've had to regroup some of our projects that we had planned to do before this winter, transfer those funds to do some repairs. The state hasn't given us any funding from MEMA or FEMA or anything like that from the July 10th storm. We were fortunate to get some help on State Street from MassDOT, but there's still a lot of work to be done with storm water remediation. So, assessing that. We do have an engineer on board who is starting to do some preliminary work with our five impact areas, and we just continue to deal with the infrastructure that we have. I think, all in all, we're still very focused on economic development and attracting new people, new businesses to our community, at the same time, making sure we keep our existing businesses. And then education is top of my priority list, making sure our schools are safe, we're getting adequate education, we have adequate facilities. And all in all, just making sure that we're responsive to the citizens in the city.
Let's turn to that search for a permanent police chief. Where do things stand right now, and when do you think that will be resolved?
As far as a permanent police chief, I haven't crossed that bridge yet. I'm very pleased with the work that interim Chief Mark Bailey is doing. I hope to address that after the first of the year.
Turning to the city council, there's some new faces joining the roster. Any thoughts on what that might mean for your legislative experience over the next two years?
Sure. I'm very excited to work with Andrew Fitch, Deanna Morrow, and Peter Breen as well as the return city councilors. I think that dynamic on the council will change in the sense that I think these three are very, very eager to learn and will ask good questions. As always, Josh, I really try hard to work with the city council, and individually I think they all have great, great goals and sometimes in the past when we get on the council floor, they get too much into each other's personalities rather than why we're there. So, I'm looking forward to working with the new people as well as the returning council. We've got a lot of work to do in North Adams and it can't be done alone.
