It was not all fun and games in Williamstown in 2025 ... but a lot of it was.

 

The town made progress on several fronts to add amenities for recreation and physical fitness.

 

The biggest and most expensive project is at Mount Greylock Regional School, a new eight-lane track and natural grass athletic field for the school's soccer and lacrosse programs.

 

The track was long needed for a school where track and field is one of the largest and most successful interscholastic athletic programs — even without an on-campus facility.

 

With the new oval that entered into service in March, the Mounties' girls team won a second straight state championship in June.

 

And the facility at the middle-high school has a life beyond high school sports. The track is open to use by community members outside of school hours and when it is not being used by the team.

 

A different kind of track also opened for business this summer when Purple Valley Trails christened its Berlin Mountain Trail on the east side of town. The new mountain bike trail is the start of what organizers plan to be a 20- to 25-mile network of trails that will serve both the local community of bikers and attract visitors to the area.

 

In the residential part of town, Williamstown this year launched a new outdoor fitness court that offers workout opportunities along the heavily used Mohican Trail multi-use path.

 

Speaking of things that are heavily used, the playgrounds at Williamstown Elementary School long have been known as the most used public amenities in town — both by the pre-K through 6th grade population at the school and by children from Williamstown and beyond outside of school hours.

 

In 2025, both playgrounds got a major overhaul with updated and fully accessible equipment and surface materials.

 

Town officials hope they have found a solution to a conundrum at a town park that makes the facility more usable. In April, Town Manager Robert Menicocci announced that natural barriers — like tall grass and trees — would be used to delineate an off-leash area at the Spruces Park, where some residents expressed concern about equity for would-be users who were fearful of or uncomfortable around canines roaming free.

 

And, while not adding to the physical infrastructure, the town did increase opportunities for community building and celebration by adding a third townwide holiday celebration to the venerable Holiday Walk and July 4 traditions. In 2025, Pride Month joined that short list with events throughout the the month of June and a public display of Pride Flags along the downtown stretch of Main Street (Route 2).

 

Looking ahead, Town Hall is studying how to renovate the Broad Brook Park in the White Oaks neighborhood on the north side of town and put pickleball courts at Linear Park, and Purple Valley Trails likely will be back before the Community Preservation Committee in early 2026 with a grant request to support a $720,000 skate park on Stetson Road next to the fitness pad.

 

Perhaps the best part of these recreation improvements — for town officials — is that most came with minimal use of revenue from property taxes.

 

The track and field project got a $3.5 million infusion from the remains of a 2016 capital gift to the school district from Williams College; it also utilized $100,000 from the town's Community Preservation Act receipts.

 

CPA funding also supplemented the mountain bike trail. A different Williams College capital gift — to WES when it opened in 2002 2022 — helped fund the playground replacement project, as did town funds its allotment out of the federal American Rescue Plan Act. The fitness pad was largely funded through grants. And the Pride Month festivities received a modest $5,000 contribution of town funds.

 

Anything project that might add to the tax rate itself likely would meet strong scrutiny.

 

Both the Finance Committee, which reviews the town budget each year, and the Select Board, which oversees the town manager, spent a lot of time in 2025 talking about pressures on that budget.

 

Rising costs for municipal services and stagnation in the growth of the tax base will have serious consequences for the town in the relatively near future, officials warn. And some of those consequences already are being felt.

 

The town, which has traditionally offered financial support to a selective few non-profit agencies, turned away any new requests heading into the Fiscal Year 2026 budget — a message that was repeated in December as talks get underway on the FY27 spending plan. And the middle-high school has had to stop offering an elective in Latin — partly due to declining interest among students and partly because of priorities elsewhere in a tightening budget.

 

There also was good news coming out of the Mount Greylock Regional School District in 2025.

 

The two-town district welcomed a new principal at one of its elementary schools and a new superintendent with a familiar face. Joseph Bergeron, who was an elected member of the now defunct Williamstown Elementary School Committee and served as finance director and assistant superintendent for the Mount Greylock district, was named superintendent by the School Committee this summer.

 

Bergeron was proactive even he was an interim superintendent after the abrupt departure of Jason McCandless in 2024. Bergeron helped shepherd an overhaul of the school district's discipline policy that was informed by the analysis of The Equity Imperative, a Chicago consulting firm.

 

"It reflects trying to make sure that we are addressing behavior in its root cause, that we are trying to take steps to restore relationships and education students as a first step, that we are putting communication with families in various forms very much up front and that all responses to behavior are progressive in nature — except the most severe, Tier 3-type behavior, where we really need to jump straight from being notified to taking action that is more traditional, which would involve separation from the school population to maintain safety," Bergeron told the School Committee in October.

 

The burning issue at the annual town meeting in May was a proposed bylaw brought by citizens' petition that sought to ban smoking in multifamily housing with more than four units. The measure passed overwhelmingly in the spring and, after a lengthy review in Boston, was approved by the Attorney General's Office in December.

 

At the annual town election one week before town meeting, Shana Dixon was the winner of a two-person race to serve the remaining year of an unexpired term on the Select Board.

 

That five-person board got an unexpected shakeup a few months later when Jeffrey Johnson announced he was leaving in the middle of his second three-year term because of health issues. The board opted not to appoint someone to fill his seat, the remaining year of which will be on the ballot in May 2026.

 

Another town board lost a longtime public servant this fall when Board of Health Chair and well-known retired local physician Erwin Stuebner died at age 80.

 

Staying in town hall, the members of the town's diversity committee decided it was time for a rebrand, changing the name of the panel to the Race, Equity, Accessibility, Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

 

The newly dubbed READI Committee showed that it will continue to take on difficult topics, like the racist harassment directed at Williams College students. And its members signaled that they may be ready for a structural change in the panel's status, which has been, technically, an advisory group to the Select Board since the former Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Equity (DIRE) Committee was formed in 2020.

 

In a move that may have gone unnoticed to all but the most regular observes of local governance, the town's Sign Commission, which had struggled to maintain its membership for years, was disbanded in 2025 with its duties shifted to the Zoning Board of Appeals as town officials work to craft a proposal for a new sign bylaw.

 

Another lower profile municipal body found itself in the headlines this year. The commissioners of the Hoosic Water Quality District — an intermunicipal agency between North Adams and Williamstown — found themselves in a poop storm after presenting an FY26 budget proposal that included ramping up its composting operation by importing sludge from other communities.

 

Many Williamstown residents rang the alarm about an expansion of composting due to the presence of toxic, fluorinated chemicals known as PFAS in the human waste the HWQD treats at its Williamstown plant. In the end, the commissioners stopped pursuing a deal to import more waste but the district is continuing to produce compost from biosolids it takes in from member communities Clarksburg, North Adams and Williamstown.

 

2025 saw the substantial completion of four major road projects at two ends of town: the new rotary at the Five Corners intersection in South Williamstown; the rebuild of South Street from Field Park to just south of the Clark Art Institute; a new bridge to carry Main Street (Route 2) over the Green River; and the reconstruction of the bridge on Main Street across Hemlock Brook.

 

It also saw the start of two new construction projects: a four-home subdivision that Northern Berkshire Habitat for Humanity is building off Summer Street and a renovation at Spring Street's Images Cinema that will add a second screen.

 

Another local building project started to take shape as framing starting going up for a new Williams College Museum of Art at the Field Park rotary. And the town's largest infrastructure project in years neared completion as the Williamstown Fire District prepared to move into its new Main Street station.

 

Speaking of the Fire District, the new station nearly coincides with the arrival of a new chief, Jeffey Dias, who was hired in March and took the reins of the department in June, after the retirement of longtime Chief Craig Pedercini.

 

Finally, a June vandalism incident on the Williams College campus on the morning of commencement was resolved on Nov. 26, when a Northern Berkshire District Court judge dismissed the charges against Liam Carey after Carey completed the community service he was ordered under the commonwealth's diversion program.