something to think about if you think bringing in all this business will solve everything.
Athol is booming — shopping centers galore — Orange is the made for TV movie capital of the state. Lots of hard cash is flowing into our towns. Marijuana growers and sellers have taken over Main Street with mega proposals for business ventures and job offers.
Our local economy is in the clouds or one would think it should be. Yet upon a closer look we see a very different picture. We see drugs claiming too many of our local young lives. Neighbors who have worked hard all their lives having to sell their beloved homes because of this town’s insatiable appetite for higher and higher taxes that most folks, especially our elderly on fixed incomes, can’t afford to pay. It’s disgraceful to say the least. It makes me wonder, with so much development in the area shouldn’t the residential taxes go down as “Big Business” pays its share of town expenses?
Jim McGovern and Anne Gobi are you asleep at the wheel? Our own Suzie Whipps needs to take a real close look at why all this “progress” and “boom” isn’t trickling down to the “little guy” in the form of property tax relief.
The lifelong residents, especially the elderly, need lower taxes, more services and answers and transparency about how these huge projects and corporations, hotels, et all are going to benefit us townspeople.
We still have no clue as to why we lost our over-qualified FBI-man police chief. A really fine man by all accounts.
Why are our schools so interested in political correctness? They are forgetting school is for reading, writing and arithmetic.
Parents aren’t allowed to question our superintendent? Give me a break. What’s going on here?
We built a multi-million dollar new school building, but it’s like putting lipstick on a pig if the curriculum is still garbage and can’t seem to compete with what’s taught at Bement School or Deerfield Academy, the top private schools. It’s all an effort in futility.
Wake up citizens of Athol and Orange and find out exactly when we can expect some tangible benefit from all this commerce.
We need a local task force made up of locals to protect homeowners so our area won’t remain the foreclosure capital of the state!
I’m sure I’m not the only one saddened by what I see all over our towns.
We need to do something now!
Molly Bennett Aitken
Athol
