Going, going....The Dirt Pile Part Three:

It's enough to restore your faith in state government and the Department of Environmental Protection, and the guys and women that work there. I called an enforcement officer there on Wednesday mornng, and Wednesday afternoon he called me back. "I'm returning both your calls," he said, a little on the curt side.

"Well," I said, "You know what I'm calling about? "

"Yeah, I think I do. I talked to her up there and I guess they're trying to give them some time to take it away. How long has it been there?

"August,I think. "

"August?" he said. "How big is it?"

"It's big. Base maybe fifty by fifty, and about eighty feet high, I think?

"Eighty? Well, it shouldn't be there. I guess I'm going to have to do something to push things along a little faster."

This was Wednesday afternoon. I don't what he did or how he did it, but two backhoes and trucks were out there Friday, hauling the pile away.

The Water Carrier Speaks Out

When Dave Reid of Northampton Media called me a water carrier for Angela Plassman, I went right to my electronic dictionary to find out what it meant. It means, I think, a hard-working dope who will crank out propaganda for his candidate. Well, this water carrier will miss his city councilor. She has had enough. As almost everyone knows, the infamous trailer/manufactured home is gone. The first person to find out was evidently the Gazette reporter, who showed up to photograph it and discovered nothing left but a small pile of lumber. Overnight, the weather warnings that the Gazette posts were downgraded, and the affair was termed a "flap" by the writer. They will go on to tomorrow's story, whatever it is. David Reid of Northampton Media will probably have to go on and find someone else to pick on. Maybe me. I remember. . .Read the full story here

Dirt Pile saga, part two: Blogger files complaint with DEP and the Conservation Commission

"That pile of dirt?" says the neighbor, looking down the road toward the airport. "I hear there's money over there. I hear if you got money, all this stuff about flood plain means nothing. If you got enough money, you'll get your permits."

In March the flood water were almost to his door.

"I got me lake front property." he said, and chuckles. "King for a day."

So, we have the continuing story of the big dirt pile at Northampton Airport. This was left over after they built two new hangars at the airport. The base of the pile is about fifty by fifty, and it looks to me like it is about eighty feet high, and it looks like high quality loam. No trespassing signs warn off poachers. It is just off the airport runway, close to or actually inside the area affected by flooding in March. The adjoining area to the south was a lake, and sheet flows moving from the airport toward the south washed out the Fair Street extension. Angela Plassman took a picture of a DPW backhoe working.

David Reid of Northampton Media noted her absence at the public works meeting that night. This was the reason she couldn't get there, Dave. They were trapped by rising waters.

Today you can still see where a local farmer has done some makeshift repairs to the road's shoulder. Yesterday I was down at city hall digging into the files and I found this letter from the airport's engineering firm.

"You may note" says GZA, "A temporary stockpile of excess loan in the work area. This will be removed prior to completion of the buildings."

Well, the buildings are finished. A sentence in the DEP permit states that the compensatory storage (the detention pond in the photo) shall be created before construction of the proposed buildings begins."

The intent would seem to tell them to dig your detention ponds, cart the fill away, and then you construct the buildings. Files in the building inspector's office indicate that the airport got its final occupancy permit for the buildings on September 24th of last year. And the dirt is still here, and the conservation commission's staffer, Sarah LaValley, seems remarkably unconcerned about the matter. Maybe it is because Lisa Fusco's name is on the paperwork for the airport, and she sits on the conservation commission. So let me explicate: This pile, while it is there, displaces about the equivalent of a 5,000 square foot industrial or residential building. It maybe displaces the equivalent of a couple hundred illegal trailers. So I am filing an official complaint today for enforcement action with the DEP and the chairman of the Northampton Conservation Commission. Lets see what happens.

Lisa Fusco's candidacy for Ward Three Council seat raises questions.

Too much going on in her life already? Two of her businesses have been dissolved by the State, a lien has been filed against one of her restaurants for more than $16,000 in back taxes, and Pioneer Valley Balloons is defunct. Venus and the Cellar Bar announced they were closing today.


The other day Lisa Fusco threw her hat in the ring for the city council race in ward three to succeed Angela Plassman at a well-attended press conference at the Northampton Airport. Widely known in the community as a co-owner of the airport and member of the Conservation Commission, Fusco talked about her record at bringing the airport back from the brink of bankruptcy, creating a flight school, a hot air balloon business, and a summer program for kids learning to fly.

"We took a business that was teetering on the edge" she said, "and created jobs." As a city councilor she said she would bring her business background to the task of creating jobs and economic development in the wider community. Introducing her was former Ward Three councilor Marilyn Richards. Attending the press conference were about forty people, including some of Mayor Higgins' biggest backers including Lisa Baskin. Four city council members were there, David Narkewicz, Paul Specter, Jessie Adams, and Maureen Carney. Lisa, wearing a black suit, read from notes and was nervous, but was able to throw off some jokes and received a warm reception.

A cursory look at public records raises a lot of questions about Lisa Fusco and whether she is what she says she is, a businesswoman with a proven track record of success, and whether she really played a key role in the airport's renaissance. The beautiful downtown Easthampton restaurant that she owns with Mike Vito, former assistant to the Mayor, the Venus and the Cellar Bar owes the State of Massachusetts more than $16,000 in unpaid food taxes dating back to 2010. Today, April 26, their website announced that the restaurant, voted best place to eat in the Advocate in 2010, has closed. I talked with Mike Vito last night on the street outside the restaurant, and today with one of the people who founded the restaurant, and it seems to be a familiar story. No matter how good the food and how big your reputation, restaurants have to carry their debt load, and the renovation costs for "Venus" were a killer. More on this later. She has no office at the airport and no office hours at the airport and no equipment stored there. The manager refers all enquiries about ownership to Bob Bacon, owner of Elm Electric in Westfield, and the person who is, I believe, the majority owner of the Airport. The manager of the airport has no phone number for Lisa.

The Hot Air Balloon business that she is now sole owner of seems to be defunct. Call the number for Pioneer Valley Balloons and you find out the number has been disconnected. The business was operated out of her home at 130 Cross Path Lane, but she has never filed a DBA (doing business as) license at city hall. The last DBA certificate, according to City Clerk Wendy Mazza, expired in 2008 and was filed by Bob Bacon. There is no home number for her in the phone directory.

Wanting to talk to her and verify much of this information, but fed up with chasing a ghost around, I finally called Bob Bacon in Westfield and he called me back. Look, said Kirby, we know her here as co-owner of the airport, and she spent a lot of time in her press conference taking credit for the airport coming back from the grave. Is she really a co-owner of Northampton Airport, or is she just a minority partner? Bacon took the fifth. His is a private corporation, an LLC who is not obligated to tell us what the percentage of interest Lisa has. I raised the issue with him whether her use of the airport for her press conference was a violation of state laws that prohibit contributions of corporations to individuals. He said he gave Lisa the use of the conference room at the airport just the way he does to a lot of community organizations. Normally, however, institutions that have rooms that can be used by the public will shy away from letting political candidates use them for kick-off announcements for their political campaigns.

Looking back at our phone call, his silence said a lot. He did not spring to her defense and call her a key person to the airport's operations and development. He did have a telephone number for Fusco, and I asked him to call her and ask her to call me. To date, I have not heard from her. I have heard from Bob Croati, one of the former owners of the airport, and he told me that his impression was that Lisa had a very small interest in the airport, probably less than 5%, that resulted from Guisto's decision to fold Pioneer Balloon into the airport ownership. He gave her, as payment, a small interest in the airport. Croati was the money person in the original airport business, and lost a bundle.

One of the stranger aspects of her candidacy was that many people in Northampton know of the bad blood between the Fuscos and the Plassmans. If there was ever going to be slugging match, this was going to be it. Her opponent, until Angela Plassman resigned, is married to her former business partner, Jonathan Plassman. Starting in 1999 Jonathan Plassman and Lisa Fusco were partners in Pioneer Valley Balloons with Dick Guisto, the former owner of the airport. She and Plassman were both Environmental Police Officers, and for awhile Jonathan and her were business partners and good friends, going everywhere together, working night and day to make the business work.

But then things turned frosty in the Plassman/Fusco relationship, and the reason would seem to be Angela Plassman. Angela and Jonathan began going out together and would marry. Jonathan got dropped off the incorporation papers in 2001. In August of 2003, Angela Carbone filed a story for the Springfield Republican that Guisto and Fusco were co-managers of Pioneer Valley Balloons, "the largest ballon company in the Northeast" No mention of Plassman. In 2004, Guisto wants to sell the airport. He finds a buyer in Bob Bacon, a successful Westfield businessman. So Jonathan faces the prospect of loosing his equity in the business and getting left out in the cold. He digs out this lease that the three of them signed in 1999 and goes to a lawyer, who files a petition to partition the land, and make a separate parcel for the three hangars that the balloon company used. The petition is granted, and drags Bacon into negogiations.
"How can we make this go away?" he asks Plassman. Some kind of settlement is worked out. The sale goes through. If you look through the paperwork filed with the State during this period on ownership of Pioneer Balloons you see all kinds of mysterious changes. At one point, Guisto gave himself all the positions on the board, changed the name and cut Fusco out. Then when Bacon takes control of the airport he gives her his blessing and he too cuts her loose. On January 18, 2006, Pioneer Valley Balloons is a sole proprietorship, based in Lisa's home on 130 Cross Path Road. From being the biggest balloon company in the Northeast, it had shrunken to near nothing. Lisa never has filed any annual reports on the business with the Secretary of State since its incorporation, and the corporation was dissolved by the State on April 19th of this year.

So where does this history take us? It's the trend, these days, for businessmen to run for political office. They usually say, like Lisa Fusco did at her press conference, that their record for creating jobs prepares them to create jobs in public office. But Lisa Fusco has no track record of being able to build businesses. She picks up things with enthusiasm, and then drops them. The first business she was involved in, Barnstormin was organized in April of 2001, and dissolved in July of 2002. She bought Casey's Big Dog Saloon in Easthampton in June of 2002, and the State dissolved the corporation on April 19 of 2011. Again, its failure to file yearly reports. She volunteers for Labs4Rescue, a nonprofit working to place Labs and Lab mixes in permanent homes, she is a part time police officer in Hatfield, and in her liquor license application for Venus & the Tunnel Bar, she pledged the liquor commission that she was going to work there 30 hours a week. She co-owns a investment club with Mike Vito, former Gazette reporter and city employee, and former aide to John Kerry. One wonders where she is going to get the time to do her city councilor work.

A lot is hanging on who is the next Ward Three councilor. The ambitious partnership inherent in the Three County Fair Redevelopment Agency brings together the city, the airport and the business community. In the past, concerts and other large events at the airport were a major bone of contention between the airport and the neighbors. If the new councilor from ward three is a partner in the airport, the homeowners will loose their voice. Angela Plassman fought for the neighbors on the construction plans for the fairground, and I think she paid the price.

The mountain and the Molehill: Part one of my adventures in God's country.

The last few days I have been spending some enjoyable time out in the Meadows section of Northampton. This is the area that the city voted to keep forever flat and unbuildable back in 2005. It's where Angela Plassman, her husband and her mother live. It's another world, fields in all directions flat and rich and gucky, land now being plowed and gussied up for spring planting. Today I met and gossiped with three farmers at work, herein called "John", "Bart" and "Charlie". I find people relax right away when I say, "Here I am, I'm Mike Kirby, a writer. I don't want to know who you are." And then you can relax and chat, and they can curse out the established order, and I can write things down from time to time, and no one gets uptight.
John was spare and fit and in his sixties, I think. He was working the edge of the field, chopping back the brush.
"I bet I'm one of the few people you meet these days that are happy with high oil prices."
I agreed with him, he was.
"Last year," he said, taking a whack at a small tree, " I got $3.60 a bushel for my corn. This year I'm going to get $7.20 a bushel. Pretty good, huh? Its that ethanol stuff."
This guy was tomorrow's millionaire. I told him I was out here taking pictures of trailers and storage containers.
"Well," John said, "No shortage of them around here."
He didn't think I was crazy. We were standing on the edge of one of those anonymous dirt roads that criss-cross the meadows. All along the river you can see trailers, prefabs, and storage containers, like these.



You'd think that if Wayne Feiden was really upset about all these possible violation of building codes, he'd send out a letter to everyone and tell them to shape up. The reality is that the Connecticut River usually takes its time about flooding,and what can be moved in can usually be moved away if the river threatens.
I saw two fairly large storage units in the distance, and I wondered if I could cross the field to photograph them.
"Help yourself" he said. It was a good quarter-mile mile, and brought me out on a small, and brand-new camping area with paved roads and storage containers, built right on the shore. No one around seemed to know who built it.

There are anomalies in this world, chlldren. Mountains that no one notices, and molehills that generate headlines. There's this huge mountain of dirt sitting out next to the runway at the Northampton airport. At least a hundred feet high, I think. A couple people told me it had been there for two years, but Bob Bacon, owner of the airport told me that its only been there since last summer. It's evidently left-over from digging two smallish detention ponds when our Conscom approved their demolishing some old hangars, and building a nice big one. I've got the DEP number on the project, and I'll know more when I look at it.

Our Conscon gets draconian about old timers building replacement buildings, but in this real world one of the owners of the airport is on the Conscom and gets to present airport proposals to her buddies, and they say fine, recuse yourself and it'll be unanimous. Take your time trucking the dirt away says the Conscom. The mountain should have been gone well before the spring flood season. But the Planning Director has more serious things to worry about than mountains. He has to deal with Angela and Jonathan Plassman's trailer. Here's the view through my normal lense



and the telephoto. Its the dinky little thing over on the left, just the thing for an accessory apartment with a view of the mountains. Strap it to some oil drums and it could float out the great flood of 2016. And do you see any neighbors around that might get torqued by the trailer? Down in the meadows Angela is a hero for her fight against the Three County "Let's build now and plan our drainage later plan".

But when Wayne Feiden wrote his little letter to the building inspector and told him to investigate, he jumped right at it. Yes boss, yes Mayor. And suddenly Angela had had enough, and she said screw it I quit. And then everyone tut-tutted, the Gazette editorialized, and everyone says if she can't take the heat she should get out of the kitchen. I was in the kitchen myself. No one who has been worked over by the Gazette and the bloviators of Northampton knows what it is like. I do. Why is Angela and her family in the cross-hairs? More to come shortly.

Hating Verizon

I dreaded the task before me, telling Verizon that the kitchen phone wasn't working. In the good old days when human beings still sat behind desks and answered phones, it would have been a snap. Call them up and someone would come over and repair things.

But this is the twilight era for the land-line phone, and getting service for them in 2011 is like taking a railroad trip in the 1950s and 1960s, when American railroads decided they were happier hauling freight, and started treating passengers like dirt.

If you look in the phonebook you'll see immediately there are no Verizon offices that deal with land line phones. Wireless,yes. The last few land line people are evidently headquartered in a distant windowless complex buried behind barbed wire in a bad neighborhood in West Springfield. There is probably a lock on the only door with one of those number codes on it to keep the civilians out. So you either go to the computer and suffer that kind of torment, or you pick up the phone and deal with Verizon's not-ready-for-prime-time Voice Recognition Software. You deal with voices that give you options, say one,two, and three. If the problem is a four, you will be trapped in one of these cunningly designed endless loops. You say you don't have a dial-tone, and they understand. What phone can we contact you on? and you give them that number. They say you can't leave that number, because that phone is out of order. The software cannot understand the concept of an extension phone that is dead, but a main phone that works.

I forgot how I finally got out of that loop and got a human being; I think I pressed a whole bevy of keys at random until something clicked way back in their server network and said, hey we have a nutso Luddite here, let him through to a human. And their humans, if you finally are able to get through to them, are friendly and helpful enough. A guy came out the next day and fixed it, but even the tech rep had his problems,calling us up from the road when he got lost and his official Verizon-installed GPS unit in the truck was confusing North King and North Street.

We talked him in, and everything was Jake. Pay the man $91.50 and wish him luck as he goes out the door. His job and the landline phones he looks after, I fear, are not long for this world.

But you know, when all is said and done, it's nice to have an old-fashioned phone anchored to the wall that stays put and isn't always walking around and making itself scarce when you need it. Coming up soon: more on the Angela Plassman affair and her officially approved replacement. Oh, and the mad genius behind all these intrigues, Wayne Feiden.

Back three days and fed up all ready

And here I thought that all this California sun I have subjected myself to over the last four months would have made my disposition sunnier and less critical of the ruling order. I would fulminate less. I came back to Northampton on Tuesday night, and on Friday afternoon I learn that Angela Plassman has quit. I went to the Gazette article for my visual because it's a respectful picture that shows her doing what she has done so well, speak out. When elderly and disabled tenants of Northampton's public housing projects had a problem, she was often the only person who listened and advocated for them. She held regular sessions for constituents. She did her job. She now has charged that a department head is subjecting her and her family to harassment. I know from experience, the job of city councilor is a rough one if you buck the prevailing winds. Rough if you are not "liberal" enough, cooperative enough, quiet enough, diplomatic enough. Rough if you say that Northampton schools have a drug problem that isn't being addressed. Rough if you criticize the head of the housing authority. Rough if you have the moxie enough to buck the Mayor and destroy unanimity and cast a "no" vote every now and then. Angela, you will be sorely missed.