Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 6/20/2023
NORTHAMPTON — A crowded agenda during the City Council meeting on June 15 included a unanimous approval of changing the city’s default speeding limit from 30 miles per hour to 25 miles per hour. The approval comes after the Transportation and Parking Commission and the City Council’s Committee on Legislative Matters both sent a positive recommendation to the full council.
Background
After kicking around for several years, Northampton City Council President Jim Nash and Ward 5 Councilor Alex Jarrett presented an order during April 13’s City Council meeting that would lower the default speed limit in Northampton from 30 miles per hour to 25 miles per hour in thickly settled residential or business districts where a speed regulation has not already been posted.
The default speed limit is also otherwise known as the statutory speed limit.
According to Nash, the order has been kicking around within municipal government since 2016, when then-Mayor David Narkewicz suggested that Northampton could explore the possibility of reducing the default speed limit like Boston did at the time.
Nash and then-Councilor Ryan O’Donnell introduced the idea in 2017 and the council referred it to its committee on Legislative Matters and the Transportation & Parking Commission. Legislative Matters sent it back with a neutral recommendation, but the TPC eventually tabled it.
The order was once again referred to TPC and then Legislative Matters before the full council officially passed it.
“We just want safer streets,” Nash said. “This is not going to solve everything but it’s going to keep the conversation going, and we’ll continue to have this conversation.”
Readers can learn more about the process of getting this approved from past Reminder Publishing coverage: http://archives.thereminder.com/localnews/northampton/northampton-tpc-submits-positive-recommendation-fo/.
The Forbes Library of Trustees
The June 15 council meeting also featured the introduction of an order by Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra that would increase the number of Forbes Library Trustees from five to seven.
The trustees govern Forbes Library in a volunteer capacity and are elected for four-year terms, but according to Forbes Director Lisa Downing, the library is becoming more complex while the trustees’ workload continues to increase.
“The subcommittee work has grown,” Downing said, during the meeting. “We want to serve the community in a really robust and rounded way…increasing it from five to seven would really allow us to make this opportunity available to more people and lighten the load of the trustees that do serve on the board.”
Forbes Library featured three trustees on its board for the first 88 years of its existence, but in 1982, the Hampshire Probate and Family Court approved the petition of the Trustees to increase the number of trustees to five since the library was also becoming more complex during that period.
In order to increase the number from five to seven, the city will have to go through a laborious process.
According to Downing, the City Council must authorize a petition to the state legislature to amend the city’s charter. Once the state accepts the change, the order comes back to the city for a ballot vote, which likely would not occur until 2025.
The council took no official charge on the matter, but they plan on taking it up at a future meeting.
“Forbes is a remarkable part of our community,” Sciarra said. “They do more and more every year…I fully support them in trying to get more enthusiastic members of our community who can serve and help them with all of their committees.”