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Commonwealth Packaging Brings More Clients into the Fold

By George O'Brien February 2, 2026

Construction Special Coverage

Thinking Outside the Box

Elizabeth Gosselin Kouflie didn’t plan on taking over the family business, but she eventually found a passion for it.

Elizabeth Gosselin Kouflie says she can’t pinpoint the time when she first came to realize the COVID pandemic was likely to be the best thing to ever happen to Commonwealth Packaging.

But she started to get that sense when customers and potential customers didn’t even bother asking for a price on a job — which, in this business, is saying something.

“Normally, it’s ‘I’d like a quote on this many.’ Then, it was ‘how fast can you get me this; I don’t care what it costs.’ That’s when we knew this was going to be a real opportunity,” said Kouflie, adding that, as the world shut down and people couldn’t get the products they wanted, everything had to be shipped. And that added up to a banner year for Commonwealth, the company started by Kouflie’s father, Joe, in 1982, which she was now managing.

Indeed, in a business where margins are as thin as the cardboard sheets in the warehouse and customers can be lured away by competitors offering to do things for a few pennies less per item, Commonwealth recorded more than 20% growth year over year in 2020, said Kouflie, adding that the plant was busier than it had ever been.

“COVID opened my eyes to what we can produce out of this one-shift factory, and that’s what I want to get back to,” said Kouflie, who officially took ownership of the business in 2019 and has been bringing much-needed change to a company where there had been little of it in the three and half decades prior.

That includes a thorough renovation of the plant on Sheridan Street in Chicopee, its first in decades, as well as new machinery, the addition of a design team, better use of IT — and now AI — as well as a stronger push, with the addition of a sales rep, into Rhode Island.

It also includes marketing, something the company had never really done before, previously relying almost entirely on word of mouth and its reputation for quality and customer service in a business where there is so much emphasis on price.

Commonwealth has started to reach out to customers and potential customers with materials highlighting everything from Kouflie’s ties to Rhode Island (she graduated from Providence College and wears a PC sweatshirt in one marketing piece) to Commonwealth’s status as woman-owned, to the fact that its packages “go out first class” — literally.

Indeed, the shipping and safety supervisor’s name is David First Class.

“His last name is Class, and his middle name is First,” said Kouflie, adding that the marketing efforts, which began roughly a year ago, are starting to pay off.

“A lot of people are talking about Commonwealth right now — people are calling me up that never called before,” she noted, adding that the marketing piece targeting Rhode Island businesses is an example of efforts that have helped grow sales.

“I spent a couple of years just keeping the ship afloat and doing everything so I wouldn’t mess it up, because I was terrified of messing it up, and then I finally got comfortable a few years ago and made this my business. And we’ve changed quite a lot since then.”

“It’s working … we’re getting a lot of business,” she said. “People in Rhode Island love to do business with Rhode Islanders; it’s definitely getting some traction.”

These marketing efforts comprise one of many ways Kouflie is putting her stamp on the company (more on this later), while also maintaining its traditional focus on quality, service, and a ‘customer is king’ philosophy.

For this issue and focus on construction and manufacturing, BusinessWest talked at length with Kouflie about Commonwealth and how this is not her father’s packaging company — or your father’s packaging company — anymore.

A Cut Above

As she was earning her degree in business management at Providence College, Kouflie wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it. And eventually running the family business was not a thought that really crossed her mind.

Indeed, while she remembers getting rides on the forklift at the plant’s first location across from the Big E in West Springfield when she was young, and then holding a succession of summer jobs at the company during high school and college, she never intended to make Commonwealth a career.

All that changed in 2003, when, a year after graduating, she returned home to help her father care for her mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. There was an opening for a bookkeeper at Commonwealth; she took that job thinking it would be a temporary assignment, but soon settled in at the family business.

“It was kind of trial by fire — help out wherever you can,” she recalled. “I started doing all the HR stuff, started learning how to spec build, started taking orders … in a family business, that’s typically how it goes — you do whatever needs to be done, help out with the IT, build a web page, whatever.”

Tracing the history of the company, Kouflie said her father worked for Mount Tom Box in West Springfield, gradually moving up in the ranks. When management wouldn’t make him a partner, he bought his own box company, Loreno Packaging in West Springfield.

“He used to tell me that he’d run the boxes in the morning, take customers out to lunch, get the orders, and come back in the morning and run the boxes,” said Kouflie, adding that the business continued to grow over the years, but always kept that customer-focused flavor.

Never big into titles — she says they don’t mean much in a family business — Kouflie held many in the years after joining the business, including Human Resource manager, her role when she was named to BusinessWest’s 40 Under Forty class of 2011, when she was just 30.

In 2013, her father took a step back from the business to spend more time at home and be a caregiver, while also battling cancer himself. And Kouflie continued to take on more responsibilities.

“He stopped coming to the office every day … he gave me some freedom to show what I could do — as long as I did whatever he said,” she noted with a laugh. “I’d have to send him my monthly statements showing him what I did, and he would let me know all the things I could be doing better; that’s how we operated for six years.”

She officially took the helm when her father passed away in 2019, and, after a few years of essentially maintaining the status quo — while also coping with the challenges and huge opportunities presented by the pandemic — started putting her own mark on the business.

“Before, I was running the company the way my dad wanted me to — the same way we’d always done everything; it was just follow the dotted line and do what we’ve always done,” she told BusinessWest. “When he passed away, I spent a couple of years just keeping the ship afloat and doing everything so I wouldn’t mess it up, because I was terrified of messing it up, and then I finally got comfortable a few years ago and made this my business. And we’ve changed quite a lot since then.”

The Complete Package

When asked to elaborate, she said the business model has changed, with an emphasis on being more competitive on price, while also maintaining its traditional emphasis on quality and service.

Other changes have included the addition of a design staff with a full-time designer, putting in a CAD table, marketing, renovating the entire building, adding new machinery, updating computer hardware and software, and exploring the use of AI to streamline quoting and other processes.

These steps and others are positioning the company for growth in a highly competitive industry, one often described with the single word ‘cutthroat’ and dominated historically by “price, price, price, price, price,” Kouflie said.

But increasingly, quality is becoming more a factor for many customers, she went on, citing the example of a prominent regional brewer — for years one of the company’s larger customers (Commonwealth makes its beer trays), but one that left when a customer offered a lower price.

“They dumped me, and six or seven months later, they called and I asked if I could come and sit down,” she recalled. “With their new supplier, the glue wasn’t holding on the trays when they put the beer in; the trays are coming in, the bottles are dropping in, the boxes are blowing open, and the beer is going all over the floor. They lost so much product — the pennies they saved on the boxes, they lost in product.”

It’s a story that’s been repeated countless times over the years, she said, adding that, moving forward, the company is looking to retain existing customers and add new ones by more aggressively telling its story and stressing its many qualities and selling points.

These include everything from Kouflie’s Rhode Island ties to the recently garnered ‘woman-owned business’ status.

“It’s part of a multi-pronged effort,” she said of the latter. “I think it catches people’s eyes — there are not a lot of woman-owned box makers.”

Part of the storytelling will be a focus on people — from David First Class to Customer Service Manager Kim Weagraff, highlighted in a different marketing piece.

“We want to show the end users, the buyers, who we are — our people — and the fact that we’re a young group,” Kouflie said. “A lot of our customers feel like we’re their best friends, and a lot of customers think they can just call us up and we’ll take care of them, and we will. But we want our customers to think they’re our only customer, and that we’re sitting here waiting for them to call, and we’re going to take care of them.

“These kinds of things are helping them feel connected to Commonwealth,” she went on. “I like to say that we’re not your dad’s box factory anymore. Lots of box factories are run by older gentlemen who are set in their ways; we’re trying to show our buyers who we are.”

Whether Commonwealth can return to that frenetic pace achieved during the height of the pandemic remains to be seen, but Kouflie is pushing the envelope — or, in this case, pushing the two-piece folder box — to achieve continued growth.

E-book, Cartoons Create Intriguing Dialogue About Aging

By George O'Brien January 20, 2026

Features

Drawing Conclusions

Ira Bryck says he’s somewhat fascinated by the subject of aging, and he’s found he’s not alone.

Ira Bryck doesn’t recall either of his parents actually saying it, but when he was young, he was definitely given the impression that naps were a waste of time.

“I grew up with two industrious parents — I was not allowed to nap growing up,” he recalled, adding that, while his sisters still refrain from the practice, he now enjoys it and looks forward to the next one.

Which makes him a lot like most … let’s call them people of a certain age. And commonality is one of the many themes he tries to touch on with a new endeavor called Aging Humans: A Complete Breakdown — a play on words if ever there was one.

This is not a business, and it’s not exactly a hobby. Let’s call it the latest endeavor for Bryck, best known as the long-time director of the former Family Business Center at UMass Amherst. During more than two decades in that role, he assisted countless small businesses owned and operated by generations of the same family with the many unique challenges that come with such a management structure — and he was recognized by BusinessWest as a Difference Maker in 2020 for such efforts.

He’s still doing some business consulting and is creating some roundtables to assist fledgling businesses and fill a gap in the entrepreneurial ecosystem (a little more on this later), but much of his non-napping time is spent on Aging Humans: A Complete Breakdown, efforts that might best be described as creating an interactive dialogue through an e-book (irabryck.com/completebreakdown) on the subject of aging, complete with cartoons that he creates through AI “because I draw horribly.”

Indeed, Bryck calls his e-book Collective Wisdom from Real Elders, comprised of comments to questions such as ‘what surprises you most about being the age you are?’ ‘What have you learned from failure, misfortune, and unmet expectations?’ ‘How has your social life changed as you’ve aged?’ ‘How are you deciding and managing work and retirement?’ ‘Do you enjoy being alone? Do you get lonely?’ And even ‘how have your sleep habits changed over time, including napping?’

“I get some good feedback; some people think every one is genius, and others say, ‘I don’t get most of your cartoons.’ Most of my cartoons require some thought, and a lot of times they’re not ‘ha ha’ funny, but they are reflective.”

The responses, often humorous and from people feeling older at many different ages, certainly make for interesting reading. Here’s a sample:

• “When I look in the mirror, I see an old lady, but I still have the wonder and mentality of an 8-year-old.”

• “I thought I was 37 years old for 37 years.”

• “I don’t bounce anymore.”

• “When I wake up now, the only thing that’s stiff is my joints.”

• “When I put on my underwear now, I notice that I stand close to my bed in case I fall over while balancing on one leg.”

• “Closed captioning is my friend.”

• “My hearing aids amplify only what I don’t to hear.”

• “I do not put up with narcissists anymore. What a relief.”

• “Solitude is good; loneliness is not.”

When asked what inspired this project, Bryck, 72, said he’s intrigued by the many aspects of aging, but also research and writing on the subject, such as Erik Erikson’s theory that there are eight stages of psychosocial development, from infancy to adulthood.

“He was the first person to map human psychology through old age,” Bryck said. “And he basically said that, if you were successful in life, you would eventually come to the eighth stage at old age, where it’s ‘are you in a stage of integrity or despair?’ I just always imagined that, as a depressed person of the ’60s, I would end up as a despairing old man, and I was determined to not let that happen. And I’m interested in how people are aging.”

As for the cartoons, Bryck said he’s always enjoyed cartooning, even if he can’t draw, and the images spark more dialogue — about aging, and sometimes about whether they’re funny or not.

“I get some good feedback; some people think every one is genius, and others say, ‘I don’t get most of your cartoons,’” said Bryck, who added that’s he’s developed the requisite thick skin for such commentary. “Most of my cartoons require some thought, and a lot of times they’re not ‘ha ha’ funny, but they are reflective.”

Age-old Problems

Like many people of his age, and any other age, for that matter, Bryck has mixed feelings about AI, right down to how much energy is consumed to create it. But when it comes to his cartoons, he can rationalize.

“I felt like I was someone who suddenly had a prosthetic device that allows them to do something they couldn’t do before,” he explained, adding that, by giving AI some specific prompts, he can use it to create images that aging humans can relate to and talk about, such as the one featuring four unhappy looking, balding, graying men with seemingly nothing to say, under the caption, “when your breakfast club votes to curb discussion about health issues.”

“Your challenges are a lot less challenging if you realize how normal they are. Other people live with them, and other people survive them.”

This is one of Bryck’s favorites — he’s now created dozens of cartoons, many inspired by actual experiences or those of others he knows — and it puts a face (or, in this, four faces) on the issues and attitudes of aging humans.

This is what he had in mind when he launched the e-book, which continues to attract new readers and intriguing responses to the questions posed.

And it’s part of the evolving next chapter in Bryck’s career, which started with him working at his family’s clothing business and evolved into his role running the Family Business Center and even writing plays about the many issues facing ventures run by several generations of the same family.

Bryck still does some business consulting, coaching, and facilitating, and all three of these skill sets will be used for roundtables he’s creating for small but established businesses. Called Onward + Upward, the initiative will create what he calls “an advisory board of trusted peers” that will enable participants to work on their businesses together.

As that project comes together, Bryck will continue to generate dialogue about aging, an popular activity as the Baby Boom generation, of which he is a part, reaches its 70s, and with its older members touching 80.

He said the collective comments speak to the many issues and challenges people are facing and are ultimately offered, like many of his efforts over the years, to help people confront them together.

“The 21 questions are really good prompts, and I think a lot of people like to talk about aging,” he noted. “I just had breakfast with someone for two hours, and we talked about what is our stage of life, what are we doing with ourselves, and are we feeling productive?”

And with that, we turn to more thought-provoking comments to the questions posed in the e-book:

• “I didn’t laugh much until I was in my 60s. Now, I laugh all the time.”

• “I have become more direct and clear about boundaries and comfort. I have shifted from being more conscious of pleasing others at times to pleasing myself, within reason.”

• “I don’t imagine ever stopping work; there are so many projects around that I can play with. Maybe I’ll stop remunerative work at some point, but playing with projects … I don’t see that ending while my heart is still beating.”

• “Don’t wait too long to retire — no one knows what the future holds.”

• “Make the absolute most of whatever time you have left. Keep growing and trying new things. Count yourself lucky you got this far.”

There were originally 20 questions, Bryck said, but a friend in Amherst added one of his own: “do you feel responsible and/or guilty that you are leaving such a troubled world to the next generation, or is it their problem now?”

That query has drawn its own share of responses, such as: “I didn’t start the fire, but I probably could have a ton more to extinguish it,’’ and “not in the least bit. I am not convinced the world is all that troubled and different from previous generations. Does anyone remember the ’70s? The ’60s? WWII, etc., etc.?”

Beyond the Numbers

Such insight and running commentary is what Bryck was hoping to generate when he started the e-book, the latest endeavor from a business leader who has no intention to retire and intends to continue growing and trying new things.

“I think it’s all revealing, and it’s normalizing,” he said of the sum of what he’s collected so far. “And that was something I bring from the Family Business Center — the idea that your challenges are a lot less challenging if you realize how normal they are. Other people live with them, and other people survive them.”

And most of them, including Bryck, enjoy a good nap.

Auto Industry Faces Dramatic Shifts Heading into 2026

By George O'Brien January 20, 2026

Features

Driving Forces

Carla Cosenzi says the auto industry should see a less tumultuous year in 2026, but there will be challenges.

‘Turbulent.’

Of all the single words that could be used to describe what kind of year 2025 was for the auto industry and individual dealers, Peter Wirth believes that one works best.

And it might even be an understatement.

Indeed, a sector that was working itself back to normalcy after COVID, chip shortages, a lack of inventory, scarce supplies of used cars, and inflation was hit with tariffs as well as a seismic shift in priority when it comes to electric vehicles.

This added up to some interesting times — that’s another adjective used heavily to describe the year that was — as well as a roller-coaster year for sales that ended up mostly flat or a few percentage points higher than 2024.

“It wasn’t a bad year; it was just a lot of ups and downs and changes — with tariffs being the obvious one, but there was also the huge change in course as far as electric vehicle adoption, which had a huge impact on manufacturers, but also on us,” said Wirth, owner of Mercedes-Benz of Springfield, referencing the expiration of federal tax credits for new and used vehicles after Sept. 30 and an abrupt U-turn on mandates concerning the percentages of new car sales that had to be EVs.

Carla Cosenzi, president of TommyCar Auto Group, which boasts four stores selling Nissan, Hyundai, Volkswagen, and Genesis, agreed. She said 2025 was a solid year, one that started strong as consumers sought to beat tariffs and ended somewhat sluggishly.

“We started to really see it around October,” she said, adding that manufacturers, perhaps anticipating a slowdown due to factors ranging from tariffs to still-high interest rates, ramped up the incentives to engage consumers, who stand to benefit from higher inventories.

“Overall, it was a really good year for us,” she said, adding that Hyundai and Nissan both posted solid numbers and finished strong, making up for some slower months in the middle.

As 2026 rolls on, the pendulum is shifting even more toward normalcy and perhaps less volatility, although no one can project too far ahead in this business, said Ben Sullivan, chief operating officer for Balise Motor Sales, which owns 26 dealerships across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

Indeed, the focus is shifting back to hybrids and gasoline-powered cars, and manufacturers are providing plenty of incentives to buy and lease them, including 0% financing in some cases, he said, adding that he projects 2026 will be a good year for auto buyers and, thus, a better one for dealers.

“From a consumer point of view, I’d say 2026 will be a very positive year,” Sullivan said. “And from the dealer perspective, we’re actually pretty bullish on where this is going to go. Affordability is such a key part of consumer behavior, and the fact that availability and the incentives are going to be there for the consumers prompts us to believe we’ll be growing by 5% to 7% this year.”

Wirth agreed, noting that Mercedes has rolled out aggressive sales programs for January.

“Mercedes is putting their money where their mouth is as far as being on a growth trajectory,” he explained. “They sold 303,000 units last year, and they want to sell 325,000 to 330,000 this year; that’s a 10% increase, and it’s one of the reasons we’re incredibly optimistic for this year.”

“It wasn’t a bad year; it was just a lot of ups and downs and changes — with tariffs being the obvious one, but there was also the huge change in course as far as electric vehicle adoption, which had a huge impact on manufacturers, but also on us.”

For this issue, BusinessWest talked with area dealers about the turbulence of 2025 and the prospects for more normalcy, probably the most since COVID, in 2026.

Shifting Gears

As he talked with BusinessWest about the year that was and the years ahead, Wirth said he sympathizes with car manufacturers, who have had to cope with many different, and often dramatic, changes to the landscape in recent years, especially with tariffs and changing policy on EVs.

“I don’t envy my colleagues in corporate because it’s really hard to deliver on three fronts at the same time — electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, and combustion-engine cars, which is what’s happening right now,” he said. “This significant change in policy — and no one knows how it’s going to change in three years again — makes it really difficult for the manufacturers.”

Sullivan agreed. “For manufacturers, it takes three to five years to develop a vehicle program, and they were all assuming that, at some point, we’d have to be 100% electric, and they put a bunch of their development money down that stream,” he explained. “And now, the federal government is saying that this is no longer what they need to do. So all the manufacturers are trying to adjust and adapt just in the EV market — and that was just one of two large challenges that hit us last year.”

Ben Sullivan says that, with less urgency to sell EVs, automakers are providing incentives for other models on the lots.

The other factor was tariffs, which hit some makers harder than others, he said, noting, as others did, that these factors are prompting hard decisions, many of which will take years to materialize, about where cars will be made — and what cars will be made.

For dealers and consumers, these issues changed some buying patterns and, in many ways, altered the sales calendar.

Indeed, when tariffs were first announced last March, there was a surge in sales as consumers looked to beat the tariffs, said Wirth and others we spoke with, making March and April better than they normally are and some of the subsequent, normally heavier months lighter.

“When you look at the first half of the year, it shook out the way we expected; it was just more volatile,” he said, summoning another word to describe 2025. “You had a higher high than you were projecting, and then a lower low.”

This was just one of the many intriguing aspects of this past year, said those we spoke with, noting that what is being called a retrenchment on EVs was certainly another. Indeed, sales spiked in the run-up to the end of the $7,500 federal government purchase incentive on Sept. 30, resulting in a record for the third quarter of 2025 (about 12% of the U.S. market), before falling off in the months that followed.

Cosenzi said EVs are still selling, in part due to incentives offered by the state, but they were off by roughly 10% in 2025 over the year prior — better than many other dealers are reporting because the TommyCar dealerships are in Hadley and Northampton, which she described as a great market for EVs — and this pattern is expected to continue into 2026.

The focus is now shifting to hybrids and gasoline-powered cars, with an even greater emphasis on SUVs, said Sullivan, adding that, due to the tariffs and shifts on EVs, makers are doing some model trimming because some offerings are no longer popular, cost-effective, or both.

Drive Time

Looking down the road and toward the year ahead, those we spoke with expressed optimism about the big picture and the manner in which car makers are incentivizing consumers to buy and lease.

As Wirth noted earlier, Mercedes has set ambitious goals for 2026 and is backing them up with programs and incentives that are similar to those intended to drive sales at year end.

“Our January programs are essentially as good as our outgoing December programs were, which is something I’ve never seen before with them,” he noted. “They’re really trying to hit the ground running and maintain and ultimately increase their market share in the luxury market.

“They were all assuming that, at some point, we’d have to be 100% electric, and they put a bunch of their development money down that stream. And now, the federal government is saying that this is no longer what they need to do.”

“And while it’s still very early,” continued Wirth, who spoke with BusinessWest in the first week of January, “they seem to be starting on the right foot.”

Cosenzi and Sullivan agreed, noting that conditions are right for a solid 2026, meaning dealers have inventory (especially for what’s in demand, meaning hybrids and SUVs); they have incentives, including attractive lease deals and financing rates for purchases; and are stocking more used cars, although they’re still in somewhat short supply.

“We’re putting a lot of focus on used vehicles heading into 2026, especially those under that $30,000 price range,” said Cosenzi, adding that TommyCar has created a buying center to maximize opportunities in a still-challenging market and build an inventory.

“We’re really working to have the right-priced pre-owned vehicles that can go through the stringent certified process to give the consumers the confidence they’re looking for,” she explained, adding that there is strong demand for such vehicles, especially SUVs, in the Five College area.

Sullivan said the stars are aligning as the industry moves into 2026. “Interest rates are starting to trend down, and availability of cars is getting better, unlike during COVID,” he noted, adding that the attractive incentives that were being offered to incentivize EVs, back when the pressure was on to sell those models, have been shifted to gas and hybrid models.

“Now that the manufacturers are not under that regulation anymore, you will see in 2026 some better incentives coming back, like attractive lease payments, low APR, and customer cash, because the manufacturers can afford to do that,” he explained. “So I think that will be a very big positive for consumers as we roll into 2026; their affordability matrix will be a lot better than it was in 2024 or even 2025.”

Meanwhile, Sullivan sees some general improvement in used car availability as new car inventories have improved and consumers can replace aging vehicles and enter into new leases rather than buying cars coming off lease, and this is another source of optimism heading into 2026.

As for EVs, dealers still have them, and they’re still selling them, but the pendulum has swung, with those who have been on the fence about such vehicles now more incentivized to stay on the gas or plug-in hybrid side, the latter of which provides some attractive middle ground for those looking to reduce their carbon footprint.

These are just a few of the issues that will shape 2026, a year that will still be interesting, but probably — that’s probably — less turbulent for dealers and consumers.

STCC Launches Workforce Readiness Academy

By BusinessWest Staff January 20, 2026

Education

Tools to Succeed

Katherine Ortiz (left), an education and career advisor, seen here assisting a student in a workforce development class, will oversee college and career workshops as part of the Workforce Readiness Academy at STCC.

Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) is now enrolling for the Workforce Readiness Academy, a free, 20-hour-per-week program designed to help prospective students build the digital, academic, and career skills needed to thrive in today’s job market and succeed in college.

The Workforce Readiness Academy offers a hands-on, personalized learning experience that equips participants with essential digital literacy skills, industry-recognized certifications, and strengthened college and career readiness competencies. Whether students are entering the workforce, changing careers, or preparing for further education, the Academy provides the foundation they need to move forward with confidence, Assistant Vice President of Workforce Development Gladys Franco said.

“This program is an incredible opportunity for anyone looking to gain confidence, earn meaningful credentials, and take their next step toward a rewarding career or higher education,” Franco noted. “The Workforce Readiness Academy was intentionally designed to remove barriers and meet students where they are. Our goal is to ensure every participant leaves with the skills, support, and resources they need to succeed.”

“This program is an incredible opportunity for anyone looking to gain confidence, earn meaningful credentials, and take their next step toward a rewarding career or higher education. The Workforce Readiness Academy was intentionally designed to remove barriers and meet students where they are. Our goal is to ensure every participant leaves with the skills, support, and resources they need to succeed.”

The Academy is supported by the state Gaming Commission’s Community Mitigation Fund. The program is offered in two sessions. The first runs Jan. 26 to April 9, while the second runs April 13 to June 25. Both run Monday to Thursday. Enrollees can choose day (9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.) or evening (5-9 p.m.) options.

Each participant is paired with a dedicated college and career advisor for individualized support throughout the program.

The Academy offers the opportunity to develop computer competency and workforce readiness skills every employer expects. Students will work toward industry-recognized certifications, including ServeSafe and OSHA 10, while also engaging with local employers through networking and career connection opportunities.

To learn more or register, visit stcc.io/wra or call the Workforce Development Center at (413) 755-4225. To enroll in person, stop by Building 27 at STCC.

Consumers Rank Banks Above Other Industries for Fraud Protection

By Contributor January 20, 2026

Banking and Financial Services

Survey Says

U.S. adults overwhelmingly trust banks more than any other entity to protect them from fraud, according to a new survey conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of the American Bankers Assoc. (ABA).

By more than a 6-to-1 margin over the next closest industry, consumers chose banks (50%) over healthcare providers (8%), non-bank fintech payment providers (8%), the government (5%), cryptocurrency companies (2%), major retailers (1%) and telecom companies (1%).

The research, unveiled at ABA’s 2025 annual convention in Charlotte, N.C., also gauged consumers’ views on access to their personal financial data, bank satisfaction, the competitive landscape of the banking industry, and the role banks play in the U.S. economy.

“Financial predators are more sophisticated than ever, and America’s banks are leading the charge to protect their customers from these threats,” said Rob Nichols, ABA president and CEO. “Consumers recognize and appreciate banks’ round-the-clock efforts to detect and combat fraud, and our industry continues to leverage award-winning consumer education campaigns and other tools to empower Americans to spot scams before they can do harm.”

Nearly nine in 10 bank customers (87%) said their bank takes proactive steps to protect them from fraud and scams, and three-quarters (74%) believe their bank does more than businesses in other industries to protect them. In addition, 59% of consumers have received a fraud alert from their banks alerting them to potentially suspicious account activity, and 96% found these alerts valuable.

Rob Nichols

“Financial predators are more sophisticated than ever, and America’s banks are leading the charge to protect their customers from these threats.”

Notably, 62% of alert recipients are concerned with government regulations stopping all bank messages, including fraud alerts. Under the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) existing Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) rules, if a consumer responds ‘STOP’ to a text message from their bank on any topic — such as marketing messages — the regulation would effectively require their bank to stop sending them all messages, including fraud alerts notifying them of potentially suspicious activity on their account. The FCC is considering issuing a notice of proposed rulemaking that would update the TCPA rules to address this and other issues, an action that ABA strongly supports.

Personal Financial Data Rights

The survey also explored Americans’ views on access to their personal financial data, or ‘open banking,’ which is when consumers give permission for their financial information — like their account balance or spending history — to be shared from their bank (or wherever it’s stored) to another company, such as a budgeting app or loan service.

Most adults believe that data shouldn’t be shared if it could put consumers at risk (80%), that all organizations holding consumer data should follow the same sharing rules (76%), and that data aggregators that are monetizing the data obtained from banks should share in the operating costs (70%). Eighty percent of consumers said companies shouldn’t use data they obtain from banks to train AI models or develop new products and services without explicit consumer consent.

“The survey shows that consumers agree that everyone in the open banking ecosystem should be subject to the same rules and that sensitive personal financial information should not be used by data aggregators to power AI models or for market research absent a consumer’s clear permission,” Nichols said. “Banks should be empowered to lower the risk of data breaches and unauthorized activity to protect consumers while ensuring they can safely share their data with companies they trust.”

Satisfaction with Banks

The new survey also found that consumers are happy with their bank and view banks as vital to the U.S. economy. Among Americans with a bank account, 89% say they are “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with their primary bank, and 95% rate their bank’s customer service as “excellent,” “very good,” or “good.”

The survey found that Americans believe the nation’s banks are competing aggressively for their business and that they have ample access to banking services. More than 8 in 10 (84%) of respondents agree they have multiple options when selecting products and services such as bank accounts, loans, and credit cards, and 85% said they have a wide array of choices when deciding where to bank. Meanwhile, 84% agree they have easy access to a bank branch when they need it.

Three-quarters of consumers (75%) said the nation’s banks are a source of strength for the U.S. economy and that they appreciate the key role banks play in supporting the financial needs of individuals, businesses, and local communities. Meanwhile, 69% said they are confident in America’s banks as a whole and their ability to support individuals, businesses, and the local communities they serve.

“This national survey shows that the vast majority of American consumers think highly of their bank and recognize the critical role banks across the country play in the growth and stability of our nation’s economy,” Nichols said. “Consumers trust and value the customer service they receive from their bank, and they appreciate that banks of all sizes are competing for their business with innovative products and service they want and need.”

Monson Complex Presents Challenges, Opportunities

By George O'Brien January 19, 2026

Commercial Real Estate Cover Story Special Coverage

Vision Quest

Jeff Daley at one of the ‘T-bones’ on the MDC campus.

Jeff Daley stopped his pickup truck at a building known affectionately as one of the ‘T-bones,’ or ‘dog bones,’ because that’s what they’re shaped like.

It wasn’t the structure he wanted to comment on, necessarily — one of dozens of nondescript, red-brick buildings on the Monson Developmental Center (MDC) campus, this one a residential hall — but rather the view from it, of downtown Palmer and the mountains framing it.

“You don’t get many views better than that,” said Daley, president and CEO of Westmass Area Development Corp., which now owns a significant portion of the campus and is charged with redeveloping it, adding that he envisions this section at the high point of the sprawling complex to be ideal for estate lots of maybe five to 10 acres.

“Maybe a dozen or so could go right here,” he said, referring to an area with several T-bones, which, like almost all of the more than 40 buildings on the campus, are in an advanced state of decay and will be demolished.

“No matter how good you are, I really don’t think you can develop a vision of what this is going to be until these buildings are out of the way and we have a more permanent solution.”

And while he can imagine a large home with a bay window looking out on that view of the surrounding countryside, Daley said that it probably won’t be until all the buildings are down that Westmass and the developers it will likely partner with in this ambitious undertaking can fully understand what they have to work with — and what uses might emerge for this intriguing property.

“No matter how good you are, I really don’t think you can develop a vision of what this is going to be until these buildings are out of the way and we have a more permanent solution,” he noted. “But maybe by this fall we can start talking to developers, have them out, and see what they think.”

As he offered BusinessWest a tour of the rolling campus, Daley drove and talked about what might come next and the many hurdles to be cleared during what will likely be a 10- to 20-year project to transform the landscape into what will be known as the Village at Sawmill Brook and fill in a canvas that few residents of the 413 have seen.

Most of the buildings at the MDC are in an advanced state of decay and must be demolished.

As he did so, he used the word ‘challenging’ repeatedly, in reference to everything from demolition of the buildings, which are loaded with asbestos in the walls, floors, ceilings, and slate roofs, to finding new uses for the property — built on the side of a mountain — that will mesh with Monson’s decidedly rural character and slow, as in very slow, pace of residential growth and new building.

“When you only have 8,000 residents, you can’t plunk down something that won’t fit the community, and that’s something we’re sensitive to when we’re looking at this type of development,” he said. It’s all going to be market-driven; whatever the market dictates and zoning — that’s what we’ll manage.”

For this issue and its focus on commercial real estate, BusinessWest visited the MDC campus to get the lay of the land, if you will, and talk with Daley about the next, and quite intriguing, addition to the Westmass portfolio.

Peaking Their Interest

Daley said the buildings on the campus have deteriorated quickly since the center shut down officially more than a dozen years ago.

And it’s mostly the elements that have been responsible for the highly visible damage to many of the structures, he noted, adding that there has been little vandalism on the closely patrolled campus and few people willing to ignore the myriad ‘no trespassing’ signs posted on every building, save for the occasional ghost hunters.

“When you only have 8,000 residents, you can’t plunk down something that won’t fit the community, and that’s something we’re sensitive to when we’re looking at this type of development.”

“They come in with their infrared cameras and sound machines,” said Daley, adding that they’ve come out more in the summer months, and there’s no word if they’ve found anything.

Given the history of the MDC, there just might be a few ghosts to be found there.

An aerial view of the MDC campus shows the rolling topography.

Established nearly a decade before the start of the Civil War, it was first a state almshouse for the poor and eventually evolved into a primary school for poor children and then the Massachusetts House for Epileptics in 1895, and later the Monson State Hospital, housing people with epilepsy and developmental disabilities. The campus grew significantly in the early 20th century — with the complex expanding to more than 70 buildings across 600 acres and the population peaking at about 1,700 residents in 1968 — but faced declining populations with deinstitutionalization.

Redevelopment of the 108-acre main campus will be similar in many respects to reuse initiatives at Northampton State Hospital and the Belchertown State School, also large campuses once owned and operated by the state, said Daley, but each initiative has its own personality, with MDC’s still to be determined, obviously.

While Northampton State Hospital became a mostly residential development — more than 400 homes geared to all income levels have been built at Village Hill — along with a large manufacturing facility, the Belchertown State School property, now known as Carriage Grove, is becoming more of a mixed-use property, with plans for everything from housing to a community center in the old administration building.

The MDC will likely be more like the latter, said Daley, adding that the pattern of reuse will ultimately be shaped by the town and the development community. He said Westmass plans to advance a zoning bylaw to a town meeting vote this spring; the proposed zoning would create a mixed-use district to support long-term development of the property.

“There are a lot of folks around Monson and Palmer who raised families in big farmhouses, and now they’re getting to the point where they don’t need the big farmhouse anymore. But there’s limited housing available to move into; whether it’s a single person or an aging couple, there’s really no housing for them.”

Housing of several different types may emerge as options, he said, listing everything from three- and four-story apartment buildings to multi-family homes to cottages and those aforementioned estate lots. Other permitted uses could include small-scale commercial and office facilities, light industrial, and civic uses compatible with the neighborhood character.

The first step in the redevelopment process is clearing the site and demolition of all but a few of the 42 buildings on the main campus, 18 of which (the larger brick structures) will be mitigated by Westmass, with the state responsible for the rest.

“Unfortunately, the buildings are not savable,” said Daley, adding that preliminary cleaning and demolition work — on buildings as well as several underground and above-ground tunnels to convey steam — is expected to commence within the next few months. Bids are currently being sought, with the goal of clearing the site by the fall of 2027.

Demolition work is expected to cost roughly $16 million, and after this phase is done, there is considerable infrastructure work to be undertaken — everything from new roads and utilities to a new, wider bridge over Sawmill Brook, which runs through the middle of the property, to work to repair and upgrade the water tower on the campus (there is no pumping station that can supply water to the higher portions of the campus).

As these pieces fall into place, development efforts can move to the next stages.

Demolition of dozens of buildings at the MDC is slated to start later this year and be completed in 2027.

“Our goal is to be done with the cleaning and demolition by 2027, and between now and then, we’re going to be working on getting a full design of where the infrastructure — water, sewer, power — will go,” Daley explained. “Then, we can do a road development study and figure out where roads will go and to what part of the development. And at that time, hopefully, some of the easier development pieces can be developed or sold to generate revenues to offset the investment we’re going to have to make on the capital side on the infrastructure.”

Grounds for Optimism

While most of the buildings on the campus will come down, a few can be reused, said Daley, who pointed to a structure known, coincidentally, as the Daley Building, a recreation center with a theater on its upper floor as well as a basketball court and a decaying bowling alley.

“Our hope is that we can provide this as a community center for Monson and Palmer,” he explained. “It’s a great hall, and there’s a big gymnasium; we’re not sure how it will all work out, but we’re hoping to keep it for that purpose.”

Meanwhile, Brookside Hall, another residential facility, could be salvaged and converted into senior or veteran housing.

“We’d like to do a veterans housing project — there’s definitely a need for one in this area — but projects like that take four or five years to develop,” he noted, adding that, overall, there is a need for many different kinds of housing, especially affordable options for an aging population.

Indeed, the Commonwealth officially conveyed the property to Westmass as part of larger efforts to utilize properties under its control to address an ongoing housing crisis that is impacting every corner of the state.

“There are a lot of folks around Monson and Palmer who raised families in big farmhouses, and now they’re getting to the point where they don’t need the big farmhouse anymore,” he said. “But there’s limited housing available to move into; whether it’s a single person or an aging couple, there’s really no housing for them.”

Whatever comes of the site from a development standpoint, it will have to mesh with the town’s rural character and not dramatically change the dynamic in a community that hasn’t seen much, if any, residential growth in recent years.

“I think they’ve built something like 12 houses in the last 20 years,” said Daley, who didn’t know the exact figure but did know it wasn’t a big number.

And that statistic represents just one of the many challenges involved with a project that will unfold over the next decade or two and change the landscape of that area — literally and figuratively.

Group Looks to Turn Back Clock at Wilbraham’s Lakeside

By George O'Brien January 19, 2026

Features Special Coverage

Landmark Decision

From left: Joe Sullivan, Jordan Healy, Marc Murphy, Mike Rogers, and John Sullivan.

Joe Sullivan says he and business partner John Sullivan (no relation) were “looking to hedge our bets and diversify.”

It was the height of the pandemic; the restaurant they co-owned, Nathan Bill’s, was forced to close; and, like most all business owners navigating those difficult and unprecedented times, they didn’t know what was to come next.

“We were looking for real estate purchases and maybe another business opportunity,” said Joe Sullivan, adding that the two would buy a package store and then the plaza in which Nathan Bill’s was located, among other transactions. “And as we were doing all that, someone mentioned this spot to us and said it would be good for a restaurant.

“We already had three restaurants and said, ‘we don’t really want another restaurant, but it looks interesting,’” he went on. “We did our due diligence and realized that we could do something different and really special here.”

That was the genesis of one of the more intriguing development initiatives in the region — work to turn back the clock on the Wilbraham landmark known as the Lakeside.

Once a popular inn and restaurant, the property on Nine Mile Pond, most recently home to a transportation company, had fallen into disuse. John and Joe Sullivan have become partners with the principals at West Springfield-based Lock and Key Realty in an ambitious effort to revive the property and create a 15-room boutique hotel and restaurant, with outdoor dining and lake access.

“We already had three restaurants and said, ‘we don’t really want another restaurant, but it looks interesting.’ We did our due diligence and realized that we could do something different and really special here.”

The project has certainly captured the attention — and affection — of Wilbraham officials (members of the Planning Board are said to have cheered when the project was proposed), as well as the legions of fans of the Lakeside restaurant, often involving several generations of families.

“The community support has been overwhelming — social media has been huge, and we’ve gotten letters from people praising what we’re doing,” John Sullivan said. “Every time I’m out working on the yard, I’ve got people in kayaks thanking us and congratulating us.”

An early ad for the Lakeside Inn.

Such sentiments were repeated among the five main principals in this venture, who spoke with BusinessWest at the Lakeside recently. Collectively, they talked about how, while this is a solid real estate investment, the endeavor also blends history, tradition, and community, and these attributes bring ample amounts of pride and enthusiasm for what is being undertaken.

“It’s a property the community truly cares about, and with the right vision and redevelopment strategy, it has the ability to become a destination that drives economic activity and sustained local value,” said Jordan Healy, a partner at Lock and Key Realty. “For us, it’s more than a single project—it’s a chance to help reshape a landmark in a way that benefits the region for decades.”

Mike Rogers, another principal with Lock and Key Realty, agreed. “It seems that everyone who comes in has some family that had some experiences here, whether it was recently or decades ago,” he said. “So the appeal of renovating this property and trying to maintain some of that historic charm, like with the gazebo, while also modernizing it, is a huge draw for us and the community, and it’s really something that’s driving excitement in this project.”

As for the business aspects of this venture, the principals say that, while construction has not officially begun, they’re already hearing from people looking to book rooms — from couples planning to get married at the nearby GreatHorse country club to officials and participants involved with the Brimfield antique shows staged three times each year.

Meanwhile, the redevelopment of the former Eastfield Mall into a retail destination promises to bring more traffic to the Route 20 corridor and to businesses like the new Lakeside, said John Sullivan, adding that the new shopping center, coupled with the Lakeside project, is likely to spur new activity along that throughfare and activate currently idle real estate.

“There will be a ripple effect where there will be more investment opportunities and redevelopment along Boston Road,” he said, adding that there are several vacant or underutilized properties that could be reimagined.

For this issue, BusinessWest talked with the principals involved with the Lakeside project about the many aspects of this endeavor, from its history to the way it might well become a catalyst for more development on Boston Road.

On the Waterfront

For Joe Sullivan, the Lakeside project evokes a different time — for both Wilbraham and his family.

Indeed, his grandfather, Barton Sullivan, owned and operated the Auto Inn, an automobile-era lodging establishment, farther north on Route 20 and on the opposite side of Nine Mile Pond from where the Lakeside sits.

“It’s a property the community truly cares about, and with the right vision and redevelopment strategy, it has the ability to become a destination that drives economic activity and sustained local value.”

There were several establishments of that type on or near Route 20, he said, adding that, during the stagecoach era, there was one every 10 or 15 miles.

As for the Lakeside, it opened its doors in the early 1940s and quickly became a popular destination, with a restaurant, a club with bands, a banquet hall, and a few rooms for rent.

“There’s a lot of history here,” Sullivan said, noting an intriguing bit involving the name of the establishment and the body of water it fronts.

“This is called the Lakeside Inn, but this is Nine Mile Pond,” he said, noting that this name connotes how far the pond is from the center of Springfield. “At some point in the ’50s or ’60s, they changed the name of the body of water to Lake Machonish; the Lakeside owners just decided to do that because they wanted to advertise it as a lake. It didn’t catch on.

“We may try that again,” he said with a laugh, noting that it was partly out of a desire to turn back the clock, while making more business history on Boston Road, that prompted him to take a hard look at the Lakeside property. A serial entrepreneur, he and John Sullivan had become involved with several hospitality ventures, including Nathan Bill’s on Boston Road in Springfield, East Village Tavern in East Longmeadow, the Boulevard Bar on Page Boulevard in Springfield, and others.

The Auto Inn, owned and operated by Joe Sullivan’s grandfather, provided some inspiration for the Lakeside project.

As noted earlier, redevelopment of the property represented not merely a real estate investment, but a unique opportunity to revive what many would consider a landmark.

“Through talking to the architect and talking to the town, we figured out there was an opportunity to build a small boutique hotel and still have a restaurant on the first floor,” Joe Sullivan said. “Everything fit into place and worked out to look like a really successful plan.”

That plan was further solidified by the emergence of a partnership between John Sullivan, Joe Sullivan, and the principals of Lock and Key Realty — Healy, Rogers, and Marc Murphy — who, collectively and individually, have become involved with several business and real estate ventures in the 413, including Shaker Bowl in East Longmeadow and All American Masonry in Indian Orchard, as well as the redevelopment of several fire stations and other properties.

Healy said those at Lock and Key are always looking for real estate opportunities, and the Lakeside made sense on many levels.

“There’s so much history behind it … it just felt like a project where we could reutilize, revitalize, and restore something, make it pretty again — and it’s right in line with what we do,” he noted. “If we can bring some redevelopment back to Wilbraham, it’s a home run for everyone.”

Elaborating, he said there is considerable synergy between the two partnership entities, with Joe and John Sullivan bringing experience in hospitality, and Lock and Key thriving in the redevelopment realm.

Murphy agreed. “Partnering with the Sullivan Group was a natural fit. They have deep experience in hospitality, creating successful restaurant and bar concepts that consistently serve the community at a high level. Together, we blend hospitality vision with market insight to ensure the Lakeside project becomes both a vibrant destination and a strong, long-term asset for the region.”

Joe and John Sullivan officially acquired the Lakeside last August, but talks about the property and the creation of a plan for its redevelopment had been ongoing for a few years prior, Joe said.

“The timing is right because the community is ready for this property to be brought back to life.”

“I wanted to make sure the town approved of what we wanted to do before we bought the property,” he explained, adding that the partners obtained a special permit to create an inn there.

Shore Thing

As for the reimagining of the property, the partners said this will be a major undertaking, with projections for the overall cost to approach or exceed $3 million.

Indeed, while the work falls into the categories of renovation and restoration, it will be much more like new construction, said Joe, adding that, while the property still has good bones, it is no longer suited for either a restaurant or an inn.

“It’s going to be a major construction project — raising the roof, literally,” he told BusinessWest. “The major appeal is that this is waterfront property — they don’t make any more of that. It’s a beautiful spot; even the gazebo needs a little fixing up, but it adds to that picturesque appeal.”

Work is expected to start within the next few months, said John Sullivan, adding that the goal is be finished in perhaps a year to 18 months. The partners are planning a 15-room hotel and a 100-seat restaurant (to be managed by a third party), and they’re already seeing great anticipation for both.

Indeed, John said that, between parents of students at nearby Wilbraham & Monson Academy, wedding parties at GreatHorse, and visitors to the Brimfield shows, there will be strong demand for the inn’s rooms.

“A family from Scotland has asked to rent out the whole place for two weeks for a wedding, and the organizers of the Brimfield fair wanted it block it off for a whole month,” he told BusinessWest, adding that there have been many inquiries about both the inn and restaurant.

And the surge in traffic from the new retail center taking shape a few down the road at the former Eastfield Mall is expected to bring more people to the property, said the partners, noting that, given all they’ve seen and heard, from the Planning Board and kayakers alike, this certainly seems like a sound business investment.

But it has always been more than that, they stressed, noting the attachment the community has to this property and the memories it has created for generations of area residents.

“It’s a good investment opportunity, but it’s a community-focused project as well,” Healy said. “And for a lot of us, that brings a level of excitement that we normally wouldn’t have. You can build 20 houses, and you never get any notoriety from those 20 houses; you do a project like this, and the community gets excited.”

Rogers agreed. “The Lakeside project represents a turning point. It shows what’s possible when investment, vision, and community pride come together,” he said. “Projects like this attract new interest, encourage surrounding revitalization, and help establish the region as a place where people want to live, invest, and build.

“The timing is right because the community is ready for this property to be brought back to life, and market conditions support redevelopment that adds both lifestyle and economic value,” he went on, adding, as others did, that this project will being rewards — for the partners involved and the community as a whole — on many levels.

Colleges Help Students Overcome Barriers to Staying in School

By Joseph Bednar January 19, 2026

Education Special Coverage

More Than Food for Thought

Renee Tastad says HCC’s vision centers around helping students overcome barriers to success.

Renee Tastad says Holyoke Community College (HCC) takes it seriously when a student withdraws from classes, whether for a semester or permanently.

But the conversations that followed those withdrawals, over the years, have helped many more students avoid that path.

“I think it comes down to our vision, which is to be a college of academic excellence known for helping students overcome barriers to success,” said Tastad, assistant vice president of Student Affairs and dean of Enrollment Management at HCC. “So we’ve called those students to find out, ‘what prevented you from being successful? And how can we get you back on track?’

“Primarily, their concerns were childcare, transportation, cost of living expenses — ‘I had to take on extra hours at work that prevented me from committing all of my time to my studies,’” she went on. “With the help of the HCC Foundation, which has been really tremendous, we’ve been able to say, ‘OK, what can we assist with? What are things that we can reasonably do to help lessen the burden on the student to have to work those extra hours, which takes them away from their studies?’”

What has emerged from those conversations is an evolving array of student supports at HCC, from the Thrive Center food pantry to the Itsy Bitsy Child Watch service to the President’s Student Emergency Fund, which helps students with unexpected expenses.

“We’ve called those students to find out, ‘what prevented you from being successful? And how can we get you back on track?’”

“If a student’s car breaks down, that expense could derail them — they have to determine, ‘am I going to put the rent money that I had set aside toward this car repair so I can get to class? Then I’m going to be behind on rent,’” Tastad said. “So the emergency fund is one of those ways to bridge that gap for these unexpected situations that could derail their progress in school.”

American International College (AIC) in Springfield also maintains an emergency fund for students to access in times of unexpected need.

Melisa Loa says AIC leaders don’t want students going to class hungry and unable to focus on learning.

“Students may request funds for emergency situations or unanticipated circumstances that make it difficult to continue in school,” said Melisa Loa, dean of students and director of Residence Life. “They’re able to request anywhere from $100 to $1,000, depending on need. We just ask that they’re currently enrolled as a full-time undergraduate student. We review those on an ongoing basis, and we’re able to help students through that fund.”

AIC maintains numerous other non-academic student supports, from its recently opened Buzz Stop food pantry to a program called the CARE Team (the acronym stands for Concerns, Assessment, Referral, and Education) that reviews concerns around mental health and helps students struggling with such issues to access the help they need to address them.

“It’s a robust team that does a lot of great work,” Loa said. “We’re following up with students to make sure they have appropriate resources, both on and off campus. We work really hard to make sure students’ mental health concerns are addressed in a timely manner.”

Just down the road, the Center for Access Services (CAS) at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) provides students with a broad range of non-academic supports, helping them overcome barriers that stand in the way of self-sufficiency, allowing them to succeed and stay in school.

Specifically, the CAS office houses a variety of services and initiatives, including free school supplies and the RAM Mini Mart, which provides groceries and meals to students facing food insecurity. CAS staff also connect students to on-campus resources and provides referrals to community agencies that assist with financial challenges, food insecurity, homelessness, substance abuse, and various state and federal benefits.

“STCC is a contemporary community college in that there are so many non-academic supports that we provide students,” the college notes. “These range from an on-campus food pantry and food lockers to housing agreements with Elms College and AIC, a mental health counseling partnership with Uwill, and a long-standing, federally funded TRIO program investing in first-generation college students.”

“We’re following up with students to make sure they have appropriate resources, both on and off campus. We work really hard to make sure students’ mental health concerns are addressed in a timely manner.”

In short, colleges are invested in student success, and that begins with making sure they stay in school, and have the resources they need to do just that.

Hunger to Learn

At a time when food insecurity has been in the news, the food pantries available on area campuses take on greater importance. HCC and AIC both have partnerships with the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, which provides many staples. HCC’s Thrive pantry also receives funding from Stop & Shop for food and personal care items, and the campus community has been generous in donating as well, Tastad said.

“We give out thousands of pounds of food every month to any students, faculty, or staff who has a food need. You don’t have to demonstrate your need; you just have to say, ‘I need some food today.’ And we got an earmark in last year’s budget to purchase refrigerated lockers outside Thrive, for non-perishable food. That’s really helpful because a student or anybody can put their order in, and our pantry staff will fill the order and put it in the refrigerated locker, and they can pick it up anytime the building is open, not just during the hours the pantry is open. That’s been really fabulous.”

At AIC, the Buzz Stop also provides perishable and non-perishable food as well as self-care items, which can be accessed outside normal pantry hours, Loa explained. “If a student needs an item in the middle of the night, they can contact the campus police, and the police will open it for them.”

“Their primary identifier is not necessarily a student — they’re a parent, they’re an employee, or they’re a caregiver, something other than a student. So we want to make sure that we’re respecting the time that they have here on campus.”

Like HCC, supplies from the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts have been supplemented by numerous monetary donations at AIC. “That’s really helpful to keep the pantry going, especially for items we’re not able to get from the Food Bank.”

Loa emphasized the importance of this simple service.

“We don’t want students going to class thinking about where their next meal is coming from, whether they’re residential or commuter. We want students to be happy, healthy, and fed, and able to focus on their academics. We want their basic needs to be met. That’s what these resources are for — to meet those needs so they can come to school and focus on their academics.”

Many students have become regular users of the Buzz Stop, she added, and many off-campus students who are food-insecure have said other community pantries don’t always offer the same amount of food.

“In the last couple of months, with things happening with SNAP, we’ve been very thankful that we’re able to provide food, and they’re really thankful and appreciative that this is a resource on campus.”

At HCC, the Thrive Center also helps students access housing in the area, Tastad told BusinessWest, partnering with AIC and Elms College to have students live on those campuses, and maintaining housing agreements with the Holyoke Housing Authority, with vouchers reserved just for HCC students to access Section 8 housing, among other options, including housing available through Gándara Center and at Westfield State University under a state homeless youth initiative.

Meanwhile, HCC recently expanded its Itsy Bitsy Child Watch Center, doubling its capacity. The center is a free, drop-in service for student parents who need short-term child care while they attend classes, study, or meet with tutors and advisers. It opened as a pilot program in fall 2022 after a $100,000 state allocation, and expanded with the help of a $600,000 grant from the Davis Foundation in late 2023.

The Itsy Bitsy Child Watch Center is now located next to the HCC Parent Learning Center, a study lounge and play area for parents and their children, and the Marieb Adult Learner Success Center, a support program for student parents and students ages 24 and older.

“So the students, when they’re in class, can drop their kids off at the child watch, but when they’re not in class, they sometimes go over to the Parent Learning Center because they can be in that space with their kids,” Tastad explained.

Springboard to Success

The throughline in all these efforts, again, is identifying what might derail a student from completing their degree, and then filling those gaps, Tastad said, all with the understanding that many students aren’t traditional, full-time attendees, but older part-time students with families, jobs, and other responsibilities to juggle.

“Their primary identifier is not necessarily a student — they’re a parent, they’re an employee, or they’re a caregiver, something other than a student. So we want to make sure that we’re respecting the time that they have here on campus.”

And make sure their studies continue — which not only helps the college and the student, but a regional economy that, in many cases, is struggling to recruit skilled talent in many fields.

“We take it seriously,” Tastad said. “We are a part of the Greater Holyoke community, and everything we can do to support the students and create that network is going to help everyone prosper. Student success is built into our strategic plan. We’ve put it out there that this is what we are known for, and it’s true.”

Banks, Credit Unions Leverage Evolving Technology

By Joseph Bednar January 19, 2026

Banking and Financial Services Special Coverage

Tools of the Trade

Marco Bernasconi says Country Bank’s adoption of new technology must be done smartly, with the needs of customers in mind.

It’s no secret, Marco Bernasconi said, that all banks use similar technology. The difference lies in how they deploy it, and which services they emphasize.

“It’s not just about getting bigger, or being involved in more technology; it’s about operating with intelligence and leveraging efficiency and automation to drive sustainable growth,” said Bernasconi, chief Operating and Innovation officer at Country Bank. “For us, it’s about being smart and determining how to serve the needs of customers.”

Glenn Welch, president of Freedom Credit Union, agreed.

“A lot of us use services provided through a third-party provider. So if you go to our websites, they’re fairly similar — different colors, but the same tools,” he said. “So a lot of it comes down to service. You have to have the tools on the websites, but customers have to like you, too. You have to provide good service to the members.”

Both were speaking to a reality shared by all banks and credit unions these days — at a time when fewer customers actually visit a branch to do business, instead conducting most of it online, institutions need to ensure that those digital tools are robust, easy to use, and, especially, secure.

At the same time, though, there will always be a need for a physical branch presence for the business that people like to conduct there — opening accounts, loan applications, and, for some, normal deposits and withdrawals — so banks can’t afford to neglect that side of their business while they focus on developing and evolving their digital platform.

“We’re modernizing digital channels and continuing to leverage digital investing and marketing tools, and constantly reassessing different technologies to keep customers secure. But we also need to be equipped to train the team when people come in for traditional transactions,” said Bernasconi, noting that Country’s branch strategy includes its first branch in Springfield, opening this year.

“We’re modernizing digital channels and continuing to leverage digital investing and marketing tools, and constantly reassessing different technologies to keep customers secure. But we also need to be equipped to train the team when people come in for traditional transactions.”

The volume of branch visitors has changed from the time he was a teller, he added, “but they’re coming in with more difficult problems, and we’re spending more time with them on education, explaining different products, helping move their financial lives forward. So we certainly need traditional transactions at branches.”

A balance between high-tech and high-touch resources is important to commercial customers as well, said Aleda De Maria, executive vice president and chief operating officer at PeoplesBank.

“A lot of our small business owners are all things to their users — CEO, CFO, HR person, day-to-day manager. So we want to make sure we’re offering services through technology to make their lives easier,” she explained.

Aleda De Maria says PeoplesBank has bolstered its internal fraud detection tools to protect customers.

For example, “last year, we implemented some smaller balance lending that our customers can apply for 100% digitally and get answers from us within days, in some cases. We’d like to push that in 2026, optimize that to bring it to a wider audience. That’s something I’m super excited about.”

Last year, PeoplesBank underwent a core conversion of its technology and systems, building on the early growth of its digital brand, ZYNLO Bank, which it launched in 2020 in partnership with Nymbus.

“We didn’t just do the conversion to say we did it. We did it to continually evolve what we offer customers,” De Maria said, adding that the focus was on both back-end technology and front-end interface.

“We are constantly focused on the front end. That’s the window into PeoplesBank. If the customer opens an account and we’re not seeing them after that, what are they doing? They’re online and mobile,” she went on. “Because of the conversion, we have more control over the customer experience and can be more aggressive in updating user experiences — and to ask ourselves what services are available, how can we improve, and what we can add to that.”

Bernasconi said banks must decide whether to crawl, walk, or run toward new technology, but all are asking similar questions — how to deal with the rise of AI, from both a technical and governance perspective; how to help customers access new business products; and, through all of it, how to ensure a crisp customer experience.

“We’re competing with the Apples and Amazons, the fintechs now; it’s not competing only with banks and credit unions anymore,” he added. “The world has changed.”

Battling Back

All the area financial leaders who spoke with BusinessWest said fraud prevention — and the increasingly powerful tools that enable it — are critical to any institution’s technology strategy.

“One of the biggest things we’re talking about is fraud detection,” De Maria said. “I recently read an article saying financial scams are an industry now, and one of the things the scammers have going for them is the use of AI. So we’re having internal conversations about how to leverage new technology to detect and prevent these scammers from getting a foot in the door or gaining access to customer accounts — the concept of how to fight AI with AI, using different fraud detection tools.”

Last year, PeoplesBank launched a new fraud detection module developed through ZYNLO.

“We saw some success immediately in detecting fraud specific to account-to-account activity,” she noted. “We’re looking to expand that and get into other areas like mobile deposits, and also things like devices; the technology that we’re dealing with can look at a device somebody’s on and better detect whether that’s your device or not because of how they interact with the screen, where normally they’d spend three seconds on a screen, and they’re now spending 10 because it’s not as familiar to them.

“From a customer perspective, those things may not sound exciting — unless you’ve been the victim of fraud — but it’s certainly something we are extremely excited about as a bank, to be able to step up our game in this industry that has been created around fraud and scams.”

“From a customer perspective, those things may not sound exciting — unless you’ve been the victim of fraud — but it’s certainly something we are extremely excited about as a bank, to be able to step up our game in this industry that has been created around fraud and scams. So we’ll be looking this quarter at deploying more of those fraud technologies at PeoplesBank.”

Such efforts are critical, De Maria added, at a time when many people do the majority of their banking online.

“We still see a significant amount of accounts open in person — those are still greater than the accounts we open online — but after that, we may not see those customers often; they’re relying on the bank’s investment in technology. There is an expectation that, if they use that technology, they’re going to be safe; they’re going to be protected. I think customers should have the expectation that banks are investing in technology to make things safer and more secure.”

Welch said Freedom has also developed a robust set of fraud prevention tools on the back end, which can detect transactions that are unusual to an account at any given time. The same goes for wire fraud or other types of social engineering attacks designed to separate customers from their money.

“At times, I think we have annoyed members by asking them too many questions, but we want to keep them safe. And we’ve stopped a lot of fraud up front by just knowing our members, knowing what their normal transactions are, reaching out to them, and making sure that is something they want to do.”

Along with its wide array of digital banking tools, Country Bank also hosts numerous online financial literacy and fraud prevention resources, in addition to community outreaches like its Credit for Life fairs at area high schools.

Glenn Welch says people became more comfortable during the pandemic conducting basic transactions online, but many were relieved to return to face-to-face interactions.

“It’s extremely important that we spend a lot of time in our community and with the high schools, educating them in financial literacy and credit reports and how to manage budgets,” Bernasconi said, noting that it’s in the bank’s interest to engage young adults. “We spend a lot of time understanding the needs of younger generations. We’ve got to cater to the customers that we have, but also onboard the next generation and be astute to their needs as well.”

Face to Face

One way banks and credit unions have melded high tech with high touch is with interactive teller machines, or ITMs, which offer the functions of a traditional ATM with some enhanced services, such as making loan payments, cashing large checks, opening accounts, and, most notably, speaking live with a teller over a video feed.

“We launched our first ITMs in 2019. I like to say we had a crystal ball before COVID hit,” De Maria said. “Our ITM fleet is pretty significant — we have ITMs at every banking center, and also standalone remote locations throughout Western Mass. And we’re seeing, on average, about 25% of our in-person transactions occurring through the ITMs. At some banking centers, it’s as much as 35% to 40%.”

And it’s not just personal lines — about one-quarter of PeoplesBank’s commercial clients have used an ITM at least once. “We’re really seeing a good adoption of the ITM technology,” she said, noting that they operate seven days a week. “They’re what I would consider the next generation of drive-up teller, essentially.”

Country Bank has a fleet of ITMs as well, and while Freedom Credit Union offers one at its Springfield main office — and has the technology ready to deploy at other branches — Welch said questions remain about whether customers are clamoring for more.

“People are using it a lot like an ATM. We might need it more at remote sites because, if the branch is open, customers like to see people,” he explained. “These were perfect during COVID; we couldn’t let people in, or they had to wait in a long line. But now, I think if people travel to the branch, if they want the convenience of a drive-up ATM, they do that, but if they want to talk over transactions, we find they’re coming inside.

“We’ve stopped a lot of fraud up front by just knowing our members, knowing what their normal transactions are, reaching out to them, and making sure that is something they want to do.”

“So we’re going to turn on the remote one that we have in Ludlow to see if that makes a difference,” he went on. “If it’s not attached to a building or a branch in a remote area, and they have transactions they want to discuss with someone, they might get more out of it. So that’s part of our strategy this year — we’re going to test it in Ludlow and see how that goes.”

Part of any institution’s strategy, Welch added, has to be how to engage multiple generations, which is why all this technology is important.

“The younger generation doesn’t necessarily want to come in to do transactions. If they want to do an auto loan, they may not want to do it online, and definitely for mortgages, they want to be walked through the process and talk to people,” he said, adding that Freedom also has a secure video call platform where people can engage in these conversations from home and even download documents.

But since the pandemic, he added, “I think a lot of people got more comfortable doing basic transactions online.”

Across the industry, that’s especially true of younger customers, so Freedom — whose average customer age is around 50, a number Welch would like to see creep into the 30s — will, like all financial institutions, continue to evolve its digital platforms and other high-tech offerings in order to strike that generational balance and meet customer needs.

“When people age out of here, we need to have new members filling in the pipeline,” he said. “And we need to keep them here.”

Agawam Rides Growing Wave of Momentum

By George O'Brien January 6, 2026

Community Spotlight

Steven (left) and Adam Rovithis in the Pit at Next Level Cowork Space.

They call it ‘the Pit.’

This an open area with several work stations, and it’s built “for momentum, not necessarily quiet,” said Adam Rovithis, adding that it is one of many realms within Next Level Cowork Space, a new venture he and his brother, Steven, launched last spring in Agawam’s industrial park.

There’s also the (Quiet) Cove, another open space, and mostly a no-phone-call zone; the Launch Pad, a conference room ideal for everything from small business meetings to real estate closings; the Lounge, event space featuring everything from a full kitchen to a foosball table (one local family recently rented it out for Thanksgiving); several small (95 to 350 square feet) offices; and some larger tenants, including a marketing firm and a kitchen design outfit.

It all comes together nicely at the region’s latest co-working concept, one the brothers Rovithis said is off to a solid start thanks to what they tout as attractive pricing — $250 a month for one of those private offices and $99 a month for an open desk, for example — a convenient location just a few minutes off Route 57, and an atmosphere they describe as “a community.”

“There’s no corporate feel here … we want it to be more of a community, more like family, than anything else,” Steven said, adding that, while the partners may eventually consider expanding and taking the concept to other markets, for now they’re fully focused on making the Agawam facility a success.

Next Level Cowork is one of many converging stories in Agawam. Others include:

• A small-scale lithium-ion battery storage facility, proposed by Long Road Energy in response to an RFP from the state, and planned for 404 Silver St., formerly home to Lucia Lumber. The proposal has drawn widespread opposition from residents, who cite everything from safety concerns to environmental impact and property values, but Mayor Christopher Johnson said the city is working with the developers to implement strict safety ordinances;

• Ongoing construction of a new Agawam High School. The $226 million project is being undertaken in phases, with current work focusing on the community wing of the school;

• A new police station, which opened recently in the former HUB Insurance building on Suffield Street. The $14 million facility, a price tag that includes acquisition of the building, was put beyond schedule by delays in procuring electric switch gear and a backup generator, said the mayor, but the ceremonial ribbon was cut early last month; and

• Several other new businesses, including a new Ollie’s Bargain Outlet, which is taking over the former American Freight space in the Southgate Shopping Plaza, Convenient MD Urgent Care & Walk-in Clinic on Suffield Street, a new Baystate Ob/Gyn facility on Silver Street, and Fancy Bagels, also in the Southgate Shopping Plaza.

“There’s a lot happening — it’s an exciting time in Agawam,” said Robin Wozniak, president of the West of the River Chamber of Commerce, which includes Agawam. “We’re seeing a lot of momentum in the community.”

As for the battery storage facility, the Silver Street proposal was not among the four chosen recently in the first round of projects — sites in Everett, Somerset, Chelsea, and Tyngsborough, which together will create 1,300 megawatts of battery storage, were selected — but there will be subsequent rounds, Johnson said.

“It’s a benign facility — it’s not what you see when you Google ‘battery storage facility,’ like in New York and California, where they had the fires. That’s not what they build today.”

He noted that such facilities are needed and are going to be placed … somewhere. With the proper safeguards in place, Agawam could and should be one of those places, he said, adding that a facility will bring some jobs, but it would also become the second-highest taxpayer in the city behind Six Flags.

“It’s a benign facility — it’s not what you see when you Google ‘battery storage facility,’ like in New York and California, where they had the fires,” he told BusinessWest. “That’s not what they build today.”

For this latest installment of its Community Spotlight series, BusinessWest takes a look at the many converging storylines in Agawam, and the many forms of progress in this city of almost 29,000.

Watt’s Happening?

The proposed battery-storage facility is a comparatively small project — 250 megawatts, according to Johnson. By way of comparison, the proposal for Everett, on the site of 22 old oil storage tankers, would procure more than 700 megawatts of battery storage.

Overall, the state plans to lock in 5,000 megawatts by 2030, said Johnson, adding that Agawam’s proposal will likely be resubmitted for subsequent rounds of projects.

Unlike the Everett proposal, Agawam’s site borders a residential neighborhood — the Agawam Industrial Park is on the other side of Silver Street, Johnson acknowledged, adding that there are safeguards in place for such facilities.

The Lounge at Next Level Cowork Space.

“For lack of a better way to describe it, these facilities are broken down into containerized units on the property,” he explained. “There will be a number of units on the property, each one containing batteries; they’re monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year — every cell of every battery is monitored for performance.”

Overall, he said such a facility would be a safe, quiet, mostly unnoticed addition to the tax base, and a welcome addition given the cost of infrastructure and capital projects in the city — especially the new high school.

A pet project of Johnson’s and the primary reason he returned to the corner office in January 2024, 24 years after he first served in that capacity (he later served on the City Council), the new high school is an ambitious undertaking, which, as noted earlier, is being undertaken in stages.

“There will be a number of units on the property, each one containing batteries; they’re monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year — every cell of every battery is monitored for performance.”

The first stage is what Johnson calls the ‘community wing’ portion of the building, now under construction. It includes the gymnasiums, auditorium, cafeteria, locker rooms, media center, office space, and other facilities, he explained, adding that this phase is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year or the beginning of 2027.

Phase 2 is the academic wing, construction of which will entail demolition of a portion of the existing high school, said Johnson, adding that the community wing will be temporarily connected to the academic wings of the current high school to ensure there is no disruption to any programming during ongoing construction.

Phase 3, scheduled to be completed in June 2028, involves demolition of the existing building and completion of athletic fields. This phase will be completed by the end of 2028, said the mayor, adding that the undertaking is on time and, more importantly, on budget.

Agawam officials cut the ribbon on the city’s new police station early last month.

As for the new police station, it replaces a nearly 40-year-old facility (a renovated elementary school) on Springfield Street that was cramped not long after it opened, the mayor noted.

“This station has more room — there’s built-in additional capacity, and it’s laid out to better accommodate workflow,” he explained, adding that renovation of the old insurance property came with a price tag that is roughly half of what new construction would have been.

Work in Progress

When asked about the name affixed to their new venture, Steven and Adam Rovithis both pointed to the sign on the wall in the conference room reading “Welcome to the Next Level.”

It was placed there to help motivate those working at the real estate company they formed (Rovithis Realty, later rebranded ROVI Homes) and moved into the former laboratory facility on Herbert P. Almgren Drive in the Agawam Regional Industrial Park, on the site of the former Bowles Airport.

Agawam at a Glance

Year Incorporated: 1855
Population: 28,692
Area: 24.2 square miles
County: Hampden
Residential Tax Rate: $14.10
Commercial Tax Rate: $26.67
Median Household Income: $49,390
Family Household Income: $59,088
Type of government: Mayor, City Council
Largest Employers: OMG Inc., Agawam Public Schools, Six Flags New England
* Latest information available

“One of the marketing people said, ‘why don’t we just call it Next Level?’” Steven recalled, noting that the name helps indicate that this is co-work space with some different, innovative twists.

The property was acquired by the two brothers — who come from a family of entrepreneurs; their uncle, Manny, owned the appliance chain that bore his name, and their father, Steve, helped him get that venture off the ground — to house the real estate business, but other tenants as well. These included an attorney’s office and the kitchen design company, said Adam, adding that, with the real estate employees working remotely during and after COVID, there was more space available to lease out, and co-working space became an increasingly attractive option.

Indeed, while the co-working movement has had its ups and downs — some ventures have thrived, while others, most notably the large-scale Venture X facility in Holyoke, have not — the brothers thought their community concept would work and forged ahead.

In putting together their venture, they borrowed from other co-work facilities and office spaces and tweaked concepts, said Steven, noting that they had seen variations of the Pit and the Lounge in other settings.

They currently boast several tenants making use of the different kinds of spaces available, especially the private offices and the Pit. Clients have ranged from permanent tenants to professionals who have made use of the space and its amenities after dropping off teenagers at nearby Six Flags and before picking them up again.

Current tenants include an IT professional, a software development company, two financial services professionals, a healthcare consultant, a hazardous waste consultant, and others, said Steven, adding that the community aspect of the venture is punctuated by regular networking events among tenants on the third Thursday of every month.

“We get all of our business owners together, have some food and drink, talk a little bit of business, and do some networking,” he said. “We have a few deals come together in the lounge — two different businesses saying ‘hey, I can help you.’”

As noted earlier, the partners believe this is a concept that can work in other markets, and expansion is certainly an option down the road.

“I think we can do more, but right now, we’re still so new at this that we want to make sure that we nail this location,” Steven said. “If this works, we can definitely do more. I think co-work is picking up again, and this concept, 99 bucks a month to get out of your house … that’s appealing to many people.”

January Is National Glaucoma Awareness Month

By BusinessWest Staff January 6, 2026

Healthcare News

Combating the ‘Silent Thief of Sight’

As part of January’s National Glaucoma Awareness Month, Prevent Blindness, the nation’s leading patient advocacy organization dedicated to preventing blindness and preserving sight, is providing patients, care partners, and allied health professionals with free educational resources on the condition.

According to the National Eye Institute, glaucoma is a group of eye diseases that can cause vision loss and blindness by damaging the optic nerve. Generally, symptoms begin slowly, usually starting with loss of peripheral (side) vision. It is sometimes referred to as the ‘silent thief of sight’ because people with glaucoma often do not notice vision loss in its early stages.

“There is currently no cure for glaucoma. However, as with many eye diseases and conditions, early detection and treatment can slow significant vision loss. That’s why access to affordable quality eyecare is essential for everyone.”

There are several types of glaucoma, with the two most common being primary open-angle glaucoma and angle-closure glaucoma. Other important types include normal-tension glaucoma and secondary glaucoma, caused by injury or other conditions like diabetes. While rare, glaucoma can also occur in children and includes congenital glaucoma in babies.

Common risk factors for glaucoma include:

• Age: 60 years or older (over age 40 for African-Americans)

• Race/ethnicity: African American, Hispanic, Asian, or of Native American descent.

• Family history: Parent, brother, sister, or anyone related by blood with glaucoma.

• Medical history: History of high pressure in the eyes, previous eye injury, long-term steroid use, head trauma, or nearsightedness.

• Diabetes: Adults with diabetes are twice as likely to develop glaucoma. The risk increases with the amount of time someone has had diabetes.

“There is currently no cure for glaucoma. However, as with many eye diseases and conditions, early detection and treatment can slow significant vision loss,” said Jeff Todd, president and CEO of Prevent Blindness. “That’s why access to affordable quality eyecare is essential for everyone.”

Prevent Blindness offers a collection of free, expert-approved resources at preventblindness.org, including downloadable fact sheets, a listing of glaucoma financial assistance resources, shareable social media graphics, and a dedicated webpage.

Prevent Blindness and Responsum Health invite the public to join the Glaucoma Community, a free platform (responsumhealth.com/the-glaucoma-community) that provides educational glaucoma content, a personalized newsfeed, a moderated community chat, and a dedicated Facebook group. The community is offered in multiple languages and is available via a web browser or through a free mobile app for Apple or Android users.

On Tuesday, Jan. 20 at 3 p.m. Prevent Blindness will also host a free webinar, “Critical Conversations About Glaucoma.” This discussion is designed for people living with glaucoma, their care partners, and family members, and offers practical guidance, reassurance, and support.

Topics include understanding glaucoma from the start, how to describe vision changes, proper use of glaucoma eye drops, managing the emotional impact of a diagnosis, and talking with family about hereditary risk and eye exams.

The “Critical Conversations About Glaucoma” webinar will be moderated by Hillary Golden, founder of Glaucoma Coach and a Prevent Blindness ASPECT Patient Engagement Program graduate. Speakers will include Dr. Karen Allison, associate professor of Clinical Ophthalmology at Flaum Eye Institute, University of Rochester Medical Center, and a Prevent Blindness board of directors member; and Dr. Pathik Amin, visiting associate professor of Ophthalmology, Glaucoma Service, Illinois Eye and Ear Infirmary, University of Illinois at Chicago. Register at preventblindness.org/glaucoma-webinar.

Accounting Associations Take Issue with New Federal Loan Caps

By Contributor January 6, 2026

Accounting and Tax Planning

What’s in a Classification?

The National Assoc. of State Boards of Accountancy recently came out in opposition of the U.S. Department of Education’s implementation of new student loan policies that reclassify accounting degrees as ‘non-professional.’

“Classifying accountants as anything other than professionals fundamentally misrepresents the critical work CPAs perform, work that is responsible for the integrity of the global financial systems on which businesses and individuals rely,” NASBA President and CEO Daniel Dustin said. “There’s a reason certified public accountancy has been a licensed profession in the United
States since 1896.”

The Department of Education change affects federal loan caps under the new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) that, beginning in July 2026, will reduce borrowing limits for accounting students to $20,500 per year, compared to $50,000 per year for degrees the department now labels ‘professional.’

NASBA argues that a reduction in loan access may deter a broad range of students from entering the CPA profession at a time when the complexity of markets and businesses require a robust and educated workforce. The association maintains that federal policy must accurately reflect the realities of professional CPA licensure, as economic stability and protection of the public depend on a strong and well-regulated accounting profession.

This reclassification also excludes many other long-recognized licensed professions, including those responsible for public health and safety, such as nursing, architecture, education, and engineering.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the new loan limits that result from these reclassifications will help drive down the cost of graduate programs and reduce the debt students have to take out. Graduate students received more than half of all new federal student loans originated in recent years, and graduate student loans now make up half of the outstanding $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio.

Among the professions that still retain their ‘professional’ designation for higher graduate school borrowing limits are medicine (MD), dentistry (DDS/DMD), law (LLB/JD), and several others. Undergraduate students are generally not affected by the new lending limits.

NASBA plans to consult with the 55 U.S. accounting jurisdictions it represents — which license more than 653,000 CPAs in the U.S. — and will engage policymakers to ensure accounting is restored to the professional degree category.

Other organizations have publicly opposed the reclassification as well. The National Assoc. of Tax Professionals is also urging the Department of Education to reconsider the change. In a statement, the NATP argued against the non-professional classification on four grounds.

1. The reduced federal borrowing levels will make accounting education less financially accessible. This could deter students from entering the field, especially first-generation college students, students from rural or underserved communities, adults seeking a career change, working students completing degrees part-time, and anyone needing graduate-level coursework to advance.

For a profession that already requires rigorous education and often additional coursework for licensure, lowering loan access could make a critical career path harder to pursue.

2. Accounting is a professional field, and the reclassification doesn’t reflect that. Accounting is a licensed, regulated, ethics-based profession with real-world public responsibility. Tax professionals and accountants complete extensive coursework, uphold ethical and legal standards, maintain continuing education, help taxpayers navigate complex federal and state laws, and protect the integrity of the tax system.

Reclassifying these degrees as non-professional does not align with real-world requirements or the public-facing nature of this work.

3. The tax-professional workforce is already stretched thin. More than 80 million taxpayers rely on paid preparers each year. Many small businesses, elderly taxpayers, rural communities, and underserved populations depend on credentialed professionals to prepare accurate returns and resolve IRS issues.

But the tax workforce is aging, and firms across the country report difficulty recruiting new talent — a trend NATP members have voiced repeatedly. Limiting access to accounting education risks shrinking the talent pipeline, increasing filing errors, lengthening IRS response backlogs, reducing availability of professional help in underserved areas, and exacerbating seasonal workforce shortages. This isn’t just an academic concern, but a practical one with direct consequences for taxpayer service.

4. Taxpayer service and compliance could suffer. The federal tax code is becoming more complex each year. New credits, expanded eligibility rules, increased digital reporting requirements, and shifting IRS processes all increase the need for well-trained professionals.

If fewer students can afford to pursue accounting degrees, taxpayers could experience longer wait times for appointments, reduced access to qualified preparers, higher risk of filing mistakes, greater reliance on unregulated or untrained preparers, and increased compliance challenges.

Economic Outlook 2026

By George O'Brien January 5, 2026

Cover Story Economic Outlook

Watch to see more from Brian Canina:

Clouding the Issue

The Forecast Calls for … More Uncertainty

It’s called the ‘quits rate.’

As that name suggests, it represents the number of employees who voluntarily quit their jobs as a percentage of total employment.

When times are good for workers, the quits rate is understandably higher. When times are not so good, or when there are high levels of anxiety and uncertainty about the economy and the jobs market — and that would describe the current climate — the rate starts to come down.

“Over the past few months, quits have dropped precipitously,” said Bob Nakosteen, a semi-retired Economics professor at UMass Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management, reflecting on a jobs market increasingly described with the words ‘stuck’ and ‘stagnant.’ “People are hanging onto their jobs for dear life, which tells me that they’re not getting offers to entice them to quit, and they don’t feel that they can take the risk to leave their job and look for another one, because they’re just not out there.”

This sentiment is reflected in the latest jobs report: the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a few weeks back that the U.S. economy lost 105,000 jobs in October and added 64,000 jobs in November, with the unemployment rate rising to a four-year high of 4.6% that month.

The falling quits rate and the jobless numbers are just two of the many ways economists and business leaders are trying to quantify and qualify the current economic scene, often described as ‘confusing,’ although quantifying is more difficult with fewer hard numbers to work with — in general, and even more so because of the recent government shutdown.

Another measure is the Associated Industries of Massachusetts’ (AIM) Business Confidence Index, or BCI. Scored on a 100-point scale, with 50 indicating neutrality, the monthly BCI soared to 57.7 when President Trump was elected in November 2024, but quickly fell to 41.5 (a COVID-like level) in April when Trump’s tariff plan was announced, and has continued to hover below 50 since, AIM President Brooke Thomson said.

She told BusinessWest that, overall, the business community doesn’t like uncertainty, and the prospect for more in 2026, reflected in the BCI numbers, poses questions about what kind of year it will be.

Between the quits rate, the BCI, and other measures, the emerging picture is one of continued uncertainty, even about the near term, let alone several quarters out, given ambiguity about matters from tariffs, interest rates, the jobs market, and the AI investment boom (and whether that bubble is about to burst) to inflation and affordability crunch.

There is some optimism following the most recent quarter-point interest rate drop early last month, but there will need to be more of those, and likely more substantial cuts, in the year ahead for a deep impact to result, said those we spoke with.

Bob Nakosteen

“People are hanging onto their jobs for dear life, which tells me that they’re not getting offers to entice them to quit, and they don’t feel that they can take the risk to leave their job and look for another one, because they’re just not out there.”

“With the recent Fed rate cuts, we’re expecting things to probably pick up, modestly, because there is still some potential uncertainty, economically,” said Brian Canina, president and chief operating officer of Holyoke-based PeoplesBank. “If the Fed continues to lower rates, and the lowering of the rates on the short end of the interest rate curve impacts the long-term interest rate, and those come down, we may see some increased lending and some potential refinancing.”

Overall, said Nakosteen, there is a mixed economic picture for 2026, with expectations for slower growth and perhaps — that’s perhaps — a mild, short recession.

But it’s very difficult to project without hard data, with so much uncertainty clouding whatever picture the data presents, and amid a variety of mixed signals, such as GDP rising a robust 4.3% in the third quarter at the same time as bourbon maker Jim Beam announced it would be shuttering one of its distilleries in Kentucky, in part due to tariffs and slumping demand.“

The data are not painting a clear picture at all. Unemployment is going up — kind of gently, but it’s going up. Inflation is rising — kind of gently, but it’s still rising,” he said, adding that the country may be heading for what economists call ‘stagflation,’ a somewhat rare economic condition characterized by high inflation, stagnant economic growth, and high unemployment occurring simultaneously.

Ups and Downs

As he talked about 2025 and what kind of year it was for the region, Aaron Vega spoke from two different, but in many ways similar, perspectives — first as outgoing director of Planning & Economic Development in Holyoke and the incoming president and CEO of the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council.

Brian Canina

“With the recent Fed rate cuts, we’re expecting things to probably pick up, modestly, because there is still some potential uncertainty, economically.”

“It’s like two steps forward, two steps back, one step to the side,” he said, noting that this was true in Holyoke, but also the region. While new businesses were added, including Pickleball Kingdom at the Holyoke Mall, and new initiatives launched, there were setbacks, such as recent layoffs at Yankee Candle and Sublime System’s decision to pause its project to build a plant in Holyoke following the loss of a U.S. Department of Energy grant.

Elaborating, Vega said the region’s economy was buffeted by some strong headwinds, most of which were beyond its control. These included tariffs, policy changes, inflation, ongoing changes in the retail realm, and even the price of energy.

“We all know that Massachusetts is a bit of an expensive state in which to do business. So how do we entice businesses to come to Massachusetts, and then, how do we get them to come to Western Massachusetts when we’re still developing our hubs and developing our initiatives?” he asked, adding that these same headwinds will prevail in 2026.

This up-and-down nature of the economy was reflected in the BCI numbers for 2025, said Thomson, noting that the index would rise a few points one month, drop a point or two, then rise again, and then fall again; it was up two points to 48.5 in November, for example. This wavering is a symptom of uncertainty and policies that foster it, she said, adding that the sluggish performance in 2025 — some economists say the country is teetering on recession if not officially in it — was different from such cycles in the past.

“Most recessions, or downturns, occurred because of some sort of situation in the financial markets, some sort of causation that deeply hit our financial markets,” she explained. “This was different; it’s almost self-inflicted through policy. There’s nothing inherently wrong in the financial sector.

Aaron Vega

“It’s like two steps forward, two steps back, one step to the side.”

“There’s still money out there to lend to businesses, there’s opportunities for businesses, but there is feeling on behalf of business leaders that they don’t know what to expect … ‘I don’t know what my bottom line is going to be, I don’t know what my costs are going to be, so I’m not going to take out that loan, I’m not going to do that expansion project, I’m not going to give out big bonuses or hire more people because I don’t know what’s around the corner.’”

This was the picture throughout 2025, and this sentiment is expected to continue into at least early 2026, Thomson said, adding, again, that business owners like consistently and reliability, and these are two commodities missing at the federal policy level, and there has been a resulting trickle-down to states, with some, like Massachusetts, getting hit harder than others.

Indeed, several sectors in the Bay State were deeply impacted by federal policy changes, including healthcare (see related story on page 25), education, and especially manufacturing, due to tariff policies, she noted.

“I’ve been throughout the state this year visiting manufacturers, and even the ones that are managing to do all right are doing it because they’re being really, really creative, despite this,” she added. “And they would never say they’re thriving; they’re saying, ‘we’re being creative, and we’re managing it.’ But I have more stories with people saying, ‘this is killing me — I’m barely making it,’ and there have been two or three small business that have actually closed their doors.”

Fear of the Unknown

Carol Campbell, president of Chicopee Industrial Contractors (CIC), spoke for many business owners when she said 2025 was “an interesting year,” marked by those headwinds Vega mentioned, and especially tariffs.

CIC works with manufacturers, handling rigging, machinery moving, machine installation, and other services, and many of those machines are made overseas, said Campbell, adding that the tariffs placed on them — or the threat of tariffs, as well as general uncertainty about what might come next — prompted some hesitation and project delays.

Brooke Thomson

“Most recessions, or downturns, occurred because of some sort of situation in the financial markets, some sort of causation that deeply hit our financial markets. This was different; it’s almost self-inflicted through policy. There’s nothing inherently wrong in the financial sector.”

“What we found was just a fear of the unknown,” she explained, adding that, by March, even Fortune 500 companies were hitting pause on some projects.

Things improved as the year went on, and, overall, 2025 was a solid year, she said, adding quickly that there is optimism about 2026, but also some lingering fear of the unknown.

As they look ahead, those we spoke with said several factors will determine the trajectory of the economy, especially the AI investment boom and whether that bubble will burst, inflation, consumer spending, business confidence (especially when it comes to hiring), and, of course, interest rates.

“A lot of it will hinge on what happens with interest rates,” said Canina, adding that the size and frequency of cuts will ultimately determine the impact on the economy.

“A 25-basis-point change is not necessarily going to have a significant impact,” he explained. “But when you see the Fed make consecutive rate cuts, and if they were to drop a full percentage point in a six- to 12-month period of time, I think by the 12-month point you’ll start to see some pickup, and then, it will continue to grow from there.”

Elaborating, he said many businesses remained on the sidelines in 2025 when it came to large investments and expansion initiatives, due mostly to uncertainty about the economy and where things were headed, and partly to interest rates still well above those enjoyed just a few years ago, post-COVID. He’s optimistic that some will get back in the game in the months to come.

Jeff Sullivan, president and CEO of Springfield-based New Valley Bank, agreed.

“The mortgage rates and the longer-term rates, we don’t see them coming down quite as much,” he said. “It’s nothing that’s going to change consumer behavior — we don’t see a refinance boom.

Carol Campbell

“What we found was just a fear of the unknown.”

“Meanwhile, the idea of borrowing money at 6% or 6.5% doesn’t seem to be unpalatable,” he added, opining that current rates are not stifling activity. “It’s not stopping deals from happening. Would they rather borrow at 5%? Absolutely they would, but where we are now is tolerable. When the rates peaked nine or 10 months ago and it was hard to get under 7%, that was starting to chill the market, but now we’re back down to 6% or 6.5%, and that’s not stopping anyone.”

Overall, Sullivan is more upbeat about 2026 than some others we spoke with. He said 2025 was a solid year for the bank, in deposit growth and otherwise, while he also noted cautious optimism among many commercial customers.

“The overall mood is generally positive,” he said. “The people who are more nervous are the people who do business with the general public, especially with the middle-class, working-class general public. The firms that are business-to-business sales … I think the optimism is there. The firms that are dependent upon lower- and middle-income consumers being their customers … I’m more worried.

“It’s the K-shaped recovery,” he went on. “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer; we definitely see that sentiment among our customer base.”

Meanwhile, he expects the recent wave of mergers and acquisitions to continue, as businesses search for all-important scale and private equity firms continue their hunt for opportunities across seemingly all sectors of the economy.

“These private equity companies have a belief that they’re going to be so successful, they’re paying top dollar to acquire local companies and roll them up into a much larger platform,” he said, adding that the trend extends across the board, even to HVAC contractors, alarm companies, and sprinkler companies. “We hear from customers every quarter that are taking buyout offers; they’re saying, ‘I can’t say no to this. It’s so much money; it’s more than I thought I’d ever get. I wasn’t ready to sell, but I can’t say no.’”

The Local Business Community Offers Perspectives on 2026

By BusinessWest Staff January 5, 2026

Economic Outlook Special Coverage

Surveying the Landscape

Beyond the big-picture context provided by regional business leaders in the lead story on page 4, how do individual business and nonprofit leaders in Western Mass. see their own enterprises faring in 2026? On the following pages, 17 of them share their answers to that question — and what they see as the key trends, challenges, and opportunities arising in the coming year.

Ray Berry, Owner, White Lion Brewing

As a brewery, we operate at the intersection of hospitality and manufacturing. According to our national trade association, the craft beer industry is expected to experience its third consecutive year of volume decline, and the second year in which brewery closures outpace new openings.

Despite these industry headwinds, White Lion remains optimistic. While overall production is sideways, we are seeing meaningful growth and expanded opportunity across other areas of our operation.

Strategic changes implemented in 2025 are positioning the business for greater strength in 2026. These include our transition to an all-alcohol bar, which increased foot traffic; a renewed focus on community engagement that drove a significant rise in on-site events; activation of underutilized space within Tower Square to reach new audiences; continued growth in outdoor programming to strengthen partnerships; and, looking ahead to 2026, a planned enhancement of our food menu to better reflect and complement the diverse experiences we offer.

Megan Burke, President and CEO, Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts

While rising prices, increased demand for services, and reductions in federal resources strained the Western Mass. nonprofit community in 2025, our nonprofit partners demonstrated resilience. More than 50% of the nonprofits serving our community reported funding losses, forcing them to do more with less.

Yet, this year revealed the strength of our communities. We saw our neighbors step up with incredible generosity of both time and money, deepening their commitment and finding creative ways to respond.

As the Community Foundation plans for the year ahead, our 35th year of impact, we are listening to residents as we hone our vision to advance equity and opportunity for all. We feel honored by the call to serve as a connector, supporting those who seek to give and the community helpers who are best placed to respond to changing needs. While we anticipate many new challenges in 2026, we are committed to standing with our communities, responding with urgency and trust, and meeting this moment together.

Sandra Doran, President, Bay Path University

The defining challenges in higher education today are affordability, access, and relevance. At Bay Path University, we are steadfast in delivering an affordable, high-quality education that leads to a career.

For more than 125 years, Bay Path has prepared learners for careers. We meet regularly with employers and business leaders because understanding workforce needs matters. Today, one message is clear: graduates must be AI literate.

That is why we are thoughtfully investing in augmented artificial intelligence as both a teaching tool and an educational resource — making learners career-ready while also improving efficiency and controlling costs. This approach delivers what students and employers expect in an education that must be affordable, relevant, and aligned with opportunity.

Thomas Dowling, CPA, Partner-in-Charge, Whittlesey

Looking ahead, I predict that talent shortages will continue to be a challenge for many industries. As a result, organizations will reconsider their approach to attracting, developing, and retaining their people. Rather than sticking to traditional hiring models, I anticipate that we’ll see an increased focus on investing in existing teams, whether that involves upskilling or adopting a more deliberate, longer-term approach to workforce planning.

Artificial intelligence will continue to become part of everyday operations, enabling businesses to work more efficiently and make better-informed decisions. With broader adoption comes increased responsibility, particularly in terms of governance, ethical use, and cybersecurity.

The organizations that find the right balance between new technology and human judgment will be better-positioned to strengthen their teams, adapt to change, and remain resilient.

Curtis Edgin, President, Caolo & Bieniek Architects

As Caolo & Bieniek looks forward to 2026 and beyond, the only thing we know for certain is there will continue to be change in the architecture and construction industry.

As codes and standards continue to evolve and material technologies improve, we’ve learned that these changes help us raise the bar in the environments we create for our clients and the communities we’re part of.

Meeting client needs, from enhanced building performance to concerns of increasing construction costs, requires us to be educated in the possibilities and apply that knowledge in how we serve our clients’ best interests.

Improved delivery technology provides our team with opportunities, but is only part of the answer. There still needs to be an experienced understanding of how buildings go together, as well as an awareness of conditions those in the field encounter.

We’re optimistic we will meet the challenges, as we have done for more than 60 years.

Jeffrey Fialky, Managing Shareholder, Bacon Wilson, P.C.

Overall, 2025 was a great year for business from our vantage point. We witnessed quite a bit of business succession as well as real estate activity, particularly in the commercial space. Favorable downward movement in interest rates was certainly a contributing factor, a catalytic trend that will inevitably continue into 2026 with at least one more interest rate cut in the forecast.

The likely theme this year, and for years to follow, is artificial intelligence. I read a recent article that stated that AI can currently replace 11% of the workforce. With a technological leap that outpaces the Industrial Revolution and internet boom by exponential proportions, the business community will continue to have to stay nimble as the future unfolds.

I do believe, however, that in the Pioneer Valley, while by no means immune or insulated from the impact of evolving technology, is nonetheless very well-positioned. Unlike communities in other parts of the state or country that have employment tied closely to the technology sectors, the Western Mass. economy is, to a large extent, based upon healthcare, manufacturing, and trades, industries that will still require the human touch.

I recently called a doctor’s office to schedule an appointment, and the appointment was scheduled by an AI assistant; I was surprised by the efficiency. So while you can see that certain jobs may be adversely affected by AI, potential realized savings in that regard opens up the opportunity for small businesses to continue to invest in growth of their core operations, which in turn will lead to expansion and hiring.

John Gannon, Partner, Skoler, Abbott & Presser, P.C.

The labor and employment law landscape for businesses is evolving in 2026. This year, employers will be navigating Massachusetts’ new pay transparency requirements while dealing with growing oversight of AI tools in hiring and workplace practices.

Massachusetts’ new pay transparency law requires many employers to post salary ranges in all job postings. This includes “any advertisement or job posting intended to recruit job applicants for a particular and specific employment position,” regardless of whether the employer recruits directly or utilizes a third party for such purposes.

Federally, employers are looking at potential new regulatory guidance on the use of AI-driven hiring tools, such as the No Robot Bosses Act, which is designed to establish safeguards against employment discrimination that may arise from AI algorithms. The legislation is also meant to ensure that human judgment remains a critical component in employment decisions.

These changes present new, unique compliance challenges for employers.

Lynn Gray-Yucka, General Manager, Holyoke Mall

Holyoke Mall’s strength lies in creatively curating the right tenant mix to drive revenue, enhance customer experience, strengthen market relevance, and enhance the overall asset value. We are optimized for sustained financial growth well into the future as we embark upon a substantial reinvestment into the infrastructure. This three-phase, multi-year enhancement project includes new paving, curbing, and landscaping; fresh paint on the exterior building, new signage packages, and interior upgrades that have already started and continue into 2026.

As the shopping center industry continues to be ever-changing, Holyoke Mall is a shining example as the only high-performing, super-regional property within our trade area. Twenty years ago, our center had a tenant mix that included 90% to 95% traditional retail. Today, that number is closer to 70% to 75%.

As business continues to evolve, Holyoke Mall will be ready for what comes next as the dominant shopping center in Western Mass., offering more than just traditional retail, but also best-in-class dining and entertainment concepts.

Roseann Martoccia, Executive Director, Access Care Partners

At Access Care Partners, we serve older adults and people with disabilities of any age, as well as providing support to families and caregivers. As we look at 2026, we know Massachusetts has a rapidly growing aging demographic; already, 27% of the Commonwealth’s current population are age 60 or older. This trend will continue for the next 10 to 15 years and bring with it increasing care needs, including dementia, chronic medical conditions, and behavioral health issues.

To meet these needs, funding for home and community-based services is more critical than ever. Supporting people in their homes is not only a cost-effective option; it also enables caregivers to remain in the workforce and provide economically for their families while contributing to the overall stability of the workforce in Massachusetts.

Our industry experienced 2025 as a year of uncertainty and funding challenges due to changes at the federal level. The impact on Massachusetts, our healthcare system, and care at home will continue in 2026 and beyond. We will approach the year with continued commitment to serving our communities’ needs by meeting these challenges and strengthening our advocacy.

Amy McMahan, Founder, Mesa Verde and NOM Meals

I think Western Mass. restaurants are going to continue to experience a thinning of the herd due to a shrinking skilled laborforce, rising food costs, and decreased consumer spending. But necessity is the mother of innovation, and these restaurants are modeling winning strategies:

• Equity as a business strategy: By paying a universal $25 per hour wage, Dreamhouse in Turners Falls has eliminated the front/back of the house pay differential, enabling higher wages in the kitchen. This translates into consistently high food quality and dining experience.

• Win-Win alternate revenue streams: Hillside Pizza in South Deerfield and Bernardston has long partnered with local nonprofits, providing fundraising mechanisms that benefit the community and provide a steady, separate income stream for their restaurants.

• Partnership and pop-ups: Ginger Love Café, a popular food truck, takes over Jake’s Northampton, a beloved breakfast spot, in the evening. Reduced rent and start-up costs mean a higher chance of survival for both parties.

• Workforce retention as a separator: The expansion of Northampton’s La Veracruzana into Amherst proves the endurance of legacy restaurants that have tenured, nimble, and skilled staff who execute affordable, high-quality food.

Megan Moynihan, CEO, United Way of Pioneer Valley

For more than 100 years, United Way of Pioneer Valley has stood alongside our neighbors in Hampden County, Granby, and South Hadley. Today, that commitment matters more than ever. We face challenges that demand collaboration, local knowledge, and unwavering dedication.

The need is real. In 2025, food insecurity surged by 447%, affecting 49,000 residents. Call2Talk answered more than 2,000 crisis calls, while Thrive guided 700 individuals toward financial stability. Yet, amid these challenges, hope shines through. Youth Leaders in Action is shaping tomorrow’s community builders. VolunteerConnect links thousands of volunteers with more than 100 organizations. And Stuff the Bus ensures students start school ready to learn.

We’re also investing in the nonprofit sector itself — because strong organizations create strong communities. Through programs like Community Leadership Connect, OnBoard, and Leaders Lounge, we equip local leaders to navigate unprecedented pressures.

Together, we’re building the next century of impact for the Pioneer Valley. Join us in making a difference.

Evan Plotkin, President, NAI Plotkin

Springfield’s commercial real estate market stands at an inflection point. As interest rates ease, capital is slowly returning to secondary markets that offer value investors can no longer find in gateway cities.

Downtown Springfield tells a compelling story. The more than $10 million dollar transformation of the former CityStage theater into the Hope Theater is creating a state-of-the-art cultural attraction and educational center. At 1350 Main St., the top two floors now house a cutting-edge STEM high school focused on science, engineering, technology, and mathematics, a model that points toward the future of office space. Perhaps more institutions of higher learning will follow this lead, repurposing traditional office buildings as we’ve done at One Financial Plaza.

The anticipated commuter rail connection to Boston could prove transformative, spurring development around the station neighborhood well before trains begin running. Decisions about the future courthouse location will significantly shape downtown’s trajectory. Across from MGM, residential and curated retail development is already underway — early stages of what promises to activate that critical corridor.

The trend toward downtown residential conversion is creating new vitality. More housing means more foot traffic, more retail demand, and a more vibrant urban core.

For patient investors, Springfield offers something increasingly rare — genuine upside in a market others have overlooked.

Nicole Polite, CEO, the MH Group

In 2026, healthcare staffing will continue to remain in high demand due to an aging population, increasing medical and behavioral health needs, high turnover and burnout, and ongoing labor shortages across the field. Hospitals, long-term care facilities, behavioral health programs, home care agencies, and recovery centers will continue to rely on staffing agencies to fill gaps caused by retirements, burnout, and turnover.

Staffing models such as per diem, contract, and travel will remain in high demand, placing greater emphasis on cost control and schedule optimization. Demand will remain strongest for registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, behavioral health clinicians, direct care workers, and home health aides.

There will be a stronger focus on regulatory and compliance requirements, particularly credential verification, background checks, worker classification, and pay transparency — along with faster onboarding while maintaining compliance.

Technology will assist in supporting compliance; however, healthcare is a highly regulated, human-centered industry. Patient care requires licensed professionals, supervision, ethical decision making, and relationship-based trust — areas where AI cannot operate independently.

Hannah Rechtschaffen, Director, Greenfield Business Assoc.

In 2026, business hits the intersection of high-tech efficiency and deeply human experience. AI is taking hold in the local marketplace, helping rural businesses punch above their weight. And it’s our job to help them compete. Online shopping isn’t slowing down, either; convenience is here to stay.

The twist: people are also showing up. Travel to the region is increasing, and there’s a quiet cultural reset. Less drinking, less doomscrolling, and more intentional socializing have led to growing demand for late-night spaces centered on connection: games, music, conversation, and creative gatherings.

For communities like Greenfield, this duality is not a contradiction — it’s an opportunity. The future of regional business is not digital or physical, but a thoughtful, well-supported blend of both: technology supporting human-centered experiences rather than replacing them.

None of this is happening without pressure or constraint. What’s encouraging is how places like Franklin County respond: pulling together regional and state leaders to advocate for policy changes that make progress possible, while staying relentlessly focused on the daily work — connecting businesses to opportunity, to one another, and to the resources they need to be hopeful about the future. That is where momentum turns into resilience.

Yes, there are tectonic shifts happening in how we do business, and there is a call back to the analog not as nostalgia, but as relief. 2026 will be a big year because we invested in places, people, and experiences that make this region worth showing up for.

Meg Sanders, CEO, Canna Provisions

If there is one thing we can count on in 2026, it’s that nobody in the cannabis industry truly knows what’s coming. The news about the Trump administration rescheduling cannabis to Schedule III have created the illusion of clarity, but let’s be honest. This is not the first time a White House has said, ‘hurry up and look at this issue.’ An executive order to study something is not the same as meaningful reform, and history has taught this industry not to confuse motion with progress.

At the same time, the Commonwealth is staring down a 2026 ballot initiative that could roll back adult-use sales entirely. If that happens, the results won’t be theoretical. The black market will surge overnight. Tens of thousands of jobs will vanish. Hundreds of millions in tax revenue will evaporate. And communities that embraced legal cannabis will be left to absorb the fallout. So when people confidently predict what 2026 will bring, I smile and take it with a grain of New Year’s salt.

The only certainty in cannabis right now is uncertainty, and savvy operators aren’t betting on promises or panic. Instead, they’re preparing for a year where adaptability, resilience, and clear-eyed realism will matter more than ever in Western Mass.

Timothy Suffish, CFA, Senior Vice President, Head of Equities, St. Germain Investments

Entering 2026, investors continue to expect more from their wealth management relationship. Simply managing their investments is not enough. They want a dedicated team of professionals to handle all of their finances. Whether it be their financial advisor walking them through their retirement plan options or a portfolio manager articulating market dynamics, clients expect a holistic approach that is professional and consistent with their expectations.

Wealth management continues steering more toward teams, as the work necessary to provide the maximum value to clients is simply too complex to take on for one person. A team comprised of advisors fluent in tax planning, estate planning, asset management, and financial planning is what’s expected to hit personal and professional financial goals.

Ultimately, trust is the foundation of a wealth management relationship. Having a trusted partner who is experienced and dependable is critical to accomplishing your financial goals.

George Timmons, President, Holyoke Community College

For community colleges, 2026 will be defined by one word: integration.

At HCC, we’ve spent six months in deep conversation — with faculty and staff, students, and nearly 100 regional business and nonprofit leaders — about the future we want to build together. Those conversations have positioned us to tackle the most pressing challenges in Western Mass. head-on.

HCC is uniquely positioned as the convener that brings diverse voices to the table. We sit at the intersection of education and workforce development, of student aspiration and employer need.

Free community college in Massachusetts has brought unprecedented enrollment growth and diversity to our campus. Our response isn’t to work harder in isolation — it’s to work smarter in partnership.

In 2026, we’ll leverage that convening power to build solutions: employer-driven programs that launch quickly, transportation coordination that gets students to class reliably, and wraparound supports addressing basic needs holistically. We’re partnering with regional employers to anticipate workforce gaps and prepare students for living-wage careers.

Community colleges belong to their communities. HCC will prove we’re the catalyst amplifying what’s great about Western Mass. while addressing our toughest challenges — together.

Paciorek Electric Builds on Almost Three Decades of Growth

By JosepG January 5, 2026

Features Special Coverage

Wired for Success

President Tim Paciorek

Tim Paciorek always knew he wanted to own a business one day. In fact, he can trace that itch for entrepreneurship back to when he was 8 years old and wanted a four-wheeler that cost $700.

“My father said, ‘if you want something like that, you’re going to have to pay for it yourself. But what I’ll do is match whatever you make. So you’ve got to go find a job. You’ve got to do something.’”

His first job was a paper route, which taught him about dealing with customers and collecting money — a job he soon supplemented with work on a local farm.

“When I saved $350, he put up the other $350, and I got my four-wheeler. That was, in a sense, teaching me delayed gratification and also having goals and dreams. That’s how it all started,” said Paciorek, who continued to do both jobs for several years and never stopped working throughout his teen years, from starting a car reconditioning enterprise when he was 12 to making Christmas ornaments at a woodcrafting shop, to raking leaves and mowing lawns.

“All of that was building up to owning a business,” he said. “I wanted to be successful, and I didn’t want to work for somebody for the rest of my life. Even at 8 years old, I wanted it. I knew I was going to have my own business one day.”

To do that, Paciorek decided to attend Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School in Northampton and learn a trade. He was interested in electrical, plumbing, carpentry, and automotive, especially the first two, but he chose electrical because his uncle, John Paciorek, had an electrical business in South Deerfield, and by his junior year, he was working there part-time as a co-op, and moved to full-time after graduation.

“I wanted to be successful, and I didn’t want to work for somebody for the rest of my life. Even at 8 years old, I wanted it. I knew I was going to have my own business one day.”

“He did a really good mix of work — residential and a lot of commercial, but also industrial. We worked at a couple of plastic factories, working on machine wiring, and we also did a lot of work at Mount Snow; we would go there from August to December and would work there six days a week, 10-hour days, rewiring the lodges and lifts and the condos and all kinds of stuff.

“Even though I was working for someone, I was learning a lot of things about the business, and watching a lot,” he added, “and I knew that I was going to own an electrical business one day.”

In 1997, the year he earned his electrical license at age 21, Paciorek started transitioning toward that goal by dedicating his days to his uncle’s business, but doing a lot of side work on nights and weekends — until July 4, 1998, which he calls “my personal Independence Day,” when he hung his own shingle, full-time.

“The rest is history,” he told BusinessWest — a history marked by strong business growth, an active commitment to cultivating the next generation of young electricians, and an intriguing real estate project in Hatfield that has become home not only to Paciorek Electric, but a host of small businesses.

“Now I’ve got my own son, Rocky, working for me — that was really a great moment for me when he decided to join the electrical field. He went to Smith Voke just like I did, learned the trade, and came to work for us; he’s also licensed,” Paciorek said. “And my brother, Tony, is also working for me. It’s really cool to have two family members working in the in the business.”

From the Ground Up

In fact, Paciorek now has 11 employees in all, and a fleet of 10 service vans, but it was a long road getting to this point.

“The first five years, I worked basically on my own. If I had a bigger job, if I needed extra hands to pull wire or whatever, I would call up some friends and have them come help me. But mostly it was just me for five years, doing everything myself.

Rally House, a tennis and pickleball facility in Hatfield, is among the projects Paciorek Electric has worked on.

“Many times, I look back and wonder how I did it,” he added. “I would work all during the day, and then at night I’d be in the office, sometimes until midnight, doing billing or work quotes, that type of thing.”

But he gradually got the help he needed, hiring his first apprentice — his brother — about five years in, and hiring an office manager five years after that. Growth has been steady ever since; these days, almost half the work is residential, and the rest commercial and industrial, the latter including work for such notable names as Deerfield Plastics, Pliant Corp., and high-tech, secure companies such as Telaxis and Millitech. In all of it, he relies on reputation.

“I always talk to my guys about customer service, about giving the customer what they want — as long as it’s legal, of course. Customers ask all the time, ‘do you have to do that?’ And we say, ‘yeah, we have to; it’s code.’ But we’ve had customers that wanted their light fixture moved five times. And we’ve done it. The customer’s always right as long as they’re paying for it.

“I always wanted to be in business, and even starting at 13 and 14 years old, I would go to different seminars about business, and I started learning about real estate, finding out that a lot of wealthy people held a lot of their investments in real estate.”

“That’s what we live by — to keep customer satisfaction up. My guys are great. We have a very strict code of ethics where we talk about customer service, keeping the place clean, using booties if the weather’s bad or they’ve got nice floors. And we keep good communication so the customer knows what’s happening — because sometimes you run into obstacles when you’re running wires. We try to keep the communication up so customers know where we’re at.”

Speaking of where the company is at — literally — Paciorek bought his current headquarters, the former home of General Cigar Co., in 2015. It wasn’t his first experience there, as it was on his paper route a couple decades earlier. The complex — with multiple buildings and vehicle bays — was more space than the electrical company needed, but he was thinking bigger than that.

“I always wanted to be in business, and even starting at 13 and 14 years old, I would go to different seminars about business, and I started learning about real estate, finding out that a lot of wealthy people held a lot of their investments in real estate. So I started taking real estate courses not to be a Realtor, but to be an investor or a developer. And I started learning about apartment buildings and commercial properties.”

Buying the 65 Elm St. complex — the third-largest building in Hatfield, with more than 83,000 square feet, plus a front house, two barns, and a five-car garage — not only meant consolidating what had become four different locations for his operation, but also having room to lease space to what are now about 20 small businesses, from financial services firms to wellness and behavioral health practices to other construction trades. In the winter, the building’s basement becomes a car storage business, where about 60 clients keep their vehicles, many of them classic show cars, out of the cold weather.

He credits Greenfield Savings Bank for taking a chance on the real estate project, which involved a complete gut job and renovation.

Tim Paciorek (center) has grown his team to 11 employees.

“They’ve been really great as far as helping me and seeing the vision that I had. Any time you invest in anybody, you’re taking a chance, and you hope that it goes right. And I think they saw the vision I had in this building. I give credit to all the different people that helped me get here through the years, from bankers to my accountants and attorneys. There’s a whole team of people that you need to do a project like this, or to be in business at all.”

Making Connections

All these perspectives — about entrepreneurship, the trades, and what it takes to succeed — are lessons Paciorek imparts to young people considering career options. And he has supported a number of apprentices starting out in the field; some have become full-time employees.

“The trades are definitely in need of more workers, people that will put their tools on and actually get out there and work,” he told BusinessWest. “The Baby Boomers are retiring, and they’ve been retiring for the last 10 years. So that is causing a huge shortage in electricians and plumbers and carpenters — all the trades. And it’s really hard to find new help, so you have to keep the young people coming in.”

One problem is that many vocational programs aren’t able to take as many students as they’d like due to a shortage of teachers, but Paciorek also sees a lack of motivation in many young people to do the hard work necessary to move ahead.

“The vast majority of this generation doesn’t have the skills or, unfortunately, the drive that a lot of us employers are looking for. And there are a lot of things that we’ve got to try to teach them, but some things can’t be taught,” he explained. “Things like a good handshake and eye contact, that stuff can be taught. But the drive is really hard.”

“Whenever I have kids in front of me, I tell them, ‘whatever you want to do, whether it be an electrician, a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber, a writer — whatever you want to do in life, you need to start learning about it.’”

For instance, he added, “that cell phone is dangerous. I tell all the guys, ‘you’ve got to stay off your cell phone. A customer doesn’t want to pay for you to be on your cell.’ And I’ve had to fire a couple of people in the past because of that. It’s a different generation — when I grew up, we didn’t have cell phones, so we just worked. Nowadays, it’s become a habit for a lot of this generation to be on their phone all the time. So that’s one of the things I say when I talk at the different schools.”

One major problem, he added, is the lack of job opportunities for young people compared to when he was growing up in the 1980s — which means fewer opportunities to develop the work ethic he learned early on. Jobs for teenagers are still around, he added, and motivated young people will find them, but they’re not as obvious.

“I talk to kids all the time, and they say, ‘well, I’m not old enough. I have to be a certain age.’ I say, ‘OK, then do what I did; go do your own business — wash somebody’s car, go rake leaves, find something else to do.’”

Certainly, not everyone grows up with the same drive as Paciorek, whose serial entrepreneurship over the years has also included almost two decades as a DJ, working about 40 weddings a year, and ownership of a Hatfield restaurant, Grill ’N Chill, now known as Posada’s Cantina, which he ran with his brother for eight years.

“Whenever I have kids in front of me, I tell them, ‘whatever you want to do, whether it be an electrician, a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber, a writer — whatever you want to do in life, you need to start learning about it.’ When I was young, I remember my dad telling me, ‘if you want to succeed, don’t go talk to a broke person; you talk to someone who’s successful. If you want to be a doctor, go talk to a doctor. If you want to be an electrician, go talk to an electrician.”

So he continues to talk to them, and encourage them to start training in a trade.

In his own work, Paciorek has carved out an impressive body of work, and took numerous opportunities during his talk with BusinessWest to credit everyone who has supported his journey, from his financial advisors to his parents, who instilled his early values, to Rocky and his fiancee — not to mention the customers who have trusted in Paciorek Electric and his real estate company, DiamondBack Properties, over the years.

And the business is still evolving, with one example being a robust business in generators, installing about 50 and servicing about 500 each year. “It started off as just a little side thing, a generator here, a generator there, but now it’s pretty big,” he said.

The same can be said of a 28-year-old electrical company and its visionary leader, who worked hard to earn a four-wheeler at 8 years old, and has worked hard to achieve a whole lot more ever since.

Baystate Leader Sees Momentum Even as Seas Get Choppier

By George O'Brien January 5, 2026

Healthcare News Special Coverage

Turning the Battleship

Peter Banko says that, despite a mountain of challenges, the Baystate Health system has achieved needed momentum.

Peter Banko was asked if he was frustrated.

He would certainly have good reason to be.

After all, Banko, president and CEO of Baystate Health, had spent the past 17 months or so trying to right the ship at the system — “turning around a battleship in a bathtub,” as he would later tell the audience at a forum on the state of the healthcare sector in the region — and had made a good amount of progress through difficult and unpopular decisions that included layoffs, cutbacks in many departments, and, most recently, buyouts for many employees, resulting in a profitable fiscal 2025.

But by his estimation, provisions within the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (or OB3, as he calls it), signed into law last July, will cost Baystate Health $146 million a year through its specific provisions and their aftereffects, and essentially wipe out all that’s been accomplished and bring the system back to where he started in terms of the size of the hole to dig out of.

“Those reductions wipe out our positive cash flow in one fell swoop,” said Banko, noting that the system exceeded budget expectations for fiscal 2025 and recorded a 3.6% EBIDA (earnings before interest, depreciation, and amortization). “We exceeded our budget expectations by about $50 million; it was the first time we exceeded our budget in six years. But whatever progress we made this year gets eliminated by the One Big Beautiful Bill; we’re down to zero again, and we start from scratch.”

“We’ve got a lot of great work going on behind the scenes that isn’t glamorous and won’t make headlines, but it’s the right work. I feel more optimistic than I’ve felt in a long time.”

So … while frustration would certainly be understandable, and the picture for 2026 is bleak by most accounts (more on that later), he prefers to be upbeat — to a degree.

“That’s because I believe we’ve created some momentum,” he said. “I’m happy with the momentum we’ve created. We’ve got a lot of great work going on behind the scenes that isn’t glamorous and won’t make headlines, but it’s the right work. I feel more optimistic than I’ve felt in a long time.

“I feel like we have the team and the committed board and committed team members that are willing to do the tough work and make the difficult decisions for it to be successful,” he went on, adding that there are certainly more difficult decisions to be made, and more consolidation likely in the healthcare industry — and 2026 is shaping up to be an ultra-challenging transition year for hospitals.

But, overall, he believes the ship has been turned and is positioned to navigate the turbulent seas that are forecasted.

For this issue and its focus on healthcare, we talked at length with Banko about the progress that’s been made, how much of that progress stands to be undone by the OB3, and what happens next as he continues the turn-around assignment he assumed in the fall of 2024.

Time of Transition

Banko said the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will result in $1 trillion in cuts nationally and represents “the largest rollback to federal support for healthcare in our lifetimes.”

Most of the impact to the Baystate system will not kick in until October, a month before the midterm elections, he went on, adding that online estimators project that the overall impact to Baystate will be more than $140 million. Broken down, these cuts involve everything from sharp increases to the number of uninsured individuals from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to a decrease in funding from Medicaid (MassHealth), to a loss of funds from the 340B Drug Pricing Program.

The impact to the system — and all providers — will be profound, he said.

Valley Springs Behavioral Health Hospital, one of Baystate Health’s most significant recent projects, opened in Holyoke in 2023.

“A lot of people won’t have insurance, so they won’t have access to coverage or financing,” he explained. “They’re going to delay care, and they’re increasingly have to use the ED when things are really serious, so we’re going to have more overcrowding. It would be shortsighted to say that this will most significantly impact the poor and vulnerable in our community; if you have commercial insurance, you can expect double-digit increases in your premiums the next five years because commercial insurance makes up the difference for Medicare and Medicaid.

“If you’re an employer in this state or anywhere in the United States, you’re going to be paying more for your insurance to cover the gaps here,” he went on, adding that, for systems like Baystate, the impact will be felt in the ER, certainly, but in other realms as well.

When asked to make projections on what will happen across the system and its four hospitals — Baystate Medical Center, Baystate Noble Hospital, Baystate Wing Hospital, and Baystate Franklin Medical Center — Banko said it’s too early to do so, with the specific impacts not likely to be known until the provisions of the bill take effect.

And that won’t be until almost a year from now, he went on, adding that, in most respects, 2026 will be what he called a “transition year.”

“It will be like preparing for a snowstorm,” he told BusinessWest before extending the metaphor further. “Everyone is going to be buying milk and bread and snow shovels; there’s going to be a lot of preparation and action in anticipation of next year.”

When asked how a system prepares for the storm that’s coming, he said the system will continue to make additions and adjustments in the ER in anticipation of more people using that front door instead of primary care.

“We’re aggressively recruiting nurses and physicians for the ER, and we’re working on improving our throughput in the hospital, which impacts the ER,” he explained. “We’re working on improving access and throughput, which will help.”

Overall, he said the system itself will manage, but he’s concerned about the human toll for the cutbacks and their impact on the overall health of the community.

“It will be like preparing for a snowstorm. Everyone is going to be buying milk and bread and snow shovels; there’s going to be a lot of preparation and action in anticipation of next year.”

“Let’s consider this from the humanistic end — someone who had coverage now doesn’t,” he said. “They may be in the middle of cancer treatment; they may be in the middle of a pregnancy. A few months from now, they get diagnosed with a condition, and they delay care, or they’re feeling symptoms, and they know they can’t afford care. From a community standpoint, we’re worried about the impact to the most vulnerable people in our community.

“How do we look our community in the face and say, ‘15% to 25% of you no longer have coverage,’” he went on. “This state has worked so hard, going back to Governor [Mitt] Romney, to provide care for as many people as possible — it’s hard to say all because some people fall through the cracks — and now, it’s all being dismantled.”

Bottom Line

And it’s unlikely there will be much, if any, help coming from Washington, Banko opined, noting that, for now, both sides consider what’s happening to be a “political win,” which makes action before the midterms unlikely in his view.

“Behind the scenes, I think everyone knows what the right things to do are,” he went on. “But OB3 has become a political football, so the folks left holding the bag are our governor and our Legislature — they’re going to have to fill a huge budget gap, $4 billion to $5 billion, and I don’t envy them having to try to figure that out. And our healthcare systems are left holding the bag because it impacts us most severely. Who gets lost in this are the people losing coverage — I’m not sure they have a voice at the moment.”

As for the Baystate system itself, Banko said that, when it comes to the progress made in 2025, budget-wise, roughly half is attributable to cost cutting, with the other half coming from revenue growth.

“We saw decent growth in our business last year, above what our expectations were,” he noted, adding that this growth came in ER volume, surgical volume, inpatient volume, and other realms. “More than half our financial improvement was solid revenue growth.”

Looking ahead to 2026, he’s projecting revenue growth of 2% to 3%, with expenses growing 6%.

“And in any business, that’s not a recipe for success,” he went on, adding that the system has identified core growth areas, including overall access to care.

“We lose a lot of our patients to Boston because they can’t get in here. So if we can grow revenue by 6% to 8% and trim some of our costs, that will allow us to stay in the game,” he explained, adding that there will be more cost cutting in the year ahead — at Baystate and most other providers.

There will also be some less profitable services cut back or eliminated by many providers, he said, as well as continued consolidation within the industry as systems look for all-important scale in the wake of the rising costs of doing business.

“We’re talking to a lot of organizations, and with each one, I have a confidentiality agreement that I can’t violate,” he said, withholding comment on rumored talks between Baystate and Mercy Medical Center. “So, I would just say this … everyone is talking to everyone right now. There isn’t a week that goes by that I’m not having a discussion with a competitor, someone in an adjacent market, someone in a non-adjacent market.

“Everyone is viewing the changes from OB3 as transformational, so everyone is trying to figure out the same thing,” he went on. “We’re all talking to one another about, ‘hey, how do we manage this?’ Or ‘can we manage this better together?’”

There is some evidence that scale has not worked out in healthcare, at least as much as it has in other industries, he continued, adding quickly that he believes scale does bring advantages; systems just need to seize those advantages.

“Our overhead costs are about 12.9%,” Banko explained. “Without more scale, we can bring that down to 10%, but best-practice health systems are below 8%, and there’s no way we can get below 8% without more scale.”

In the meantime, and as he mentioned earlier, he senses real momentum across the system, progress in many ways overshadowed by large headlines about layoffs and buyout programs.

“What gets published in the media is just the financial stuff,” he told BusinessWest. “So when we do a layoff or cut costs somewhere, that gets all the media attention, and it gets all the attention inside the organization. But I would say that 80% of the work is non-financial, and we’re making real progress.”

Heed These 2025 Federal Information Reporting Considerations

By Contributor January 5, 2026

Accounting and Tax Planning Special Coverage

A Time and Place for Everything

By Mary C. Walsh

As the tax filing season looms, employers must ensure compliance with federal information reporting requirements, including payroll and payment reporting to the government, employees, and other income recipients. Most of forms are required to be electronically filed. In 2026, there are new requirements for reporting employee tips and overtime. This article provides details regarding these reporting obligations.

General Federal Year-end Information Return Filing Requirements for Forms W-2, W-3, and 1099 (INT, NEC, and MISC)

• Electronic filing is required if at least 10 of the following forms, combined, are required to be filed: W-2, 1094, 1095-B, 1095-C, 1097-BTC, 1098, 1098-C, 1098-E, 1098-Q, 1098T, 1099, 3921, 3922, 5498, 9027, W02G, and 499R-2/W-2PR. In some cases, electronic filing is given more time to file with the IRS than paper filing.

• Filing and due date information is set forth in IRS Publication 509, Tax Calendars for use in 2026 (www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p509.pdf). See also IRS Publication 1220, Specifications for Electronic Filing of Forms 1097, 1098, 1099, 3921, 3922, 5498, and W-2G, which sets forth electronic filing format specifications.

• Typically, due dates fall at the end of a month. However, if a due date is a weekend day or holiday, the next business day becomes the due date. Also, Congress or the president may specify a different due date, e.g., if there is an emergency. In 2026, Jan. 31 is a Saturday, making Feb. 2 the next business day, and Feb. 28 is a Saturday, making March 2 the next business day.

“For 2025, the IRS encourages employers to provide some accounting so employees can claim the deduction on their federal tax returns. The IRS has stated that employers may report the amounts of qualified tips and overtime to employees through secure methods, including an online portal or additional written statements provided to employees.”

Information Reporting Due Dates for 2026

• W-2, Wage and Tax Statement: File with Social Security Administration (SSA), electronic and paper, by Feb. 2. Provide to employees by Feb. 2.

• W-3, Transmittal of Wage and Tax Statements: File with SSA, electronic and paper, by Feb. 2.

• 1099-INT, Interest Income and 1099-DIV, Dividend Income: File with IRS, electronic, by March 31. File with IRS, paper (must be accompanied with IRS Form 1096, Annual Summary and Transmittal of U.S. Information Returns) by March 2. Provide to recipients by Feb. 2.

• 1099-NEC, Non-employee Compensation: File with IRS, electronic and paper, by Feb. 2. Provide to recipients by Feb. 2.

• 1099-MISC, Miscellaneous Income: Nothing reported in box 8 (substitute payments in lieu of dividends or interest) or box 9 (crop insurance proceeds): File with IRS, electronic, by March 31. File with IRS, paper (must be accompanied with IRS Form 1096, Annual Summary and Transmittal of U.S. Information Returns) by March 2. Provide to recipients by Feb. 2.

• 1099-MISC, Miscellaneous Income: Amount reported in box 8 (substitute payments in lieu of dividends or interest) or box 9 (crop insurance proceeds): File with IRS, electronic, by March 31. File with IRS, paper (must be accompanied with IRS Form 1096, Annual Summary and Transmittal of U.S. Information Returns), by March 2. Provide to recipients by Feb. 2.

Special Issue: Tips and Overtime

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), enacted this past July, allows certain employees to deduct tips and overtime compensation. One area of uncertainty, affecting both employers and employees, regards 2025 payroll reporting for tips and overtime.

Under the OBBBA, from 2025 to 2028, certain employees who receive qualified tips may deduct up to $25,000 of those tips, and those who receive overtime pay may deduct up to $12,500 of qualified overtime compensation ($25,000 for joint filers).

To enable employees to report their deduction, the OBBBA requires employers to provide separate accounting of the total amount of cash tips and overtime. Employers failing to comply with these reporting requirements may be subject to penalties.

Although the IRS has released a draft version of Form W-2 for 2026 reflecting OBBBA changes, the 2025 version of the form will not be updated, creating a challenge for employer reporting compliance. As a result, for tax year 2025, the IRS announced that employers will not face penalties for failing to provide required tip and overtime accounting to employees (Notice 2025-62). This relief only applies to tax year 2025 because the IRS recognizes that employers might not have the information required to be reported.

For 2025, the IRS encourages employers to provide some accounting so employees can claim the deduction on their federal tax returns. The IRS has stated that employers may report the amounts of qualified tips and overtime to employees through secure methods, including an online portal or additional written statements provided to employees.

When reporting these amounts, employers should not stop at the maximum of $25,000 (tips) or $12,500 (overtime). The full amounts of qualified tips and overtime should be reported. It is up to employees to determine the maximum deductible amount when preparing their federal income tax returns.

With little authoritative guidance and difficulty getting full information from existing systems and payroll providers, employers must do their best in providing employees with this information. Employers could, for example, provide the information by separate letter or use W-2 Box 14 (Other). For the most current guidance (updated as issued), visit www.irs.gov/newsroom/one-big-beautiful-bill-provisions and click on “No tax on tips (Section 70201)” and “No tax on overtime (Section 70202).”

Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire do not allow employees to deduct tips or overtime; thus, this reporting issue largely does not impact New England and New York payroll reporting.

Finally, remember that this article is intended to serve only as a general guideline. Your personal circumstances will likely require careful examination. You should schedule a meeting with your adviser to assist with all your tax planning needs.

Mary C. Walsh is a senior manager at Meyers Brothers Kalicka, P.C. She holds an MS accounting and an MBA from Northeastern University, an LLM in taxation from Boston University School of Law, a JD from the University of Connecticut School of Law, and a BA from UMass Amherst. She is a CPA licensed in Florida and an attorney licensed in Massachusetts. She is a member of CPAmerica and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

Staying Current with Eversource’s Mike Vedovelli

By George O'Brien December 23, 2025

Where Are They Now?

Mike Vedovelli seen today at Eversource

Mike Vedovelli as a member of the 40 Under Forty class of 2011

Mike Vedovelli says it’s as if he had written the job description for himself.

Indeed, Eversource had posted for a Community Relations specialist, and the job description it sent out indicated it was looking for someone who knew the region — as in the four counties of Western Mass. — and also “knew the economic development side of things,” said Vedovelli, who had all this covered through previous career stops.

These included nearly a decade in Westfield’s Community Development office, several more running the Western Mass. office of the Massachusetts Office of Business Development (MOBD), and then a few years as director of Community Development in Chicopee.

He thought that experience qualified him to join the giant utility in the community relations role, and those doing the hiring agreed, thus beginning an intriguing chapter in the career of this 2011 40 Under Forty honoree. And he’s written a few more since joining Eversource, rising in the ranks, first as manager of Community Relations for Massachusetts (overseeing the team of specialists, each serving their own region), and currently as director of Community Relations and Economic Development in Massachusetts.

Based at the utility’s facility on Cadwell Drive in Springfield, but frequently on the road to communities in every corner of the state, Vedovelli now oversees a team of 14, “which rises to 140 during storm events,” he said, adding that one of his many responsibilities is to work with those on his teams to coordinate response to severe weather in the more than 70 communities served by the utility.

“Each city and town has a designated liaison,” he explained, adding that, from an incident-command structure in Boston, he oversees these liaisons as they work with their respective communities on preparation for, and response to, severe weather.

Community Focus

We’ll get back to the weather and how Vedovelli and Eversource prepares for it. But first, a look back.

Vedovelli, who grew up in Indian Orchard and stayed in the region, first started working in government and economic development when he became an accountant and Grants Compliance coordinator in the Westfield Community Development office, overseeing HUD initiatives and especially the Community Development Block Grant program.

He worked in Westfield for more than 10 years before becoming a regional director for the Massachusetts Office of Business Development, with the region essentially being everything west of Worcester — 101 cities and towns, a number that has stuck with him.

While getting to know those cities and towns in the 413 and their business communities, he helped several companies, including Titeflex and Smith & Wesson (which would eventually relocate its headquarters and significant operations to Tennessee starting in 2021), stay in the region, expand, and create more jobs.

“I made a point of getting to know all four counties as well as I could — knowing not just the businesses, but the fabric of the communities — and making connections.”

“I was representing the governor and the administration, and you had to be aware of what was occurring on many different levels, not just in business development opportunities,” he said of his work at MOBD and now it would provide him with invaluable experience for career stops to come. “I made a point of getting to know all four counties as well as I could — knowing not just the businesses, but the fabric of the communities — and making connections.”

It was rewarding work that came to an abrupt end with the change of gubernatorial administrations in January 2015. A few months later, one of those connections he’d made paid off when he got a call from then-Chicopee Mayor Michael Kos to see if he would be interested in becoming the city’s next director of Community Development.

Vedovelli was, and spent the next few years on projects ranging from redevelopment of the former Uniroyal plant to the opening of a Mercedes-Benz dealership on Burnett Road.

But then, he read the job description that seemed written for him.

Over the past nine years, he has added several new responsibilities, but maintains that the work still comes down to making connections and building relationships, something he’s been doing his whole career, while “handling all things Eversource, on the gas, electric, and transmission sides.

“Every day is different — that’s the 24/7 nature of the business,” he said of his work and what he likes most about it, adding that his job description is varied and includes everything from educating public officials, communities, and other key partners on Eversource’s projects to conducting outreach for the siting of major projects and strategic initiatives.

Power Play

In recent years, a growing focus has been on meeting the state’s decarbonization goals and the many investments needed to make that happen.

“We’re working very closely with our load forecasting team to analyze areas as we move toward decarbonization, and the loads that will put forth on the system,” he explained. “New infrastructure will be needed, and placing infrastructure is always a challenge, while also upgrading the existing system to make it as safe and reliable as we can.

“People are relying on power more and more — not just for their home and business, but for electric vehicles and everything else that requires power,” he went on. “It’s a needed resource.”

Then there’s the weather, which has always been a very big part of this job, he said, adding that the utility contracts with several weather services and partners with the University of Connecticut, which creates the UConn Outage Prediction Model, which is fed with high-resolution weather data to forecast a storm’s impact on the electric grid.

The model takes into account everything from snowfall amounts to wind speeds to the amount of foliage in trees (a huge factor in the devastating impact from the pre-Halloween storm in 2011) to project the level of power outages, he went on.

“With the information that we get from the weather service and the information we get from the prediction models, the incident commander can make decisions on enacting an emergency response plan,” Vedovelli explained. “Everyone in the company has a storm role.”

And while the community liaisons have many responsibilities, he said, the biggest is communicating with officials in that city or town so that they can make informed decisions.

“If they know when a road is going to be open, if they know when power is going to be restored, they can make decisions for their community,” he told BusinessWest, adding that this is especially true during weather events that stretch over several days.

Preparation is always the key, he said, adding that Eversource is prepping for hurricane season from June to early November, and there are regular training programs to help ensure that those at the utility are prepared for whatever might happen and have the necessary resources in place. Such was the case with three tornadoes that touched down on Cape Cod in July 2019, an unexpected weather event, he noted.

“If you think about the Cape and how many people are there in July … now mix in a tornado,” he said. “That tornado came through on a Tuesday, and everything was buttoned up and cleaned up by Thursday. That shows you the power of being prepared.”

Helping the utility and communities across the state be prepared for such calamities is now a big part of Vedovelli’s job description. No, he didn’t write it himself, but his past experiences have enabled him to carry it out and make a surge — yes, that’s an industry term — in his career.

Appeals Court to Address Employers’ Shield to Equal Pay Liability

By Contributor December 23, 2025

Law

Work in Progress

By Meaghan Murphy, Esq.

A Massachusetts Superior Court recently dismissed claims brought by an employee under the Massachusetts Equal Pay Act (MEPA) and the Massachusetts anti-discrimination law after an employer successfully used the MEPA’s absolute defense to liability. Unhappy with the outcome, the employee who filed the lawsuit appealed the Superior Court’s decision, and that appeal is pending.

The Appeals Court heard argument in this case on Sept. 3, and a decision is expected in the coming months. That decision will be the first appellate guidance on the affirmative defense available to employers under MEPA and will set the standard for pay equity disputes across the state.

Before diving into the case on appeal, it is important to understand what MEPA prohibits and requires, and what the employer defense that acts as a total shield to liability is all about.

What MEPA Does

MEPA applies only to claims of discriminatory pay based on gender. The law prohibits employers from paying employees less due to their gender, and further requires employers to pay employees equal pay for comparable work.

Meaghan Murphy

“The Appeals Court affirms the Superior Court’s dismissal of Woodward’s claims, it might mean that employers can rely on self-evaluations and proposed changes as a shield to liability, without actually making the changes — a lower standard for this affirmative defense than expected.”

Comparable work is work that requires substantially similar skill, effort, and responsibility, and is performed under similar working conditions. A job title or job description alone does not determine if two employees are performing comparable jobs. A more fact-specific analysis of the day-to-day duties and responsibilities is typically required.

The ‘Evaluate and Progress’ Defense

MEPA contains a rare ‘safe harbor’ provision that courts can rely on to dismiss MEPA claims when an employer successfully shows they have met the legal requirements. Under §105A(d) of MEPA, employers are protected from liability for gender-based pay disparity claims if they complete “a self-evaluation” of their own pay practices “in good faith” and demonstrate “reasonable progress” toward eliminating any identified wage differentials based on gender for comparable work. An important caveat: that self-evaluation must be completed within three years of an employee (or group of employees) filing a claim under MEPA.

If an employer can satisfy these requirements, then MEPA claims are barred. In other words, there is no liability for employers who can show they took these steps within three years of getting sued under MEPA. Of course, not all employers conduct these self-evaluations. But for those that do, this ‘evaluate and progress’ defense is a total game changer.

The Case on Appeal

In Woodward v. Board of Registration in Nursing et al., the plaintiff, Lauren Woodward, was hired by the Board of Registration in Nursing as a compliance officer. Woodward is a woman, and the two other compliance officers at the time were men.

Part of a compliance officer’s pay was based on the number of years of relevant or similar work experience they had prior to being hired. The board gave credit — and increased the pay — for that prior experience. All three compliance officers were credited with different numbers of years of experience, but the two men were credited with more years based on their respective experience. That resulted in the men being paid more than Woodward for the same job.

In June 2020, Woodward filed a lawsuit alleging that she was paid less than the two male compliance officers. She asserted a claim under MEPA and a sex discrimination claim under the Massachusetts anti-discrimination law based on these same allegations of sex-based pay disparity.

In a motion filed with the court, the board asked that the claims be dismissed and asserted the ‘evaluate and progress’ defense under MEPA. The board argued that it had conducted a good-faith self-evaluation of its pay practices within three years of Woodward’s claim being filed, that it had identified wage differentials based on gender for comparable work, and that it had made reasonable progress towards eliminating those wage differentials.

During its self-evaluation, which the board said was conducted in November 2019, the board identified seven individuals — both women and men — who were subject to potentially impermissible pay disparities. The board proposed that the pay for all seven employees be adjusted upward to match the pay of their peers doing comparable work. Notably, Woodward was not one of the seven employees identified during the evaluation, so her pay was not proposed to be adjusted upward to match that of her two male co-workers.

Based on these facts, the board argued, it had satisfied the requirements of the ‘evaluate and progress’ defense and, therefore, is shielded from Woodward’s MEPA claim.

Woodward did not dispute that the board had conducted a self-evaluation of its pay practices. However, she disputed other important facts, including whether the self-evaluation was conducted in good faith and whether the board made reasonable progress toward eliminating wage differentials based on the findings of that self-evaluation.

Interestingly, Woodward pointed out that, while the board had proposed adjustments to the pay for the seven employees identified, it had not actually made those adjustments. Therefore, according to Woodward, the board failed to show reasonable progress toward correcting the gender-based pay disparities.

The court was not persuaded by this argument from Woodward, finding that the proposal for pay adjustments for the employees identified was enough. According to the court, though evidence of actual pay increases would have demonstrated greater progress towards eliminating gender-based wage differentials, evidence of the board’s first step toward such pay increases — identifying potentially impermissible wage differentials and proposing corresponding pay increases, subject to funding approval — appears to satisfy the requirements of MEPA.

The board also argued that, even if it could not use the ‘evaluate and progress’ defense, the pay disparity between Woodward and her male peers was lawful because it was based on their varying experience and not their differing genders. But the court did not get to that argument because the board successfully demonstrated it was entitled to the affirmative defense MEPA provides. So the court stopped there.

The court also did not address the merits of Woodward’s sex discrimination claim under the state’s anti-discrimination law. Under MEPA, an employer who can establish the ‘evaluate and progress’ defense avoids liability under MEPA and the state’s anti-discrimination law.

Woodward’s claims were dismissed at the summary judgment stage (i.e., before ever getting to a jury). As mentioned above, Woodward has appealed. In her appeal, Woodward contends that the court improperly analyzed her claims and how MEPA’s ‘evaluate and progress’ defense should be applied.

What’s Next?

Employers and employees alike should be interested in the Appeals Court’s decision in this case. If the Appeals Court affirms the Superior Court’s dismissal of Woodward’s claims, it might mean that employers can rely on self-evaluations and proposed changes as a shield to liability, without actually making the changes — a lower standard for this affirmative defense than expected.

Alternatively, the Appeals Court could disagree with the Superior Court’s dismissal of Woodward’s claims and send the case back down for further analysis, which might result in a jury deciding the case. A decision is expected in the coming months.

Meaghan Murphy is an attorney with Skoler, Abbott & Presser, P.C. Licensed in both Connecticut and Massachusetts, she regularly advises clients on various workplace issues, including discipline and performance matters, policy development and implementation, and compliance with local, state, and federal laws and regulations.

How to Make the Most of Your Charitable Giving

By Contributor December 23, 2025

Law

Choosing a Cause That Matters

By Gina M. Barry, Esq.

As we come to the holiday season, charitable giving comes to the fore. Do you donate money to charity each year? Perhaps you donate to an organization dedicated to finding a cure for an awful disease. Perhaps you choose to benefit organizations that support and encourage positive growth in our youth. Perhaps you decide to support the local animal shelter or abuse prevention.

To reap the most benefit from charitable giving, you must first choose an appropriate charity to benefit from your generosity. There are thousands of charities working within a huge variety of causes from which to choose. Thus, you can be certain there is a charity working to bring positive change in a way that you would love to support. Of course, the causes touched upon above are just a few examples of where your donation can make a difference.

Once you have decided that you would like to support a charitable cause, it is important to determine how you will contribute. Most will choose to donate cash; however, you might also consider donating highly appreciated securities, which would allow you to avoid paying the capital gains tax on those assets. Likewise, the charity also would avoid paying this tax due to its charitable status.

Aside from a monetary donation, you may also donate goods. When purging your household to make way for new holiday items, you can donate those that are gently used, but no longer desired. For example, you may have a pantry full of uneaten, non-perishable food that your family is not eating. Consider filling a couple of grocery bags with this food and donating to your local food pantry.

“Donations claimed as tax-deductible contributions for 2025 must be actually paid to the charity on or before Dec. 31, 2025, and it is best always to obtain a receipt for your donation regardless of the amount.”

Likewise, children often grow out of clothes and get bored with their toys while they are still in good repair. Many charities that benefit children would be delighted to receive these clothes and toys to help the children that they serve. Similarly, when you and your old vehicle finally part ways, you do not have to send the vehicle to a junkyard. Many charities accept any vehicle, working or not, as a donation.

If making a monetary contribution or a donation of goods is not possible at this time, consider volunteering your time to your favorite cause. Elder services, animal shelters, hospitals, and soup kitchens are all wonderful places to volunteer. While the time you volunteer is not tax-deductible, any out-of-pocket expenses associated with volunteering are usually deductible. For example, travel expenses to and from the volunteer site, as well as parking fees and tolls, may be deducted.

Next Steps

When you have decided which cause you would like to help and in what manner, you are almost ready to make a donation. Be certain the charity has received approval from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as being eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions. You can determine the tax-exempt status of an organization either by contacting your local IRS office or by asking the organization for a copy of its ‘letter of determination,’ which is the formal notification the organization receives from the IRS once its tax-exempt status has been approved. Also, IRS Publication 78, Cumulative List of Organizations, is an annual listing of thousands of organizations that can accept tax-deductible donations.

Donations claimed as tax-deductible contributions for 2025 must be actually paid to the charity on or before Dec. 31, 2025, and it is best always to obtain a receipt for your donation regardless of the amount. When considering donating to charity, it is also important to check in with your tax advisor, as there have been some important changes.

For example, starting in 2026, even taxpayers who take the standard deduction (i.e., don’t itemize) can claim a modest ‘above-the-line’ deduction — up to $1,000 for singles and $2,000 for married couples filing jointly. For those who do itemize, deductions for charitable contributions will apply only to the portion that exceeds 0.5% of adjusted gross income. That means the first 0.5% of adjusted gross income in charitable gifts each year will not reduce taxable income. Further, in 2026, the tax benefits of itemized charitable deductions will be capped at 35%, even for those in the 37% marginal tax bracket. Thus, to make the most of your charitable giving, be sure to consult your advisor before making your donations.

Charitable giving is extremely rewarding. You will not only reap the benefit of knowing that you are helping to make a difference in this world, but when tax season comes, you may enjoy a beneficial tax deduction as well.

Gina M. Barry is an attorney in the Springfield office of Bacon Wilson, P.C. She is a member of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, the Estate Planning Council, and the Western Massachusetts Elder Care Professionals Assoc. She concentrates her practice in the areas of estate and asset protection planning, probate administration, guardianships, conservatorships, and residential real estate.

Eversource Wins Award for Electric Grid Monitoring System

By BusinessWest Staff December 23, 2025

Environment and Engineering

Innovative Approach

From left: Eversource Senior Vice President of Engineering Digaunto Chatterjee, Eversource Manager of Substation and Transmission Data Innovation Junhui Zhao, Assoc. of Edison Illuminating Companies Vice President of Technical Strategy Elizabeth Cook, and Assoc. of Edison Illuminating Companies CEO Steve Hauser.

In recognition of its ongoing commitment to sustainability in providing safe, reliable electric service to customers, Eversource has been honored with a 2025 Achievement Award from the Assoc. of Edison Illuminating Companies (AEIC), the electric utility industry’s longest-serving and preeminent association of leading operations experts.

The AEIC Achievement Awards are presented annually to member utilities and individuals who demonstrate significant contributions to advancing operational excellence in the electric industry. This year, Eversource received one of the prestigious awards for developing a cutting-edge leak detection method for high-pressure-fluid-filled (HPFF) cables — a type of high-voltage, underground electric transmission line that runs through densely populated areas like Boston — which is already helping to enhance the operational efficiency of the grid and mitigate environmental risk.

“This remarkable technology has reduced the time required to detect leaks within these underground transmission networks from several days to a few hours, and we are already seeing in practice how valuable this application is for our system operators, as it allows us to respond to any issues and address them even more quickly and efficiently,” said Digaunto Chatterjee, Eversource’s senior vice president of Engineering.

“Not only does this transformative monitoring tool provide substantial operational benefits, it can also be implemented cost-effectively, creating vast potential for this method to become a scalable solution as utilities across the country face challenges of addressing aging infrastructure and maintaining environmental responsibility.”

“Not only does this transformative monitoring tool provide substantial operational benefits, it can also be implemented cost-effectively, creating vast potential for this method to become a scalable solution as utilities across the country face challenges of addressing aging infrastructure and maintaining environmental responsibility,” he added. “I’m incredibly proud of our team for being recognized by AEIC for their achievements on this innovative project, which we hope will serve as a model for similar advancements throughout the industry.”

Operated in Boston and other cities throughout Eversource’s three-state service territory, HPFF systems are designed to provide safe, reliable and efficient delivery of electricity in densely populated urban areas. Because of the extensive lengths and critical nature of these underground, high-voltage power lines, HPFF systems require smart, highly sensitive methods of leak detection monitoring.

Eversource’s team of engineers was honored with the 2025 AEIC Achievement Award for the solution they developed to address these challenges in the Boston area — a dynamic monitoring dashboard powered by artificial intelligence, which offers comprehensive insights into the operational status of HPFF networks that allow for a dramatic reduction in leakage detection time, in turn lowering environmental risk.

Since its implementation in late 2023, the early detection system has been rigorously tested and has already proven to be effective in detecting early-stage leaks within the HPFF network in Boston, highlighting the benefits of integrating sophisticated analytics with operational expertise. Because this innovative tool is entirely data-driven and does not require new sensors, it is also cost-efficient and provides greater potential for the system to be more widely adopted.

Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation Grants Support Perinatal Health

By BusinessWest Staff December 23, 2025

Insurance

Advancing Equity

The Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation announced $771,000 in new grant funding to support 15 organizations working to improve perinatal health across Massachusetts through its Perinatal Health Initiative, a multi-year program aimed at reducing racial inequities in perinatal health outcomes.

Now in its second cycle, the multi-year Perinatal Health Initiative grant program is part of the foundation’s broader strategy of grantmaking and policy analysis aimed at better understanding and disrupting structural racism and broadening health equity.

Building on the foundation’s 2024 effort, the two-year program was shaped by insights from community partners, fellow funders, and an ongoing assessment of the perinatal health landscape. Seven of the organizations funded in 2025 are continuing grantees from the foundation’s initial cohort to deepen their impact through this next phase. The grants support organizations providing community-based perinatal education and support, expanding the perinatal workforce, and policy advocacy.

“These organizations are creating lasting improvements in perinatal health by expanding access to culturally responsive care and centering community voices.”

“These organizations are creating lasting improvements in perinatal health by expanding access to culturally responsive care and centering community voices,” said Audrey Shelto, president and CEO of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation. “Their work exemplifies the power of community-based leadership in achieving health equity.”

The foundation’s board of directors approved two-year grants ranging from $25,000 to $60,000 for each of the following nonprofit organizations and their projects:

• Accompany Doula Care, Boston, which will partner with Health Leads and collaborate with healthcare systems, advocates, and providers to launch a cross-sector workgroup to increase equitable maternal health outcomes by integrating doulas into clinical care teams and creating supportive hospital policies;

• Berkshire Nursing Families, to expand the organization’s support of families who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color in Berkshire County by launching perinatal education programs, training new staff to become certified lactation counselors, and building a diverse workforce;

• Family Health Center of Worcester, to expand the capacity of its OB Advocates program, which connects community members with trained and culturally aligned doulas during pregnancy through two years postpartum;

• First Teacher Boston, which will integrate its pilot perinatal health program into its community-based parent education for Black and Brown families in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, offering year-round workshops, infant-focused resources, and professional development for staff in perinatal care;

• Greater Lowell Health Alliance of CHNA 10, which will build upon its Doula Academy to expand, diversify, and increase skills of the local perinatal workforce in the Lowell area;

• Greenfield Community College Foundation, to create Massachusetts’ first public certified professional midwives accredited training program to increase access to a pipeline of trained, licensed midwives and expand community birth options;

• It Takes a Village, Huntington, which will partner with the Green River Doula Network to provide community-led perinatal education, perinatal mood and anxiety disorder prevention, labor preparation, postpartum care, breastfeeding support, peer-led support circles, and extended home visits for historically marginalized families in Western Mass.;

• Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which will support the Mind the Gap Coalition’s statewide advocacy to strengthen perinatal mental health policies and align efforts across the continuum from prenatal to infancy;

• Nantucket Community School, to increase access to childbirth education and lactation supports by providing classes and training three instructors from Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities and those fluent in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese;

• Neighborhood Birth Center, Roxbury, to educate public health experts, policy makers, and payers regarding issues to advance midwifery education, workforce development, and access to birth centers, and lead a campaign to promote equitable reimbursement for licensed midwives and birth center facilities;

• North Quabbin Health Collaborative, Orange, which will expand one-to-one nurse visits for families up to one-year postpartum in rural and structurally marginalized communities in the towns of Orange, New Salem, Petersham, Warwick, and Wendell, providing health education programs, screening, and referrals;

• Propa City Community Outreach, Roxbury, which will implement a community-centered initiative focused on perinatal loss, expanding access to healing-centered education, connecting families and care providers across Massachusetts, and reducing isolation for families experiencing loss;

• Sacred Birthing Village, New Bedford, to train 12 multi-ethnic and linguistically diverse women in Southeastern Mass. to provide doula care and prepare them to meet state certification requirements for MassHealth-covered services;

• Worcester Addresses Childhood Trauma, which will partner with Worcester Public Health to deliver culturally responsive perinatal education, public awareness campaigns, and events guided by the Citywide Black and Brown Maternal Health Work Plan; and

• Worcester RISE for Health, to strengthen its Maternal Care Access program for refugee and immigrant communities by providing practice-based mentorship for doulas and developing a centralized referral system and wraparound supports.

The Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation will continue to collaborate with other foundations working in perinatal health to collectively learn, align philanthropic efforts, and elevate local leadership and community-led solutions to advance birth equity in Massachusetts.

What Employers Must Know About Salary Range Transparency Law

By Contributor December 22, 2025

Law Special Coverage

Out in the Open

By Michael Lewis, Esq.

On Oct. 29, Massachusetts’ pay transparency law took effect. Employers must post a good-faith pay range for each specific position and provide that range to applicants and employees on request. Larger employers must also submit workforce equal employment opportunity (EEO) data to the state.

Actions to take now: Set credible pay ranges, update posting templates, train managers and recruiters, and calendar your EEO data submission.

Posting and disclosure duties apply if you averaged 25 or more Massachusetts employees last year. Count all employees whose primary place of work is Massachusetts, including full-time, part-time, seasonal, and temporary workers. Include remote employees tied to a Massachusetts worksite and out-of-state employees who report to or are assigned to a Massachusetts base. Determine coverage once a year by averaging headcount across all pay periods. The separate EEO data reporting duty applies to employers with 100 or more Massachusetts employees that already file EEO reports with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Your postings must show a real pay range for Massachusetts roles. Every advertisement or job posting for a particular and specific position with a Massachusetts primary place of work must list a range you reasonably expect to pay at the time of posting. Third-party and agency postings count. If pay is by commission or piece rate, include the expected commission or piece rate range. The law does not require listing benefits or bonuses.

You also must disclose ranges to applicants and current employees. Upon request, give any applicant the range for the posted position. Give current employees the range when you offer a promotion or transfer, and upon request for their own position, even if no vacancy exists. Make sure managers know who answers these requests and how.

“Every advertisement or job posting for a particular and specific position with a Massachusetts primary place of work must list a range you reasonably expect to pay at the time of posting.”

‘Primary place of work’ reaches remote and hybrid setups. If a role reports to or is assigned to a Massachusetts worksite, treat it as covered, even when the individual works outside the state. If the role can be performed in Massachusetts, assume the posting rule applies.

Enforcement sits with the attorney general; there is no private lawsuit. Expect a warning for a first violation, then escalating civil penalties. Through Oct. 29, 2027, you get two business days to cure after a notice. Retaliation against applicants or employees who seek ranges or complain about violations is prohibited.

Large employers must submit EEO workforce data to the Commonwealth. If you file EEO-1 (or EEO-3/4/5, as applicable) with the EEOC, you must transmit the same reports to the Secretary of the Commonwealth on the state schedule. The state will publish aggregate industry reports; individual employer submissions are not public records.

Seven Practical Steps to Get Compliant Quickly

• Decide coverage. Run the 25-employee average using last year’s payroll periods. Flag multi-state and remote roles tied to Massachusetts.

• Map positions. List all ‘particular and specific’ jobs in Massachusetts, including internal ladders and common transfer paths.

• Set ranges now. Build good-faith minimums and maximums for each position using market data, internal equity, geography, and level. Avoid inflated bands that you would not actually pay.

• Standardize postings. Add a salary-range line to every template and require recruiters and agencies to include it. For social posts, link to the full posting with the range.

• Train managers and recruiters. Give a script for handling range requests. Remind teams not to ask for salary history until after an offer. Reinforce anti-retaliation.

• Document and monitor. Keep a living list of ranges, the date set, the factors considered, and the owner. Review at set intervals and after material changes.

• Calendar the data filings. If you file EEO reports federally, calendar the Massachusetts submission dates and designate the filer.

Templates You Can Use Today

Required range line for postings: “Pay range for this role: $__ to $__ per year [or $__ to $__ per hour]. Actual pay will reflect skills, experience, and job-related factors. This role [includes commission with an expected range of $__ to $__ ] is paid by piece rate with an expected range of $__ to $__].”

Applicant range request response: “Thank you for your interest. The pay range for the [position] is $__ to $__ [plus commission/piece rate as posted].”

Employee request for current position: “The current pay range for your position, [position/title/level/location], is $__ to $__. We review ranges on [cadence] based on market data, skills, and responsibilities.”

Common Questions from Employers

Do we need to update a posting if the range changes during the search? Post the range you reasonably expect to pay when you publish the posting. If your range materially changes during the search, update the posting and your internal file.

Do we need to include bonuses or benefits? No. List the base salary or hourly range. Include commission or piece-rate ranges if those pay forms apply.

Do internal promotions without a posting trigger disclosure? Yes. Provide the range when offering a promotion or transfer.

Do we have to share ranges for every job on demand? Applicants get the posted position’s range on request. Employees get their own position’s range on request, even when no opening exists.

How should we handle multi-state postings? If the role could be filled by someone whose primary place of work is Massachusetts — or the role reports to a Massachusetts worksite — include a Massachusetts-compliant range.

Key Dates and Thresholds at a Glance

• Oct. 29, 2025: Salary-range posting and disclosure duties began for employers with 25 or more Massachusetts employees.

• Feb. 1, 2026 (EEO reporting): EEO-1 due annually; EEO-3 and EEO-5 due in odd-numbered years; EEO-4 due in even-numbered years — only for employers that file these reports with the EEOC.

• Through Oct. 29, 2027: Two-business-day cure period after a notice from the attorney general.

Why Act Now?

Pay ranges will surface internally and externally. Employees will compare. Posting ranges that you cannot defend invites morale issues and legal risk. You control the narrative by setting credible bands, training your teams, and responding cleanly to requests.

Michael Lewis is an attorney with the Commercial Litigation Group at Halloran Sage, handling complex business and employment disputes for a wide range of clients in industries including healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and technology.

Engineering Firms Prioritize Ways to Attract, Develop New Talent

By Joseph Bednar December 22, 2025

Environment and Engineering Special Coverage

Something to Build On

Two Western New England University students work on a jet engine they built. (Photo courtesy of Western New England University)

Among the courses Mike Rust teaches at Western New England University (WNE) is “Introduction to Engineering,” a very hands-on class that teaches the engineering design process to freshmen through a robotics development project.

At first, “they’re looking at me like, ‘I don’t know how to do these things.’ And then we train them in all the technical things that they need to do,” said Rust, professor of Biomedical Engineering and director of Experiential and Entrepreneurial Learning at WNE. “Over time, they’re weaning off, and at the end of the course, the faculty’s checking in, but the students are doing it themselves. They almost don’t notice, but by the end, they’re acting like an engineer; they’re thinking like an engineer — because they’ve lived and breathed it their first year on campus.

“When I was a student a couple decades ago, we didn’t get a project like that to work on until junior year,” Rust said, adding that giving students hands-on experience from day one helps them thrive throughout college — which can translate into success in internship experiences and their early career. “The context sticks a little better when they have the muscle memory because they’ve experienced it, not just thought about it.”

It’s not just in class that WNE engineering students are preparing for the real world. At the Delbridge Career Center, the university’s career services hub, a professional adviser is assigned to each student, and available resources include résumé development, mock interviews, internship connections, and an alumni network.

“Engineering is a professionally oriented field, and students, when they’re coming through our programs, are already thinking in these terms when they start: where are they going to go with this degree? What are they going to do long term?” Rust said, explaining how those career services tie into the hands-on classroom model.

“The context sticks a little better when they have the muscle memory because they’ve experienced it, not just thought about it.”

“We teach theory, but we’re always putting that theory into practice with projects; students are actually doing it. So when they go to the interview, they can say, ‘I have done these things; this is the value I can provide your company.’ And when they get their first job after graduation, they can hit the ground running.

“Everyone needs to be trained when they join a company,” he added, “but what we hear from companies is that the learning curve is a little flatter because they’ve got a lot of that hands-on exposure.”

That’s appreciated by firms like Westfield-based Tighe & Bond, a very large, multi-state engineering firm that hires close to 100 new employees each year.

Bob Belitz says Tighe & Bond’s robust internship program aims to give aspiring engineers as much real-world, hands-on experience as possible.

“In such a competitive marketplace, we’re trying to build relationships and connections as early as possible, so we get connected to students and universities whenever we can,” said Bob Belitz, the firm’s president and CEO. “We’re participating in educational programs, going into elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools to judge fairs or just explain to these students what a career in STEM could look like.”

Those efforts are complemented at the college level with scholarships and an internship program that brings in about 30 students per year to work on real-world projects.

“What we’re trying to do through these programs is give these students a real-life, hands-on experience, to get them on as many projects site as possible. The more practical exposure they get to the work we do, the better, so our mission is to do as much of that as we can,” Belitz said, adding that interns also get professional development opportunities like help writing résumés, enhancing speaking and interview skills, and even a career fair where they present a poster board on the projects they worked on during the summer.

“In such a competitive marketplace, we’re trying to build relationships and connections as early as possible, so we get connected to students and universities whenever we can.”

“A large majority of them either come back for another internship, or we offer them full-time employment. They’re exposed to the culture of the company; we assign them buddies and team leaders throughout the course of the summer when they’re here. Hopefully they appreciate that direct investment,” he went on.

And if they choose to pursue work somewhere else, well, “it helps enhance the profession either way.”

Values and Purpose

All these efforts at recruitment and career development are important for an industry that needs new blood, said Ashley Sullivan, president and CEO of O’Reilly, Talbot & Okun Associates (OTO) in Springfield.

“For the past few years, it has been very challenging to recruit and find people. We have a shortage of people, it seems,” she noted. “We have a big exodus with retirements — through the whole COVID pandemic, there were people rethinking engineering. So there’s a lot of work, and there seems to be not a lot of people.”

Ashley Sullivan says today’s young recruits are looking for a company that aligns not only with their work interest, but with their purpose, goals, and values.

One way to attract talent is through a workplace culture that resonates with young people, she explained, and OTO started to put more emphasis on that when she transitioned into company leadership in 2020, better defining its brand; emphasizing workplace values like transparency, respect, and togetherness; and operating according to the mission statement, “we will elevate our industry to create and deliver the best solutions for natural and built environments.”

“We asked, ‘who are we? Who do we want to be?’” Sullivan said. “And we need to live by that so we can communicate it and say, with full transparency, ‘this is what we are. If you want to work at a place like this, this is what you’re going to get.’”

Meanwhile, the recruitment process involves not only interviews with top leadership, but eventually meetings with field staff and project managers. “We invest a lot in the interview process — by that time, we know this is a great candidate, so how do we show them how they would fit into our business model and fit in with our people?”

Belitz also emphasized the value of workplace culture in attracting what he characterizes as a more purpose-driven generation of young job applicants than he’s seen before.

“The narrative has changed a little bit. This generation is interested in the stability of the company. I don’t know if it’s the uncertain economy driving it, but to be able to say to these prospective interns that the company has been around over 100 years, we’re very financially stable, we do purpose-driven work, we’re 100% owned by employees — that’s a nice difference,” he explained.

“The big picture is that we’re trying to train engineers who are value creators — technically strong, skilled at math and science, but they also have that vision of how the world can be a better place.”

“We’ve also put in some really good benefits for students, like loan repayment. Benefits are a hot-button issue, so we’re really trying to promote this overall climate of stability and of the company investing in the people we bring into the firm,” Belitz added. “And giving back to the community is another key part of the puzzle — and a big selling point for young people.”

Sullivan agreed with that emphasis on culture and purpose.

“I think this newest generation wants a company that knows who they are and has a purpose — one that aligns with their purpose or what their goals are,” she told BusinessWest. “It could be that they want to see their projects have an impact on the community — they’re really community- and impact-driven, much more than the rest of us that were just looking to get a job, which is really neat. I think culture and the big picture is important to them.”

In short, she said, “they want to matter. They want to know their value, and they want to be valuable. And they want that from the beginning.”

Meanwhile, retention is as important as recruitment, which is why Tighe & Bond invests thought, time, and energy into cultivating career tracks for employees, Belitz said.

The firm’s onboarding and training program consists of not only leadership training, but anything people need to do their jobs: project management, quality management, safety and health principles, and more — efforts branded internally as Tighe & Bond University.

Mike Rust says higher education has seen a shift toward giving engineering students more hands-on, project-based experience right from the start of their college careers.

“We’ve also started investing more in training around technology, making sure folks have a good understanding of how to appropriate and use things like artificial intelligence and other investments we’ve made in digital toolsm” he added. “There’s a lot of energy around that, especially with the younger generation.”

Sullivan said many recruits want to see a clear career ladder at work.

“I think it’s important for them to be able to see where they could be in a few years, so they feel like they’re moving along. I think they want to see opportunity; they don’t want to get stuck in a rut or doing one task.

“And for me, leading a small business, I want people that want to do that because I love that people will develop and can do a little bit more of a project. If that means they’re more valuable, then the pay comes with that,” she added. “At OTO, those two things are aligned. It’s always in our benefit to develop people, so we’re looking for people that really want to do more.”

Surveying the Landscape

While Tighe & Bond is a civil and environmental engineering firm and OTO specializes in geotechnical, environmental, and industrial hygiene consulting services, Western New England, like many universities with strong engineering programs, is sending graduates out into myriad engineering disciplines — mechanical, electrical, civil and environmental, biomedical, industrial, and more. And placement rates are high, with 97% of engineering graduates placed in jobs within six months.

“Engineering tends to be pretty steady regardless of what’s going on in the economy,” Rust said. “The big picture is that we’re trying to train engineers who are value creators — technically strong, skilled at math and science, but they also have that vision of how the world can be a better place.”

Elaborating, he added, “they’re encouraged to think in those terms — to take an existing product and improve it, or talk to the customer about what the pain points are and how to address them. They’re thinking not only about what a company does, but what it could do. And companies come back to us and say, ‘can you get me five more of that student you got us last year? They were what we want.’ Because they’re not satisfied with the status quo.”

Sullivan, who has taught classes at WNE, still participates in engineering advisory boards there, connecting area industry leaders with educators.

“We talk about what we looking for for graduates and who are we looking to hire. But they also talk to us about the exciting research they’re doing, the programs they have, the outreach they have, where they have challenges, where they may need support,” she explained. “And I really feel like, whenever you have two or more groups together working to solve a problem, the ideas that come out of there are amazing.”

Like Rust, Sullivan appreciates when young people emerge with a problem-solving mindset, but also an appreciation for how they can change the landscape, both literally and figuratively.

“We get to work with a lot of people, and we get to see new development and help with projects that impact our own lives or the people we care about,” she said, naming the recently opened Square One expansion in Springfield and DC Station, the new electric vehicle charging hub in Northampton, as two examples.

“I can bring my daughters to an urgent care and know that I worked on it,” she added. “That’s one of the reasons why we try to encourage people to come to OTO, or to be in civil engineering: you impact people. The work is hard, but it’s so rewarding, and you’re constantly reminded why you do it.”

From New Coverage Risks to Emerging AI, the Insurance Landscape Is Shifting

By Joseph Bednar December 22, 2025

Insurance Special Coverage

Rate of Change

Insurance isn’t any home or business owner’s favorite topic — well, except for insurance agents, maybe — and the many pressures on rates over the past several years, from inflation and supply chain issues to adverse weather events and jury verdicts, has made it an even more difficult conversation.

The good news, said Sam Hanmer, president and CEO of Chicopee-based Rush Insurance Group, is that, while the rate environment has continued to move north, he’s seeing a slowdown on the property side.

“Property took the biggest hit after COVID. When supply was so hard to come by, it shot pricing up. Everyone’s experienced that. As an industry, we were relatively slow to figure that out,” he explained, noting that insurance carriers eventually increased rates to reflect that reality, some numerous times. “So the industry has caught up in terms of costs of construction.”

Still, rate changes vary with the age of a property, said Mark Rosa, senior account executive with Borawski Insurance in Northampton. “With newer homes, rates are fairly stable. Someone with an older house could see some rate increases because there are some insurance credits on new homes that someone with a house built in 1978 is not going to qualify for,” he noted. “But I don’t expect what we saw the last few years, 10%, 15%, 20% rate increases. That’s gone away slowly, and I expect to see some kind of stability.”

“I don’t expect what we saw the last few years, 10%, 15%, 20% rate increases. That’s gone away slowly, and I expect to see some kind of stability.”

That said, climate change and natural disasters have continued to impact the rate environment in unpredictable ways.

“I think that we as insurers would like to have that buttoned down, but with weather patterns, I think we’ll have to wait a little while longer; I think that’s going to continue to plague the insurance industry,” he said, as opposed to, say, construction costs, which have settled a bit: “I think we’ve handled that with the rate increases in the past.”

Automotive insurance has seen rate increases as well, but for different reasons, one of which is simply today’s technological sophistication, Hanmer said. “A fender bender used to cost $500, now it’s six grand, with all the cameras in these cars now.”

Another issue causing auto rates to rise is what Rosa, and others in the insurance industry, characterize as “legal system abuse,” or a trend toward massive payouts in lawsuits that wind up being borne by insurance payers and, eventually, passed on to customers. It’s a concern across all types of insurance, but particularly product liability and auto accidents; in those areas, verdict payouts rose 7.1% annually, on average, between 2016 and 2022, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

A 2025 Perryman Group study, “The Economic Impact of Excessive Tort Costs on U.S. Households,” says consumer prices in the U.S. are estimated to be 1.32% higher than they would be without excessive litigation.

Sam Hanmer

“People believe they can buy insurance online, which a lot of people do, and they never have problems — until they have one. So where do they turn? They need an advocate in the form of an agent.”

Meanwhile, the median size of so-called ‘nuclear verdicts’ — defined as jury awards of $10 million or greater — has more than doubled since 2020, according to Marathon Strategies’ “Corporate Verdicts Go Thermonuclear: 2024 Edition.” And it’s not just the severity of the verdicts that’s trending upward, but the frequency of litigation as well.

All these statistics were compiled in a recent Legal System Abuse Toolkit prepared by Trusted Choice and the Big I for use by independent insurance agents.

“Legal system abuse is a problem for policyholders, consumers, and the economy as a whole,” the toolkit argues. “It drives up prices, drives out insurers and investors, and clogs the court system with frivolous cases that could be handled fairly without litigation. Moreover, the beneficiaries are opportunists in the legal field and their financial backers.”

There are other trends at play as well. Hanmer said umbrella insurance is seeing higher rates these days, and Rosa noted that some types of contractors, such as snow plowers, have found it harder to secure affordable policies. “But most classes of businesses are seeing some stability, and even some rate softening,” Rosa added.

Knowledge Is Power

Like many indepenent agencies have expressed to BusinessWest over the years, both Hanmer and Rosa took the opportunity to underline the importance of working with an agent to navigate these complexities.

“We have to understand their business before we put a program together,” Hanmer said. “We need to understand the business they’re in, their risks, the exposures they face, and how best to mitigate them. There’s more to that than buying insurance, but insurance is still primarily how you protect yourself from unknowns and risks. So with in-depth knowledge, we can put a program together and best fit what those exposures are.”

That creates relationships that go well beyond just buying a policy, he added.

“People believe they can buy insurance online, which a lot of people do, and they never have problems — until they have one. So where do they turn? They need an advocate in the form of an agent. It’s so important to educate people that there is a need for an agent. When you buy insurance, you hope you never use it, but when you need it, you’re glad you have it — and you’re glad you have an advocate.”

Mark Rosa

“We’re seeing cyber claims for classes of businesses I never thought possible. And there are legal fees that come with cyber strikes.”

Rosa agreed. “Obviously, you need to ask the right questions. Without an intimate knowledge of a business, you’re not able to do the job in the right way,” he said. “There’s so much in every one of these policies; they aren’t just one size fits all. There’s a lot of time involved in order to do the job correctly.

“So it’s a lot of learning what the business does, spending time with the owner, asking lots of questions. Otherwise, we don’t know how to fill certain gaps,” he went on. “I think what differentiates one agent from the next is what the experience is like and how unique it is. Everyone’s business is unique. While you might qualify for a certain policy type, it doesn’t mean you don’t need to go above and beyond that.”

Rosa added that insurance isn’t something business owners always want to talk about, but the conversations are necessary, if only to regularly check in on changes to the business and evolving risks and exposures.

One of those is cyber liability, which over the past decade has become an essential part of commercial insurance — for businesses of all sizes and sectors.

“More and more, the hackers are incredibly adept and professional in how they do things — it’s amazing how good these guys are. So cyber insurance is something that everybody needs now,” Hanmer said. “It used to be, people thought only big companies were targeted, but that’s not true anymore. Everyone is getting targeted. Cyber insurance is a must buy in this market.”

Rosa agreed. “We’re seeing cyber claims for classes of businesses I never thought possible. And there are legal fees that come with cyber strikes,” he noted. “Some business owners say, ‘the data was backed up from the day before, so I don’t care.’ Well, that’s understandable, but what happens when the state or the federal government comes and slaps you with a fine, and now you’re paying for credit monitoring? We’ve seen a small business pay $63,000 between the fines and the legal paperwork. And that business could have had a cyber policy anywhere from $1,200 to $1,500 over the year.”

Career Opportunities

Beyond the financial numbers, Hanmer said, the biggest challenge the industry faces — not just regionally but nationwide — is a shallow talent pool of young people clamoring to enter the field.

“They’re not migrating into the insurance world like they had in the past. So staffing and talent is our biggest challenge right now. Ask any agent, and they’ll say the same thing — we can’t find anybody,” he explained, before offering a few thoughts on why that might be.

“It’s not flashy enough, I think, for kids. All the technology and the tech startups, that’s where they’re migrating — the more tech-oriented world. Insurance is not tech-heavy, although it’s evolving. So I don’t think insurance is exciting enough for them, and it’s too bad because it’s a great business. When I find a young person and I can bend their ear for a minute, I encourage opportunities to be in the insurance world.”

Rosa noted that technology is creeping into the insurance world in some intriguing ways. For one, underwriters are using it to adjust what they currently have on the books, using drone or satellite footage.

“When they see your house was built in 1978, now they’re subscribing to third-party technology to show an image of your roof. And hey, this roof looks like it might be 20 to 30 years old. So are the rates increasing? They might be,” he said — if the company wants to keep insuring that property at all.

If not, he went on, “now you’re going from a carrier with a favorable rate to your options being more limited, and it’s gone from $1,200 to $1,600. It’s about insurability and certain risks and what insurance companies are willing to insure.”

At the same time, insurance companies are increasingly determining how they can incorporate artificial intelligence into those processes, and that will affect rates as well, Rosa noted.

“For homeowners and our business clients, AI will shake things up. Carriers have access to so much data, and they might say, ‘hey, we can’t insure this type of business any longer.’ And that will force rates higher. It might even be a good opportunity for carriers that don’t use the technology.

“It’s too hard to say what will happens,” he added, “but I do think insurance is an industry that’s been kind of slow on technology for many decades, but that will accelerate in the next two to five years — and insurance is going to be different from what it is today.”

South Hadley Says It’s Open for Business

By George O'Brien December 22, 2025

Community Spotlight Special Coverage

Community Spotlight

Sean Fitzgerald says SHELD’s fiber business, Fiberspring, continues to expand beyond its South Hadley roots.

Lisa Wong says she was following a trend of sorts. But this was also a no-brainer.

She was referring to her move to follow up four terms as mayor of Fitchburg, in Central Mass., with a new assignment as town manager of South Hadley.

Her immediate predecessor in that role, Mike Sullivan, did essentially the same thing, moving from the corner office in Holyoke, so there’s precedent for taking that career path. As for Wong, who has also been town manager in Winchester, she has many deep connections to South Hadley, including family — and her marriage certificate.

So when Sullivan, whom she knew from when they were both mayors, talked up the job, she threw her hat in the ring and was eventually chosen, coming aboard nearly four years ago.

When asked to compare and contrast the mayor and town manager roles, Wong said that, other than dealing with the press less frequently, the jobs are very similar, and involve managing for today and planning for tomorrow, in equal parts.

In South Hadley, that means everything from ongoing work to reimagine a section of Main Street to early-stage work to build a new elementary school; from a new housing project, called the Clover, to a town meeting vote to approve six additional liquor licenses (there are 19 at present), a nod to a growing restaurant and hospitality sector.

Now under construction near the Rocky’s plaza on Route 116, the Clover project, being undertaken by Way Finders, will include 60 units of mixed-income housing, said Wong, adding that this will help close the gap in the town’s housing needs, but more work is needed.

“We’re looking at places like the Falls and the Route 202 and 33 corridor as additional places for our businesses to grow, but also to bring in new businesses, especially small businesses, to create more vibrancy.”

“We have a bigger dent to make,” she said, adding that the town recently created an affordable housing trust, tasked with creating more housing options.

These are some of the many intriguing storylines in South Hadley. Others include continued growth of the South Hadley Electric Light Department’s (SHELD) fiber internet business, called Fiberspring, which has now expanded beyond the town, as well as plans for a new, $25 million headquarters building for the utility.

SHELD is now an internet provider in the towns of Leverett and Shutesbury, both in nearby Franklin County, and recently won a contract to provide fiber for customers in Longmeadow.

“We won a unanimous vote from the Select Board in Longmeadow, and we’ve done their engineering and design, so that’s pretty exciting,” SHELD General Manager Sean Fitzgerald told BusinessWest. “We’ve delivered to them a full, town-wide design engineering package, and in the spring, we’ll believe they’ll take a vote to finance either a partial launch or an entire town launch of fiber; they have a huge appetite for this.”

As for the new headquarters facility, SHELD has chosen a site across from the Big Y on Willimansett Street for a construction of a facility will replace a more than 100-year-old structure and provide the utility with room to grow, especially on the fiber side, and an opportunity to move out of a flood zone.

There’s also the community’s large and diverse business community, which includes those that have been around for decades — like Carey’s Flowers and Chap de Laine’s Interiors, and relative newcomers such as a Delaney’s Market.

Located in a small church salvaged by one of the towns flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir, the South Hadley Delaney’s Market also includes the kitchen that makes the grab-and-go offerings now available at five locations across the region — South Hadley, Longmeadow, Westfield, Wilbraham, and the latest addition in West Springfield, with plans to expand in Holyoke.

Founder Peter Rosskothen, a serial entrepreneur who revitalized the Log Cabin banquet facility in Holyoke, said the Delaney’s Market concept, launched a decade ago with the Longmeadow store, is catching on, with the chain amassing a growing roster of steady, repeat customers.

“We’re feeling the economy a little bit this year, but it’s a very steady concept, with loyal, regular customers,” he said. “So I feel good about the concept.”

As for Chap de Laine’s, the landmark business, opened in 1957, is preparing to mark 50 years in business, said second-generation owner Lisanne Chapdelaine, who took the helm in 1997. It has celebrated more milestones since, she noted, by being faithful to the mission set in place by her father, while also becoming a one-stop shop, handling everything from residential and commercial furnishings to flooring coverings to window treatments.

Peter Rosskothen says his chain of Delaney’s Markets continues to grow, evolve, and draw repeat customers.

“We’re still in all the categories we have been historically,” she said. “And our design services go beyond our product offerings, providing the end users with paint and wallpaper. It’s all part of being a one-stop shop.”

Current Events

Wong said she considers South Hadley to be a destination community, complete with restaurants and shops (at Village Commons, for example), parks, the arts, recreation facilities, and Mount Holyoke College.

Among her many goals is to promote these various assets and draw more visitors, while also providing quality services to those who call the community home.

“I’m led by my love of the town,” she said, adding that there are several developing stories, including some infrastructure projects, topped by a major reconstruction of what’s known as the Falls Quarter, the historic South Hadley Falls neighborhood, which sits along the Connecticut River.

“There will be a major reconstruction of Main Street from the Chicopee line to the library,” said Wong, adding that plans call for creation of multi-purpose trails, beautification efforts, and other initiatives. “It will really revitalize that area.”

As she explained, “we’re looking at places like the Falls and the Route 202 and 33 corridor as additional places for our businesses to grow, but also to bring in new businesses, especially small businesses, to create more vibrancy. We have a lot of rezoning of quarters to create a more walkable neighborhood feel that can also accommodate quality commercial spaces.

South Hadley at a Glance

Year Incorporated: 1775
Population: 18,150
Area: 18.4 square miles
County: Hampshire
Residential and commercial tax rate: $15.41 (Fire District 1); $15.74 (Fire District 2)
Median Household Income: $46,678
Median Family Income: $58,693
Type of government: Town Meeting
Largest Employers: Mount Holyoke College; Loomis Communities; Big Y
* Latest information available

“We’re opening ourselves up for business,” she went on. “We want people to thrive here, but we also want to create new opportunities to be part of our vibrancy.”

Meanwhile, the town is looking to replace Mosier School, currently grades 2-4, and expand it to grades 1-5.

“This would be a major undertaking and a major asset for the community,” Wong said, adding that the town is looking at design options and anticipates building by 2030 or 2031.

While South Hadley is progressing on many fronts, so too is SHELD. Indeed, Fitzgerald told BusinessWest that the fiber project in town has mostly exceeded expectations, with the utility now boasting a 53% market share.

“And it’s still growing — we’re approaching 3,000 customers in South Hadley alone,” he noted. “People are jumping on the fiber every day. We’re adding nine to 12 customers every week — it’s the best case that we could have hoped for.”

Looking ahead to the Longmeadow project, Fitzgerald said it will be handled in much the same way that South Hadley (which is similar in size) was, meaning it will be phased in through creation of fiber service areas (FSAs), or fiberhoods, as SHELD likes to call them.

“Each fiberhood has 250 to 300 customers, so if we start out with three or four of those, you’re looking at close to 1,000 customers,” he said, adding that Longmeadow will eventually have about 6,000 customers. “You build the town out in sections.”

And the expectations are similar in South Hadley, he went on, adding that projections call for at least a 50% market share and likely much higher, as the need for reliable internet service continues to grow.

“Co-ax cable doesn’t have the capability of the fiber, and also, the industry has changed; people watch their television differently now,” he explained. “Those factors will drive us probably over 60% to 70% over the next three years.”

Meanwhile, SHELD continues to explore further expansion opportunities, such as in Southampton, where the town has made a proposal, and Hadley, one of several communities “kicking the tires,” said Fitzgerald, adding that further expansion, which could include going into neighboring states, will be challenged by the number of private equity companies getting into the fiber business, such as Gateway Fiber and GoNetSpeed.

“They’re coming in and slapping fiber up,” he added. “And if you have too many competitors on the pole, it waters down your ability to be successful.”

As for the new headquarters building, SHELD hopes to be in construction of that facility by the second quarter of 2026, Fitzgerald noted, adding that, to pay for it, the utility will likely impose a 2.5-cent rate increase on the electric side (roughly $200 per year for the average customer), a cost that will likely be reduced as revenues grow on the fiber side.

Food for Thought

Rosskothen told BusinessWest that, beyond convenience, the main thrust at Delaney’s Market is on ‘fresh.’

Made in South Hadley with local ingredients, the meals are brought to the four other locations daily to ensure freshness, he explained, adding that the concept has caught on with many different constituencies.

“Most of those who use it are young people, busy people, seniors … it’s a wide variety of customers that come regularly,” he said, adding that these groups are attracted by a combination of convenience, quality, and variety. “Hopefully, they come once a week, and many of our customers come at least two and half times a month.”

They have a wide variety of options to consider, from chicken francaise to shepherd’s pie; blackened salmon to stuffed peppers; chicken pot pie to lobster pie (Tuesday only).

“At this time of year, the comfort foods seem to do really well — the pot pies, the chicken parm, the shepherd’s pie,” he noted, adding that the stores to very well around the holidays, both for those entertaining and those too busy to cook.

In the new year, the company will add calorie-smart offerings that will coincide with those New Year’s resolutions to eat smarter and healthier, said Rosskothen, adding that, while the concept was launched a decade ago, it has been continually tweaked to generate new customers — and more repeat customers.

In many ways, that has been the same blueprint at Chap de Laine’s.

Indeed, the landmark store, first located in South Hadley Falls and then moved to its current location on College Street in 1970, has been welcoming different generations of the same family, said Chapdelaine, adding that the store has adapted to changing times while remaining true to its roots.

For example, people can do research on the internet, she explained — which, if used properly, can be a useful tool and a vehicle for bringing people to the store.

Most of the products sold in the store are made in the U.S., which reduces the broad impact from tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, she noted, adding quickly that even products made in the country will likely have components made overseas that are subject to tariffs.

“We have one or two small brands that are subject to tariffs,” she explained. “We have two big lines for which we’re paying 20% more, overnight, and that’s a biggie.”

But Chap de Laine’s has successfully navigated plenty of change as it approaches 50 years, in a town where change — and, hopefully, business momentum — promise to be constant as well.

Year-end Tax Planning

By Contributor December 9, 2025

Features

Recent Tax Legislation Complicates Matters as 2026 Approaches

By Kristina Drzal Houghton, CPA, MST

The end of the year is often an optimal time for tax planning for both individuals and small business owners. Traditionally, the conventional tax wisdom is to accelerate tax deductions into the current year and defer taxable income until the next year. However, new tax legislation enacted in 2025 significantly complicates matters.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) — signed on the Fourth of July — is a follow-up to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) enacted during President Trump’s first term. Many of the provisions included in the TCJA, particularly those affecting individuals and families, went into effect in 2018 and were scheduled to expire after 2025. The OBBBA extends most of those tax provisions, with certain modifications, and often makes them a permanent part of the tax code.

“The tax law allows you to deduct charitable donations within generous limits. However, the OBBBA adds several tax complications.”

In addition, the new law creates brand-new tax-saving opportunities, while also posing potential tax pitfalls for the unwary. In some cases, the OBBBA provisions are effective in 2025, but others do not kick in until 2026 or a later date.

This article is divided into two sections: Individual Tax Planning and Business Tax Planning.

INDIVIDUAL TAX PLANNING

Itemized Deductions

The TCJA suspended several itemized deductions for 2018 through 2025 while boosting the standard deduction. The OBBBA generally extends these rules with some modifications.

If you expect to itemize deductions on your 2025 tax return, take advantage of several key deductions that can lower your tax bill. Consider the following:

• Donate cash or property to a qualified charitable organization (see more below).

• Pay deductible mortgage interest if it makes sense for your situation. This includes interest on acquisition debt up to $750,000 for your principal residence and one other home.

• Make state and local tax (SALT) payments up to the annual deduction limit. Under the OBBBA, the SALT cap is quadrupled from $10,000 to $40,000 for 2025, subject to a phase-out for high-income taxpayers. The cap increases by 1% annually through 2029 before expiring.

Charitable Donations

The tax law allows you to deduct charitable donations within generous limits. However, the OBBBA adds several tax complications.

For the first time ever, the OBBBA imposes a floor of 0.5% of adjusted gross income (AGI) before you can claim any charitable deduction, effective in 2026. This new rule may be especially important if you are planning to donate appreciated long-term-gain property, such as stock, that would qualify for a deduction equal to the property’s fair market value. The deduction for property is limited to 30% of AGI, but any excess may be carried over for up to five years.

The OBBBA also allows a deduction of up to $1,000 for non-itemizers, beginning in 2026. The maximum deduction is doubled to $2,000 on a joint return.

Consider bunching charitable donations in a year in which you expect to itemize. For instance, if you are itemizing in 2025, you may step up charitable gift giving before Jan. 1. As long as you make a donation this year, it is deductible in 2025 — even if you charge it in December 2025 and pay it in 2026.

Home Energy Credits

If you own your principal residence, you may benefit from two types of home energy tax credits on your 2025 return.

Make energy-saving installations before the end of the year to secure credits for qualified improvements. Under the OBBBA, both credits will expire after 2025 and are not expected to be renewed.

The two credits still available before 2026 are as follows:

• Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit: This is a 30% credit for qualified expenses like insulation, central air conditioners, water heaters, furnaces, heat pumps, biomass stoves and boilers, and home energy audits, up to a maximum of $3,200.

• Residential Clean Energy Credit: This is a 30% credit for the cost of new qualified clean energy property like solar electric panels, solar water heaters, wind turbines, geothermal heat pumps, fuel cells, and battery storage technology.

401(k) Plan Savings

Contributions to a 401(k) plan are made by employees on a pre-tax basis and can earn tax-deferred income until withdrawals are made. Plus, your company may provide matching contributions based on a percentage of salary.

For 2025, the regular contribution limit is $23,500, but if you are 50 or older, you can add a ‘catch contribution’ of $7,500 for a total of $31,000. Even better: under SECURE 2.0, those ages 60-63 can make a ‘super catch-up contribution’ of $11,250 for a total of $34,750.

Beginning in 2026, if individuals age 50 and over earned more than $145,000 in the prior year, any of their 401(k) catch-up contributions must be made to a Roth-type account. The Roth version of the 401(k) imposes tax on amounts contributed in 2025, but future payments are generally exempt from tax.

Required Minimum Distributions

Generally, you must begin taking required minimum distributions (RMDs) from qualified retirement plans, like 401(k) plans, and IRAs after a specified age. Under SECURE 2.0, the age threshold has been raised to 73 (scheduled to increase to 75 in 2033). The amount of the RMD is based on IRS life expectancy tables and your account balance at the end of last year.

Assess your obligations. If you can postpone RMDs longer, you can continue to benefit from tax-deferred growth. Otherwise, make arrangements to receive RMDs before Jan. 1, 2026 to avoid any penalties.

Family Tax Breaks

If you are a parent with young children, you may be entitled to several tax breaks designed to reduce your family’s tax burden.

For 2025, parents may claim a Child Tax Credit (CTC) of $2,200 for each qualifying child, subject to a phase-out beginning at $200,000 for single filers and $400,000 for joint filers.

The dependent care credit is enhanced for certain taxpayers with a modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) below specified levels. For high-income taxpayers, the maximum credit remains $600 for one child and $1,200 for two or more children.

Under the TCJA, parents could withdraw up to $10,000 tax-free from a Section 529 plan for higher education to pay a child’s tuition at a qualified elementary or secondary school. The OBBBA doubles the cap to $20,000, beginning in 2026.

Other Tax Breaks

Under the new law, employees can annually deduct part of overtime pay, up to $12,500 for single filers and $25,000 for joint filers, retroactive to Jan. 1, 2025. But the deduction is available only for the ‘premium’ of part overtime pay based on the time-and-a-half rate mandated by the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In addition, the deduction is phased out based on MAGI. The phase-out begins at $150,000 of MAGI for single filers and $300,000 for joint filers.

Similarly, the OBBBA creates a new deduction for up to $25,000 of tips received by an employee in a service industry from 2025 through 2028, subject to a phase-out above $150,000 of MAGI for single filers and $300,000 for joint filers.

BUSINESS TAX PLANNING

Depreciation-based Deductions

A business may benefit from one of two depreciation-related tax breaks, or both, for qualified property placed in service. The OBBBA enhances those tax breaks, beginning in 2025.

Ensure that qualified property is placed in service before the end of the year. Otherwise, your business does not qualify for either tax break on its 2025 return.

• Section 179 deduction: Section 179 allows a business to currently deduct the cost of qualified property up to an annual limit, subject to a phase-out. The OBBBA permanently hikes the limit to $2.5 million and the phase-out threshold to $4 million in 2025, with future indexing.

• First-year bonus depreciation: the TCJA authorized 100% first-year bonus depreciation subject to a phase-out over a five-year period. The applicable percentage for 2025 was scheduled to be only 40%, but the OBBBA permanently restores the 100% deduction, retroactive to Jan. 20, 2025.

Regular depreciation deductions may be elected. As always, special rules may apply, such as a separate set of limits on vehicles.

Research and Experimental Expenses

Previously, the tax law permitted a company to fully deduct domestic R&E expenses in the year in which they were incurred. But the TCJA required costs incurred after 2021 to be capitalized and amortized over 60 months.

Now, the new law reinstates the prior rules, retroactive to Jan. 1, 2025. Alternatively, a business can still elect to amortize the expenses over 60 months. Due to special transitional rules for expenses incurred in 2022 through 2024, it may be beneficial to file amended returns for these years. Note: the amortization period for foreign R&E expenses remains at 15 years.

Miscellaneous

Stock up on routine supplies (especially if you expect prices to rise soon). If you buy the supplies in 2025, they are deductible this year even if they are not used until 2026.

The OBBBA imposes a 1% floor on deductions for charitable donations by C corporations, beginning in 2026. A corporation may increase its donations late in 2025 to avoid the upcoming floor on deductions.

Owners of pass-through business entities like S corporations and partnerships may adopt SALT ‘workarounds’ to qualify for state deductions or credits. The entities make the payments, and then tax benefits are passed through to individuals on their personal tax returns.

Maximize the qualified business income deduction of up to 20% for pass-through entities and self-employed individuals. Note that special rules apply if you are in a specified service trade or business. The OBBBA extends this tax break and makes it permanent.

Bottom Line

This year-end tax-planning article is based on the prevailing federal tax laws, rules, and regulations. Of course, it is subject to change, especially if additional tax legislation is enacted by Congress before the end of the year.

Finally, remember that this article is intended to serve only as a general guideline. Your personal circumstances will likely require careful examination. You should schedule a meeting with your adviser to assist with all your tax planning needs.

Kristina Drzal Houghton, CPA, MST is a partner at the Holyoke-based accounting firm Meyers Brothers Kalicka, P.C.

Longmeadow Has Landmark Decisions to Make

By George O'Brien December 9, 2025

Community Spotlight

An architect’s rendering of the planned Longmeadow Middle School. Construction is slated to start in the fall of 2026.

Marty O’Shea says officials in Longmeadow have been discussing what to do with the town’s two middle schools — Williams and Glenbrook — for nearly 20 years now.

The former was opened in 1959 and the latter in 1968, he noted, adding that, beyond their advancing years, the schools were designed to serve a different model of education than the district currently requires.

Charting a course for the school properties and securing funding from the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) has been a long journey with many twists and turns, said O’Shea, Longmeadow’s school superintendent, adding that, 18 years after the town first submitted both schools to the MSBA for consideration for renovation or replacement, construction is slated to begin in the fall of 2026 on a new, $151 million facility that will replace both schools.

It will be called Longmeadow Middle School, and it will provide the community not only with a state-of-the-art facility — to be built on the Williams Middle School campus — but a unique development opportunity on the Glenbrook site.

“Our education plan calls for more space that will give kids the opportunities to be involved with project-based learning and give us more opportunities to expand science, technology, and engineering opportunities for kids,” O’Shea explained, adding that the design also prioritizes supporting special education students and the arts, both the performing and fine arts.

“Our education plan calls for more space that will give kids the opportunities to be involved with project-based learning and give us more opportunities to expand science, technology, and engineering opportunities for kids.”

As for the Glenbook site, “we’ll start looking at what to do there soon, so that we don’t wait until the property is vacant to begin that process. We won’t start any construction or final plans, but we will start the community discussion,” said Town Manager Lyn Simmons, adding that the 20-acre campus could have several potential uses, including housing in a community where there are few, if any, available building lots.

Resolution of the middle school question and conjecture about the future of the Glenbrook site are just two of the many converging stories in this residential community of almost 16,000 people. Others include:

• A pending Planning Board vote in early December on a proposal to redevelop the site of a closed Church of Christ, Scientist on Williams Street, abutting the Longmeadow Shops. Plans call for demolishing the church and constructing three buildings to house retail tenants, a bank with a drive-thru, and a coffee shop with a drive-thru — a complex that would, in many ways, serve as an extension of the shops;

An architect’s rendering of a proposed new retail facility, to be built on the site of a closed church on Williams Street.

• Work to design improvements to the busy intersection at Williams Street, Redfern Drive, and Frank Smith Road, a project inspired by the project on the church property and made possible by a $287,000 MassWorks grant;

• Ongoing work to decide the best uses for three other town landmarks — the Community House, formerly home to some town offices and now used primarily as a polling place; Town Hall, mostly vacant since town offices were moved to the former Greenwood Park Elementary School off Maple Street; and ‘Old Town Hall’ on Longmeadow Street, vacant for many years. Simmons said a task force will be appointed to consider options for each site and determine the best course of action;

• Early-stage work to replace aging water and sewer lines (60% of which are more than 100 years old), beginning with a water line replacement project, approved at town meeting last month, that will begin with Western Drive. These initiatives have been accompanied by 40% increases in water and sewer rates, which were comparatively low and are still lower than many in the region, Simmons noted;

• A growing stable of eateries — a sushi restaurant and one specializing in Indian cuisine are two of the latest additions — that has made the town a dining destination; and

• Continued growth of a small but eclectic business community, one that is based mostly in retail and hospitality.

That list includes Twin Hills Country Club, which has enjoyed a very strong year, both on the course and with its event business, said Laura Chipouras, club manager.

She told BusinessWest that, in addition to tournaments, weddings, and showers, the club has seen a surge in business-related gatherings, everything from annual retreats to sales strategy sessions.

“We’re seeing lots of retreats, and I think that’s probably due to people returning to the office after COVID and feeling that they need to get together,” she explained, adding that, overall, business has brisk — well ahead of last year’s pace — and the bookings for 2026 have been solid.

For this latest installment in its Community Spotlight series, we take an in-depth look at Longmeadow, and some landmark decisions being made there — literally and figuratively.

School of Thought

Reflecting on the middle school project, O’Shea — who has been superintendent for nine years now — noted that, while discussions on the two facilities began nearly two decades ago, the town had other priorities to address, such as a new high school, senior center, and DPW facility.

With those resolved, the middle school discussions resumed, with consolidation emerging as the best option over time, as capital needs grew and enrollment in each of the schools fell to roughly 300 in recent years.

That puts them on the smaller end for middle schools, he said, adding that other communities and districts of similar size, such as neighboring East Longmeadow and the Hampden-Wilbraham School District, which he served as an administrator, have one middle school.

“We did a citizens’ survey just to find out what people wanted to see happen there, and those results were interesting. There was a lot of attachment to Community House, a moderate attachment to Town Hall, and very little attachment to Old Town Hall.”

And there are several advantages to be gained through consolidation, he noted, both on the educational side and the operations side.

“On the educational side, in a single setting, I think we’ll be able to assign staff in ways that are more efficient and also better for us educationally,” he explained. “Right now, we have staff that are, in many cases, stretched across two buildings, such as in the areas of music and oral language, library, and special education.

“We think that having all our educators under one roof will put us in a better position to serve students,” he went on, “and we’ll be able to expand programming.”

Meanwhile, the town should see substantial savings from staffing and operating one larger school rather than two older structures that are now well beyond their expected useful life and in many ways inefficient, he went on, noting that the new, 134,735-square-foot facility will be fossil fuel-free, rely on a ground-source heat exchange system for heating and cooling, and be net-zero ready, meaning it will produce as much energy as it consumes.

“You’re maintaining one campus instead of two, you’re maintaining and repairing one campus instead of two, food service — you’re running a single operation instead of two,” he explained. “On the operations side, there are some opportunities where we could see come savings.”

O’Shea and other administrators and staff have visited several communities that have constructed middle schools recently, including several built by Springfield-based Fontaine Bros., recently chosen as the general contractor for the Longmeadow project, and they’ll visit more as the design process continues and the focus shifts to furniture, fixtures, flooring, lighting, and materials used.

Longmeadow at a glance

Year Incorporated: 1783
Population: 15,853
Area: 9.7 square miles
County: Hampden
Residential Tax Rate: $21.12
Commercial Tax Rate: $21.12
Median Household Income: $109,586
Median Family Income: $115,578
Type of Government: Open Town Meeting; Town Manager; Select Board
Largest Employers: Bay Path University; JGS Lifecare; Glenmeadow
* Latest information available

While that project moves forward, the attention of many town residents is also fixed on the church redevelopment initiative.

Simmons noted that the review process has been slowed by the need to conduct a traffic study and undertake it while school is in session. There have been several Planning Board hearings on the matter, with questions on everything from traffic to storm drainage, she said, adding that a decision is expected soon — perhaps early this month.

The project and the increase in traffic it is likely to produce will necessitate work on the traffic corridor in the area near the site, where several roads converge, said Simmons, adding that, when designs for improvements are finalized, the town will apply for a MassWorks grant round to fund construction.

Past Is Prologue

While the middle school and church redevelopment projects move forward, another initiative enters its next phase.

This would be the ongoing work to determine the best possible uses for three unused or underutilized municipal facilities — the Community House, built in 1920; Town Hall, dating from 1939; and Old Town Hall, originally a one-room schoolhouse, built in 1855.

As noted earlier, a task force will be created to consider various options and perhaps suggest an action plan, said Simmons, noting that property condition reports on the three historic structures, submitted by the Springfield-based engineering firm Fuss & O’Neill in September, have unveiled lengthy lists of work needed at all three.

At the Community House, for example, the report concluded that several million dollars in repairs and upgrades are needed — everything from repointing brick to prevent further deterioration and water intrusion to an elevator for access to the second floor, to regrading and repaving the parking area to improve drainage.

There are similar lists for the other properties, she said, adding that, when summing up public sentiment on the landmarks, there are varying degrees of appetite for investment and eventual redevelopment.

“We did a citizens’ survey just to find out what people wanted to see happen there, and those results were interesting,” she told BusinessWest. “There was a lot of attachment to Community House, a moderate attachment to Town Hall, and very little attachment to Old Town Hall.”

Some possible uses were floated in that survey, she went on, adding that there was little sentiment for housing in any of the structures, with most residents preferring an arts and cultural center, a restaurant or café, or recreational programs at all three, with moderate enthusiasm for other uses, ranging from retail to co-working space to a museum.

Ultimately, much will depend on the development community, she said, adding that applications for the task force are being sought, and it is hoped that the panel can wrap up its work in a year.

As for the business community, it continues to grow, especially within the retail and hospitality sectors, said Simmons, adding that the town’s location — it’s convenient to East Longmeadow, Springfield, and Northern Conn. — has made it a retail and dining destination.

That same location has benefited the event business at Twin Hills, said Chipouras, adding that the club has several different event rooms, including a ballroom that can host up to 400, and they’re being booked for a wide range of functions — including BusinessWest’s eighth annual Women of Impact gala on Dec. 9. As noted earlier, business is up across the board, but she is especially encouraged by a rise in corporate outings.

On the day Chipouras talked with BusinessWest, for example, two of the smaller banquet rooms were being used for corporate retreats, which certainly took a back seat during COVID, and there have been several days like that over the course of the past year.

“Later this week, we have an accounting firm coming in to do a class on new tax laws, and we have a bank that’s doing a very large retreat, a learning session,” she noted. “They start early in the morning, and at the end of the day, they do cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.”

Meanwhile, there has also been a surge in proms, weddings, and holiday parties, another tradition that took a hit during the pandemic and the years that followed.

“I’m seeing them come back,” said Chipouras, adding that, while the club sees a large amount of repeat business with clients, it has added new clients to the portfolio as well.

In short, she sees positive momentum — and in this mostly residential town with a small but growing business community, she’s not the only one.

Massachusetts Girls in Trades Conference, Career Fair Turns 10

By BusinessWest Staff December 9, 2025

Building Trades

Something to Build On

Laborers Local 596 member Chelsea Fenton shares the benefits of union apprenticeship and details her experience with students during a workshop at the recent Girls in Trades Conference.

On Nov. 20, students from 19 schools across Berkshire, Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin, and Worcester counties gathered in Holyoke to explore life-changing opportunities in the union construction industry at the 10th annual Massachusetts Girls in Trades (MA GIT) Conference and Career Fair.

These events are designed to help young women build confidence, gain hands-on knowledge, and envision themselves in careers they may never have considered before.

“Being part of Massachusetts Girls in Trades has changed my outlook completely,” said Kennedy Landers, a Worcester Tech Construction Academy student. “It’s lifted my hopes of being a girl in the trades and given me reassurance that I can do this — and that there are other girls like me.”

Massachusetts building trades unions train the vast majority of the state’s construction apprentices — 74% of all registered apprentices statewide. They also provide opportunities for those historically underrepresented in the trades: 80% of all apprentices of color and 88% of all registered tradeswomen train through union programs. Today, one in 10 union apprentices in Massachusetts is a woman, a number that continues to grow.

In total, 356 students attended this year’s western conference held at Dean Tech High School. This year’s event launched the new MA GIT alumni network, connecting graduates with mentorship and career support as they enter into the trades.

For Jaylene dos Santos, the conference represents the heart of the organization’s mission. “As the chair of the Massachusetts Girls in Trades Student Leadership Council, I have seen the positive change that we make every single day,” she said. “Our resources and support allow students to feel empowered as they enter the construction and construction-related trades. I’m incredibly proud of the work we do to build safe, inclusive spaces for all learners.”

At this year’s event, students heard directly from dos Santos as well as Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia and Massachusetts Building Trades Unions President Frank Callahan.

“Union apprenticeship programs are the foundation of an inclusive, world-class construction workforce here in Massachusetts. Women now comprise over 11% of all union building trades apprentices in Massachusetts, tripling the national average and representing a twofold increase since 2012,” Callahan said. “Each year, the union building trades provide a pathway to a rewarding career, with industry-leading wages and benefits, free training and skills development, the highest safety standards, and opportunities for advancement.”

In anticipation of the 2025 conference, Franklin County Technical School student Cameron Jacques said, “I’m really looking forward to this event. It’s a chance to learn not only about my own trade, but also about so many others — and to see how women can continue to thrive in a workforce that’s often male-dominated.”

Her classmate Alison George shared her energy. “I’m excited to explore all the new opportunities this conference will have to offer me,” she said. “It’s inspiring to know there are so many women in these careers, ready to share their experiences.”

The event connects girls enrolled in career and technical education programs with tradeswomen, union apprenticeship programs, and industry leaders. Each year, the conference aims to empower the next generation of tradeswomen, encouraging them to pursue high-paying, debt-free careers that build both communities and futures.

For many of these students, a career in the trades offers a debt-free path to the middle class. With starting wages of $18 to $22 per hour that rise to $35 to $55 per hour over the course of a two- to five-year apprenticeship, event organizers noted, these programs create life-changing opportunities, building skills, stability, and a more inclusive workforce.

Hospital Administrators Say 2026 Will Pose Stern Challenges

By George O'Brien December 9, 2025

Healthcare News

Gauging the Ripple Effects

When he came to Holyoke Medical Center as its new president and CEO in 2013, Spiros Hatiras considered it the proverbial best-kept secret.

By most all accounts, it isn’t that any longer.

“It took us a decade or so, but we’re no longer a secret,” he said, meaning that healthcare professionals have found the facility and helped make it a workplace of choice, and area residents have as well, making it their hospital of choice. “We’re in a growth mentality.”

This emergence, if you will, and lost status as a best-kept secret, has helped HMC grow in several ways over the past several years — and remain in a growth mode, even as several colliding forces have created an ultra-challenging environment for all hospitals, one that is projected to be much more daunting in 2026.

Spiros Hatiras

“It took us a decade or so, but we’re no longer a secret. We’re in a growth mentality.”

Indeed, HMC’s strong performance stands as an outlier in a year that saw continued cutbacks and layoffs within the four-hospital Baystate Health system, including, most recently, an offer of buyouts to some 1,300 employees to cut costs; apparent ongoing discussions that could result in a merger of Baystate Health and Mercy Medical Center; and, most recently, Mercy’s announcement that it is temporarily suspending maternity and newborn services at its Family Life Center, effective Dec. 8, due to what the administration there calls “significant provider and nurse staffing constraints.”

These headlines have mixed with those concerning the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law last summer, which is expected to have a significant negative effect, financially and operationally, on hospitals, primarily through more than $1 trillion in federal healthcare spending cuts.

Overall, the law is projected to increase the number of uninsured individuals, leading to a surge in uncompensated care costs for providers and a growing number of individuals putting off preventive care, as they did during COVID, with detrimental results that are still being felt. Meanwhile, reimbursement for the care provided to those who are insured, especially by Medicaid and Medicare, is expected to decrease and fall even further behind the continually rising cost of providing that care.

Dr. Robert Roose, president of Community Hospitals for Trinity Health Of New England, put things in perspective and talked at length about ripple effects from these cuts.

“The federal changes are going to directly impact people who get coverage through Medicaid and/or any state-based health insurance exchanges, and that impact is going to be profound for those people and their families,” he explained. “The ripple effects will be felt by all of us … the health systems and the communities we serve will feel the effects in other ways. There could be reductions in access and services, longer wait times, and potential impacts in delivering care.”

Kevin Whitney, who became president and chief operating officer of Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, a member of Mass General Brigham, last March, agreed.

“We’re concerned about the rising cost of care, especially since COVID,” said Whitney, a registered paramedic and registered nurse who was serving as vice president of Community Operations for the Mass General Brigham Community Division, as well as interim vice president of Patient Care Services and chief nursing officer for CDH, when he was chosen to be its next president and COO. “We always cite a chart showing costs rising at a much higher rate than what we’re receiving for reimbursement, and reimbursement is flat if not decreasing, especially with Medicaid within the Big Beautiful Bill.”

Elaborating, he said that, for a variety of reasons, including the aging of the population, hospitals of all sizes are seeing the percentage of patients covered by commercial payers decrease, with a corresponding rise in those covered by Medicare and Medicaid.

Dr. Robert Roose

“The ripple effects will be felt by all of us … the health systems and the communities we serve will feel the effects in other ways. There could be reductions in access and services, longer wait times, and potential impacts in delivering care.”

“What we get reimbursed by public payers really doesn’t cover the cost of delivering care,” he went on. “And traditionally, organizations have relied on commercial payers to help offset those losses and enable us to reinvest in our organization and our people.”

Quantifying the matter, he said the OBBA’s total projected impact on Mass General Brigham, when fully phased in, will be between $120 million to $300 million, with $100 million to $200 million from work requirements, and another $20 million to $100 million from Affordable Care Act cuts.

Those are big numbers, and they are expected to generate a strong ripple effect that will impact hospitals in many different ways, said those we spoke with.

For this issue, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at the many challenges facing hospitals today — and the forecast for the year ahead.

Numbers Game

Hatiras told BusinessWest that, while many hospitals struggled in 2025, HMC did not.

“It’s been a great year for us. We’ve grown our business, revenue is strong, we’ve done well with our workforce — it’s going to be a very strong year for us,” he told BusinessWest, noting that HMC’s fiscal year ended in September, and he didn’t have hard numbers yet.

Breaking down the year and the hospital’s performance, he said there were several factors that went into it, including redesign of the state’s waiver system — which he credited to the Executive Office of Health and Human Services and MassHealth officials — which directed more federal money to providers across the Commonwealth.

“Everyone benefited from this, some hospitals more than others,” he said, adding that HMC’s strong fiscal 2025 was also attributable to growth in primary care and outpatient services, with an expansion of the hospital’s overall footprint with new locations, as well as staff retention and the accompanying reduction in the high costs of turnover.

“If you’re struggling with staffing and temporary staffing, that’s a big hit,” Hatiras noted. “We had less of an issue with that than perhaps others did, and that’s just one of the many factors that contributed to a solid 2025.”

Maybe the biggest factor is that lost status as a best-kept secret, he went on, adding that, while area residents are finding the facility, so too are healthcare professionals.

“We see a lot of people from other surrounding facilities, knocking on our door and saying, ‘do you have any openings? We heard it’s a great place to work,’” he said, adding that, years ago, it was rare to see professionals come to HMC from competing hospitals.

Kevin Whitney

“We have to be as proactive as we can to prepare for and manage the impacts of the Big Beautiful Bill, in particular.”

“Now, it happens on a routine basis,” Hatiras said. “And it’s because of our culture; we’ve built a great culture, and people are taking note.”

Overall, while 2025 was a year of coping with challenges at area hospitals, it was also a time to move forward with several new initiatives in the broad realms of patient care and patient experience, said Whitney, listing, at CDH, everything from new, state-of-the-art MRI imaging services as its Amherst location, which opened last month, to expansion of the Emergency Department, to the resumption of no-cost shuttle service, which takes patients from CDH to Mass General Brigham destination hospitals — Mass General, Brigham & Women’s, and Mass Eye and Ear.

The eight-passenger shuttle departs promptly from the hospital’s Atwood location at 6:30 a.m., leaves the Boston hospitals at 3 p.m., and returns to Northampton around 5 p.m., Whitney noted, adding that this popular service is one of many efforts to improve convenience and overall quality of care.

As for the emergency room expansion, it includes a full imaging suite, which brings benefits for patients and staff alike.

“There’s a new CT machine that’s immediately available to our ED patients, and it’s a great support for our team because it’s right there in the department, as well as ultrasound and diagnostic imaging. So it’s a full imaging suite right there in the department, which makes it more accessible but also more efficient for patients and the team,” he explained. “Before, every patient who needed a CT scan, for example, needed to be transported, with an ED staffer, to the imaging department, which is quite a distance away.”

Such initiatives will help position CDH to better handle what could be additional headwinds in the ED, said Whitney, who, like others we spoke with, said hospitals must do what they can to prepare for what is to come and become more resilient in the wake of those forces.

“We have to be as proactive as we can to prepare for and manage the impacts of the Big Beautiful Bill, in particular. It’s about continuing to be the best of the best in quality, safety, and experience,” he said, citing the overriding goal at CDH, “and also making sure that we’re creating the best environment in which to practice, deliver care, and work and staff appropriately. The more we can retain folks, it will create more of a sense of community, but it will also help us reduce the expenses of turnover, for example.”

Looking Ahead

Roose agreed, returning to the subject of potential — even probable — ripple effects from the federal cuts, and their widespread impact.

“The emergency room is one example,” he said. “When people don’t have coverage, like Medicaid or a similar insurance product, they often can’t go to their primary care provider, so they turn to the emergency room for routine care, which can result in more crowding in emergency departments, delays, and staffing challenges that impact others.

“So that can have a ripple effect in other areas, including even cost, including the cost for those with private insurance because the system isn’t as efficient and now needs to provide care for many people who don’t have coverage,” he went on. “And that can have a ripple effect that can influence operations and staffing and finances.”

It might be several months into 2026 before the full impact of the federal legislation — many pieces of which won’t take effect in April — and those ripple effects are known, but they could be substantial, he continued, adding that it is incumbent upon health systems to prepare as best they can for what is to come.

“The impact is not insignificant, and it’s something we’re actively planning around,” Roose said. “And we won’t know the true impact until it fully plays itself out — it will be well into 2026 until we fully understand the impact.”

Meanwhile, there are many different kinds of headwinds facing hospitals and health systems, some obvious to the public and some less so, said Hatiras, citing, as one example, the state’s Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) program, which is certainly impacting his hospital — and, from what’s he’s heard anecdotally, others as well.

“We’re pretty good at spotting icebergs. We’re not like the Titanic; we have people out front looking at icebergs, and we’ve spotted a few in the time that I’ve been here, and this is the next big iceberg coming down — for hospitals and other large employers as well,” he warned, adding that the system has, in his view, become abused.

In the case of hospitals, it leaves them forced to fill staffing voids, often with little notice, and, in the case of nurses and other professionals, with usually expensive options.

“Prior to the PFML being enacted, on average, we had about 20,000 to 25,000 hours of leave that people would take in a year, and that was a little less than 1% of our total work hours,” he said. “Last year, we approached 500,000 hours, a 20-fold increase, amounting to 13% of our total work hours, or the equivalent of more than 230 FTEs.

“Try to wrap your brain around that number … this is out of control,” Hatiras went on, adding that this is not an HMC problem, but an industry problem, one that now has the attention of the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Assoc., which is surveying hospitals to gather information.

Elaborating, he said that, in addition to the leave being used for long-term health matters, it is being used intermittently, maybe a few days a week, for problems such as stress.

“That leaves us in the lurch,” he explained, adding that, with some positions, such as nursing, it leaves the hospital few options other than overtime or agency personnel, which increases costs significantly.

Whether it’s the many expected ripple effects from the OBBBA or growing detrimental repercussions from PFML, 2026 seems certain to be a year of intrigue and challenge for area hospitals — and the full impact of these forces and other headwinds may not be known for several months.

How to Protect Your Business from Cybercrime in a Digital World

By Contributor December 9, 2025

Cybersecurity

Strong Defenses

By Terra Carnrike-Granata and Andrew Frisbie

The ever-evolving digital world we operate in each day offers infinite opportunities for business growth and development, but it also presents many risks.

On the positive side, the artificial intelligence (AI) boom provides businesses of all sizes ways to streamline processes and operations, reduce costs, and generate revenue. On the other hand, the explosion of AI technology has created new pathways for sophisticated cybercriminal enterprises to attack.

According to a recent study from Massachusetts IT Sloan Cybersecurity and Safe Security, 80% of ransomware attacks are powered by AI-generated malware, phishing campaigns, and deepfake-driven social engineering. The study asserts that “AI has made ransomware attacks faster, more efficient, and harder to detect.”

In today’s threat landscape, hacking is a business. Sophisticated organizations operate like legitimate businesses, and their primary goal is usually financial gain through theft, extortion, and exploitation. These fraudsters have legitimate businesses of all sizes in their crosshairs.

According to a survey from Mastercard of more than 5,000 small and medium-sized business owners, 46% have experienced a cyberattack on their current business, and nearly one in five that suffered an attack later filed for bankruptcy or closed their business. Smaller businesses often do not budget for adequate cybersecurity protection and have fewer internal resources dedicated to cybersecurity, and criminals know it.

Terra Carnrike-Granata

Andrew Frisbie

“Educate your employees. A robust security program, combined with awareness of warning signs, safe practices, and responses to takeover, are crucial for protecting your company and customers.”

But even small or medium-sized businesses with limited cybersecurity budgets and resources can use these strategies to protect their assets from cyberattacks:

• Require multi-factor authentication (MFA). If your business does not require MFA, you are taking an unnecessary risk by leaving accounts and personal information unprotected and vulnerable to attack.

• Ensure all employees use strong, unique passwords, or consider passwordless options for improved security. The most important characteristic of a strong password is length, with between 12 and 21 characters recommended. Good passwords also avoid predictable patterns (such as 123456 and qwerty), and should not include personal information like birthdays, addresses, or phone numbers. Passwords should also be unique for every login. Passwordless options use passkeys or biometric identifiers in place of passwords and can be very strong if implemented properly.

• Install antivirus software on all company devices. Antivirus software protects devices from known and even suspected malware, which can steal your data, encrypt it so you cannot access it, or even erase it completely.

• Keep all device software patched and up to date. Patching is fundamental to security because fraudsters exploit known vulnerabilities. By keeping software up to date, devices receive regular security patches, which makes it much harder for hackers to exploit.

• Educate your employees. A robust security program, combined with awareness of warning signs, safe practices, and responses to takeover, are crucial for protecting your company and customers.

• Invest in third-party cybersecurity expertise. Getting outside eyes on your company’s security environment is critical to a well-rounded security posture. In most cases, the cost of an outside security consultant is reasonable when compared with the cost of a breach, including business downtime, reputational damage, a potential ransom payment, and data loss.

• Invest in adequate cyber insurance, which helps mitigate the financial impact of cyberattacks and data breaches by covering costs related to incident response, data recovery, legal fees, business interruption, and other potential liabilities.

The rise in AI usage has also spurred an increase in high-quality email impersonation attacks and business email compromise. With higher quality phishing and social engineering tactics, scam emails look more realistic, so it is important to remind employees to pause and evaluate before responding, clicking on links, or downloading attachments. Encourage employees to report suspicious emails to the network administrator to be checked for signs of trouble.

Financial institutions will never ask for personal information or account credentials in an email or text message, so it is good practice to call your bank directly if a suspicious email, phone call, or text raises concerns about your business bank accounts.

It is important to note that, even with processes and protections in place, businesses can experience cybersecurity incidents and should be prepared to respond immediately. In the event of a cyber incident, businesses should cease all activity on the network or system, contact their bank(s), and change online banking passwords. Depending on the level and seriousness of the incident, businesses may also need to file reports with local police and the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.

It is also critical to keep meticulous records of events around the incident to aid in the recovery process. NBT Bank’s Business Fraud Information Center provides a full range of resources and information as well as up-to-date fraud information and alerts to help protect your business from becoming one of the thousands victimized by scammers each year.

Terra Carnrike-Granata is senior director of Information Security at NBT Bank, where she designs and implements sophisticated controls to prevent loss and mitigate risk, while also developing innovative ways to educate consumers and businesses on cyberthreats. Andrew Frisbie is vice president and director of Information Security at NBT Bank, where he provides strategic leadership to and operational oversight of the Information Security, Cyber Operations, Third-party Risk Management, and Insider Risk Management programs.

Veterans’ Home Takes Shape in Holyoke

By George O'Brien December 8, 2025

Cover Story Healthcare News

View to the Future

The new Veterans’ Home at Holyoke is slated to welcome its first residents next September.

An architect’s rendering of the new facility shows its compelling design and ornate gardens.

The new Veterans’ Home at Holyoke won’t be welcoming its first residents for another nine months or so, but the gleaming, $500 million structure on a hill overlooking the Paper City has already captured the imagination of the region.

Highly visible to motorists on I-91 and to residents of Holyoke as well, the nine-story, Y-shaped building — a design one of those on the construction team said was inspired by the tricorn hats worn by Revolutionary War soldiers — serves as both a reminder of the tragedy that occurred during the early days of COVID at the structure it will replace, as well as a symbol of the state’s commitment to modernize the facility in the wake of that calamity.

Michael Lazo, executive director of the home, was a member of the National Guard unit that was dispatched to what was then called the Soldiers’ Home in late March 2020 amid a deepening crisis that would eventually take the lives of 76 residents in one of the nation’s worst COVID-19 outbreaks in a long-term care facility.

“I remember first walking in and not knowing what the heck we were walking into,” he recalled, noting that he arrived at the site on March 30, three days after the facility’s leadership made the fateful decision to combine two locked dementia units into a single undersized unit, precipitating the rapid spread of COVID. “Everything looked completely normal; you wouldn’t think anything was going on.”

Lazo would later be offered a full-time COO position at the home and eventually would be named interim director by the board of trustees and then the state. Today, he oversees all operations at the home while also preparing for the opening of the new facility, which will be called the Veterans’ Home, rather than the Soldiers’ Home, in deference to the veterans who served in other branches of the military.

“I think it just came down to money; other priorities probably stepped in and took precedence, so some of the funding this building should have received went elsewhere.”

“Especially the Marines — they’ve never liked Soldiers’ Home,” he joked, adding that he’s also finding time these days to offer tours of the building in progress — to staff, a few elected officials (more of those are scheduled to go through in the days and weeks to come), and a few media members.

BusinessWest was afforded such a tour late last month. As noted, the facility is several months from welcoming its first residents, and only a few floors are even approaching completion. But even at this early stage, it’s apparent that the complex itself is a work of art — one that will integrate the building with the surrounding landscape — and the structure will be state-of-the-art.

Indeed, building systems, designed to LEED Gold certification, include geothermal heating and cooling and facilities that are net-zero energy ready, a high-efficiency exterior envelope with triple-glazed windows, and natural ventilation. The foundation and outdoor retaining wall are made up of Goshen stone. Amenities include a great room, chapel, memory care floor, 40-person adult day health program, dental suite, salon, hobby room, four gardens, and a central kitchen.

Michael Lazo says the new Veterans’ Home at Holyoke emphasizes the privacy and dignity of residents.

Overall, said Lazo, the facility, complete with its curved brick walls, takes the form of three shells that overlap to define three inpatient neighborhoods, each of which benefits from light and views. A typical resident floor will be comprised of three ‘houses’ with 12 beds per house, nursing support, and community spaces, including dining, living, and den. A large garden anchors the complex, and in between wings are smaller, dedicated gardens.

For this issue, BusinessWest takes an early look at what will be one of the biggest stories of 2026, the long-awaited opening of the Veterans’ Home and the start of a new era of service to those who have served their country.

Learning Curves

Lazo said he wasn’t around, so he can only speculate and reflect on what he’s been told over the years.

But he believes that, in the years preceding the COVID tragedy, the state “simply forgot about” the Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke.

One of his predecessors in the director’s role resigned over what amounted to indifference on the state’s part concerning the facility, he said, adding that, in the decades preceding the COVID tragedy, there was little investment in the facility, and little oversight as well — and it showed, especially in the broad realm of preventive maintenance, or the lack thereof.

“I think it just came down to money; other priorities probably stepped in and took precedence, so some of the funding this building should have received went elsewhere,” he said, adding, again, that he was just speculating.

The tragic events in the early days of COVID and the investigations that followed certainly put the facility front of mind, triggering significant reforms to the state’s oversight of its veterans’ homes, he said, adding that what emerged were plans for a new long-term care facility that would serve more veterans and provide them with state-of-the-art amenities.

An architect’s rendering of the new Veterans’ Home at Holyoke.

There was some talk of expanding and modernizing the current facility, he noted, but building new emerged as the more practical option. And while another site may have been considered, the state became committed to keeping the facility at its prominent hilltop location, a popular decision, but one that has presented challenges to the builders of the new facility as they squeezed it onto the site — and will present more to those that will tear down the current home.

Indeed, when finished, one corner of the new home will be just 10 feet from the current facility, which will eventually be used for parking and a garden area.

The new facility will house 234 residents, almost double the current population of 128. There will be 212 single-occupancy bedrooms and 11 double-occupancy bedrooms in those three neighborhoods mentioned earlier: North House, East House, and West House.

These neighborhoods, which will house veterans of several different conflicts (including World War II) and peacetime periods as well, represent substantial improvements over current facilities, said Lazo, especially in the realms of privacy and dignity of residents — each unit has a private bath and showers, while the current facility features common baths — as well as activities and things to do.

“Each veteran has a good-sized room, and there’s plenty of activity space, both on the first floor as well as in each individual unit.”

“The space for veterans is great,” Lazo said. “Each veteran has a good-sized room, and there’s plenty of activity space, both on the first floor as well as in each individual unit. Each floor will have a different activity; we’ll have an exercise bike or some small weights on one floor and arts supplies on the next floor, so veterans will be able to move about the building to do whatever activity they’re interested in at that time.”

And then, there will be the so-called great room, which will host large gatherings such as holiday activities and Super Bowl watch parties, he said, noting that it will be equipped with a 90-inch television.

Tour de Force

As BusinessWest toured the second floor of the new facility and a 30-unit memory care unit under construction there, we were directed to one of the 12- by 16-foot resident rooms, complete with a large window, spacious bath and shower area, space where a 55-inch television will go, built-in storage and shelving units, a desk, and other accommodations.

As the tour continued, Tim Senecal, general supervisor with Commodore Walsh Holyoke, a joint venture comprised of Commodore Builders LLC and Walsh Brothers Inc., referenced common den areas with huge windows and sweeping views of the surrounding area, the facility’s chapel, administrative space, and the location that will become the great room.

A rendering of the planned great room.

“The higher you go, the better the views get, obviously,” said Senecal, who talked as he walked — about everything from those views to the many challenges involved with construction, from excavating for the foundation to the brickwork, made more difficult by the curved nature of the structure, to the Goshen stone retaining wall.

Some of the building’s design elements were borrowed from the new Veterans’ Home at Chelsea, a smaller facility (154 beds) that opened last year, said Lazo, adding that the overall design is distinct, with input from the staff at the current home.

As noted earlier, the first residents will not move into the new home until next September; the first group of 24 will be moved from the fourth floor of the current facility to the third floor of the new one. After that, if all goes well, veterans will move in roughly 20 at a time, with the memory care residents being the last to move. Lazo said his goal is to have all residents moved by February 2027.

That 16-month period will be the most challenging for the staff members at the facility because they will be managing two facilities at the same time, he added, noting that final project completion, including the demolition of the current home, is slated for mid-2028.

As he talked about that teardown and the logistical challenges it will present, Lazo joked that it’s likely that several staff members wouldn’t mind helping with that effort and send the tired, tragedy-scarred property into history.

But that will also be a sad time, he said, noting that several generations from the same families, including his own, lived and died in that home.

The new home, born in many ways from that tragedy of nearly six years ago, will no doubt create its own memories and its own history.

But right now, it’s creating excitement for the next chapter in the story of this fabled property — and with good reason.

Giving Guide 2025

By BusinessWest Staff December 8, 2025

Giving Guide Special Coverage

Regional Philanthropic Opportunities

Leaders of nonprofits across Western Mass. have grappled with a more challenging fiscal climate in the past year — and the need to become more ambitious, creative, and expansive in their fundraising efforts as federal funding shrinks. For the past 15 years, BusinessWest has published its annual Giving Guide to shine a spotlight on local nonprofits, detailing specific community needs and showing you not only how to support them, but exactly what your money and time can accomplish.

The profiles of area nonprofit organizations on the following pages — many of them sponsored by businesses that believe in their missions — are just a sampling of the region’s thousands of such organizations. These profiles are intended to educate readers about what these groups are doing to improve quality of life for the people living and working in the 413, but also to inspire them to provide the critical support (which comes in many different forms, from donating to volunteering to advocating) that they and so many others so desperately need.

View the 2025 Giving Guide PDF Flipbook HERE

Amherst Survival Center

Behavioral Health Network Inc.

Berkshire Family & Individual Resources

Community Foundation Of Western Massachusetts

Food Bank Of Western Massachusetts

Franklin County Sheriff’s Office Triad Program

Friends Of Franklin County Regional Dog Shelter

Glenmeadow

HCS Head Start Inc.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Family Services

Rachel’s Table Of Western Massachusetts

RFK Community Alliance

Tom Cosenzi Driving For The Cure Charity Golf Tournament

Women’s Fund Of Western Massachusetts

YWCA Of Western Massachusetts

Presented by:

The Year in Review

By George O'Brien December 8, 2025

Features Special Coverage

From AI to the Courthouse Search, the Landscape Is Changing

By George O’Brien and Joseph Bednar

It is December, time to look ahead to what might happen in the new year, but also look back, at what has been an eventful year, to say the least.

For example, Springfield has become engrossed in the search for a site for a new courthouse, the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council has named a new director, AI is changing the landscape in all kinds of ways, and remote work is becoming more entrenched in the workplace. Then there’s the constantly changing story of tariffs, federal budget cuts that are challenging nonprofits, and an ongoing housing crisis.

As we said, it’s been an eventful year. Here’s a look back at some of the biggest stories of 2025:

A Softening of the Job Market

“Job hugging.”

That was one of the workforce trends to unfold in 2025, a year that saw the pendulum swing from this being an employees’ market to one favoring employers. The phrase refers to people hanging onto their jobs longer amid concerns that the grass isn’t any greener elsewhere, amid forces ranging from AI to severe cutbacks within the federal government.

“People are feeling a sense of volatility and continuous change, and when you feel like that, you look for some personal anchors, and for a lot of people, their job is their personal anchor,” Allison Ebner, president of the Employers Assoc. of the NorthEast, told BusinessWest recently, adding that this is a fairly recent phenomenon dating back to last spring or early summer. “Everything in the world is changing, and they want to keep something consistent, and maybe it’s their job.”

But while people may be hugging their job, they’re still looking around, as evidenced by the strong turnout at the recent job fair staged by the MassHire Springfield Career Center. The turnout was strong on both the job seeker and employer sides of the coin, indicating that, while some sectors are seeing a slowdown, many others, especially healthcare, are still struggling to find qualified help.

Seeking New Sources of Funding

This issue of BusinessWest includes the annual Giving Guide, encouraging readers to support local nonprofits. And it couldn’t come at a better time, at the tail end of a year in which federal funding for nonprofits of all types was significantly slashed.

That has caused frustration, but also a new determination among nonprofit leaders to be more creative and collaborative in meeting the many needs of the community.

“People are reaching out, and not just with appeals for direct funding,” Denise Hurst, vice president of Community Impact and Partnerships with the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, told us in May. “They’re asking about opportunities to partner with one another, share ideas, and collaborate in real time to navigate these difficult times.”

Meanwhile, a coalition of local nonprofits working in farming, conservation, food security, health, and environmental justice has come together under the name Resilient Valley to respond to federal funding cuts that have slashed organizational budgets by 25% to 40% or more.

“We realized we were all telling the same story,” said Billy Spitzer, executive director of the Hitchcock Center for the Environment. “Our budgets had been gutted overnight, and the ripple effects were only beginning. We decided we couldn’t face this crisis in isolation. We needed to find strength in each other.”

The Impact of Tariffs

President Trump ran on the promise of new, sweeping tariffs, and he has certainly followed through, announcing ‘Liberation Day’ on April 2, followed by months of trade talks, new deals, deadlines made, deadlines extended, and seemingly never-ending speculation about the impact of tariffs on prices, individual businesses, and entire sectors.

Dave Fontaine, CEO of Fontaine Bros. Inc., told BusinessWest earlier this year that tariffs will certainly impact project costs because tariffs on products, such as steel or copper, are applied not when they are ordered, but when they enter the country.

“I think it’s vitally important to bring this area back — it raises the quality of living for those living downtown, and it provides places for people to go and eat.”

“I would equate it to walking into a store … the sales tax is 6.25%, and then, while you’re purchasing the item, the sales tax gets doubled or tripled,” he explained. “That’s going to impact at the register.”

Uncertainty around tariff decisions also triggered fluctuations in the stock market this past spring — and plenty of client phone calls to investment firms. But Jeffrey Liguori, executive vice president of Bradley Foster & Sargent Inc., was one of several experts who told us it’s wise to take a longer view.

“The data is 100% in your favor. Nothing ever goes straight up. We’ve lived through most of these crises — the housing crisis, the tech bubble, the Great Recession,” he said. “All of those, time and again, have been incredible buying opportunities. It’s almost like, if there’s no pain, there’s no gain.”

The Search for a New Courthouse

The search for a replacement for the troubled Roderick C. Ireland courthouse in Springield entered an intriguing new phase when the state’s Department of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM) decided to let a private developer build and manage the facility and have the state lease it.

An RFP was issued mid-year, and 11 proposals were received involving a wide range of properties, from the park created by the demolition of the former Steiger’s department store to the Republican building; from the current courthouse site itself to the home of the former Mardi Gras strip club.

DCAMM is now weighing those proposals and is expected to have a decision in the first or second quarter of next year, making for a long and agonizing wait to see how the city’s landscape will be changed.

Progress in the Entertainment District

Many of the windows in the storefronts are still boarded up or covered by brown paper, but behind all this, there is some progress in Springfield’s entertainment district.

Noted attorney and developer Raipher Pellegrino, with support from the city in the form of a $2 million grant, is filling in a canvas along a city block of buildings on Worthington Street.

He envisions five restaurants in all, most with doors opening out onto Worthington Street and outdoor dining, in addition to a club and other businesses that will support each other and bring people and energy back to that corridor.

“I think it’s vitally important to bring this area back — it raises the quality of living for those living downtown, and it provides places for people to go and eat,” he told BusinessWest in June, adding that the project is a work in progress. “That was my desire with this, and it’s a much more difficult project than I think anyone envisioned, but I think we’re starting to see it evolve, and we’re seeing a lot of momentum.”

A Work of Arts

Another intriguing story in 2025 was the opening of the Hope Center for the Arts in downtown Springfield. Created in the former CityStage space, the center is the culmination of a long-held dream of Bob Bolduc, former owner of Pride Stations and Stores and founder of the Hope for Youth and Families Foundation.

The center, which opened its doors during the summer, and created at a cost of more than $14 million, is designed as flexible learning, rehearsal, and performance space that will advance the mission of the foundation and several partner organizations focused on the arts and helping youth and families in Springfield thrive.

Bolduc said the facility is designed to educate young people, immerse them in the arts, and perhaps inspire careers in that realm.

“The arts are not just entertaining and cultural, which we need in this city; they’re also inspiring,” he told BusinessWest. “Imagine a kid who gets turned on to dance or vocals or an instrument and then goes to a good school on a scholarship … we’ve changed their life.”

AI Has Become a Force

Wherever artificial intelligence takes us, we’ll look back at 2025 as the year it firmly established itself as a force to be reckoned with. Businesses in sectors ranging from law to accounting to healthcare are finding new ways to utilize AI to create new efficiencies and, in some cases, trim their workforce expense.

Meanwhile, for those in the workforce, as well as those looking to enter it, the ability to use AI has rapidly become a skill they must have.

Indeed, Ebner told us, “the phrase you hear now is, ‘AI won’t replace all the people, but it will replace people who don’t have AI skills.’”

Nicole Polite, CEO and founder of the East Longmeadow-based MH Group, agreed, telling BusinessWest that employers are becoming more skills-focused in their hiring.

“I often talk to people during the interview process and ask them what training they’ve had in terms of AI and make sure they stay in front of it,” she noted, “because AI is here for the long haul, so we have to adjust to it.”

Remote Work Is Here to Stay

Also seemingly here for good is remote work, as 2025 saw remote and hybrid models becoming more entrenched, regionally and nationally, even as some major employers were scaling back on the practice, if not cutting it out.

Indeed, while business leaders such as J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon enforced return-to-office policies, requiring most employees to work in person five days a week — arguing “you can’t learn working from your basement” — most businesses locally have preferred to stay with hybrid schedules as a way to retain valued talent — and attract new talent.

And while the practice seems to work for most businesses and their employees, it is definitely having an impact on businesses in central business districts in cities regionally and across the country — as well as the commercial real estate owners who rely on them, not to mention the restaurants and retailers who count on people working nearby and stopping in.

The Housing Crisis Continues

An ongoing story in 2025 was the housing crisis that has enveloped the county and this region. As BusinessWest continued its Community Spotlight series, leaders in cities and towns across the 413 spoke of the need for more housing of all kinds, especially the affordable variety.

Housing is needed for many reasons, they said, from helping seniors stay in their hometowns as the cost of homes skyrockets to enabling those in the workforce to afford to live in or close to the communities where they work, a problem that is especially acute in the Berkshires, where home prices have soared.

And while new housing projects are underway or planned in several area communities, from Pittsfield and Lee to Springfield and Chicopee, in many cases, the new units will only scratch the surface when it comes to what is needed.

A New Effort to Spark Entrepreneurship

They’re calling it VVM 2.0, and that’s a poignant name.

VVM is an acronym for Valley Venture Mentors, the nonprofit started to inspire entrepreneurship and provide fledging businesses with the mentorship and technical support needed to get to the next stage. The agency thrived for several years, but essentially didn’t survive the pandemic and other challenges to its existence.

Paul Silva, one of VVM’s founders, with support from the Davis Foundation and the MassMutual Foundation, recently launched a new initiative called Innovate413 that is designed to spark new tech-based startups in the region.

When asked how it would work, Silva said the initiative will provide startups with what he called “an unfair advantage,” in the form of access to potential customers, meaning large, regional employers that will talk about problems facing them and all those in their industries, and access to the latest artificial intelligence and product development techniques.

“When you’re in Silicon Valley or in Boston, you have access to that stuff, but the vast majority of the country doesn’t,” he told BusinessWest.

Aaron Vega Chosen to Lead the EDC

Rick Sullivan, president of the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council (EDC), announced his retirement early in the year, and soon thereafter, a nationwide search for a successor commenced.

It ended this fall with the announcement that Aaron Vega, director of the Office of Planning and Economic Development in Holyoke, would assume that high-profile position in January. Vega brings a diverse résumé to his new job. Indeed, he worked for many years as a freelance film editor and also owned his own yoga studio before becoming a city councilor in Holyoke and then a state representative.

Vega told BusinessWest that his first order of business is to conduct a lengthy listening tour. Longer-term, he wants to build on progress made with developing new business sectors, such as food science, clean energy, and cybersecurity, while also being more aggressive with efforts to promote the region and tell its story.

Hub of Progress

Speaking of the EDC, it recently celebrated a major milestone for the innovation economy, with Western Mass. being designated as both a Quantum Technology TechHub and a Food Science TechHub through the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. In addition to the two designations, funding in the form of $1 million to advance a feasibility and design study of a quantum supply chain accelerator (QSCA) was awarded to Springfield Technical Community College.

“Western Massachusetts is the only region in the Commonwealth to receive two TechHub designations, which is a testament to the strength of our innovation ecosystem and the collaboration that defines it.”

The QSCA will build on the foundation established in Holyoke at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center and the state’s first quantum computing complex launched with QuEra Computing Inc. The accelerator, which will be the first regional facility of its kind to drive commercialization, support startups, and strengthen advanced manufacturing supply chains across the Pioneer Valley, will be located at the Springfield Technology Park.

“Western Massachusetts is the only region in the Commonwealth to receive two TechHub designations, which is a testament to the strength of our innovation ecosystem and the collaboration that defines it,” said Rick Sullivan, outgoing president and CEO of the EDC. “These designations, and the $1 million dollar investment in the quantum supply chain accelerator, represent years of hard work and vision from our regional partners.”

A New Chapter for the Monson Developmental Center

Housing is one of the many potential new uses for the Monson Developmental Center, which is an intriguing new addition to the large portfolio of Westmass Area Development Corp.

Indeed, in July, the Commonwealth officially transferred the sprawling campus to Westmass, touting the transaction as part of ongoing efforts to utilize existing properties to build more housing in the state.

And with that transfer, Westmass, in partnership with DCAMM, will commence work to create what will be known as the Village at Sawmill Brook, named for the brook that runs through the property, which closed in the ’90s. This village will take shape over the next 10 to 20 years, said Westmass President and CEO Jeff Daley, adding that this is a large and difficult undertaking for the agency, but one laden with potential.

“It’s an imposing site, and there’s a ton of work that has to be done,” he told BusinessWest. “And there’s a lot of money that has to be invested just to make the site developable again.”

Something to Sink Your Teeth Into

BusinessWest continued a 30-year tradition by honoring its Top Entrepreneur in 2025, with the award going to John and Chris DeVoie, founders of the Hot Table chain of panini restaurants.

Launched in 2007, the chain has grown to 13 locations and well beyond its roots at the Brightwood Plaza — to several communities in the 413 and also Central Mass. and into Connecticut.

The past few years have been extremely busy, with the opening of five new restaurants — in Westfield, Chicopee, West Springfield, and Franklin, as well as Manchester, Conn., a time that has been followed by a period of absorbing such rapid and profound growth. Further expansion is possible, but the high costs of building has prompted the partners to hit pause while they continue to search for new opportunities.

“We always want to be nimble — the market changes quickly; that’s one of the things COVID taught us,” Chris said. “We always have our eyes open and our ears to the ground, watch what’s happening in other cities and with trends, and not chase every shiny object, especially when it comes to the menu — do what you do, and do it well.”

Rare Forms Aims to Create Healthier Homes

By Joseph Bednar December 8, 2025

Building Trades Special Coverage

Sustainable by Design

President Greg Bossie

Greg Bossie jokes that negative ideas around building with straw starts in childhood.

“We all grew up with the Three Little Pigs,” he said. “So people have a lot of misconceptions about the viability of straw as a building component.”

But no one’s huffing, puffing, and blowing houses down that are constructed or renovated by Rare Forms, a unique, mission-driven construction company that Bossie launched in 2020.

At the heart of the business model are what’s known as seed straw panels, which are assembled to form the exterior of a house or business.

“I really felt that I wanted to push further into a values- and mission-based structure, particularly around the use of bio-based building materials and internal structure.”

“We build a wood frame, so they are structural. We build it in a steel jig table, and then the straw gets compressed with a pneumatic press,” he explained. “So there’s no binder, there’s no lime or cement or anything like that in it. It’s just compressed straw, which performs really well in terms of the comfort and insulation of a structure.”

And straw is not hay, he added, knocking down another one of those misconceptions. “Straw is just the woody stalk of the grain plant, which could be wheat, rye, oat, rice, any grain that has a woody stalk. We use rye from Plainville Farm in Hadley.”

He explained that the hard, compressed straw, wrapped in a sealed panel, has the same base molecular structure as wood, and is not prone to decomposition, partly because of the way it’s airtight, yet ‘vapor-open,’ allowing any water entering the structure to exit quickly, preventing moisture damage.

The straw panels are also fire-resistant, whereas foam insulation is flammable, he added.

“Lots of people worry about fire, justifiably. But compressed straw, when compressed in a panel, behaves like timber, which means that, when exposed to fire, it chars on the outside and protects its inner core. With a straw panel, we can get a one- or two-hour fire rating, so it’s actually far less fire-prone than, say, any fluffy insulation that allows air movement, because you need oxygen movement to fuel fire, and when you’ve got this incredibly compressed structure that doesn’t allow any air movement through it, it’s really fire-resistant.

“Straw-based building systems have been used for millennia,” Bossie noted. “But actually encasing straw — compressing straw into a wood frame and panelizing it in this way — is really an innovation of the last maybe 12 years or so. It’s a combination of two well-worn building technologies — wood frame and straw bale building combined into one system.

Compressed straw panels, like those in this home under construction, are both structural and insulating.

“That allows us to utilize the advantages of off-site construction methodology, meaning that we can do all of this in a climate-controlled environment,” he went on, while walking BusinessWest through the shop where bales of hay are stacked, ready to be compressed and panelized.

“One of the risks of traditional straw bale building, particularly in our climate, is that, during construction, it can be exposed to a lot of moisture. Straw panels allow us to work in a controlled environment,” he noted. “We can compress the straw into these wood panels, wrap those panels in weather-resistant barriers, and then install them on site in a relatively short period of time, so that we can limit any potential water exposure during that time. Roof panels tend to take a little bit longer than wall panels, but we can basically assemble this high-performance envelope very quickly.”

Building a Passion

Bossie went to school for architecture and worked in that field for a number of years, but when he moved to Massachusetts from California in 2011, he ended up co-owning a company called Stone Soup Concrete, which specializes in concrete countertops. Later, he was project manager for a design-build company working in the residential sector.

“That got me into building science and high-performance building. But I really felt that I wanted to push further into a values- and mission-based structure, particularly around the use of bio-based building materials and internal structure.”

That idea became Rare Forms, which was just Bossie at first, actually doing the construction before the company started to grow; it now totals about a dozen employees.

“Operational carbon is really important; it adds up over the lifetime of a building. But all of that embodied carbon happens now.”

“We were doing residential design-build, primarily retrofit and addition work to start, and then got into doing some new construction homes,” he explained. “And then, a year and a half ago, we actively pushed into the straw panel aspect of things, which had been my goal for quite a while.

“Straw panels allow us to build homes and additions that actually store more embodied carbon than they emit in the construction process,” he went on. “The construction industry has been focused on what we call operational carbon for a long time, which is energy usage — and trying to reduce our energy usage — and we’ve made incredible strides with that over the last 30 years or so.

Greg Bossie says it was important to him to launch a mission- and values-driven company.

Greg Bossie says his company’s values extend to environmental impact, homeowner health, community support, and more..

“But in the last 10 years — really, the last five to seven years — people started to seriously look at embodied carbon and realize that, in the current state of climate crisis, operational carbon is really important; it adds up over the lifetime of a building. But all of that embodied carbon happens now. And lots of buildings get built in such a way that they have an incredibly high embodied carbon footprint.”

What Rare Forms does, Bossie explained, is use bio-based building materials to substantially reduce or even invert the embodied carbon aspect of building, while also maintaining high building performance and the low energy usage. Another motivation is better indoor air quality, meaning greater comfort and health for building occupants.

“There’s a lot of asthma issues that are caused by building materials from all the foams, so we’re trying to build with completely foam-free assemblies wherever possible, which, in new construction is very achievable; with retrofits, it can be a little bit more difficult with older structures.”

While the straw to create the wall panels is sourced from Hadley, the company’s roof panels are insulated with a product called TimberHP, a wood fiber insulation product manufactured in Madison, Maine, from waste timber from that state’s sprawling timber industry.

In short, “we think about sustainability pretty holistically,” Bossie told BusinessWest. “There’s the materials side of things, which is choosing what you build the house out of. There’s also the waste management, doing as much selective deconstruction as possible, meaning saving fixtures, finishes, any building materials you can, keeping as much out of the landfill to begin with as possible, either saving materials for use in the project or donating those materials.”

Meanwhile, the company works with local sawyers to source timber locally, and also strives to reduce transportation emissions. For example, while Rare Forms mainly works in the 413, it’s currently working on a project in Peru, Vt., and has come up with a way to lessen travel impact on the environment.

“Our team meets here at the shop, and they carpool in one vehicle up there. They stay overnight during the week and then drive back so that we don’t have a team of four people each taking individual vehicles two hours each way every day,” he explained. “Trucking building materials is an incredibly high emissions aspect of building.”

Mission Driven

The seed panel system was designed by New Frameworks in Essex Junction, Vt., one of three founding member companies — Rare Forms and Building Integrity in Columbia, Mo. are the others — in the Seed Collaborative, a partnership that aims to create a broad network of companies using local materials to build carbon-positive systems.

“The function of buildings is to provide shelter for people. Ultimately, I think that how we relate to other human beings is what defines our lives. How we take care of each other is what defines the value of a society. How we shelter people defines our culture of care.”

“We share the methodology of manufacturing straw panels, as well as other shared services — we’re sharing marketing services and business consulting services, and trying to consolidate a lot of the infrastructure of each individual business to make this endeavor more accessible from a business perspective, and also to help make the kits and panels themselves more affordable, so these homes can be more accessible to middle-class homeowners,” Bossie explained, adding that the Seed Collaborative will continue to expand across the U.S., starting with the next set of partners in Colorado, Maryland, and Washington.

Rare Forms has also carved out a niche in prefabricated accessory dwelling units (ADUs), tiny homes that blend efficiency, sustainability, and aesthetics. The company recently won an award in an ADU design competition staged by the North Adams Partnership and AARP.

Greg Bossie says Rare Forms essentially combines two well-worn building technologies, wood frame and straw bale building, in innovative new ways.

“The state is really inclined to push ADU expansion right now; it’s one way that we can increase housing density and available housing units,” he noted. “We have a housing affordability and availability crisis, and ADUs are one way that we can increase housing density in existing neighborhoods without substantially impacting the character of those neighborhoods.

“It is, unfortunately, a really expensive way to do that,” he admitted. “The cost per housing unit for ADUs is high because you’re taking essentially all of the infrastructure that you need for a 1,500- or 3,000-square-foot house and compacting it into, say, a 600- or 900-square-foot house. You’ve still got all the utilities, all the electricity, all your mechanicals and plumbing and kitchen and bath. So the cost per square foot for an ADU tends to be substantially higher than for a larger house. But we’re working hard to find ways to make them accessible to middle-class homeowners.”

The company’s values extend beyond building materials and environmental impact; they include work in the community as well. Rare Forms donates 1% of all its revenue each year to nonprofit organizations, including the Hitchcock Center for the Environment, the Connecticut River Valley Conservancy, Leave No Trace, the Venture Out Project, and Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture.

“We focus on both donating monetarily to local organizations and also using our space to help build communities,” he noted, which includes hosting events focused on everything from building science to promoting women and people of color in the trades.

From a broader perspective, “it’s about people,” Bossie said. “The function of buildings is to provide shelter for people. Ultimately, I think that how we relate to other human beings is what defines our lives. How we take care of each other is what defines the value of a society. How we shelter people defines our culture of care.

“And I wanted to — both personally and from a business perspective — really invest in building something that can care for people, both in terms of what we build and how we build it and how we build the business as well, making sure that we are investing all of our resources back into the people that are here, employees of Rare Forms, but also our trade partners, our clients.”

So when Bossie calls Rare Forms a mission- and values-based business, he’s got a lot on his mind.

“I like people,” he said. “I also have three daughters, and, while I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about legacy, the way that I want to define the success of my own life is — like a lot of people, I think — can I leave the world a little bit better for my kids than I found it?”

Cybersecurity Offers Promising Career Paths

By Joseph Bednar December 8, 2025

Cybersecurity Special Coverage

Evolving Threats

Sean O’Brien says cybersecurity used to be seen as a niche issue in many business sectors, but has become a central concern.

As high-tech businesses grapple with the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) — and workers worry what that might mean for their job security — those who work in cybersecurity may have reason for optimism, Sean O’Brien said.

“Even though we’ve seen a shift, certainly, in IT careers around AI — folks getting laid off and so on — cybersecurity is still humming along. It’s one of the hot industries, essentially,” O’Brien, director of Cybersecurity at Bay Path University, recently told BusinessWest.

A few days earlier, O’Brien had led Bay Path’s 13th annual Cybersecurity Summit, where he and other experts discussed how artificial intelligence is reshaping cybersecurity, education, and workforce development, and what all that means for career paths in this quickly evolving field.

Some young people might be scared off by what they perceive as the highly technical nature of cybersecurity, but he emphasized that the field, and the work being done within it, is strikingly diverse.

“One of the reasons I keep emphasizing the non-technical nature of cybersecurity is because I think that tech can scare people,” he said. “First off, we’re talking about things that are actually scary — things that keep me up at night. But also, people don’t want to feel like they’re going to be a code monkey, so to speak, sitting at a keyboard all day. So I try to emphasize the more exciting cases, the sort of weird and interesting stuff that we can do in cybersecurity.

“Cybersecurity is wide-ranging. There are people who analyze malware — they look at what’s in our software and how it spies on people and breaks their stuff and steals their info, or even drains their Bitcoin wallet, those kinds of things. There are folks who do digital forensics work — they may be looking at evidence and preparing it for a court case or even just an investigation or an audit of an organization.”

Then there are people who work at security operations centers like the one now located at the Richard E. Neal Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in Springfield, which help organizations detect, prevent, and respond to threats.

“When people talk about AI being a threat, what they really mean is generative AI being a threat, large language models being a threat. And just like AI had been used for defensive good purposes before, we can still take generative AI and use it for good purposes as well.”

“That’s a burgeoning field, being the individual who looks at a dashboard, sees all the information coming in, and makes conclusions and reports and even post-mortem analysis,” O’Brien explained. “Even after something has gone wrong, you need the individual who’s going to say, ‘well, here’s how it went wrong,’ and provide that report to the C-suite in an organization.”

Then there are individuals moving to cybersecurity from other fields — or vice versa — and incorporating it into other disciplines.

“I want to have folks who are managers, essentially, who are able to take all of this information, come up with security plans and risk management scenarios, and talk about security architecture and those kinds of things, because those don’t change no matter what goes on with the technology,” O’Brien told BusinessWest. “In my time — and I’ve been doing this since I was a kid, essentially — I have seen technology shift so much, but the fundamentals don’t change.”

In short, it’s a field broad enough to welcome people from any discipline or interest, and that, combined with the fact that it’s certain to remain important, makes cybersecurity an attractive career option.

“You’ve got to have the hunger for it, certainly,” he added. “That’s why it’s always fun to be around other cyber folks, because they’re always energetic.”

Future Shock

The keynote address at the Cybersecurity Summit was delivered by Scott Shapiro, a professor at Yale Law School. O’Brien met him years ago when he worked there, and the two of them co-founded a cybersecurity lab for Yale law students.

“We took folks who are non-technical, primarily — great legal minds, certainly, but not technical people — and we got them to use the command line. We got them to do hacks on their own,” O’Brien said. “We would say, ‘here’s why strong passwords are important. By the way, here’s how to crack a weak password.’”

Now in charge of Bay Path’s cybersecurity program, O’Brien is passionate about sparking that interest in young people.

Sean O’Brien (right) conducts a ‘fireside chat’ with Yale Law School Professor Scott Shapiro about advances in cybersecurity and AI during the recent Cybersecurity Summit.

“Bay Path, an amazing program, really has an innovative approach, which is one of the reasons they recruited me,” he told BusinessWest. “They said, ‘hey, you’re doing some cool and interesting things with cybersecurity, we’re doing cool and interesting things with cybersecurity, so let’s hang out.’”

Shapiro’s address — and ‘fireside chat’ discussion with O’Brien — touched numerous times on the role of AI in cybersecurity, and why it’s not all bad news.

“The first thing is to recognize that every tool can be used for good or for bad. A gun can be used either to defend yourself and your family in your home or to hold up a convenience store. And encryption — we love encryption when it protects our private communication; we hate it when it’s called ransomware,” said Shapiro, who is also the author of Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks.

He applied the same message to AI, after a quick history lesson explaining the difference between classical AI and generative AI, which is a much more recent phenomenon.

“AI has been part of cybersecurity for such a long time. You had very basic symbolic systems that helped detect for intrusions and exploitations. In the 2010s, you could not walk through a trade show without people telling you about their AI that protects everyone, and that was machine learning that tried to correlate usage with time, with location, and try to figure out the markers of a threat.

“Now, when people talk about AI being a threat, what they really mean is generative AI being a threat, large language models being a threat. And just like AI had been used for defensive good purposes before, we can still take generative AI and use it for good purposes as well.”

The bad purposes are plenty, Shapiro said, from deepfakes to malware. But in many ways, AI is simply sharpening the sort of threats that already existed.

On the traditional internet, O’Brien told BusinessWest, “we had things called botnets. These are automated computers that are being controlled by a command and control computer somewhere. So your grandmother’s TV set or set-top box or router can be controlled by some adversary somewhere on the other side of the world. You get enough of these machines talking together, they can attack websites; they can break stuff down. Those kinds of threats have been going on for a very long time.

“I would say what’s going on right now is AI is an accelerating force,” he went on. “We still have these threats; everything old is new again. But because AI is able to sort of think on its feet, it’s able to probabilistically change direction and try certain things very easily.”

During the Cybersecurity Summit, O’Brien talked about a botnet called Aisuru that was the most highly trafficked domain in the world during November — more than Google, Yahoo, Facebook, you name it — because of the ease with which it insinuated itself into everything from routers to cameras to gaming platforms. Its goal? Distributed denial of service attacks trying to take down websites.

That sort of threat takes cybersecurity out of the business realm and makes it everyone’s concern.

“Now that everybody’s online constantly, we have devices in our pockets which are basically supercomputers. We’re surrounded by devices, cameras, thermostats, all the stuff that’s connected to the internet. Cybersecurity is now a central topic. It’s encompassed so many aspects of our life,” he explained. “Chat GPT was released to the public a few years ago, and there is a real revolution in computing, and people are starting to see how these algorithms can do incredibly useful stuff, but also incredibly dangerous stuff.”

But AI can also be a strong weapon against those dangers.

“I remember old-style viruses. We had some Macs in our elementary school that got a virus, and everything went down. But then we started having virus detection engines — they look for signatures, and they react. AI is very good at this sort of signature detection and being very agile, being able to look at some things and say, ‘this looks like activity that shouldn’t be happening in the network.’

“So those detection tools, this ability to read through long logs of text, which is what people use ChatGPT and these types of technologies for anyway, are security tools that are speeding up the pace of action and analysis and giving cybersecurity analysts a lot more detailed information a lot more quickly.”

Always Watching

One reason O’Brien likes being an educator is seeing what students are actually interested in, and the way they think of new threats and new applications.

“The students are coming to us with scenarios that are interesting, their own ideas about unique hacks that could be happening. I had a student, for example, demonstrate for me a hack of a Roomba. I hadn’t thought much about a Roomba, but you think about a Roomba, it moves around, and it actually has a lot of data about the physical space,” he said.

“Having that surprise at this point in my life, after I’ve thought I’ve seen everything, is a really big part of this. I’m excited to see where things go.”

And that constant learning is yet another reason why cybersecurity careers will remain attractive — and why shepherding a new generation into that work is so important.

“I think it’s going to be hard to eliminate the need for cybersecurity folks, no matter what comes around the corner technologically,” O’Brien told BusinessWest. “We’ve got to stay on our feet. We’ve got to lock our things up.”

Giving Guide 2025

By BusinessWest Staff December 1, 2025

Giving Guide Special Publications

Regional Philanthropic Opportunities

Leaders of nonprofits across Western Mass. have grappled with a more challenging fiscal climate in the past year — and the need to become more ambitious, creative, and expansive in their fundraising efforts as federal funding shrinks. For the past 15 years, BusinessWest has published its annual Giving Guide to shine a spotlight on local nonprofits, detailing specific community needs and showing you not only how to support them, but exactly what your money and time can accomplish.

The profiles of area nonprofit organizations on the following pages — many of them sponsored by businesses that believe in their missions — are just a sampling of the region’s thousands of such organizations. These profiles are intended to educate readers about what these groups are doing to improve quality of life for the people living and working in the 413, but also to inspire them to provide the critical support (which comes in many different forms, from donating to volunteering to advocating) that they and so many others so desperately need.

View the 2025 Giving Guide PDF Flipbook HERE

Amherst Survival Center

Behavioral Health Network Inc.

Berkshire Family & Individual Resources

Community Foundation Of Western Massachusetts

Food Bank Of Western Massachusetts

Franklin County Sheriff’s Office Triad Program

Friends Of Franklin County Regional Dog Shelter

Glenmeadow

HCS Head Start Inc.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Family Services

Rachel’s Table Of Western Massachusetts

RFK Community Alliance

Tom Cosenzi Driving For The Cure Charity Golf Tournament

Women’s Fund Of Western Massachusetts

YWCA Of Western Massachusetts

Presented by:

Partners Restaurant Celebrates 40 Years of Food, Community

By Joseph Bednar November 25, 2025

Features Restaurants

Morning Glory

Sue and Mark Tansey are partners in both business and life.

Mark Tansey didn’t exactly plan his path into the culinary world.

“My brother kind of pushed me into the business,” he recalled. “My mother died when I was 15, and I had to cook at home. I wanted to go to college, and he goes, ‘why don’t you go to cooking school?’ So I ended up going to Johnson & Wales.”

In addition to completing that two-year program, Tansey worked at the Monte Carlo in West Springfield, and later at Hillbrook House in Westfield, then Springfield Country Club. The first two of those establishments are long gone, but his next venture — Partners Restaurant & Catering in Agawam — is still going strong, more than 40 years later.

“A woman came to me and said, ‘I have this little breakfast-lunch place in Agawam, Mark, if you want to think about it,’” he recalled. That was 1984, and Partners had been open just a couple of years when its then-owner wanted to unload it. Tansey, then just 24 years old, liked what he saw, secured a $45,000 loan from Westbank, and started crafting a plan, both culinary and financial.

“I had to learn how to write the financials, how to figure out, ‘well, if I have one dishwasher and a cook and a server, how much do I need?’ But then I realized, for the first couple of years, I was the dishwasher and the cook.”

His first marriage would end in those early years, and he wound up bonding with his current wife (and business partner) of 33 years, Sue, over food; her family owned Angy’s Tortellini at the time, and she ran a small catering business.

And now, they’re celebrating four decades running a restaurant and catering business that has outlasted challenges ranging from a devastating fire in 2014 to the COVID-19 pandemic (more on both later), emerging from it all with a loyal clientele, about 50 employees, and even a succession plan (the Tanseys’ daughter, Siena, is deeply involved in the business).

In short, there’s plenty to celebrate, which they did on Nov. 22 with an admittedly late 40th anniversary event (the actual milestone was last year) at the restaurant, where they expected about 400 people to show up.

“We have a lot of repeat business, and we have people that say, ‘I can’t wait until they put out those specials because I want to see what I’m going to have this weekend.’”

The clientele has been multi-generational, Sue said, but so has the staff.

“We’ve had multiple third-generation family members working for us. We’ve had the mother, then their daughter, and now the granddaughter working for us — I’d say a good five families like that. It’s so cool.”

Both Tanseys attribute much of the restaurant’s success to its staff. In the early days, Sue said, “if we came home on a Sunday and we were over $1,000, we’d be like, ‘oh my God.’ Now, we serve 400, 500 people on a Sunday.” And they appreciate those putting in all the work to make that happen.

“Everybody makes fair money; I pay them well. I don’t chintz around. And if we do have a great week, they get extra,” Mark said. “How is that money going to enhance my life? I could use it, but in the long run, by giving everybody 50 bucks, it works out better, because they’re going to stay, we have less turnover, less training. I didn’t know that in the first five years of business, but after a while, we did.”

The result is clear in the waitstaff’s hustle and demeanor, he added. “That’s how we want it. I want people to feel fun and not have a grumpy person greeting them.”

Serving Up Challenges

Sept. 3, 2014 was not one of those fun days.

That’s the night the Tanseys were summoned to the restaurant, which had suffered a major electrical fire caused by degraded conduits across the street.

“If you looked in the window, you wouldn’t think we had a fire, but it was all electrical damage; everything was permeated with smoke,” Sue said. “They ended up having to take the building down.”

Thankfully, an insurance policy allowed them to operate at another spot, and they opened Partners at the Cup on Route 20 in West Springfield the following June. Before that, however, “we still had catering to do,” Mark said. “Because I had a rapport with Six Flags, they had a kitchen out in the back. It was winter, and they weren’t using their stoves and ovens, and they didn’t charge us at all.”

First Baptist Church of Agawam also allowed the couple to cater from there, so they paid rent to the church to do that for a while. “We had people come out of the woodwork to help us rebuild,” Mark said.

Partners reopened in December 2015, and the couple ran both locations until 2020, when the Cup closed for good.

As difficult as the fire was, however, COVID may have been worse. “I think I still have PTSD,” Sue told BusinessWest. “It was difficult to figure out the PPP, but we rallied, and we came up with menus. We had family dinners. We did takeout. We had a few employees that weren’t afraid, and we ran a skeleton crew.”

That was when Siena came home from Boston, where she had she studied hospitality and was working at the Omni Parker House until it closed, and started a new career at Partners.

“We also fed our employees; we would have employee dinners.” Sue recalled. “It was very hard work. We did fish and chips Friday night, and people would pre-order. We had a little side window that worked out perfectly, so people didn’t have to come in.

“But every Monday, we waited for [then-Gov.] Charlie Baker to drop another hammer. Every Monday, there was another restriction on us. It was awful. But then we were able to open outside, and we put up a big tent. Eventually, we ended up coming back inside, though we had to go from 80 seats down to 40, with barriers between them. But we still had our loyal employees.”

“Thank God for them,” Mark quickly added. “Especially during COVID. We were not surprised, but taken aback by how much support we got.”

It’s not just the restaurant that has succeeded, but a catering business that has taken many forms and operated in many settings over the decades, and now includes an event space that opened two years ago right on the Partners property, which can accommodate parties of more than 400 people.

On both sides of the business, Mark said, they use as much locally sourced, fresh food as possible, from produce to breads — no canned vegetables anywhere. And patrons look forward to the ever-changing specials board, which benefits not only their taste buds, but the bottom line.

“You can get bacon and eggs anywhere at $6, $7, $8. But I want to get a higher check average because I have a good payroll,” he explained. “So I’ll try to do dinner entrees for breakfast specials. Like, this weekend we have beef brisket. And now, instead of getting steak and eggs for $14.95, you can get smoked beef brisket for $16.95.

“We have a lot of repeat business,” he added, “and we have people that say, ‘I can’t wait until they put out those specials because I want to see what I’m going to have this weekend.’”

Off the Air

Mark has taken his passion for cooking to the airwaves in past decades, hosting a local cooking TV show, Continental Cuisine, and a talk radio show, The Latest Dish, as well as participating in cooking demos and seminars for the Big E, Angy’s Tortellini, Big Y Foods, and various clubs and organizations.

“At that time, people wanted quick meals they could make at home,” he told BusinessWest. “People can go to a restaurant and get chicken parm; I would show them how to do a chicken parm or something simple. Speed scratch cooking — that’s kind of what I did. And then I did some more upscale stuff, because I have some background in that too. But I wanted the people to know that you can do this at home.”

Sue thinks her husband could have become nationally known.

“Food Network was just starting to come out, Emeril was getting popular, and I remember thinking I should send in a tape for Mark,” she said. “And I never did it.”

“I could have been famous,” he said, then flashed a warm smile at his partner. “But look at our life.”

Exploding Black Hole Could Reveal Foundations of Universe

By Contributor November 25, 2025

Education

Challenging the Assumptions

Physicists have long believed that black holes explode at the end of their lives, and that such explosions happen — at most — only once every 100,000 years. But new research published in Physical Review Letters by physicists at UMass Amherst has found a more than 90% probability that one of these black hole explosions might be seen within the decade, and that, if we are prepared, our current fleet of space and earthbound telescopes could witness the event.

Such an explosion would be strong evidence of a theorized but never observed kind of black hole, called a ‘primordial black hole,’ that could have formed less than a second after the Big Bang occurred, 13.8 billion years ago. Furthermore, the explosion would provide a definitive catalog of all the subatomic particles in existence, including the ones science has observed, such as electrons, quarks, and Higgs bosons; the ones so far only hypothesized, like dark matter particles; as well as everything else that is, so far, entirely unknown to science.

Andrea Thamm

“The lighter a black hole is, the hotter it should be, and the more particles it will emit. As PBHs evaporate, they become ever lighter, and so hotter, emitting even more radiation in a runaway process until explosion. It’s that Hawking radiation that our telescopes can detect.”

This catalog would finally answer one of humankind’s oldest questions: from where did everything in existence come?

Science knows that black holes exist and has a good understanding of their life cycle: an old, large star runs out of fuel, implodes in a massively powerful supernova, and leaves behind an area of spacetime with such intense gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape. These black holes are incredibly heavy and essentially stable.

But, as physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out in 1970, another kind of black hole — a primordial black hole (PBH), could be created not by the collapse of a star, but from the universe’s primordial conditions shortly after the Big Bang.

PBHs, like the standard black holes, are so massively dense that almost nothing can escape them — which is what makes them ‘black.’ However, despite their density, PBHs could be much lighter than the black holes so far observed. Furthermore, Hawking also showed that black holes have a temperature and could, in theory, slowly emit particles via what is now known as ‘Hawking radiation’ if they got hot enough.

“The lighter a black hole is, the hotter it should be, and the more particles it will emit. As PBHs evaporate, they become ever lighter, and so hotter, emitting even more radiation in a runaway process until explosion. It’s that Hawking radiation that our telescopes can detect,” said Andrea Thamm, co-author and assistant professor of Physics at UMass Amherst.

Yet, while we should be able to, no one has ever directly observed a PBH.

“We know how to observe this Hawking radiation,” said Joaquim Iguaz Juan, a postdoctoral researcher in physics at UMass Amherst. “We can see it with our current crop of telescopes, and because the only black holes that can explode today or in the near future are these PBHs, we know that, if we see Hawking radiation, we are seeing an exploding PBH.”

Asking the Right Questions

Though physicists since Hawking’s time have thought that the chances of seeing an exploding PBH are infinitesimally slight, Iguaz Juan noted that “our job as physicists is to question the received assumptions, to ask better questions, and come up with more precise hypotheses.”

The team’s new hypothesis? Get ready now to see the explosion. “We believe that there is up to a 90% chance of witnessing an exploding PBH in the next 10 years,” says Aidan Symons, one of the paper’s co-authors and a graduate student in physics at UMass Amherst.

In its work, the team explores a ‘dark-QED toy model.’ This is essentially a copy of the usual electric force as known, but which includes a very heavy, hypothesized version of the electron, which the team calls a ‘dark electron.’

The team then reconsidered long-held assumptions about the electrical charge of black holes. Standard black holes have no charge, and it was assumed that PBHs are likewise electrically neutral.

“We make a different assumption,” said Michael Baker, co-author and an assistant professor of Physics at UMass Amherst. “We show that, if a primordial black hole is formed with a small, dark electric charge, then the toy model predicts that it should be temporarily stabilized before finally exploding.”

Taking all known experimental data into account, the team found that a PBH explosion could potentially be observed not once every 100,000 years, as previously thought, but once every 10 years.

“We’re not claiming that it’s absolutely going to happen this decade, but there could be a 90% chance that it does,” Baker said. “Since we already have the technology to observe these explosions, we should be ready.”

Added Iguaz Juan, “this would be the first-ever direct observation of both Hawking radiation and a PBH. We would also get a definitive record of every particle that makes up everything in the universe. It would completely revolutionize physics and help us rewrite the history of the universe.”

Housing Affordability Remains a Thorny Problem

By Contributor November 25, 2025

Wealth Management

Finding a Way Home

By Jeffrey Liguori

In many ways, the U.S. economy is still dealing with the effects of the global financial crisis of almost two decades ago. It was a massive reset of our entire financial system, with one segment, residential real estate, still evolving from that disruption.

The boom of housing and real estate prices, exacerbated by exotic derivative investment vehicles tied to mortgages of borrowers with poor credit, led to an historic bust in the real estate industry. Following the crash, banks significantly tightened up their lending standards, and home building, illustrated by housing starts, collapsed as demand for new homes evaporated.

Consider this: the number of new housing units rose from roughly 1.65 million to a peak of 2 million per year from 1999 to 2005 before contracting to fewer than 500,000 in 2009. By contrast, the number of 20- to 30-year-olds in the country, the typical first-time homebuyer, which drives much of the market, increased from 72 million to 78 million from 1990 to 2000. And while that is a modest increase of about 8% over a decade, the growth in that cohort of the population grew by nearly 40% in the prior decade, from 1980 to 1990.

Jeffrey Liguori

“When the Fed raised rates to fight inflation from 2022 to 2024, mortgage costs climbed rapidly, and higher rates reduced the number of homeowners willing to sell or upgrade. Contrary to economic theory, supply shrank while demand stayed high, putting home ownership out of reach for many.”

The combination of population growth and a booming economy prior to 2007 worsened the housing availability issue, which was already running short of demand. The economic downturn simply put that supply and demand imbalance on hold. Until COVID.

Today, housing affordability remains a significant problem. COVID stimulus and the shift to remote work caused demand to surge, driving up prices. When the Fed raised rates to fight inflation from 2022 to 2024, mortgage costs climbed rapidly, and higher rates reduced the number of homeowners willing to sell or upgrade. Contrary to economic theory, supply shrank while demand stayed high, putting home ownership out of reach for many.

Individuals and families at the lower end of the economic scale are at a greater disadvantage, consistent with our bifurcated economy, as illustrated here:

Recently, President Trump proposed the idea of a 50-year mortgage as a solution to the housing affordability problem. The concept may have originated from Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), who has strong ties to the homebuilding industry. Pulte’s grandfather, William Pulte, founded Pulte Homes, now the third-largest home builder in the U.S., with annual sales exceeding $17 billion.

The FHFA is central to residential real estate as an overseer of the mortgage market and conservator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which protects taxpayers and maintains the stability of the housing finance system. The FHFA, with its access to valuable data and policy tools, is in a unique position to help alleviate the issue.

Extending the term of a mortgage from 30 to 50 years means lower monthly payments for the borrower. To put affordability in perspective, prior to the pandemic, the median home price in the U.S. stood at approximately $260,000, with a 30-year fixed mortgage rate averaging 3.8% and 20% down, resulting in monthly payments near $1,200. Currently, the median price has risen to about $420,000, while mortgage rates have increased to around 6.4%, pushing monthly payments above $2,100.

This means the cost of purchasing a typical home today is more than double what it was before the pandemic and requires significantly more cash down. The cost has put buyers on the sidelines. But the persistent shortage of supply has kept prices stable at historically high levels. J.P. Morgan estimates there is a shortage of almost 3 million homes, which could take a decade to resolve.

The chief economist for the National Assoc. of Realtors, Lawrence Yun, says the “small savings” on monthly payments for a 50-year mortgage has tradeoffs. For one thing, building equity in one’s home, often the largest asset to most families, would take considerably longer.

According to Yun, “it would also take almost 40 years to pay off half the balance, meaning most borrowers would not begin building meaningful equity until the final decade.” Which simply reinforces the current problem of existing homeowners not trading up because financing costs are too high. It is unlikely that someone would use their current equity and take on a loan for another 50 years just to be able buy a nicer home at the same monthly cost.

And what if this type of mortgage sparks demand for homebuyers? Without greater supply, it will undoubtedly drive up prices, thus not solving the affordability problem at all.

Analysts say that, to implement a 50-year mortgage, Trump would need Congress to repeal the law that prohibits government-backed loans with terms longer than 30 years. Some believe regulators have the executive authority to create this type of loan.

Jim Millstein, who served as the Treasury Department’s chief restructuring officer from 2009 to 2011, noted that “a lot of so-called innovations occurred to make mortgages more affordable prior to the financial crisis. It proved to be a disaster.”

Time will tell if this is a crisis in the making or the start of a solution to the housing problem.

Jeffrey Liguori is executive vice president of Bradley Foster & Sargent Inc.