Meeting the Mayor: Berkshire Eagle Coverage

The Berkshire Eagle kindly covered our meeting with Mayor Macksey in this article:

Local group has big plans for North Adams' Notch Forest, if they can get the city on board (Do, please, click the link. The Eagle needs traffic and subscribers!)

By Sten Spinella, The Berkshire Eagle

Jul 17, 2025

NORTH ADAMS — Grassroots group Save Notch Forest has gone from chanting outside City Hall to singing kumbaya with those inside.

Save Notch vigorously and successfully opposed a plan to log around the Notch Reservoir last year, but is now meeting with the city, building a relationship, and trying to get their proposals heard by the powers that be.

Among those proposals is an update of the Bellows Pipe Trailhead, part of a larger “Forever Wild” plan meant to protect the city’s water supply from what the group warns are the adverse effects of logging.

Save Notch will be meeting with the mayor again sometime in the next two weeks to "forge an alliance" and position the group as a partner with the city "to explore and hopefully secure 'Forever Wild' status for the 1,600-acre forest," Berkshires landscape architect Walt Cudnohufsky said.

"Forever Wild" status is meant to legally and permanently protect the forest from development and logging. Proponents believe it will allow for clean air and water, climate moderation, carbon storage and wildlife habitats at little fiscal burden to the city. Save Notch Forest follows the thinking of William Moomaw, a Williamstown-based climate scientist and professor emeritus at Tufts University. Moomaw also was on Gov. Maura Healey's Climate Forestry Committee.

"Among the planet’s most effective carbon sinks, the carbon dense northern hardwood forests are our best means, and the only real means, of slowing climate damaging carbon emissions," Save Notch Forest says in its "Forever Wild" proposal, paraphrasing Moomaw. "Western MA has older trees and old growth forests that are unique and an enormous potential contributor to sequestering carbon, in tree trunks, roots and soils. We are at the epicenter of the best and tallest trees in the eastern half of the continent."

"Forever Wild" puts Save Notch Forest's stance on what is currently a scientific debate — is it better to remove dead and dying trees more likely to be impacted by climate change from forests, or to let nature take its course — into practice.

Foremost among the motivations for becoming "Forever Wild" is to make sure, as regimes and budgets change, that no one can play politics with the city's water supply.

The group hopes to avoid leaving decisions about the wellbeing of the reservoir and surrounding forest to "city-designated officials' personal interpretations of what is advisable and allowed and what is not in forest management."

Save Notch Forest is seeking recognition from the city and Mayor Jennifer Macksey’s endorsement to explore their proposals

"We are still in the courting stage, let's say, of getting reacquainted," Macksey said. "They're very knowledgeable people, and I enjoyed our meeting."

For Macksey's part, she has taken in a wealth of information through meetings with the group and their written materials for the "Forever Wild" plan, as well as their trailhead update, and is marinating on all of it.

"I'm all about preserving the forest, I'm all about having natural habitat up there, I'm all about furthering the hiking trails," Macksey said. "But we also have some infrastructure issues up there with runoff that need to be addressed."

Cudnohufsky and his fellow group members are seeking a facelift for the Bellows Pipe Trailhead, in an effort to live up to its reputation, having been named by Condé Nast Traveler as one of the "best fall hikes in America."

"Some of us see it [the trailhead and parking area] as a bit shabby," Cudnohufsky said. "The gate is broken. It gets icy in the winter, and the parking doesn't function. ... We have to get this property and trail on the map."