With Reading’s elderly population growing and town officials years ago declaring the town’s senior center facilities as woefully inadequate, the problem is known and well-defined.
Middlesex Top Stories
The Professional Center for Child Development (PCCD) announced that Anderson School special educator Rhonda Boudreau has been awarded the Mass… Read more
With the Montvale Avenue area site slated to become one of the largest life sciences campuses outside of Boston proper, motorists heading down… Read more
MIDDLESEX EAST - Stoneham officials and state highway planners a quarter century ago first began eyeing a potential makeover of the southern … Read more
By RYAN LAROCHE
Few would ever make the connection
Visitors to Reading Center would be well advised to carefully read all the new parking signs.
Five years ago, Winchester made the decision to send two building projects, the Lynch Elementary School and the Muraco Elementary School, to the Massachusetts School Building Authority for help with funding. While the town knew the chances were slim the MSBA would agreed to fund both project…
Offered a chance to treat its downtown area like a blank canvas, Woburn is all but assured a $16.7 million check to completely redesign its downtown center.
This year, as most people focus on the mid-term elections for governor, senators (US and state) and representatives (US and state), there are other important races that will appear on the September and November ballots. One is the race for state auditor.
MIDDLESEX - Though likely a small comfort to families who lost loved ones to the prescription and synthetic drug epidemic, area communities will recuperate nearly $4.3 million expended in the now decades-long battle against opioids, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey revealed last week.
As Woburn officials threaten to ignore the new mandate entirely, municipal leaders in Reading, Burlington and Stoneham also recently denounced a new state law that will result in the construction of thousands of new apartments across the region.
By RYAN LAROCHE
Woburn resident Eugene Styller hadn’t touched a brush for some 65 years when in 2019, his grandchildren asked for his help while working on a landscape painting.
School officials in Reading sure are glad they didn’t decide to tackle a projected school space shortage all on their own.
Reading native Tyler Walsh, currently a senior studying Broadcast Journalism at the University of Miami (or “The U” as students commonly refer to it), just received some exciting news: he, along with his team, was nominated by the Television Academy Foundation’s prestigious 41st College Tele…
Left with just weeks to respond to the inevitable loss of the emergency pandemic measure, town officials in Stoneham recently bemoaned the quiet removal of an outdoor dining extension that had been tucked inside a $101 million COVID-19 response bill.
MIDDLESEX - Moving swiftly after failing to meet new state testing standards in recent months, leaders in Burlington and neighboring Woburn will spend roughly $33 million to eliminate traces of polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from their local drinking water supplies.
A Tewksbury teacher was thrown out of a recent School Committee meeting as he asked to speak to them, and he was escorted out with a smile and a fist bump to the officer that accompanied him.
Long regarded for their industrious and seemingly inexhaustible work ethics, Stoneham TV Executive Director Amy Brough Palmerino and her dedicated second-in-command, studio operations manager George Manfra, go by many titles.
MIDDLESEX - Once the financial can that everybody just loved to just kick down the road, it’s a massive liability that Woburn Mayor Scott Galvin several years ago described as the “800-pound gorilla in the room” that could no longer be ignored.
2021 marked the 100-year anniversary of the closing of Penikese Island in Buzzard’s Bay, off the coast of Massachusetts. From November 1905 to March 1921, the State of Massachusetts administered a hospital for people with Hansen’s Disease (formerly known as leprosy) on the barren 74-acre isl…
MIDDLESEX - Ever since the busy Boston Regional Medical Center (BRMC) complex across from Spot Pond closed its doors for good nearly 20 years ago now, Stoneham officials eagerly facilitated nearly every effort by Burlington’s Gutierrez Company to redevelop the sprawling commercial site.
MIDDLESEX - Officials in Woburn and Wilmington long insisted that the reconstruction of the New Boston Street bridge will spark a new wave of redevelopment by Anderson Regional Transportation Center.
As Massachusetts residents were choosing between presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton back in the fall of 2016, they were also deciding another rather important issue: would marijuana become legal in the state. The answer turned out to be yes.
MIDDLESEX - With Wilmington’s newest elementary school now more than a half-century old, town officials will likely explore a districtwide school consolidation plan when studying options for replacing the district’s 66-year-old Wildwood Early Childhood Center.
Mass Golf has a new president of its board of directors and he’s a local Winchester Country Club member. Alan Macdonald, 77, takes over the reins from Thomas Berkel. Macdonald previously served as both treasurer and vice president since joining the board in 2007.
MIDDLESEX - With the first shovels full of dirt likely to be scooped from the future construction site sometime next summer, a dogged band of Stoneham citizens and politicians can finally celebrate the fruits of their decade-plus long pursuit of a new high school.
The “Plan B” for the area’s Salvation Army fund-raising efforts during the holiday season is more in place this year than last year.
MIDDLESEX - Reading Town Meeting representatives earlier this month killed a proposal to institute a temporary permitting freeze on new 40R redevelopments within the community’s downtown area.
The NewDEAL, a “selective national network of exceptional, rising, pro-growth progressive state and local elected leaders,” announced that the efforts of Massachusetts State Representative Tram Nguyen (D-Andover) to promote justice for victims of violent crimes have made her a finalist in th…
The casting, with Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, is brilliant, and the ending, in a top-down convertible, is sublime. So why is the rest of Pablo Larraín's "Spencer" such a hollow exercise in high camp?
It’s an Irishman’s 128 square foot dream.
MIDDLESEX - It’s safe to say Stoneham’s officials were anything but electrified by recent news about the snail’s pace of work on a major underground transmission line.
According to the website www.endhomelessness.org, a reported 17,975 homeless people live in Massachusetts or 26.1 per 10,000. For comparison, California has a homelessness rate of 40.9 per 10,000 and New York has a homelessness rate of 46.9 per 10,000.
MIDDLESEX - Still reeling from a series of demoralizing setbacks in recent years due to another unwanted housing project, North Woburn residents needed a win.
MIDDLESEX - With about $141 in financial assistance from the Mass. School Building Authority (MSBA) at stake, the future of a new $317 million Northeast Metropolitan Technical High School could very well rest on the outcome of several key municipal meetings over the next 10 days.
Christian Detzel wanted to give back to a good cause. The 53-year old Burlington resident reached a stage in his life where he felt settled; he was married and had a couple of young children. The passing of his mother soon after the birth of his first child inspired him to give back to child…
It’s a crisis of plenty.
MIDDLESEX - Towering escalations in labor and materials costs could washout the Town of Reading’s plans for a new elevated water storage tank.
Project Bread, the state’s largest anti-hunger organization spearheading Massachusetts’ COVID-19 hunger relief efforts, tapped life-long Woburn resident Meg Meaney to join its newly formed Advisory Council.
MIDDLESEX - No one likes to pay more for water and sewer services.
MIDDLESEX - A Woburn-based pharmaceutical startup intends to open up the world’s only manufacturing plant capable of mass-producing pharmaceutical products from start to finish.
Winchester recently made a bit of local history when it held a special election back in June to overturn a vote of Town Meeting. Something like that last happened 70 or 80 years ago and it involved a "movie house" that residents supported but the Board of Selectmen did not (even though the t…
MIDDLESEX - With the last redevelopment plans torpedoed by the Great Recession more than a dozen years earlier, Stoneham’s citizens acted last spring to revive plans to redevelop portions of an underutilized industrial zone near the Woburn line into housing.
MIDDLESEX - It’s the controversial policy that many communities continue to wrestle with: To mask or not to mask.
After graduating Framingham State in 2018, Sarah Lyn Norton got accepted into the Peace Corps in Nepal and expected to head out in January of 2019. Unfortunately, things fell through, leaving Norton, a 2014 graduate of Woburn Memorial High School, with no job, living at home and feeling hear…
MIDDLESEX - A little over five years ago now, superintendents representing a dozen school districts in the Middlesex League urged their home communities to delay the start of classes for adolescents until at least 8 a.m.
Cities and towns involved in the Resilient Mystic Collaborative applauded the doubling of annual funds for the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) Grant Program to $21 million in the Baker Administration’s FY2022 Capital Plan.
MIDDLESEX - Walking a byway tread by few, she’s a country musician from Reading, Mass.
WILMINGTON - With local farmers once cultivating one of the largest hops crops in the United States, many major brewers and beer makers long ago crowned the Town of Wilmington with the nickname of “Hop Town.”
State Senator Barry Finegold (a Democrat who represents Tewksbury in the Second Essex and Middlesex District), Representative Natalie Higgins (D-Leominster), and Conrad Roy’s mother submitted testimony last week to the Joint Committee on the Judiciary in support of Conrad’s Law (S.1032/H.164…
MIDDLESEX - Officials from a Lowell-based addictions treatment center just recently sold a previously skeptical Reading public on the merits of moving a one-of-a-kind substance abuse recovery facility into a quiet residential neighborhood by the town’s public library.
MIDDLESEX - A number Stonehamites and town officials believe a changing climate could worsen area flooding hazards, including by Montvale Avenue and within neighborhoods by various streams.
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