Investigations

Ongoing: Project Paycheck

Where did all the Berkshire County workers go?

If you’ve noticed more ‘help wanted’ signs around Berkshire County, you’re not imagining things. But, the answer, we’ve found, is more complicated than ‘people just don’t want to work.’ Our new series focuses on why there is a labor shortage, what working in the Berkshires means and where our local jobs economy goes from here.

How the pandemic tipped Lenox onto a national list of ‘economically distressed’ communities

PROJECT PAYCHECK: Lenox is an “economically distressed” community. So is nearby Hinsdale, and even Becket. How these three relatively affluent Berkshire County towns got that designation – earning them a splash of red on a map – will be one of the pandemic’s weirdest footnotes.

Finding child care in the Berkshires went from hard to horrible since the pandemic. We look at the reasons behind the child care staffing crisis

PROJECT PAYCHECK: Child care centers in the Berkshires are fighting to hold it together, one positive COVID-19 test and one teacher resignation after another. By all accounts, the pandemic has steamrolled a stressed early-education system in Massachusetts. “It’s been difficult not being able to work because I can’t find child care for my daughter," said one Berkshire County mother. She's not alone.

The years the music died. A Berkshire songwriter’s pandemic lament

PROJECT PAYCHECK: Unlike some in the “great resignation,” singer-songwriter Bernice Lewis isn’t walking away from a career. She’d gladly run right back to the music business that’s been her life going on four decades, if it was still there.

How the pandemic pushed a party mom, a nature lover and a gardener to reinvent their Berkshire work lives

PROJECT PAYCHECK: Tommy doesn’t know it yet, because he's just one. But, his mom is chasing a new career that bears his name. We catch up with some of this year's breakout entrepreneurs.

This Lenox startup hunts job candidates who aren’t even looking

PROJECT PAYCHECK: One of this year’s tech startups in the Berkshires displays a little needle on its website, with a thread poking through. Jane and Eric Singer, of Lenox, aren't tailors, but they are altering what it means to post a local job online.

Other Investigations

Berkshire County’s recreational cannabis industry pulls in about $200 million a year. One company accounts for a quarter of that

Jun 11, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: Three years after Theory Wellness opened as the first retail cannabis outlet in Berkshire County, 24 licensed recreational-use companies in the Berkshires pull in roughly $200 million in yearly sales. One company accounts for more than a quarter of that, according to estimates The Eagle derived through public records requests.

'If my kids hear guns, they know what to do.' Pittsfield residents describe what's it's like to live in a city with 13 shootings in four months

May 26, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: Shootings have jolted Pittsfield neighborhoods. Residents say that in the weeks and months since, they’ve tried to go back to life as normal, but can’t get images and sounds out of their heads.

Meg Britton-Mehlisch

Pittsfield Reporter

A North Adams business partnership hoped to ride a city's revival. Things instead went 'sour,' ending in lawsuits

May 19, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: The court battle over Very Good Properties LLC has involved allegations of fraudulent billing, threats, defamation, side deals and stolen business opportunities.

Greta Jochem

Reporter

'I can't keep rebuilding.' Residents displaced by Lincoln Street fire in Pittsfield struggle to get back on their feet

May 15, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: Twelve families in the city's Morningside neighborhood, most with school-aged children, lost their homes in fires that hit three buildings April 22. A month later, their lives remain in flux, as assistance wears thin and new apartments prove scarce.

Amanda Burke

Cops and Courts Reporter

Pittsfield police have legal concerns about body cameras, but more than 100 Massachusetts police departments use them

May 14, 2022

More than 100 Massachusetts police departments have or have promised the state to start a body camera program. The Pittsfield Police Department is playing catch-up. We look into how other departments are using the technology and answering handling the legal concerns cited by Pittsfield police.

Meg Britton-Mehlisch

Pittsfield Reporter

Miguel Estrella said the gun was his. Police didn't believe him

May 9, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: Friends and family say that in the last years of his life, Miguel Estrella tried to break free from troubles of his youth, including links to people with criminal records. One night in February 2020 showed how hard that can be, when Estrella tried to claim he owned the gun Adams police found in his car. Police believe he was coerced to say that.

Larry Parnass

Managing editor for innovation

What happens when one town employee has too much power? It doesn’t go well, probe into Monterey's long civic conflict finds

May 1, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: Investigators hired last year to probe complaints at Town Hall found the Monterey town’s administrator central to most conflicts, engaging in a misuse of power though “a pattern of conduct” that is retaliatory and manipulative — findings she strongly denies.

Heather Bellow

Reporter

The Berkshire Flyer gets passengers from NYC to Pittsfield, but how do they get around once they get to the Berkshires? Not easily one family found

May 1, 2022

When Berkshire Flyer service got the green light this week, it seemed a dream of easier rail trips linking New York City with Berkshire County had been achieved. But simply getting to Berkshire County isn’t the whole story for rail travelers. We follow one family trying to get four miles in Pittsfield without a car.

Meg Britton-Mehlisch

Pittsfield Reporter

Most Popular this Week

Officers involved in six shootings by Pittsfield police in last two decades were cleared of wrongdoing

Apr 21, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: Over the past two decades, Pittsfield police officers have shot seven people. In four instances, the shootings were fatal. In all but the most recent incident, which remains under investigation, the shootings were deemed justified and the officers were cleared of wrongdoing.

Amanda Burke

Cops and Courts Reporter

A walk through Pittsfield's West Side, where neighbors say most just want to get their families 'out of here'

Apr 17, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: A map prepared by a federal government agency in 1936 fashioned once refined Circular Avenue on Pittsfield's West Side into a kind of bull’s eye, advising bankers where not to invest. Nearly a century later, it’s plain that decades of disinvestment rubbed this place raw.

Larry Parnass

Managing editor for innovation

Powerful maps: Groundbreaking report exposes ‘redlining’ in Pittsfield’s past that kept Black citizens in poverty cycle

Apr 16, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: It wasn’t Jim Crow laws that helped lock a poverty cycle in place — those were illegal in Massachusetts. It was a map of Pittsfield. A groundbreaking report, "Redlining in Pittsfield: A Case Study," tells the story.

Heather Bellow

Reporter

A Lee resident saw Meghan Marohn's car parked for two days, then called the police. Neighbors have watched the search for the missing NY woman unfold

Apr 8, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: Since Shaker High School English teacher Meghan Marohn went missing in their neighborhood, life hasn't quite been the same.

Heather Bellow

Reporter

This wasn't the Miguel they knew. Friends describe the Pittsfield man shot by police as 'not just a statistic' but a man working toward his dreams

Apr 2, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: The people who knew and loved Miguel Angel Estrella can’t believe his life ended as it did last week, with two bullets to his chest outside his Pittsfield apartment, during a police response to a man in a mental health crisis.

Larry Parnass

Managing editor for innovation

Compassion, community and medication: What recovery and hope look like in the Berkshires opioid epidemic

Mar 28, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: As the opioid crisis turns as deadly as it has ever been, people touched by substance use disorder in the Berkshires have thrown themselves into the fight, working on keeping themselves and others alive. Helping people move toward “recovery,” however they define it.

While the world was focused on COVID, Berkshire County families buried loved ones due to addiction

Mar 25, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: As the pandemic recedes, another public health crisis lingers in its wake, one that has caused immense grief and suffering for years and will continue to plague the Berkshires. That crisis is addiction.

Even the mayor agrees blight is a major problem for North Adams, so why are residents still looking at these abandoned properties?

Mar 19, 2022

EAGLE INVESTIGATIONS: Mayor Jennifer Macksey said addressing blight is a priority. We checked in to see what the city is doing about the problem properties and what obstacles stand in the way of finding a solution for these neighborhood eyesores.