AccessPlus Awarded Grant to Bring Fiber to Affordable Housing Units

By Breanna SteeleiBerkshires Staff
03:15PM / Friday, April 18, 2025Print Story | Email Story

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Internet provider AccessPlus was recently awarded the Massachusetts Broadband Institute Retrofit program grant.

"We are committed to delivering high-quality, high-speed internet to the Pittsfield community," said Kevin Alward, CEO of AccessPlus in a recent press release. "This grant allows us to further our mission of ensuring that everyone has access to the fast and reliable internet they need."

The grant was a part of the Healey-Driscoll administration's $10.4 million initiative to modernize the public housing internet in Massachusetts.

This grant will be used to bring high speed fiber internet to 13 multi-unit dwelling properties. This serves 587 housing units in Pittsfield, helping those who work from home.

"Some of the major benefits are the work from home we’ve seen so much of that through the years with covid but really became the standard is that work from and before COVID, if you had one person at home, it was not a big deal to work off the connection that was there," Chief Operating Officer Jason Cummins said. "With fiber broadband you got the symmetrical, that's the big key to that it’s symmetrical internet so you can have the entire household work from home."

AccessPlus has been with the community for more than 20 years and is the only second round award winner to provide a minimum starting speed of 500 Mbps (megabits per second0 internet connectivity to all its housing units, with options for residents to upgrade to multi-gig fiber internet for even greater speeds.

Just about a year ago AcessPlus' Fiber Broadband Network went online with the first business customers in Pittsfield.

"We’ve been focused on business users up to about a year and a half ago when we really identified that the market here in Western Mass really could use fiber you know a fiber to the play," Cummins said.

AccessPlus has also applied for a third round of funding with MBI to help expand their fiber internet access to more affordable housing units.

Their goal is to expand access to the rest of the Berkshires as well. For those interested in applying, visit www.getaccessplus.com.

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Dalton Considers Updating its Municipal Code

By Sabrina DammsiBerkshires Staff
01:21PM / Thursday, August 27, 2026

DALTON, Mass. — The town is considering updating its original 18-year municipal code to 2026 standards.

During a recent Select Board meeting, General Code New England account manager Zach Dumont outlined the 18- to-24 month process.

General Code New England is a division of the International Code Council, which writes all the statewide building codes across the United States. For the last 18 years, the organization has been the codifier for municipalities.

"We work with communities to build, maintain, and update your local municipal code. That is your collection of bylaws, ordinances, regulations, and any other legislation you've ever adopted," Dumont said.

Once the project is complete, the town would have a fully updated set of books and an improved eCode360 site, he said.

"The way the process would work is we would put together a scope of work, a timeline, a price point, and everything that we would want to touch or do as a part of the code project," Dumont said.

When a municipal code is built, it has a general lifespan of about 15 to 20 years, and although that is a long time, it goes by very quickly, he said.

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