A landslide win for Governor’s Councilor Edward O’Brien, and easy victories for most other incumbents marked a primary election that brought light voter turnouts throughout the county. O’Brien of Easthampton defeated Anthony Ravosa by a convincing 32,927 to 23,257.
■The Cooley Dickinson Hospital’s board of trustees has voted to phase out the hospital’s school of nursing over a three-year period. The hospital noted that the school has been a financial burden and predicted savings of $200,000 from the closing.
■The Cooley Dickinson Hospital today opens its new outpatient behavioral health services office in Florence, in the former Florence Sewing Machine Co. building. The shift brings 40 full-time and part-time hospital employees into Florence.
■The Florence Plan, a work in progress of the city Planning Department, has been praised for recommending ways to strengthen what makes Florence what Wayne Feiden, the director of planning, calls a planner’s dream: its lively little commercial hub accessible on foot from neighborhoods with a good mix of housing types, its jobs in converted factory buildings at its edges, and a virtual greenbelt hugging it.
■For the first time in its five-year history, the Northampton BikeFest will raise funds for the Northampton Education Foundation. Proceeds from the event will also benefit Steph’s Wild Ride, a nonprofit that helps young people undergoing cancer treatment, and the Northampton Cycling Club, the founder of BikeFest.
■The owner of the Hotel Northampton intends to develop a $10 million, 108-room Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott hotel next to the Daily Hampshire Gazette’s headquarters on Conz Street. Mansour Ghalibaf’s proposal revies a long-held goal of city officials — a new hotel in or near the downtown.