■Downtown merchants today formed an “action committee” to work on solutions to the parking problem in Northampton. The committee was formed after merchants agreed that they are “powerless” to stop the proposed TOPICS program here, a state and federally funded project that will attempt to improve traffic flow downtown. Among the changes will be a switch from diagonal parking on Main Street to parallel parking.
■A combination of tight money, apparent apathy and improved community services may be sounding the death knell for the Northampton Hotline. The telephone counseling and referral service, which got a rousing send-off with a “walkathon” three and a half years ago, is succumbing due to a lack of funding, diminishing calls and a question of whether the Hotline may have served its purpose in the community.
■The landlord of the VA Community Care Center on Pleasant Street is seeking a new tenant, in anticipation of the care center’s departure in mid-January. The care center, which provides out-patient and vocational care to about 65 veterans every day, plans to complete its relocation to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Leeds in January.
■Workers on the Northampton High School renovation project will get an early start Tuesday pouring the concrete slab that will underlie the floors of the new addition’s gym and cafeteria. Project representative William Letendre said concrete trucks are scheduled to start pouring at 5 a.m. and will continue, at a rate of about five trucks per hour, until around noon.
■Mount Holyoke College President Lynn Pasquerella will announce a plan to get more women into the sciences when she joins President Obama and more than 400 fellow college leaders at the second College Opportunity Day of Action summit in Washington on Thursday.
■The Northampton City Council will consider a Conservation Commission request Thursday to buy seven acres of prime farmland in the Meadows and use it as a potential bargaining chip to provide public access to Rainbow Beach on the nearby Connecticut River.