WILLIAMSBURG — Town Administrator Nick Caccamo will be doing the same job in a different place come after the new year comes.
On Tuesday, the Select Board voted to accept his resignation as he heads to Adams, the third-largest town in Berkshire County. With 8,000 people and an annual budget in the ballpark of $20 million, that is more than double the budget and almost triple the size of Williamsburg, where he will work his last day on Jan. 12.
Caccamo has been town administrator in Williamsburg since May 2021, and he took time on Wednesday to voice some of his accomplishments while leaving some advice for his successor.
“I’m thinking back to the spring of 2021. It was just like this intense experience of everything being brand new,” said Caccamo, reflecting on his first job as a town administrator. “On a personal development level, I came in knowing a lot about municipal government, but I didn’t have that direct town administrator experience. So since day one, it’s just been learning new things every day, every week.”
One of his first aspirations was to clean up the Town Offices building. So far, a former mail room has been renovated into a bathroom, a wilting front-door canopy was replaced and new windows, ones that aren’t old and can open, have been installed at the front of the building.
“I think curb appeal for a building like this is really valuable. And not to mention, offices got fresh, consistent air for the first time in potentially decades,” he said, highlighting the importance of the the new windows and their contribution to a more comfortable office environment.
His current project before leaving is to get a bid for painting the exterior.
“A number of improvements feel really incremental, but they have added a lot of value,” he said. “Like you can dream and think, ‘oh this would be great.’ But when you start to work within the confines of procurement, general law and public construction, that’s all part of the big learning curve.”
Over his time in Williamsburg, he guided the Mill River Greenway project with the help of volunteers, whom he praised for their dedication. Public safety has also been a focus of town officials over his time, as a new Public Safety complex was erected in July of 2024, and a full-time fire chief was hired in town for the first time.
He attributes his success in the position to being open to community concerns and keeping his door open.
As Caccamo exits, he hopes his memory in town is tied to the perennial flower garden out in front of Town Offices that went in over the past year. His mother had even come with the help of volunteers to get it done to spruce up what had been an overgrown and weed-infested flower bed.
Leaving a note for his successor, he said it will be important to ensure the South Main Street Rail Trail moves along on schedule. The $3 million state-funded project, which has been in the works since 2012, will create a trail connection between Northampton and Williamsburg.
“What’s a little complicated about that project is that it’s made up of multiple funding sources that all have different deadlines,” he said. “So the next person will just need to be really mindful of those and adhere to those deadlines. But that represents a pretty substantial and first step in a very transformative project for the town.”
Former teacher, frequent runner
After receiving an undergraduate degree in secondary education from UMass Amherst, Caccamo soon realized there wasn’t a huge market for history teachers like himself. While still a teacher, he was elected to Pittsfield’s City Council where he spent eight years.
It’s that experience on the council that drove Caccamo back into the classroom, but not as a teacher. Returning to UMass, he picked up public policy and administration for grad school, but he never left behind a mild-mannered demeanor.
“It was that work [in Pittsfield] that made me realize that the real government operations occur inside town offices and city halls. And that’s what prompted me to go back to graduate school in my nearly 30s as a sort of non-traditional student,” Caccamo said. “I know the federal government gets a lot of coverage, but a lot of good things happen at the local level, and there’s some real opportunities to improve quality of life in pretty substantial ways.”
When he got out of school, he saw the posting for Williamsburg, a community which at the time he had only known by stops at the Elbow Room, a Main Street coffee shop.
“I had only experienced the town driving on the way to campus. Like I used to get coffee at the Elbow Room, and that was sort of my extent of understanding of Williamsburg,” he said. “But coming to work here you realize it’s a lot more. Everyone has been really sweet and they love the community they live in. And I just don’t know if it’s the same everywhere else, but there’s such an effort to want to improve quality of life here that really can’t be understated or overstated.”
Long term, his focus is to work in bigger communities.
“The Adams job represents sort of a really interesting next step and sort of career growth,” he said. “It’ll be some time before I get comfortable and get a sense of patterns and rhythms of that community. It’s substantially bigger.”
Having interviewed in Hadley and Lenox, Adams wasn’t the only community Caccamo took a crack at. A frequent theme in those interviews was his passion for endurance running and how it informs his work life.
He tracks all his weekly miles on a spreadsheet, which routinely total 31. On average, his daily runs total anywhere from three to 11 miles. He feels this is an attainable amount of miles and has kept him feeling good as he heads into his 40s.
“I use that anecdote because I think these jobs require the day in and day out endurance training. I sort of likened it to, you know, there are days it is sunny and 65 degrees and running feels like a dream,” he said. “But at the same time when it’s the middle of January and it’s zero degrees out and you still make the effort to put the miles in.”
He continued, “And it’s similar with jobs like this. They require the day in and day out approach. Like any job, there are good days and bad days. But when you look at it as one big picture you get a better sense . You can see the accumulated progress.”