The Amherst Current

Fraud Claim Latest Tactic to Derail Jones Library Building Project

By Ginny Hamilton

On Sunday December 1, a group called the Amherst Historical Preservation Coalition (see note below) submitted a statement to the Massachusetts Inspector General’s office claiming “Waste, Fraud and Abuse in the Massachusetts Public Library Construction Program-supported Jones Library Renovation-expansion Project.” The 17-page document is rife with multiple inaccuracies, misleading information, and opinion masquerading as fact.

To address a few:

The claim that the Library waited to submit the required Project Notification Form (PNF) to the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC) until February 2024 is simply not true. The Library first submitted a PNF with project plans to MHC in 2016, at which point MHC directed project leaders to return when plans were further along. The Library submitted an updated PNF in October 2023. One month later, MHC replied with substantive comments, and stating that they would await a determination from NEH. Library staff resubmitted the PNF in February 2024, addressing MHC’s comments. 

Current building plans remain more sustainable than the existing building, both in terms of the environmental impacts of construction and ongoing operations. Claims that the project is “wasteful and environmentally unsound” are not supported by the numbers and standards accepted by sustainability professionals.

The Town has not used Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC) funds to pay for value engineering. The Trustees have committed to reimburse the Town for the costs of redesigning the project. This commitment has been widely documented and discussed, including during the November 2024 building committee meeting where these invoices were approved.

Capital Campaign fundraising remains robust. Originally tasked to raise $6.6 million, the non-profit Friends of the Jones Libraries have secured just under $10 million as of November 1, despite the project remaining uncertain. Now that the re-bidding process has proven we have a viable project, we remain confident in our ability to raise the rest. Characterizing the remaining fundraising goals as “an unfulfilled commitment” disparages the hard work of our elected representatives and the generosity of project donors.

Thankfully, the MBLC was not deterred from their continued support. On Thursday, December 5, the MBLC Commissioners voted unanimously to extend their deadline to March 31, 2025, allowing time to complete the historic preservation review. 

We can agree this project has been a long haul. In addition to active opposition, COVID delays, inflation, and redesign have slowed the process. 

We can agree the project is incredibly complex. Project plans achieve multiple purposes: preserve the historic building and collections, create much needed community space, and do so in a sustainable way. Accomplishing this requires multiple funding streams – public and private, federal, state and local, individual and institutional – each with their own processes and regulations, some overlapping, others not.

While the process and our efforts have been far from perfect, to claim fraud is simply another delay tactic without merit. 

Note: Amherst Historical Preservation Coalition lists the following members of a Steering Committee:

  • Jeff Lee, former member of Amherst Redevelopment Authority
  • Sarah McKee, former President, Jones Library Board of Trustees
  • Molly Turner, former President, Jones Library Board of Trustees
  • Carol Gray, former Jones Library Trustee
  • Hilda Greenbaum, benefactor of the 2024 expansion and preservation of the North Amherst Library
  • Olivia Mausel, former co-chair Holyoke Historical Commission
  • Art Keene, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts
  • Meir Gross, Emeritus Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, University of Massachusetts
  • Carol Pope, donor and designer of the Jones Library Kinsey Garden
  • Arlie Gould, Save Our Library

Currently employed by the Friends of the Jones Libraries to manage the Capital Campaign fundraising efforts, Ginny Hamilton (she/they) has worked in campaign organizing and advocacy for social change for over 30 years. Ginny lives in South Amherst with spouse and teen, two parakeets, and too many mice to count.

3 comments

  1. “ On Thursday, December 5, the MBLC Commissioners voted unanimously to extend their deadline to March 31, 2025, allowing time to complete the historic preservation review. ”

    This is fantastic news! Congratulations and thank you to all the stakeholders who perceived and adapted to the challenges presented by the costly nature of the delays. I personally cannot wait to go to the significantly upgraded Jones Library!

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  3. The writer’s statements here actually differ from what the documents show. As of October 26, 2016, the demolition/expansion Project’s plans were already well along. Please see the architects’ Concept – Schematic of existing and proposed plans for each floor of the Jones Library demolition/ expansion project (Project).1

    The Project Notification Form (PNF) dated October 31, 2016, which the Jones Library Director submitted to the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC), consisted of a mere 2 pages with, it appears, a one-page map.2 Contrary to the writer’s assertion, it included no plans.

    The MHC’s response was a letter, dated December 23, 2016, to Town Manager Paul Bockelman, with ccs to the Library Director and others.3

    This MHC letter informed Town Manager Bockelman and other recipients that 1) the Jones Library is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as a contributing structure in the Amherst Central Business District, and is listed on the State Register; 2) the October 2016 PNF supplied too little data for the MHC to assess the Project’s effect on the historic, 1928 Library; and 3) the detailed Project data that the MHC requires includes diagrams and photographs of all original features that the Project would affect, and whether these would be stored for reinstallation.

    Less than a month later, nonetheless, in their multi-million dollar construction grant application to the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC), the Town Manager, Library Director, and Library Trustees all attested – they swore — that the Jones Library was not on the State Register of Historic Places, and not on the National Register.4

    What these officials swore to was, of course, absolutely untrue. They know better. They never corrected it.

    Despite this, the MBLC apparently believed the Town Manager, Library Director, and Library Trustees. The MBLC’s own construction regulations require recipients of construction grants for historic libraries to comply with the MHC historic preservation statutes and regulations. Yet, although the Town Manager, Library Director, and Library Trustees had not complied with either the MBLC or MHC regulations, in February 2021 the MBLC disbursed some $2,700,000 of its construction grant for the Project.

    It was years later that the Trustees submitted some of the data missing from their initial PNF. Their PNF dated October 17, 2023, 7 years after their 3-page first PNF, is 222 pages long.5

    Even so, as the writer acknowledges above, those 222 pages were insufficient. She writes, “Library staff resubmitted the PNF in February 2024, addressing MHC’s comments.”

    By that time, however, it was too late for the MHC’s mandatory historic preservation consultation process to eliminate, minimize, or mitigate the Project’s obvious “adverse effects” on the historic Library. As mentioned below, that’s because of the federal HUD and NEH grants that the Project had received in 2023, thanks to Congressman Jim McGovern.

    As to the Project’s sustainability, what was the environmental effect of several million dollars’ worth of “Value Engineering” to reduce the Project’s costs? The Trustees’ architects “Value Engineered” a number of apparently effective sustainability features right out of the Project, before it went out to bid again in September 2024.

    Has anyone has calculated the resulting diminution in sustainability, as compared with the environmental burden of demolishing around 40% of the existing Library structure and hauling it to a landfill? If so, I’d be grateful for a reference.

    Finally, as to the source of some $550,0000 to pay for redrawing the “Value Engineered” construction documents, that is a waste of money whether the Town pays for it out of public funds, or the Library Trustees pay for it out of their (supposedly perpetual) Endowment.

    Those revised construction documents still include the “adverse effects” on the historic Jones Library that the MHC identified, and which have already cost the Town of Amherst and Trustees some $1.8 million in anticipated Massachusetts Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits.

    (By the way, didn’t the Trustees’ professional fundraisers know that leaving “adverse effects” – also known, in the federal regulations, as violations of the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings — in project plans for a historic library, could jeopardize the Project’s eligibility for those Tax Credits?)

    To me as a past Library Trustee President, paying for these revised, but still “adverse effect”-ridden, construction documents out of the Library’s Endowment is perhaps the worse idea. It permanently reduces the capital providing income for the Library’s annual operating expenses. Yet there’s no guarantee that Town Council can forever make up this yearly deficiency out of the tax levy. That’s arguably a breach of the Trustees’ fiduciary duty.

    It is worth noting that the MHC’s Executive Director is also the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) for purposes of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act.

    What if the SHPO now insists that the Project comply with that Act, and that its “adverse effects” thus be eliminated or minimized? Must the Project’s construction documents then be revised yet again, for a third round of construction contract bidding?

    The thought does come to mind: If Town Manager Bockelman, the Jones Library Director, and Jones Library Trustees had simply done in 2016 what they were legally obligated to do “as early as possible in the planning process of [the] project,”7 this Project might even be done by now. And how much easier that would have been on everyone!

    Respectfully submitted,

    Sarah McKee
    smckee57@earthlink.net

    1. https://www.joneslibrary.org/DocumentCenter/View/1752/Presentation-by-Finegold-Alexander-Architects-October-26-2016-PDF.
    2. https://www.joneslibrary.org/DocumentCenter/View/1960/Jones-Library-2016-2017-MBLC-Construction-Grant-Round-Application-January-26-2017-PDF, frames 333-335 of 526.
    3. Construction-Grant-Round-Application, fn. 2, above, Frame 336 of 526.
    4. Construction Grant-Round-Application, fn. above, Frames 10 and 90.
    5. 605 CMR 6.05 (2)(d) 23.
    6. https://www.joneslibrary.org/DocumentCenter/View/10524/Project-Notification-Form-October-17-2023-PDF.
    7. 950 CMR 71.00, Protection of Properties Included in the State Register of Historic Places, Section 71.02.

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