UMass to Manufacture Locally Sourced Goods in Parking Lots

By Staff Reporter

In an emergency session Monday night that drew nearly four hundred residents to Town Hall — including seventeen people who had been waiting since 6:00 PM to speak about an unrelated compost bin rebate program — the Amherst Town Council voted 13-0 to declare Amherst a “Tariff Sanctuary Municipality,” making it the first town in the Commonwealth to formally refuse to acknowledge federal import duties on goods it finds “philosophically inconsistent with community values.”

The resolution, co-sponsored by all thirteen councilors and introduced with a twelve-slide presentation featuring a land acknowledgment, two pie charts, and a quote from Noam Chomsky, passed just after midnight following three hours of public comment.

“Amherst has always been a community that leads,” Council President Mandi Jo Hanneke told the standing-room crowd. “We were ahead of the curve on plastic bag bans, on defunding ornamental shrubbery, on ranked-choice voting. Tonight, we are once again telling the world: international trade policy stops at the Pelham town line.”

The measure directs Town Manager Paul Bockelman to “explore all available mechanisms” to shield Amherst residents and businesses from tariff-related price increases, including a new Office of Import Sovereignty to be housed in the old North Amherst school building — pending a feasibility study, a community engagement process, a 90-day public comment period, and a land use review.

The centerpiece of the plan, however, is a sweeping partnership with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which agreed to convert six underutilized surface parking lots into what officials are calling “domestic production nodes” — open-air manufacturing spaces where locally produced goods can substitute for tariff-affected imports. The university, eager to repair relations with town residents after years of tensions over noise, enrollment growth, and the annual ‘Blarney Blowout’, called the arrangement “a historic moment of town-gown solidarity.”

“This is exactly the kind of collaboration we’ve been seeking,” said a UMass spokesperson. “Students in the Isenberg School of Management will run the supply chains. The College of Natural Sciences will grow the raw materials. And the Fine Arts Center has already agreed to host a benefit concert to raise awareness of the awareness we are raising.”

Proposed locally manufactured replacements include:

• Maple syrup (substituting for Canadian imports) — to be tapped from trees on the UMass arboretum
• Handwoven textiles — produced in a new certificate program called “Loom Studies: A Justice-Centered Practicum”
• Bicycle components — fabricated in the UMass Makerspace and available to residents for purchase or “solidarity borrow”
• Coffee — this remains unresolved; a subcommittee will report back in eighteen months

Not everyone was satisfied. During public comment, one resident noted that the resolution contained no specific mention of fair trade certification standards and requested the entire document be tabled pending a review by a yet-to-be-formed Tariff Equity and Procurement Justice Task Force. Another resident praised the initiative but asked why the font in the appendix was not screen-reader accessible. A third simply said, “I support this, I just want it on the record that I was here.”

Councilor Lynn Griesemer recused herself from a procedural sub-vote citing a potential conflict of interest, then un-recused herself after the conflict was determined to involve a different municipality entirely.

The town’s business community offered cautious optimism. “As long as the parking lot conversions don’t affect the two spaces behind Black Sheep Deli, we’re supportive,” said the owner of a downtown shop, who asked not to be named because she hadn’t finished reading the resolution yet.

Implementation is expected to begin in the third quarter of fiscal year 2027, assuming the feasibility study is completed, a consultant is hired, the consultant’s report is publicly posted for sixty days, and residents can agree on what font to use.

The Amherst Current wishes all readers a thoughtful and critically engaged April 1st.

An artificial-intelligence tool assisted in the making of this article which was reviewed and edited by the editor.