According to Town Clerk Sue Audette, precincts and polling locations have changed for about 80% of residents since we last went to the polls.
If you want to vote in the state primary on September 6, check that your registration is up-to-date by August 27. You can check at this link, which will also tell you your new precinct number and polling place, and your party affiliation if applicable. If you need to register or update information, see this page for options. The last day to register for the general election on November 8 is October 29.
As the Daily Hampshire Gazette’s circulation declined in the late 2000s, a series of blogs gave Amherst readers alternative sources of information.
The Gazette’s circulation had fallen by 20 percent from its 1995 peak when the local owners sold the newspaper to a regional chain in 2005. It would fall a lot more over the next 15 years.
All over the U.S., local newspapers were shedding reporters, readers and advertising. Between 2008 and 2020, the number of newspaper journalists declined by more than half. Meanwhile, new web publishing tools facilitated the posting of interactive content by community volunteers and elected officials.
In Amherst, blogs and other online news sources sprang up, often providing more detail than space-constrained newspapers, and for free. In this post, I’ll highlight some of them, and list others at the end.
“I will probably be a bit rough around the edges as I settle in to this role,” wrote Stephanie O’Keeffe on her Select Board blog as she became the chair. “I will make mistakes. (And you can gloat about them! I understand the occupational hazards.) But if I didn’t think I could help move us forward, then I wouldn’t have gone down this path.”
Stephanie O’Keeffe
O’Keeffe started blogging in 2006, chronicling her Town Meeting experience, as a way to let people know how she was voting and why. (It is still accessible online.) “I was troubled by the inscrutability of that body, and how most people have little choice but to elect members about whom they know nothing,” she explained.
Then she started inAmherst.com, which began by covering local businesses and events like the Grace Church renovation, moving a house from Kendrick Park, and demolition of fraternity houses. It expanded into play-by-play recaps of Select Board meetings.
She wrote another blog as a candidate for the Select Board in 2008 and, after she was elected, she wrote a blog for a year about the board’s activities (it’s accessible here). Her husband, Jonathan, produced tallyvotes.org, which provided information on how each Town Meeting member voted, along with illustrative graphs.
In 2009, after a year on the Select Board, she wrote on her blog about “Things I’ve Learned.” Here’s a condensed version: “We can’t be blazing our own trails outside of meetings; Disagreeing is important, but agreeing is more important; There are more moving parts to all of this than people can possibly know; It is easier to criticize how things work than to make them work better; Few people see an issue from other than their own perspective; My inclination is to trust, too much; Don’t believe everything you read; This isn’t supposed to be a full-time job; Policy is elusive; Focus on the positive.”
Larry Kelley, a fifth-generation Amherst resident who had been a karate teacher, athletic club owner, Town Meeting gadfly and Bulletin columnist, started his blog in 2007. “Only in the Republic of Amherst” lasted for 10 years, until Kelley died in an auto accident.
Kelley thrived on controversy. He enjoyed his role as combative citizen journalist, following the police scanner, going to large student parties with a camera, and filing Open Meeting Law complaints. He attended and reported on more Town Hall meetings than the “crusty” Gazette, as he called it, and he had good sources of information in the Police and Fire Departments.
Kelley often published a “DUI Dishonor Roll,” which included photos of people facing charges of drunk driving in court. He attacked Town ownership of Cherry Hill Golf Course, absentee landlords, and “NIMBYs” who opposed new development. He called the doomed elementary school plan a “Mega School.”
Larry Kelley
Kelley was a truculent man, sometimes engaging in name-calling (he called O’Keeffe “Princess Stephanie,” one of his nicer epithets) and often jousting with commenters. He allowed all kinds of comments, including anonymous ones (though he often called these correspondents “cowardly anon nitwits”).
He published stunning aerial photos of Amherst from his drones. Love him or hate him, the town lost a distinctive perspective when he died. Here are two representative quotes from Kelley’s blog:
“From canceling ‘West Side Story’ because it was ‘racist’ to allowing kids to perform the R-rated ‘Vagina Monologues,’ ARHS is a shining example of the mayhem that results from Political Correctness run amok.”
“UMass needs to seek out the hard core party types (reflected in Nuisance House tickets, Resisting Arrest, and Assault and Battery on a police officer charges) and be rid of them once and for all.”
Catherine Sanderson was a controversial School Committee member who wrote 443 posts on her blog between 2008 and 2011. You can see the blog here.
Her blog provided extensive summaries of School Committee meetings and republished newspaper stories, and she often pushed the public schools to do better. On her blog, she gave her opinions on teacher salaries, per-pupil expenses, budgets, the achievement gap, “How to Evaluate the 9th Grade Science Course,” and the math program. She often detailed her independent research on school issues. One post on a superintendent search received 119 comments.
She was a contrarian who, in two superintendent searches, voted for candidates who were not hired. Many people believe she was right both times.
In her final post, Sanderson wrote, “Although many students do in fact have good experiences in some (or even all) aspects of our schools, others have less consistently positive experiences – and we need to recognize this dissatisfaction and try whenever possible to solve the problems (instead of pretending they don’t exist and derogating those who raise them).”
An anonymous commenter responded, “These last three years have been among the most damaging to our schools in recent memory, largely because of the combat zone and false dichotomies of Catherine Sanderson.”
Another blog by a School Committee member started this year. Jennifer Shiao, who was elected in November, has provided detailed recaps of committee meetings and explained her positions on school issues in 14 posts so far. You can access her blog here.
“A Better Amherst” started in 2017 as a blog explaining the Charter Commission’s proposal for a new form of government and advocating for its approval by voters. Mandi Jo Hanneke and I were members of the commission, and we published 80 posts on the blog in the six months before voters approved the new charter in 2018. “A Better Amherst,” which had 5,000 users, is no longer online but is available on Amazon in paperback form.
Mandi Jo Hanneke
The blog provided rebuttals to charges that the new form of government would promote development, make money a major factor in elections, depress women’s participation, and concentrate power. It debunked with dollar figures the assertion that the “yes” campaign had bigger donors than the “no” campaign.
Ten respected Amherst residents who supported a “yes” vote on the charter wrote guest posts on the blog. Two of these posts, by Jim Wald and Kate Atkinson, received more views than any post Hanneke or I wrote. The blog also published many comments, including 108 from charter opponents, especially Janet McGowan, who wrote 45.
Hanneke left the blog after the charter election to run for the new Town Council. I continued it with another 50 posts over the next 14 months.
“A Better Amherst” published many endorsements of the new charter, such as: “Our current system feels an awful lot like taxation without representation” (Ginny Hamilton) and “What IS at risk in this referendum is the power of a relatively small group of Town Meeting members who have been able to wield that power for years by directing debates and manipulating the rules” (Bob Rakoff) and “Councils are like email, and Town Meetings are like regular mail” (Franklin administrator Jeff Nutting).
The Amherst Indywas founded in late 2018 by Laura Quilter, Maria Kopicki and Art Keene, all of whom opposed the new charter that voters had recently approved, and the elementary school plan of six years ago. Keene, a former anthropology professor and successful ARHS girls cross country coach, and his wife Maura, a retired physician, are the publishers and write many of the articles.
The Indy is not a blog, but rather a free online news source, or as Art Keene puts it, “a community journalism project.” It provides detailed reports on some Amherst government meetings that the Gazette also covers (such as the Town Council) and some that might otherwise go unreported (such as the Planning Board). This week it included a listing of public events, which the Gazette and Bulletin no longer publish, and a local Covid update.
“We aim to involve many residents in the process of collecting and reporting news and in so doing raise civic awareness and promote civic participation,” Art Keene told me. “We are unapologetically progressive in our orientation and seek to emphasize issues of social and economic justice and democratic practice.”
Although the Indy professes to be a forum for “exploring new ideas and diverse opinions,” most of the writers and commenters opposed the charter and the school plan, and many opposed the Jones Library renovation/expansion project.
The Indy’s mission statement says, “We are committed to a rigorous separation of reporting from commentary.” It has published over 3,000 articles by 267 contributors, and aims to publish 24 to 36 articles a week, half of them news, Keene said.
Their most-viewed article was “Amherst residents demand end to local mask mandates” on Feb. 11, while the second-most was about black squirrels and the fourth-most about a family of bears, Keene said. The third-most and fifth-most viewed concerned the Jones Library project.
Sarah Marshall and I started The Amherst Current a year ago. We provided extensive coverage of last November’s election, and have offered many posts explaining local issues. I have recently written posts on famous writers who lived in Amherst and this multi-part history of Amherst journalism over the last 45 years. I’m not providing more details here, because regular Current readers already know what we do, and because Sarah and I will have more information about the blog in a first-anniversary post next week.
Many other blogs have arisen in Amherst over the past 16 years. Mary Carey, the Gazette’s former Town Hall reporter, started one in 2006, though she mostly steered clear of Town politics. Marla Goldberg-Jamate published amherstspectator.com in 2017-18. Alison Donta-Venman wrote a blog called “Amherst by the Numbers” in 2009.
Former Town Manager Larry Shaffer and the Amherst Police Department have had blogs, and Amherst GIS has a blog with some cool maps of the town. Gavin Andresen has a blog called Gavinthink, and several school PTOs and parent councils have maintained blogs. Numerous Amherst College students have blogs.
Anyone who wants to cite other Amherst blogs is welcome to do so in the comments.
When it comes to the elementary school building project in Amherst, by all means – advocate with elected and public decision makers. The project will be all the better with more voices and perspectives in the mix.
But, effective advocacy should not rely on misleading statements or false claims. This post is to fact-check a number of these statements and claims.
A petition is going around, created by a PAC in Amherst, that compares the two potential building sites, providing some accurate info but leaving out other critical information and including statements that are misleading or false. Specifically:
Yes, the project designers have recommended a roundabout be constructed at the Wildwood entrance to accommodate the increased traffic from the consolidated school. But they also recommended construction to widen the road in front of Fort River to accommodate the increased traffic at that site. And, importantly, the traffic study (completed by traffic engineers) demonstrates that the traffic around the Fort River site is significantly worse than around the Wildwood site, both today and after potential construction at either location.
No, Fort River will not “most likely be sold or leased for development” were Wildwood selected as the site for the consolidated school. There has been no such discussion. In fact, multiple Town Councilors have stated in public meetings their commitment to retaining both properties for the town.
No, it’s not true that the community fields at the Fort River location “would likely be lost.” Again, there has been no such discussion. If the Wildwood location were to be selected for the building project, improvements to fields at the Fort River location will not be part of the project but the fields will by no means “be lost.” In fact, since the latest estimates show that the building costs at the Wildwood location could be approximately $2 million lower than at Fort River, the community could use some of those savings to improve the community fields at Fort River should it choose.
Yes, the full project completion will take longer at the Wildwood location than at the Fort River location. But, students will move into the new building in fall of 2026 in either location. If the Wildwood location is selected, the rebuilding of a parking lot would need to be completed by the following spring or summer.
Yes, decisions eventually will need to be made about what to do with the site that is not selected for the school building project, and many interesting and worthy ideas have already been proposed. But, both Wildwood and Fort River buildings are failing – it’s why we are consolidating the two schools in this building project, after all. Repurposing either one of the buildings would cost millions in renovations and repairs – and in the case of Wildwood, removal of hazardous materials – that are not part of this school building project. And, any such decision can only be made after the decision is made about which location is best for the consolidated elementary school.
I, personally, am concerned about the extended period of limited access to outdoor spaces for students during construction were the Wildwood location selected, but the choice of building location is far from a “clear choice” or a “no-brainer” as some would have you believe.
The facts and professional analyses both demonstrate that while there are pros and cons associated with each location, both are workable. The Elementary School Building Committee has a tough decision to make when it meets on June 13, and I will support them whatever choice they make. Because the most important thing is that we get our students into a new school building as soon as possible.
Allison McDonald is the chair of the Amherst School Committee; the views expressed in this column are her own. (From the editors: Continue below for important alerts.)
The Elementary School Building Committee is hosting a Community Forum tomorrow night, Thursday, on Zoom, 6:30-9:00 p.m. https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86119993876 Meeting ID 861 1999 3876
The Elementary School Building Committee will meet next Monday morning, 8:30-11:00 a.m. by Zoom and may vote on the preferred option (that is, location and type of construction) at that time. Here is the link. Meeting ID 829 3205 2132
This is the second part of series on Amherst newspapers and blogs from 1977 to the present. Here’s a link to Part One.
By Nick Grabbe
Amherst news stories attracted national attention four times between 1997 and 2002, as many Americans heard about our town because of a canceled high school musical, criticism of the flag, odd police incidents, and a fake Emily Dickinson manuscript.
And three times over the next few years, newspapers revealed that men who worked with young people in Amherst had to resign because of sexual improprieties.
It was a time when most people still got most of their local news from newspapers. And as the 1980s ended, the Amherst Bulletin was a successful weekly newspaper, with deep roots in the community and lots of advertising that paid for a large staff and free delivery through the mail.
But the Bulletin had a fundamental problem, and the solution to that problem, though perhaps inevitable, contributed to its ultimate decline.
I had been the editor of the Bulletin since 1980. In 1987 and ’88, the paper was sometimes as fat as 52 pages, five and a half times bigger than today’s Bulletin. It had a full-time staff of 11 and a busy office downtown. An independent survey found that the Bulletin’s readers “exhibit remarkably strong loyalty to their weekly.”
This Bulletin front page is from 1988, when it was editorially independent of the Gazette.
The Bulletin had three reporters who lived in Amherst and had extensive experience writing about Town government and the schools. It had sections devoted to Amherst sports and to news from the regional towns and campuses. There was a robust commentary page with regular columnists and lots of letters. Local people wrote about Amherst’s history, gardening, fitness, food, music and movies.
But there was a problem. The Bulletin and the Daily Hampshire Gazette, based in Northampton, were owned by the same company. The two papers had separate Amherst staffs, but we worked in the same office and were often in competition with each other for stories. There were often two reporters at Select Board meetings, one from each paper, and two reporters and two photographers at high school football games. When ad revenue declined in 1990-91, this unusual duplication of effort became untenable.
Some Gazette employees in Northampton felt, justifiably, that the free Bulletin limited paid circulation of the daily paper in Amherst. In February 1991, the two papers merged their news-gathering operations. This change happened the same week as another news story that brought Amherst national notoriety: Gregory Levey died after setting himself on fire on the town common in an antiwar protest.
This front page of the Bulletin is from 1995.
It made sense for the two papers to stop competing with each other, but the 1990s saw a gradual diminishing of the Bulletin’s independence and impact. News stories now had to come out first in the daily Gazette, leaving the Bulletin trying to approach issues differently while using the same reporters. The Bulletin frequently published features on the front page that were not in the Gazette, but increasingly, the news stories were the same in both papers.
In the early 1990s, the Gazette and Bulletin covered tax overrides, instructional grouping in the Amherst schools, bad blood on the Select Board, town-gown conflicts and a proposal to cut the number of streetlights. With echoes today, there was a successful plan for a $3.2 million Jones Library renovation and expansion and an unsuccessful plan for a $8.9 million new elementary school.
Two Amherst natives who would become influential in town wrote regular columns for the Bulletin. Larry Kelley railed about the Cherry Hill Golf Course purchase and Town-funded recreation programs, while Meg Gage proposed turning the junior high into a middle school. Well-known writers such as Julius Lester and Howard Ziff wrote commentaries.
The Gazette and Bulletin extensively covered the first of Amherst’s three charter commissions, and the rejection in 1994 of its proposal to create a seven-member town council, with one acting as a mayor, but to keep a smaller Town Meeting. A group called Amherst Citizens for Responsible Government supported the proposed change in government, and helped defeat tax overrides for the regional schools, expansion of the high school, and renovation of Town Hall.
A photo display called “Love Makes a Family” in the elementary schools caused some people to question its appropriateness.
During the 1990s, the newspapers covered numerous Amherst controversies: the removal of a Christmas tree from the Jones Library, mold and sickness at Fort River School, efforts to broaden the tax base, banners with political messages over South Pleasant Street, and a photo exhibit in the elementary schools about non-traditional families called “Love Makes a Family.”
The biggest political battle of the 1990s was over building a parking garage. The Bulletin published a chart of pros and cons of three sites: Boltwood Walk, behind CVS, and Amity Street. There were six Town Meeting sessions in 1997 just on the garage issue, which the Bulletin called “Amherst’s longest-running soap opera.” Town Meeting rejected a plan for a larger garage at Boltwood Walk, and a compromise was finally agreed on for a smaller structure, the one you see there today.
The newspapers also covered vandalism at a typewriter store that was seen as racist and inspired a group called Not In Our Town. There was a debate over whether posters on bus shelters and light poles created a cosmopolitan atmosphere or a sloppy appearance. Dan Lombardo at the Jones Library found that a newly discovered manuscript by Emily Dickinson was actually the work of a master forger, a story that brought international attention to Amherst.
In 1997, a UMass student, apparently drunk, died after he fell through a greenhouse roof on campus. The police were responding regularly to gatherings of hundreds of students, many of them drunk, outside Antonio’s and on Hobart Lane. Longtime residents living near the campus complained about late-night noise. The Gazette frequently reported incidents of student misbehavior – and some in Amherst wondered if it exaggerated the extent of the problem. In 1998, the Gazette produced a special section called “One Weekend in Amherst” about student drinking.
Smoking also became an issue. The Bulletin conducted a sting, giving two underage youths money and instructing them to try to buy cigarettes at 21 stores. The paper then listed the names of the 18 stores that did not bother asking them for IDs. The Board of Health banned smoking in all Amherst bars, a move that was controversial at the time but within a few years was adopted widely in Massachusetts.
In 1999, ARHS canceled a planned production of “West Side Story,” and the resulting controversy was picked up by the international press. While Puerto Rican students and some parents maintained that the musical promoted harmful stereotypes, others called the cancellation political correctness run amok.
I stepped down as editor of the Amherst Bulletin in 1999 and became a writer for both papers, whose staffs were by then firmly integrated. For the first time, one person was responsible for Amherst coverage in both papers. And, for the first time, the editor of the Bulletin did not live in Amherst and, based in Northampton, rarely came here. Some of these Amherst editors were capable, but their unfamiliarity with the town popped up on occasion, such as when a headline referred to Select Board member Hill Boss as “Hill.”
By the turn of the century, the long, slow decline of newspapers nationwide had begun, as the Internet expanded the options for receiving information and cut into everyone’s reading time. Local newspapers suffered the most.
In early 2002, the Gazette and Bulletin announced a reduction in staffing by the equivalent of 11 full-time positions. The Gazette’s circulation had started a long decline, the company’s profit margin had been cut in half, and advertising was down by 7 percent. Craig’s List undercut the once-profitable Classified ads.
The placement of 29 flags on light poles was a big issue before and after Sept. 11, 2001.
On Sept. 11, 2001, shortly after planes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the newspapers sprang into action, covering the reactions to the terrorist attacks. About 14 hours before that unforgettable moment, the Select Board had had a vigorous debate over the placement of 29 American flags on downtown light poles. The newspapers reported that UMass physics professor Jennie Traschen told the Select Board that some see the flag as “a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression.” Her unfortunately timed remarks were reported by national news outlets. By the end of 2001 she had received 1,500 emails, most of them critical and many of them obscene.
The town manager ordered the flags taken down a few days after Sept. 11, but the Select Board tangled with Larry Kelley over the timing and extent of the flag display for several years.
Amazingly, three men who worked with young people in Amherst resigned because of sexual improprieties in the early 2000s. The Gazette reported that the ARHS principal was alleged to have asked a male 9th grader to expose a nipple, and the Town’s youth sports director left after officials found that he wrote sexually oriented e-mails using boys’ names and transmitted them to his home computer. The director of the Amherst Boys and Girls Club was arrested for possession of child pornography.
The early 2000s also saw a lawsuit by 27 Orchard Valley residents that didn’t succeed in blocking an affordable housing complex, and a campaign to revive the Amherst Cinema that did succeed. The price of Amherst house lots topped $100,000.
Criticism of Town Meeting continued. In the spring of 2001, it lasted 12 nights, and in 2002 one session got through only two articles of a 45-article warrant. Turnout in the local election dipped to 7.7 percent.
Voters created a second Charter Commission in 2001, and its nine members met more than 50 times. Seven of the members supported its proposal to replace Town Meeting with a nine-member council, with both an elected mayor and a manager. In 2003, voters rejected this plan by only 14 votes, and in 2005 they rejected it again, by a wider margin.
Scott Merzbach started writing the Bulletin police log in 1997, and it was a surprise hit with readers. It was also the subject of a four-page article in Harper’s magazine in 2002 called “Gone When Police Got There.” A Leverett man collected quirky items from the police log, calling them “found poetry,” and collected them in a book, describing incidents such as a frozen turkey plunked in the middle of North Pleasant Street and a man licking the pavement on Main Street.
Amherst’s distinctiveness was, once again, publicized around the country.
Next in this series: As newspapers serving Amherst continued to struggle, 10 blogs and web sites started providing residents with news and views.
From the Town: The Amherst Memorial Day observances will be returning to its usual Amherst annual program. There will be a parade this year. The Veterans Service Organizations of Amherst, as well as Central Hampshire Veteran Services, have planned this year’s remembrance with marching units from American Legion Post 148 and VFW Post 754, as well as Amherst Police and Fire departments. There will be other civic and youth organizations participating like previous years.
There will be a ceremony to honor our deceased men and women in uniform who endured incredible sacrifices, and, for some, the ultimate sacrifice of giving their life for their country. This year’s guest speaker will be Robert H. Romer, author of the newly released book I am a Bitter Enemy to Slavery An Amherst College Student Goes to War Christopher Pennell (1842-1864). There also will be a performance of the Amherst Pelham Regional High School Chorale.
The President of the United States of America proclaims May 30, 2022, a National Day of Remembrance. He encourages all Americans to observe this solemn day of remembrance and to honor our military, past and present, with appropriate ceremonies and activities. All Federal agencies and interested organizations, groups, and individuals shall fly the flag of the United States at half-staff this May 30 in honor of those American patriots who died as a result of their service.
The Veterans Service Organizations of Amherst invites those who wish to observe this year’s ceremony to go to the grounds behind the War Memorial Pool where the parade will end and the ceremony will begin directly following.
We look forward to seeing you there this year and encourage all community members to remember the meaning of Memorial Day in honoring those who died in military service to our nation…lest we forget…
The Memorial Day parade begins today at 9 a.m. at the Town the Common, heads up North and East Pleasant Streets to Triangle Street, and proceeds to the War Memorial Pool where the ceremony will be held.
It’s hard to believe, but in 1981 there were four weekly newspapers based in Amherst. They were:
The Amherst Record, a community paper going through changes;
The Amherst News, a cooperative run by former Record employees;
The Valley Advocate, an “alternative” paper free for pickup, and
The Amherst Bulletin, a free tabloid shopper owned by the Gazette.
In addition, the Daily Hampshire Gazette had a well-read second section called “Amherst Area News,” and radio station WTTT covered Amherst news every day. The UMass Daily Collegian, the Amherst Student and the ARHS Graphic all covered news from their schools.
But this history begins in 1977. The Advocate and Bulletin had been around for only a few years, while the Record had been Amherst’s home-town paper for over a century. The Record was published twice a week, cost 25 cents a copy, and the editor and publisher, Michael De Sherbinin, lived on Triangle Street. It was small-town, old-fashioned local journalism.
The Amherst Record had been publishing since 1868.
The Record published Town Hall news, lots of funky columns, and information from surrounding towns. When Princess Grace stayed at the Lord Jeff, there was a story and photo on the front page. “The Policeman’s Lot” was a precursor to the Bulletin’s police log. The Record published the voting records of Town Meeting candidates, box scores of ARHS baseball games, plus recipes and movie guides. A large Stop & Shop ad included a coupon for frozen French fries for five cents. An ad for a ranch house listed the asking price as $36,900.
But in 1977, Record employees went on strike, and the picketing of the Main Street offices divided the town. The strike was settled, but De Sherbinin ultimately sold the paper to an out-of-state company, which tried to turn the Record into a morning daily. That effort failed and was abandoned in 1980. The Record became a free weekly that residents could pick up at stores around the town.
Meanwhile, the Advocate grew dramatically in size, quality and influence in the late 1970s. Based in Amherst, it occasionally covered Amherst stories, such as a feature asking why five unrelated housemates were threatening to the town.
I was the managing editor of the Advocate in 1976-77, during which time it took aim at nuclear power, covered the local music scene, and strutted its baby-boomer bona fides by devoting an entire issue to stories about marijuana. The Advocate had its most successful period after I left, expanding its staffing, winning over previously reluctant advertisers, reaching a high level of quality in its journalism, and finally winning a major national award in 1979 for a series of articles on the impact of the Hadley malls on downtown businesses.
Amherst newspaper readers were well served in 1981 by having multiple sources of printed information. There wasn’t more to write about than there is today, but people paid a lot more attention to newspapers in the era before social media. And there wasn’t an overriding political issue like a parking garage or a new charter to get people worked up. It was just a heyday for newspapers.
But then, one by one, three of these four weekly papers folded or left Amherst. The Advocate, after being hassled by the building inspector over its Amity Street offices, moved to Hatfield. The News, which was avidly read by followers of town government, went under, largely because it wasn’t free and its low circulation couldn’t compete for advertising with the free weeklies. The Record, after years of losing money, went through a series of ownership changes, and alienated people by erecting bright-yellow delivery boxes on residents’ lawns without their permission. It published its last issue in early 1984.
The Amherst Bulletin as a feature paper in 1981.
I had been editor of the Bulletin since 1980, operating with a tiny staff and a mostly feature orientation. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who became a nationally known writer, got her start in journalism writing features for the Bulletin during this period. The pictured cover story about a hot-air balloonist was typical of the “soft news” the Bulletin presented, but there was occasionally some harder stories. One memorable one was headlined “Boston bankers ready to wait out nuclear war in Amherst bunker.”
Responding to the demise of the Record, the Bulletin expanded into news-gathering and became a broadsheet (full-size) paper in 1985. The Bulletin hired three well-connected and tireless reporters from the defunct weeklies: Nancy Newcombe, Phyllis Lehrer and Patrick Callahan.
As the only weekly left in Amherst, with extensive reach to readers from its free mail circulation and support from the Gazette’s advertising and production departments, the Bulletin expanded in its size and offerings. It established a commentary page and sections devoted to schools, sports, arts and leisure, and news from the campuses and surrounding towns. There was a local history column, features on local people, a calendar of events, high school honor rolls, and even Little League game reports and lists of new books at the Jones Library.
Over the next 15 years, the Bulletin covered some controversial proposals that have echoes today: a new elementary school, a renovated Jones Library, a new form of government, and a downtown parking garage.
By 1987, the Amherst Bulletin had grown in size, offerings and influence. This issue was 52 pages.
The two biggest Amherst stories of the mid-to-late-1980s were the Town’s purchase of Cherry Hill Golf Course in order to stop plans for a condominium development there, and whether to allow a business that bought and sold used auto parts to remain at the old landfill site. Unlike most papers, the Bulletin did not run editorials taking positions on these or any other controversial issues.
Amherst’s public-access cable TV station started carrying Town Meeting live, and the sessions were often more interesting to watch than sitcoms. Newcombe and WTTT news director Tim Ashwell provided informed commentary, with Lehrer also speaking to viewers. The Gazette continued to report Amherst news daily, and many of their young reporters were excellent, but they rarely stuck around for long, and the editors were based in Northampton and rarely visited Amherst. The Springfield daily appealed to some Amherst residents who liked a morning paper, but it had limited readership or influence here.
Next in this series: In the 1990s, the Bulletin and Gazette merge their news-gathering operations, leading to the slow decline of Amherst’s weekly newspaper.
Amherst residents are encouraged to attend a virtual forum, one week from tomorrow, to learn about and discuss
The two possible building sites, Wildwood and Fort River,
The preliminary evaluation of the alternatives, and
The educational program and space plan.
The building committee will be submitting its “preferred schematic report,” outlining detailed evaluations of all the alternatives, the chosen site, and basic building program, to the MSBC at the end of June. The Community Forum is an important opportunity to contribute your thoughts as this work is undertaken.
The Forum will be held by Zoom on Thursday, May 5, 6:30 p.m.-9:00 p.m.
Using local data gathered during the 2020 census, Amherst recently developed and adopted a new map of voting precincts and districts. Interestingly, while 81% of voters remain in the same precinct (renumbered, perhaps), only 61% remain in the same district.
The most significant changes to boundaries occurred near the center of town, with Districts 3 and 4 redrawn such that all four of their current Town Councilors – Dorothy Pam, Jennifer Taub, Anika Lopes, and Pam Rooney – reside in the new District 4. When voters go to the polls in November of 2023 (possibly earlier if primaries are needed), no incumbents will be on the District 3 ballot, while four may appear on the District 4 ballot if all four seek reelection.
Map of new voting precincts and districts
Until then, all Councilors represent the districts as they existed last November. But voters in the new District 3, at least, may want to begin evaluating whether they or their neighbors want to become candidates for the two open seats.
All residents should check their new precinct and district assignments. The annual town census, recently mailed to all residents, includes a tear-off notice at the bottom, such as the one my family received, shown below.
Updated information regarding the author’s voting precinct, district, and poll location
If you missed that attachment to the annual census, you can check your precinct and district by looking up your street and house number here. Note that some precincts have new designations; for example, my Precinct 9 has been renamed Precinct 4A, as shown in the map above. Some polling locations have changed as well. If a debt exclusion override for a new elementary school is put to voters a year from now, we will vote at these updated polling places.
Why were these changes made? State law requires “reprecincting” after every decennial census. Last summer, an Amherst District Advisory Board (DAB) was appointed and met weekly to analyze the census data and explore different map options. Given the strict requirements, the DAB put forward only one compliant map to the Town Council last October. You can read the DAB’s report and view the presentation to Council.
Demographic changes since 2010 and other data, such as voting activity, that drove the reprecincting effort included:
An increase in Amherst’s population,
Shifts in where people reside, including increases in downtown Amherst and at the University and some decreases elsewhere,
Extreme differences in population density across town, with about 40% of the population living in 2% of the land area,
High variability in the number of active voters across census blocks.
Potential maps also had to meet state requirements, such as:
No precinct could include more than 4,000 residents,
Populations of precincts could not vary by more than 5% of the average,
Precincts and districts should be as compact as possible,
Minority voting strength must not be diluted
One of the DAB’s goals was to avoid clustering dormitories and other student-heavy areas primarily into two districts, since the differences in student voting behavior create large imbalances in voter strength across districts. For example, in last November’s election, turnout in Precinct 10 (District 3) was 20%, whereas turnout in Precinct 8 (District 5), was 44%. The minimum number of votes to win a contested Council seat in District 3 last year was 191, versus 475 in District 4. In contrast, more than 1,100 people voted for each of two unopposed candidates in District 5.
In the new map, District 4 runs mainly east-west rather than north-south, capturing more of the student population. District 3 now covers a much larger area to the south, capturing some of the previous District 4 and District 5. District 1 has lost some of its southern end to District 2 and gained some of District 2’s territory to the northeast. Finally, District 5 is now enormous, geographically, and includes both southeast Amherst and part of downtown. The center of Amherst is now split between Districts 4 and 5 rather than Districts 3 and 4. Future Councilors from District 5 will need to address both “rural” and “urban” priorities.
For comparison, here is the former map, in effect last fall.
Former map, no longer valid for local elections
FYI, District 3 Councilors are holding a meeting for constituents this weekend. See On our radar for details.
In the late spring of 2020, the callous murder of George Floyd triggered protests around the world, including here in Amherst. Within a few months, a local group, Reparations for Amherst, sponsored a petition to request Amherst’s Town Council to commit to anti-racism and to establish a reparations fund.
In December of 2020, Town Council unanimously adopted a resolution affirming the Town’s commitment to ending structural racism and achieving racial equity for Black residents. One of the first actions consequent to this resolution was to establish a new Town committee, the African Heritage Reparations Assembly (AHRA), and give it the task of developing reparations proposals. The Assembly’s first chair is Michele Miller, who continues in this role since her election to Town Council and wrote about reparations work on this blog earlier this year.
Within a few months of forming, the AHRA submitted a report to Council outlining their initial work and their plan for the future. Shortly thereafter, the AHRA developed a strategic plan for completing its complex task by the end of June, 2023, after receiving a time extension. Central elements include documenting harms – instances or patterns of racial injustice – done to Black residents of Amherst, documenting the impacts of those harms, and proposing remedies for those harms.
The Assembly is currently considering surveys, interviews, focus groups, and other means of reaching community members to explore residents’ understanding of local racial injustice, what “reparations” can mean or entail, and the degree to which residents have been engaged with the work of the AHRA, Reparations for Amherst, or the Black Assembly of Amherst, Massachusetts.
Part of the work of repair is to educate, and the AHRA has identified several programs that may be useful. One, developed by the Jewish Community of Amherst (JCA), is a curriculum called “The Stolen Beam,” is five-part exploration of reparations. Members of the JCA will be leading participants through the curriculum at the Jones Library, every Tuesday in May. (See this link for more information and registration.) Other available programs include “Owning Up” workshops on wealth disparities, conducted by Reparations for Amherst for non-Black residents, and “On the Road: the Case for Local Reparations,” a presentation by Michele Miller that she has already made to the Applewood community.
One challenge of designing a reparations program that uses taxpayer funds is ensuring that the program serves a “public purpose.” Payments of tax money to individuals is ordinarily not permitted. Readers may recall the recent debate over awarding Community Preservation Act funds to private property owners, in which there was concern about whether a public purpose was served. The answer, in that case, was yes, because the public’s view of a historic property is deemed a public benefit. But no public benefit or purpose is yet recognized in Massachusetts for reparations for racial injustice to individuals. (I assume that damages awarded in a lawsuit are exempt.)
The Town’s attorneys proposed three options by which establishing a legally compliant reparations program might be established. The AHRA decided to request that Town Council pursue one of the options, namely, a home-rule petition, or specific local legislation, that describes (local) reparations as a (local) public purpose, and consulted with Rep. Mindy Domb and Sen. Jo Comerford about that process.
At the Council meeting of March 3 (begin at minute 45 on the video), members of the AHRA recalled to Council its anti-racism resolution and spoke of their experiences, and those of family members, as people of color in Amherst. They advocated a home-rule petition essential to writing wrongs identified in the resolution. Council unanimously approved a motion directing the Town Manager to begin the process of seeking special legislation to define reparations as a public purpose, to seek guidance, as needed, from the African Heritage Reparation Assembly, to provide a copy of the proposed petition to the AHRA for review prior to submitting it to the Town Council for approval, and then to file it with the State Legislature.
There is no guarantee that a home-rule petition will be granted, so AHRA may also pursue the other avenues described to them by the Town’s attorneys.
Once a reparations program is developed, where will funds come from? Town Council voted last November to direct $210,000 from “free cash” (money left over from the previous fiscal year’s budget) to a Reparations Stabilization Fund. That Fund currently should receive additional, but variable, funding annually.
Other elements of AHRA’s work include contracting with the Donahue Institute to combine data from the recent decennial census with more granular survey data to more clearly identify the residences of Black Amherst residents. This information will help AHRA in its efforts to engage these residents in its work, including the documentation of harms.
Relatedly, AHRA is seeking grant funding from the Massachusetts Humanities Council to document, via film or audio, the oral histories of Black residents. It has already received a small grant from the Amherst Cultural Council to help it document its efforts to design a successful reparations program. Since very few communities in the United States have pursued such a goal, Amherst’s experience may be of interest to others.
AHRA’s webpage includes a “Resources” link to numerous documents and articles relevant to their work.
The Amherst School Committee meets today, Tuesday, 6:30-9:00 p.m. Agenda includes discussion and vote on the Educational Plan and Space Summary for the elementary school building project. https://https://meet.google.com/kjt-fdaa-gme Full agenda: http://go.boarddocs.com/ma/arps/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=CC4R9F6CA67F
The public is invited to a forum regarding the elementary school building project on Wednesday, March 9, 6:30-9 p.m. The DiNisco Design Team will present overviews on the following topics: Educational Program & Space Summary Needs, Existing Conditions Updates, Preliminary Evaluation of Alternatives. The forum will take public comment. Participate or watch by Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/91347209624 Meeting ID: 913 4720 9624 To indicate you wish to make a comment click “raise hand.”
Second in a series of posts by former Town Councilor George Ryan on issues critical to Amherst’s immediate future.
In response to the death of George Floyd and the national expression of outrage at police violence aimed at people of color, Amherst has committed itself to the creation and implementation of the Community Responders for Equity and Service Program (CRESS), a program meant to provide an unarmed civilian alternative for situations that might otherwise require a police response.
In the coming months, the Town will need to hire and train eight community responders and a director and administrative assistant to run the program, at an estimated annual operating cost of $936,000. This new program will present significant challenges, including finding and training eight qualified (ideally, bilingual) candidates, and figuring out how they can work effectively with our existing public safety personnel (Police and Fire Departments and Dispatch). The staffing challenge will be compounded by regional personnel shortages in the social services and mental health fields.
Funding will also be a challenge. For the next fiscal year, the Town will use some of its federal Covid relief money to pay for non-operating and one-time costs, along with a one-time $450,000 Public Health Grant from the State and $200,000 reallocated from the Amherst Police budget by not filling two positions that are currently vacant.
Funding in FY24 and beyond will be a much greater challenge. Unless funding for other departments is reduced, or significant new revenue identified, the Town will almost certainly need to make use of reserves. These reserves have already been earmarked in the Town’s financial plan to help fund four major capital projects. The amount of reserves needed in turn will depend on union negotiations, health insurance premium changes and other major cost increases. There are a lot of unknowns here. Costs related to salaries, step increases, and health insurance will almost certainly go up.
There also will be pressure from some to cut police positions in order to fund this program in the long term. In my opinion, it would not be wise to further cut existing public safety positions. In communities where such civilian responder programs have been created, the programs have not been funded by cutting existing public safety budgets but rather by finding other sources of revenue.
A further challenge will be the need, for the foreseeable future, for higher annual allocations to the municipal budget, as opposed to the library system and the schools. In the past, all departments including the schools were given a yearly 2.5 percent increase (the maximum allowed under Proposition 2½) but increases beyond that were shared equally. The sense among Town departments that “we are all in this together” could be lost and create unavoidable tensions.
Here are two additional issues Amherst faces.
Finding a site for Public Works. For the past three years, the Town has been unable to secure a site for a new DPW facility. This failure has many causes and no single villain. Not surprisingly, neighborhood concerns played an important role in defeating at least one attractive proposal where the Town was to be gifted the land for a new DPW site. Given the high price of land in Amherst, a free site would be enormously beneficial to taxpayers.
In the coming year, this problem needs to be resolved because, without a site for the DPW, we cannot move forward with the new Fire Station at the current DPW site. Every year of delay increases the cost or constrains what we can build. Delay also has prevented us from fully implementing the financial plan that has been created to responsibly fund four major capital projects. Perhaps we will need multiple sites for the DPW – not an ideal solution, but at least we could move forward.
Homelessness and Transitional Housing. In its Town Manager Performance Goals for 2022, the Town Council reiterated its desire for the creation of a permanent, year-round shelter for homeless individuals. The Town Manager has allocated $1 million of federal Covid relief money to address homelessness and transitional housing. (Transitional housing is temporary housing, often including support services, that helps prepare individuals for permanent housing.)
At least three possible sites in Amherst have been identified. The question is whether anything will actually happen. While an informal working group was created by the Town Manager to address this issue, its membership, mandate, and progress remain opaque. It is also unclear what the Town Manager has in mind for “transitional housing” or how (and by whom) that will be addressed.
Coming, in the third part of this series – fixing the rental registration bylaw and deciding on a downtown parking garage.
Perhaps I should not be surprised, but as the Elementary School Building Committee (ESBC) and the Amherst School Committee (ASC) methodically move through the process of designing a new or renovated school, some voices are already sounding the alarm about the size and/or cost of the project.
I very much want a new school (to house the Wildwood and Fort River students) that will pass muster both with the Town Council and the voters, who will be asked to support a debt exclusion override in a year or so. So it is vital to develop a proposal that is neither extravagant or unreasonable, and is strongly supported by Town Council.
But it is too early to argue that we are on course for a too-big-and-too-expensive elementary school. I hope everyone will calmly follow the process, contribute their ideas, hopes, and concerns, and avoid premature judgments.
So where are we in the process?
First of all, the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) specifies the sequence of work that must be conducted in order to qualify for partial state funding for the school. While some residents may wish the process unfolded differently, it is what it is. In brief, this is my understanding of where we are and what will happen next.
MSBA will contribute money only to a school that adequately provides space for the district’s educational program. Therefore, step 1 is defining that program, and you can view the draft here. The school committee is scheduled to vote on the educational program on March 8. Step 2 (which happens in conjunction with step 1) is to propose the space required to carry out that program. (Larger spaces are fine but MSBA won’t pay for what they don’t agree is required.) The types of spaces include, for example, the core academic classrooms, special education rooms, a “cafetorium,” music and art rooms, etc.
Step 3 is making very rough cost estimates for the seven options under study (more on that below). Step 4 is choosing the preferred option – that decision is scheduled to happen in June. Step 5 is designing the building and getting a detailed cost estimate. Step 6 is securing funding through the override. We are in the midst of steps 1 and 2.
Screenshot of the Anser Advisory project timeline
Last week, at the Feb. 8 meeting of the ASC, the DiNisco Design team presented the draft educational plan and an early draft space assessment. Most of the conversation focused on a table of space numbers that are, on their face, confusing or worrisome. One of the confusing aspects of the table is that space needs labeled “MSBA guidance” are, according to the architects, incomplete, not specific to Amherst, and not determinative. That “guidance” does not, for example, include space for some programs required by law and that MSBA will fund. By comparison, however, the draft space needs for our educational program look excessive. Donna DiNisco, principal at DiNisco Design, assured the committee that the MSBA is aware of the deficiencies of the guidance, that the parties will come to agreement about the allowable space, and that the eventual design will not exceed MSBA space limits.
Because the educational program drives the decisions about space, and the space requirements will strongly affect the cost of construction, members of the public are encouraged to submit thoughts about the draft educational program, or the project more generally, to the ESBC or the ASC in the next few weeks. You can email the ESBC chair, Cathy Schoen, and the ASC chair, Allison McDonald. Here are links to websites for the school project and the school committee.
If you want to watch the presentation and discussion of Feb. 8, begin at about minute 40 of this video. Also, see our “On our radar” page for details of a live Community Chat about the project next week.
End note: Two enrollment options are under study, per MSBA’s authorization: a 165-student school at Fort River (does not address the Wildwood school at all), and a 575-student school at either the Fort River or Wildwood sites. The seven scenarios that must be evaluated before June are:
For the Fort River-only school (165 students), the three options of renovating the existing school, renovating and adding to the school (add/reno), and new construction.
For the 575-student alternative, four options will be studied – add/reno and new construction at each site.
Recently, a study titled “Supporting and Retaining School Leaders” was brought to my attention. The report, commissioned by the Amherst-Pelham Regional School District, focused primarily on principals, but it could apply to any school leader, or even teachers and staff for that matter.
Being a school leader is a rewarding but difficult job. It’s a job where it feels like you have 1,000 bosses and it’s impossible to please them all.
What makes the Amherst area different, perhaps, is that there is more unrelenting opposition to decisions made that some do not agree with. Three bullet points from the report listed below illustrate that:
A Culture that Questions Decisions: Respondents all described the unique culture of Amherst as a challenge – even more so for those coming to Amherst from outside the district. Amherst was described as a community that values discourse and consensus, but that also questions or challenges most decisions. In the words of one respondent, “I fully expect that any decision I make will be questioned.”
Public Criticism Turns Personal: Respondents acknowledged that discourse and dissent are expected and welcome. What was stressful, however, was when public criticism turned to personal attacks — “behind my back,” in public meetings, and in online postings.
Outspoken Families and Community Members: While Amherst was described as a community that values discourse and dissent, most respondents described an impression that only loud voices were being heard – and getting their way. When a small but vocal group is opposed to a decision, it becomes challenging to move forward. In some cases, parents or community members feel “I know better” and believe, in the words of one respondent, “I have a right to say what I want, how I want.” Leaders find it most challenging when this “how” becomes negative and personal.
I saw this firsthand during my time on the Amherst and Regional School Committees (2010-2016). Committee meetings were often dominated by the “issue of the day,” which could range from budget cutting to racial issues to which math curriculum should be chosen.
Often, the most vocal and “loud” voices did seem to take over. Only those who feel strongly about something actually show up to those meetings, so that’s partly why. It was very important during those meetings to allow people to speak and have their say, but to guide the discussion with rules, including how long someone could speak, and that no personal attacks could be made. We used to say “Criticize the thing, not the person.” I had cards with the rules printed, which I would hand out at meetings.
What makes some of this so difficult is that sometimes not all the facts can be made public, due to employee and/or student confidentiality laws. That makes it hard to discuss the reasons why certain decisions are made. A few of the most contentious issues at School Committee meetings involved this. There needs to be some kind of solution to the problem of one-sided discussion – the neutral ombudsman solution might be one of them (more below). The public needs some sense of whether a decision was a good one or not, but sometimes cannot know the facts surrounding it.
It is worth stepping back to look at the balancing act that exists between two forces. This may get a bit off track from the main subject here, but it is closely related. I will come back to the main subject at the end.
Force #1 is the fact that a school system is a public entity, with highly engaged constituents – parents of school children – many of whom want to have a say in how their kids are educated, and who feel like they have that right, since it is a public body.
Force #2 is that educators are the experts we hire to do this job of educating our kids, and they generally know better how to do it than the constituents do. They are also the educational decision makers, since we put them in charge of education.
Both forces are not wrong. Both have a valid point of view.
In our democratic system, we have collectively made the choice to vote for people to oversee and carry out our public jobs, one of them being the job of educating our kids. So it goes like this: citizens vote for School Committee members, who in turn vote for and hire a superintendent, who in turn hires the principals and other school leaders, who hire teachers and staff.
When an educational decision needs to be made, or an issue resolved, it should go like this:
All voices should be heard and listened to with as much empathy as possible.
Those voices need to be reasonably stated. That does not mean they can’t be angry or even a bit loud. Anger is often understandable and warranted. But they cannot under any circumstances include personal attacks. And no one person should be allowed to dominate a discussion.
Then the decision makers need to deliberate carefully, putting aside as much as possible any bias that exists in their minds.
Finally, a decision is reached.
At that point, input and deliberation is over on that topic. Not everyone may like the decision, but they need to respect the fact that the process is over.
Too often in Amherst, Step 5 does not work that way, and the process is never over for some people.
It is, of course, appropriate and expected for those who don’t agree with a decision to keep working on changing minds for the next time a similar decision needs to be made. But it’s not OK to continue to challenge a decision that was made, after this process is done.
(Aside: As a School Committee member, I did continue to challenge decisions sometimes, but privately, not publicly. I recall a scheduling change at the middle school that many, including myself, thought was wrong. I felt so strongly about it that I threatened to resign from the committee in my discussions about it with the superintendent. In the end I thought that resigning would not really do any good, and I lost that battle. It happens.)
Nationally, this problem is most evident in the movement that claims that President Biden did not win the election. Locally, it was evident in those who did not like how the Jones Library vote turned out, and Town Meeting of 2016 voting no on the elementary school building plan (see end note).
I am not sure what the answer is, both for Amherst and for the country. I don’t really see people changing, at least not in the near term.
Coming back to the topic of supporting and retaining school leaders, I do think that all the mentoring ideas presented in the report are good ones.
But the report talks only about mentoring school leaders. What about mentoring the parents?
Perhaps there could be a neutral place a parent could go to first to figure out the best way to present and solve the problem he/she is having, rather than just launching into it with a school leader or teacher.
The RADAR anti-racism group I used to be part of had long wanted an ombudsman to be hired, to create a neutral place to bring complaints to. Superintendents kept resisting it. But one day when I was in Maria Geryk’s office she simply said “I am doing it” and hired Barry Brooks to be the first ombudsman. I see that office still exists, which is a good thing.
Something along these lines, a neutral counselor who could help guide parents on how best to approach school leaders and staff with issues they are having, might be helpful. But that takes staff and thus money, so I am not sure how it would affect the budget. Or possibly this already exists and I don’t know it, and needs to be more publicized.
At any rate, in these times more than ever, we need mentoring and other systems to support school leaders, teachers and staff. And perhaps we should also include the mentoring of parents.
I know how important mentoring is, because I could not have done my job on the School Committee without the mentoring I got from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, as well as from a group of former members who helped me out in the beginning.
End note: In 2016 Town Meeting voted no on funding the elementary school building plan. The article voted on was a bond authorization vote, which was supposed to be strictly about whether the town could afford the project or not, which is why it was the only vote in the process that required a two-thirds vote to pass. Instead, it ended up being a vote on the merits of the plan itself. There was no plan that did not have cons along with its pros. The “loudest voices” would speak on one of the cons and made it seem like careful consideration of all pros and cons had not been done, when in fact it had, by the School Committee and the School Building Committee. And the majority of town voters had already voted yes to raising their own taxes to implement the plan.
End-of-year campaign finance reports for all candidates, ballot question committees, and local political action committees were due January 20. Here are the highlights.
The two ballot question committees, Vote No – Start Over Smart and Vote Yes for Our Library, both dissolved at the end of 2021, gifting their remaining funds to the Friends of the Jones Library System Campaign Committee ($1,761 from the Vote Yes committee) and the Amherst Survival Center ($96 from the Vote No committee). Over their lifetimes,
Vote No received $5,673 in donations from at least 44 donors, while Vote Yes received a total of $12,710 in donations from at least 109 donors. (Recall that donors who give a total of $50 or less do not need to be named.)
Vote No spent $5,577 on its campaign, while Vote Yes spent $10,949.
Vote No received donations of $500 from two individuals and one additional donation of $1,000. Vote Yes received one donation of $500.
Element5 Digital on Unsplash
The two local political action committees (PACs), Amherst Forward and the Progressive Coalition of Amherst, did not dissolve. The Progressive Coalition (PCA) ended the year with $198 in the bank and $293 in liabilities; Amherst Forward ended the year with $3,345 in the bank and $0 in liabilities.
Both PACs endorsed candidates and spent money on campaign materials delivered to voters by mail. These expenditures are considered in-kind contributions to the endorsed candidates and must be communicated to the candidates, who must then list these contributions on their year-end finance reports. I have not seen any in-kind contribution reported by any candidate endorsed by the Progressive Coalition. Most, but not all, candidates endorsed by Amherst Forward reported in-kind contributions. Candidates and committees may amend their reports if errors are found.
Other information of note in the year-end reports:
In 2021, PCA received a total of $4,356 from at least 24 donors while Amherst Forward received $5,898 from 110 donors.
Nine people gave between $101 and $500 to PCA, four of whom gave $500. Four people gave between $101 and $500 to Amherst Forward, with no gift exceeding $104.
PCA spent $4,158 on its campaign and received $217 of in-kind contributions. Amherst Forward spent $3,916 on its campaign and received $40 of in-kind contributions.
Six people ran for the three at-large seats on Town Council. Here are highlights of the campaign finance reports for each candidate (alphabetical order; winners in bold):
Vira Douangmany Cage’s campaign received a total of $9,196 from 82 individuals, 15 of whom gave between $101 and $500, and one of whom gave $1,000. Her committee spent $8,376, and ended the year with no liabilities and $820 on hand.
Robert Greeney did not raise or spend any money for his campaign.
Mandi Jo Hanneke raised $1,580 for her campaign from at least 15 donors (largest donation, $250) and spent $1,623. The campaign reported $438 of in-kind contributions, including $99 from Amherst Forward. The campaign has no liabilities and retains $114.
Vince O’Connor’s campaign received $1,200 from at least 24 donors, spent $975, reports $232 in liabilities, and has $225 on-hand.
Andy Steinberg received a total of $2,060 from at least 18 donors, spent $1,920, reported an in-kind from Amherst Forward, and ended with $394 on hand and $2,343 in liabilities (candidate loans).
Ellisha Walker raised $4,730 from at least 47 contributors, 3 of whom contributed $500. The campaign spent $2,680, received $178 of in-kind services, has no liabilities, and retains $2,050.
Candidates for Town Council in District 3 were Dorothy Pam, George Ryan, and Jennifer Taub (winners in bold).
Dorothy Pam submitted a cumulative report for 2021. Her committee reported a total of $2,738 in contributions, but two loans by the candidate, reported in the 8th-day-preceding report, did not appear in the year-end report. The loans were not repaid or reported as liabilities. However, a third loan, which should have appeared in the 8th-day-preceding report, was listed in the year-end report. Furthermore, unitemized contributions were reported in the 8th-day-preceding but did not appear in the year-end receipts schedule. (Possibly, those donors made additional contributions and were then listed by name.) The committee spent $2,782, leaving it with $3.
George Ryan’s campaign reported a total of $3,134 from at least 28 people, as well as two candidate loans. It spent $2,746, reported an in-kind donation from Amherst Forward, and carries one liability for a candidate loan.
Jennifer Taub raised a total of $3,107 from 26 people, including the candidate. The committee spent $3,057, reported no in-kind contributions or liabilities, and ended with $50.
Candidates for Town Council in District 4 were Anika Lopes, Pam Rooney, and Evan Ross (winners in bold).
Anika Lopes received $1,505 from 17 people, including herself. Her campaign received $1,420 in in-kind contributions from four individuals (including the candidate) and Amherst Forward. The committee spent $921, retains $602, and reports one liability of $300.
Pam Rooney raised $3,969 from at least 42 contributors. Her committee spent $3,330, received no in-kind contributions, retains $639, and has no liabilities.
Evan Ross reported a total of $1,458.95 in contributions from at least 25 individuals. His campaign spent $1,161, reported no in-kind contributions, and ended the year with $884 and $858 in liabilities (candidate loans). In January of 2022, his committee dissolved after repaying the candidate and donating the remaining cash ($25) to the Friends of the Jones Library System Campaign Committee.
Please share this with neighbors and spread the word about our first District 1 meeting, January 30th at 3:30 p.m. We’re honored to be serving as your District 1 Councilors and we look forward to hearing from you!
In service,
Cathy and Michele
Community Forum about the Elementary School Project, Thursday, February 3, 6:30-9:00 p.m.
Join the first public discussion of the building project by Zoom to hear an overview of:
(Precincts 5 and 9 – roughly from Strong St to College St, and along S. Pleasant St from Route 9 to the Columbia Drive neighborhoods):
As your new Councilors, we would like to hear from you and be able to communicate information and news on a regular basis to you. One reliable way to reach you with updates and information is via email. If you are interested in hearing from us, kindly email Councilor Lopes and Councilor Rooney at our respective Town email addresses – lopesa@amherstma.gov and rooneyp@amherstma.gov to let us know you want to be on our mailing list. If you are a neighborhood email list “manager”, we would greatly appreciate it if you would post this notice to let your neighborhoods know of our interest in reaching out to, and hearing from, as many people as we can.
To reach us – or any Councilor – the Town Council’s main phone (413) 259-3001 and the shared email address that reaches all 13 councilors, towncouncil@amherstma.gov, are also very good ways to reach us with your thoughts and questions. The Town Council website has lots of good information and a place to directly submit comments: https://www.amherstma.gov/3435/Town-Council .
We look forward to hearing from you! Here’s to healthy and productive New Year!
During the month of January, the Amherst Elementary School Educational Visioning Group (EVG) — a group of administrators, teachers, School Building Committee members, parents, and community partners – will participate in two Educational Visioning Workshops run by New Vista Design and DiNisco Design. Each workshop will be a collaborative virtual session designed to inform the elementary school feasibility study that has been awarded to the town of Amherst by the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA). Participants will be led through a step-by-step visioning process aimed at capturing their best thinking about Amherst elementary schools’ current and future educational goals and priorities, building on previous visioning work done by the district, and exploring best practices and possibilities in innovative school facility design.
The workshops will take place virtually via Zoom (please see the meeting link below) and are designed to be highly participatory, engaging, and informative. The educational and architectural goals set during these workshops will have a direct and tangible impact on the design approach and features of the new school facility. We understand that this is already an extremely busy time of year that has been further impacted by the return of students to in-person learning, so we do hope that you will consider taking part in these visioning sessions and sharing your ideas and dreams for the renovated and/or new elementary school facility.
We have scheduled two meetings to cover the same content in the hopes that you will be able to join one of them: Thursday, Jan. 13, 8:30-11:30 a.m., and Wednesday, Jan. 26, 6-9 p.m.
Focus areas will include:
Priorities for the new and/or renovated facility.
21st-century learning goals that have been approved by ARPS.
Strengths, Challenges, Opportunities, and Goals (SCOG analysis) associated with this projects and ARPS’s elementary schools’ current academic programming as well as the District’s vision for its future.
21st-century design patterns that innovative elementary schools throughout Massachusetts and the US have put into practice to make their forward-thinking learning goals come alive on the level of facility design.
Blue sky ideas that participants would like to see in the new school program and facility.
The meetings will be recorded and posted to the Elementary School Building Committee (ESBC) website at https://www.amherst-school-project.com/ where you may also provide input and feedback at your convenience.
Please contact Cathy Schoen, ESBC Chair, at schoenc@amherstma.gov if you would like more information about the upcoming workshops and how to take part in them.
We invited all outgoing Town Councilors to respond to questions and are posting the responses this week. Today we hear from Evan Ross of district 4.
What achievements during your term are you most proud of?
This first Council has a long list of achievements of which our entire community should be proud. The most prominent is the approval of the expansion and renovation project of the Jones Library. This vote will impact our community for generations, and touches so many of the stated goals and values of our community, from climate action to social justice. I am also proud of the actions we have taken to reinvest in our downtown and to establish our downtown as a destination. I am more optimistic about the future of our downtown now than I have been in a long time. From the performance shell on the Common (voted Dec. 2021), to the Kendrick Park playground (voted Dec. 2019), to an expanded and renovated Jones Library (voted April 2021), to streamlined permitting for outdoor dining (voted June 2020), to the renovation and restoration of our North Common (voted May 2021), to moving forward a new destination parking facility (voted Dec. 2021), to ending the prohibition on the sale of alcohol on the town commons (voted March 2020), this Council is responsible for renewed vibrancy in our downtown and consistently demonstrated a commitment investing in our downtown.
Finally, I am also proud of the work we did on housing. While there is much work to do, this Council took important steps to address our town’s housing crisis. The Council developed and approved by near-unanimous vote a Comprehensive Housing Policy. This document represents a public recognition that Amherst is facing a housing crisis and sets housing goals for our community that focus around production, affordability, diversity, and sustainability. The document also establishes an ambitious goal: minimum of 250 new units for households earning less than 80% Area Median Income (AMI) over the next five years, and minimum of 850 units above 80% AMI over the next five years. Consider that from 2010-2019, a ten-year period, Amherst built 663 new units. Reaching the goal of over 1,000 new units over the next five years is a major commitment by the Council to housing production and will take proactive efforts by subsequent Councils. This Council began that work both through its investment in affordable housing projects and through passage of progressive zoning amendments focused on housing affordability. Specifically, we strengthened inclusionary zoning, eased the permitting pathway for apartments in village centers, eased the permitting pathway for most Accessory Dwelling Units, and made parking minimums more flexible.
credit Town of Amherst
Any suggestions for reducing the workload?
Reducing the workload for Councilors is an important goal if we want to recruit new Councilors who represent and reflect the demographic diversity of our community. To some extent, the workload of the Council is what you make of it. Some Councilors choose to take up leadership roles, chair committees, write and introduce policies, and serve the Council as liaisons. Others read the packet, attend meetings, and vote. There is no wrong way to be a Councilor, and each Councilor can and should take on a workload that reflects their capacity. That said, here are some thoughts on reducing the workload:
Fewer agenda items. The Council has a lot of work ahead of it, and occasionally the president will need to post an agenda that folks will see and say “that’s too much!” But as general practice, the president should try to limit the number of agenda items to what they determine is reasonable for the Council to adjourn by 9 p.m. (which means the Council will actually adjourn by 10 p.m.).
Councilor comments. Councilors need to abide by the 3-minute cap on their comments. Some Councilors, and one in particular, consistently ignore this rule and will talk well over the cap. The president needs to enforce this rule.
Councilor questions. On some issues, Councilors were invited to review materials and send their questions in advance to relevant staff. In this way, the questions could be answered prior to the meeting and meeting time was not consumed by answering individual questions. This should be a more common practice but requires Councilors to be provided materials well enough in advance for them to read them, develop questions, and for staff to prepare responses to those questions prior to the meeting.
Public comment. Public comment can consume large amounts of meeting time. If there are 20 public commenters and each uses their full 3 minutes that is a full hour of Council time on public comment. Many public commenters email their comments to the Council in advance of the meeting, then show up and read their comments to the Council. We need to develop a public culture around the Council that recognizes the Council workload and acknowledges their role in reducing meeting times. The public should be encouraged to submit written comments via the Council comment portal and if they have provided written comments then refrain from taking up meeting time repeating those comments during public comment.
What are your hopes for the incoming Council?
My biggest hope is that they work together to make progress. With 13 Councilors, the ideas, priorities, and personalities will always conflict. Finding common ground isn’t always easy, and sometimes compromise feels like folding. But we need our town to continue moving forward, and that will require Councilors finding ways to collaborate and compromise. Housing is one of the most pressing issues facing our town, but also a space where the Council will likely be divided. Several Councilors ran (and won) on NIMBYism (Pam, Taub, Rooney). Others have consistently advocated for housing production and growth (Hanneke, Steinberg, Bahl-Milne). We can’t wait to tackle housing, which means Councilors from both sides of the spectrum will need to find ways to work together, find common ground, and compromise.
Most importantly on this front, I hope the Council will reject the false narrative that there are two sides or parties. The beginning of my term was consistently defined by folks invoking a narrative that it was the “Amherst Forward” majority versus the “Independents” minority. By the end of the term that narrative had fizzled. Folks noted shifting coalitions that varied by issue. The only Councilor who consistently maintained this false and damaging binary was Councilor DuMont. The 2020 election was a bit different. There were two political action committees. Two candidates were endorsed by both (Walker and Lopes). Two candidates were endorsed by neither (Rooney and Schoen). The narrative of two sides is breaking down and I hope the Councilors themselves will actively work to break it down. The concept of some Councilors as “independent” I hope will be left behind, too, as every Councilor is independent. Councilors (and the public) need to stop defining Councilors simply by who did or did not endorse them in an election, and call out how doing so damages and divides our community.
The new Town Council will be sworn in this evening. We invited all outgoing Town Councilors to respond to questions and are posting the responses this week. Today we hear from George Ryan of district 3 and Stephen Schreiber of district 4.
George Ryan
What achievements during your term are you most proud of?
Despite a global pandemic that began half-way through our term we passed important zoning reforms in the areas of affordable housing (Inclusionary Zoning), housing opportunity (Accessory Dwelling Units) and Downtown development (Mixed Use, Parking Overlay); we supported affordable housing initiatives (132 Northampton Road, Belchertown Road/East Street School), approved the borrowing for the Jones Library Renovation/Expansion, and created from scratch a workable Council Committee structure (Finance, Town Services, Community Resources, and Governance).
credit Town of Amherst
Any suggestions for reducing the workload?
Having created and “beta tested” the existing Council Committee structure over the past three years this will take a huge time burden off the shoulders of the new Council — now the new Councilors need to trust the work of those Committees. The Council President could be more strict in enforcing the existing rules that govern debate in the Council. The use of the consent agenda has been a help. I think a Council of 13 by its very nature creates a challenge that may prove hard to overcome — everyone has a right to their say and if you have three minutes every time you speak that takes up a lot of time. Finally, Council may need to meet more often if it wishes to keep its meetings to under 4 hours.
What are your hopes for the incoming Council?
I hope that zoning reforms will continue to create more housing opportunity and development in the downtown and village centers, I hope that the Council will work with the Town Manager to get all four Major Capital Projects off the ground (i.e. insist that the Town settle on a site or sites for the DPW), and I hope that the Council will see to it that the newly created CRESS program is implemented in a way that is both fiscally responsible and does not adversely impact public safety. And I hope that the Council will soon be able to resume in-person meetings — I felt that while the Council functioned well enough via remote means this kind of distance governance is not healthy for the creation (and maintenance) of personal relationships among the Councilors. I felt that some of the unpleasantness of the last few months — in addition to the general nastiness of the election — was exacerbated by the fact that we no longer met face-to-face on a biweekly basis. Perhaps that is more a hope for the world at large and just not the Council?
Steve Schreiber
What achievements during your term are you most proud of?
I’m proud that the 13 inaugural Town Councilors all stuck it out for their full 3-year terms. We generally worked together well, especially considering the issues facing the town. I’m proud that we supported the renovation (and/or expansion) of the Town’s three most important physical resources — the Common, the Jones Library, and the schools. And I’m proud that we essentially eliminated single family zoning in Amherst, by approving a greatly expanding accessory dwelling unit by-law.
credit NCARB
Any suggestions for reducing the workload?
Committee sizes must be reduced to 3 (or 4) councilors each, and councilors should serve on only one Town Council committee each. Committee meetings should meet once a month. Town Council needs to trust other town boards and committees, and not duplicate (or negate) those committee’s charges. For example, the duplication of efforts by the CRC and the Planning Board needs to get under control.
What are your hopes for the incoming Council?
Please leave the campsite cleaner than you found it. Be respectful of staff’s ability to support the council. Be ambitious but also be humble — not all of the world’s problems have to be solved in Amherst.
Happy New Year! Our second Town Council will be sworn in Monday evening. We invited all outgoing Town Councilors to respond to questions and will post the responses over the next couple of days. Today we hear from at-large Councilor Alisa Brewer.
What achievements during your term are you most proud of?
We did a lot of work setting up structures while also making progress moving forward on the work our community needs.
We continuously asked ourselves who we are not hearing from, and how we might hear from them.
We regularly paid attention — to the chagrin of some of my colleagues — to what history has taught us and brought us in municipal governance in Amherst, so we could do better, instead of relying solely on what some inexperienced Town Councilors thought sounded good out of context in other communities.
We learned to trust the work of both Town Council subcommittees and the many appointed bodies in order to improve our thinking and deliberations on multiple issues.
credit Town of Amherst
I am proud that:
we achieved temporary zoning flexibility to support local businesses by enabling outside dining,
we provided Zoom live coverage and readily accessible recordings that surpass any coverage of Amherst municipal governance meetings in the past (except for 20+ years ago when our local newspapers apparently provided comprehensive coverage),
the majority of us agreed that we cannot go back to the old, pre-pandemic days of forcing people to drive to Town Hall to speak for three minutes on camera,
we made progress on the Elementary School project, and
we lived our values on affordable housing, racial equity, and social justice by investing both time and money and by pushing beyond the comfort zone of many residents and staff.
I am proud that I was able to convince many of my colleagues to give the less obvious suspects a chance to lead both the Town Council and the Town Council subcommittees, rather than choosing the easiest route for leadership. As I said at our last Town Council meeting in December, it is a mistake to rely on the same folks over and over just because it’s easier to sit back and let them do the work. We can and must support each other in developing leadership skills.
Yet I will never forget the colleague who said publicly during annual officer elections that the youngest Town Council member would be around and could wait his turn –this was both unbelievably short-sighted and thoughtlessly biased, while demonstrating poor judgment in a Town that says it values many types of diversity. And I will never forgive the colleague who purposefully mischaracterized both her own Town Council subcommittee leadership and the work of another colleague in order to damage that colleague’s re-election.
Any suggestions for reducing the workload?
The Clerk of the Town Council has never been a full-time position, stretching the amazing Athena O’Keeffe in too many directions. The Town Council needs at least one full-time staff person working for the Town Council in addition to our only other employee, the Town Manager. The Clerk of the Town Council also needs to continue to be empowered to hire contracted minute-takers for all full Town Council and Town Council subcommittee meetings. It is ridiculous to expect the Clerk of the Town Council to take all Town Council-related minutes, or to expect any part-time elected officials to take their own minutes.
Town Councilors have to serve on too many Town Council subcommittees, and most meetings of both the full Town Council and Town Council subcommittees are too long. There is no obvious solution to this. There is no benefit to compressing the number of Town Council subcommittees, given their charges. There is always more work to be done than we feel we can accomplish in both Town Council meetings and numerous Town Council subcommittee meetings. If we decrease the number of Town Councilors on each subcommittee to three, that would be more manageable, as none would be required to serve on more than one subcommittee (except for the seats we also have on the Finance Committee, the Elementary School Building Committee, the Jones Library Building Committee, Joint Capital Planning Committee, and Budget Coordinating Group). Unfortunately, under Open Meeting Law, no two members of a three-member subcommittee could talk about subcommittee business outside a posted meeting. I recommend that the next Town Council at least try having GOL (Governance, Organization, and Legislation) be a three-member subcommittee and see how that goes.
We have seen some progress in the Town Manager requiring Town staff to submit their presentation materials further in advance of Monday meetings and subcommittee meetings. But we still have room to improve in that area, especially for big annual presentations like the financial indicators presentation that was purposefully withheld from part-time elected officials, out of some misguided sense of tradition, until a couple hours before the meeting. It often feels as though the Town Manager is placing the Town Council in the position of not having time to prepare questions in advance of our meeting.
It is also completely unacceptable to expect part-time elected officials to devote a huge chunk of their weekend to reading and analyzing packet materials for a Monday night meeting, and it’s ridiculous to assume that any part-time elected official can spend Monday afternoon doing that as well. As I’ve been saying for over a decade, everyone is busy and does things at the last minute — make the “last minute” sooner, so the reading and processing of packet materials happens over a longer period of time.
One workload item that must be addressed, if we expect to attract and retain part-time elected officials who have jobs and families, is to not expect Town Council subcommittee meetings to be held during the traditional workday. This was a misstep by this Town Council and broke with years of precedent for having most Amherst committee meetings be in the evening. Of course, evening meetings are also difficult for those with jobs and family members to care for, but it doesn’t make much sense for the public to be expected to follow daytime meetings, either. And a Town Councilor’s desire to serve on a particular Town Council subcommittee should not be thwarted by that subcommittee’s “traditional” meeting schedule.
Small modifications should also continue to be pursued, as well, such as the recent development of an online Public Comment form that immediately distributes to the full Town Council. This may seem minor, given that every email sent to TownCouncil@AmherstMA.gov always was and is also immediately distributed to the full Town Council, but having the Public Comment be in that format makes it clearer which things to attack in our Town Councilor email boxes first, and which things are automatically being uploaded weekly to the Town Council webpage. They’re both public records, but it is useful for the public to check that web page regularly to see what people are talking about rather than guessing at making a public records request.
The Town Council President should not be required to read the Consent Calendar aloud, as this takes a long chunk of time at the beginning of meetings when everyone is fresh — as fresh as anyone can be at 6:30 p.m. on a Monday. Resolutions and Proclamations should automatically result in press releases on the Town website so that less meeting time is spent describing them.
The Town Council President should ask Councilors for their expectations of upcoming staff presentations in advance of those meetings, so that it’s clear that no staff presentation should generally last more than 10-15 minutes plus lots of time for questions.
The Town Council President should continue to ask Councilors to provide input to the Town Council subcommittee that will be exploring the issue in more detail. We have done a good job of not making unnecessary referrals when the full Town Council has appropriate information to act, and we should continue to evaluate when referral is helpful and when it just slows things down. Each Town Council subcommittee Chair should similarly be asking the subcommittee their expectations for upcoming staff presentations in advance of those meetings, as we experienced several really frustrating subcommittee meetings where staff presentations were repeated verbatim from the full Town Council and strangely had taken none of the questions and comments into account.
The Town Council may need to periodically remind the Town Manager that he is to support what the Town Council believes it needs in the way of staff time or presentation length, not just tell the Town Council what it is going to get. Obviously, the Town Manager should not let the Town Council or the staff waste each other’s time, so there needs to be clear, ongoing communication between the Town Manager and the Town Council, and between the Town Manager and his staff, to meet everyone’s needs.
The Town Council needs to agree on the annual Town Manager Performance Evaluation instrument soon after the annual Town Manager Performance Goals are established, rather than once again waiting until the last minute to try out yet another new, and potentially disastrous, instrument right before the evaluation period commences. Revisiting the instrument as well as the written goals throughout the year would make completing the evaluation less time-consuming for each Town Councilor. Town Councilors who do not complete the evaluation instrument as written should be noted clearly, as having some Town Councilors refuse to choose rankings or provide any written comment warps the entire evaluation process. The evaluation period also needs to be moved back to June-August rather than the one-off move to election season in 2021. And it would do our community a huge disservice to assign the annual Town Manager evaluation to a third party, or to a Town Council subcommittee, rather than expecting each of the 13 Town Councilors to pull their weight.
What are your hopes for the incoming Council?
I hope the incoming Town Council recognizes that their job is not to tote up the number of public comments they receive for and against and call that a mandate, because it isn’t. The Town Councilors were voted into office to use their judgment on our behalf, not to serve as a tally board.
I hope the incoming Town Council stops allowing some members to pretend they aren’t themselves part of an Independence Party while criticizing the publicly organized PACs.
I hope the incoming Town Council finds a way to effectively censure any colleagues who write or speak falsely about their colleagues’ motives and actions. Assuming people will “consider the source” and disregard obviously false aspersions may well have cost a Town Councilor re-election. I hope the incoming Town Council finds a way to remind each other to live the values described in the Town Council Statement of Values within the Town Council Rules of Procedure.
I hope the incoming Councilors recognize the value of working with Town Councilors they’re not sure about, and really try to forge perhaps unexpected alliances on mutual goals. The full Town Council acts with more respect and trust — and authority — when its members work with each other freely, not according to some arbitrary division.
I hope the incoming Town Council does not learn to rely on the Remote Participation roll-call vote to see which way the wind is blowing, and understands that normally the yeas all vote at the same time, as do the nays and abstains.
I hope the incoming Town Council recognizes that the point of the Charter 2.10 (c) “nuclear” option to postpone is not to irritate colleagues you don’t agree with, or to frustrate the public who expected the Town Council to act on the night the Town Council advertised they would act, but to await actual new information that could change the outcome. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
I hope the incoming Town Council views the Town Council President not as their boss or as their mother or as their confidante, but as the person who facilitates the work the Town Council desires. I hope the incoming Town Council does not view the President and Vice President as an Executive Team with the Town Manager, but instead that the Town Councilors who aren’t President take turns working on Agenda setting and Motion review, and that the incoming Town Council sees the Vice President only as someone who steps in if the President is not available, and does not assume the Vice President will be the next President.
I hope the incoming Town Council shares leadership, not via the awkward and unworkable concept of co-Presidents or co-Chairs, but instead by mentoring each other in leadership roles within the full Town Council and in the Town Council subcommittees. The Chair of each Town Council subcommittee is there to do the work the subcommittee desires, and the Chair does not set subcommittee agendas without input from the full subcommittee. The President and the subcommittee Chairs should always be looking for ways to delegate officer tasks to other Town Councilors so as to not only make the officer role less onerous, but also increase each Town Councilor’s investment in the work.
I hope the incoming Town Council does not view the Town Manager as their boss or as their father or as a friend, but as the person to whom the Town Council communicates all policy leadership and who is in fact the only staff member directly responsible for meeting the Town Council’s needs. Please also note this is the Town Council’s needs, as determined by the majority, not by what individual Town Councilor X wants at any given moment.
I hope the incoming Town Council respects the long-established Amherst culture of sending all requests for information to the Town Manager for him to manage, rather than reaching out to any staff — other than the Clerk of the Town Council — directly. Yes, it’s faster to call up or email a department head or other staff yourself, but it’s not appropriate. If the Town Manager is not responding to your request, that’s a Town Council problem with the Town Manager, not one to be gone around to other staff.
I hope the incoming Town Council recognizes the fine precedent the initial Town Council set in not publishing separate Minority Reports. If four members of a subcommittee agree on something, then the fifth member does not get pages or paragraphs to explain why they disagree, as that obviously ends up giving less space to the four members in agreement. If the incoming Town Councilors are unfamiliar with the Chair or designated report writer incorporating minority views within Town Council subcommittee reports both fairly and accurately, they have plenty of examples to look at in TSO (Town Services & Outreach; previously Outreach, Communications, & Appointments) Reports to Town Council.
I hope the incoming Town Council does not see their role as whipping up public sentiment for one or another Town Councilor’s preferred position in order to inspire emails and appearances at public comment, but rather as both regular and creative communicators of what the Town Council is working on and why, and as listeners to all members of the public, not just those in their District or the ones who write most often.
I hope the incoming Town Council is willing to read all press coverage of community issues, not just one blog or one newspaper.
I hope the incoming Town Council recognizes that they are the ones who were elected by voters to represent our community, and that in fact the public does not have an equal voice to elected Town Councilors at the decision-making table.
I hope the incoming Town Council finds their service more rewarding than frustrating. We appreciate their willingness to serve!
The recent campaign leading up to the Nov. 2 election was indeed acrimonious.
Some candidates and supporters behaved quite badly. Some library renovation and expansion opponents engaged in widespread misrepresentations, and some are apparently continuing to pursue anti-democratic efforts to get their way. An outgoing Town Councilor repeatedly criticized some of her colleagues who were running for reelection, and called for their defeat. And the unpleasant, even vitriolic, tone of public discourse continued in a recent email in which a re-elected Town Councilor misrepresented the processes of town government, and more.
The ongoing nastiness certainly takes up a lot of space and energy. It’s both the manifestation and the cause of a lot of suffering, but is it representative of our town?
Voter turnout on Nov. 2 was 31.15 percent, as 5,042 of 16,187 registered voters cast ballots. While canvassing for a “yes” vote on the library renovation and expansion project, a HOT issue in the Amherst Bulletin and on various listservs and web pages, I spoke with folks who were completely unaware of the situation.
It seems that apathy, rather than acrimony, is actually more representative of our community. Can we find a way to address both, and restore our community together?
The problem is (at least) two-headed: 1) How can we create an attractive civic life in which people will want to participate, and 2) how might we offer opportunities for people to engage in good faith with those with whom they disagree?
Among the politically engaged, the polarization that has so injured us nationally exists right here in Amherst. We’re not using the same labels here, but the features of our civic disease are the same:
We have become two factions, each angry at the other, and neither trusting the other’s basic humanity or good intentions; and
We view our political opponents as uninformed, misguided, stupid or bad people whose ways of thinking are both incomprehensible and dangerous.
Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying, “I do not like that man. I must get to know him better.” If that’s a remedy for this disease, could we do it in Amherst? Is there a way, as individuals, that we could try to understand the other side’s point of view, even if we don’t agree with it? At a community level, is there a way to engage with those with whom we disagree in an effort to find common ground and ways to work together? Can we find ways to identify and support principles that unite us rather than divide us?
Does our formal civic process attract and engage most Amherst voters, or residents? I deeply appreciate volunteers’ and Town employees’ efforts, and at the same time I wonder whether we are doing enough as a community. Is what we’re doing now working? I’ve heard “doing the same thing and expecting different results” is one definition of insanity. How’s that working out for us? Should we try something different?
I suspect the unpleasantness and acrimony that so stimulate some of us is precisely the thing that drives others of us away from civic engagement. But what if Amherst offered “Common Ground Conversations,” a public dialogue process emphasizing listening to our neighbors and understanding their values, hopes and fears?
Imagine a series of structured public conversations that offer people an opportunity to speak respectfully, and to be heard respectfully. Imagine a process that would encourage people to listen without becoming defensive, and to speak without attacking. We could agree to allow others to hold their own views, no matter what they are – and we could sincerely try to understand their views, and the values underlying those views. We could abandon all hope of persuading others that we are right, knowing that others won’t try to persuade us that they are right.
By no means am I suggesting that we must suppress our views and values, or mute our passion. However, for this process to be effective, we must together agree to speak respectfully to each other, and to refrain from attacking each other. That, in itself, would be a change for the better!
If we agree to do this hard work together, what might we expect?
Maybe we’ll come to understand our neighbors better through thoughtfully listening as they express their nuanced views. As our understanding increases, our stereotyped thinking about those with whom we disagree may decrease, and we might find that we develop greater trust in our neighbors’ good intentions and their basic humanity. Common ground might emerge. We might start working together, rather than working against each other. Folks who have been uninterested or alienated might be attracted to participating in developing our community. And those who continue to speak disrespectfully of others will find they gradually have less impact on our public discourse.
On the one hand, it’s probably best to do the work without having any expectations as to its outcome. On the other hand, I can’t help but hope for a decrease in rancor and vitriol, and a gradual, steady improvement in the quality and tone of our conversations. And, just as important, perhaps we’ll also see an increase in civic interest and participation.
Shall we try something new? Or will we continue to do the same thing, expecting different results? Are you ready for a change? I know I am.
Since Amherst was accepted into the MA School Building Authority (MSBA) funding program two years ago, the town and the School Building Committee have been engaged in formational meetings to get the project underway. Now, with the recent selection of DiNisco Design as project architects, we are delighted to be entering the next exciting phase of the elementary school building project.
Last night the teams from DiNisco Design and Anser Advisory, our owner’s project manager (OPM), met in a joint meeting with the school committee and building committee to present key milestones and target dates for the next phases of the project. If all goes smoothly, Amherst students will enter the new elementary school by Fall 2026.
This next phase is when we’ll create the plans for what the school building will look like and where it will be located. We’ll build from the community listening sessions three years ago and engage teachers, staff, families, and community members as we develop priorities that will inform the design of our elementary school building.
Early in the new year, the design team will meet with teachers, parents and caregivers, and residents, and will study a variety of site selection considerations, such as traffic and geography, to inform the town’s decision on location. They will also work with the school community to develop the education plan and input on design features for the school.
With the 6th grade moving to the middle school in the Fall of 2023, the new school will be designed for kindergarten through grade 5, replacing both Fort River and Wildwood and including the innovative Caminantes dual-language program.
The school building committee has outlined some other initial design goals, including spaces for project based learning, small group breakout areas, plenty of daylight in classrooms and throughout the building, and outdoor spaces both for education and play; we look forward to refining these goals through this next phase of the project.
Importantly, the school will be a model for sustainability, built to be net-zero and eliminate reliance on fossil fuels. The DiNisco team was selected in part because of their experience in designing green elementary school buildings. With our school building project, we have the opportunity to innovate and make substantial impact on the town’s progress toward our sustainability goals.
The MSBA requires development and consideration of multiple alternatives in this next phase of the building project; these alternatives include a K-6 building to replace only Fort River in addition to a K-5 building to replace both Fort River and Wildwood, as well as renovation, renovation/addition, and new construction. This consideration will be part of the work that will happen in the early half of next year.
The school building committee launched a website (https://www.amherst-school-project.com/) with comprehensive information about the project. Progress updates as well as information about when and how community members can engage throughout the project will be shared on that website. We plan to update the community on our progress regularly through columns like this. We anticipate a variety of opportunities for public engagement throughout this process, and we will seek to engage families, teachers, and the broader community.
The new year will bring with it exciting and intensive effort in this next phase of the school building project. We look forward to uniting to bring a new elementary school to our children that is a source of joy and pride, and is a solid investment in all of our futures.
Allison McDonald is chair of the Amherst School Committee: you can email her at mcdonalda@arps.org. Cathy Schoen, chair of the Elementary School Building Committee, is a Councilor representing District 1. You can email Cathy at schoenc@amherstma.gov.
Low voter turn-out; low civic engagement; limited participation in town affairs by historically marginalized groups; barriers to participation: these are some of the issues that the new town charter hopes to address through various public participation mechanisms. One mechanism is the required semiannual meetings of district councilors with constituents, for example.
Another effort driven by the charter was the creation of a new town position, Community Participation Officer (CPO). In its first three years of implementation, this responsibility (for which no new money was budgeted) has been shared by three Town employees who bring different skills to the task: Brianna Sunryd, Jennifer Moyston, and Angela Mills. I spoke with all of them earlier this fall to learn how their work has unfolded.
Brianna Sunryd, credit Town of Amherst
Brianna Sunryd, the Communications Manager for Town Hall, said that the team spent its initial months assessing the community’s needs and building its work plan. She described her pieces of the work as developing strategies for community outreach, involvement, and communications, and using information technologies in innovative ways. To support participation in the decennial census by all parts of the community – some of which were very hesitant – the CPOs developed plans for outreach, in-person meetings, and activities. During the summer of 2019, the team created and distributed census-related kits for children. Then, just as efforts ramped up in early 2020, the pandemic hit and changed the direction of all CPO efforts.
During the pandemic, Brianna focused on implementation of the Zoom meeting platform throughout Town government, to enable both the internal work of Town Hall and the many public meetings. As others have noted, the convenience of Zoom (for those with Internet access) led to a marked increase in attendance at public meetings, in views of recorded meetings (most meetings were not recorded to video before the pandemic), and participation in committees, now possible from one’s home. Now that at least some in-person meetings are likely to be permitted in the coming months, a pressing question is how to integrate livestreaming and remote participation with in-person meetings in a way that is not awkward for participants. Another means by which residents can follow and engage in local issues is the Engage Amherst platform, launched in February of 2021. With this platform, residents can post questions on subjects such as the North Amherst Library expansion, the Hickory Ridge Golf Course acquisition, and the financing plan for the major capital projects, and receive quick responses, all of which stay publicly available on the site. (In fact, just as this post was being written, the Town announced two additional civic participate tools – click here for the press release – for trial use in the next 10 days.)
One limitation to participation in town affairs by some residents is a language barrier. The town does not have the capability (that is, funding) to provide real-time translation services or to translate documents, announcements, or webpages in Spanish or other languages. Fortunately, Angela Mills (Executive Assistant to the Town Manager) is fluent in Spanish and can provide translation to an extent. Unfortunately, automated translation services for town resources or meetings are not yet satisfactory. (At the urging of the Community Safety Working Group, the Town is hoping to identify funds for stipends for committee volunteers who must pay for child care, transportation, or other expenses enabling them to serve – an additional set of barriers to participation.)
Jennifer Moyston, credit Town of Amherst
Jennifer Moyston, Administrative Assistant to the Town Manager, grew up in Amherst. The focus of her CPO work has been to address diversity and inclusion gaps through trust-building with minority communities and the development and promotion of cultural events. Before the pandemic, Jennifer regularly accompanied LSSE (now the Recreation Department) staff to apartment complexes to engage with parents and children, and visited the Amherst Survival Center to be a resource for visitors with concerns or needs that the Town could address. The pandemic shuttered these in-person gatherings, but more recently she has been able to accompany the Mobile Market on its rounds, to set up a table at a bit of a remove and be available to chat. Jennifer’s regular appearance at the Mobile Market sites helped make contacts with Town staff less threatening, at least during these visits.
Another important pandemic response was to begin a Mask for All initiative in conjunction with Anika Lopes Millinery (the business of the incoming D4 councilor). Jennifer said that 17 sewers created more than 500 masks using materials donated by 19 individuals in the months before cloth masks became readily available for purchase. Another 100 masks were donated by a business. Altogether, almost 100 people received masks through this effort.
Cultural events that were developed, highlighted, or promoted over the past three years included the Town’s first-ever Chinese Lunar New Year program, the Town’s program in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. (separate from the annual breakfast), Black History Month programming, and, most recently, the enormously successful Juneteenth, co-sponsored by the Civil War Tablets Committee and the Mill District. Jennifer hopes to further develop the town’s observances of cultural holidays and milestones.
Angela Mills, credit Town of Amherst
Pre-pandemic, the main areas of Angela Mills’ CPO work were (1) planning the inaugural ceremony for the first Council; (2) assisting councilors with planning and conduct of the required meetings mentioned above; and (3) attending district meetings to assist constituents with questions or complaints about town services, completion of Community Activity Forms by which residents indicate interest in committee service. During the pandemic, Angela was the staff person in contact with residents required to quarantine at home, connecting them with food, rental support, and grant applications. Once vaccination drives began, Angela attended the clinics to provide Spanish-language translation and outreach. She also worked with the new Covid Ambassadors on their public outreach and responses to inquiries or complaints made to the Covid Concerns hotline.
With pandemic-related efforts diminishing, the CPOs held a retreat this fall to review their work and plan for the future. We will share that plan when it is available. In the meantime, you can email your thoughts to them at sunrydb@amherstma.gov, moystonj@amherstma.gov, or millsa@amherstma.gov.
One of my favorite political podcasts, “Left, Right, and Center,” allows each participant time for a brief rant at the end of the show. Consider this post my rant.
Several times lately I have heard that, for democracies to remain strong, losers of elections must accept defeat, and winners must not suppress the losers. This could have been written for Amherst as well as today’s national GOP.
In the past few months, some citizens on the losing side of votes, races, or the ballot question have questioned the legitimacy of the results, impugned the integrity of the staff in the Clerk’s office, elected officials, and volunteers, or petitioned courts to reject the results. Unhappiness on the part of some elected officials who voted in the minority led to very personal criticisms of other elected officials.
Photo credit Doug Marshall
All in all, I hear too much whining. I hope that the disgruntled among us are not spreading their own version of Trump’s Big Lie and corroding confidence in our local democratic order. I lost my race for Elector of the Oliver Smith Will on November 2 and am disappointed. However, I am confident that I lost fair and square and emailed congratulations to the victor on November 3. I am not spreading baseless and/or anonymous accusations or suing.
The race for a council seat in District 4 (my own), is so close that a recount has been requested. I do not consider a request for a recount to be whiny or an attack on our system, since a margin of 5 votes is very small and perhaps the result of error when there are multiple ways by which to vote. And I have every confidence that, should Evan Ross be found to have lost to Pam Rooney after the recount, he will abide by that outcome and not badmouth the Clerk.
However, the numerous and continuing challenges to Town Council’s April vote to approve the appropriation for the Jones Library project, Council’s decision to put the issue on the ballot, and the conclusiveness of the results, are prime examples of sore losing. I do not believe that pursuing the voter-veto option permitted by the town’s charter was illegitimate or whiny – but everything that has happened since gathering signatures, yes. And if a 65-35 vote to undertake the library project doesn’t persuade the losers that they have lost, I don’t know what will. They should respect the bedrock principle that democracy requires losers to accept that winners won and stop wasting taxpayer money.
Another set of complaints is, essentially, that our new form of government is not enough like our previous form of government. For example, I have heard calls to give more power to more people. And like a software designer, I say, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. I understand that some people miss Town Meeting, but it is time to move on.
I also hear claims that decisions are “unfair,” when the decisions don’t uphold the complainers’ policy preferences. It is astonishing to me that some Amherst voters consider their local government to be illegitimate or corrupt simply because they don’t get what they want. This is how children behave.
To be clear, disagreements or unhappiness with the decisions, policies, and priorities of our elected officials do not constitute whining – the debate over issues is essential, and few decisions can please everyone. I am not telling people to happy up. But, in my opinion, voters on the losing side of any contest should pursue one or more of these options instead of challenging the integrity of officials or elections without good evidence of malfeasance:
Respect the majority opinion;
Build support for the minority point of view and try again;
Revise the desired policy to attract more support;
Work harder to engage like-minded residents in the political process;
Run for office or volunteer for committee work.
Unhappiness with the defeat of the school building project several years ago was acute and widespread. But the losers, after the Town Meeting’s first vote not to authorize borrowing, built support, turned out residents, and tried again. And then, deeply disappointed, they accepted the second defeat. New candidates for Town Council recently arose in Districts 3 and 4 (perhaps in other districts as well) because of unhappiness with the records of incumbents – and won. These actions honor our democratic process. On the other hand, complaints that voters who organized themselves into a local political action committee were thereby acting unethically were sour grapes. (Hopefully, we can retire that complaint now that we have two PACs.)
Finally, one frequent whine is that residents were not consulted by committees or elected bodies. To this I say: Take responsibility for your own civic participation. If you care about the Jones Library project, or the elementary school project, or a zoning bylaw, or a significant policy change, then put in the work to follow and understand it. Attend or watch the meetings, or read the minutes, or ask questions by phone or email, or reach out to your Councilors, or participate via the Engage Amherst platform, or read the reports. (A tip: Watch meeting videos at 2x speed.) Do not wait until a vote is imminent or someone shows up with a petition to discover that an issue is important to you. If you don’t have time for this work (and not everyone does), then at least don’t complain that decision-makers have acted in bad faith or that they should come to your door to update you, personally, and ask for your thoughts. If you haven’t participated, don’t blame others and don’t accuse them of failing to seek public input. Democracy is work.
The “Yes” side of the Jones Library referendum picked up 14 more votes, while the “No” side added two, as 17 ballots that were not counted on Election Day were opened Monday at Town Hall.
The 14 extra “Yes” votes brings the unofficial total to 3,201, or 65.5 percent. The unofficial “No” vote total is now 1,685. Some overseas and provisional ballots remain to be counted.
The closest race on Election Day was for second place in the District 4 Town Councilor competition. There was no change in the outcome; Pamela Rooney was still ahead of Evan Ross, but Ross has called for a recount.
Extra votes for at-large Town Council candidates were: Ellisha Walker, 13; Mandi Jo Hanneke, 11; Andrew Steinberg, 9; Vira Douangmany Cage, 4; and Vince O’Connor, 3.
This is the time of year when decisions about how our local tax dollars will be spent in the next fiscal year begin taking shape. Even if the phrase “municipal finance” makes your eyes glaze over, you may want to know a bit about what will happen over the next few months so that you can share your thoughts with the planners and decision makers, including your district councilors, at the appropriate time. If you have opinions about funding of our schools, roads and sidewalks, public safety, “green” infrastructure, affordable housing, or any other area of town expense, make a plan to be involved. Don’t wait until it is too late!
First, if you were not following this blog in the summer, you may want to read this post that gives the basics of our town’s finances.
Second, you may want to attend, or watch later if you cannot attend, the virtual Cuppa’ Joe event on Friday, November 19, from 8-9 a.m. Town Manager Paul Bockelman and Finance Director Sean Mangano will answer questions large and small about town finances and the upcoming budget development schedule for fiscal year 2023 (which begins July 1, 2022).
Third, you may be interested in watching the presentation of Financial Indicators to representatives of Council, the Amherst School Committee, and the Jones Library Trustees on Monday, November 15, or having a look at the slides. Here are the slides from a year ago. You can see that they show 10-year trends for various types of income and expense, give a qualitative judgment about the significance of each trend for the coming year, and finish with the general outlook for town finances for the year ahead. Of course, much is uncertain at such an early point, but these indicators set the tone (looking good! or, uh-oh, tough year ahead!) for budget development. (When the slides of this year’s presentation are posted, we will link to them.)
Fourth, a public budget forum will be held on Monday, November 15 by Zoom – visit the Town Council’s website for details on watching or participating. We believe that the budget calendar will be made public at this time.
Fortunately, local taxes are not the town’s only source of revenue. Amherst has received significant funds from the federal government during the pandemic, and is currently deciding what to do with almost $12 million in ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds. Have a look at this presentation from October, in which spending of 80% of those funds is proposed. Public health/racial equity, homelessness, and housing support are targeted for the largest awards.
Furthermore, town staff are frequently successful in landing grants for projects that otherwise might not be undertaken. Recent grants include:
$449,949 from the state’s Equitable Approaches to Public Safety (EAPS) program to assist in planning and implementing the new CRESS program;
$1.5 million from the state’s MassWorks program to improve traffic, cyclist, and pedestrian safety through a redesign of the intersection of Pomeroy St., West Pomeroy St., and West St. (Rt. 116) in the Pomeroy Village Center;
$184,728 under its MassDOT Shared Streets and Spaces Program. The Town’s Safe Streets and Paths project will make mobility improvements along Triangle, Pray, and East Pleasant Streets;
$250,000 from the Stanton Foundation to assist in the design and construction of Amherst’s first dog park;
$400,000 from the state’s PARC (Parklands Acquisitions and Renovations for Communities) program toward design and construction of the Kendrick Park playground.
Hats off to town staff for bringing these extra funds here.
(The numbers below reflect the vote totals from all precincts on Election Day. The Town Clerk’s office received 17 ballots on Election Day that were unable to be delivered to the polls prior to closing. These ballots will be counted by a team of election workers on Nov. 8 beginning at 10 a.m. in the second floor meeting room in Town Hall.)
Finally, Election Day! We hope every voter will have exercised this important right by 8 p.m. tonight. Be sure to turn over your ballot to see the question regarding the Jones Library project (and vote Yes!). **Check this blog tonight for unofficial results**
Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash
Precincts are the same as they were last year; if you are unsure about your precinct or polling locations, see this page.
If you haven’t yet done your homework, or want to refresh your memory, we encourage you to
Click on the Category, Candidate panels, to see our summaries of the many candidate forums.
Go to the “Candidate Information and Events” page to find links to candidate statements, survey responses, videos, websites, etc., or follow this link.
Click on the Category, Jones Library, to see all posts pertaining to the ballot question.
Go to the page, “Councilors’ statements on the Jones Library project,” to see the full text of their reasons for voting as they did in April, or follow this link.
Read, watch, or listen to some of the resources we list regarding the financing plan for the four major capital projects.
Read watch, or listen to some of the resources we list regarding the Jones Library expansion and renovation project.
The Jones Library, a highly regarded and much loved institution, is in desperate need of repair and renovation.
Only 45 percent of the cost of the library renovation/expansion project will be paid from local taxes, and a tax increase won’t be necessary.
If we turn down the $13.8 million state grant after rejecting the $34 million grant for a new school, our credibility with state funding sources will be further damaged.
If we vote “No,” taxpayers will probably have to pay for about $15 million in building improvements, with no help from the state.
If we vote “Yes,” the amount of state income tax and sales tax payments we pay will be channeled back into the infrastructure of our Town, and not sent off to some other community.
A “Yes” vote affirms the 10-2-1 vote of our democratically elected Town Councilors, who worked diligently for years, in numerous public meetings, to fully understand the proposed project, with the Town’s best interests and bottom line at heart.
The expansion and renovation project will dramatically reduce fossil fuel use in the building.
It will protect the valuable, historic, and at-risk Special Collections, which many people come to Amherst to see, and allow them to be housed securely and accessibly.
It will make all the library’s services accessible to people with physical limitations.
The Town’s debt payments have declined to near zero, meaning we have ample capacity to borrow funds as needed for this project.
Historic elements of the original building will be protected, restored, and some opened to the public for the first time in decades.
There will finally be ample bright, comfortable, and quiet areas in which patrons can sit and read.
The project will create more space for adult collections, including Blu-ray films, and eliminate bookshelves that are six feet from the floor or at foot level.
It will provide a safe, bright and supervised place where teenagers can hang out.
Visitors will be able to find meeting rooms and bathrooms on the first floor.
It will enable the children’s room to better serve the diverse ages of the hundreds of kids who come in every day.
It will help revitalize local businesses by bringing more people downtown.
It will show support for library employees, who shouldn’t have to work in a substandard building.
It will provide more space for English as a Second Language, where tutors now have to compete for space.
There will be spaces for public meetings for community groups to access directly from outside of the Library EVEN WHEN THE LIBRARY IS CLOSED.
When the new charter was being debated, one fear was that running for office would cost a lot of money and candidates would be beholden to wealthy donors. In fact, most of the candidates for Town Council three years ago listed expenses at this point in the campaign of under $2,000.
Today we summarize the 8th-day-preceding reports of candidates in contested Town Council races. Note that donors who give no more than $50 in 2021 do not need to be individually identified. Multiple contributions from an individual are combined.
Today I look at the 8th-day-preceding reports of the two ballot questions committee, Vote No – Start Over Smart, and Vote Yes for Our Library. Unlike for PACs or candidate committees, there is no limit to the amount of money that can be given to a ballot question committee. As in previous summaries, multiple contributions from the same individual in a calendar year are combined. Individuals contributing no more than $50 do not need to be identified.
First observation: Fewer people donated to the No campaign than to the Yes campaign, but potentially a larger percentage of its donors contributed $500 each. (Without knowing the precise number of total donors, this comparison cannot be conclusive.)
Second observation: In any campaign, expenditures are generally made for purposes such as postage, signs, printing, advertising, and website hosting. All of the Yes committee’s expenses and some of the No campaign’s expenses are for such items. However, the No committee reports additional expenses about which I am curious. I am the first to admit that I am no expert in campaign finance, so perhaps these expenses are completely legitimate, but why would a library ballot question committee have expenses for affidavit letters, moratorium letters, and Voter Veto letters? Perhaps the descriptions are insufficiently detailed, but none, on their face, seem to me relevant to the ballot question. Moreover, while those expenses are dated in September (the committee was organized on August 31), the only moratorium and Voter Veto efforts I know about occurred in the spring. I hope to learn more about these expenses.
I grew up in Amherst. I served on Town Meeting. I own a home here, and a business. I am raising a child here. I’ve seen and experienced firsthand how our town and school officials can be dismissive of public input. I’ve experienced the rage when I feel personally disrespected by that dismissal. I experienced the awful divisions revealed through the loss of state funding for new schools and our shift away from Town Meeting toward a new council form of government. And I’ve come to believe that we, culturally, for good and bad, are driven by symbolism. This symbolism is a factor of both our specialness and, as is so often the case with specialness, our privilege.
In Amherst, we do things “on principle” and, while I am proud of our principled culture, I’ve also seen it bite us in the ass. It was our privilege to turn away $34 million on principle because half of our community didn’t like the way the School Department reconfigured our schools to solve what they, and the state, had determined to be core problems in our system. It is our privilege that has, for decades, made it so difficult for developers to build new housing and create new business opportunities in town, leaving residential taxes to carry so much of our infrastructure burden, because while our main economy is driven by students, we don’t want our aesthetics to be ruled by financial interests that take advantage of that.
It was our privilege that, years ago, resulted in our failure to adopt a “form-based” zoning overlay that would have created height and setback restrictions (and pre-empted recent aesthetic blunders) because of vocal outcry against what many saw as an attempt to throw us to the developers. If we vote against the library project, it will be our privilege to turn away $13 million in state funds to build a truly 21st century learning center, an investment that I believe aligns with our core values of equity and community. Our principled stance will then allow us to say “Take your money and we’ll spend the same amount just to fix the building as it is!” because some very vocal, very angry and principled members of our community are horrified by the symbolism of spending so much money on a new library, even if the project won’t increase our taxes and the money won’t go toward other needed projects (two of the many false rumors spread in rage over what is perceived as an unprincipled act of fiscal and cultural irresponsibility).
This driving force of symbolism (or principle; I’m still parsing the difference) can be a powerful force for good; it is also, I believe, what makes us such a difficult community to govern. Town Meeting was a symbolically beautiful institution but it met only a scant number of times a year, and during those times there was a history, that I experienced firsthand, of destroying plans and budgets our extremely qualified hired professionals had spent months and even years working on — with one raised hand, one symbolic gesture and a room full of people who felt great about doing work to advance what they (we) saw as progress.
These symbolic/principled actions had real consequences, for good and ill (depending on your perspective) like the half-percent for art vote that added sometimes many tens of thousands of dollars for art into our capital budgets, or the time we added extra funds to enable more scholarships for low-income children to participate in public programs. Unfortunately, I believe, these gestures also created a history of antagonism between those struggling daily to govern our community and the public they serve.
It’s complicated. We have a population of very smart and often very privileged (again, for good and ill) people with the time and resources to put a lot of energy into how our government runs and what it does, and a governing staff and body that I believe sees those folks largely as a threat. There’s a legacy of, dare I use the acronym, PTSD on both sides of this equation. It’s why so many people I know, myself included, would never want to run for public office in Amherst. Engaging in a battle of symbolism is necessary for change to happen (think any progressive social movement) but it is also exhausting, often thankless and sometimes deeply counterproductive.
Recent negative campaign rhetoric has placed the Amherst Business Improvement District (BID) board and our executive director in the middle of debate around Town Council politics, municipal and private development, and other less germane issues. The Amherst BID would like to set the record straight about its function and positions.
Who we are. The Amherst BID is a made up of downtown businesses and property owners organized to provide downtown Amherst with supplementary services such as cleaning streets, beautification like flowers, streetscape enhancements, and marketing and advocating for the area and its businesses. The Amherst BID is funded through a tax assessment on commercial property owners with additional financial support through memoranda of understanding with institutional partners – UMass Amherst and Amherst College and the Town of Amherst. With our staff of two fulltime and one part-time worker, we advocate for over 200 small businesses in Amherst’s downtown.
Our goal is a strong, commercially viable downtown. A strong downtown benefits the entire community. We want to create a place where people want to visit, shop, eat, congregate, and enjoy a wide range of cultural offerings. We are very proud of our partnership with our community. The Amherst BID works with and collaborates with our public schools, the Town of Amherst, Amherst Recreation, our cultural institutions, the colleges and the university and more. The BID has been a lead donor to the John P. Musante Health Center and provides fiscal support to dozens of Amherst nonprofits, benefitting all members of our community.
We have worked overtime for our small businesses during the pandemic. In the last 18+ months, the Amherst BID, alongside the Amherst Area Chamber of Commerce, has secured over $500,000 in private donations and state funds that have gone directly to Amherst businesses. Nearly $100,000 of that money raised supported families in need as we partnered with Family Outreach of Amherst and the Amherst Survival Center through our Dinner Delights Program. We have written scores of successful grants for small businesses for state, federal and other small business programs. Through our lobbying and advocacy we have worked with downtown businesses to open popular new and expanded outdoor dining areas, which provided a needed economic infusion during the pandemic.
We are working to bring small and diverse businesses to our downtown. The BID actively recruits new and diverse businesses to Amherst. Our team works hand-in-hand with small business owners, many new to business or those with English as a second language, to navigate town permitting processes and steer them to successful openings. A most recent example is the successful launch of Mexicalito and the soon to open Hazel’s Kitchen – and there are more in the works.
Our work is making a difference. The BID’s efforts have been lauded by state government officials who have celebrated its initiative and innovation including being the only community cited in testimony before the U.S. Congress by Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, Mike Kennealy who cited the Amherst BID’s economic development work during the pandemic as a beacon of success in Massachusetts.
If you have been to the Block Party, a concert on the Common or at Sweetser Park, or WinterFest, or if you will enjoy the Halloween parade or lighting of the Merry Maple, the BID organized, funded or contributed to each of these events.
We are proud of our indefatigable executive director, Gabrielle Gould, who has done the hard work of helping businesses survive during the pandemic, recruiting new businesses to join our downtown, and advocating for the things that need to happen to ensure our downtown stays vibrant well into the future. She’s smart, savvy, and knows what she’s doing. The BID Board unanimously supports her and the work she and her team are doing.
Making Amherst a cultural destination is crucial to our long-range economic viability as a small town. That’s why we support these initiatives:
Jones Library Renovation and Expansion: The Amherst BID recognizes that the Jones Library is an economic driver for Amherst and supports its renovation and expansion to meet the needs of the community. It is important to note that while we support the Jones Library question on the ballot, we do not endorse any candidates running for office. Our staff, board members and business owners, as private citizens, do have the right to express their own opinions.
More and Better Parking: The BID has been public about Amherst’s need for more parking and would like to find a way to see that built without taxpayer dollars.
More Cultural Opportunities to Downtown: [Through the non-profit Downtown Amherst Foundation,] we are currently attempting to bring several cultural venues to Amherst – The Drake (at the former location of the High Horse) and a Performance Shell on the Common – to build a more inclusive and sustainable destination for residents and visitors alike. Creating free and low-cost places for members of the community and other artists to perform is vital to becoming a more culturally inclusive community. We believe that free arts and cultural offerings that are accessible for all is an extremely important part of community building as well as economic sustainability.
Our mission is clear: A strong, economically viable downtown anchored in culture and the arts. Ms. Gould has embraced this mission and carried this message to all levels of government and the public. We look forward to continuing this dialogue in and to working closely with the incoming Town Council. It is in the best interests of our community that this discourse be civil and about the issues.
First, the two local Political Action Committees. Three years ago, the formation of Amherst Forward provoked many accusations and worries about Big and/or Dark Money entering local politics. At that time, and continuing today, Amherst Forward asks individuals to limit contributions to $52 per year. Now that a second PAC, the Progressive Coalition of Amherst, exists, we thought you might be interested in their financial reports covering Jan. 1 to Oct. 15 (called the 8th-day-preceding report).
# donations more than $100-$500 (the legal maximum): 8
# $500 donations: 4
In-kind donations received: $216.76
Expenses: reported as $0 but since they ended with only $423.23 this seems odd.
Liabilities: $293.27
Amherst Forward
Money on hand as of January 1: $1,363.90
Total receipts through October 15: $5,352
# of donors: 105
# donations $50 or less: 28
#donations more than $50-$100: 74
# donations more than $100-$500 (the legal maximum): 3
# $500 donations: 0
In-kind donations received: $39.97
Expenses: $1,524.19
Liabilities: $524.99
It looks to us like the Progressive Coalition was bankrolled by a small number of people, four of whom provided more than half of all donations by giving the maximum permitted contribution of $500.
It looks to us like Amherst Forward has a large base of small-money donors. No individual contributed more than $104.
After reading comments that were misrepresentations and outright lies about my Town Council colleagues, I feel compelled to set the record straight and share my experience of working with those who have been targeted and maligned.
As a certified mindfulness coach, teacher and practicing Buddhist, I am known on Town Council for being balanced, truth-seeking and inclusive. I hope that after reading my observations, you will reach out and get to know all Town Council candidates before deciding who you’re voting for.
Thirteen of us elected to the first Town Council in 2018 came with different passions, skills, and endorsements from different groups of people in town — people who supported the new charter and those who preferred Town Meeting. Since then, we as a Town Council have been through difficult times together. And yet we have achieved so much to be proud of! Implementing a new form of government in the middle of a health, economic, racial injustice, and climate crisis, we:
Oversaw a large town as a pandemic shut down our schools, businesses, and life as we know it;
Resolved to be an anti-racist town and correct the harm done to Black residents;
Brought a social justice lens to issues;
Formed the Energy and Climate Action Committee to address climate action goals and bring a climate action lens to discussions;
Dealt with inadequate social infrastructure of schools/library and high housing and property taxes that make it hard for families to live in town.
After having worked and struggled together, supported and respected each other, it’s disheartening to see attacks against majority decisions and individual councilors come from one of our own councilors.
I worked closely with Andy, Mandi Jo, George, and Evan. The Amherst Current is not endorsing candidates in the Nov. 2 election, and I am not trying to tell people how to vote. I am only relating my impressions of these four incumbent Councilors from working with them for the past three years.
As the Vice Chair of the Community Resources Committee (CRC), I got to work closely with Mandi Jo Hanneke, who is the chair of the committee. As the chair she has the power, one may say, but she also has the responsibility for coordinating all the meeting dates, agendas, minutes, and writing hundreds of reports that go to the Town Council summarizing our work in CRC. She is the chair because no one else wants to take on that responsibility!
I admire Mandi’s work ethic and sense of fairness and justice. She wrote bylaws protecting workers from wage theft and is working with me to create an inclusive engagement process with the team at UMass to ensure that we hear the underrepresented voices. There’s a reason she has cosponsored bylaws with ten councilors—she is approachable, reliable, and has great legal knowledge!
As Vice Chair of the Council, Evan Ross is also on CRC. He played a lead role in crafting a Comprehensive Housing Policy, focusing on affordable housing and home ownership. As a renter, he has been a strong advocate for renters and for making changes in our zoning bylaws to make housing affordable for young professionals and families. Zoning is a complex and nuanced issue. In my experience, no one understands zoning as well as he does. I’ve learned a lot from him. We may not always agree but that’s OK, and in fact it ensures that we’re looking at issues from diverse lenses. We need more young, thoughtful and hard-working Town Councilors.
Andy Steinberg is the chair of the Finance Committee and one of the most informed and kindest people I know. His entire career has been dedicated to public service. After graduating from law school, he worked in the field of civil legal aid, providing aid to poor people, the elderly, and the disabled.
Andy’s been in local government since 1996 and is the most knowledgeable Councilor about town finances and budgets. Moving forward, we’re looking to invest in our new community responders’ program, address systemic harm to Black residents, our four capital projects, and climate action goals. We need the unique strengths that Andy brings that combine financial expertise and empathy.
I’ve worked with George Ryan in his capacity as the chair of the Governance, Organization, and Legislation Committee (GOL). He’s always supporting his colleagues’ work through resolutions and bylaws. I respect most his commitment to affordable housing, which is a Town Council priority. George’s commitment was tested when we voted on the Valley CDC’s proposal for 28 affordable units in his district. Many of his neighbors were against it and his fellow district Councilor abstained from that controversial vote. George voted in favor of affordable housing despite the high probability of losing neighborhood votes because he believed in this project and Valley CDC, which he knows from his work on the board of Habitat for Humanity. George had the courage and integrity to stand up for what he believes is right for the underrepresented in our town.
Reading this post may not change your mind about these councilors. If you already appreciate Mandi Jo’s, Evan’s, Andy’s and George’s hard work on Town Council, you’ll continue to like them, even though you may disagree with them at times. If you don’t like them, then you’ll continue to feel that way, regardless of their support of issues that you also care about. But don’t believe me. Get to know them for yourself!
Beyond correcting the record about my colleagues, I want to invite us all to do a better job of getting to know each other as human beings and not just through the lens that divides us and filters all we see and hear based on what we already believe about people.
Zoom and social media have made it easier for us to dehumanize and say what we want without realizing the impact of our words on others and the stress and trauma that others might be experiencing. We need to stop doing that. If we’re going to solve the big problems that lie before us — systemic racism, climate change, unaffordable housing, high property taxes, homelessness and our dysfunctional schools and library buildings — then people with different viewpoints and experiences need to feel safe and know that their questions, ideas, and perspectives will not be attacked or quoted out of context.
The only way that I know to disrupt our assumptions about others is by getting to know them.
I’ll end with an invitation for all to reach out to at least one person who we disagree with and go for a walk or coffee/tea and get to know them as a human being.
THE AMHERST CURRENT 