Letter: Should Brookline Become a City? Our Experience in Amherst Says No!
Photo: Town of Brookline, MA.
The following letter was sent to the Boston Globe on June 23, 2025.
Should Brookline become a city?
A resounding NO from this 45-year Amherst Town Meeting member in a town that has called itself a city for the last eight years. From a precinct with 30 town meeting representatives, I now live in a district with two representatives on Town Council without the checks and balances of an elected executive branch. Our Town Council does have three at large members in addition to the ten district representatives but they act more like legislators than independent Select Board members.
We are a sharply divided town. There is essentially one PAC, Amherst Forward, and the rest of us are non-PAC members and many crucial votes are 6-6 with the council president having the tie-breaking vote. The most important former town committees are duplicates of or replaced by council committees. For example, the Community Resource Committee and the Planning Board both design and approve zoning amendments. Citizens cannot easily place items on the council agenda nor bring a council decision to a public referendum without a unreasonably large number of signatures in a population that is hugely inflated by college and university students who are registered voters but don’t usually vote in local elections.
Lastly the workload of council members is so onerous as well as the need to ring doorbells of every house in the district to get elected, it is difficult to recruit good people willing and able to make this commitment. This does not result in real competitive elections.
I wish every day I had the power I lost when we gave up Town Meeting in favor of “efficient government”.
Brookline: do not cede your political power to a city council that may not represent your views!
Hilda Greenbaum
Hilda Greenbaum is a 65-year resident of the Amherst area and a 50-year resident of Amherst, a town meeting member 1975–2018, and a former member of various town boards and committees, including Public Transportation, Assessors, and Zoning Board of Appeals. Her particular interests are land use and historic preservation.
Brookline resident here. The problem with our current Town Meeting is that it’s a wildly nonrepresentative deliberative body. I suppose it’s nice for the people on the inside, but for the tens of thousands of us who aren’t, it’s pretty clear we’re only tangentially connected to their self-interest.
Dear Michael, I suppose one could say the same thing about Amherst’s Town Meeting but it was much more “representative” than the oligarchy with no checks and balances that is in place now. Maybe Brookline will have an elected Mayor accountable to the public instead of a paid manager directed by the 13 member Council—at least that’s what some people are telling the Charter Review Committee.
Michael,
I’m interested to hear how you think Brookline town meeting is not representing you. Who are the self-interested people? I see Brookline for Everyone has a long list of accomplishments in town meeting. https://brooklineforeveryone.com/about-us/accomplishments/.
See this week’s Indy article reflecting how much Amherst residents feel the loss of town meeting. https://www.amherstindy.org/2025/07/11/opinion-amhersts-town-council-form-of-government-fails-every-democratic-test/
As the old saw goes, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest. I’d say that goes for the various representative forms of government too — the less representative, the worse. The representative Town Meeting form has its limitations — but the Council form simply exacerbates those limitations.
I’d be interested in moves that make Town Meeting more representative and effective, rather than eliminating it in the interests of an alleged efficiency. For instance, what about for larger Towns, adding in neighborhood councils or other approaches to develop “representative” TMs?
Taking away legislative power from a large group and concentrating it in a small group is the opposite of better representing the public. Power players, special interest groups and well-connected PACs will find it easier to influence elections and town decisions.
The slogan of Amherst defenders of the Town Meeting/Select Board form of government that “You can’t buy Town Meeting” has never rung truer.
The Town Meeting vs. Town Council discussion here seems to be centered on the hypothetical benefits/detriments of each system. Either system can work to provide a vibrant government that represents the people of the Town well; there is nothing inherent in either system that guarantees a responsive government.
My understanding is that the voters of Amherst decided to replace representative Town Meeting because of actual problems with the way that Town Meeting was serving the Town. It would be interesting to hear from those who wish to return to Town Meeting about
1) why Town Meeting advocates back then (circa 2015-2018) were not able to convince Amherst voters that repairs to the Town Meeting system were preferable to the change to our Town Council system, and
2) what changes in Town Meeting might have changed the results of the Town vote to implement a Town Council form of government.
My dear Fred,
It’s all about who has the power and Amherst Forward et al. wanted more than they had with the representative town meeting. And it’s still all about power politics: “my way or the highway”. I, as an old-timer, feel powerless, disenfranchised, and on the losing side of every council vote. If I wanted to live in Somerville, I’d move east; so why would I approve of bringing Somerville to Amherst having left Cambridge in 1965?
And the future looks bleaker.