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.