Opinion: Our Town Government is Broken. Part 1

by Art and Maura Keene

Here’s the heart of the matter up front. 

The people  in charge of our town government, (you can call them Amherst Forward, or Amherst Forward-endorsed, or the advocates of unfettered development of off-campus student housing, or just the ruling majority) have been completely in charge since Amherst changed its form of government in 2019. And for all of that time, they have held not just a majority on the Town Council but a supermajority, passing most votes by huge margins and stacking town committees with allies sympathetic to their agenda. In most cases, they have been able to do whatever they wanted to do and our current circumstances are a product of their doing, their planning, their leadership. Council President Lynn Griesemer, one of their number, is the only president that our Town Council has ever known. Our town government, and the fate of the town, has been exclusively in hands of this group.

So if you are happy with the direction in which the town is headed, and if you think that we are doing pretty well, then you should give our current government and its leadership the credit and continue to support them with your vote.

And if you think that the town could be doing a lot better and is headed in the wrong direction, the folks currently in charge wholly own responsibility for that and you should support a change of personnel in the upcoming election.

The way it looks to us (as people who have lived here for 43 years and who moved here for the town’s outstanding schools), the town has languished under the current government and current leadership and a change is sorely needed.

A Few Examples

Schools: Our schools, once the best in Western Mass and among the best in the state, are now a shadow of their former selves, mediocre dwellers of the middle of the pack. With draconian budget cuts in each of the last three years resulting in reductions of staff and elimination of programs and with budget hawks on the Town Council demanding more austerity in the coming year, it looks like without some inspired and creative interventions, this downward trajectory will continue.

Read More
Correcting Councilor Ryan on the School Budget (Support our Schools)
Council Passes School Budget with Reservations and Warnings (Marua Keene)
Does the Town of Amherst Still Value K-12 Education? (Art and Maura Keene)

Roads: Our town roads, which were superior to those in all of the surrounding towns when we moved here in 1982, now resemble a lunar landscape, with the town engineer warning that they will soon be downgraded from fair to poor. And with more than $42M in repairs needed to bring the roads up to snuff and only a couple of million at best budgeted each year, there is no apparent path to getting out of this mess.

Read More
Little Relief In Sight for Town’s Roads (Jeff Lee)
The State of Amherst’s Roads is Fair. Town Faces $42 Million Backlog. (Maura Keene)
Ask Perplexity AI: When Will Amherst’s Roads Be in Good Condition? (Ira Bryck)

Seniors: Our Senior Center is an embarrassment with many of Amherst’s nearly 5,000 seniors traveling to neighboring Hadley, South Hadley, and Northampton to utilize their far superior senior centers. This is an affront to the 14.7% of the total population or 36% of the permanent year-round population that is over 55 years of age who pay among the highest taxes in the state.

Read More
Amherst Seniors Need and Deserve a New Building (Richard Yourga)
Seniors Plead for Services as New Council Convenes (Maura Keene)

Housing: Housing in Amherst is increasingly unaffordable and young families especially are finding it difficult to find affordable homes, as LLCs are buying up the housing stock to convert to student rentals.  Similarly, new rental housing is driving up rents across the board for students and non-students alike. The population of year-round residents has dwindled to 13,000 and our K-12 student enrollment is down by half because families are leaving Amherst.

Read More
It’s Time for UMass To Address the Chronic Shortage of Housing Off-Campus (Ira Bryck)
Increased Housing Density in the Cards for North Amherst (Maura Keene)
UMass Poll: Housing Tops the List of Concerns of Bay State Voters as Economic Fears Increase (UMass News & Media)

Social Justice: The town’s civilian responder service CRESS has had its budget slashed as the town drags its feet on social justice initiatives to which it committed four years ago. And the scandal in our schools in 2023 surrounding the harassment of gay and trans students at the Middle School continues to plague the town in the form of ongoing lawsuits and unresolved concerns about student safety – all resulting from the tendency of town leadership to deny or minimize the crisis rather to confront it head on.

Read More
CSSJC: Town Lags in Meeting Racial and Social Justice Commitments (Norah Stewart)
Progress Report on the Town’s Progress on Community Safety Working Group’s Recommendations (Art Keene)
Much Work Remains to Make Amherst an Equitable Community: Liberatory Visioning Project Final Report (Maura Keene)
Protect Trans and Queer Kids: A Roundup on The Crisis at ARMS (Megan Lambert)

Democracy: The current town government has demonstrated time and again an insularity that sees them putting more energy into fending off public concerns than to considering creative solutions to the challenges that face us all, squandering the prodigious breadth of expertise and experience of our community. If an idea doesn’t originate inside the majority’s very small echo chamber, it’s not going to get a fair consideration. The Town Council’s aversion to public input, public participation, and due diligence, and its habit of adopting positions and then digging in its heels to defend them, results in bad decisions. Just one frustrating illustration was when the town took a stand in favor of installing an artificial turf field at the high school in spite of a scientific consensus that it was a threat to public health, the Board of Health’s strong recommendation against it, and cost estimates suggesting that such installations would be unaffordable. Only when it was clear that there was not enough money available for such an installation did the council majority back down from their insistence that it would be artificial turf or nothing.

Read More
Democracy in Amherst (Michael Greenebaum)
The Rise of Political Parties in Amherst Has Diminished Local Democracy (Lou Conover)
Thoughtful, Deliberate (and Not Rushed) Planning. Reflections of a Former Town Councilor on How This Town Council Fails to Meet the Promises of the Charter, Democracy, Transparency, and Public Participation (Darcy DuMont)

Town Charter: The town is in the process of reviewing the town charter, something that only happens once every 10 years. While a League of Women Voters thoughtful and comprehensive review of the charter that included a survey of more than 400 residents, showed that the majority were unhappy with the way our town government works, wanting more transparency, more accountability, more public participation, and more democracy, the Amherst Forward-aligned majority on the review committee have resisted further consideration of all suggestions addressing those concerns and would seem to be moving toward recommendations supporting the status quo.

Read More
Revisiting the League of Women Voters’ Study of the Town’s Home Rule Charter (Art Keene)
Charter Review Committee Retreat Exemplifies Bad Government (Darcy DuMont)
Charter Review Committee Should Listen to What the Public Has Said (Art Keene)

The Jones Library Expansion: And then there is the Jones Library expansion project, the final cost of which is unknown, the mandated cash flow analysis and fundraising reports from which are largely missing or opaque, and from which requests for additional town funds seem unending. This project has been a disaster of sloppy planning and fiduciary irresponsibility, with Town Councilors impervious to the multitude of concerns raised by the public and with a stunning lack of curiosity about how we will ultimately pay the bill. And those councilors who have been most enthusiastic and unquestioning in their support of funding the Jones renovation whatever the cost, are the ones who have most loudly berated the school committee for seeking adequate funding for the schools.

Read More
Not One More Penny? Jones Library Is Back Asking the Town for Even More Money (Mickey Rathbun and Maria Kopicki)
Amherst Residents Will Have to Cover the Jones Library Funding Shortfall  (Anita Sarro)
Amherst Has Got Financial Trouble. We Deserve Full Disclosure (Jeff Lee)

What’s Next?
There are plenty more examples of poor planning, poor decision making, poor prioritization, and failed leadership on the part of our town government’s majority. But you get the point. Those who have failed this town so spectacularly during their majority rule now tell us that only they can fix the mess that they themselves have created. But that claim is hardly credible given the track record that those in power have amassed over the last six years.

It is time for a change. That change begins by removing the incumbents who own responsibility for the town’s sorry conditions. We recommend replacing Lynn Griesemer (District 2), George Ryan (District 3), Freke Ette (District 1) and Mandi Jo Hanneke (at-large) with more creative, more democratically-minded candidates. The council majority have been completely in charge. They have set and implemented the agenda. They are offering you tax overrides, cuts in services, mediocre schools, and even less democracy and less public participation than the meager offerings of the last six years. The differences between the above-mentioned candidates and their opponents are apparent in a careful reading of their candidate statements (see e.g. here, here, and here), even though all say that they support affordable housing, good schools, and lower taxes. But who is offering us something new? Who is offering original and specific ideas for addressing the mess that six years of poor leadership has given us and who is just offering platitudes and more of the same?

Incumbents Have a Voting Record
These differences are also apparent in the voting records of the incumbents. And we’ll explore those in Part 2, scheduled to appear on Monday November 3.

Early Voting has started. Vote for a change.