Amherst Forward Calls It Quits
Photo: Amherst Forward
The leadership of the local political action committee Amherst Forward announced in a June 30 email to its followers that it would be “wrapping up operations” over the coming months.
The email, written by Laura Draucker, Clare Bertrand, and MaryAnn Grim, said, “Our leadership team members have moved, gotten new jobs or caretaking responsibilities, or simply needed to reprioritize how they spend their time. As a result, we can no longer follow the details of the [town] council closely enough to provide timely and thoughtful updates to our community, and this ultimately limits our ability to endorse candidates in the next election cycle.”
The email continued: “Therefore, we are stepping back now to let the next wave of Amherst residents fill the void in their own way — we still need more candidates to run for office and to sit on committees, and we need to put a stop to personal attacks that hurt our chances of having contested elections in the future. We need to have the hard conversations about budgets, infrastructure projects, development, and housing. We need to be willing to entertain all ideas without judgment or assumptions about motives. We need to avoid echo chambers that make us suspicious of our neighbors. We need to focus on moving forward.”
“Once we finish paying off our recurring expenses, any remaining funds will be donated to the Friends of the Jones Library Capital Campaign,” the email said.
History
Amherst Forward emerged from the organization Amherst For All, a group that successfully campaigned for the adoption of a new town charter that transitioned Amherst from a Representative Town Meeting form of government to a Town Council form of government.
According to the Amherst Forward website, the PAC was created because its founders believed some residents felt excluded from local decision-making and wanted a transparent organization that could endorse candidates, educate voters, and advocate on issues such as housing, infrastructure, schools, and economic development. The organization promised “full-time democracy” and greater transparency and accountability, and it states that it deliberately chose to organize as a registered PAC so that its finances and leadership would be publicly disclosed.
The PAC focused on what it considered the critical areas for the town, including K-12 school infrastructure (specifically supporting a single-school building project to replace the Wildwood and Fort River elementary schools), fostering a vibrant downtown, increasing residential density downtown, revising and modernizing the town’s master plan, and supporting the expansion of the Jones Library along with three other major capital projects (a new elementary school, a DPW building, and a firehouse). It then endorsed candidates who aligned with this vision for the town’s future.
Amherst Forward’s Facebook presence dates back to at least August 2015, when the group announced the start of a “charter reform movement.” Around the same time, it hailed the formation of an allied organization called Amherst For All (AFA) that pushed to change the town’s government structure.
Amherst Forward (AF) officially registered as a PAC in 2018, following the successful charter campaign that replaced the 240-member Representative Town Meeting with an elected town council of 13 representatives and a hired town manager. Its early efforts focused on supporting town council candidates who had endorsed the new charter and who supported the changes AF wanted to see in Amherst’s town government priorities.
In that first election, candidates endorsed by AF won eight of 13 seats on the town council, creating a supermajority bloc that often voted together throughout the council’s initial three-year term. Councilor Pat DeAngelis, an independent, also frequently voted with the AF-endorsed bloc and was endorsed by the PAC in the second election cycle.
AF’s founders were co-chairs Ginny Hamilton and Katherine Appy, and treasurer MaryAnn Grim. The following individuals served in the early years as members of the 10-person leadership team: Laura Draucker, Kent Faerber, Matt Blumenfeld, Claudia Canale-Parola, Sarah Marshall, Clare Bertrand, Bennett Hazlip, Jan Klausner-Wise, Ray LaRaja, and others. Current town councilor Andy Churchill (at large) has served previously on the leadership team of both Amherst For All and Amherst Forward.
Many of those founders have been prominent figures in the Jones Library demolition and expansion project. PAC leader Kent Faerber co-chairs the Jones Library Capital Campaign, and founder Hamilton was hired as manager of the capital campaign, a position she held until June 2025.
Friendly relations between Amherst For All, Amherst Forward, and state Rep. Mindy Domb, a vigorous champion of the Jones Library renovation-expansion, have been noted. MaryAnn Grim has served as Domb’s campaign treasurer as well as treasurer for the two PACs.
AF has disputed the charge that it became a power broker with an agenda in town politics, saying instead that it was primarily engaged in studying issues, recommending candidates, and encouraging positions on certain issues, most notably the Jones Library expansion and downtown real estate development. Its webpage states: “Even in a town the size of Amherst, it can be difficult for both residents and our elected representatives to keep track of all the issues, much less to understand how these issues may be connected. … We wanted to change that. Made up solely of Amherst volunteers, Amherst Forward began in 2018 to encourage and support candidates to run for our new town council who shared our four key priorities: balanced development, infrastructure to support town needs, deeper civic participation, and thriving public schools.”
Critics of AF, many of whom have written previously for the Indy, argued that AF’s domination of town politics had greatly diminished democracy in Amherst; undermined public participation, transparency, and accountability; promoted candidates supportive of special interests; fostered hostility to adequate school budgets (see also here); promoted polarizing, toxic politics; was mostly silent or oppositional on many issues related to social justice and civil rights (see also here); oversaw considerable increases in residents’ tax bills; and left the town on the hook for a substantial portion of the Jones Library’s $15 million share of the project (see also here).
Actually, the origins of Amherst Forward go back even further, to 2006 under the name Sustainable Amherst. This group professed a love of the town and a vision it wished to promote, as well as a concern that Town Meeting was in effect a club of elites who made decisions out of the public eye, and ones that were not in the best interests of the town as a whole. It soon developed a website — http://www.tallyvotes.org — which recorded and posted the attendance and votes of all Town Meeting members. At one point this site also offered a ranking of all members, based on their agreement or disagreement with the positions that Sustainable Amherst had taken on certain issues. Such a yea or nay dichotomy left no room for nuance or for the reasoning behind why a member had voted a particular way, giving the uncomfortable impression of a “you’re either with us or against us” mentality. Eventually some Town Meeting members expressed discomfort with this practice, and the rankings were discontinued — at least publicly.
I’ve lived in Amherst for only 8.25 years, so can’t respond to the history. However, two things come to mind from reading the article and the comment by Barberet.
First, what exactly does “Sustainable” refer to? Environment? Architecture? Cultural amenities? Growth (an oxymoron)? Everything judged to be ‘good’ which is usually disputed by many residents?
Second, Isn’t feeling uncomfortable in discussions about Town Meetings a good and necessary part of deep democracy? It stimulates self-reflection and taking responsibility for one’s behavior and views.
Has anyone ever suggested having a Town Meeting every 6 months? If held on Saturdays, most working people could attend. There is merit in some of the old ways of doing things.
They got their library, putting the town in a hole for decades. They looked around at the rubble at their feet, said “Our work here is done,” and rode off into the sunset.
As one of the vocal critics of the Amherst Forward PAC, the connection between this group’s formation and its advocacy of a developer’s agenda cannot be overstated. There are parallels with carpetbaggers who move on from a town where they have few ties, once the profiteering is complete. Doubtless, this connection to developers will become clear to more Amherst residents as time passes. It speaks volumes that Jones Library Trustees, who very early on, aligned themselves with the AF PAC, hired a Public Relations firm to “sell” the Jones demolition-expansion project to the Town, spinning data and slanting truth about population size, the “need” for a dedicated teen space (when it already existed at the Jones), emphasizing “clear sight-lines” in a new build as a justification for demolishing a brick addition with a metal roof and its 50-100 year life span. Sadly, this PR spin was effective in Amherst, which was already struggling with voter apathy, despite its reputation as an engaged community. More tragically, Amherst residents will be left financially struggling for years to pay off the legacy of the elitist AF PAC and lamenting the altered downtown landscape with its cheaply built 5-story dorms.
Thank you, Amherst Forward, for diminishing our democracy and perverting our priorities. Please reflect on how moving “Amherst Forward” and making “America Great” are not that different.
AF has done a lot of damage in 8 years. It has deeply offended many former town meeting members who want a more direct democracy and more robust public participation. It has messed up the downtown and made it a student food court and very unappealing to year round residents. It has not supported neighborhood zoning protections. It did not prioritize efforts for equity or climate action. It has committed the town to the financial fiasco that is the Jones Library project. And it completely controlled and minimized the every 10 year Charter Review by dominating the meetings and report despite valiant efforts by Chair Julian Hynes.
I don’t think it will make much difference that the AF PAC is gone. 6 Councilors are AF or AF adjacent. The Town Manager continues to be very supportive of AF. The former AF leaders will still be telling people whom to vote for. The same people have been the leaders for many years so we know who they are. The Amherst Current, their mouthpiece, still exists. And now there’s a group of loud, 40 something, privileged white men who want to steer the course of zoning and housing using gaslighting and other means of deception. They could be worse than the first iteration of AF.
I obviously recognize and concur with how divisiveness has hurt our town, socially, financially, and governmentally. At the same time, I have had numerous civil conversations with people I disagree with in town, and hope there may be new opportunities for such collaboration as our elected officials are not being sourced from any political action committee, and committed to certain positions. I am just expressing the hope that there may be more discussion across the imaginary aisle. That is not to say we should all agree, but we should disagree more collaboratively.
I hope and pray we Amherst citizens can find our way back to the middle ground where both sides are willing to give just a little—happily or not—to move forward. It’s hard to find something good besides the new school that has happened in 8 years. Harder yet to find anything the council has done that Town Meeting was accused of not doing/being.
I’m not really a praying person so I have little hope.
I’ll add one other thing here — Amherst needs to be more liberal.
People in Amherst need to adopt the values of the liberal enlightenment, particularly in placing the human value of the people with who they disagree above that disagreement.
I’m not suggesting that one should abandon one’s beliefs or ignore one’s values, but only remember that you are debating human beings, not the utter incarnation of evil.