Opinion: An Elected Mayor Won’t Fix Everything, but It Might Help

Social Injustice Goes Global

Recently, Raymond La Raja, a professor of political science at UMass, made this case in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, not that Amherst lacks democracy, but quite the opposite. We have public comment, committees, subcommittees, listening sessions, working groups, task forces—an abundance of voice. His concern is that all this participation doesn’t reliably translate into decisions anyone can clearly own. Democracy, in his telling, isn’t just about being heard but about the system’s capacity to act. When authority is too diffuse, accountability dissolves and trust follows.

The remedy he proposes is structural clarity: an elected mayor with visible executive authority who voters can reward or punish and whose name appears next to outcomes.

That theory helps explain why many friends and colleagues who share my dissatisfaction with Amherst’s current Home Rule Charter believe that replacing our appointed Town Manager with an elected mayor would solve the problem.

I agree—though not without ambivalence. I live in Amherst, but I measure time by Northampton. By how long it takes to bike down Route 9 and whether I’m meeting someone at Haymarket or Pulaski Park and by how often someone says, “Well, in Northampton they just decided that.”

That last part matters. Northampton has something Amherst doesn’t: a mayor. Not a myth or a managerial abstraction but a person whose name people actually know and you can like, dislike, vote for, vote out, argue with at a City Council meeting, or yell about on Facebook and then immediately regret.

In Amherst, power feels misty. Decisions happen, but no one seems to own them. Ask who’s responsible for a zoning decision, a housing project, or a budget choice and you get a flowchart instead of an answer: Council did this, the Manager recommended that and a board approved something else. Everyone gestures sideways.

Northampton doesn’t do that. Not because it’s purer, smarter, or magically immune to dysfunction but because the system insists on a face.

When Northampton needed fiscal stability after the Great Recession, it wasn’t a committee that took the credit or the blame but the mayor. When downtown changed, housing debates heated up, and schools and city services competed for funding, people knew who to pressure. That didn’t make everyone happy, but it made things legible.

And legibility is underrated as we grew up being told to “be engaged,” “show up,” “participate.” But participation requires knowing where to aim your energy. Amherst’s council–manager system tells us to aim everywhere at once, which is functionally the same as nowhere.

An elected mayor doesn’t fix voter apathy, money in politics, or the fact that half of us are exhausted and working two jobs but it does something small and radical and simplifies the story of power.

Northampton voters don’t need to understand the internal mechanics of appointments to know whether things feel like they’re moving in the right direction. They don’t need a background in municipal governance to know who to vote out when they’re mad. Democracy, at its best, doesn’t require a manual.

Critics of mayoral systems are right to worry about consolidation of power. History gives us plenty of reasons to be nervous about strong executives but Amherst already has consolidated power  consolidated quietly, through appointments, professional norms, and a culture of consensus that makes dissent feel impolite.

At least a mayor has to knock on doors, must explain themselves in public and to face voters every four years and hear, plainly, whether the town is buying what they’re selling.

In Northampton, the mayor prepares the budget. The City Council argues about it and everyone understands that dance. In Amherst, the choreography is so complex that by the time the music stops, most residents have left the room.

This isn’t about loving Northampton or hating Amherst but about admitting that our expectations of local government are modest—plow the snow, fix the potholes, don’t embarrass us—and that our current system struggles even with that because no one clearly owns the outcome.

Even seeing Northampton, a visible mayoral face doesn’t automatically fix systemic weaknesses. Without reforms addressing participation, equity, and the invisible influence of PACs, an elected mayor alone will not make Amherst more democratic.

Still, an elected mayor would make Amherst more legible—more virtuous in the sense of clarity and accountability, and more honest about power, responsibility, and failure. Residents would know who to praise, who to question, and who ultimately carries the consequences when things go wrong. That transparency, even imperfect, is itself a radical step toward real democracy.

Rizwana Khan is a writer, educator, and human rights advocate in the Town of Amherst.