OPINION: TOWN COUNCIL FOR NOOBS: OUT WITH OCA

REGULAR COUNCIL MEETING (2/24/20)

The big issue was: The reorganization of council committees. 

The Outreach, Communication, and Appointments Committee (OCA) was killed on Monday night when Town Council voted to disband the committee. A new committee—the Town Services and Outreach Committee (TSO) rose in its place, whose charge limits it to overseeing town services and outreach. In the same, sweeping vote, the council handed appointing authority to council committees and other new duties to expanded versions of the Governance, Organization and Legislation Committee (GOL) and Community Resources Committee (CRC).

OCA has had a difficult year. Although charged with a variety of tasks, its primary job has been overseeing appointments to the Planning Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals, and appointing the non-voting members of the Finance Committee. Before it could do these, it had to develop processes that have larger implications for how the town as a whole appoints multi-member bodies.

To Public or Not to Public?
There has been much discussion over the past year regarding the lack of public access to information about candidates for the many volunteer committees, boards, and commissions that help run Amherst (see for example here, here and here). To serve on one of these multi-member bodies, candidates fill out a form called a Community Activity Form (CAF) with personal information about their background, experience, and interest in open positions. In Amherst, these have always been considered personnel files, and, as such, have been treated as confidential. In Northampton and elsewhere these are made public.

Councilors Evan Ross and Sarah Swartz have argued that keeping the process confidential encourages people who might be intimidated by having their personal information made public, or who might be discouraged from applying if they knew that competing applicants had more experience. Other councilors, including Darcy Dumont, have argued that there is no way to hold the town accountable for its decisions unless the process is fully transparent, and the applicant pool and its qualifications are public record. 

The members of OCA—Councilors Evan Ross (current Chair), Sarah Swartz (former Chair), Darcy Dumont, Alisa Brewer and George Ryan—have spent long hours over the course of the year developing a system for how to conduct the interview and appointment process, and have changed course several times. Most recently, interviews for Planning Board were done in a group setting, with all of the candidates being asked the questions simultaneously in the Town Room, with the public looking on and with the proceedings recorded on Amherst Media.

In With The New
Ross and Ryan are also on GOL, where they began working on a plan to reorganize the standing council committees, including OCA. They did so without the knowledge or support of OCA’s other three members until very late in their process, and only after presenting the issue to the council as a whole.  When I first heard of their plan, I wondered why councilors would want to spend more time reorganizing now that the first, extra year they were given in the charter to do so has passed. The council has spent a considerable amount of time getting their committees up and running, so why scrap their structure now? 

Ross, Ryan, and Mandi Jo Hanneke, who also worked on this reorganization as a member of GOL, said that it would make the council more efficient. GOL will now have the ability to proactively look at bylaws for changes without having to get the full council’s approval, and this will eliminate unnecessary and duplicative work. 

GOL’s new powers (and workload) now includes overseeing Councilor’s appointments to Council standing committees, and overseeing appointments for non-voting Council liaisons to multi-member bodies. It also includes doing the same for Clerk of the Council and Town Manager, when referred by the council. Andy Steinberg expressed deep concerns about giving a standing committee control over hiring the Town Manager. Cathy Schoen also expressed concern that Councilor’s appointments to committees should be made by the Council as a whole, so that they are distributed fairly and not biased.

Similarly, CRC will now oversee appointments to the Planning Board and the Zoning Board of Appeals. Ryan and others made the argument that it is sensible to have the CRC, whose charge is now more focused on land use, planning, and economic development, make these appointments.

Over the course of the year, several appointees proved to be controversial. There are benefits to having a different group of people, which isn’t directly affiliated with the processes it governs, overseeing appointments. The people closest to an issue are not always the best suited to make decisions. Experts often get lost in conventional wisdom or technical details. Outsiders have new ideas that can open log jams and expose rote thinking. A separate appointing committee like OCA offered some distance from the other Council committees.

Who’s Afraid of TSO?
Swartz was visibly upset about the dissolution of OCA. No one has worked harder than she has to establish its policies. Fighting back tears, she said she took the move to end it personally, and that although she will move forward without bearing grudges, she strongly disagreed with the proposal. Lynn Griesemer said that all of Swartz’s hard work was appreciated and would apply in the future because the processes she helped develop would continue to be followed in the new structure.

Swartz decried TSO as a toothless committee, pointing out that while OCA was charged with outreach and working with town staff, they were rebuffed by staff and the Town Manager who told them that this wasn’t the Council’s job. TSO, she said, will have nothing to do, and will be redundant. Which councilors, she wondered, would be willing to waste their time by serving on it?

While Pat De Angelis said that the reorganization of the Council’s committees was not a power grab by members of GOL, it sure looks like one from the outside. To avoid this perception, I have a modest proposal that responds to Swartz’s comments. Griesemer will soon determine council committee appointments for next year. As part of this decision, the current members of GOL who worked on the reorganization should step down from that committee and spend the next year on TSO, getting the new committee going and proving how committed they are to the changes they wrought.