Letter: Amherst Needs A Better Process For Addressing Perceived Conflicts Of Interest
Photo: Blue Diamond Gallery. Creative commons
The following letter was submitted to the Amherst Town Council on February 15, 2021.
I have always been proud to live in the town which believes its government has “Openness to the Max.”
It meant to me that openness, and its close relative, transparency, were such important guiding principles that I could be confident that there was always “sunshine” to protect against even the perception of conflict of interest.
But it seems that motto turns out to describe a wish, rather than any kind of ethical guardrail.
But like any town, we do need those guardrails, so that we can rely on our decisions being made democratically and fairly. They may be particularly important in a smaller town like ours, where individuals often wear many hats and know each other through multiple connections
Conflicts of interest, real or perceived, happen in all levels of government. But – despite the overall goodness of the people involved – any of us can find ourselves in political situations where we should not have a vote or influence. I am not accusing anyone of anything, but stating that there is the potential for a perceived conflict of interest when:
- · A single person has a significant influence in both the decisions of the town’s planning board and the planning decisions of the town’s major employer
- · A senior town executive makes decisions about a controversial parking garage and serves on the board of the BID, the organization of town center property owners that will most benefit from those decisions. This is the most executive role in our town, pledged to look for the good of all rather than a small group of property owners
- · A Town Councilor votes on a solar moratorium that might restrict the opportunities of a friend and sometimes business partner – and claims there is no conflict of interest, because they consider themself a neutral and aware person
Other cases may be unavoidable, where a decision benefits a spouse’s employer, not that there is any financial gain, or wrongdoing of any kind. Having an improved disclosure process might increase the clarity in these scenarios.
How can a community member protest any situation like this?
Lacking a town process for resolving these issues, one can personally encourage the individual with the perceived conflict of interest to recuse themselves. If they won’t, the citizen’s only available recourse is to file a complaint with the State Ethics Commission.
There must be a better way.
I encourage the Town Council to seek legal advice to ensure that these sorts of problematic real or perceived conflicts of interest are properly handled, in a more effective, less contentious, and more transparent way.
Our Town can and should set its bar higher, in this age of rampant political dysfunction and cynicism. I hope the Amherst Town Council will establish such a process, to proactively and effectively handle the appearance of conflict of interest problems in a civil and realistic way.
Ira Bryck
Ira Bryck has lived in Amherst since 1993, ran the Family Business Center for 25 years, hosted the “Western Mass. Business Show” on WHMP for seven years, now coaches business leaders, and is a big fan of Amherst’s downtown.
Thank you Ira,
I agree that these conflicts of interest are alarming and disheartening. It’s hard to believe that a town council member would have a business relationship with a landowner who is proposing huge industry in our town and that she would not recuse herself. Thank you for helping to bring this to light.
see below a reply from Shalini to me, and me back to her:
On 2/17/22, 12:36 AM, “Bahl-Milne, Shalini” wrote:
Dear Ira,
Thank you for caring enough to write to us.
I cannot speak to the other cases but with respect to the point made about me, someone like yourself who also cares wrote to Lynn early on about this. Lynn spoke with me immediately and guided me to speak with the State Ethics Commission about my situation, which I promptly did. Attached is my memo and form filed with the Town Clerk clarifying that I have no conflict of interested based on my conversation with the ethics commission.
I think I may have made one mistake. I was required to make this statement about not having any conflict of interest before council meetings and I think I didn’t do that at the last meeting. I apologize for not making this statement before the meeting. I will remember to do that in the future.
Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to discuss this further over the phone.
With love and gratitude,
Shalini
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Hello, Shalini,
Thank you for reaching out to explain your perspective on recusal and perceived conflicts. I appreciate that you are hoping to do the right thing, for your own morality, as well as your civic duty.
I am suggesting a process where there would be a deeper dive into whether one might be conflicted. Any official might not realize the biases that a friendship and/ or business arrangement can impose on one’s judgement.
In your case, you describe the relationship as your friend took your class and also had some employees take it. You don’t mention the business arrangement featured here: https://www.beetlepress.com/two-creative-businesswomen-collaborate-to-build-a-mindful-community-in-the-mill-district-of-north-amherst/ Hopefully, an improved system would not be as reliant on self-reporting, and have the means to gather the information needed to decide.
As a meditator since 1975, I appreciate your appreciation of being mindful. But by definition, meditation is taking a pause, so that one might go deeper. A process that would be more local, more civil, more curious than your brief exchange with the State Ethics Commission might ask people to reflect on:
· Do I have a relationship or role that makes me less than completely neutral, or appear to be?
· Will my non-recusal increase public skepticism for me and/or the governing body?
· Do I have influence in conflicting roles that confuse the decision factors for me?
· Are there core values or objectives in a role I’m in, that make it difficult for me to be completely objective in another role?
There is some redundancy in those questions, and a committee that might build a more robust method to explore real or perceived conflicts would finesse that, as well as other effective tactics.
As I said in my letter to you and the Town Council, I am not pointing a finger at 3 particular people, as much as hoping to point out that at any given point in time, there might be multiple situations that may be perceived as problematic. The field of Behavioral Economics teaches that a person’s judgement is impaired by a host of psychological biases, no matter how intelligent or neutral we think we may be. I am asking that a deeper dive be built into the system, to identify and resolve these kinds of problems.
In the solar debate, we seem to be teeming with local experts, not only heard in town testimony, but in regular, ongoing heated debates on NextDoor.com . Seemingly knowledgeable people strongly disagree on how to execute solar energy, and none of them acknowledging points of their opposition. The fact that you spoke to a number of experts doesn’t say whether you’ve gotten fair representation from experts on both sides. A pause/ moratorium (which you voted for before you voted against) would be an opportunity to focus on getting it right, instead of another case of our new government “flying the plane while building it.” (I understand that was needed to get the council going, but it’s not a great operating policy.)
Thank you for considering my perspectives.
Respectfully,
Ira Bryck
Ps: As this correspondence is a “public discussion” between a resident and a town councilor, each expressing their perspective, I assume I can make it public.
Regarding Ethics and conflict of interest. I sent the following to the Town Council.
Dear Members of the Town council,
I am writing to express my support for Ira Bryck’s suggestion that the Town Council seek out legal advice to manage the perceptions of conflict of interest among your membership.
Ira Bryck suggests that there are several instances of perceived conflicts of interest. I have also seen instances of what appear to me to be clear conflicts of interest. Individuals with good hearts like yourselves will have trouble seeing and understanding how it looks to others on the outside of your networks who don’t know you personally. You may be convinced that you will act in an unbiased manner. However, the reality is that there is a perception of conflict and this needs to be addressed in an independent way if we are to have accountability to the public along with transparency.
Openness about relationships that present a potential perceived conflict is a good first step, but not adequate when there is no external standard to determine whether the perceived conflict requires recusal from a vote. Transparency must be followed with accountability. Right now there isn’t a proper mechanism or independent standard locally, to ensure the accountability side of transparency.
I too would urge the Town Council, as Ira has suggested, to seek out legal guidance so there are checks and balances in place. This type of action is essential to the legitimacy of the Town Council and its decisions.
While the discussion may be rightly focused on CoI – and the perception of CoI –the curious link to “mindfulness at the Mill Distrct” which Ira shared brings to mind Karl Marx’s famous remark about “opiate for the masses” – here’s a more modern take on that:
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/10/religion-less-opiate-more-suppressant-study-finds
To clarify, I am pro mindfulness and anti doping the masses, literally or figuratively.
Thank you Ira for including my response back to your letter and since the letter I’ve spoken with Rani Parker as well to clarify that I have spoken with the office of ethics commission. Everything that I shared with her is in my disclosure form, whcih brings me to Ira’s response to my response.
But first, the gift in all this, for those who want to receive, is now we know a lot more about:
1. The potential impact of solar on our environments (thanks to the smart solar people and others)
2. The unintended consequences of a moratorium (thanks to the researchers at Energy Transitions Institute at UMass who wrote to the council against the Moratorium sharing the consequences of an 19-month moratorium. Their names are disclosed below and include Brian Yellen who was referred to me by one of the folks from smart solar)
3. How to ensure that the large scale solar projects dont have unintended consequences while the siting study and bylaw are completed (thanks to my research I learned that section 53G of the state law allows towns to hire independent consultants that will be paid for by the solar company who can study the impact on the waterbodies, soil erosion, etc. I also learned that we can ask for a decomission fund that is set up ahead of time so that even if company goes bankrupt the town will have money to use for dismantling solar).
4. The inequities related to fossil fuel and renewable energy (thanks to the info provided by Dr. Steve Roof at Hampshire college who is also in ECAC and the ETI group at UMass.)
I have many more people to thank for taking time to educate me about this issue that’s close to my heart – protecting our environment and promoting the wellbeing of all beings.
This brings me to Ira’s response to my association with Cinda related to the mindful community/city project. Thank you for asking. This is not a business arrangement and I did share about this in my disclosure form and the ethics office that we’re committed to a shared goal of a mindful community but there’s no financial involvement.
Please read my full blog post on this here: https://knowyourmind.training/mindful-city-a-prototype-at-the-mill-district-north-amherst/
This initiative came out of a conversation that I was having with the Foundation for A Mindful Society who brought mindfulness to the British parliament. As a councilor I can’t bring this initiative to our town (because of a conflict of interest) but Cinda offered the mill district as a venue to explore what a mindful city might look like. It’s a conversation for her to explore how to be a mindful leader and for me to see what mindfulness looks like over and beyond people meditating and taking a pause.
Rob, I didn’t read what you sent but my sense is that you’re right that mindfulness, even though it’s not a religion, has been used by organizations to alleviate their stress with mindfulness workshops without addressing the causes of stress. I wrote about this issue in a book chapter, “Paradoxes of teaching mindfulness in business.” that you can see here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-64924-5_14
But when practiced true to it’s intentions, mindfulness is a way of waking us up from our default reactions and realign with our intentions to benefit everyone impacted by our decisions. Like your default reaction Rob might be to automatically make certain associations about mindfulness (psychological biases) and as Ira pointed out we all have biases. In the absence of awareness of our biases we believe them to be true and act on them.
A mindfulness training may not change our biases but allows us to see them and trains us to be compassionate and curious in the middle of it all, even when we’re triggered, to still remember that we’re all human. Once we have a calm mind and open heart we can see what do we know and not know about the situation rather than making assumptions.
So Ira, I did disclose everything that you’re pointing out to the ethics commission. I was guided by them that there’s no conflict of interest.
Sharon, our town council president also emailed Ira and Rani about the process we use for conflict of interest and I followed every step of it (other than forgetting to state that I followed it before the meeting and I will make sure to do that in the future).
Lastly, if I wanted to help my friend I would have recused myself. A recusal counts as a no vote. Instead I’ve spent a lot of time to understand the impacts of large scale solar and a moratorium from independent experts in the field. I didn’t stop there. I also looked for what’s in place to ensure that we do this right using 53G.
I hope I’ve provided enough information. I am going on vacation after tomorrow and will not be responding to town related emails till then but happy to respond after that!
Oh yes, the names of the folks and the diverse disciplines they research in:
Dr. Michael Ash, Professor of Economics, Acting Faculty Director of The Energy Transition Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Environmental justice, political economy of health, corporate accountability, inequality, quantitative methods
Dr. Erin Baker, Professor of Industrial Engineering, Faculty Director of The Energy Transition Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sustainable and equitable energy systems.
Dr. Anna Goldstein, Executive Director of the Energy Transition Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst Research Assistant Professor, Environmental Conservation
Dr. Brian Yellen, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst hydrologist who studies storm water management
Hi Shalini,
Many of us are quite familiar with mindfulness meditation. We also know that, when a person is into meditation, this does not mean that we can count on that person to be compassionate or clear-minded. We have seen with the many, many instances of terrible behavior by meditators and mediation teachers. The fact that you teach this does not indicate your are above being influenced by your good friend and it does not shed light on anything relevant to the issue at hand.
You wrote: ” I was guided by them that there’s no conflict of interest.” I don’t think this is accurate. It is my understanding from what you told me, that they left the decision about how to interpret and act on the conflict of interest up to you. You decided, on your own, that you can rise above it. This is your right.
Yet, there is no doubt that there a conflict of interest given that you are close friends with the major landowner in a major town conflict AND, though you two are not technically in business together, you have publicly promoted her business interests as seen in your blog and elsewhere AND she has promoted yours. It understandably feels yukky for many people.
Because of your allegiance to Ms. Jones, many of us are worried that you may not even be aware of how this pushes you and that you will not feel free to protect our forests, water and eco-systems by preventing clear-cutting of forestlands. I hope you prove us wrong.