Opinion: Reflections at the End of the Year

Here are things I am sad about in Amherst as 2023 draws to an end.

I am sad about downtown.  I wish that an earlier Town Council hadn’t treated it as another village center rather than as the center for the whole town.  I wish that we hadn’t built more housing – especially such ugly and ungainly housing – downtown.  Kendrick Place, Boltwood Place, One East Pleasant Street are unsuited to their sites; they house residents who are, as transients, understandably less interested in Amherst and its issues than in their own lives and plans, and, whatever they contribute to our economy, deaden our sense of community.  Our town depends on students but by and large they don’t much care about us.  That is natural but it is detrimental to our downtown and to our social and political conditions.

I am sad about our social and political conditions.  I am sad about the political institutions that emerged from the last Charter Commission.  I will never stop lamenting the loss of Town Meeting and I find the Town Council a pallid and unsubstantial substitute for democratic governance.  But our conditions have deeper roots, and Town Meeting was far from perfect.  Our Select Board and School Committee became frustrated with checks and balances, and the Charter Commission was their revenge.  Our charter, like so many Donahue Institute-guided charters across the state, does away with checks and balances, replacing them with control and constraint.

I am sad about what we have seen happen when a need to control and constrain is frustrated.  When people accustomed to being in control find themselves losing control they have no ability to recalibrate their approach to disagreement, negotiation, and conflict.  This year we saw this in the school committee and school administration in the middle school crisis.  We saw this in the town council and town hall in the half-hearted approach to first approving and then not supporting the important CRESS program.  And we are still living with the consequences to our town library when the need to control incapacitates the ability to work through disagreement.

I am sad about the library.  Almost everyone who was a vocal critic of the trustees’ plan was also committed to the success of the Jones Library as demonstrated by their past positions of leadership on the Trustees or the Friends.  By deciding that they were enemies, the current trustees and their fundraisers made them so.  What ought to have been an easy set of revisions to the expansion plans turned into an antagonistic struggle and it still is.  We should have had our renovated and expanded Jones building several years ago.  Instead, there is a question about what the future holds.

I’m sad about the future of Amherst, a town I love that has been so good to me and my family.  For decades it was a town I was eager to give back to.  Right now?  Of course I am old and mostly stay at home, but I have never really recovered from the incident during the charter campaign when I was in an on-the-air debate being broadcast live from The Black Sheep and a man unknown to me got up and started attacking me with absurd invective.  The place was full of charter supporters whom I knew well, and who knew me well.  They were silent throughout this surreal episode and they have been silent ever since.  That seems to be the kind of town Amherst has become.  We seem to be impatient with disagreement.

How do we learn how to disagree constructively?  Town Meeting could do it.  The second Town Council, more widely representative than the first, could do it.  I offer my best wishes to the third, to take office next month, but I am worried.  In general, no matter how committed and fair-minded councilors may be, there is something about the charter that leads the Town Council to want power and control, and wanting power is inevitably at the expense of imagination,  collaboration, and constructive disagreement.

Of course, given the state of the world and the nation, my issues with Amherst seem like small potatoes.  We are lucky to be here, all of us.  If we were inclined to solve the problems that make me sad, we could do so easily by figuring out how to talk to each other.  We could restore checks and balances in a way that made them less cumbersome than they sometimes seemed to be.  We could give voice to more residents which would lead them to feel more connected to the town.  Winning votes might come to feel less important than having votes.

2024 is the year of the charter review and possible amendment.  Right now I don’t expect much to come of that.  But I could be surprised.  That would make me happy.

Michael Greenebaum was Principal of Mark’s Meadow School from 1970 to 1991, and from 1974 taught Organization Studies in the Higher Education Center at the UMass School of Education.  He served in Town Meeting from 1992, was on the first Charter Commission in 1993, and served on several town committees including the Town Commercial Relations Committee and the Long Range Planning Committee.