Letter: Amherst’s Long Failure to Comply with Preservation Law

The following letter was sent to the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC) on December 7, 2024, regarding comments made by Commissioner Comeau prior to the MBLC’s vote to grant the Town of Amherst until March 31, 2025, to sign a construction contract for its Jones Library Project (MBLC total grant amount $15,565,472).

At your meeting on December 5, 2024, Commissioner George T. Comeau spoke in terms that might be regarded as arguably slanderous, of the Amherst Historic Preservation Coalitions’s courtesy copy to you of its Report to the Massachusetts Office of the Inspector General. This Report describes grave concerns about the MBLC’s Massachusetts Public Library Construction Program.

In particular, these concerns relate to the construction grant that the MBLC awarded for a project on the Jones Library in Amherst. It would demolish the entirety of the Library’s brick 1993 addition and parts of the historic, 1928 Library’s exterior and interior. The Project would include a new, larger addition.

Several members of the coalition’s steering committee reviewed that report in draft. I am one of them. I do not appreciate Commissioner Comeau’s slurs, for my colleagues or for myself.

In the coalition’s report, Commissioner Comeau failed to identify a single statement that he said was a lie.

Granted, there are points in that the report that might have been expressed more precisely. But as far as I know there is no falsity, witting or otherwise. Commissioner Comeau’s blanket statements were unfair. They were apparently also unsupported.

In advocating for the Town of Amherst’s requested extension of time to sign a construction contract for its project, Commissioner Comeau gave great weight to the support generously expressed by several elected officials.

But, to obtain that support, what representations did the town and the Jones Library Trustees make to those officials? Would they have advocated for this second extension of time for the town to sign that construction contract, had they been aware of the following facts?

• In January 2017, in mandatory forms on their multi-million dollar MBLC construction grant application, the Town Manager, Jones Library Director, and Jones Library Trustees wrongly attested by omission (pp.90) that this historic Library was not on the State Register of Historic Places, and not on the National Register (as a contributing structure in the Downtown Amherst Business District) (see p.9 or preceding document). The Library is listed on both. This possibly contributed to the MBLC’s failure to insist that the town and Library Trustees have their project timely vetted for compliance with the MBLC’s own historic preservation regulations (605 CMR 6.05, Conditions of eligibility, subsection (2)(d)23) as well as those of the MHC (900 CMR 71.00).

• The Town Manager and the Trustees failed, until February 2024, to provide all the Project Notification Form data that they had been legally obligated to provide to the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC), for historic preservation vetting “as early as possible in the planning stages of the project.” Here, this was no later than 2016.

• Based on a consultant’s reporting and the Historic Structure Report that the Trustees submitted for the purpose, the MHC notified the Library Director in April 2024 for apparently the third time that the Project’s “adverse effects” on this historic Library made it ineligible to receive some $2,000,000 in Massachusetts Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credits.

• The Town and Trustees had counted such Tax Credits toward the project’s financing since at least 2017. Amherst Town Council voted an increase in borrowing authority for the project without having been informed of this $2,000,000 reduction in anticipated funding.

• Bob Pam, who served as the Library Trustees’ Treasurer from about 2012 until 2024, and whose professional life was in municipal finance, warned repeatedly that the project was not fiscally viable (see also here).

• The Town put this project out to bid not once (first in January 2024), but twice (again in September 2024), using construction bid documents in which “adverse effects,” identified by the MHC, still remained;

• After nearly a decade, and more than $2,700,000 in MBLC grant funding, the town and Library Trustees still lack a project design that complies with applicable historic preservation law; and

• This implies that the project’s costs are almost certain to exceed the single, within-budget general contractor bid received in October 2024, and that the project might have to be re-bid yet again, at yet more expense, if necessary changes are discovered before the construction contract is signed.

The plain fact is that the town and Jones Library Trustees did not need this extension of time because their project is complex. They needed it because, for years, they blew off their legal obligation to have their project vetted, either by the MHC (905 CMR 71.02 (1)) or under regulations implementing Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (36 CFR 800.6). Resolution of adverse effects, subsection (a) to eliminate (State) or to avoid (federal) “adverse effects” to the historic Jones Library. Failing that, project sponsors are required to minimize “adverse effects” or, failing even that, mitigate them (36 CFR 800.6, Resolution of adverse effects, subsection (a)).

I have no doubt that Commissioner Comeau will file a reply to the coalition’s report with the Office of the Massachusetts Inspector General. I do not doubt that he will share a copy with the coalition, and look forward to seeing it.

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Sarah McKee

Sarah McKee was an Amherst resident for more than 20 years. She is a former president of the Jones Library Trustees and former General Counsel, Interpol U.S. National Central Bureau, and is a member of the D.C. Bar.