Opinion: Frequently Unanswered Questions: Is Amherst on the Verge of a Generation-Long Fiscal Disaster?
Photo: Shutterstock
by Art Keene, Maura Keene, and Maria Kopicki
It is hard to imagine that the town would undertake a $46 million capital project without having sound answers to some fundamental questions – such as where will the money come from, and what will happen if we fall short in gathering that money, and how will this large expenditure impact the town’s ability to meet other essential needs of its residents? And yet, we stand on the threshold of the town making a commitment to a project that will shape town budgets and taxes for a generation, without the answers that we really need.
The Town Council and its Finance Committee have the authority to demand the answers to such questions but have yet to do so. The Town Council has the right to rescind the borrowing for the Jones expansion project and they should do just that if they don’t get the answers that we need to determine whether the town can afford to move this project forward.
We encourage Amherst residents to let their elected representatives know that answering these questions must precede the town signing a construction contract to move the Jones project forward.
Here are five questions that have been frequently asked but have yet to be answered by Jones expansion sponsors or town government.
1. If the Jones Capital Campaign fails to raise the money it has promised to the town (as former Jones Treasurer Bob Pam warned is likely) and the town must make up the difference, how will this fiscally impact the town?
Note: the current Jones outstanding funding obligation, assuming no further increases in costs, is over $13 million. Councilor George Ryan and several others have said that the burden of any shortfall is on the Jones Trustees who have offered the library endowment as collateral and promised to borrow the money if their fundraising comes up short. But the fundraising shortfall exceeds the $9 million endowment which is also needed for library operating expenses. And if the trustees attempted to borrow to pay their debt to the town, they would not have sufficient funds to meet the debt service of the loan. If the Trustees can’t raise the money that they have promised, the town (which will borrow the full cost of construction up front and pay all interest on the loans) is on the hook for the tab.
2. The current low bid for the project is $7 million less than what the same company bid in the first round. But the library has only adopted about $1.5 million in value engineering changes to the plans and the other bid was more than $3 million higher than the low bid. This discrepancy begs for an accounting and explanation.
3. How, specifically, will the proposed reduction of the town’s capital spending on everything but the four major projects, by more than 50% per year for at least a decade as required by the capital projects models, impact the town’s ability to meet its other needs? What repairs, maintenance, purchases, etc. will NOT happen as a result of this considerable reduction?
Note: Our current town budget is not sufficient to meet our maintenance and capital needs. Examples include long-deferred maintenance and repairs, such as the ongoing wait to repair the middle school roof and the lagging effort to maintain our roads and sidewalks.
4. Jones treasurer Bob Pam has warned on multiple occasions that the Jones project is no longer fiscally viable and poses a significant danger to the future of the library and the town (see also here). Pam’s warnings have never been discussed by the Town Council or Jones Library Trustees. How can the project move forward without a consideration of the implications of these warnings? What exactly is the danger of which Pam warned? Why have we not had a public discussion of Pam’s warnings?
5. When will the town undertake the environmental impact review of the project mandated under National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and required for the release of roughly $1 million provisionally granted to the town by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)? No information has been provided to the public and not even the scope of this review has been discussed publicly.
Why don’t we have answers to the above questions?
Several councilors say they don’t read the Indy, but I doubt that’s true.
So I ask them each to respond to the questions raised in this article, to be printed in the Indy.
I’ve watched several Town Council meetings that discussed whether the library project should progress, is on track, is even solvent. And yet the votes come in that 2/3 AF majority to pursue this discombobulated plan.
And continue to state such inaccuracies as the majority of people in Amherst voted for this and continue to support it. To remind people again, 3000 people voted for it, and 2000 voted against it. And those 3000 people are certainly not donating to the effort what the effort needs. Hence very low donations.
Again, to all trustees: please answer the questions asked in this article, right here. The readers of the Indy deserve to know your perspective on this, and why each of you are voting to support such an unstable and expensive and controversial project; or why you are not.
If we are still the town where only the H is silent, please publicly state your rationale. Including why this project is more urgent than all the other things on the crucial projects list.
What’s not being said in any of this is the extent to which the higher education industry (nationally) is going to contract in the immediate future (Fall 2026).
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There has already been a 15% decline (nationally) in college attendance, and demographics alone indicate another 13% drop which persists through 2041 (beyond that, the children haven’t been born yet). In addition to this, a reduced percentage of the 18 year old cohort are going on to higher education, and this includes all demographic groups including White males.
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Higher education is already becoming a “buyer’s market” — for example, Brown University’s early decision acceptance rate skyrocketed from 13 percent for the class of 2027 to 18 percent for the class of 2029. Evidence suggests this is reflective of the Ivy’s and to the extent that UMass Amherst is a “safety school” — and for a lot of kids in Suburban Boston, it still is — given the choice, they will instead go to Brown, etc.
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Think back to when you were young and single. Would you rather spend 8 months of the year in Amherst — or Boston/Cambridge? And there are hiking trails there too, including the other end of the Norwottuck Rail Trail as that’s where the railroad went to. So if it is an equal between UMass and a school in Boston or NYC or DC, whom do you think is going to wind up with the empty seats?
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I don’t know how many people remember what Amherst was like circa 1991 but restaurants and stores were going out of business, UMass was laying people off, with others “bumping” each other all over campus. Brittany Manor (now Southpoint and Boulders) was essentially abandoned, much of it condemned.
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This is going to happen again — the only question is to what extent. And one needs to remember that the property taxes paid by the apartment complexes are based upon their income, a combination of what they can get for rent and their occupancy. It’s a legal process but this essentially is what happens, and the Town gets less money if vacancies increase.
SO EVEN WITHOUT the expense of a new library, Amherst is looking at less revenue through at least 2041.
And it’s not just me saying this — here’s NPR: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cliff-fewer-college-students-mean-fewer-graduates