Opinion: Charter Review Committee Should Listen to What the Public Has Already Said
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Amherst’s charter review committee has been meeting since September 2024 and has dedicated most of its time to debating how to collect public input for this once-in-a-decade review of the town’s home rule charter. (See e.g. here, here, here, and here.) They have spent their last six meetings deliberating on the questions they should ask and to whom. At their last meeting they agreed to hire a consultant, the Collins Center at UMass Boston, who also advised the Charter Commission that created the current charter, to help them develop an outreach strategy. Former Town Councilor Darcy DuMont has charged that the committee seems to be engaged in a foot-dragging strategy in order to run out the clock and avoid having to consider changes to the status quo. The committee has acknowledged their slow progress and has extended the deadline for completing their work until October of 2025.
There is already a substantial body of public input in hand regarding the public’s views on the charter. Public comments and a survey sponsored by the League of Women Voters Amherst (LWVA) have provided a long list of aspects of the charter that beg for improvement and that merit review. The committee could have been talking about these issues for months already and by the time they devise and execute their outreach strategy, they will have run out most of the clock.
The questions that have been raised by the public cover all 10 articles of the charter but emphasize concerns about transparency, public participation and representation, and elections. The LWVA survey showed that Amherst residents are unhappy with how their current form of government is working and they have ideas for how it can be improved.
The Town’s Pattern of Seeking and Then Ignoring Public Input
“This town is great at soliciting public input and then ignoring it”
– John Hornik, Former Chair of the Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust
Since the adoption of our town council form of government in December 2018 under the new charter, we have seen a pattern of the Town Manager and town committees seeking and then ignoring public input. When data on public sentiments and understandings are available and suggest something other than the preconceived conclusion that the manager or committees seek, they often end up declaring those data invalid or insufficient, or out of date, or not representative, and assert a need to start from scratch.
This has proven to be an effective temporizing strategy as committees can spend months debating what to ask, whom to ask, how to ask, and who will do the asking, as is the current case with the charter review committee.
The Town Services and Outreach Committee (TSO) spent over a year attempting to develop an outreach protocol to apply to all proposals that would come before them, with an initial application of the protocol directed at getting public feedback on a proposed hauler reform bylaw (see also here). The committee already had a public survey that had been conducted by Zero Waste Amherst as well as a good deal of public comment that had been presented at TSO meetings. That complex protocol, developed by Councilor Shalini Bahl Milne, was never implemented and the hauler reform, first proposed in August 2022 continues to move forward at a snail’s pace with the question of whether more public input will be needed unresolved. This is just one example of a pattern in which town committees reinvent the wheel as a result of their membership being shuffled annually, and that is another thing that could be addressed in a charter review.
The committee exploring the creation of a Youth Empowerment Center tossed out a substantial body of public input conducted through a comprehensive participatory action research program by the 7 Gen Collective, after the Town Manager deemed those data, collected in 2021, to be out-of-date, but without indicating ways that the data were no longer useful. The new committee developed an online survey that received 105 responses. Those data are now being considered by the committee.
In the case of the Jones Library expansion, the town hired consultants in the spring of 2021, to run workshops to get community feedback on how upcoming major capital projects ought to be prioritized and where residents saw the greatest need. When the two public participation sessions (see also here) indicated that expanding the library was the lowest priority for Amherst voters, the Town Council discarded the findings and declared that the Jones expansion would be the top priority for new capital projects.
The way the town goes about this is highly inefficient with each committee spending a lot of time deliberating how to do things that have already been done. The town could develop a general outreach protocol that could be adapted to each individual case, which was the intent of Bahl Milne’s TSO efforts, though that’s not how it worked out. It could also create a committee of volunteers to take on that kind of work and to develop the skills to do it (though the council has repeatedly shown mistrust of data that they do not collect themselves, despite not having time to undertake such efforts themselves). It could develop partnerships with the several academic departments in our local colleges and University that specialize in this kind of work (e.g. Anthropology, Education, Marketing, Political Science, and Sociology). Just about anything would be more effective than what we do now if the goal is to collect reliable and representative data in support of evidence-based decision making.
What Kind of Public Input on the Charter Do We Already Have?
Recent efforts have generated substantial data on public perceptions of the charter.
- The League of Women Voters Amherst Charter Review Task Force produced a survey based on the League’s standards of good government. Four hundred and five residents responded to the survey. The results were presented at a public meeting and in the Indy.
The LVWA Charter Review Task Force held three public forums (link to all recordings here) in the spring of 2024 to explore:
Articles 2 & 5 Legislation and Financial Policies and Procedures
Articles 1 & 7 Incorporation Powers and Elections
Articles 8 & 10 Public Participation Transition Procedures
2.The LWVA published 16 recommendations based on a consensus meeting that took into consideration their forums and their survey.
3. In anticipation of the upcoming charter review, the Indy solicited public comment on the charter and published 10 articles offering comprehensive discussions of how the charter could be improved.
- Indy Rewind Opinion: The Chamber of Commerce Home Rule Charter Debate by Michael Greenebaum
- Opinion: How the Town Council President Has Consolidated Power by Darcy DuMont
- Indy Rewind: Opinion: Thoughtful, Deliberate (and Not Rushed) Planning. Reflections by a Soon-to-Be Former Councilor on How This Town Council Fails to Meet the Promises of the Charter, Democracy, Transparency, and Public Participation. (#5) by Darcy DuMont
- Issues & Analyses: Review Of The Town Charter. The Concentration Of Power by Michael Greenebaum
- Issues & Analyses: There Is Much Room For Improvement In Amherst’s Home Rule Charter by Anita Sarro
- Issues & Analyses: Fundamental Issues That Need To Be Addressed In A Review Of The Town Charter by Michael Greenebaum
- Opinion: This Is The Moment When We Can Bring Equity To Our Town by Anita Sarro
- Public Comment: Redistricting For Equality An Impossible Task Under The Current Charter by Maria Kopicki
5.Since the inception of the current form of government, public comment has addressed shortcomings of the charter and a record of that comment can be found in town records and in the Indy.
All of this is to say that we already know a lot about what is on the public’s mind where the charter is concerned. Time is short. But the questions and concerns raised over the last year in these varied venues have yet to receive a moment of consideration from the committee. The issues, the questions, and the concerns of the public merit thoughtful consideration in the charter review. And because so many touch on the practice of democracy, and because there is a widely held belief among Amherst voters according to the LWVA survey that our local democracy is deficient, these questions are all the more germane and their consideration more urgent in these perilous times where democracy and the rule of law are under assault daily.
That these questions have not been considered lends credence to Darcy DuMont’s charge that ”the fix is in” and that the intent of this review is to reaffirm the status quo for another 10 years.
Some Suggestions for Improving the Charter That the Committee Could Be Talking About Right Now
Looking at all of the documents cited above, there are at least 50 good questions that a thorough and responsible charter review ought to consider. Here, by way of example, is a baker’s dozen.
Transparency
- Should the charter require that applications for seats on town committees and boards overseen by the Town Manager be public records?
Public Participation
- Should the charter be amended so that no single town councilor can unilaterally postpone a discussion?
- The current charter limits the ability of voters to bring matters to the council by petition or to challenge decisions of the council. Should the charter expand voter opportunities for effective petitioning or for challenging decisions? Should the requirements of the voter veto (Section 8) be relaxed to require fewer signatures or to allow more time to collect them?
- Should the charter ensure that council meetings continue to be livestreamed and recorded?
- Since many residents feel unheard and unrepresented, how can the charter be modified to address this shortcoming?
Elections and Representation
- Should the charter include a recall provision for elected officials (recall is currently not an option available to voters)?
- Should the charter require elections by the voters for the filling of open seats, rather than the current practice of appointment by the Town Council?
- Should the charter limit the number of one-year terms served by a council president?
- Should the charter lengthen and stagger the terms of elected officials?
- Should the size of the council be expanded (since there is apparently more work than the current 13 councilors can effectively manage and many residents complain that their elected representatives are inaccessible)?
- Should there be term limits for elected officials and for residents appointed to town committees by the town manager?
- Should the charter require that town councilors hold a minimum of four district meetings/year? Should at-large councilors be required to hold constituent meetings?
Governance
1.The Town Manager is essentially an unelected mayor, shielded by a friendly council. Should the charter replace the town manager with an elected mayor? (This change could not be implemented without the creation of a new Charter Commission but the review committee could make this recommendation.)
Art Keene is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at UMass Amherst. He was co-founder and co-director of two social justice-based civic leadership programs at UMass – The UMass Alliance For Community Transformation (UACT) and The Community Scholars Program. He is Managing Editor of the Amherst Indy.
The promise of the new Town Charter was efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency — all qualities that Town Meeting sorely lacked, according to charter proponents. And what have we gotten?
Efficiency? Council meetings have often been marathon sessions that have gone long into the night, and at least once into the wee hours. As Art Keene notes above, much time has been spent in inventing new and even more complex procedures to do the things that Town Meeting used to do, leaving less and less time to do the actual business of the town. At one point I was going to count up the hours logged by councilors and compare them to the time spent by Town Meeting, but, well, that would hardly be an efficient use of my time. There is, however, a degree of efficiency in that all this time is now being spent by only 13 people, instead of 240.
Effectiveness? Well, there are more potholes than ever, there is no new fire station, no new DPW headquarters, CRESS continues to not serve the mission for which it was created, instead being relegated to poll watching and lunchroom duty, the School Committee is being chastised for asking for too much money for education.
And transparency? We know that information was withheld from councilors and the public on the proposed ban on artificial turf, on the concerns of the Massachusetts Historical Commission on the library renovation, on the meetings of councilors with the Amherst Police Department in the wake of the Amherst Nine incident. We don’t know what else we don’t know.
It’s easy to demonize the status quo and promise wonderful change. It is not as easy to deliver on that promise.
Denise Barbaret is correct. It’s as if our little town government can’t listen to constituents and then make decisions that address their concerns. Christine Whitaker said she was shocked when she realized Michiganders’ priority was road repair. People don’t want government to hire one set of consultants after another or attempt to legislate attitudes, they want government to efficiently take care of business. Maybe the town council should look at how permitting is managed in Amherst. We’re watching public buildings deteriorate while we remain enmeshed in a library project many of us think of as overkill. If Cress is not busy enough why aren’t they walking the streets and roads to find people who need support? How can we support the schools without raising property taxes, which are the biggest expense for many citizens? We’re approaching a financially uncertain period and we need a focused, effective government.
I’ve only lived here since 2021, but I’m curious if there is enough political will to reverse course and return to Town Meeting? I am learning, through my advocacy with school funding among other things, that there is a disconnect between political will and the TC and Town Manager decisions. I’m deeply concerned with the level of power the Town Manager has, especially as it relates to the budget.
I feel disenfranchised by our current town governance structure. Even if Town Meeting was inefficient and unpleasant before 2018, we could at least say ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ in front of our neighbors. Now, all I hear is ‘no’ from TC members on issues myself and my neighbors would have supported.
town meeting was way better… and they shrunk the meeting room at the town hall, and remote meeting will keep us from communicating with each other. I believe they prefer it that way.