Opinion: Town Manager Is Gaslighting Amherst Residents Concerning Jones Library Expansion

Town Manager Paul Bockelman offered several pages of vague answers in response to town councilors’ recent questions about the viability of the Jones Library Expansion Project. Those answers were mostly evasive and unsatisfying and led some councilors to protest that the financial risks to the town from continuing the project seem far greater than he was letting on.

In two instances, Bockelman’s answers were worse than evasive and instead offered false narratives in what appears to be an effort to gaslight Amherst residents into doubting their own concerns about the project.

Costs of Library Construction
The costs of the library construction have most certainly gone up since the town received a bid of $35,769,000 from Fontaine Brothers. (just under the projected $36 million budget and $3 million below the only other bid received) in October of 2024. This projected total cost of $46.1 million includes soft costs and a $3.6 million contingency for unanticipated cost overruns. While it is widely acknowledged that construction costs are escalating  (see e.g. here and here) , Bockelman insists that the total cost of the project is capped at $46.1 million and that any additional costs will be covered by the built-in $3.6 million contingency.

Here’s the question that Bockelman evades: What if $3.6 million is not enough to cover the overages that everyone acknowledges are part of the current reality?

We know some sources of likely overage (i.e. not accounted for in the current bid):: new tariffs, rising costs of building materials exclusive of tariffs, inflation, supply chain disruptions, the added cost of a new slate roof not in the original bid, the added cost of replacement windows not in the original bid, historic preservation costs including those of woodwork preservation, and consultant costs for the Section 106 (historic) and NEPA (environmental) reviews. I, and others, have called on Bockelman and the Jones Trustees on multiple occasions to do an audit of the project finances that accounts for known and likely cost escalations, and they have refused (see e.g. here and here.). 

Given the widely-offered figure that tariffs will increase the cost of commercial construction projects by 3-12% (see e.g. here,  here, and here), it’s easy to imagine that escalations will quickly eat up the contingency.  And once that’s gone, the town will have to borrow even more money to complete the project. 

Bockleman confirmed on Monday (3/24) that the roof will not be rebid until late spring/early summer, but the construction contract must be signed by the end of April. That is, he intends to sign a contract before knowing the full cost of the project. It is important to note that a contingency is not meant to cover expenses that are known before a contract is signed, but is there to accommodate unexpected expenses that always arise in the course of construction. And such unexpected costs are all the more likely when renovating a 100 year old building on a very difficult site.

It is our responsibility as taxpayers to ask who pays the overage if the contingency is exhausted. In most cases, it is the owner, that is, our town. Experienced general contractors are extraordinarily unlikely to take that financial burden on themselves. These new additional costs ought to be built into the bid and with so much that is yet to be determined, the project should go out to bid again. In any case, Bockelman’s assertion that the project cannot cost more than $46 million is not credible and Amherst residents should be worried about the unspecified obligations and liabilities the Town Manager is taking on in our name.

Failures of the Capital Campaign
Bockelman continues to insist that the town’s obligation for the project is limited to $15.8 million and that the balance, including overages, is the responsibility of the Jones Trustees and their capital campaign.  This assertion is not credible on many counts.  First, the town must borrow the entire cost of construction up front and the town alone is responsible for debt service on that borrowing.  That debt service is an additional obligation of more than $1-$1.5 million per year that library advocates routinely exclude from their discussion of the financials.  [Note: The Town Manager has not provided updated cash flow or debt service analyses since the Town Council voted to authorize the $46.1 million in December 2024.]

Second, the Jones Trustees have promised to pay the balance of the project costs (beyond the town’s $15.8 million and the $15.5 million granted by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners) but so far have struggled to raise the money that they have promised. Of the $14.8M that is the Library’s portion of the $46.1 million, they only have $3-4 million in hand, $1 million of which is Amherst CPA funds. Whatever money they fail to raise is money that the town will have to cover.

Bockelman asserts that any overage will be the responsibility of the Jones Trustees and that since they are elected officials, we must trust that they will meet their obligations. But the Trustees have given us little reason to believe that they can deliver on their promise or that they deserve our trust.

1.  The Trustees have raised less than half of the money that they have promised to the town and must raise at least another $7 million (more if the project exceeds $46.1 million which many close observers of the project now think is likely). 

2. The Trustees have failed to raise much money at all in the six months since the bid was received (less than $100,000, aside from depleting the Woodbury fund, meant for programming, by two-thirds of its value, to contribute to the project). Their receipts before expenses in the month of February 2025 were $1129.  Jeff Lee has pointed out that at their current rate of fund-raising, it would take the Capital Campaign another 514 years to raise the remaining $7 million.
   
3. According to the payment schedule promised in December 2024 in order to secure the votes of Town Councilors for additional borrowing, the Trustees are in arrears to the town by over $4 million. (see also here).
   
4. The Trustees have promised to borrow the amount of any shortfall to make good their obligation to the town but have offered absolutely no explanation of how they could possibly meet payments on such a loan without depleting the entire endowment which is needed to fund annual operating expenses and which is, itself, jeopardized by the current turmoil in the stock market. They have offered no proof that any institution is prepared to even offer such a loan. 

All of the above points to a likelihood that the town is going to have to pick up a substantial tab for the failed capital campaign. And that is real money that is going to impact budgets for 20 years (or more) to come. And so we must ask, what happens if the trustees don’t come up with the money that they have promised?

Consequences
Let’s say that the town has to pick up the expense of the failed capital campaign and pay off the $7 million (but likely more) for which they had expected to be reimbursed.  Borrowing that sum at 5% interest over a 20 year term would cost the town in the neighborhood of an additional $500,000 per year.  

The last few years have seen the town unable to level-fund its budget, requiring painful cuts which have been unevenly distributed across town departments – impacting most profoundly the schools and the roads. Take away another half million from the town budget and those cuts will have to be deeper and spread more widely. And they will last a generation. What would we cut from our budget to accommodate that added expense? Note that for the coming budget year, the schools face a $3.1 million shortfall. And in  the previous year, that shortfall was $1.6 million. And $2.1 million in provisionally awarded federal grants remain unsecured by the library although they have been tallied by the trustees as “secured”, an example of the trustees propensity to count funds as secured that are decidedly not. Those federal funds are at risk not only because the town has yet to complete its required environmental review but also because Trump could  eliminate those grant programs with the stroke of a sharpie, as he has done with billions of dollars of other federal grants over the last six weeks. 

Given the dismal performance of the capital campaign, the possibility of that money NOT coming in needs to be considered and the consequences calculated..  Bockelman has refused to consider this question and the last two Town Finance Directors  did not build undesirable outcomes into fiscal modeling for the capital projects. (see e.g. here and here).  Bockleman insists that any shortfalls of capital campaign are the Jones Trustees’ problem.  But the town borrows the money up front, and the town carries the debt and the town is on the hook for repayment.. 

The Town Manager has not offered much in the way of analysis.  He has been opaque about his dealings with contractors and about how all the pieces of the puzzle could fit together.  He says that “some” subcontractors will hold their bids from more than six months ago but leaves out which ones will, which ones won’t, and what that translates to in increased costs. He says the plan is to move on to the next lowest bidder if necessary  but the difference between the lowest and second lowest sub-bids is over $1M. 

What he has offered is platitudes (“trust us”) and assertions that are quite obviously empirically false (“the project will not cost more than $46 million”), or dubious and without empirical support (“all of the anticipated overage can be accommodated by the $3.6 million contingency”).

It’s hard to reconcile Bockelman’s equanimity with the fiscal risks that are in front of us.  It’s clear to many that the project is no longer fiscally viable, something former Jones Treasurer Bob Pam asserted 10 months ago (see also here). The fiscal instability brought on by the Trump administration intensifies by the day and is only going to make things more challenging. Certainly, if Bockelman is going to continue to insist that everything is going to work out fine, he owes Amherst residents, who will bear the burden of this albatross of a project, a more transparent and comprehensive analysis of the way things are and the risks and consequences that we would take on. Otherwise, it’s just more gaslighting.

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.