Letter: Town Is Not Ready To a Sign Contract for Jones Library Expansion

The following letter was sent to the Amherst Town Council and the Amherst Town Manager on April 6, 2025

I served as a Jones Library Trustee from 2009 – 2012, and as Trustee President my final year.

This email raises two critical points concerning the Jones Library’s demolition/expansion project

First, must the entire project now be rebid if you go on with it, because changes to the  treatment of the carved mahogany woodwork have changed the scope of the general contractor’s work? 

Attorney Joe Cook, an area resident who retired in 2023 as Northampton’s Chief Procurement Officer, comments in the Indy concerning that woodwork: “The Town cannot sign a contract with a general contractor when the scope of work has changed for that general contractor prior to a contract being signed. We received this information from the head of the Attorney General’s Bid Unit. The work of the general contractor has changed since the bids were received last year.”

Town Councilors need to know with certainty, now, whether these changes mandate redrawing the construction documents and putting the entire project out yet again to bid – for the third time. If so, this will add substantially to the project’s costs. As you are aware, it  will also require the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners to grant yet a further extension of time, beyond April 30, to sign a general contract.

Second,  the record-breaking market crashes of this past Thursday and Friday have surely hit the library’s endowment hard, and thus counsel a more economical repair option.

In the 2008-9 recession, as I well recall, the endowment sank from $9+M to $5+M with astonishing rapidity. Everything I have seen indicates that the endowment’s investment strategies are much the same now as then, and that the current market crashes are even worse. In addition, the markets might fall yet further.

Making good on the library trustees’ optimistic pledge of the endowment itself, to make up a shortfall of at least $7M in their fundraising, would thus be ill-advised in the extreme.

For one thing, recovery from our imminent depression (yes, Wall Street has started to go there) is said to be uncertain. The library will thus desperately need whatever income the endowment’s full capital can yield in order to pay annual operating costs.

In addition, a diminished endowment might fail to cover the Trustees’ fundraising deficiency, while the more than $1million annual interest on borrowing for the library’s over-budget project could strangle the town’s depression-straitened finances for years.

After living in Amherst for 22 years, I moved for health and family reasons. I still care about the town. In my own view, it is urgent now to do whatever it will take to survive the storm that the White House occupant’s tariffs just created.

For Amherst’s Town Councilors to cancel this problematic library project at once, and to pursue a more affordable repair option, would be an excellent start at preparing for what is shaping up as a very difficult passage.

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.