Who will lead on economy?

Published on December 29, 2006

Amherst Center is a monthly column that seeks to portray local issues from a centrist perspective. It is written by Town Meeting members Baer Tierkel and Clare Bertrand and School Committee member Andy Churchill.

Those of us in the Amherst Center have a vision of Amherst that revolves around good schools, open space, cultural diversity, greener living and small-town life, all without soaking the taxpayer. The question is, can we afford this vision?

Over the past six years our town has been heading down a road to insolvency, struggling through annual fiscal deficits. Amherst has spent these years cutting services, spending our town's savings account, and hoping the state will send us more dough. This is not a sustainable long-term strategy.

There is another side to the fiscal equation, one that Amherst has been neglecting for years: increasing local revenues through economic development.

In the time that we have spent all of our savings without a long-term fiscal strategy, the piece of Amherst's tax pie that businesses comprise has been cut in half, from 18 percent to 9 percent, which means that homeowners are shouldering more and more of Amherst's tax burden.

Our businesses are paying their fair share: tax rates for homeowners and businesses have increased at the exact same rate. And while Amherst continues to attract new residents, the same cannot be said for new businesses, so the portion of taxes paid by residents has gone up.

As our homeowners/renters shoulder more costs, we are losing our affordability, our cultural diversity, and our ability to support good schools and other services that make Amherst a great place to live. Do we want Amherst to look like Longmeadow, with businesses only making up 4 percent of the business pie, unaffordable housing, and little cultural diversity?

We need focus and commitment to a sensible economic development strategy if we want to get Amherst back on the road to fiscal solvency and affordability.

We know we can do it if we focus on it. For example, we have done a great job preserving open space in Amherst. How did we achieve this? We have a conservation director. We have a Conservation Commission that is respected and whose counsel is acted upon by the Select Board and Town Meeting. We have focus and a long-term commitment to open space.

Economic development requires the same focus and commitment. And the first step is to create the position of economic development director. If we want to attract the types of businesses to Amherst that match our vision - clean, green, intellectual, cultural businesses that complement our existing small-town economy - we need someone in town government whose full-time job is to make that happen.

Here's an example of the problem. It has taken over 12 months for Fresh Side, a very small, existing Amherst business, to open a new location. Imagine what it takes for a new, larger business!

We also need to keep our existing businesses. A few years ago, Amherst lost a large employer, National Evaluation Systems, to the research park in Hadley. Sure, we had planned and zoned Professional Research Parks of our own, but there was no one to market them, to cut through red tape, to close the deal.

Ask NES why they moved; ask Fresh Side why they aren't open yet: it's tough to do business with Amherst. Businesses now know this, and are choosing neighboring towns such as Hadley, Northampton, Easthampton, and Holyoke. We need to reverse this dynamic.

As we have seen, there is stiff competition from other towns to attract clean, green, intellectual, and cultural businesses that create well-paying jobs. We cannot just sit around and expect them to show up at our doorstep. We need to ensure that our infrastructure works for these types of businesses and we need to market our town to them. All of this requires focus and commitment from a full-time economic development director.

An economic development director would be the "someone" to focus on economic development in Amherst. He or she would:

• Develop a specific strategy for economic development that meshes with our vision for Amherst.

• Identify the actions Amherst needs to take to make us an attractive destination for clean, green businesses that provide good jobs.

• Coordinate with the master plan to ensure that our plan enables rather than retards appropriate business growth.

• Provide existing and prospective businesses with "one-stop shopping" in dealing with the myriad town departments and regulations.

• Finally, once this strategy is underway, he or she would market our town to the types of businesses that fit into our vision for Amherst.

You ask, in our budget crisis, can we afford a new position of economic development director? This is a revenue-generating job, one that would pay for itself in the first several years. The question is, "Can we afford not to?"

We are facing another massive budget shortfall in a long line of budget shortfalls. We are running out of services to cut. We cannot continually rely on raising taxes - although this year we may have to, due to years of neglect of economic development. If we want to break this cycle in the future, we need help: we need an economic development director in the Amherst Center.