Master plan: Mother of all documents

By Nick Grabbe
Staff Writer

Published on December 14, 2007

Months after the Comprehensive Planning Committee was scheduled to produce a final document, its members are still debating issues like student housing and duplexes.

And the comprehensive plan process, which resembles a 12-session Town Meeting in its attention to detail, has come under criticism from two people who have been deeply involved in it.

At the same time, Amherst's road map for the future is sputtering to a consensus 20 months after the process started. Next month, the committee hopes to turn the draft plan over to the Planning Board, which could quickly adopt it, continue the dissection of the issues, or even send the process back to the beginning.

How Town Meeting will react to the specific changes being recommended - and to whether spending $200,000 on consultants was worth it - is anyone's guess. The amount of detail on the comprehensive plan's recommendations at the town's Web site, amherstma.gov, should satisfy the most diligent citizen's appetite.

On Tuesday, the committee had an interesting debate over privately developed student housing to expand tax revenues and reduce the pressure on residential neighborhoods, which the plan endorses, and the significance of a random survey last summer that may have indicated popular opposition.

Member Aaron Hayden said the plan can't ignore the presence of thousands of students and has to take some positions that may be unpopular. "We can't build a fence around the university and keep them away," he said.

The survey didn't ask nuanced questions, said member Marilyn Blaustein. It didn't ask, for example, about specific sites for student housing or its impact on the tax base, she said.

But member Molly Turner said that the university should provide more on-campus housing and private development shouldn't be seen as "an opportunity for economic development." Student housing has its costs in terms of police activity, she said.

There is also no unanimity on whether duplexes should be allowed by right or by special permit. Town Meeting spent 90 minutes debating this issue with respect to hotels and motels recently.

Alan Root, who has been actively involved in the comprehensive plan from the beginning, calls the final draft "a novel written by a committee" and is writing a minority report.

"We ended up with a draft with about 30,000 words, encompassing 200 strategies," he said. "It puts the Constitution and the Magna Carta to shame in terms of its longevity."

Root said he thinks the draft should be pruned to about a third of its current length.

"I don't think this community has the capacity to keep its eyes on a ball that is traveling in 200 directions at the same time," he said.

The comprehensive plan doesn't pay enough attention to what citizens said in the brainstorming sessions of October 2006 or the random survey last summer, on issues such as student housing and housing density, Root said. He also said the Select Board "was not careful enough in making its selections of new members" when it greatly expanded the size of the committee.

That expansion remains a sore point for Niels la Cour, who as a senior planner in Town Hall coordinated the comprehensive plan. He resigned last month and took a job at UMass.

La Cour called the draft plan "an incredibly valuable document that incorporated a tremendous amount of participation that was totally unprecedented in the community." But he also spoke about his frustrations with the process.

The Select Board caused "damage" by expanding the committee, a move that the consultants raised red flags over, la Cour said. "We were dealing with people who hadn't been involved in the process and it took time to get them up to speed," he said.

The comprehensive plan had a bias against experts, from the composition of the committee to the work groups that hammered out the details to his own role, la Cour said. "I regret feeling like a glorified gofer," he said. "As a professional planner, I was never allowed to do my job."

He said he would have liked to explore future development scenarios, but the process was crippled by "pathological paranoia." "We do everything by committee because we don't trust anyone to make a decision," he said.

Despite his misgivings, la Cour said, "There's more consensus about major issues than people want to admit to in this very divisive political environment."

Gerry Weiss, chairman of the Select Board, has defended the expansion of the committee, saying it became more representative of the community. "I'm impressed with the amount of work done by so many people on the master plan, and I'm looking forward to seeing the final draft," he said in response to the criticism by Root and la Cour.

James Wald, the third and final chairman of the committee, said that the length of some towns' plans are shorter than Amherst's and some are longer. He said there is some "creative redundancy" in strategies that appear in more than one place.

As for the survey, much depends on how the questions are asked, he said. It was not designed to give context to the issues and most respondents had to provide concise answers, he said.

"We're not doing business by plebiscite," he said. "If we were, you'd just get your number-two pencil and that would be the master plan."