It's the 'city' of Amherst

By JOSEPH C. MAWSON

Published on February 29, 2008

Amherst is a beautiful, vibrant college town of 35,000. Amherst is the largest community in Hampshire County, the ninth largest municipality in the five western counties of the commonwealth and the 40th largest (of 351) in all of Massachusetts.

Forty-seven percent of our students are not residents. If they all were, the population would have been 48,000. The costs associated with servicing this population are great. How we perceive and govern our "city" is important. Our nostalgic form of governance - a representative Town Meeting, small select board and a town manager - is not efficient enough to adequately provide timely and cost-effective services to a population of this size.

Our Town Meeting members are not representative in age class, population size or method of election. The Town Meeting was a reluctant step away from the open Town Meeting for those towns that grew larger. For the hundreds of small towns in the state the open Town Meeting is still fine. Our Town Meeting meets twice a year for 10 to 12 days (nights) and leaves many questions on policy to be interpreted by our Select Board. Voting for representative Town Meeting members is not realistic when all the residents of a precinct know that on the slate are their names, address, maybe where they work and a paragraph of their views. The precincts themselves are different thus representation is impossible to determine. The votes of too many of the Town Meeting members seem to be on their agenda, not on hard facts.

Imagine the chaos if every vote on every item had to be recorded for every member of the representative Town Meeting at every session - A for absent, B for abstention, Y for yes, N for no. Technology would make this possible. It would help those represented know how their representatives voted. It would show any trends in the voting between precincts. Nonmembers could then make a rational choice on who we wanted next time. I'll bet there would be many calls to those reps who had too many As or Bs.

We treat our town manager as if he were a mayor. He makes policy even implements policy, and with the Finance Committee, creates a budget - their priorities - then sends it to the select board, who take their interpretations from the representative Town Meeting. A slow inefficient process, that leads to confusion and delays. A larger council and no representative Town Meeting would be better. At least they would meet often and all their votes would be counted. Yes, and a mayor who would set some semblance of a vision for Amherst. As it is now, the citizens do not know who sets direction - we don't vote for the manager. So far, we have no definable future plan. A committee asking 40,000 people to send in their wish lists seems fine for political correctness, but it is irrational if you want a plan for this current year - or next or the year after. Our planning efforts, even zoning, are colored by what was, not what is or should or could be.

There are other issues needing change. For one, our volunteer committees and appointments. We seem to be more concerned with PC than with experience and competency.

With our city's budget of $65 million-plus, the myriad of state and federal laws and mandates, our increasing population and the complexities of technologies, it is not productive to hold on to the old view of Amherst as "a quaint, small New England town" with a quaint New England form of government.

As a friend once said to me: "Yes, the students are the 900-pound Gorilla in the room and even if he doesn't vote and isn't a resident, and doesn't pay much tax, you still have to ‘feed' him, and supply some of his stuff." Then he added: "Your kind of town government is funky - whose in charge?"

Joseph C. Mawson is a 75-year-old, 50-year resident of Amherst.