Amherst Center: Team players or Lone Rangers?

Published on February 29, 2008

It's budget season, and it's election season - a good time to think about what Amherst needs to do and what kind of leadership will enable us to do it. And this year, in the Select Board race, there are plenty of choices for your two votes. So how do you decide who to vote for?

Well, a key thing to think about is that we elect one Select Board, not five mayors. So choosing Select Board candidates is not only about who they are as individuals - it's about whether they "play well with others" as members of a leadership team. To have an effective Select Board, we need board members with the skills and temperament to come together on a course of action for the town and then lead, together.

Sadly, over the past three years, we haven't seen much of this type of collaborative leadership. Select Board Chairman Gerry Weiss has tried to bridge gaps and move forward, but it's like he's been herding cats. Watch any recent Select Board meeting, and you'll share the frustration as the conversation repeats itself, gets hung up in minutiae, or otherwise veers off into the weeds of competing agendas, with no resolution in sight.

A recent columnist has urged us to focus on our budget crisis, using the image of a fiscal and emotional "wedge" to describe the widening gap between revenues and expenditures and our lack of a plan for closing it. It's clear that this has been the number-one challenge facing the town for several years now. Yet the Select Board has been unable to put forward a plan for solving it. Why?

Perhaps it's because we as voters haven't put enough emphasis in the past on the critical skills board members need to govern effectively. We have ended up electing too many individual activists, and not enough collaborative problem-solvers.

Not that there's anything wrong with activism. But community activists and board members have different, yet equally vital, roles to play.

The community activist's role is to advocate forcefully for particular causes. The board's role is to collaboratively decide what's best for the town as a whole - based on input from professional staff, informed volunteer committees, individual citizens and community activists - and then work together to lead the town in that direction.

Blur the lines between board and activist roles, and it's hard to tell whether you're speaking for the board or for yourself. You end up with confusion, wasted effort and ill will. You end up with a group of five isolated individuals, each with their own agendas, instead of the collaborative leadership that we desperately need our Select Board to provide. We need to change this dynamic.

So as you consider the candidates, ask yourself, are they team players or Lone Rangers? Will they listen to others and work toward consensus? Will they focus on key priorities or just jump on whatever issue comes along? Will they respect staff work and data or just push their personal beliefs and opinions?

Will they engender trust and goodwill as our representatives? Will they contribute their unique opinions, but collaborate on solutions? In short, will they be productive members of a five-person board that must work cooperatively to lead effectively?

We see these qualities in two candidates in particular: Stephanie O'Keeffe and Diana Stein. Both of them are bridge-builders, with friendly contacts that represent many different communities in town. Both of them respect good data and the staff and committees that can provide it. Both of them are good listeners and thoughtful problem-solvers. Both of them understand the give-and-take of partnership, contributing their diverse perspectives, but then able to collaborate on developing a shared vision.

Both of them can help build a Select Board that is more than just the sum of its parts, but rather a truly functional leadership body. O'Keeffe and Stein offer a style of leadership that gives us hope that Amherst can put forth an actual plan to attack our fiscal crisis, and protect our schools, our green space, our town services.

The bottom line is, has the current status quo served us well on the Select Board? We think we can do better. In a year in which change is in the air nationally, wouldn't it be nice if change could take root locally as well, so that our town could finally make some progress on the key fiscal challenge that has so far stymied the Select Board?

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