It gave way to gossip

By BOB ACKERMANN

Published on May 02, 2008

Those who study gossip know that some opinions, initially passed between just a few people, can spread like a raging epidemic without any regard as to whether or not they are supported by fact. Those who hear them find them so obviously true that no support is required. A recent publicly available example is the rumor that Barack Obama is Muslim, which, once it was articulated on the Web, has been reflected back in thousands of opinions without any accompanying justification. It just seems obviously true to many of those who hear it.

My opinion is that the outcome of the recent Amherst election cannot be understood without recognizing the role that gossip about the Select Board may have played in determining voters' preferences. Let me try to explain the puzzlement that gives rise to this belief.

The editor of the Bulletin explained the outcome of the election in an editorial on this page as a result of voter decision to support the candidates who "spoke in their campaigns about finding new sources of revenue, encouraging economic development, and helping business stay and grow in Amherst." These candidates also were said to recognize "that efforts to override the Proposition 2½ cap on local property taxes are not an answer to balancing Amherst's budget."

Here's the puzzlement. These views were also strongly supported by the losing candidates, especially Hwei-Ling Greeney, so they cannot explain (by themselves) the decisions of voters. Further, the only explicit opinions by the winning candidates on these issues, such as pursuing a local meals tax, simply recycled ideas that have been on the table since the last override attempt. Did voters decide that the outgoing Select Board simply lacked the gumption to force these ideas into reality? That is one possibility, but it has intrinsic difficulties. Instantiation of the meals tax, for example, requires an act of the Legislature to turn a potential source of income that it currently controls over to municipalities. That's where I stop thinking it as an imminent budget solution.

No amount of gumption can overcome legislative inertia.

And so, to explain what happened, I turn to an opinion that I have heard expressed on many occasions as an obvious fact, that the outgoing Select Board dithered in an individualistic micromanaging mode when it should have been synchronizing an effective unity of opinion.

Now, I am a compulsive viewer of ACTV local governmental programming. I have watched nearly all of every session of the outgoing Select Board with considerable interest.

With both Hwei-Ling Greeney and Rob Kusner as personal friends, I was always put to the test of analysis when their opinions differed, as they often did, during Select Board discussions. Both represented segments of the town's population that will likely lose this natural representation in the new environment. Voters seem to have retired the notion of diversity in favor of trying something (anything) new.

Admittedly, the outgoing Select Board did not solve the problem of the structural deficit, but readers of this column will already know that I regard this as tautological in that the structural deficit is not solvable on the current terrain. (I do wish the new Select Board success in proving me wrong on this.)

In my opinion, the dithering micromanaging charges against the outgoing Select Board do not stand up against a detailed viewing of actual Select Board discussions. Given the quality of their attention to detail, their preparation for discussion, the creativity of their suggestions, and Rob Kusner's apparently little-noticed but relentless efforts at finding compromise between the opinions of his colleagues, my belief is that both Hwei-Ling Greeney and Rob Kusner (had he run again) should have had a lock on re-election.

So what happened? My suggestion is that receptivity for what I see as gossip was prepared by the manifest fact that the structural deficit and our financial problems persist despite whatever the outgoing Select Board did, and so any "explanation" of that is likely to be already true on its reception. And so, those with objections to particular decisions of the Select Board needed only to formulate the "micromanaging explanation" to give it a force with casual observers of Amherst municipal government that well exceeded its factual merits.

The Select Board has no real mechanism for recognizing the contributions of those who choose not to run for re-election or who are defeated at the polls. In this vacuum, I would like to explicitly note my own high appreciation and admiration for the contributions of Hwei-Ling Greeney and Rob Kusner (and before them Robie Hubley) to the Amherst Select Board. They had (or would have had) my vote, but apparently I vote wrong. What to do? The (old) Select Board is dead. Long live the (new) Select Board.

Bob Ackermann is a retired professor. His column appears monthly.