Amherst Town Meeting aka The Vince Show
The 257th annual Amherst Town Meeting concluded last night with pretty much a half-session compared to the previous seven nights that went the full three hours and change.
As usual we started late by about seven minutes, but still the earliest start time (by a minute or two) of all eight sessions. In total an hour of time wasted for those who showed up on time. And it was not because members needed to shower after walking, jogging or cycling to get the meeting.
Also, as usual, we concluded the night with an anti-business (non binding) vote to oppose the Kinder Morgan gas pipeline. The original voice vote was so overwhelming I'm pretty sure only 2 or 3 No votes could be heard. Still, someone from the floor "doubted it" so a standing or Tally vote could occur (137 yes to 7 no).
In all we had nine Tally Votes, each requiring a minimum of ten minutes or 1.5 hours total. Throw in the standing votes, which also require about ten minutes, and you have the total time for an entire night's session.
Yes, electronic voting will do away with these time wasting inefficiencies. And provide much better accountability.
But the real problem is the institution itself, which is non representative of our little college town that borders on being a city.
Amherst has the lowest median age in the entire state with over 50% of our population "college aged youth," almost all of them renters.
See any college age youth?
While Town Meeting is on average retirement age homeowners.
Diversity of race, creed, color or sexual preference? As my Italian friends would say, "Forget about it!"
Since Amherst has only a pathetic 10% commercial tax base the equally pathetic number of Town Meeting members with small business experience is probably not all that far off. But still troubling.
Even my 8-year-old gets the simple formula of supply and demand (especially with candy around Halloween), which seems to stump Town Meeting time and time again.
Virtually all of the zoning articles (which require a two-thirds majority to pass) failed. And in the future zoning tweaks will be required to bring about the positive smart growth this town so desperately needs to address our lack of housing and commercial enterprise.
The BANANA/NIMBYs used to be an obstructionist fringe that could barely muster the one-third required to kill a zoning article.
Yet both their anti-business zoning articles, either of which would have detonated a dirty bomb in our town center business district, managed to muster a MAJORITY of Town Meeting support.
Paging Dr. Kevorkian!
53 comments:
Look at all those whitehairs. What a drag it is to live here. And not being in a situation to be able to move, I lament this frozen-in-time existence.
At least most of these people will be dead soon. I don't mean that in a nasty way - it's just that they are standing in the way of progress. Hurry up and die, good people!
The symbolic vote against the pipeline was rooted in nimbyism too. It not only hurts business development, but does nothing to address climate change, which is happening now.
We really need to do something. These people don't represent me.
Whattya got against hair color of white?? Oh. You must be an agist.
No. YOU need to do something. Who Does represent you?
"We really need to do something. These people don't represent me."
Try running for Town Meeting instead of just sitting on your butt complaining.
Town meeting is doing its job: keeping control of the Town away from 21 year old UMass students
"Control" is not the issue. It's simply a matter of having a voice.
No, please DON'T run for Town Meeting. TM needs to be disbanded and the town needs a mayor.
Down with Vince/Abe Lincoln.
LOL. Abe Lincoln. Classic.
Something needs to change. This process is ridiculous. The only people who have time for Town Meeting are those that are retired or their kids are out of the house. Perhaps this is why the majority do not care about the dwindling enrollment in the public schools due to the lack of housing.
Why do we allow things to be controlled by the few people in town that have the time. Can't we just elect someone responsible to run things like most places do?
How much does TM cost the tax payers anyway?
If yer gonna call me ageist, at least spell it right.
Yes, I am ageist. These old cronies are so out of touch and do not belong running this entire town like it was still 1965. They are "activists" looking for a cause, any opportunity to exercise what they see is the democratic process, regardless of whether or not it makes sense. It's what keeps them ALIVE.
both anon@12:42 and 12:46 are spot on.
If I was not a single mom I would. There is no way single parents can serve on town meeting. That's why it is filled with retired people.
...and Trustafarians like VInce.
OK, sound like there is enthusiasm for pushing forward a new town governance model/mayor. What would it actually take to put this into practice? I know there was an attempt at this a few years ago that failed. I wasn't here then, so I wonder why?
15% of the registered voters signatures to get it on the ballot to call for a Charter Commission.
That's around 3,000 signatures.
And then a majority vote at the next annual town election. The commission then has 2 years to come up with a new form of government.
That too must then get a majority vote at the next annual election.
In 2003 it lost by 14 votes.
Can't single people be retired ? What's the thinking here? I don't see what difference being single, married or working or retired or young or middle aged or old- aged has to do with anything. Next, you'll probably say that it makes a difference what race or creed or color you are. Gidalmighty what a town.
Captain Ahab is more like it. Thank god no one judges the rest of us by how we look...
No matter who runs the thing, it will be controlled by a few people . Isn't tha the way it's set up in the first place. Oh. I see.. You want em to look like YOU!
Yes! Let's get a mayor. Of corse the color of her/his hair could be a disqualifier.
Yes. Of corse. God forbid anyone try to exercise a democratic process.
I didn't say just single. I said single mom. Big difference. To serve on town meeting I have to find a babysitter for each night. At $10 an hour for a sitter it gets mighty expensive. Plus then I'm not at home monitoring homework. It's just really very very difficult to be a single PARENT and serve on town meeting.
Town meeting has become group therapy for a large portion of town residents.
"Exhibit A" is the guy who told us (for 3 minutes) that the reason that so many TM members want to keep talking--rather than voting-- is because they don't feel heard.
We have created our own monster. We have a huge town bureaucracy to listen to those residents who don't feel heard.
These are real issues--it must be terrible to not feel heard. I hope these folks can find the support they need somewhere other than the floor of Town Meeting or the halls of Town Hall. Help is available.
As a parent you know the most important phrase is "stop whining." No one said you have to serve on town meeting. Just find a like-minded person who can and vote for them.
It's tough all over.
As a parent and a current Town Meeting member, I think I know the difference between whining and legitimate criticism. Anon 3:46 is on to something real: it's clear that the meeting sessions are serving another more personal function for a significant number of members than simply serving the Town. Anon 3:20 is also raising a real concern. I thought we voted awhile ago in TM for a subsidy for child care which might assist her. If the anonymous mom on here is sincere, check with TMCC.
This year spring Town Meeting took 22.5 hours (an hour of which was wasted waiting for others to arrive). I think the time objection has been overblown for a couple of years.
I saw absolutely nothing good that came out of this Town Meeting, and several truly ominous signs, both procedurally (the body utterly unwilling to end debate, the interrupting shouts of "point of order" to shut down apparently hated members of town departments or boards) and on the substance (anti-development vote counts that were perilously close to the 2/3rd's). Mr. Kelley is not being alarmist. I don't always agree with his military metaphors, but some of those zoning articles were in fact "dirty bombs", and they got majority votes. (people!)
The problem is that understanding town policy is not just something you can visit for 22.5 hours and leave behind for the rest of your waking life. (I admit: I got a bit turned around and confused on the Butterfield article, for example.) It requires taking the energy to educate yourself about what's going on. In addition, some warrant article sponsors are simply trying to blow up development ANYWHERE (thus the aptness of BANANA), rather than achieving the immediate ends set out in the article. There's an initial lack of transparency that's only overcome by reading, paying attention, and asking questions.
Since we're not allowed to talk about motives in Town Meeting, the motives never get out there. The Bulletin nowadays is no help. Mr. Kelley is harsh, but comes closest to getting at the objectives. There are people in there who are very, very savvy politically, and they know how to manipulate the body.
Until more people start to see sitting in there, with a vote (leave out your persuasive powers, which you may or may not have), as a kind of duty, that tries to protect an investment of several thousand dollars each year, we are in deep trouble.
Whenever you're over at Trader Joe's in Hadley, greeting your friends from Amherst, ask yourself, "why couldn't this have been located in Amherst?" Well, it clearly could've been, contributing to OUR schools and roads, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of appropriate sustainable INOFFENSIVE development in downtown and village centers (not sprawl) that is being jettisoned year after year.
Rich Morse
Thanks for the info about child care subsidy. I'll check it out and if it's there I'll run next year.
The information about the money available for child care for Town Meeting members is at www.amherstma.gov/DocumentCenter/View/19830: up to $30 per night.
Given the lack of parents of young children in there right now, I'll bet this money has rarely been tapped.
Rich Morse
"Trustafarians like Vince."
He has a trust fund? Then why does he have a housing subsidy?
I bet Carol Grey taps into the fund as much as possible
Larry,
There's something off about the statement you make - "While Town Meeting is on average retirement age homeowners." and the numbers you post. First, the total in your data for the Town Meeting column is 258. Town meeting only has 240 members. Why the difference? Second, the data says that 58 (16+42) Town Meeting members are in the traditional retirement age bracket (65+). The largest age group (135), by far, 55 - 64, is pre-retirement. How does this square with your statement cited above. The data says to me that the majority of Town Meeting members (even with these inflated numbers) are people who are working. Please explain your thinking.
Actually Kevin Collins posted those over on my Facebook after I had written this article.
So I just did a screen grab and added it.
I was simply going by my gut, 20+ years experience in Town Meeting (as well as photos I took from the floor).
Thank you, Larry, for the explanation. Perhaps a lesson in checking the numbers before you post? As to your gut, 20+ years in Town Meeting (I bow to your endurance) and pictures, many of my friends were grey in their 40's and 50's, so you can never tell. It would be interesting to have accurate data about Town Meetings makeup by age, home ownership, job/profession, etc. to do a detailed analysis about who is a Town Meeting member. Perhaps it would enlighten us all.
I was in Town Meeting for several years in the 80's and then again in the 90's, but my work took me out of town so much that I missed half the meetings, so I stopped participating. I suspect that it still true for many people in Amherst.
Kevin Collins, I know you read this blog, so where did those numbers come from?
Actually the League of Women Voters did just such a survey about 20 years ago. Same results: Old, white, homeowners (although the male/female ratio has always been pretty good).
Town Meeting has 240 members, with additional ex-officio members including the Moderator, the Town Manager, the Library President, the School Committee, the Select Board, so it's in excess of 250 members.
See how much about Town Meeting that we think we know, but don't? You'll learn even more if you watch the meetings and see how it works.
Moderator can vote but never has. Town Manager Musante also can vote and he does. Town Manager Barry Del Castilho and Larry Shaffer never did.
Why is it that we expect all of Select Board and Finance Committee Chair to vote, but we give the School Committee and the Library President a pass on these votes? There are some traditions that don't make political sense any more.
At some point, Ms. Cage, who, to her credit, voted often this spring, might realize that the people she is voting with are essentially working to choke off the kind of development that would increase and diversity the funding sources for the schools. I understand that there's a steep and long learning curve in these elective jobs, but I hope that this learning about what's really going on in Town Meeting would be part of it.
Three other members of School Committee voted hardly at all. The demands of their offices are great. But, sorry, you are the trustees of our schools with an eye on the bottom line and the funding sources. John Musante has seen things currently as dire enough that he voted each time.
It's hard to come to residents with override requests if you as a School Committee member have been taking a pass in the body that is empowered to provide the funding for the services that we feel we need to be a responsible community.
It's time to stop deluding ourselves. This is a small university city, with poor people and enormous demands for services. It's not a farm town any more; it's not even a quaint college town with cows and trees. Enough with the fantasies. You have to fund what we have, without compromising what we love. There is no crime in having a bustling downtown with a large walking population, thriving retail, even a well-behaved nightlife, so we can maintain the glorious silence of our natural areas.
Rich Morse
When people give up their right to choose (which is 100%) for a vote in some group (100/size of the group%), what do you expect?
People do not understand voting because most of those voting are not in power. For the cute little voter, voting is about having their say...getting representation. Which is perfect, it allows the real reason we have voting to work its magic.
For those in power (and thus, in reality) voting is a method of minimizing your reaction to not being allowed to do things your way. You give up before they make you, because you agreed to loose before you lost. When you engage most other conflicts, you do not agree to loose in advance.
Voting is actually strategic policing, even when the ballot box is not stuffed. By having a vote and getting sheep to believe that they have a say (when their say is smaller than their lottery odds most days), the powers that be have convinced you to agree not to riot before you loose.
What did you expect, to have a real say in what the town government does. That is just cute.
The old folks don't have to die, the young folks simply have to learn what real resistance and property ownership is. They need to understand Liberty, the thing that everyone turns to when they really believe they are right, even those squarely on the left.
They've had these meetings for 22-some-odd years. Surely kids were had by a lotta the people who ran the things in all that time. If you're going to complain about having kids, and how it takes away from your time, maybe you have a bigger problem than you think.
There's nothing wrong, of course, with being old and white.
Oh, it's terrible that so many TM members are "white"!
I think the fantasy is that if the town moved to a mayoral system the demographic would change. It would probably still look like the selectboard. Constance Kruger and Jim Wald, etc. look just like the current town meeting members, and we'd be unlikely to be voting UMass students as mayor.
Not "terrible" just not perfectly "representative" of Amherst, where 23% of the population is not white.
Er...that's 200-some odd...
On what rock does it say things have to be perfect? Or even perfectly representative?
anon@947: I would settle for good, but TM is terribly bad.
What's wrong with permitting >well behaved children to attend Town Meeting with their parents? Lots of smaller towns have been doing this for years -- and there is no small amount of educational benefit to the child as well.
Anon 10:23 PM,
Thanks for answering my question about the numbers in Town Meeting. I had forgotten about the ex-officio members such s the Select Board. However, even with those additions, Town Meeting is still not "on average retirement age homeowners."
Some people retire earlier than others.
Happening now? Climate change has occurred since the dawn of time.
There are no badly behaved children. Just bad parents. Sure let em in!
So, Town Meeting really has morphed from 9 precincts into "unorganized tribal areas".
I suggest we reorganize TM into the following tribal areas:
1. Anti-Gateway (run by the warlords Fox, Wilder, Karlstrom, Adams)
2. Anti-Butterfield (introducing newcomer Brown)
3.Anti-Downtown-infill (warlord Wentworth and OConnor)
4. Anti-North-Amherst-development (warlords Perots, Keller and friends)
5. Anti-Southeast-St-development (warlords McGowan, Grey)
6. Anti-Cushman-development (Ira and Sean)
7. Anti Atkins (what happened to them?)
8. Anti-everything (Oldham, Acosta)
9. Everyone else
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