The Select Board last night, sort of, addressed the Public Relations nightmare caused by the "Barney Blowout," one of the more juvenile celebrations hosted in downtown Amherst.
In fact, it used to be called "Kegs 'n Eggs" but came under such criticism two years ago for boorish bad behavior that they simply changed the name rather than the behavior.
Call me a prude or a cranky old reformed drunk, but I have serious problems with a downtown public promotion that encourages heavy drinking before noon.
Especially when that production abuses Irish heritage.
The Amherst Select Board this evening by a 3-2 "consensus" declined to place an advisory question before town voters to get their opinion on the merits of flying the commemorative flags in the downtown annually on 9/11, rather than the once-every-five-years plan currently in place.
Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe was, as usual, the deciding vote -- although she did not have the courage to actually let the board take a formal vote.
And now they have denied the people of Amherst the right to vote on this (Only In Amherst) volatile issue.
9/11/11 Amherst Town Common. Photo by Greg Saulmon
On Monday night 7:30 p.m. the Amherst Select Board will decide if the people of Amherst can decide -- once and for all -- whether commemorative American flags can fly in the downtown on 9/11 to honor and remember the 3,000 innocent souls lost that awful morning.
By a simple majority vote the five member SB can place a question before the voters on the upcoming April 9 local election ballot.
On May 16, 2007 representative Amherst Town Meeting voted by a shameful 96-41against allowing the flags to fly every 9/11.
Every September since the day of the attack, I have gone before the Amherst Select Board to request the 29 commemorative flags fly on 9/11. Only twice since 2003 have they been allowed up under "compromise" proposals, first by SB Chair Gerry Weiss allowing them to fly once every three years, and most recently by Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe alowing them up once every five years, on "milestone anniversaries".
According to this schedule 2016 is the next time the flags will be allowed to fly, on the 15th anniversary. Last summer the town received a boatload of negative press over the contentious issue.
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Kind of ironic that the Select Board will also discuss a request to raise the Tibetan flag ...
RECEIVED:
2/21/13 at 3:47 pm. MEETING TIME: 6:30 pm. LOCATION: Town Room,
Town Hall. LIST OF TOPICS: Public Comment. Mt. Holyoke Range Advisory
Committee Appointments. Food Truck Regulations Update. FY14 Budget
Discussion. Town Manager, Select Board Member and Chair's Reports.
Request to Place Question April 9, 2013 election ballot. Untimed Items:
Request to raise Tibetan Flag 03-10-13; Warrants for Upcoming Elections;
Select Board Meeting Schedule; Parking and Street Closure Requests; New
Taxi Driver/Chauffeur Licenses; Special Liquor Licenses; Approve
Minutes; and Committee Appointments as presented. Topics the Chair did
not reasonably anticipate 48 hours before the meeting.
SB Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe, John Musante, Sandy Pooler, FinCom Chair Andy Steinberg
Unlike the venerable Amherst Schools the Town Manager today presented to the Select Board and Finance Committee a level services budget that stayed within their suggested cap of 3%, so residents will see no deterioration in services and little extra money coming out of their household budget.
Unless of course the Schools request an Override to cover their projected $737,000 deficit at the elementary level. In last year's budget the schools were given an extra $218,200 from Free Cash cash for instance.
If the Town Manger should find extra money coming into the municipal side of the budget (besides the $6,200,894 held in reserves) he would use $61,000 to fund an additional police officer for a department that is down five sworn officers over the past six years, while UMass has continued to grow over those same years.
$100,000 to add an Economic Development office to help stimulate the business/commercial side of the property tax equation, which is seriously out of balance, with residential property shouldering 90% of the property tax burden.
And the Safe & Healthy Neighborhood initiative would benefit by the addition of a building inspector ($63,608). Town Meeting will vote this spring on requiring rental registration, and inspections will be a vital component for enforcement.
On an even more optimistic note Town Manager Musante reports: "In FY14 the town hopes to see the installation by a private company of one of the largest solar arrays
in Massachusetts at the old landfill on Belchertown Road and to promote other solar
development in town."
Either way, the immediate future seems bright.
Bales of hay on the old landfill that will be used this spring for regrading
Amherst Town Center 1:15 AM McMurphy's Bar, Antonio's Pizza
Last night -- or I should say early this morning -- all five of our ambulances were busy dealing with ETOH (passed out drunk) students, four police cruisers (probably all the on duty ones we had) were at the scene of a drunk driver who had driven around concrete barricades, up on to active railroad tracts becoming hopelessly stuck ... when a call came in from South Amherst for an "unresponsive baby with difficulty breathing."
Around Midnight APD dispersed a large crowd of unruly students from Phillips Street
Amherst Fire Department had to send a fire engine from Central Station and wait for one of our ambulances already at the hospital to return back to Amherst, thus causing a delay. Obviously if our first responders had the personnel and equipment needed they could keep delays to a minimum, increasing both safety and peace of mind.
The last 12 hours should serve as yet another wake up call. Town officials need to act quickly and decisively. Our police and fire department's are understaffed. And somebody is going to die.
Over the past six consecutive years, through sound fiscal management, the town has had an end-of-the-year surplus of just over $1 million. A quarter of that would go a long way to solving staffing problems with our beleaguered first responders.
Tax exempt UMass, the second largest landowner in town, also needs to step up and help fund the professional providers who react to emergencies their students create. Ditto Hampshire College.
Alcohol abuse is an epidemic that needs serious attention. Anyone remember that UMass student motorcyclist on his way back to campus last April only weeks before he was to graduate, slaughtered by a wrong way drunk driver on Rt 116 in Hadley? I'm sure his family remembers!
DA Sullivan and State Police need to set up yet another high profile DUI roadblock in town before Halloween. Senator Stan Rosenberg and Representative Ellen Story should file a bill making it a crime (or at least a civil offense) to be in an automobile with a drunk driver and not report it to authorities.
Car stuck on railroad tracks near Amtrak Station
I noticed the passenger of the drunk driver who drove his car onto the rail road tracks checking his smart phone while watching his drunk friend being escorted away.
Jack Thornton. You drink & drive, you go to jail
Maybe somewhat sober people would think twice about getting in a car with a drunk friend if they knew they could be held responsible. Kind of gives new meaning to the slogan, "Friends don't let friends drive drunk." And as one of my favorite twitterian's pointed out, "Especially on railroad tracks!"
When I told one of the cops I was live tweeting from the scene early this morning he asked, "Is anybody listening?" God I hope so.
Arrested for DUI and trespassing on RR property: Jack Thornton, 23 Bennett Rd, Gardner, MA, age 19
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AFD member picked up the slack after I went to bed and posted to Facebook photo of all five Amherst ambulances parked at Cooley Dickinson hospital at 3:00 AM:
So the accusations are starting to fly faster than quail frantically fleeing the hunter's birdshot.
The venerable Amherst Bulletin in today's editorial has strongly suggested I am an "extremist" for wishing to fly commemorative flags in the downtown to remember, commemorate, honor the 2,997 citizens slaughtered that awful day.
Well I suppose if I'm in the same camp as the Amherst firefighters, who issued a strong statement of support for flying the flags every 9/11, that's okay with me.
And Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe borderline resorts to libel/slander in the same Amherst Bulletin front page article by strongly suggesting I purposely, willfully "exploited people's misunderstanding and oversimplification of this issue."
Interestingly the article closes with an exchange between O'Keeffe and an ardent flag supporter who thanked her for clarifying the complications, but even so, still thought the commemorative flags should fly on 9/11. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Last night around 10:30 PM WWLP Ch 22 News put up another flag flap story stating unequivocally that I "questioned the patriotism" of Amherst and town manager John Musante on my Fox & Friends live appearance on Sunday morning.
They even interviewed an Amherst resident who was aghast that I would dare to question their patriotism. Only thing is I never even remotely suggested that. The interviewee probably got it from the Gazette coverage where Ms. O'Keeffe is complaining about uninformed viewers questioning her patriotism.
Bu you would think the reporter could have at least watched the five-minute-30-second Fox interview, or maybe contacted me for comment/fact checking. She had been stalking me on Twitter for the past two weeks, so it's not like it would have been hard for her to reach me.
I notice this morning the story has been pulled from wwlp.com
On the night of September 10, 2001 during a two hour discussion about everything both good and bad our flag represents, the most over-the-top statement came from a UMass professor and town meeting member who sacrilegiously branded our flag "a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and repression."
As she returned to her seat, a grandmotherly flag supporter said sternly, "Shame on you!"
On the night of August 27, 2012 Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe did not even vote on my request to fly those flags on 9/11, instead opting to pocket veto the idea. And as part of the excuse Ms. O'Keeffe seems to suggest that nobody in town cares whether the flags fly this year or not.
Shame!
Because I think she's wrong, and so does the media and every person I've encountered on the street over the past few days.
Just since Monday this sad story has been published with prominent placement in The Daily Hampshire Gazette, The Amherst Bulletin, Springfield Republican (note 100+ comments), WGGB Ch 40 and WWLP Ch 22 local TV, FoxNews national website and tomorrow morning on their national TV show, Fox and Friends.
The Amherst Select Board routinely meets again on September 10, the eleventh anniversary of that infamous Eve of Destruction meeting. Let's hope they come to their senses and allow the commemorative flags to send a signal that in Amherst, like everywhere else in this great country of ours, we do care.
#AmherstMa Select Board pocket vetoes flying flags on 9/11. Did not even take a vote. No commemorative flags in the downtown this 9/11.
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Tonight at 8:00 PM the Amherst Select Board, like a previous Select Board did almost 11 years ago, will decide the fate of 29 commemorative flags: to fly or not to fly, on the most depressing anniversary of my lifetime, 9/11.
Currently SB policy is to allow the commemorative flags, which do fly every Memorial Day and five other holidays, to fly on 9/11 once every five years or what SB Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe referred to as "milestone anniversaries."
On the night of September 10, 2001 about 12 hours before the first plane struck its intended target in New York City, I closed my brief presentation with a question: "Do you really want to be remembered as the politicians who voted against the flag?"
And tonight I will leave this Select Board with another simple question, "Do you honestly believe 9/11 is only worth commemorating once every five years?"
After more than a year since Town Meeting overwhelmingly gave him the authority to do so, Town Manager John Musante brought before the Select Board a 31 page draft of the "Solar Power Services Agreement" he negotiated for electric energy created at a solar farm situated on the old landfill.
The 25 year deal calls for Amherst to lock in electric rates at 6.75 cents per kilowatt hour from the energy produced at up to a 4.25 megawatt operation, with total savings estimated at between $1.8 million and $6.8 million over the life of the contract. Original value estimates first floated over a year ago were as high as $1 million annually for thirty years in electricity savings and property taxes paid.
The state is proposing solar farms be exempt from paying local property taxes thus the $15 million operation that would have paid $300,000 annually to Amherst will, like some of our academic and cultural institutions, pay nothing.
Musante also disclosed that he was in negotiations with another provider of solar energy from a site located outside of Amherst (Easthampton?). This secondary source could reduce the need for such a large solar array footprint proposed for the old landfill, which could somewhat appease concerned neighbors.
Town Manager John Musante, Stephanie O'Keeffe Select Board Chair
The Select Board did not take a formal vote on the agreement, but Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe told the town manager he had their "full support."
The Solar Farm still has a number of significant hurdles to clear before any energy starts to flow: A lawsuit brought by immediate neighbors of the proposed solar farm is still active, the Amherst Zoning Board of Appeals must also support the project unanimously and the question of a "threatened species", the Grasshopper Sparrow, means a National Heritage Species permit must be secured.
But tonight's presentation certainly demonstrated there's light at the end of the tunnel.
Despite strong industry opposition and a lukewarm response from politicians, the bright eyed, bushy tailed MassPIRG activists continue to push for passage of an expanded bottle bill that would add water and juice containers to the list of items--mainly beer and soda--requiring a five cent deposit.
Amherst Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe, fellow SB member Diana Stein and Town Manager John Musante attended an event today at high noon to show their support. The sparsly attended rally at Kendrick Park mirrors one held in Boston today where activists hope the bill will make it out of committee later this week.
Forty years of martial arts training--38 of them as a black belt--makes me intimately familiar with justifiable use of force. This YouTube video purported to be "4 cops beating the shit out of a UMass student for no reason" during the Meadow Street Mayhem last Saturday afternoon is a perfect example...Of what is justifiable.
First of all they are Amherst Police Department officers, not UMass--although both departments are highly trained. What the camera does not show is 1,000 other students on the quad that sunny afternoon, or the perp's physical provocation towards police in the moments leading up to his arrest. Or the previous calls to APD for help at the scene dealing with loud noise, thrown bottles, and drunken fistfights.
What I find more interesting in this juvenile report published on Barstoolsports.com, is not so much the attempt to discredit APD (or UMPD) by whipping up sympathy for a drunken fool who deserves to be expelled from school, but the email to tenants from a landlord who seems to be feeling the public pressure to tighten the way he runs his housing ship.
Even more interesting, it was Kendrick Property Management who first called 911 to warn of a large gathering coming together in the quad area of Townhouse Apartments that Saturday afternoon, an apartment complex they manage.
The mayhem over Patriots Day weekend included not only this incident but far more serious ones: two drunken driving arrests, passed out drunk students overwhelming our emergency services by tying up all five ambulances simultaneously, and the horrific accident on the Amherst/Hadley line that took the life of a 24 year old UMass student (and a Amherst resident) about to graduate, killed by a wrong way driver.
And of course the slobfest of 1,000 college aged youths (code for UMass students) taking over Puffers Pond and leaving in their wake a boatload of debris. Just how to do you think most of those kids made it back to their dwellings after that pernicious public party early Monday night?
Our roads are not safe (cue Jim Morrison, "There's a killer on the road"); our neighborhoods not conducive to raising families! And it's only going to get worse over the next three or four weekends. The Amherst Select Board, our highest ranking elected public officials, needs to act. Now.
Request District Attorney Dave Sullivan coordinate with State Police, APD, and UMPD a Driving Under the Influence roadblock in Amherst, near UMass, before graduation.
Request Senator Stan Rosenberg and Representative Ellen Story file
state legislation to allow local municipal bylaw fine violations (noise,
nuisance, alcohol) be increased to a maximum of $500 from the current
$300.
Issue a sternly worded statement to the local media--especially the Mass Daily Collegian--giving voice to the outrage.
Editors Note; UMass is the #3 employer in Western Massachusetts and has been Amherst's #1 employer for over 100 years. Every September Amherst is blessed to have thousands of exuberant new consumers flock to the University for the first time. 99% of UMass students are industrious, mature, decent individuals driving on the road to success. It's the 1% you read about here. And they need to change their act.
In spite of seasonably inclement weather--a cop's best friend--and a published plea from Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe in the venerable Mass Daily Collegian (3rd letter down, so not exactly top billing) outlining party behavior that is "Not OK", the damn kids went and did it anyway. Party that is. Not OK!
Especially since my winner this week for 'Party House of the Weekend' is the same location requesting a Special Permit from the Zoning Board of Appeals to double occupancy from a one family (4 maximum unrelated tenants) to a two family (max of eight). Which in this case would seem to indicate a doubling of party house potential. Not OK.
156 Sunset Ave, within shadow of Southwest Towers
According to Amherst Police Department logs:
12:41 AM early Sunday morning
Large party 200+ people with DJ equipment. Arrested for Noise and Nuisance House violations ($600 each):
Stephanie Blynn, 14 Valerie Dr, Plainville, MA, age 21
Heather Ohandley, 16 Hillside Rd, Plainville, MA, age 22
Shauna Obrien, 15 Melrose Ave, Wakefield, MA, age 22
Meanwhile on the street near 156 Sunset Ave:
ETOH (highly intoxicated) female on the roadway and unable to walk or get up. Upon speaking with Nicole, she stated she was going to her dorm, as she attempted to go in the opposite direction of Southwest. Nicole stated she was coming from the party at 156 Sunset Avenue. Transported Nicole to her dorm.
So last night at our illustrious Select Board meeting, during a routine discussion of repackaging outstanding loans into one cheaper bond issue--refinanced with a low 2.16% interest rate--Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe asked Finance Director Sandy Pooler about the current status of the (not so) portable modular classrooms at the former Mark's Meadow Elementary School, a building owned by UMass.
"Stationary," he responded laconically.
Had Mr. Pooler been around five years ago when the classrooms were first purchased for $205,000 he probably would not now be so flippant.
Perhaps no single incident best captures the hubris of the pre-Catherine Sanderson Amherst School Committee, where the rubber stamp was routinely pressed into action, better than the portable classrooms fiasco. Although warned on the floor of Town Meeting about declining enrollments at Mark's Meadow by longtime town meeting contrarian Nancy Gordon, the portable classrooms unanimously endorsed by the School Committee passed overwhelmingly.
In fact, at the time, School Committee Chair (and UMass School of Education Assistant Director Center for Education Policy) Andy Churchill stated: "the School Committee needs to look hard at whether we need
to add two or four modular classrooms, understanding that there is a
financial component to be considered." So I guess it could have been (twice as) bad.
Just three years later, at Catherine Sanderson's bold urging, Mark's Meadow was closed and the portable classrooms, never actually put to use as classrooms serving students, lay fallow.
Now they are too expensive to move ($50,000 or more) and negotiations with UMass to purchase them seem to be going nowhere.
Yes, Ms. O'Keeffe should have banished Mr. Pooler to the woodshed for his dry sense of humor. Or better yet, to our abandoned, useless, expensive, modular classrooms.
I'm a journalist unafraid to put down the pen or crawl out from behind the keyboard to say what needs to be said. Loudly.
Obviously the Amherst Bulletin is not listening
On September 9 when UMass and town officials alongside District Attorney Dave Sullivan tried to soothe the party hardy behavior patterns exhibited by a hard core minority of students by handing out oatmeal cookies (I kid you not) the Gazette/Bulletin assigned veteran reporter Nick Grabbe to cover the late night "story"--what is usually referred to in journalism as a "puff piece."
Meanwhile, simultaneously in the north end of campus, the Meadow Street riot occurred. The next day the Gazette carried the cookie caper story on the front page.
Over 50 patrons were already lined up alongside McMurphy's Uptown Tavern entrance at 9:45 AM this morning awaiting a 10:00 AM opening. Yes folks, McMurphy's is a bar.
And even though the owner and manager described to our illustrious Select Board (acting as Liquor Commissioners) two weeks ago the customers they expected at this event to be "a little bit of an older crowd" they look, umm, kind of young to me.
So it took a while, but the lame duck leader of the flagship University of Massachusetts at Amherst Chancellor Bob Holub responded to the Front Page, above-the-fold-glorification-of-student-parties story that appeared in both the Daily Hampshire Gazette and Amherst Bulletin on September 29--a Friday no less.
Chancellor Robert Holub
His Letter To The Editor appears in this Saturday's Gazette--the most widely read press run of the week--along with two other letters sternly criticizing the student party mentality oozing from the original article by two young champions of the ZooMass image of old, Peter Clark and Emerson Rutkowski.
I actually tried to get our venerable Amherst Select Board to respond with their own Letter To The Editor a couple weeks back, but apparently to no avail.
SB Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe can publicly criticize our beleaguered DPW for not completing construction of the downtown Spring Street parking lot in the middle of an unexpected monsoon season, but hides her head in the mud when it comes to riotous student behavior that degrades the quality of life in neighborhoods near and far from UMass, the largest employer in Western Massachusetts and Amherst's second largest landowner--all of it tax exempt.
Spring Street parking lot Friday morning October 21
Princess Stephanie once again demonstrates her PR flack background (although odd such a true blue Dem would borrow from Tricky Dick Nixon's handbook) as she spins nothing but positives with her postmortem analysis of the just completed Amherst Town Meeting.
She forgets to mention of course that the Select Board was 0-2 on articles that garnered any press attention: A much needed zoning change, championed by the Select Board and Town Manager (and her husband on the Planning Board and her dad, Chair of the Amherst Redevelopment Authority) but panned by town meeting; and the typical anti-war advisory article the Select board had voted 4-1 for "no recommendation," but was overwhelmingly approved by Town Meeting.
So if this looks a little awkward and orchestrated that's because it was. But hey, the Open Meeting Law allows for public officials to kibitz behind the scenes as long as it only involves "housekeeping."
For those of you new to the ongoing antics of the People's Republic, Stephanie O'Keeffe rose from complete obscurity to the venerable Amherst Select Board mainly via her groundbreaking blog "Stephanie's Town Meeting Experience".
Then after I took out former SB Czar Anne Awad, who was replaced in a mid-year election by Aaron Hayden, she orchestrated a coup d'état and cut off His Lordship Gerry Weiss's, errr...knees and ascended the throne.
Now she's been reelected. All hail the queen. Also worthy to note that we now have a sitting majority of Select Board members "elected" without having any competition in the election.
Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe explains the Interstellar Alien Landing Port
But seriously folks, tonight the campaign for a multi-million dollar tax Override began.
The Finance Committee gave a verbal report that parroted the Assistant Town Manager's presentation a few weeks back to the illustrious Select Board projecting a $4 million budget gap next year.
Of course over the next couple hours during routine housekeeping warrant articles we learned the town has stashed in surplus $2.6 million in Free Cash, $2.8 million in a Health Care Trust Fund, $1.3 million in Stabilization, $1.4 million in the Water Fund and the Town Manager announced a $1 million state Community Development Block Grant in each of the next two years.
Yet...the sky is falling. Or maybe it's a UFO.
So notice Princess Stephanie trots out that old fallacy that Prop 2.5% does not allow municipalities to keep up with inflation (roughly 3%). She ignores the other part of the law that allows "new growth" to be combined; and the two have always exceeded the simple rate of inflation.
Even our toothless "watchdog" Finance Committee issued an Override Report last year that clearly shows Amherst homeowners have absorbed a 6% average increase in their taxes--or twice the rate of inflation. Welcome to the People's Republic!
McMurphy's Uptown Tavern 9:45 AM
Chancellor Robert Holub 
Spring Street parking lot Friday morning October 21
Kendrick Park Amherst Town Center
UMass Parking Lot near Whitmore
Upper Amity Street Town Center
Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe explains the Interstellar Alien Landing Port
