All that glitters...

Like that old song lyric: "Don't push me cause I'm close to the edge."
UPDATE: Saturday, February 21, 2009 (Yikes) 'Comments' are the best!
And so it continues to go (but not for long)

UPDATE: Thursday November 13, 2009
I have been running a fitness center for 27 years and only been blogging since 3/17/07; and never have I gone back to a two-week old post to add an update (a day or two maybe, but never this long)

My sitemeter tells me I’m getting almost a dozen visitors a day to this particular post because you did an internet search for “leading edge fitness Amherst” or “Golds becomes the leading edge” or something similar.

And that only further proves my point! The local boys who originally founded Golds five years ago were supposed to be so hip, so cool, so cutting edge (maybe that’s where the new name comes from) using the Net, Facebook, email interaction with customers, etc.

But this name changed occurred so suddenly nobody thought ahead to take out a domain name under “the leading edge Amherst” and fill it with content so that when you did your search they would come up number one rather than my humble critique?

Original post: 10/30/08
Changing your name from the gold standard of health club franchises (not that there are all that many in the industry, as about 85% of fitness facilities are Mom-and-Pops) “Golds Gym” to “The Leading Edge” is kind of like that McDonalds in Hadley changing its name to “Billy Bob’s Burgers”.

And, of course, it has nothing whatsoever to do with paying the annual 5% of gross revenues franchise fee. Even at “only” 1,500 members paying $40/month that still amounts to a yearly overhead of $36,000.

When Golds first opened five years ago they revealed an astonishing target of 3,000 members. I say astonishing because if you added up the entire membership of established Health Clubs this side of the river (Hampshire Fitness, Kidsports, Ultimate Fitness and
Amherst Athletic Club) it would not total much more than 3,000.

But considering “Video To Go” located adjacent to Golds and about four or five times smaller in square footage was paying $5,000 per month rent (so you can imagine what Golds is now paying), they really do need that many members to break even.

And yeah, after Golds opened Kidsports and Ultimate Fitness closed--but the owners of Hampshire Fitness sold out to Perry Messer, owner of the oldest club in the Valley ‘Northampton Athletic Club’, and about as experienced a pro as you can get.

A recent Gazette article revealed that membership of both Perry’s clubs now number “about 3,500”. So the largest, oldest two clubs in the Valley combined barely exceed what Golds—I mean ‘The Leading Edge’-- all by itself needs to survive.

In an email to employees they herald “opening a second club in Greenfield soon!” Interestingly ‘Video To Go' moved to Greenfield (to escape the high Amherst rent and cutthroat competition from Blockbuster Video) and lasted less than a year.

And since the conditions placed on Newmarket Center in 1985 calls for sign review/approval by the Planning Board, you gotta wonder if the sign changes were recently approved.

One woman's experience

Previous post on the death of Ultimate Fitness

AC: The pillaging continues

So let me get this strait: during this economic downturn Amherst College can afford to pay $2.3 million for an office building in the heart of the downtown that is currently valued at less than half that amount, but they will allow the Lord Jeff Inn to go to seed?

Okay, new rule: whenever a tax exempt entity—especially the LARGEST landowner in town—buys endangered commercial property and takes it off the tax rolls, they should maintain the tax payment to the town that the private owner paid.

This year Mrs. Hastings paid the town $16,000 on that building; next year (or whenever the leases are up for the Doctors, Lawyers, and Psychologists and Amherst College sends them packing) the building will net zero tax revenue.

AC invokes Roseannadanna's "never mind"

So let me get this strait Tony: Amherst College still has about a Billion dollars in the endowment; and you are already half-way to the $425 Million fundraising goal only announced publicly this week (the first such effort since 2001) and yet you can’t come up with a lousy $20 million to follow thru on the much hyped, eagerly awaited renovations to the esteemed Lord Jeffery Inn, an anchor business (more like the Rock of Gibraltar) for generations in the heart of downtown Amherst?

Four months ago Amherst College “donated” $120,000 to the town (after public disclosure our ambulance/fire runs the previous year cost Amherst taxpayers about that amount). And the Lord Jeff paid the town $32,000 in property taxes and perhaps that same amount in revenues from the 4% local hotel/motel lodging tax.

So this coming year (and now it looks like the next couple years as well) Amherst College will probably still require the same amount (over $100-K) of emergency services provided by AFD--only now the Lord Jeff will pay zero hotel/motel tax and will probably ask for an abatement on property taxes since the business will be generating zero income.

Meanwhile they are abandoning the playing field to the Umass Campus Center Hotel –that just announced a $9.2 million overhaul (at taxpayer expense of course) and they pay neither property taxes nor the local hotel motel tax. And they are located FAR from downtown Amherst.

All-in-all, bad for the taxpayers of Amherst, bad for downtown business, and beyond bad for the image of the #1 Liberal Arts College in America.

Gee Tony, maybe you should have had that lunch with Dave Keenan a while back—he would have told you (in a most colorful way) that this is insanity.

And could you not have at least waited until after the November 4 election to drop this bomb? Now Mr. Hayden (I would hope a highly regarded Amherst College employee) is going to take a beating on this issue probably as early as tonight at the League of Women Voters’ candidate’s night.

Mr. Morales has already played the race card, likening Aaron to “John McCain.” Now with this awful announcement they will by tying him to the College and suggesting he helped pass out diseased blanket to the darn Indians.

Hey Tony, it's okay with me if you fly that majestic American flag on Chapel High at half-staff next week when the Jeff closes.

Rainbow over South Amherst

4: 35 PM (Crocker Farm School)

Hope springs eternal.

Another one bites the dust

So I and 146 other movers and shakers just received a depressing email. Curt Shumway, my former Amherst Redevelopment Authority compatriot and current Hotel/Motel Czar in the Happy Valley, is migrating from Amherst to South Hadley.

Yeah they can have Anne Awad, Barry Del Castilho (is he still acting Town Manager?) and School Superintendent Gus Sayer; but one of Amherst’s venerable founding families? Say it isn’t so!

And of course, that is a major problem with our fair town: Even multi-generational townies like Curt Shumway get fed up and move away.

Click to enlarge

Revitalizing the crop?

After the last Christmas tree is sold, the Amherst Pelham Boy Scouts always clean up after themselves at Kendrick Park. The same cannot be said for the out-of-town wheat growers. Well, at least we didn’t finance them with CPA funds.

Looked better back in June

CPA snafu

So the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has decided: the precedent setting case is now the law of the land (Massachusetts land that is): A community cannot use CPA funds to improve or rehabilitate land that was purchased prior to the creation of the CPA.

Like our Plum Brook Weeds, errrrrr, I mean Soccer fields--land purchased in 1974 for conservation/recreation and thirty years later expensively fine tuned into a more specific recreational pursuit, although still not ready for Prime Time.

While the court did not decide whether to grandfather projects already illegally completed (such as Plum Brook) they did clearly say: “We also have been urged to specify that our interpretation will be applied prospectively such that our ruling will have no effect on CPA appropriations already expended by municipalities throughout the Commonwealth. This issue has not been raised by the parties, and we reserve opinion on the matter until it is properly presented.”

Either way, The People’s Republic of Amherst was greedy enough to leverage CPA funds by taking out a large loan repaid over ten years.

So now you have to wonder: where is Amherst going to find the $40,000 annual loan payment over the next five or six years to retire the original $500,000 loan?

If Amherst cannot expend legally and properly the money it gets with the 1.5% CPA tax, how can we trust them with doubling that tax burden to 3%?

My original "I told you so"

The Boston Globe Reports (yeah, the Crusty Gazette will get around to it)