Let the floodgates open

Four viable consultants responded to the Gateway Project RFP

February may be the shortest month of the year, but for the Amherst Redevelopment Authority it will be our busiest in over a generation with three meetings scheduled to peruse proposals submitted by consultants competing for the job of leading a "visioning process" to ensure public acceptance of the proposed Gateway Project, the most ambitious undertaking for the ARA since founding almost 40 years ago.

At our last meeting 1/31 we were presented with the four consultant proposals and a legal opinion from the town attorney stating that Umass is indeed exempt from all local zoning when it comes to the Gateway Project, meaning they can do whatever they damn well please with that property--especially since they paid $2 million to acquire it, and tens of thousands more to demolish the five frat houses.

Of course if vocal NIMBYs had their way, the ARA would be spending the next three meetings playing solitaire. Their unelected leader, John Fox, appeared before the Amherst Select Board on 12/20/10 to submit a petition that requested a moratorium on the current consultant search.

Ironically the consultant is being hired precisely to attract and engage ALL stakeholders (including taxpayers townwide) in a process that allows EVERYONE a voice to shape what develops at that strategic location--not just those immediate neighbors with a misguided sensitivity fueled by a bawdy recent past.

This outreach curation will include at least six provincial stakeholder meetings and then another three Charrettes--a kind of Three Ring Circus where everybody gets to come under one big tent to share feedback.

By March 1st we will have chosen a consultant; they will spend 8 to 10 weeks dealing with a myriad of planning details--not to mention voluminous feedback from the general public.

Then the consultant provides the ARA with an initial draft of the "Gateway Project Vision" and we put it under our microscope. They then come back with a revised version incorporating our suggestions and that version, hopefully, is finalized by a majority vote (preferably a unanimous vote).

And even then, the finished proposal is formally presented in a joint public meeting of the ARA and the Planning Board. All leading up to the biggest hoop of all: a two-thirds vote of Amherst Town Meeting to approve the new zoning required for turning this dream into reality.

Yes, more hoops than a Chinese hula hoop factory. But in the end, well worth it.

Snow be gone

Walmart Hadley roof snow removal

Blue Flag on a blue/white background. (I hear it's hot in Egypt about now.)

Expanding my audience

UPDATE: 9:35 AM

So my radio debut went well if I do say so myself. As usual, the only problem is not enough time or bandwidth to properly discuss "All things Amherst." I had planned to highlight four hot button issues (any one of which could end up being the issue of the year) and really only managed to work in two of them: the impending Superintendent search decision and the somewhat intertwined School Committee race between upstart incumbent Catherine Sanderson and newcomer Katherine Appy.

Did not have the time to touch on the other two, Umass related, issues: Blockading Lincoln Avenue access to Umass for the first time in 150 years; and the Gateway Project, an ambitious significant infrastructure upgrade dressing up the main entryway to Umass formerly stained by the slummy presence of Frat Row.

Oh well, there's always next week.
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ORIGINAL POST: Wednesday night
So tomorrow morning I start my weekly gig at WHMP radio with a 7:40 AM eight minute segment on Chris Collins Morning News broadcast talking about "All things Amherst." I've always loved radio because of the immediacy--kind of like the Internet.

Fifty years ago my mother routinely set the clock radio alarm to WHMP during school days to rouse us in the morning (and during the winter hoping for a school closing announcement, as she was a public school teacher in Easthampton.)

So I would almost always awaken to the sound of the legendary newsman with a golden voice, Ron Hall.

The Ghost of Christmas yet to come?

So yeah, I'm sticking my oversized neck out by publishing this but, unlike WikiLeaks, I will provide background and context for this important document, obtained under the legitimate protection of an Executive Session Monday night at the Amherst Redevelopment Authority meeting (legal advice from the town attorney is exempt from disclosure under Mass Public Documents Law.)

Kind of an "Executive Decision" on my part--as the acting Chair of the ARA and, as such, I of course take full responsibility.

I consider it a journalistic "correction" for something I previously published. When overly concerned, outspoken neighbor John Fox (a retired Washington attorney) visited the Amherst Select Board to rail against the Gateway Project and present to them a petition signed by 147 fellow "concerned citizens" he also attached to that petition an email exchange he had with town planner Christine Brestrup declaring Umass was subject to local town zoning and as such was limited in what they could develop on the former Frat Row, a now vacant prime piece of property (worth millions) sitting at the entry/Gateway to Umass.

Turns out our town attorney disagrees with that assumption. And it's an extremely critical point: UMass does not need the town or the ARA to build anything--including any kind of housing--on the former Frat Row. Backs up what Mr. Diacon pointed out an an ARA meeting months ago; they could build a 20 story residential project designed exclusively for undergrads if they so desired--all of it off the property tax rolls.

Key sentence of attorney Bard's email being the close: "It is therefore my opinion that, were UMass to retain ownership of the Gateway site and to development it for its own use in furtherance of its essential governmental function, such development of the site would not be controlled by the Town's Zoning Bylaw."

So NIMBY neighbors: be careful what you wish for. Torpedo the Gateway Project as envisioned in this joint coalition between the town, ARA and Umass...at your own risk.

Gateway supporters show resolve

left to right: Todd Diacon, John Musante, Jonathan Tucker

If nothing else tonight's Amherst Redevelopment Authority meeting reaffirmed the strong partnership already forged between the ARA, Umass and the town, as Deputy Chancellor Todd Diacon and Town Manager John Musante clarified their vision for the Gateway Project before the ARA and a packed room of 50 onlookers, many of them concerned neighbors defending their backyards from the perceived spectre of the college town bogeyman: undergraduates.

Musante outlined four main objectives:

1) Create a development that the community wants.

2) Strengthen the neighborhood by constructing higher end housing to compete with seedy substandard slums.

3) Increase the towns tax base, stimulate jobs and bring customers to the downtown via the Gateway corridor.

4) Give the town a significant say in what gets developed there because indeed something is going to get developed one way or the other.

Deputy Chancellor Diacon called the Gateway a "signature attraction at the entrance to our campus". And to counter the constant complaint from neighbors about substantial undergrad student housing being a core requirement of the deal, Diacon pointed out the University is currently constructing 1,500 beds for the Commonwealth Honors College in the heart of the campus which goes a long way towards alleviating the needs for undergraduate housing.

If Gateway is built and the doesn't include undergraduates in the apartments that would "fine with us." The University is not demanding the housing be "only for undergraduates."


In his closing remarks, borrowing a them from President Obama (who borrowed it from 'Bob The Builder'), the Town Manager said confidently "I think we can do this. We have the talent. We can do something pretty special along North Pleasant Street."

Out of the four proposals received to lead the vision process, the ARA hopes to select a consultant by March 1st.
View from the head table

Amherst's Berlin Wall: The news spreads

UPDATE (11:15 PM): public hearing Tuesday night has been canceled due to the weather

UPDATE (10:15 AM) Note poll over on the right. You can only vote once and No, you do not have to live in the People's Republic in order to vote, as you may want to someday drive to Umass, the veritable flagship of our state higher education system.

Springfield Sunday Republican reports (click hotlink to read)

Yeah, the readership of the Sunday paper is probably twice that of other editions. Yikes!

If town officials were smart they would start this "experiment" on April 1st, and then after the deluge of cranky calls, emails and text messages overwhelms the system by the end of the day, nix the project the following day and just attribute the whole thing to an "April Fools Joke".

I shot an arrow into the air...

By the time the Challenger vaporized in real time before millions of stunned viewers 25 years ago I was already an avowed news junkie and I was auditing a course taught by the legendary Howard Ziff, founder of the highly regarded Umass journalism program.

Coincidentally enough he had scheduled the editor of the Concord Monitor, Christa McAuliffe's hometown newspaper, to be a guest lecturer that semester and he appeared only weeks after the disaster.

I asked him what he would have done if he absolutely knew beyond a shadow of a doubt the Challenger would explode that morning but had no corroboration. He looked me directly in the eye and said (with his voice somewhat trembling) he would have done "Anything--absolutely anything--to get the word out, including standing in town center naked with a warning tattooed to my butt."

Of course in 1986 the Internet was strictly a niche work area for nerdy scientists plus the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, was not even born. Still, the viral spread of news about the stunning disaster was nothing short of amazing. Within an hour 85% of Americans had heard about it and most of them ran to their televisions to watch it...over and over again.

I knew one of the astronauts, Ron McNair--a traditional style black belt who fought in local karate tournaments in the Boston area even though NASA disapproved. And my only verbal interaction with him after we fought at Rocky DiRico's tournament was to tell him how cool I considered it that he still did what he loved even though it made his bosses nervous.

He said something to the effect that he also loved equally being an astronaut, and could not conceive of giving up either. Christa McAuliffe loved being a teacher. Ironically in a preflight interview she had said it would be cool to go from teaching history to making it.

I have often wondered if the Power of the Web had been harnessed prior to that ill-fated flight if it could have made the life or death difference? Perhaps a word of warning sounded by an engineer (on his personal blog) who helped design the o-rings and knew they were not safe in sub freezing temperatures would have brought further pressure to bear on bureaucrats who had put aside their engineer hats in favor of their manager ones.

But now I'm not so sure. Only nine months ago the Deepwater Horizon, a super-expensive, pride of American technology oil platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing 11 workers and creating the worst environmental disaster in history. There too engineers put aside ethics in favor of expediency and the bottom line.

As Pete Seeger observed in a song so very long ago: "When will they ever learn?"



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