Déjà vu all over again

The guts of last night’s meeting were devoted to a technicality.

Apparently, upon meeting an absurdly low threshold for “new information,” any article from the current Town Meeting can be reconsidered if it is so moved by a member who voted with the majority, abstained or was absent during the initial consideration.

This is really great news. We have 70-100 people absent each session. Think of the possibilities! Amherst’s 247th Annual Town Meeting might well go on in perpetuity.

And so a member absent the first time and now present for his fourth session so far (out of eleven) moved that we reconsider Article 23, the one about fixing the Professional Research Park zoning designation to allow “quiet businesses” to meet with clients on site, if such client visits are primarily by appointment.

Let’s be perfectly clear here: I support this zoning change. I am disappointed and frankly mystified by the opposition to this. But I did not support its reconsideration.

Why not? So many reasons. This met the “letter of the law” allowing reconsideration, but it in no way met the spirit. If you condone misusing reconsideration in this way now because it serves your purposes, you lose the moral authority to oppose such misuse by “the other side.” Anything that exploits absence for benefit is odious to me. Heck, if just a couple more people who supported this change had not been absent the first time, we wouldn’t even have this problem. But they were absent, and that resulted in a loss, and that should teach us all a lesson: you need to come and vote every night folks – that’s what this is all about. And you also have to accept defeat. Democracy doesn’t mean you always get your way.

The new information claims were also particularly lame: Having now gone through the budget, we know what bad shape we’re in, and people might have voted differently the first time if they had known it would be so bad. If there are TM members for whom that is true, it does not bode well for the body.

A lot of the arguments against reconsideration were just as bad, and it pained me to be allied with them. How can we reconsider this when we don’t even remember what this issue is about? We didn’t bring our paperwork on this. We can’t remember how we voted last time. People who were absent last time don’t have enough information. The budget is balanced – this won’t help. Please.

Eventually we had a tally vote on the motion to reconsider. It passed with 89 voting in support, and 81 opposed. I voted to oppose.

So this vote now transports us back to the point in discussion right before the vote several weeks ago. People start making all the same arguments for and against. Tiny rational change. Step toward diversifying tax base. Big-picture benefit. Traffic! Plenty of empty space around! Eek – change!

My favorite ridiculous arguments:

There’s so much available vacant space, so obviously demand isn’t there. Despite claims to the contrary, these spaces are primarily store fronts. In addition to being more expensive than office space, it is crazy to think that you would put a professional services firm in a space that is intended for something like a pizza place or a bike shop. Yeah, you could if you were exceptionally desperate, but otherwise you wouldn’t. You’d go to Hadley.

We say we want a vibrant downtown, but this could draw business away from there. Right. Because nothing gives a downtown that fun, bustling, vibrant flair like professional offices. Downtowns are about retail, restaurants and entertainment. Sure, other kinds of businesses like to be in that mix, but they don’t contribute to the vibrancy. It’s nice to be able to stop in at your accountant’s office or your lawyer’s office while you’re downtown doing other things, but if downtown were all lawyers and accountants, you wouldn’t have been there in the first place.

This designation was intended to help UMass research start-ups, and we can’t abandon them. A change to this designation wouldn’t preclude such UMass entities; it would allow them and others. Instead, we have neither.

Honestly, I can’t understand why this doesn’t pass. (And it doesn’t. This is its second attempt at this TM, and it has come before the body several times previously.) I can see why the neighbors in Amherst Woods don’t want it, even though I think they are being unreasonable. At least their opposition makes a little sense – abutters never want anything changed. But what about everyone else? I can only conclude that it is because some people oppose any development of any kind – even smart, quiet, clean, low-impact development.

So there was no new drama in this discussion. There was a motion to refer it back to the planning board, and that failed in a tally vote with 58 supporting and 112 opposing, and I voted to oppose. We then had a tally vote again on the main motion, and again it failed, this time by a wider margin: 102 supporting, 69 opposed, and I voted in support. Last time it was 99 supporting, 52 opposed. It required a 2/3 majority.

This raises some interesting issues. If you’re going to go through the trouble and aggravation of reconsideration, I would think you’d only do so if you were absolutely certain it would work in your favor. Perhaps they thought they were sure, but maybe some people who supported the vote last time changed their vote this time because they were offended by the reconsideration. Personally, I think that would be an irresponsible vote. We can always only vote what is in front of us. Those opposing reconsideration had the opportunity to express that opposition with the vote on the motion to reconsider. But it passed. Again – you don’t always get the outcome you want. But that was the outcome, and now we were voting on the merits of the article. To be voting a grudge instead of the current motion is wrong. What’s next – you oppose a motion just because you don’t like the person making it? The system really falls apart if we don’t defend its integrity. Not much good happened in that regard last night.

Once that debacle ended – after like an hour and half – we moved on to the Community Presevation Act articles. CPAC money is collected through a property tax surcharge, and the money can only be used in four categories: affordable housing, open space, historic preservation and recreation. CPAC money cannot be diverted to the schools, the operating budget, etc. This makes these articles quite non-controversial. The first was divided into three parts.

Article 32A was to appropriate $6500 of CPAC funds to the Amherst Housing Authority for various repairs and improvements to a four-unit affordable housing property the town owns in North Amherst, called Keet House. The vote to approve this was unanimous.

32B was to appropriate $45,000 to the AHA for money toward the final financing package for a planned 11-unit affordable housing project on Main Street. It also passed unanimously.

32C was to appropriate $30,000 for the 4-unit project on Stanley Street that will partner Habitat for Humanity and Amherst College, on land donated by the college. That too received unanimous support.

Article 33 was about appropriating $92,500 in CPAC funds for a variety of historic preservation projects, including work at the town cemeteries, studying the town commons, researching the expansion of historic districts, finding ways to protect historic houses, continuing the funding of archival preservation of historic town records, and funding publications about the various historic districts of town. The vote on this was also unanimous, or may have had one or two quiet opposers.

Article 34 was to appropriate $125,000 toward protecting open space on the Holyoke Range, either through purchasing the property in question, or purchasing a conservation restriction on it. The value of the property is substantially higher than this, and other funding sources will contribute to the ultimate financial package. Determining whether it is purchased outright or protected by the deed restriction was not up to Town Meeting – just appropriating these funds toward one of those eventual outcomes. This passed with near unanimous support – a handful of people voted to oppose. I voted in support, as I did with all these CPA articles.

And with that, we called it a night.


Random Bits

The meeting began at about 7:37 – a record!

The first order of business was a nice one: outgoing Town Clerk Anna Maciaszek was presented with flowers and gifts for her service to the Town, with particular appreciation for continuing to assist Town Meeting, even though her new job in Connecticut has already begun. A donation envelope and a card have been circulating during the last couple of sessions. With the moderator temporarily suspending the TM rule against applause, Anna received a standing ovation.

This was Hawaiian Shirt Night. Is this a real tradition? I have no idea. Mysterious e-mails and rumors about it circulated during the day. I would say about a third of us participated, myself included. I thought it was a great idea – fun, simple, unifying. Bravo! Or Aloha! Or whatever.

If approval of the reconsideration motion put us back to the pre-vote point in the original discussion, then I wonder why the Planning Board didn’t sit at the tables up front. Instead, a couple of non-TM PB members were stuck trying unsuccessfully to be recognized from the gallery, and Paul Bobrowski had to do all the PB work.

I’m thinking that the night TM finally ends – assuming we ever reach that point – I will be celebrating its conclusion afterwards at my favorite downtown establishment, the Amherst Brewing Company. Will you join me? We’ll hoist a non-partisan pint to a job well done. Or at least, a job done, well or otherwise. Cheers to that.