So we launched SustainableAmherst.org, where Andy, Clare, and Baer have written down our values and mapped them to Town Meeting tally votes.  Then we can compare how candidates have voted to the direction we would like our small town to take.  We have analyzed each of the 253 candidates for the 240 positions up for election this year in Amherst and are endorsing those candidates whom we believe share in our vision for Amherst.

Sustainable Amherst TM Endorsements
(http://sustainableamherst.org/2012-candidates)

Take a look, each endorsement links to the candidates’ voting history, so you can do your own research!

We’d like to thank all our neighbors who are volunteering to serve in Town Meeting, whether we agree on our town’s direction or not.  Much of our town is governed and managed by volunteers to selflessly give of their time.  Thanks!

http://www.wheredoivotema.com/bal/myelectioninfo.php

Next Tuesday, April 3rd is our town election (7am-8pm) and due to redistricting we will each vote for ALL 24 Town Meeting positions. Andy, Clare, and Baer at Sustainable Amherst will be reviewing all the candidates voting records in town meeting against the values we’ve laid out for Sustainable Amherst and post endorsements in the next few days.

In the meantime, you can be doing your own research! Here are some great links:

Sample Ballots:
http://amherstma.gov/DocumentView.aspx?DID=6386

Research TM Voting Records:
http://www.tallyvotes.org

All 240 Town Meeting seats are up for election this year (due to redistricting). This is the time for you to jump in, and help support our schools and town by joining Town Meeting! Just stop by Town Hall and sign the form. Do it today!

Don’t know about Town Meeting?  Town Meeting…

• is a commitment of only about 10 nights/year from 7:30-10pm in the ARMS auditorium.
• approves the school, library, and town budgets.  Town Meeting creates all local laws and zoning.
• is joined by going to Town Hall and signing the TM candidate form.  This year’s election is 4/2/12.
• has 24 seats in each precinct (map).  All are up for reelection this year, which means this is a great year to join TM.
• is over 300 years old in Amherst (originally Hadley pre-1759)
• is a great way to learn what is going on in town, in addition to doing your civic duty.
• is followed by members to quaff a cold beverage and discuss our town.
• has great impact on the quality of life in our town.  It’s important to have a rational and representative Town Meeting.
• is both fun and a great way to provide civic service to our town.

Questions?

More info here: amherstma.gov/townmeeting

The problem is sprawl:  unplanned, uncontrolled development that spreads out into areas outside of town and village centers.

• Loss of agricultural land, habitat, rural character
• Over-dependence on the automobile, large carbon footprint
• Unplanned incursion of students into family neighborhoods
• Costly extension of sewer lines and other town services to low-density areas
• Lack of workforce and middle-income housing

How to fight sprawl:  promote a planned, controlled, and higher-density mix of housing and businesses in town and village centers, to protect open space in the rest of town.  This is what the community has said it wanted for years, and it was codified in the Master Plan.

Article 17 fights sprawl and protects open space by promoting environmentally sensible densification of housing and businesses in village centers where people can live, work, and access public transportation.

The alternative to Article 17 is the current hodgepodge.  The North Amherst triangle today is a largely unattractive, unplanned mix of old gas stations, street-side parking lots, student rental houses, grandfathered light industrial uses, and so on.  We can do better, and as the South Amherst village center develops, we want to avoid this there, too.

Article 17 uses “form-based code” for better control over how these village centers look and work, not just what types of uses are allowed.  The new zoning focuses on making the overall design of the village centers more walkable, liveable, connected, and coherent.  This includes the design of streetscapes, buildings, site layouts, open spaces, walking and biking lanes, and how these things are connected.  Large apartment buildings are discouraged by having to face a higher level of scrutiny from the ZBA.  Parking lots are placed out of sight.  Mixed-use commercial and residential development appealing to a variety of residents is encouraged.

Article 17 provides a blueprint for good planning of residential units, in a diverse mix.  This is important because many of our current housing problems come from a LACK of planning.  For example, the design of the Townhouse apartments in North Amherst provides large numbers of uniform, small units and interior courtyards – a recipe for large, uncontrolled gatherings of young people.  Article 17 would require a mix of 1-bedroom, 2-bedroom, and 3-bedroom unit types.  This is designed to encourage the diverse mix of housing types and residents (families, retirees, town employees, students, etc.) needed for both responsible behavior and a socially and economically vital village center.

Article 17 increases costs to developers up front in exchange for greater clarity about what types of development will be approved if they follow the rules.  The article does not approve any particular development.  What it does do, though, is lay out the rules in advance for what types of developments are likely to be approved and what types are going to have a hard time.  The town is better able to control the appearance, environmental footprint, and livability of these existing village centers, while builders have some assurance that if they spend money up front on planning and materials to meet these more-specific town standards they will be able to move forward.

It’s easy to dismiss this opposition as selfish Not-In-My-BackYard NIMBYism, but the truth is, none of us likes to bear the brunt of change. It’s natural to be a NIMBY.

There’s an inherent fairness question whenever one group is asked to make a change for the benefit of the larger community. But the answer is not to avoid any change at all, for fear of hurting someone. The answer is to get as clear as possible about (1) why we need to change, (2) what the actual costs and benefits will be, and (3) how risk will be apportioned.

Change happens. We all feel a sense of loss when we lose what’s comfortable and familiar. We certainly need to assess the risks and costs of change, but we also need to realize that if we do nothing to improve our local revenues, we are opting for change nonetheless. It is simply the change that comes from repeatedly cutting away at our town’s quality of life, leaving ourselves at the mercy of state and national trends that are beyond our control.

We’ve already cut $7 million out of our town services in the past few years. The library held a barbecue fundraiser to keep Friday service hours. We closed an elementary school to keep from wiping out arts and music. And we’re all driving around potholes and wondering where the money will come from to fix them.

The solar farm and Gateway are big, game-changing projects that offer us the opportunity to take control of our financial destiny for years into the future. They do so by leveraging our green values and college-town resources.

But they have to be done right. We would love to see neighbors of these projects take the approach of “How can we make this work?” rather than “This has to stop at all costs.” We began to see this approach at the Gateway visioning sessions last week; we hope this constructive engagement continues.

On the solar farm, let’s approach the questions carefully and fully. Landfill neighbors want greater clarity on the actual, net revenues that will be generated by the solar farm; we agree that the best possible financial information should be provided to Town Meeting.

One neighbor compared the solar farm to a nuclear power plant, saying there’s a small risk of a catastrophic event. Let’s lose the hyperbole but answer the valid questions about the likelihood of an accidental breach of the landfill cap, how catastrophic such a breach would be, and, as one homeowner put it, “Who’s going to help me if there’s a leak and my property value goes to zero?”

Town Meeting should hear how these risks will be assessed and what the ultimate approval process will be. But then Town Meeting should vote Yes to let negotiations proceed on a project plan that will still need to face regulatory scrutiny.

Finally, we need to be as clear-eyed about the “devil we know” as we are imaginative about the “devil we don’t”. Gateway neighbors live in a college town with lots of college students. Solar farm neighbors live next to an old dump now. These proposals shouldn’t be weighed against a pristine world without these pre-existing conditions.

Under the right circumstances, we’re all NIMBYs. But let’s work to avoid the hyperbole and collaborate on solutions that help our town while not unfairly penalizing single households. By putting ourselves in our neighbors’ shoes, we can make sure we get the best answers possible to key questions of cost, benefit, risk, and fairness, as we work to secure a more stable fiscal future for us all.

Town Meeting starts on May 2nd and we’ll be discussing lots of fun topics, like the town and schools budget, the proposed solar farm on the old landfill, where we’ll invest our CPA dollars, a number of zoning changes, and other town business such as keeping livestock in town.  You can find the warrant here (the warrant is basically Town Meeting’s agenda).

Our kids have their lists of chores, too, but staying on task can be a challenge: “I know I said I’d clean my room, but I thought instead I should organize my Legos.” Nice idea, but meanwhile that room isn’t cleaning itself …

Which brings us to the Amherst School Committee. With two new members and three others who aren’t shrinking violets, there are lots of ideas flying around. “Let’s add elementary Spanish.” “Let’s get a new lawyer.”

“Let’s have a communication subcommittee.” “Let’s separate from Pelham.”

Some of these sound like good ideas, others less so, but who knows? The bigger question is, how do these fit in with the existing to-do list? Since there will always be more ideas than time/energy/money to implement them, how do we as a community set our priorities for the schools?

What goes at the top of the to-do list, and what goes lower, perhaps to wait for another day?

To its credit, the School Committee (which included one of the authors of this column) and the previous superintendent worked collaboratively at the beginning of this year to create a to-do list, a plan, for the district.

It’s a good list of priority goals for the schools – but it’s also a long list, with 18 goals altogether.

Implementing this goals list is a huge amount of work that includes: ensuring a smooth closure of Mark’s Meadow school; redistricting all 1,321 elementary students and the staff that serve them; aligning curriculum across grades and classes; evaluating the math curriculum, the middle school, and the special education program; hiring new principals in Pelham and the middle school; working on budget transparency with a citizen’s advisory committee; and much more (for the full list, go to www.arps.org/node/1082). Some of this has been accomplished, but there’s still lots still to do.

The schools are working on these tasks while having to make do with lower staffing levels than previously.

The success of the override only meant that things aren’t as bad as they would otherwise have been – we will now “only” cut $2.5 million out of current staffing levels town-wide, instead of $4.2 million.

With so much work to do and ever-tightening budgets, each new idea – each addition to the to-do list – means something else may not get done. Music, art and physical ed have been cut in our elementary schools in previous years – do we add Spanish, or do we restore some of those cuts? Or should we do something else? There are trade offs in each decision, and they need to be considered comprehensively.

We believe School Committee members should build on their previous good work that resulted in this year’s plan. In the short term, they should use that list of district goals as it was intended, to frame the committee’s agenda for the rest of the year. They worked with the superintendent to create this to-do list; now they should allow staff to do the work and schedule regular updates to discuss how it’s going.

Looking forward, the School Committee and school administrators need to come together to develop a shared vision of what the community wants from its schools. Our schools need a sustainable process of continuous improvement that builds on existing strengths and incorporates new ideas in a systematic way. The School Committee’s role is to represent community interests and keep a steady hand on the tiller. Changing course every month only wastes our precious resources.

There is so much to do already, including the hiring of a much-needed curriculum director and a permanent superintendent. Simply making piecemeal additions to an already extensive to-do list without an overall strategy is a recipe for frustration. We urge the School Committee to work collaboratively with the administration to set a vision, then a strategy, and then to allow the schools to execute that plan over the year. Then adjust course the next year.

That kind of leadership will not only enable us to get closer to our destination, but will also give everyone on board a more satisfying voyage.

Amherst Center is written for the Amherst Bulletin by school parents and Town Meeting members Clare Bertrand, Andy Churchill and Baer Tierkel.

We also urge you to vote for Rick Hood in the contested School Committee race on the same day.

In considering the override vote, think for a minute why you live in Amherst, and not Belchertown, Hadley, Greenfield or Northampton.

Why is Amherst such a great place to live?

Well, it didn’t happen by accident.

Amherst is what it is because previous generations of residents have invested in schools, libraries, public safety, recreation, open space, elder services – the public infrastructure that makes up the fabric of our community, supporting our diversity, our vibrancy and our strong property values.

Now the national economic crisis is threatening the Amherst we’ve built. The state has cut our funding by $3.1 million over the last two years, and another $1.1 million in state aid cuts are expected next year. We can’t control the federal and state fiscal climate.

But we can step up locally to protect our community from the worst of the damage from this short-term, external crisis.

Some will argue that Amherst has been living beyond our means for years, and that we need to “tighten our belt first.”

Well, the good news for you is that Amherst has already tightened its belt.

While Northampton was passing their override last year, Amherst was cutting 51 staff from the schools and 13.5 from town departments (including three police officers).

Our town officials took seriously the message from the failure of the 2007 override.

They asked a citizens’ Facilitation of Community Choices Committee to examine the budget and identify strategies for closing Amherst’s structural deficit.

Here are the areas the FCCC identified in 2008, and what has happened since:

1. Increase fees for services. Done. LSSE is now practically all fee-based; other fees increased.

2. Increase revenue from ambulance service. Done. Rates have been increased.

3. Reduce costs through efficiencies, consolidation and regionalization.We’ve closed a school, closed a pool, consolidated departments in Town Hall, restructured health plans, pursued regional emergency dispatch and cut more than 60 staff.

4. Increase economic development. Master plan is done; business zoning is revamped; revenue-generating projects include the Lord Jeff, Boltwood Place, New England Environmental. Patterson property development and UMass taxable student housing discussions are ongoing.

5. Implement local option meals/lodging tax. Done. New, annual revenues now coming in.

6. Secure a Proposition 2½ override. Yes, the citizens’ fiscal committee said we would need one.

Our public officials have done the hard work needed to balance our budget over the long term.

Even with the override, we will have made $7 million in cuts this year and next.

What we face now is the short-term problem of the recession.

We can’t just keep cutting our way out – not if we want to emerge with the things we value about our community intact.

Enough is enough.

We need this override to save our schools, libraries and town operations from making an additional $1.68 million of the worst cuts.

Based on prioritized lists of the most critical, staff-identified needs, potential cuts will be rolled back as follows: $400,000 in the elementary schools, $739,195 in the middle and high schools, $88,994 in the libraries, and $452,252 in town operations. (For more information, visit voteyesforamherst.org.)

Here’s what it will cost you: for the average house ($334,600 assessed value) – $22 per month. And since property taxes are deductible, it actually comes to less than $16/month for the average taxpayer. That’s only about $3.50 a week!

Amherst has only had two overrides to support the operating budget in 30 years – we don’t do this very often.

But it’s time now to come together as a community and once again protect our investment in a quality of life that has been built over generations.

A final word on candidate Rick Hood: He will be an excellent School Committee member.

A Web designer and local business owner, he understands budgets and cares deeply about improving communication between the schools and the public. (For more information, visit rickhoodforamherst.org.)

A former president of the high school Parent Center, he brings knowledge of the high school to a committee that dearly needs it. And his thoughtful, low-key manner will help smooth the sometimes stormy waters of committee meetings.

Three thumbs up!

Amherst Center is a monthly column which appears in The Amherst Bulletin that seeks to portray local issues from a centrist perspective. It is written by Town Meeting members Baer Tierkel and Clare Bertrand and School Committee member Andy Churchill. Amherst Center appears in The Amherst Bulletin on the last Friday of each month.

* “As a graduate of ARHS, I found that it prepared me extremely well for the workload at Oberlin.”

* “I definitely know that my excellent high school preparation allowed me to succeed in very difficult courses (at Harvard). In particular, my mathematics preparation set me up for success in college-level math.”

* “I feel as though I was just as well prepared as many of the prep school kids that also attend Williams.”

* “I felt extremely well prepared for Dartmouth College. In particular, I believe my writing skills were superior to my peers at school solely due to training/courses in high school. In science, preparation was strong compared to incoming freshman.”

* “I feel very prepared for the kind of writing that I am doing (at the University of Vermont) this year. The social studies department especially did an excellent job in preparing me for college-level essays and research.”

* “ARHS has more life-changing teachers than I believed possible, many of them better teachers than my college professors (at Northeastern).”

* “(At ARHS) I wrote a 20-page final paper for honors economics, and several 12-page papers for AP English & a good number of my peers at Haverford had never written more than five pages at once. I am extremely grateful to have attended a school like ARHS that challenged and prepared me for my future education.”

* “ARHS prepared me to take risks and be open to a wide variety of paths -both at the (College of the Atlantic) and after. I had the opportunity to take many different classes in different subjects, academic and elective, that made me realize how many possibilities there are for future study.”

* “Students at ARHS are able to select classes that they are interested in which allows them to be more confident in their likes and dislikes when entering college where they should focus on a more specific field.

I found that ARHS helped me to discover myself; however, I see many students at Gettysburg College who have no idea who they are.”

* “I am particularly worried about two things due to budget cuts: the size of classes increasing and the loss of the classes that most interest and inspire students. I thrived on meeting with teachers after school to work on a project or a piece of writing, extensive comments on essays, and feeling like I got to know the teacher & and they knew a good amount about who I was. This kind of teacher-student relationship severely decreases as class size goes up.” (College of the Atlantic)

* “I’m especially worried about electives. I think it is really vital that nonacademic options are available to kids, because not everyone finds their calling in academics, and without something else to hold onto, they will likely find themselves adrift.” (Pomona)

* “I am extremely worried about (losing) the small class sizes of the social studies department. I believe I learned how to craft an essay extremely well in those classes, and a large class size would hurt the deep levels of analysis we were able to do. I also strongly believe most of the sense of community at ARHS comes from the performing arts department, and this strongly needs to be preserved.” (Lawrence University, transferring to Oberlin)

* “People at Harvard are surprised to learn that we had three students from (ARHS) all accepted last year.

With less money, the kind of opportunities given to me would not be possible for future students, and a decline in our seniors’ intellectual achievements and success rates in getting into competitive schools is sure to follow.”

* “A town that is not willing to fund its schools is sending the message to its students that their education is not valuable. I remember feeling a sense of abandonment when I heard about all of the cuts that were being made to the classes I thought were teaching me so much.” (UVM)

We are confident that we would receive similarly supportive responses regarding the other public systems and services that have been built up over generations in Amherst. We need to recognize what we have, and what we could lose if we don’t protect it.

We have cut our budgets across our town for five years now, eating away at the fabric that makes our town a wonderful place.

We need to be ready to step up and pass an override to preserve these fundamental elements of Amherst for the future.

Amherst Center is a monthly column which appears in The Amherst Bulletin that seeks to portray local issues from a centrist perspective. It is written by Town Meeting members Baer Tierkel and Clare Bertrand and School Committee member Andy Churchill. Amherst Center appears in The Amherst Bulletin on the last Friday of each month.

1. Lose weight (of the rhetorical kind). Town Meeting was pretty efficient this year – only 10 nights total – and a lot of positive work got done. So the scale indicates the diet is working, but the doctor wants us to keep exercising our restraint, our compassion and our muscles of collaboration.

2. Take a trip (look at how other places do things). Our town manager took the Kendrick Park committee to New Hampshire to check out options for our newest downtown park. And the schools have brought in new perspectives and are looking at “benchmark” districts. The challenge here is to take the best ideas from others while not selling our existing areas of excellence short.

3. Prioritize that to-do list (we can’t afford to do everything). The citizens’ fiscal committee (the FCCC) led the way, and the state’s fiscal crisis sealed the deal. With state aid back below 2002 levels, our administrators, boards and committees are making the tough decisions – closing a school, closing a pool and slashing staffing levels. We applaud this new focus on efficiency. The challenge now is to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

4. Get a pay raise (boost our tax base with economic development). A new, green LEED-certified building is almost completed in our professional research park in east Amherst, an innovative new building is proposed downtown for the first time in many years, and the Lord Jeff is back on track to open by 2011. Good job! Now we need some taxable student housing for all those additional students the university is admitting. Avoiding more unplanned “party houses” and raising new tax revenues – it’s a win-win.

5. Stop blaming others (take responsibility for our own future). We really deserve a big pat on the back for this one. The work we have done to address our financial reality – cuts plus new efficiencies – represents our sadder, wiser maturity. We see the work ahead of us, we’ve made hard decisions, and we need to continue to rely upon ourselves to fund what is important to us.

6. Improve your education (hire good school staff, expect excellence, and provide needed resources). Since we wrote this, the schools have gone through a leadership transition that is still shaking out – four new principals (one is gone already) and four different superintendents (two interims shared the job, before leaving it to a third interim). At the same time, the schools cut the equivalent of 55 full-time staff just last year and face more big cuts this year, including the closing of Mark’s Meadow school. So it’s been a tough time. But it looks to us like the schools have hired well, eliminated an unjust imbalance in the elementary schools, increased efficiencies and agreed upon some rigorous and forward-looking goals for this year. As parents with kids from elementary to high school, we continue to be impressed by the many examples of excellence, caring and professionalism we see from our educators in the face of these annual cuts.

7. Quit smokin’! (quit the unhealthy fuming). This continues to be a challenge here locally. We seem to abide by the rules of not smoking in plain sight, but we still smoke in the boys/girls room, fuming anonymously on blogs, for example, name-calling and throwing out strident assertions based on incomplete facts. Sure, we should question authority, but let’s do so together in a spirit of inquiry, not inquisition.

8. Volunteer (get involved in making Amherst work). This on-going resolution is such a challenge in these busy times, but we’ve seen wonderful new faces on our Select Board, School Committee and Planning Board. Having new people step forward with new ideas and energy is vital to our long-term viability.

9. Spend time with family and friends. This past year the 250th committee gave us oodles of opportunities to enjoy one another’s company while we focused on our history. What fun to see our neighbors dressed up as characters from Amherst’s past in West Cemetery. And the 250th gala was a rockin’ good time with an incredible cross-section of folks from all over town celebrating together. Let’s keep that good vibe going and keep finding new ways to build community.

10. Count our blessings. We truly live in the most beautiful, creative, and interesting town in the country (not that we are biased at all).

Amherst Center is a monthly column which appears in The Amherst Bulletin that seeks to portray local issues from a centrist perspective. It is written by Town Meeting members Baer Tierkel and Clare Bertrand and School Committee member Andy Churchill. Amherst Center appears in The Amherst Bulletin on the last Friday of each month.