Climate change induced by global warming is an existential threat everywhere in the world, even in Amherst.
Solving and mitigating this threat is a goal most everybody in Amherst can agree on. Unfortunately, pro-growth-economics and business-as-usual policies still dominate our government’s agenda and undermine attempts to improve the situation. A few examples:
The Select Board authorized a million dollar rotary at Kendrick Park over Town Meeting’s advisory not to.
The Business Improvement District is actively lobbying for another municipal parking lot and for taller buildings in the downtown core.
The School Committee and School Building Committee nearly committed the town to doubling the school bus commutes for elementary school children by centralizing all K-1 students to one school building and all Grade 2-6 students to another building on the other side of town.
Investments like these don’t help us use less fossil fuels; rather, they ensure that we use more in the future. We can, and must, do better.
A new bylaw that actually combats global warming was proposed by the grassroots citizen groups, Mothers Out Front and Climate Action Now. They wrote the warrant article that became the net zero-energy bylaw. It requires all town taxpayer-funded buildings to produce their own clean renewable energy, thus saving future energy costs while reducing our carbon pollution.
Seeing the merits of this proposal, Town Meeting passed the net zero-energy bylaw over the objections of the Select Board.
Town Meeting is having an existential threat of its own.
The Charter Commission proposed a new charter (the rule book that defines our government), that eliminates Town Meeting altogether, cedes power of the town’s purse to a council of 13 (a larger version of the Select Board). The thinking seems to be, “If we can’t convince them, eliminate them.”
If the charter passes on March 27, we would lose the government institution that is actually making tangible progress on the climate-action front, and doing so in a broad-based democratic way.
Your right to speak your mind to a council is free, but your right to vote at Town Meeting is priceless.
Jim Turner
Amherst
The writer is a Town Meeting member from Precinct 10.