Last week’s well-attended meeting of the Amherst Charter Commission was revealing and important in many respects.
At the time of the meeting, five of the nine commissioners favored a mayor-council form of government, while four supported keeping Town Meeting, perhaps at a reduced size.
Nick Grabbe, on the majority side, and Meg Gage, on the minority side, were both uncomfortable with the closeness of this 5-4 split and together developed a proposal that kept important elements of both positions. At the end of a long meeting, the Gage-Grabbe proposal was further modified and it passed with a 5-4 vote. In essence the commission currently supports a mayor supported by professional management and a legislative council of 60 members, up from the 13 which had been the majority position when the evening started.
Since I don’t know how I feel about this proposal I will reserve comment on it until I do. But I found the discussion around the Gage-Grabbe proposal interesting and important; it reminded me of discussions I heard when, as a school principal, I attended the monthly meetings of the Amherst School Committee and listened to members talk about the importance of “basic skills.” No one disagreed about their importance (how could they?) but it became clear to me that this agreement disguised many different interpretations of what the term meant.
So too with the Charter Commission members, their supporters and their critics. Two terms, “checks and balances,” and “vision” are used, to wide approbation but with little effort to see if there is agreement about what they mean. What is “checked” and what is “balanced?”
There has been talk of a “unitary vision” and a “comprehensive vision” (and again, how can one be against vision?) but whose vision and how vision is attained, or developed, or intuited, or implemented remains undiscussed. The idea of vision has become too important to the Charter Commission discussions to remain so vague for so long.
The philosopher and critic, Isaiah Berlin, appropriated an ancient Greek saying, “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing” to suggest two different ways of viewing the world, its variety and its challenges.
Back in the 1970s, the hedgehogs on the Amherst School Committee construed “basic skills” narrowly and put them at the center of the schools’ concerns. To them, basic skills were what tests measured. As a fox, I criticized this point of view and asked in what way calculus could be considered more basic than playing a musical scale in tune?
Hedgehogs and foxes are essential to every field of endeavor and to each other, even as they get impatient with each other for having incompatible visions of the way things are and the way things should be. I think there are more hedgehogs than foxes on the Charter Commission, and that is no surprise. I think town boards and committees become more like hedgehogs as they develop deep knowledge of how town government works.
My guess is that many commissioners, when they think about vision, are thinking mostly about economic development. My guess is that when they talk about checks and balances, they are thinking about administrative hedgehogs and legislative hedgehogs.
Their decision last week to have a 60-seat legislative council is likely to allow more foxes into town government. These foxes would acknowledge the importance of economic development but also stress social issues, environmental issues, cultural issues and issues of town character and its place in the world.
As a fox, I salute the commission for its decision last week and hope that it will hold steadily to it. Can it develop a vision of how foxes and hedgehogs can work together?
Michael Greenebaum is a Town Meeting member from Precinct 6, and a retired principal at the former Mark’s Meadow School.