2023 Candidate Questionnaire

Amherst Forward is a volunteer-led political action committee (PAC) that tracks town government, reviews candidates for local elected office, and provides important information that residents can use to make decisions in local elections and townwide votes.  Our priorities are:

• Smart, strategic development to support Town revenue needs while preserving open space, consistent with the Master Plan and informed by the Climate Action, Adaptation and Resilience Plan (CAARP).
• Equitable, excellent infrastructure that matches our community’s diverse needs and expectations, supports our climate action goals, and leverages innovative funding models and available state and federal funds to reduce our residents’ tax burden. Recent and upcoming projects we support include affordable housing, a new elementary school, a renovated public library, a new DPW building, a fire station in South Amherst, and much improved roads and sidewalks.
• Civic engagement that encourages the informed, optimistic, and collaborative participation of a wide cross-section of residents in Town decision-making.
• Thriving public schools with dedicated resources that support sustainable infrastructure, diverse student and educator needs, high quality and equitable curriculum, and a stable leadership so that our students, staff, and community can thrive. 

Questionnaire Goal: This questionnaire will help determine which candidates for local public office will be endorsed by Amherst Forward. Our final endorsements will be based on candidates’ relevant experience; their views on leading issues identified by Amherst Forward; their ability to demonstrate a positive, informed and collaborative temperament; and how well they understand the role. The answers to these questions will be combined with in-person interviews and publicly available data (such as public voting records and appearances in local media) to inform our final endorsements.

lgriesemer7@gmail.com 

Name

Lynn Griesemer

Role. (Town Council Only) Amherst has a 13-person Town Council that hires and works with a professional Town Manager (and, through the Manager, Town staff). What do you see as the role of a Town Councilor in this system? 

(School Committee Only) The Amherst School Committee is one of three school committees that hire and work with a professional School Superintendent (and, through the Superintendent, school staff). What do you see as the role of a School Committee member in this system? 

The Town Council is the Legislative body of the City Known as the Town of Amherst.  The Council’s role is defined by Mass General Laws and the Charter, which states that “….all powers of the Town shall be vested in the Town Council as a whole, which shall provide for the performance of all duties and obligations imposed upon the Town by law.” (Amherst Home Rule Charter (to herein be referred to as “Charter), Article 1.3) The Charter also states that, “The administration of all Town fiscal, prudential, and municipal affairs shall be vested in the executive branch headed by the Town Manager.” (Charter, Article 2, Section 2.3)

With this in mind, a key role of the Town Council is to hire, evaluate, and oversee the Town’s relationship with the Town Manager. This includes some specific responsibilities in relationship to the Executive Branch, including approval of the appointment of all Department Heads, approval of Town Manager appointments to many committees (e.g., Planning Board, Zoning Board of Appeals, Non-voting Members of the Finance Committee, and the members of the soon to be formed Charter Review Committee).

Making this division of responsibilities work for the residents of the community requires council members to strike a careful balance, particularly in terms of avoiding inappropriate interference in the Manager’s areas of responsibility. If the Council replaces the Manager’s judgement with its own, it loses the ability to ensure effective accountability.

As the legislative branch, the Council acts for the Town in a broad range of areas, including taxation policies, financial appropriation, and zoning and other local ordinances. This places a great deal of responsibility in the hands of a relatively small number of individuals, and in my opinion that places a special obligation on each member to be open to many points of view, to allow for extensive debate and discussion, to be clear and candid when making decisions on behalf of the community, and to learn from mistakes and improve going forward. This is what has guided my wrok on the Council as a member and especially as its president.

Relevant experience. (Incumbent) In addition to serving on the Council/as a School Committee member, what other experiences  – including lived, professional, civic, and volunteer –  shape your approach to serving on the Council/School Committee?

(New Candidate) What experiences – including lived, professional, civic, and volunteer – will shape your approach to serving on the Council/School Committee?

Civic Responsibility is in my genes:  I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania with parents who demonstrated civic responsibility every day. My father was a local attorney with a lifelong commitment to economic and social opportunity. My mother was a social worker and housing advocate who showed my sisters and me what it meant to be independent and involved at a time when too many young women were receiving a different message about our role in the world.

It takes a Community:  By the time I was eighteen both of my parents passed away, and I was in charge of raising my two younger sisters. The power of community and our obligations to each other really hit home as I went to college, worked, and raised the girls with the help of family, friends, and Social Security.

Professional Life: My first job out of college was as a math teacher in rural Appalachia. Those years made an indelible impression on me about the power of public education and our obligation to nurture the best in every child. Those lessons never left me, and I’ve spent my career working to build strong public and educational organizations. After earning my doctorate, I went to work as a faculty member at the University of Rhode Island, then as director of a seven-state non-profit education consortium, and for the 31 years for the University of Massachusetts as Associate Vice President for Economic Development and in various roles at the UMass Donahue Institute, including service as its Executive Director.

Education: In addition to my B.A. in Mathematics, M.S. in Education, and Ed.D. in Education Curriculum and Instruction and Administration, along the way I took a deeper dive into understanding how strong public institutions work by enrolling in the mid-career MPA program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. That experience — and the lifelong relationships I formed — continue to inspire me toward positive public service.

Personal Life: That’s also where I met my husband of 25 years, Bryan Harvey, who served on Amherst’s Finance Committee and Selectboard, making local government part of our daily diet. With our son, Sasha, we enjoy a wonderful life in Amherst, and I am committed to passing on an even stronger community.

Committees:  In addition to serving on the Town Council as President and District 2 Councilor since its inception in 2018 I have served the Town of Amherst as a Town Meeting member: Chair, Fire Station Study Committee (2008-10); Chair, DPW/Fire Station Advisory Committee (2016-18); and the Committee that negotiated the Zero Energy Bylaw.

Community Service. Locally, I have been engaged with the Amherst Survival Center for over 15 years as Chair of the Capital Campaign to build the present building; as a member and President of the Board of Directors; as a member of the Finance Committee; and as a member and Chair of the Investment Committee.

Regionally I have served as a Board member on one of the predecessor organizations that merged to become the Girl Scouts of Western Massachusetts, and continue to serve as Chair of the Audit Committee.  This year I was selected to be a member of the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts and a Co-Chair of its Executive Director Succession Committee.

Collaborative decision-making. (Town Council) Individual Councilors represent their constituents in decision-making, but to be effective, they need to collaborate to get to a majority. Give an example of when you had to collaborate with others to solve a problem. What lessons learned would you apply as a Town Councilor (or have you applied if you currently serve as a Town Councilor)?

(School Committee) School Committees reach decisions by majority votes. Give an example of when you had to collaborate with others to solve a problem or make a decision. What lessons learned would you apply as a School Committee Member (or have you applied if you currently serve as a School Committee Member)?

Collaboration has been important to me in my role as a member of the Council and in carrying out my duties as its presiding officer. While the president has only one vote, I have looked for ways to help the council conduct its business collaboratively. This often requires listening carefully to different ideas and viewpoints, looking for areas of possible agreement and progress, and suggesting concrete ways to move forward even when everyone does not agree. One example of this for me was collaborating with the Community Safety Working Group (CSWG) and its successor the Community Safety/Social Justice Committee (CSSJC). These groups proposed seven wide-ranging and complex recommendations for Town action, each of which raised serious issues with the potential for controversy that might have derailed action. But I believed it was essential for the Council to work through these issues and demonstrate its willingness and ability to make progress for the community. Toward that end I called for multiple joint meetings of the Council and the CCSJW, ongoing debate and discussion over a period of months, and non-stop iterations of different wording and approaches too numerous to count. In fact, the Council spent more time and energy on this issue than any other during the past year. Collaboration does not always produce consensus, and in this case differences remain. But all the effort paid off. By trying to weave a consistent and constructive path we were able to move the Town forward in all seven areas, and put in place a system for ongoing progress reports.

Key town needs. What do you see as the top 3 key areas the Town needs to make progress in? How would you plan to help progress happen in those areas?

Significant Capital Investment within the Financial Limits of Amherst.

For the past 4 1/2 years we have said there are four major capital projects: elementary school, library, fire and DPW. These remain essential, and the major progress we have made on the school and library projects is encouraging.

But over that same period it has become inescapably clear to me that we need to be thinking in terms of a “fifth” project: our transportation infrastructure of roads, sidewalks and bikepaths. Years of competing priorities, the ravages of climate change, and eye-popping escalation in costs – during COVID but persisting to this day — have revealed that our usual approach to roads and related needs is simply not working. We are desperately patching the patches, but not making headway on the long-term problem.

There is no easy answer as to how the Town can break the back of this problem, but our coordinated approach to the “original four” projects points the way:

• Understand and accept the full scope of what needs to be done, and relentlessly pursue a solution however long it takes.
• Move beyond the traditional annual view of the streets and sidewalks budget, and dedicate currently available resources to a long-term plan that demonstrates how we will address the backlog and avoid falling into this hole again. This is the essential foundation for two reasons:
  • First, we must expand the resources we can apply to this problem. This will require adjustments to the annual budget, but also aggressive development of grants, gifts and other sources and sustained partnerships with other communities in the region, the state and federal governments+, the institutions, and the private sector. It will take many hands to solve this problem, but we can’t expect others to join in if we cannot persuade them we know what to do and are determined to do it.
  • Second, one of the obstacles we face is that the private sector capacity to handle road projects in the region is limited. The state lays out its plans years in advance, and the contractors gear up for that work. When we budget from year to year, we will always be second in line.

This year I successfully argued for additional use of reserves to get to work on some of our most egregious – and embarrassing – examples of neglect, but I will not support a piecemeal approach going forward. We know what to do: we need to commit to doing it.

Meanwhile, other needs – somewhat smaller in scale but no less important – demand attention. One of these is upgrading the facilities available to support programs and services for seniors. The Bangs Center is an important resource, but fall short of what a vibrant senior center should offer. Fortunately, we have the opportunity to make significant improvements in the Bangs using ARPA and other grant funds. That is a program I will support to move us forward in the near- and mid-term.

Continue efforts in Racial and Social Justice

Across the country and here at home, advancing social and racial justice commands our best efforts. Each community must find its own way, and Amherst ahs made impressive progress. Just in the past year or two we’ve placed Amherst at the leading edge among communities adapting their structures and services to promote racial and social justice:

• We created the CRESS (spell out) program to provide alternative intervention and support for non-violent and jmental health related incidents. CRESS ahs been invited into the Harvard Kennedy School’s Performance Lab for Alternative 911 Emergency Response Implementation, joining municipalities such as Alexandria, VA; Baltimore, MD; Cambridge, MA; Lawrence/Douglas County, KS; Los Angeles, CA; Madison/Dane County, WI; Portland, OR; Sacramento, CA; and Tucson, AZ. This will help us both learn from others and share our own strengths and experiences.

• We created  the Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Department, adding several new positions and attracting an outstanding leader for this effort. The DEI Department leads training on anti-racism across all Town Departments, organizes community conversations, and coordinates the process for Community Visioning. It is also taking the lead in developing a Resident Oversight Board for the Amherst police.

• The Town Council also created the African Heritage Reparations Assembly (AHRA) which is charged with exploring how Amherst should approach reparations using the funds we have made available for this purpose.

As noted above, much of this work resulted from the collaboration with the CSWG/CSSJC.  

Creating a culture of Respectful Discourse.

Government in a civilized society needs a find a way to respectfully and productively exchange ideas – whether this is about how to address Climate Change, Housing, Social and Racial Justice, or understanding the limitations and priorities of local finances.

In my opinion, recently Amherst has too often been moving in the wrong direction.  As a Town Councilor and President of the Town Council I believe our best approach is to model inclusive and listening behavior that acknowledges everyone’s contribution to an issue and still accepts that sometimes we need to make very difficult choices.  One area for serious improvement is providing a more complete background and discussion about the tradeoffs we face when when we make those choices.  

Council accomplishments. (Town Council Only) What do you see as the biggest accomplishments of the Council in this term? This can include the way the Council functioned, its governance, and/or specific initiatives or needs the Council moved forward. For incumbents, what was your role in that success?

The first 4 ½ years of this new form have been hectic and demanding, and I am proud of what the Council has accomplished:

• Met the requirements of the Charter including public forums; district meetings; and, of course, Town Council and committee meetings. Councilors work actively as members of the 4 Standing Committees; the Joint Capital Planning Committee; and have added the Elementary School Building Committee; and the Jones Library Building Committee. Individual Councilors are liaisons to selected Town Committees and available to all residents. As president I have been responsible for making some of these committee assignments and managing the process for bringing action forward, and I believe the functioning of the Council is going well.

• Policy partnership with the Town Manager (see above). I have both participated in helped organize this process, which has resulted in clear expectations and benchmarks and a constructive relationship between the Council and the Manager. As reflected in the Town Manager’s Goals we have accomplished much together in the past year, and as a Councilor I have been closely involved in these priorities.

• Climate Action, including progress on Community Choice Aggregation; development of the Solar Landfill Project, creation of the Solar Bylaw Working Group;  and exploring the feasibility of Town-managed hauling for trash, recycling and composting.
  • Community Health and Safety, including temporary bylaws related to the COVID-19; creation of  the CRESS program; and adoption of new  Water and Sewer Bylaws and Regulations.
  • Economic Vitality, including strengthening our  partnerships with the BID and Chamber and our human service non-profits; invested in recreation facilities and our public ways; and adopted Zoning and General Bylaws in support of economic vitality and overall community welfare, including adjustments based on Temporary Bylaw 14, housing, parking, surveillance technology, and historic preservation.
  • Capital Investments. In addition to major capital programs discussed above, pursuing (through an anonymous donation) expansion of the North Amherst Library and (with CPA funds and other donations)  construction of a Dog Park
  • Sound Finances, including achieving balanced budgets, managing sufficient reserves, and securing  clean audits, all of which helped the Town achieve its A++ bond rating.
  • Housing Affordability. An expanding portfolio of projects, including the renovation and construction of affordable studio apartments at 132 Northampton Road, and new projects at Belchertown Road,  East Street School, and Ball Lane; and purchase of 457 Main Street as a starting point for creating a permanent shelter. 

• Racial Equity and Social Justice  (see discussion under “Key Priorities, above).

Council shortcomings. (Town Council Only) Where did the Council fall short this term? How do you think it could have done better?  This can include the way the Council functions, its governance, and/or specific initiatives.

The Town Council needs to:

• Continue to make the job of being a Councilor more manageable, including working together to shorten Council Meetings.
• Create additional mechanism that promote transparency.
• Create understanding of the fiscal realities of our budget and the pressure we have placed on taxpayers.
• Seek additional ways to increase and broaden resident engagement.
• Work to establish a culture of respectful discourse (see above).

Motivation to serve.  In 500 characters or less, what is your biggest motivation to serve as a Town Councilor/on the School Committee? (500 characters ~ 150 words) *

In my first terms I wanted to help with the transition to a new form of government; tackle some long-standing community challenges; and tap into my skills and experience in a useful way. I still do. Moreover, having come so far with our key capital projects I’d like to see the process through. Having achieved some success in getting the new structure off the ground, I’d like to spend more time on the creative process of government. And having observed how fragile the mechanisms of government can be in the face of division and contention, I want to do what I can to resist the corrosion that seems to be eating away at government everywhere and at every level. Amherst can provide an example of what good government looks like in difficult times. I’d like to remain part of that.