Eight hundred and fifty-four residents Greenfield residents signed the Hope Street parking lot referendum petition to put the issue on the Nov. 4 ballot. These signatures were gathered in less than two weeks, and submitted six days before the 30-day deadline.
Referendum petitions are the purest form of local democracy we have. Voters who want to put an issue on the ballot demonstrate grassroots interest in local government — something rare during this epidemic of top-down oligarchy.
The referendum is about much more than a parking lot or housing. I worked to reform our housing laws to end home equity theft. I supported the conversion of a large home on Prospect Street — next door to my home — into a 6-bedroom group home, owned by a realty company located in Connecticut. This property is “totally exempt from taxation” as a “charitable house.” There are 19 other properties like this one around the city. Greenfield has $294.7 million in assessed value of tax-exempt properties.
At the Aug. 20 City Council meeting, At Large Councilor Wahab Minhas addressed the larger issues: “There is a sentiment in the public that they have been left out about what happens to city property, about the general make-up of the neighborhood … People have this kind of skepticism about what is happening to their public property … We have millions of dollars of property that is tax exempt, that simply are off the tax rolls, and the burden on taxpayers is enormous. I support this going to the ballot and people making decisions for themselves … We should not be leaving people out of the process.”
I watched four hours of that City Council meeting. City Clerk Kathy Scott explained that if the councilors did not rescind their vote making the Hope Street parking lot surplus property — the citizen’s referendum would appear on the ballot. “The form of the question needs to be reviewed and approved by the city attorney, and that has happened,” Scott explained. “It needs to go on the ballot as written by petitioners, as approved by the attorney.” Yet nine councilors voted to redraft the petitioners’ language. The city’s attorney has ruled the council has no right in the charter to reword the citizen’s ballot language.
The mayor told councilors: “The best way to build housing is on top of each other.” She added: “I have never advocated for low-income housing on that lot.” Greenfield has 25% of the population in Franklin County, but 52% of the subsidized housing. Our “urban” planners believe housing should be built almost anywhere, at taller heights, even in an historic district. This “rural urbanization” suggests we should live denser together, in buildings allowed “by right,” on lots with multiple accessory dwellings, and areas of protected habitat, like Stone Farm Lane — a stone’s throw from the banks of the Connecticut River.
How will a city with infrastructure challenges now, manage 800 new housing units over the next decade? Where’s the financial data projecting the added cost to taxpayers of education, water supply, sewage treatment, employee pensions, and other rising obligations? Fifteen months ago, our urban consultants recommended we conduct a feasibility study for the Hope Street parking lot. That never happened. The request for proposals has still not been finished.
Greenfield’s population today is lower than it was 45 years ago. The elderly are our only demographic that’s growing. A recent state housing study says Franklin County has one of the lowest future growth housing needs in the state: less than 2.5% growth compared to our total housing units.
The metastasizing of multi-story apartment buildings are another chapter in Greenfield’s narrative of recent development controversies:
• The decades-long inability to repurpose the First National Bank on Bank Row.
•The waste of $3 million in tax dollars to assemble, then tear down, a temporary fire station, and degrade the parking lot under it.
• The promise by a former mayor to neighbors that the Hope Street parking lot would be restored when the temporary fire station was gone.
• The city’s rejection of an offer by the state to give us the Armory on Hope Street, now being considered for housing.
• The approval of a housing project on Main Street displacing several street-level retail stores to build a 4-story “box” with 22 apartments and six townhouses facing a railroad underpass.
The Hope Street referendum is about much more than the fate of just one parking lot. It’s become a plebiscite about “urban” development in Greenfield, about our city’s current budget capacity, and about a government that’s “leaving people out of the process.”
Al Norman’s Pushback column appears in the Recorder the first and third Wednesday of each month.