Amherst Budget - Amherst Indy
Money - money - money me!
Where is the wealth of we?
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Constructing community
Connection and unity
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Commonwealth we
My primary purpose for running for the Town Council is to improve our collective sense of unity and community. I believe if we work together with enhanced humility and respect we will be far more effective at addressing problems and meeting our communal needs. The first step in this effort is insisting on the inclusion and participation of widest diversity of perspectives possible. In my opinion we are not currently being adequately inclusive of divergent views. Our priorities for allocating resources should reflect a process of broad participation and inclusion at all planning stages. I think we all agree on the need for the four major capital projects. The scope and style of each project needs to include the engagement and participation of diverse perspectives in the earliest planning stages and throughout. Clearly this was the failure of the school building project and libraries renovations project. The result is long, long divisive debate and delays. Two of the four projects could have been completed by now had the process been widely inclusive in the early opening stages ten to fifteen years ago.
Unlike other areas of town governance, budgeting and finance seems to be less controversial and divisive. However, that process could benefit from the inclusion of more community members. Two areas that should be examined more closely is infrastructure and social services. Many community members would advocate for increased funding for infrastructure, such as roads, sidewalks, etc. The same could be said for our current level of social services funding. Both of these and perhaps other areas I am unaware of ought to be considered for a change in funding formula.
Stepping outside my comfort zone, I would suggest that we, the town, investigate unconventional means of bring a greater degree of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) into our budgeting and finance considerations. I would argue that our current model of using zoning to harness the energy of private profit making corporations to meet our housing and social equity agenda will forever be inadequate. The primary resource of a major University village is the 14,000 unhoused students who will bring $200,000,000 – $300,000,000 per annum spending on housing alone into our area. Through taxation we currently harvest about 5% of that resource. Much more that that is harvested by absentee landlords and large finance and investment entities (hedge funds perhaps). We need to figure out how to harvest or harness more of this vast resource. Amherst ight be a good place to begin to examine many of our, largely invisible, underlying assumptions about entrepreneurship, land ownership, capitalism and government.
