It seems to Marc

My wife and I are still newspaper readers (well, the electronic version these days), and we are happy to share our breakfast table with two of them: the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Boston Globe.

Every now and then, I'll read something that prompts me to be not just a newspaper reader, but also a contributor--of letters to the editor or of longer op-eds.  The web page you are looking at now is a compilation of those pieces.

(Incidentally, if you were looking for Marc Warner's professional website but inadvertantly stumbled here, then try warnertransportation.com)

Is anyone in Congress doing their job?
[Note, this was the Gazette's headline; I had suggested "Honesty, compromise, and not the old party line"]

By Marc Warner
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette and Greenfield Reporter
December 30, 2025

Jim McGovern, our congressman, was exasperated. The hour allotted for debate in the House last week was almost over, and he'd watched those rising in opposition to his resolution show photos of gang violence, recite statistics of drug overdoses, but totally ignore the resolution's central question of whether Congress ought to have a say in our march to war with Venezuela. "All we're saying here is let's do our job," said McGovern. "If you don't want to do the job, I don't know why the hell you're here!"

Ultimately, the measure failed. All the Republican reps but independent-minded Don Bacon and Thomas Massie and a far less principled but suddenly on-the-outs-with-Trump Marjorie Taylor Greene voted against it. All but one Democrat--Henry Cuellar, the guy Trump just pardoned over money laundering and bribery charges--voted for it. There would be no hearings about the military strikes on drug boats, no administration testimony about the role of Venezuelan oil in influencing our goals, and no Congressional debate at all about whether our efforts to overthrow Nicolás Maduro would prompt the Venezuelans to greet us as liberators or lead that country in to years of chaos.

So thanks to Congressman McGovern for pushing the issue, and I share his exasperation at all those Republicans who just get in line with "whatever you say, sir!" rather than assert their prerogative as a co-equal and responsible branch of government.

But here's my own independent-mindedness: What about Jim McGovern? Is he and most of the other Democrats in Congress doing their job? I'm not talking about the resolution last week, but rather their willingness to ignore the massive national debt. When Congressman McGovern first entered Congress in January 1997, the debt was $5.4 trillion. Now it's $38.5 trillion, a growth rate three-and-a-half times the rate of inflation, and $113,000 for every American citizen. The $1 trillion we'll pay this year in interest on the debt is money that does not go to expanding health care, abating hunger, or to any public good or service that Democrats in general and progressive congressmen like Jim McGovern in particular have insisted are matters of fairness and decency.

Yes, Congressman, these programs are matters of fairness and decency, but putting the costs of these programs today on the national credit card isn't fair or decent to the next generation who gets stuck with the bill. Our legacy to them--among all the other consequences of ineffective governance that we're sending their way--is hyperinflation or slashed social welfare programs in response to forced austerity. It isn't fair, it isn't decent, and it wasn't inevitable.

And yes, the Republicans are just as irresponsible. They cut taxes with the ostensible idea that the IRS will reap more from a spurred economy than it will lose from the lower tax rates. It doesn't. It has never come close. Every member of Congress must know this, but the vast majority of the Republicans have long shown their disregard of obvious truth (e.g., the 147 who voted against certifying Biden's 2020 election win), and are too willing to put the broad interests of country behind the narrow interests of party and donors.

It's the same game with the Democrats. The health care bill they offered in the Senate in mid-December was theirs to write, but again said nothing but extend the enhanced subsidies passed in 2021 as a temporary Covid-era expediency. This is exactly what the Republicans voted down multiple times and was the cause of the longest government shutdown in history. The Democrats MUST have known that the Republicans would vote it down again, but the opportunity for partisan messaging was apparently more appealing than negotiating, compromising, and making progress to solve a real problem.

Being honest. Negotiating. Compromising. These are essential for responsibly reining in our national debt and for crafting any bill that can withstand the 60-vote cloture rule in the Senate or the two-thirds of congress needed to override a presidential veto. They are the only way to solve real problems. The fight, fight, fight for the old parties is not going to get us there. Rather, we must stop fighting for them at all. Six months ago, I did just that. After being an active Democrat since I turned 18, I went to the Northampton City Clerk's office and re-registered as a member of the Forward Party.

Never heard of it? Well, I expect you will. For it is a home for those committed to integrity and truth; fairness and decency; and policies based on powerful arguments about the broad public good, and not on loud arguments by powerful players. It is a home for those who foremost want their elected officials to do their job: to give up the gridlock and get hard things done. Not right. Not left. Forward.

Marc Warner lives in Northampton and is on the Executive Committee of the Forward Party of Massachusetts


L3Harris protests are off-base and irresponsible

By Marc Warner
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
September 4, 2025

Protesters on Village Hill, activists at City Council meetings, and writers of multiple Gazette op-eds and letters have all sought in the last few months to push military contractor L3Harris out of Northampton. They are convinced of their good sense and moral rectitude, and the recent candidate forums have shown that many Northampton politicians, including three of the four mayoral candidates, are supporting them.

This is nonsense. The protesters are wrong. The supporting politicians are irresponsible.

Consider first the protesters. Their core participants from Demilitarize Western Mass define themselves as "a collective of antiwar, anti-imperialist, abolitionist activists confronting the military-industrial complex." They certainly take their stance with fervor, but a small group with a bucket of fake blood in Northampton is not a convincing case for a veto over the decisions on military or foreign affairs made by elected officials in Washington.

Claiming to stake out a demilitarized part of the country is also just freeloading on national defense or NIMBYing your way out of military facilities. Aren't these obligations that we share with the country as a whole?

There is in fact no local ordinance as sought by the protesters -- and as supported by Mayor Gina Louise Sciarra -- that would ever have any teeth to stop a military facility or military contractor from coming into town. This is not a statement about the abuse of power by the lawless man in the White House, but about the established power of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The protesters' fury at the L3Harris employees is also way off base. Look, L3Harris making periscopes on Village Hill is not IG Farben using slave labor in service to the Nazis and knowingly making Zyklon B for the gas chambers at Auschwitz. There is no equivalency, and none of the 300 or so employees at L3Harris in Northampton is going to end up guilty of crimes against humanity … other than in the muddled minds of the protesters.

The biggest stretch of all, though, is the charge that L3Harris makes Northampton a target in a nuclear war.

This was the focus of a Gazette op-ed last week and came up as well in the candidate forum. It really should not be a factor. Northampton will not be fine in any nuclear war, but Kim Jong Un or Russian ICBMs would in any case aim at America's counter-strike capabilities and points of maximum damage, and not at a small city with a small plant on the supply chain.

Here's a more realistic fear: L3Harris says enough with this crazy town, picks up stakes, and Northampton loses 300 high-wage manufacturing jobs, loses the multiplier effects that the local economy derives from this income, and loses the significant property tax revenue and all the teachers and other public services that that money supports.

It is shocking to me that any Northampton elected official or city administrator would be willing to accept this loss. Mayor Clare Higgins certainly didn't. She was the Northampton mayor in 2011 when Kollmorgen (later acquired by L3Harris) outgrew the property on King Street where it had been since 1951. Rather than see the city's largest industrial employer go elsewhere, Higgins supported the changes to the Village Hill master plan that made the site available to Kollmorgen and the tax increment financing deal that encouraged the company to take it.

The irresponsibility of so many of today's local elected officials and candidates goes even deeper. Complicity of city officials in seeking to push a big business out of town could lead credit rating agencies to question the city's management and consequently to lower our vaunted credit rating. It could also expose the city to a wildly expensive lawsuit.

Here's a case to keep in mind: Gibson's Bakery v. Oberlin College. A 2016 shoplifting and assault incident led to Oberlin College students protesting against the local bakery and accusing it of racial discrimination. Various college faculty and administrators then jumped on the bandwagon and so fanned the anti-Gibson's flames, that the bakery sued the college for engaging in tortious interference of business and for defaming the owners and employees. The college lost, and after running through subsequent appeals, it ended up paying Gibson's Bakery $36.59 million -- an amount that the college's insurance companies refused to cover.

If the anti-L3Harris sentiments expressed at the candidate forums ever became the city's clear and official policy, then it would not be tough to see the City of Northampton in the role of Oberlin College and L3Harris following the Gibson's Bakery approach of suing for tortious interference of business.

I hope that elected officials and candidates will take this to heart. I hope too that the L3Harris protesters will forego the theatrics and try to make their case more sensibly to federal officials through well-reasoned arguments. I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Marc Warner lives in Northampton.


Mayoral competence? Look at results

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
March 28, 2025

To the Editor:

While the writers of the March 21 letter, “Mayor Sciarra, a competent, compassionate leader,” list several examples of what they see as the Northampton mayor’s compassion, they’re pretty thin on their basis for declaring her competence. The one item they raise of any possible relevance here — she’s “a whiz at budgets and spreadsheets” — is an awfully low bar for someone at the top of the organizational chart for a $137 million per year operation. A better measure of mayoral competence is to look at results.

What’s changed during the mayor’s time in office? Have residents and businesses stayed in the city, and have families kept their kids in the city schools? Has crime dropped and school test scores risen? Are city roads, sewer lines, buildings and rec facilities in a state of good repair? Have city staff and contractors delivered these outcomes efficiently at a reasonable cost per unit?

A competent mayor is one who is making progress on all of these. It is a person who routinely ensures that department heads are tracking overtime, are knowledgeable about best practices, are extensively benchmarking performance against peer communities, and are applying lessons learned and findings to deliver effective and efficient services.

So, does Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra meet these criteria of a competent mayor? It’s hard to tell. There sure seems to be a lot of Northampton families seeking alternatives to the city schools, but there generally just is too little information from which to draw a clear conclusion.

Marc Warner
Northampton

Our lawn sign, November 2024.  Grrr.





Value, not politics, should determine public procurement

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
January 22, 2024

To the Editor:

The Jan. 19 letter “Why are we sending money out of state?” suggests that the Amherst School Committee was wrong to contract with an executive search firm from “red state” Nebraska. As someone who has signed over 60 contracts with public agencies throughout the United States, I know that this type of argument is contrary to how public procurement works — or should work.

Procurement rules require agencies to publicly post their solicitations, set minimum qualifications and criteria for evaluation, and then hire the firm that offers the best value. There are of course cases where local familiarity or ability to attend a lot of meetings would legitimately add to the perceived value of a local firm. The political tilt of the bidder’s home state, however, seems invariably irrelevant. It is also a violation of interstate commerce laws, and any agency that sought to make this a criterion for the job would face challenges from the aggrieved out-of-state bidder and from local residents who are now getting less value for their taxes.

The letter writer should also consider the likely backlash. If public agencies in Massachusetts seek not to hire firms from red state Nebraska, it won’t be long before Nebraska agencies seek not to hire firms from blue state Massachusetts. No thanks — this political protectionism would be an overall net loss.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Reparations in Northampton would demean us
[Note, this was the first of two op-eds I wrote on this topic.]

By Marc Warner
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
December 25, 2022

A tiny group of local activists has declared that the city of Northampton should establish a reparations fund to overcome the legacy of slavery and racism. The City Council seems to agree with the general concept and plans to create a committee to fill in the details.

A problem with this initiative is that the proponents and the council have either ignored the need to establish Northampton’s guilty actions for which the reparations are now owed, or they have completely misconstrued Northampton’s history.

Let’s consider that history.

Consider Sojourner Truth. She, who spent many years talking to audiences throughout the North about her own experience as a slave, came to Northampton in 1843 to join the Northampton Association for Education and Industry. According to the Historic Northampton website, Truth felt there was no other place that offered her the same “equality of feeling,” “liberty of thought and speech,” and “largeness of soul.” It was in Northampton that Truth came into contact with abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips.

The city maintains the statue of Sojourner Truth, and it awarded $150,000 in CPA funds in 2009 to support the David Ruggles Center as a testament to our ongoing pride that Northampton was a key stop on the Underground Railroad.

Was the Northampton Association or the Ruggles Center guilty of slavery and its legacy?

How about the people of Northampton who supported Lincoln, who fought for the Union and the end of slavery, and the soldiers of Northampton memorialized on the monument downtown for having given their lives for this cause?

Do these people bear the guilt of slavery and its legacy?

Our city was on the morally right side then and we can be proud of our efforts toward racial equality ever since. Northampton never imposed Jim Crow laws. Rather, it has long committed itself to equal access to city services regardless of race. It complies with all federal and state programs to level the playing field for minorities in procurements, and it bends over backwards to find and hire minorities for city positions. The city routinely exceeds the state’s goal for affordable housing.

Our residents elected representatives who voted for the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s … and then re-elected them over and over again.

Does this sound like a community that is guilty of crimes for which it must pay reparations?

The obvious answer is that it does not. Had the petitioners brought this to an actual court instead of the City Council, it would have had to fall back on the same argument used by Rudy Giuliani in claiming fraud in the 2020 election: “We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”

The courts didn’t buy it from Giuliani, and no fair judge or jury world buy it from the supporters of Northampton reparations either.

Northampton’s relatively small Black population is also not the source of shame that some seem to suggest. Our demographics are not a testament to systemic and pervasive racism, but to the fact that we never had the type and scale of employment that would have attracted significant Black migration from the South in the last century.

The latest census, by the way, also shows that Northampton has even fewer Pacific Islanders than Blacks. Do we owe reparations to them, too?

(Actually, that group might have a stronger case. It was, after all, Northampton’s own “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” Jonathan Edwards who inspired legions of New England missionaries to go forth and knock the Hula out of native Hawaiians for 60 years.)

Look, what’s really going on here is that the reparations crowd thinks that Northampton is so progressive that it will just embrace the measure anyway.

That is a horrible idea. It is to say that though Northampton has long stood resolutely against injustice for Blacks, the city must now accept injustice against itself. No, we must not. We did not enslave anyone and we have not perpetuated its legacy. Northampton is not guilty as charged. We should be proud of that, and we should not demean ourselves by now acknowledging a crime or accepting this penalty.

Shall we also name names in a witch hunt?

Councilors, don’t fall for this. The basis for reparations is not our city’s guilt, and the proposal is not even a sensible or virtuous city response to other people’s guilt. The funds we might pay in reparations to highlight some fuzzy and indirect view of victimhood, should instead just go to a real accelerator of equity: greater early childhood intervention, particularly for those most disadvantaged during the schooling interruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Quality public education is our true civic obligation and is our best means to level the playing field for all.

We also must do what we can to ensure that businesses continue to offer the employment opportunities conducive to broad prosperity. Here too, the passage of Northampton reparations would be completely counter-productive. The City Council may not see it, but any sensible business person would: “Invest in Northampton? You mean that city paying reparations? Forget that! That city is nuts.”

Marc Warner lives in Northampton.


Northampton the ‘last place’ for reparations
[Note, I expected that my op-ed in December would be my last word on this topic. The Northampton City Council's unanimous vote two months later, however, prompted this second op-ed.]

By Marc Warner
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
February 24, 2023

Has anybody else pretty much had it with the Northampton City Council? The context of my question is their resolution calling for city-funded reparations.

The council didn’t just vote unanimously for the measure, they absolutely fawned over it. One after the other, in their comments preceding the first vote on Feb. 2, the councilors extolled the resolution’s thoughtfulness, powerfulness, and well-crafted eloquence.

Let’s see if this resolution really merits these accolades. The resolution declares that Northampton implemented “racist and segregationist zoning.” Councilors, how could none of you have challenged or even asked for the slightest proof or clarification of such a damning charge? Northampton never had any ordinance or code explicitly mentioning race or ethnicity as a condition of residence or property ownership.

A simple bit of historical context here: The Supreme Court established the unconstitutionality of government-instituted racial segregation in its unanimous ruling of Buchanan v. Warley. That was at the dawn of American zoning codes in 1917, and it has prevailed up and through the introduction of Northampton’s first real zoning code in 1975.

The Northampton zoning code made no racial reference, and the suggestion that it had the effect of limiting Black residency in Northampton does not hold up to scrutiny.

Northampton is not like the many western suburban towns that were barely hamlets 100 years ago, which now have tens of thousands of residents living almost exclusively in neighborhoods zoned for detached single-family homes beyond the means of the broader area’s lower-income households. Rather, our city has the same 29,000 population it had in 1950, and half our housing stock predates 1940.

Northampton has consistently exceeded the state’s goals for affordable housing, and our share of households in detached single-family homes has actually gone down since the start of zoning in 1975. It was 51% according to the census of 1970, but only 47% in 2020. This is hardly a record that supports a categorical declaration that our zoning was racist and segregationist.

The resolution implies that it is our racism that led so few Blacks to move to Northampton during the great migration from the South in the last century. Councilors, how could you not see the silliness of this?

Our non-metropolitan city of less than 30,000 in New England was never going to have the job opportunities to make it an attractive destination in itself, and it wasn’t even on the intervening path from the South to anywhere else. You can’t argue that Northampton pushed migrating southern Blacks away because of racism when the far more fundamental issue is that the city would never have shown up on the radar at all.

The resolution also clearly implies that racism is the cause for low Black employment in the Northampton schools and for the dearth of Black managers at the heads of most municipal departments. Councilors, do any of you really believe for a nanosecond that Northampton has not taken seriously its equal employment opportunity policy or its commitment to affirmative outreach and action? Where are the EEOC and state actions against Northampton that would support this charge?

The resolution’s call for reparations because Northampton has never elected a Black mayor is also just jaw-droppingly nuts. How many Blacks have run? Come on councilors; the council currently has two Black members and Northampton’s 82.1% vote for Barack Obama in 2008 was just about the highest share of any municipality in the country.

The reparations resolution is right to note that Northampton has the awful stain of slavery. Recent research by Historic Northampton identified 50 people enslaved in Northampton between 1654 and 1783. The resolution ignores, however, the 751 Northampton soldiers who fought in the Civil War to end slavery and the 91 who gave their lives for this ultimate moral cause.

Does this — and our deep history of abolition and support for civil rights — really count for nothing in our city’s broader ledger of racial justice?

Residents of Northampton, this resolution has less to do with truth-telling for our city than with giving local activists the national spotlight they seek. Our City Council has abetted them in this effort, but they have maligned our city in the process and have stunningly ignored the obvious: Northampton is about the last place to have a debt of reparations.

Now let them hear from the rest of us. I hope Northampton voters this November will see a full new slate of council candidates, ones less bent on resolutions and more sensibly focused instead on legislating for a more well-functioning and prosperous city with real efforts to achieve equity for all.

Marc Warner lives in Northampton.


JFK school tennis courts need attention

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
July 24, 2023

To the Editor:

While the city of Northampton recently allocated $29,150 for designing new pickleball courts at Ray Ellerbrook Park, it seems to have given up on the existing tennis courts at JFK Middle School.

Each of those six courts now is sprouting grass from lengthy fissures. Only two remain playable, barely, and the observable rate of decay this summer suggests that even those will preclude a decent game by October.

Come on, Northampton. A new initiative for pickleball doesn’t mean you should forego a state of good repair for the tennis courts you’ve got. A little concrete and asphalt now will save the city from a far more expensive total rebuild in the years to come. And those of us who still like to play tennis will be deeply appreciative. Game on!

Marc Warner
Northampton


Changing who can vote in municipal elections is a ‘breach of good sense’

By Marc Warner
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
December 3, 2021

Should we take seriously a notion of Northampton exceptionalism? This idea — that we’re exempt from the usual rules and norms — came to mind last year when a proponent of massively defunding the police told the City Council that “if it can’t happen here, then it can’t happen anywhere.”

This is one way to look at our off-the-charts progressive cred and virtue signaling. I tend to see a different conclusion: if it hasn’t happened anywhere else, maybe it’s just not a good idea.

These different views can also apply to Northampton’s recent efforts to allow 16-year-olds and non-U.S. citizens to vote in municipal elections.

While these changes would require still untaken action from the state Legislature and a city referendum, the city’s Charter Review Committee, the unanimous City Council, Mayor David Narkewicz, and Mayor-elect Gina-Louise Sciarra have all endorsed both measures. Two high school students on the Northampton Youth Commission wrote a Gazette op-ed in support of the lowered voting age last week (“Vote16 would make Northampton a better place,” Nov 27).

I take a different view. The rest of the country got it right; these are just not good ideas.

Let me start with the proposal to lower the voting age for municipal elections. The writers of the Nov. 27 op-ed cited the following as reasons to support a lowered voting age: it would increase voter turnout, it would make young people more engaged and empowered in local government, and it would promote good voting habits that would continue throughout their lifetimes.

There’s a lot of supposition here. There’s not a lot of case history from which anyone could draw conclusions. There’s also a more fundamental issue: why stop at age 16? There’s nothing in these arguments that wouldn’t also apply at age 15, 14, or some earlier point of childhood.

All of these proponents of a lowered voting age are still just talking about a threshold, and they don’t make a convincing case that 16 is a better threshold than what we have today.

My sense is that the federal government got it right 50 or so years ago when it lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. This was consistent with the legal age of maturity (when someone, for example, can sign a binding contract), and the point when most Americans finish up high school and have their first experience of independent living. The change in voting age to 18 also dealt with the issue that someone old enough to serve in Vietnam should be old enough to vote.

Where, in contrast, are today’s 16-year-olds? Still living at home with their parents. They are youths, and not at the lifestage — adulthood — that marks the obvious threshold when voting on public issues and representation should begin.

The quest for noncitizen voting also falls short of a case for Northampton exceptionalism. The American flag still flies atop City Hall, and our voters share U.S. citizenship with all other voters throughout the country. Maybe this doesn’t mean much to you. Maybe you fancy yourself a “citizen of the world” or are even actively anti-American. Nonetheless, the responsibilities and rights of citizenship — including the right to vote — are pretty much the only common ground left in America.

Watering this down won’t enhance democracy; it will undermine democracy by adding to cynicism and apathy about government and public service. It will weaken support for more sensible progressive causes.

Keep in mind too that these proposals are partisan. Imagine if youth and noncitizens in Northampton were predominantly Trump supporters or even centrist Democrats. Can anyone then imagine that our elected officials and local activists would be so enthusiastic about the concept?

This is a case of Northampton elected officials seeking to choose their voters, rather than the other way around. It is thus the flip side — and is no better — than the Republicans in Texas seeking to put up obstacles to minority voting in Houston. Moreover, it provides an excuse for those Republicans to do so: “Hey, they’re doing it too.”

The Massachusetts Legislature should reject these proposed electoral changes. If they don’t, I hope the citizens of Northampton will have the good sense to vote the proposals down in a subsequent referendum. These measures are breaches of good sense and fair elections. They don’t uplift us in righteous exceptionalism.

They just make us look silly.

Marc Warner lives in Northampton.



In support of DPW head
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
August 9, 2021

To the Editor:

A letter writer in a recent Gazette calls for the city’s mayoral candidates to commit to firing Department of Public Works head Donna LaScaleia for cutting the cherry trees as part of the reconstruction of Warfield Place.

I am a mayoral candidate, and I have no such intent. I watched Ms. LaScaleia when she discussed DPW’s FY22 budget at the City Council budget hearing in June. She came across as knowledgeable, competent, and worthy of the highest professional regard.

Over the past few weeks, I have also had a half dozen or so email exchanges with residents on Warfield Place. Clearly, those cherry trees in bloom would be an attraction on any block. They are also, however, trees, cracking the sidewalk, and — as they approach mortality and start dropping branches — apt to be cracking heads.

The DPW might have offered the residents the option of legally accepting all liability for the trees, sidewalk and street, but as long as these remained the city’s responsibility, then DPW was correct in going forward with the plan. The city cannot be anarchic, with city government yielding to every loud voice. Someone must be in charge, and that person must act for the good of the city and with fairness for all. Donna LaScaleia acted accordingly. She has my support.

Marc Warner
Northampton



An inconvenient truth about panhandling
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
June 15, 2021

To the Editor:

Jalil Johnson’s recent guest column (“Bleeding hearts of Northampton and the beggars utopia,” June 9) points out an inconvenient truth: the welcoming, generous, and tolerant qualities of our city have made our downtown attractive to panhandlers and the down-and-out — and a lot less attractive to everyone else.

The October 2019 report of the mayor’s working group on panhandling also acknowledged the adverse impacts of panhandling (something completely missing from the City Council’s earlier “vibrant sidewalks” resolution), and it added support for some related city initiatives like the new Northampton Recovery Center and the planned Resiliency Hub.

Eventually, however, the city has to go beyond the non-punitive. People enjoying a coffee or a meal at the new tables on Strong Avenue shouldn’t have to succumb to one guy’s screaming or singing at the top of his lungs.

Northampton has existing ordinances against noise, aggressive panhandling, vandalism, litter and disturbances. It’s time to use them.

Marc Warner
Northampton



Progressive ideology shouldn’t drive Northampton policing budget

By Marc Warner
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
April 28, 2021

The recording of the Northampton Arts Council’s most recent Zoom meeting shows what could hardly be a nicer group of people. The primary item of the night’s agenda, however, was not their usual subject, and the Council’s consequent action — the latest in a series of similar actions elsewhere in the city – should raise a concern for all of Northampton: unthinking adherence to progressive values at the expense of good sense and governance.

The subject of the Arts Council’s meeting was the size and function of the Northampton Police Department. This is far from the Council’s mission to support and nurture the arts in Northampton, but they had put the issue on the agenda at the request of Northampton Abolition Now (NAN).

That group has issued a set of demands (not goals, “demands”) for a 50% reduction in the city’s police budget for the coming fiscal year, with the use of the freed-up funds and the hiring and firing authority over a city department in the hands of those “who have been most harmed by police and state violence.”

NAN helped to orchestrate the local efforts last summer that got the Northampton City Council to abruptly cut the police budget by 10% — although not to reprogram the funds, as the city charter does not give the council that discretion.

The Northampton Abolition Now website lists 180 or so signatories to their demands, although only about half of these are from actual city residents. The group has also lined up and sought organizational supporters, and that’s what brought them to the Arts Council earlier this month.

The Arts Council board members listened for over an hour to a NAN spokesperson, and then voted to back NAN’s demands by near unanimity. Did the majority even consider the impact a 50% cut might have on public safety or whether it really makes sense for a city to give public management and spending authority on the basis of perceived oppressed or persecuted status?

Did they see the potential for this ostensible quest for restorative justice to become primarily a source of patronage and cronyism?

My guess is they did not, but their “walk the talk” statements at their April meeting suggests the Arts Council signed-on to NAN’s demands out of a more general sense that any action with an aura of inclusion, equity, and progressive values can never be at odds with basic good governance.

A less egregious but similar attitude affected the Northampton Policing Review Commission. The members of that group, which issued its final report in March, put in a great deal of volunteer effort and most of them seemed to have approached the subject with reason and fair intent. (One exception may be the commission member who wrote in a personal statement at the end of the final report: “Can individual cops be good people, yes, but there are no good cops.”) Their report appropriately recommended a variety of further, data-driven analyses of policing needs, staffing and overtime, but they also cited Northampton’s progressive pride as a reason “to take steps to reduce the footprint of the police in areas which do not require an armed response.”

The problem here is that the commission members lacked the subject matter expertise to determine the calls that could definitively forego an armed response, or Northampton’s context and constraints that would define the optimal policing footprint. Their key recommendation for the city to create a Department of Community Care as a non-police option for emergency services is a worthy goal, but the recommended level of funding is a total guess.

There is no more basis for their recommendation to fund the proposed department with the 10% that the City Council cut from the police budget last summer (with robust funding going forward) than there is for the City Council’s decision to cut the 10% in the first place or for the massive police cuts demanded by NAN. These actions and recommendations do not reflect any metrics about emergency call response time and patrol officer productivity, or any assessments of officer assignments relative to the distribution of emergency calls by type and time-of-day. There is certainly no consideration of Northampton’s collective bargaining agreements.

We of course still need to act. George Floyd’s murder and the broader Black Lives Matter protests do highlight a need for deep police reforms. Police Chief Jody Kasper, with input from the mayor and city council, should be seriously examining the guidelines on the use of potentially deadly force, officer training, options for mental health and social service cases, the tracking and disciplining of bad officers, and the presence of any program that sure looks like routine harassment of people of color.

This is how Northampton should show its progressive values. Declaring up front that the city should cut a fixed percent of the police budget, however, is simply arbitrary. It is pursuit of progressive purity without a grounding in data or reality. It is not a sensible way to govern.

Marc Warner lives in Northampton



'Oh, come off it, Jay’

By MARC WARNER
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
October 29, 2020

The gun nuts, the religious wackies, the QAnon crazies, the racists, the “to hell with the future, I got mine” self-centered, the people who see wearing masks as infringements on liberty rather than as sensible acts of commonwealth, and the gullible who actually believe that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would defund the police and open the border.

These were among the crowd, I imagined, whose idea of a nice October Saturday was to wave Trump flags by the Coolidge Bridge or on Route 9 in Hadley. They would vote for Trump this year, and no overture of dialogue or reason could possibly change their minds.

And then there’s Dr. Jay Fleitman. His periodic columns in the Gazette had shown his conservative leaning, but there are plenty of conservatives who are not in any of the above categories and who know better than to vote for Donald Trump. Certainly, Dr. Fleitman, the educated professional, would be among them.

Boy, was I wrong. His column Wednesday morning declares — unapologetically! — that he supports Trump’s reelection. OK, Jay. I’m guessing you’re open to reason, so let’s go through your arguments.

You view the pre-COVID economic vitality, the routing of ISIS and the control of immigration along the Mexican border as testaments to Trump’s effectiveness. Oh, come off it, Jay; Barack Obama set the fundamentals and course on each of these.

Compared with Trump’s time in office even prior to coronavirus, the Obama years witnessed a far bigger drop in unemployment, a far greater drop in territory held by ISIS and a far greater rate of apprehensions and deportations of illegal border crossers. Trump could have gained more on all of these fronts had he just put the Obama policies on autopilot.

Moreover, Fleitman refers to Trump’s “achievements” without considering the long-term negative consequences of Trump’s actions on American prosperity, health and standing. His 2017 tax cut was an unnecessary stimulus that added trillions to the national debt. His decision to pull out of the Iranian Nuclear Deal, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organization have ceded U.S. leadership and weakened the global response to global challenges.

Fleitman also credits Trump for his positive effects on Blacks and Hispanics. No Dr. Fleitman, this perspective is ridiculous. The rising tide does lift all boats, but the economic gains (pre-COVID) made by all Americans do not excuse Trump’s sucking up to a racist base.

The neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were not “fine people.” The Proud Boys should not “stand by.” The four Democratic congresswomen of color who Trump criticized in July 2019 should not “go back” to their own country. They too are our citizens.

Finally, Dr. Fleitman rejects the idea that Trump’s “style and personality” should matter. It is this suggestion — more than anything else in Fleitman’s column — that prompts me to write this response. I just don’t understand how any educated professional can tolerate Trump’s immense deficiencies in these areas.

Dr. Fleitman: integrity, character, statesmanship, style and personality do matter. Trump’s disregard for truth and ethics over the last four years have diminished the presidency, and make it more difficult for future leaders to rally Americans around a common cause. Trump is unqualified for office. And you, Dr. Fleitman, should be able to see this.

Marc Warner lives in Northampton.
[Note, the Gazette dropped the last paragraph, I presume for space reasons.]


Don't remove the Lincoln statue from Park Square

Submitted to the Boston Globe
June 20, 2020

To the editor:

Tory Bullock, the prime mover of efforts to remove the Lincoln statue in Boston's Park Square, recognizes that the statue is meant to represent freedom, but he sees the sculpted black man crouching at Lincoln's feet as representing "submissiveness."  "It represents: 'Know your place because that's where you belong,'" says Bullock, and now 7,000 petition signers and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh have agreed that the statue has to go.

What utter nonsense. The statue isn't just supposed to represent freedom, it does represent freedom. The black man has shackles broken and he is rising up out of slavery.

To see submissiveness here is to wildly miss the point. It is also to blasphemy the honor that Lincoln eternally deserves. Emancipation--the great moral cause that Lincoln fulfilled--is the absolute opposite of any promotion of black submission.

Lincoln is not the murderous Derek Chauvin on the neck of George Floyd, and supporters of keeping this statue in Park Square are not the racist neo-Nazis of Charlottesville.

Any offensiveness of this statue is not in the standing Lincoln or the rising just-freed man by his side; it is purely in the mistaken eye of the beholder.

Mayor Walsh foregoes his own sense of honesty and history by yielding to these petitions. This statue could be the centerpiece of the city's future Juneteenth celebrations.  It does not deserve to be carted away in scorn.

Marc Warner
Northampton



My local coronavirus case

By MARC WARNER
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
April 27, 2020

Editor’s note: Northampton resident Marc Warner wrote this essay about a week before his stepmother, Lucille, died peacefully in a nursing home on April 19. She had tested positive for COVID-19. Marc continues to be free of coronavirus symptoms.

Look real close at the latest data. Closer. Over there. Hampshire County. You see that new case in Northampton?

I brought it.

On Thursday, April 9, I drove to New York to get my 96-year-old stepmother, Lucille, out of the Manhattan rehab center where she’s been for a month since her fall and a broken bone by her hip on March 3.

She hadn’t had a lot of life in her before her fall. This former bon vivant had outlived her husband, most of her friends, and had swapped her life about town for a life about three rooms. She slept 21 hours a day, seemed to live mostly on coffee, and hadn’t left her apartment for at least a year and a half.

It was hard to get information from the rehab center. The facility went into coronavirus lockdown mode soon after Lucille arrived. The facility did notify me about a coronavirus case on the 14th floor, but Lucille was on the seventh, unaffected, and the staff was taking great precautions to keep the facility virus-free.

They also conveyed the sense that Lucille was not a motivated patient. There was no “rehab” going on; she refused to walk more than a few feet and the staff relented and let her go back to bed.

She was comfortable — or at least not uncomfortable. But given the ineffectiveness of rehab, the inability to visit, and the worsening situation in New York, it seemed reasonable to bring her up to Northampton — to our home and from there to a nearby nursing home if she needed more care than we could muster.

So at 2:30 p.m. on that Thursday, a helper from the center and I scooted her from a wheelchair and onto a mattress in the back of my van. A couple of howls during the transition, but then she slept for the whole trafficless drive to Northampton.

She did not, however, want to go any further. She screamed in apparent pain at all my attempts to hoist her with and without the mattress out of the van. My wife Bonnie joined the effort and applied her teacher skills to sternly lay down the rules as if to an off-task 10 year old. “Lucille, we’re going to move you. No yelling.”

I was in awe.

Alas, it didn’t work. We never got more than half of her out of the van before our mortification at the fact that the whole neighborhood could hear someone yelling “Marc, leave me” prompted us to abort and slide her back in the van.

It was also dawning on us that getting her out of the van might be just the start of our problems. Lucille was in pain and she seemed to need a lot more care than we’d realized. She couldn’t walk to the bathroom. She couldn’t seem to sit up. Could we handle this?

My doubts — and the more immediate need to get her out of the van — prompted my call to the admissions person at the nearby nursing home that I’d been in touch with a few times over the last few weeks. Would she be able to admit Lucille sooner rather than later?

The woman couldn’t have been more understanding or kinder over the phone, but no, she couldn’t allow me to just drive Lucille over and let her staff take her from there. The paperwork needed to be done, and she couldn’t open her facility to a New York transplant with the consequent risk of coronavirus.

At a loss of where to turn next, I called the city’s non-emergency line. Five minutes later, two masked EMTs were in my driveway. Fifteen minutes later, they added full Tyvek suits to their masks and proceeded to get her out of the van and into an ambulance for a trip to Cooley Dickinson Hospital.

Half way into the effort, though, they suddenly stopped, with one of the EMT’s asking excitedly, “Did you see that?!” I had not. He and his partner then said in unison, “look on the roof.” A bizarre sight: a falcon had swooped down and perched just above us.

I could not accompany the ambulance because the hospital is closed to visitors, but we did have a series of quick calls. Yes, I’m her health care proxy. No, she has no underlying medical conditions other than recovering from the broken bone by her hip. Yes, I would like her next — and final — move to be to a local nursing home.

And two hours after that, a doctor at the hospital called again to tell me that she tested positive for coronavirus.

Oh Lordy. What have I done? I assured the doctor that I’d had absolutely no sense that she might have the disease, and that I was so sorry for bringing this to Northampton and Cooley Dickinson.

Next bombshell: I have to self-isolate immediately. Within five minutes a nurse from the city health department called to confirm that I had done that.

I had, and I write this now in day three of my isolation in our bedroom. Bonnie sleeps on the couch downstairs, and I am again in awe (and thankful) for her immediate decision Thursday to banish me to the bedroom and not to the garage.

Which brings us to now. I feel fine. If there are little covids floating inside of me, they have yet to mount a noticeable attack. I’m getting work done, I have a nice springtime view out the window, I have good meals delivered on a tray outside the bedroom door.

Bonnie cancelled the annual backyard Easter egg hunt for the boys. She instead went for quality over quantity courtesy of curbside pick up of chocolates from Richardsons. Two were on my breakfast tray this morning.

As for Lucille, I wished her happy birthday by FaceTime this morning, and let her know that she’s led a wonderful 97 years, that I’m thankful for the influence she’s had on me, and that I promise the next move will be her last.

Honestly, I’m not sure she heard a word of it. I actually thought she might already be dead, and the response by the nurse orchestrating the call suggested that she thought so too. But then Lucille opened her eyes, and I got to wave before the nurse ended the call.

I suspect it will be my last call with her. The hospital plan is “focusing on comfort”; i.e., she receives no medical care or diagnostics other than a second COVID-19 test to see if she is still positive. She is.

The hospital does not have a hospice unit, and the hospital staff has said they can only keep her until Monday. She cannot go to the nursing home I had hoped to take her because of the coronavirus. She might go to a nursing home in East Longmeadow if they can open their planned coronavirus ward this weekend. Otherwise, I don’t know. A room in one of the motels on Route 5? If all else fails, we’ll take her here.

And that’s today’s “captive’s log” from Northampton.

I hope you’re well!

Marc Warner lives in Northampton.



Letter writer overstates gains in 401K

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
January 14, 2020

To the Editor:

The Jan. 3 letter, “Don’t like Trump, check your 401K” overstates the president’s contribution to the state of the economy, and seems to ignore the moral dimensions that accompany Trump’s actions.

In regard to the first, perhaps it’s enough to point out that the U.S. stock market grew at a faster rate during the Obama presidency. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 44% during the first 35 months of Trump’s presidency, but 53% during the first 35 months of Obama’s.

Moreover, the Dow Jones went up 147% during the full eight years of Obama’s two terms, and the subsequent growth that the letter writer credits to Trump may be largely just an extrapolation of the trends and fundamentals created by his predecessor.

From this perspective, the 401K-focused letter writer may have himself been hypocritical by not extending this democratic achievement with a 2016 vote for Hillary Clinton.

As for the moral dimension, the letter writer should consider that his recent 401K gains are not a virtuous end that justifies any means. No one should ever, for example, excuse the utter injustice and depravity of slavery as an acceptable tradeoff for the prosperity of the American South before the Civil War.

Likewise, we should be mindful and morally troubled by personal gains that come at a significant and unfair cost to future Americans. They will bear the brunt of the higher national debt added by President Trump’s societally-unnecessary corporate tax cut, and the added misery from global warming hastened by his rollback of environmental policies.

The proper response to this moral concern, however, is not to empty our retirement plans of any gains since 2016 as the letter writer suggests; that makes as much sense as choosing not to drive on a highway that you opposed but that got built anyway. A more reasonable response is simply to vote for new leadership — an action I will take with gusto next November.

Marc Warner
Northampton



Blowing off tax payment only shifts share of public costs onto others

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
May 2, 2019

To the Editor:

The writer of the April 25 Gazette guest column pretty much lost me at the headline: “I’m skipping my tax payment.”

Despite his claimed moral grounds, the Sunderland writer is ignoring that he lives in a representative democracy, and has the option to make his point at the voting booth, the courthouse and public forums like this newspaper.

Blowing off his taxes is just shifting his share of public costs onto others — many of whom also have some disagreement with federal policies.

At least the writer recognizes that civil disobedience comes with an acceptance of the penalties. Good, and I hope for swift enforcement. Financial penalties or even jail time for illegal tax avoidance is, in my mind, justice served.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Take care not to ‘stink up’ Northampton in pot funds race

By MARC WARNER
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
February 26, 2019

Northampton has shown pretty good sense these last few years by not joining other cities in the quest for sudden windfalls.

Let Springfield, Holyoke, and Palmer vie for the one western Massachusetts casino. We have higher graces.

We also took a sensible pass on a bid for Amazon’s second headquarters. Boston seems to have had a legitimate shot, but the other 24 Massachusetts proposals were starry-eyed wastes of time. Seriously Gardner: your charms are just not enough to overcome those 63 miles to Logan.

Now, there’s a new source of dangling dollar signs — marijuana — and this time Northampton is leading the civic charge. Mayor David Narkewicz was thrilled to be the first customer last November when New England Treatment Access opened as the first recreational marijuana store in the eastern U.S. Why not? He avoided the usual hourslong line to get in the front door. More importantly, the city received an ongoing budget boost of 3 percent on all of NETA revenue.

This, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. The mayor has promoted Northampton as a welcoming place to start your marijuana business, and the promotion has succeeded. The mayor has signed 15 municipal host agreements with 11 marijuana businesses (some companies have multiple agreements). Most of these are for general retail stores, three are for medical treatment centers and four are for marijuana cultivation and processing facilities. All will pay 3 percent on sales revenue to the city.

Mayor, this is not a good deal. You see the sudden windfall of that 3 percent tax, but you’ve exaggerated the rest of our delight in becoming the cannabis capital of the Northeast, and you’ve ignored the negative effect these developments — particularly the marijuana cultivation and processing — will have on our quality of life. Here, for example is what Bart Axelman told the Denver Post about the marijuana growing operation that moved near his Colorado home: “Six months ago our neighborhood smelled like a neighborhood, and now it smells like someone is holding up a package of marijuana to your face.”

Or consider this quote from Grace Owen-Smeltzer about a medical marijuana cultivation facility near her home in York, Maine: “That smell — it’s a skunk smell. It gets in my house and can take over. In the summertime, during barbecue season, the windows are open or you’re outside enjoying a meal, and it stinks. You can’t enjoy your own property.”

Similar complaints are popping up anywhere in the country that has legalized marijuana cultivation either outdoors or in indoor facilities.

Is this our destiny too?

Let me suggest an alternative course for Northampton:

• City policy makers and planners should make themselves aware of the experiences elsewhere.
  

• Put a moratorium on any further host agreements with marijuana businesses.
  

• Modify § 111-5, Northampton’s “right to farm” declaration to exclude marijuana cultivation or processing. Northampton has declared in this section that the negative impacts of farming, including “noise, odors, dust, and fumes,” are “more than offset by the benefits of farming to the neighborhood, community, and society in general.” I suggest that this trade-off does not apply to marijuana, and that marijuana was in any case not legal to produce at the time the city adopted this rule. For these reasons, the city should explicitly — and quickly — exempt marijuana from its right to farm declaration, and it should make any other changes to support this in the zoning code.
  

• Affirm the need for marijuana cultivation and processing facilities to comply with § 350-12.1, environmental performance standards.
  

• Require the highest form of active odor abatement as a requirement for a building and use permit. The city should only issue a building permit for indoor marijuana cultivation if it includes measures proven to be effective in mitigating the smells outside the building. My quick internet research suggests that the most effective odor abatement is with a charcoal filtration system and a building facility kept at a slight vacuum condition. The city should ensure that no marijuana cultivation facility can operate unless it implements and maintains this type of system, appropriately-sized for the planned level of cultivation.
  

Mayor and councilors, we have a wonderful city and a fine quality of life. Let’s not stink it up.

Marc Warner is a Northampton resident.


The future of transportation could be a whole new world

Published in the Boston Globe
October 9, 2018

Boston Globe Editor’s note: For the Oct. 7 Ideas edition of transportation, we asked for readers’ views on the challenges facing Greater Boston, and they responded in force. Here are a few of those letters:

To the Editor:

A big challenge in planning for the future of transportation has to be the uncertainty about where people will want to go and the options they’ll have to get there. Old habits and choices are rapidly changing. Increased opportunities for telecommuting and alternative work schedules could lop the peaks off the rush hour, and artificial intelligence might reduce the number of people with a job for which they need to commute at all.

The frequency and destination of non-commute trips are also changing. How many trips to the mall will we make as online shopping prevails? Will the number of our trips to socialize in person drop as technological advances allow us to just send our avatars to meet in virtual chat rooms? And when we do actually travel, will autonomous vehicles, congestion pricing, and expansion of Uber, Lyft, bike sharing, and car sharing services change demand for parking, curb space, sidewalks, transit, and suburban and urban living?

Transportation planners and policy makers should be asking these questions and seriously trying to gauge the prospects for various scenarios. There are probably legislative or regulatory actions they can take that could support the most socially desirable outcomes.

Marc Warner
Northampton
The writer is a transportation consultant.


Questions if abolishing ICE is good policy

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
July 03, 2018

To the Editor:

Let me see if I understand the sentiment in the June 28 Gazette article ("McGovern backs movement to abolish ICE").  The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency uses an objectionable tactic, but rather than change the tactic, Congressman James McGovern recommends getting rid of the whole agency? Is he thus endorsing the idea of an essentially “open” U.S. border without any enforcement of federal laws regarding immigration?

And if there is no enforcement of immigration laws, then what does he see as the unique rights of U.S. citizenship?

I am an active Democrat and am appalled by the election of Donald Trump. I strongly believe, however, that we owe a higher obligation to our fellow citizens than we do to those who are not. Frankly, I believe that McGovern does too, and that his recent comments about abolishing ICE are nothing but insincere political pandering.

“My people love it” is Trump’s rationale for all sorts of policy nonsense. An appeal to reason is a better way to govern.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Credits Peter Kocot for state ethics reform

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
February 23, 2018

To the editor:

After my wife and I moved from Cambridge to Northampton 12 years ago, I got the sense that awareness of Statehouse integrity issues drops off pretty fast as you got further from Beacon Hill.

The Boston Globe, for example, shines a regular spotlight on the sweetheart deals, the patronage and the cronyism in the Legislature. The Daily Hampshire Gazette? Not so much.

I hope, though, that area residents know of the significant efforts to improve legislative ethics made by Peter Kocot, our state representative who died Thursday. In 2009, he became the new chairman of the House Committee on Ethics, and he took the job and the mission seriously and personally.

I confirmed this at the time with both Pam Wilmot, executive director of the good-government group Common Cause Massachusetts, and with Jay Kaufman, a state representative from Lexington who (along with Pam) seems to be the Boston Globe’s go-to-guy for a good quote on state ethics issues. He said that Peter considered the ethics reform bill in the House to be "his" bill, and he took it as a personal affront when the rest of the Legislature moved to strike some of the more aggressive measures to curtail pay-to-play.

There was still room for improvement when then-Gov. Deval Patrick signed the campaign finance, ethics, and lobbying act, but the new law was clearly a home run for honest government in Massachusetts — and much of the credit belonged to Peter Kocot.

Marc Warner
Northampton
The writer has been a board member and treasurer of Common Cause Massachusetts since 2003.


Wants less absolutist stance on cameras

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
December 5, 2017

To the editor:

The majority of the Northampton City Council, Gazette columnist Bill Newman and many others around town seem to view the issue of downtown surveillance as if it were on par with Thomas Paine calling for independence or John Brown’s stand against slavery.

Good grief. A less passionate, less absolutist assessment would be a lot more sensible.

Consider that the proposed ordinance seeks to ban not just cameras but automatic license plate readers. Too late. We’ve already got them. It’s a key feature of the downtown’s new parking system. We type in our license plate number at the parking kiosks. A city vehicle then comes around and uses an automatic license plate reader to check the good standing of every vehicle at the curb.

Northampton and Massachusetts have also raised the idea of requiring police body cams. Do those who oppose surveillance technology but who have also called for police body cams have no inkling that maybe there’s a little hypocrisy here?

Massachusetts may one day also join the 26 other states that currently allow red light enforcement cameras. The proposed anti-surveillance ordinance, however, would preclude this use in Northampton. Is that really what those against the surveillance technology intend? They may be unwittingly mistaken to assert a fundamental right to privacy while in the downtown (no, that’s why it’s "public"), but they surely can’t insist on a fundamental right to run a red light.

Look, I too am against putting surveillance cameras downtown. But my issue doesn’t call for a high-horse ordinance and resolution. Nah, I just don’t think it’s worth the money.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Why is city clerk elected anyway?

submitted to Daily Hampshire Gazette
November 3, 2017

To the editor:

In her November 3rd letter to the Gazette, former City Clerk Wendy Mazza expresses her support for the election of Robert Driscoll to the post. Her endorsement reminds me of a more fundamental question raised a few years earlier: why is the city clerk elected anyway?

The committee that drafted Northampton's new city charter in 2012 considered this issue. I served on that committee, and felt there were strong reasons for an appointed city clerk. First, the Collins Center for Public Management at UMass identified eight criteria in support of an elected position. None of these applied to the city clerk.

Wendy Mazza also provided us with her own list for why the clerk should be an elected position, with her number one reason being that the clerk’s election is a small town tradition. So, at one time, was patronage, but we don’t miss its passing. We are also not so small a town as to prefer old-time quaintness over modern professionalism. Mazza's arguments about independence and integrity also seemed unconvincing. The weight of state statutes and prosecution are a much stronger assurance of integrity in regard to the clerk’s purview than is the election of individuals to the office.

Finally, we found no evidence that the two-thirds of Massachusetts municipalities with appointed city or town clerks have a higher incidence of electoral shenanigans, incomplete records, or hurdles in the procurement of dog licenses.

So why did we leave the city clerk as an elected position? Well, we had bigger issues to deal with and Mazza warned that she would campaign aggressively against the new charter if we called for an appointed clerk.

Look, none of us on the committee doubted Mazza's competence, and we were confident that the mayor and council would continue to have her serve as an appointed city clerk for as long as she wanted.

I still believe, however, that the clerk's office should not be a separate power base in city governance, and I thus find it hard to shake my skepticism about the value of Mazza's endorsement.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Not all who know her are Friends of Frances

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
March 27, 2017

To the editor:

A March 21 letter (" ‘Pat-RIOT’s’ day march to protest military budget") called for people to join the "Friends of Frances Crowe" for an anti-war march and rally in Northampton on April 17.

The letter writer contends that anyone who knows Ms. Crowe, who has seen her in action, and who has heard of her long inspired anti-war, pro-democracy activities is a Friend of Frances. That is not the case. I have seen Ms. Crowe in action, and have not found her to be someone I want to march behind or befriend.

My issue is not the general direction of her policies, but rather the nature and tone of her arguments. Let me cite in particular her December 2015 comment to the Northampton City Council that "the government only knows how to bomb people." The Gazette reported this in the next day’s paper, and I subsequently checked the recording to see if the reporter got the quote wrong. Nope, she said it, it was in context, and I was dismayed to see that not one person in the room seems to have let out the slightest hint of a gasp.

Well, they should have gasped. The comment was as irrational, offensive, and cranky as anything I’ve ever heard from Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump.

Friends of Frances: enjoy your march. But please don’t imagine that all of us who have contempt for President Trump and who question his proposed $54 billion increase for the military would also want to associate with Ms. Crowe’s extremism.

Marc Warner
Northampton


City Council resolutions on federal affairs unwise

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
February 12, 2017

To the editor:

I am as appalled as anyone around here by the election of Donald Trump, but I remain aware enough of U.S. governance to know when something is unconstitutional and to understand the value of the rule of law.

The Northampton City Council seems to be unclear about this. The council in its resolution and debate on Feb. 2 declared President Trump’s executive order on immigration to be "unconstitutional" ("Council condemns Trump’s ‘hateful’ travel ban," Feb. 3). As wishful thinking as that might be, it is, alas, what that odious Kellyanne Conway would call "alternative facts."

The reality is that only a federal judge can declare something unconstitutional. That had not happened at the time of the council meeting, and Judge Robart’s subsequent ruling merely extends the initial temporary restraining order while setting the stage for a further judicial review of the constitutionality of Trump’s action.

I suggest that the City Council should also check its impulses when it calls, as it did in the Feb. 2 resolution, "upon the residents of Northampton to be guided by their consciences to resist this Executive Order and any others which they deem to be illegal or unethical."

Oh really? The city clerk in Kentucky put her conscience above the law by refusing to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Timothy McVeigh followed his own warped conscience all the way to blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Councilors, we are a nation of laws and I am hopeful that the congress and the courts will be an effective balance against this terrible man we have as president. The Northampton City Council’s resolutions about federal affairs, however, seem neither appropriate, meaningful, nor wise.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Cites contempt for Trump the man

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
December 7, 2016

To the editor:

Jay Fleitman argues that the people who object to Donald Trump as president are doing so out of knee-jerk liberal angst, overblown concerns about the loss of liberty, and without proper consideration of Trump’s policy proposals.

Let me suggest that there are at least some of us who oppose Trump for a far more fundamental reason: the guy’s a jerk. Trump spent the last eight years pushing the "birther" nonsense about President Obama, and the last year or so mocking anyone who crossed his path for the presidency.

In the final presidential debate, he couldn’t go four minutes without interrupting Hillary Clinton or calling her a "nasty" and "crooked" woman. Who wants to listen to a guy like that for the next four years?

This is not the integrity, character, or statesmanship I feel is appropriate for any level of public service, much less the presidency.

Perhaps Jay Fleitman feels obliged as the Gazette’s conservative columnist to show support for Trump the Republican. But as a respected professional (he is an M.D.), I can’t understand how he deep down doesn’t share this contempt for Trump the man.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Time, and timing, of council service

By MARC WARNER
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
June 28, 2016

After losing the Northampton City Council race to William Dwight and Jesse Adams last November, I figured I’d hold on to my "Sensible Marc Warner" signs. Maybe I’d take on the incumbents again two years down the road.

I might also just get around to painting the walls and use the signs to protect the carpet.

On May 6, however, Adams resigned from the council, just four months into his two-year term. According to the Gazette article at the time, Adams wrote in his resignation letter that he could no longer serve on the council and meet the demands of his law practice. "I put a tremendous amount of time, effort and hard work into each and can no longer do both at the same time."

Uh, Jesse, you couldn’t have come to this conclusion, say, six months earlier?

In any case, four people have signed up for the special election. I’m not among them. I wasn’t expecting an opening until 2017 and have made other plans. I’ve also had the pleasure — and it really was — of running for office, and my heart at the moment just isn’t in it.

Let me comment, though, on two issues that the new contenders for the at-large City Council seat — and city voters — might want to keep in mind.

The first is Jesse’s stated reason for resigning. Major illness? Triplets on the way? Those would have been understandable. Not enough time, however, is a poor reason to quit. I do understand that councilors make a significant effort on behalf of the city, but this part-time service should not preclude a full-time job.

Councilors unwilling to spend "a tremendous amount of time" on city business don’t have to quit, they just have to spend their time more wisely.

Here’s an example from the fall campaign. A guy at a candidate forum asked how we would handle a request for a new, mid-block crosswalk. I spoke first and had this response:

"As a transportation professional, I would pull down my copy of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, look up the warrants for a mid-block crosswalk, and if they applied at this location, I would suggest that the site be added to the city’s transportation improvements plan. As a city councilor, however, I would pass along the request to (then head of Department of Public Works) Ned Huntley for him to pull down his own copy of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices."

The questioner expressed his shock that I would deprive the city of my knowledge. "Look," I insisted, "I would of course use my knowledge, and values, and energy on behalf of the city, but I’m running for City Council, not for head of DPW, and I don’t have the time to focus on an issue that city staff can handle."

Jesse was up next with this response: "I would schedule a site visit."

Jeez, no wonder you’re spending so much time as a city councilor!

Here’s another way to use council time wisely: stop playing model Congress. Northampton City Council has absolutely no authority over Trans-Pacific trade policy, drones in Yemen, or war in Iraq. Councilors should have felt absolutely no obligation to stick around for these debates. Think for a moment about Charlie Baker, not as governor, but for the years when he was president of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and a Swampscott selectman. Can anyone imagine that he would have spent his selectman time on these types of issues? Can anyone imagine that Swampscott didn’t benefit from his business-like service?

The second issue for council contenders and voters to keep in mind is what I suspect is among Adams’ unstated reason for quitting: health insurance. Adams received city-funded health insurance since he got on the council in 2010. In 2015, the independent compensation committee (set up by the City Charter Commission on which I served) concluded that part-time elected officials should not get this major perk, otherwise reserved for full-time city employees.

I agreed with this conclusion, and in my Gazette op-ed between the council’s first and second votes on the matter, I wrote that overriding the independent committee would make "the honorable council service, well, a lot less honorable."

The council kept its health care perk. Councilors Adams and Dwight were the loudest council voices in support of this view, and this was the reason I ran against them; I wanted to hold them accountable for this ethical breach.

So how might health insurance have been a factor in Adams suddenly quitting the council? He got married in October, and he acknowledged at the forum with the crosswalk that he would get on the health plan of his new wife’s company.

Is it a leap to suggest that by dropping his reliance on the city health plan, he’d also dropped a big reason for his interest in council service?

OK, new candidates. Thank you for your willingness to serve (honorably, I hope). Have fun, and if you do get elected, please use your time wisely and stay on for the full term.

Marc Warner of Northampton is president of Warner Transportation Consulting Inc.


Payout of SHELD leader would ripoff ratepayers

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
February 29, 2016

To the editor:

The Gazette reported Feb. 18 that the board of the South Hadley Electric Light Department voted to stop the automatic renewals of the utility’s manager, Wayne Doerpholz, and that the utility now owes Doerpholz $476,580 for unused vacation, sick and personal time.

Half a million dollars for unused leave allowances?  Of course don’t renew this guy’s contract, and try every means possible to claw back what this guy is allegedly owed.

I am familiar with standard labor practices at public agencies as I have helped transit agencies around the country prepare for labor negotiations and manage their operations for the last 20 years.

The paid time-off rates for this guy at SHELD are way outside of standard labor practices.

Sick time cash-out provisions — where they exist at all — are typically capped at a certain amount and paid at a fraction of the hourly rate. The payout for Doerpholz would be a huge ripoff of the SHELD ratepayers, and should be an even bigger embarrassment for the SHELD board.

The board should never have agreed to these out-of-line contractual terms, and they are remiss in letting it go unnoticed for the last 10 years.  Let’s hope that other local boards and public officials are more vigilant in their financial oversight.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Council candidate says letter misrepresented his message

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
December 18, 2015

To the editor:

I was surprised to see a Dec. 9 letter in the Gazette, "Northampton’s voter turnout shows satisfaction, not apathy." The election seems like a long time ago, and I hadn’t been aware that it was generating any ongoing discussion. The chatter certainly hasn’t come from me — I’ve barely said a peep about this election since I lost on Nov. 3.

But since the letter writer brought it up, I’ll chime in with a correction: My platform included a dozen city issues, and called for the council to be far more focused and honest about the city’s fiscal condition and challenges.

I never for a moment suggested that the city adopt a policy of fiscal austerity. In fact, the only specific cutback I called for was eliminating the health insurance perk for part-time elected officials. This was the recommendation of the independent Elected Officials Compensation Committee, and the ethical conflict of the council in voting against this committee is what prompted me to run in the first place.

I have no regrets about the content of my campaign message. The letter writer’s misrepresentation of it, however, is further indication that I could have conveyed it more effectively.

Marc Warner
Northampton


User fees at Musante Beach reasonable way to fund operations

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
September 10, 2015

To the editor:

Thanks to the writer of a letter Aug. 28 for raising the interesting suggestion that Northampton should use general taxes and not user fees to pay for services at Musante Beach. This question of how to pay for municipal services — broad-based taxes, special benefit assessments, or user fees and permits — should be a regular and thoughtful part of policy making.

For Musante Beach, the small cost for the city and a general lack of crowding might justify removal of the beach fee. Conceptually, though, the user fee is reasonable.

The key issues are that most residents don’t use the beach; the modest fees go toward the direct costs for the lifeguards, upkeep and insurance; and the layout of the beach provides for easy access control that makes charging the fee possible. This latter issue precludes a similar user fee at Puffer’s Pond in Amherst.

Note that there are cases where all of these conditions would exist, but public policy makers could reasonably decide to pick up most of the tab through broad-based taxes. Transit services, for example, get significant public funds. Here, though, there are sound externality, efficiency and distributional arguments. Particularly in bigger cities, motorists benefit from others taking the bus, the city can avoid costs of building new roads and parking facilities, and the poor and non-drivers gain a level of accessibility that could never be supported by fares alone.

These types of factors would not apply for recreational services at Musante Beach.

Marc Warner
Northampton
The writer is an at-large candidate for Northampton City Council.


Photo drone elicits cry of 'Boo!' from the stands

Published in the Boston Globe
May 7, 2015

To the editor:

Helen Greiner says her company's low-cost drone would be great for photographing a child's soccer game from a perspective encompassing the entire field ("CyPhy Works plans a $500 photo drone," Business, May 5). How about the adverse effects of distracting the players, interfering with the game, and annoying all the less self-centered parents who are content with their perspective from the sidelines?

Youth-sport referees and coaches probably toss out far more parents than they do kids. May I suggest that every youth league in America now add drone use to the list of impermissible parental behavior?

Marc Warner
Northampton



Trend is against offering health coverage for part-time elected officials

By MARC WARNER
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
January 13, 2015

NORTHAMPTON — We elect our City Council to examine city issues, provide thoughtful judgment and reflect the values of the city as a whole. The process seems to break down, however, when the issue is compensation for council members themselves.

On the one hand, members have been so reluctant to appear self-serving that they have let 24 years pass since the last City Council raise. On the other hand, when an independent committee recommends doubling the salary — they’ll take that one, thanks — they convince themselves that a linked recommendation to eliminate the city-funded health plan for part-time elected officials comes from a flawed analysis that the council is right to reject. What’s the flaw? The council members raised two types of objections at their last meeting.

First, they insisted that the health benefit is part of the robust compensation needed to attract good and diverse people to run and to serve. Seriously? City Council, school board and trustee positions with the Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School are not standard jobs. Their appeal should be for the opportunity to represent the community, make a difference, and have the honor of respected public service. The honor should come with a suitable honorarium, but not with the type of compensation that the council has in mind. A rich compensation would attract more candidates, but it would likely attract them for the rich compensation without ensuring their commitment or suitability for service.

If the council were sincere about attracting more and diverse people to serve, it should focus on the time commitment rather than on the compensation. There are just not all that many people with full-time job and family responsibilities who can afford the time expected of city councilors. Rationalize your committee structures, recognize the value of your members’ time and limit debate on issues that are outside your purview (such as drones in Yemen) or that lack any new information or prospects for actual change (late school start times).

The council’s second argument is that the benchmark table presented by the compensation committee still shows health insurance to be a common benefit. The council is right about this particular table, but this seems to be a fluke of the sample, rather than a flaw in the committee’s reasoning.

A January 2014 Boston Globe article on council compensation looked at a far bigger sample of Massachusetts cities and towns south of Boston. It found that of 48 communities surveyed, 15 offered health insurance to councilors and selectmen.

Denise Baker of the Massachusetts Municipal Association confirms that one in three municipalities offering health insurance to their part-time elected officials is also consistent with their findings. Moreover, she says that the trend has been to remove part-time elected officials and appointees from the health care benefit.

And as for the suggestion by several council members that they would never vote to remove anyone’s health insurance, it may be worthwhile to consider how these particular beneficiaries got the deal in the first place. Massachusetts law, Chapter 32B, precludes municipal employees who regularly work less than 20 hours per week from enrolling in a city or town-paid health plan. That would have made the council (12 to 15 hours per week), school board (8 to 10 hours), and Smith Vocational trustees (less than 10 hours) automatically ineligible. Somewhere in the history of 32B, however, the lawmakers carved out an exemption for elected officials who received any other compensation. City and town authorities could thus create a mysterious no-show elected board, pay the members $1 per year and then quietly — very quietly — provide each of the well-connected members with $12,000 or more in city-paid family health insurance.

This is an extreme example, but it is a case for which I hope every council member would willingly revoke health plan eligibility. I don’t mean to imply that Northampton’s part-time elected officials are as unworthy as this hypothetical, but the benefit they receive for the hours worked still raises ethical questions.

The 20-hour rule seems a clearer and fairer basis for city health plan eligibility. The council this Thursday has a chance to rescind the vote it took last month. It should do so. For while the health care benefits make these honorable jobs a lot more lucrative, they also make them, well, a lot less honorable. The compensation committee got it right. I believe any other group of seven objective citizens would have reached the same conclusion.

Marc Warner lives in Northampton and served on the Charter Drafting Committee that created the compensation advisory board.


Planned $2.25 million rail underpass in Northampton wastes public money

By MARC WARNER
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
August 15, 2014

NORTHAMPTON — About 10 years ago, nationwide attention turned toward a planned bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island in Alaska. To the construction companies that would build it, and the Alaska congressmen who pushed for federal funding, the bridge seemed like a great idea.

To pretty much everyone else, however, the bridge was a $315 million extravagance for an essentially negligible amount of traffic. The outrage went viral, and the project died under the weight of national ridicule as the "Bridge to Nowhere."

Now, there’s a plan for Northampton that may be our "Bridge to Nowhere." It’s not at a price tag that would gain national attention, and it’s not a bridge, but a tunnel.

It shares, however, the characteristic of excessive cost for a very dubious need.

The project is the bicycle underpass planned for construction in the next month or so by the railroad track off King Street behind the Taco Bell. Bicyclists coming along the path from downtown or crossing King Street from the Northampton Bike Path now carry their bikes over these tracks before continuing along the Norwottuck Rail Trail to Damon Road and the pedestrian bridge over the Connecticut.
The planned underpass would allow riders to stay on their bikes and off the tracks. The cost is $2.25 million.

Say what?

I expressed my sticker shock to Tim Doherty, project manager at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, when he described the bike path and the broader rail improvements at a recent meeting in Northampton. He insists that this is the going rate for these types of projects, but I still don’t get it. How can a 15-by-8-foot concrete box under a 90-foot rail right-of-way have no land acquisition costs yet be more than seven times the price of an average Northampton home?

More importantly, it has led me to wonder why anyone would specify a bicycle underpass for this site in the first place. According to Doherty, "the underpass is the only 100 percent effective way of preventing people from crossing the tracks."  This eliminates the risk that someone could get hit by a train, and thus justifies the investment.

That is not a reasonable response. Yes, safety matters, but a safety concern does not justify an open checkbook to eliminate any theoretical risk. We assume that people will bike or walk with a suitable degree of caution, and we don’t put underpasses at every street corner — even busy ones.

King Street is used by 19,364 cars and trucks per day, and Damon Road’s traffic count is 15,200. Yet both are equipped with at-grade bike path crossings. The rail line, in contrast, will have a maximum of 20 trains per day under the most generous future rail scenario. Can this really only be safe with a $2.25 million underpass?

A far cheaper at-grade crossing would be more appropriate for this site. Even with crossing gates, rumble strips, filler around the tracks, and a bend in the path requiring bicyclists to stop, the cost would still be a small fraction of the current plan. It would also avoid the maintenance costs of cleaning graffiti off the tunnel walls, urine off the tunnel floor, or of sending in a guy with scuba gear to fix the pump when the underpass floods after a storm like we saw Wednesday.

The at-grade crossing does not realistically compromise safety or cycling convenience. It may require the state to renegotiate its deal with the Federal Railroad Administration, but this would likely happen anyway with the state’s separately planned purchase of the full rail corridor, and it offers the chance to shift the funds toward a project of more reasonable value.

And if it means we lose the earmark?

Well, then we make our own at-grade improvement and we strike a blow against unnecessary and wasteful public spending. We hold our heads high that we did not embrace our own Bridge to Nowhere.

Marc Warner is a transportation planning consultant and a member of Northampton’s Passenger Rail Advisory Committee.


Smith students lose chance to hear from inspiring speaker, Christine Lagarde

By MARC WARNER
Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
May 17, 2014

NORTHAMPTON — Years ago I watched David Mamet’s play, "Oleanna," about a male professor who takes a massive drubbing on account of a female student’s overblown charge of sexual harassment. After the final curtain fell, I seethed at the female character for several minutes before I could separate the role from the actress and start applauding her convincing performance.

The objections at Smith College to having Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund as this year’s commencement speaker remind me of that play.

Here too, the student protesters are sanctimonious in their defense of women worldwide, and the person they’ve hounded out does not deserve this fate.

Lagarde is a phenomenally accomplished woman who runs an organization aimed at reducing poverty and stabilizing economies throughout the world. It is this mission — not a sinister quest for American hegemony, societal ruin, or female subservience — that drives the professionals at the IMF.

I speak from my own experience here. I spent last week in Belgrade, Serbia, working with staff from the International Finance Corporation, an IMF sister agency at the World Bank Group. None of the dozen IFC professionals I worked with were Americans, most were Eastern European women, and all had forsaken far greater salaries at commercial banks in order to help implement projects with broad, positive benefits for developing countries.

If I were a banker, that’s the type of banker I’d want to be.

My guess too is that Lagarde is the kind of woman who would have made Smith proud.

The protests against her were misguided. They have dishonored her, embarrassed the college, and done a disservice to the graduates who now lose a chance to hear from an inspiring speaker.

Marc Warner lives in Northampton.


Patrick took on powerful players

Submitted to the Daily Hampshire Gazette
October 28, 2010

To the editor:

For many years, Massachusetts and Rhode Island were the only states that required a paid police detail for any utility work or construction affecting a public road. This wasn't for safety or economics--48 other states, after all, got by with just flaggers or nothing. Rather, the issue was the clout of the state's police unions.

Deval Patrick did what 16 years of Republican governors did not do; he stood up to the police unions.  He opened the door for civilian flaggers, and he got rid of the highly abused and budget-busting Quinn bill program for police educational incentives. This is integrity. It is good governance. It is acting for the public good, and not just in response to powerful players. For this, and for the other reforms over the past four years to ethics laws, to pension provisions, and to the administration and funding of the state's transportation agencies, Governor Patrick deserves re-election.

Marc Warner
Northampton



City Council should focus on local issues

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
June 29, 2010

To the editor:

I understand the Northampton City Council didn't initiate the proposed anti-war resolution, but doesn't it have better things to do than to play at being a model Congress? May I suggest that the Council focus on the local issues where it truly has influence and, presumably, a real understanding. Councilors, don't burn up your time with "feel good" symbolism. When the agenda turns to subjects beyond your control, do your city - and yourselves - a favor by getting up and going home.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Finneran’s part in the process

Published in the Boston Globe
January 27, 2010

To the editor:

HARVEY SILVERGLATE ( "Finneran’s only crime is careful diplomacy,’’ Op-ed, Jan. 16) says that federal judges and prosecutors are naive to have leveled perjury charges against Thomas Finneran for his statements under oath in a 2003 redistricting case. He conveniently leaves out the most perjurious parts of the transcript from that case and the evidence collected by prosecutors to refute it. More fundamentally, though, it is Silverglate who demonstrates naivete by essentially justifying Finneran’s stated cluelessness about the redistricting process.

Massachusetts state representatives give an absurd degree of fealty to the speaker of the House. They do so as part of a deal for a better office, more staff, a chance for leadership pay, a cushy patronage job when they leave the Legislature, and party funds and supportive redistricting to help their reelection. Of course, as speaker, Finneran was involved in the redistricting process. That was his end of the deal.

Marc Warner
Northampton


My (planned) speech to delegates at the 2009 Massachusetts Democratic State Convention

[This is an exceprt from a much longer piece I wrote in July 2009 about my views on some state political issues over the previous year.  I had run to be a delegate to the state convention because I wanted to make a speech at the convention about integrity and good governance not taking a back seat to party ideology.  I had made a speech on similar themes about ten years earlier when I had last been a delegate to the democratic state convention.]

. . . The state democratic convention was on June 6th in Springfield. Governor Patrick made what I thought was a very good speech. During the previous few months, he had generally been at odds with the legislature about how to fill the state’s ever-widening budget gap. Big new taxes or fees seemed inevitable, but Senate President Therese Murray and the new house speaker, Bob DeLeo were publicly critical of the governor’s insistence on “reform before revenue.” The reforms that Patrick had in mind were in regard to pensions, ethics, and in transportation administration and funding. By early June, the legislative record on all of these was dismal.

In any case, I spent much of the morning of June 6th going over the speech I would make at the convention open forum following the morning plenary session. Here’s that speech:

* * * * *

For years it has been easy to criticize republican politicians who talk a conservative game and throw occasional cultural bones to a core, right wing constituency while pursuing a more fundamental objective of tax breaks, regulatory reductions, and outright government funding for a more well-connected, powerful few.

I sometimes wonder if the same type of criticism could apply to us. We take pride in the fact that Massachusetts has adopted a progressive tone on key social issues. These are the issues that get our attention and that influence our votes. But, fellow democrats, these are not the central elements of governance. And while we focus on these social hot buttons, we seem to ignore or are complacent about too many other actions—or inactions—of the overwhelmingly democratic politicians on Beacon Hill.

How is it that Sal DiMasi faced overwhelming evidence of a bloated software contract and a blatant kickback and yet all but eight of 144 democrats voted for his re-election as speaker?

How is it that the House then responds to the Governor’s task force on ethics by stripping provisions for stronger enforcement against gifts to state policy makers?

How is it that when every state program will go down next year, the legislature yields to police union pressure to restore full funding for the highly abused Quinn bill program for police educational incentive pay?

How is that in the midst of unrelenting pension scandals, the carmen’s union can get the legislation to ensure that the ridiculously generous pensions at the MBTA will stay in effect until 2032?

How is that the we can pass statewide health coverage legislation but we couldn’t see the collusion coming between our most prestigious hospitals, our biggest private insurer, and among our medical specialists that has sent the costs skyrocketing in the first place?

How is it that the state allowed $10 billion in cost overruns for the Big Dig, but still had a thousand leaks, still had falling concrete, and still allow Parsons/Bechtel, Modern Continental, and Aggregate Industries to be eligible for further state contracts?

These are a few instances among many, but they are all instances of state legislative action that violates what should be our basic expectation of good governance. The Carmen’s union, the police union, the state employees getting the day off for Evacuation Day, the hospital executives and the well-connected brokers who grease the skids for purveyors of highway concrete, gambling interests, lottery and investment services are not the little guys. They are special interests that take funds and shift policy away from the programs that would do a broader, clearer public good.

They also take away public confidence that our state government can spend money wisely. These are the actions that engender cynicism about state government, and that led last year to by far the biggest threat to true democratic principles: not the republicans (they’re hopelessly tainted), but ballot question 1 that would have eliminated the state income tax.

Fellow democrats, we should not be complacent about ethics and the public good. Integrity matters! We need to remind our state politicians that we expect them to serve the public good, democratic ideals, and not special interests, and not the speaker of the house.

Governor Patrick has it right to push for ethics and pension reform. The Boston Globe has it right to spotlight the sweetheart deals, the patronage, the cronyism, and other breaches of good governance. Common Cause of Massachusetts has it right to highlight the ethics agenda.

And there is something that we can do. We can develop and promote a clear ethics and no-special-interests “Massachusetts Integrity Pledge.” We can get our state reps to take this pledge before the 2010 democratic primary . . . or we can run against them.

* * * * *
That was my speech.

The annoying surprise:

I never got to give it. The plenary session at the state convention broke around 2:00. I went over to the list of follow-up events and scanned the list . . . and scanned the list . . . and scanned the list . . . and then grabbed some event organizer to find out what happened to the speaking forum. “Oh yeah, we got rid of that about five years ago. It was getting out of hand.”

Grrr.

(Incidentally, I am not questioning at all the integrity or decency of our state rep, Peter Kocot.  He's the current chairman of the House Committe on Ethics. He takes the job seriously, has pushed for strong ethics reforms, and he represents us well.)


Help the local economy by giving someone a job

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
January 16, 2009

To the editor:

There's been talk around town and a recent article in the Gazette about some local efforts to keep the election momentum alive and to do something special in honor of the Obama inauguration. Here's one more suggestion: Hire somebody. The idea is consistent with Obama's promotion of an economic stimulus plan "to put people to work." His program, of course, focuses on huge investments in public infrastructure, while a local and individual effort would be mostly minor upgrades to our own homes. The key result, however, is the same: spread some wealth and boost the economy when it needs it.

Here are the types of projects I'm talking about: better insulation in the attic, wainscoting or paneling in the bedroom, plaster repairs on the ceiling, refinishing the kitchen floors, patches to the siding on the garage. We all have little projects like these that we just haven't gotten around to. Well, now would be a good time to get one or more of them actually done. The Gazette has notices for handymen you can hire for various tasks.

Let me also mention that I suppose this sounds a little like President Bush's call after 9/11 to "go out and shop." A better comparison, I think, would be Joe Biden's suggestion a few months ago that "it's patriotic to pay your taxes." Biden's right, and now - if you've got the means - it's patriotic to hire someone, too. Our new president would love it.

Marc Warner
Northampton



Stop the vandalism and engage in a dialogue

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
October 18, 2008

To the editor:

I can commiserate to some extent with whoever's burning Obama yard signs. Four years ago, I was driving through suburban Cincinnati and passed Bush-Cheney '04 signs in front of just about every house for miles. This harrowing sight made me feel awfully glad that I was headed home to Massachusetts. Had I been a suburban Cincinnati resident, though, I still wouldn't have succumbed to vandalism. Rather, I would have relished the opportunity to put up a big yard sign of my own: "Bin Laden still at large, war in Iraq under false pretenses, trillions more in the federal deficit. Aren't you embarrassed to re-elect this guy?"

And that's the approach our local Obama sign burner should take. Put up your own sign as to why we shouldn't vote for Obama . . . although I'm at a loss about what you might say.

Marc Warner
Northampton


It’s time for neighbors to rally round the flag

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
January 1, 2008

To the editor:

It seemed unlikely that our local flag burner was from Hamas or the Taliban. I thus concluded that the culprit would be an annoyingly zealous rattlebrain around age 17 and — here I was showing my civic pride — not from Northampton, but, you know, from Amherst or maybe Wendell. Well, I was certainly wrong on the age count; Douglas E. Wight is age 65. His manifesto in the Gazette, however, suggests I’m right about the rattlebrain part. The U.S. government was involved in the September 11 attack? Good grief.

One last surprise comes to view when driving by the house on Bridge Street where the burned flag used to fly. A few years ago, someone vandalized a gay and lesbian-themed rainbow-striped "PACE" flag on Massasoit Street. It wasn’t too long before similar flags showed up by every other home on the block. Anti-semitic incidents elsewhere have prompted other neighbors to the crime scene to place menorahs in their windows too. The incident on Bridge Street, though, has yet to bring out any comparable solidarity with a neighboring victim of intolerance. Too bad.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Friends don't let friends download
[Note, this was the Globe's headline, not mine. Yick.]

Published in the Boston Globe
March 18, 2007

To the editor:

ALLOW ME to nominate Richard Stallman for the Peter Berdovsky/Sean Stevens award for public mockery of a serious subject. Stallman gets the nod for his March 13th letter in defense of illegal music downloads. In addition to his anarchistic view that the demise of record companies would be no loss to society, he steps out of the illegal downloader's shadows to frame the act with the positive spin of "sharing is friendship; to attack sharing is to attack the basis of society."

What nonsense. When others record songs and arrange to sell them, you have no moral authority to deprive them or their record companies of a buck just because you have a button that says "download now." This is not friendship; friendship calls for a personal connection more than the anonymous and indirect contact between Internet servers. Sharing suggests that the giver forgoes something - in this case all he's done is hit the "copy" command.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Bringing the carrot and the stick to state politics

Published in the Boston Globe
February 4, 2007

To the editor:

RE "GOVERNOR weighing deal on pay hikes" (Page A1, Jan. 28): I understand that negotiations and compromise are standard procedure in lawmaking, but is anyone on Beacon Hill considering that maybe lawmaker pay should not be part of the bargain?

If a company or private individual had proposed pay raises in exchange for public policy, we would call it a bribe. That it might come from the governor makes it no more palatable. It might even be worse. It is one branch of government seeking to buy off the balancing powers of another. Why not let the governor use a line-item veto to cut salaries of any legislator in the opposition? Why not have the governor and Legislature determine annual pay for judges based on the popularity of their rulings?

Maybe I'm naively idealistic about politics, but a proposal to grant raises to legislative leaders in return for their support seems outside of ethical bounds. If legislators want more pay, they should start with an objective benchmarking study of the legislatures in 49 other states. Policy alliances with the governor should have no role in this equation.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Meters: Thoughts about parking space management

Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
February 2, 2007

To the editor:

Let me see if I have this right: Barry Volain goes shopping downtown, doesn't put enough money in the meter, and then charges the city with "institutional hostility and vindictiveness" for giving him a $10 parking ticket? Northampton, he claims, should get a new motto: "Most Petty City in America."

Good grief, Barry; take a chill pill. Yes, it's annoying to get a parking ticket, but the real annoyance would be to drive into town and then have to cruise endlessly for an open space. Parking rules and rigid enforcement keep this latter scenario to a minimum. In their absence, the fortunate few to get the limited parking spots would stay longer, the spots would turnover less, and the rest of us would give up on downtown and head off reluctantly on yet another trip to the mall.

This is not vindictiveness or pettiness. It's just standard good management.

Marc Warner
Northampton


Ads a terrible idea to boost lottery sales

Published in the Boston Globe
October 18, 2003

To the editor:

Eight years ago, in what seems to be a rare moment of principle and decency, the Massachusetts legislature banned the ads for the state lottery.  Former Senate President Tom Birmingham was the prime mover of this effort, and it was the main reason I originally supported him in the democratic primary for governor.

Now, state Treasurer Tim Cahill has decided that expediency trumps principle.  "For better or worse, we've got the lottery, but the better part is it pays for firemen, and fills potholes," he says in today's Globe.  To this end, he plans to run a $5 million ad campaign to boost lottery sales.

This is a terrible idea.  The state got into the lottery business to take the proceeds away from Mafia-controlled "numbers" runners.  That was reasonable.  Promoting the self-delusion of the lottery as a ticket to Easy Street is not.  Firemen should get paid and potholes should get filled, but don't do it by duping the gullible.  Fund them legitimately--through taxes.

Marc Warner
Cambridge


Quinn Bill letter to Governor Romney

And here (from way back in the files) is the February 26, 2003 letter I sent to then Gov. Romney:

Honorable Mitt Romney,
Governor
State House
Boston, MA

Dear Governor Romney:

Is it possible that the Globe editorial had it right this morning and that you now insist that taxpayers do get their money’s worth from the Quinn Bill?  Oh please, say it isn’t so.

Governor, I voted for you in November, and I did so despite the fact that I am a life-long Democrat, past delegate at the Democratic State Convention, and Cambridge Democratic caucus member (for Robert Reich) last summer.  I voted for you because you represented integrity—a characteristic I viewed as lost by the Democratic leadership in the state legislature.  The evidence of their breach of integrity was the undermining of the Clean Elections law, the cronyism among the legislative leadership, the legislative control and patronage of the judiciary, and—most prominently—the Quinn Bill.   Here was a program that was an obvious case of abuse: credit for "life experience," classes held in police union halls, faculty without advanced degrees, courses without homework, and a taxpayer cost of $100 million per year.  Last year, I was embarrassed to be a Massachusetts Democrat when Speaker Finneran yielded to police union pressure and killed the House Ways and Means proposal to cut the salary incentives.  The result was galling; everything in the state budget went down last year except that boondoggle Quinn Bill: up ten percent!

Shannon O’Brien gave me no confidence in her ability or commitment to re-establish state political integrity or to fight special interests in the name of common sense and public good.  You were different.

Governor, your effort to reduce patronage and your willingness to stand up for the broad public good (e.g., holding PG&E to its commitment for the Salem plant clean-up) have been assurances that I made the right vote in November.  Your current support of the Quinn Bill, however, sounds like the worst of Beacon Hill.  I hope you will renew our trust in your integrity by changing your view on this ridiculous program.

You may have noticed that I sent a copy of this letter to my state representative, Paul Demakis.  About ten years ago, he promoted the effort to rein in the paid police details for even the most minor work on state or local roads.  As he told me during his campaign last summer, the measure did not get vocal support from then governor Weld.  The measure died, and Demakis ended up with police union opposition in the next election.  I understand this political consequence, but let me suggest that there is Massachusetts experience for the state government prevailing against a well-connected union.

In 1980, Governor King signed legislation giving MBTA management a series of new rights to decide unilaterally certain aspects of otherwise bargainable subjects.  The legislation eliminated the automatic cost of living increase, restricted pension benefits, and gave management the right to apportion overtime, hire part-time labor, and contract for goods and services.  Union interest in these matters was of secondary concern, and, as the law went into effect, the unions’ strength was seriously eroded.   The law is Chapter 581 of the Massachusetts Code, but it is more commonly known as "the Management Rights Act."

David Cohen, now the mayor of Newton, was a state representative at the time and he was the prime sponsor of the bill.  The motivation was fiscal crisis at the MBTA.  A union cost-of-living adjustment and unproductive labor practices had pushed operating costs at the T up 18 percent in one year.  The federal subsidy had not kept pace, and the Carmen’s Union pushed for fare hikes and more state funding.  The legislature chose instead to ignore the Carmen’s Union and to "protect the littler guy."  According to Cohen, the MBTA daily rider was the focus of a new populism.  The legislature could have dealt with just the immediate fiscal crisis, but their bailout after an 18 hour shut-down of transit services came with the labor reforms.

Today, the state is again in a fiscal crisis, and, as in 1980 with the T, the state again has a rare opportunity to effect drastic change.  The police officers of Massachusetts are not in need of state largesse.  They are not the "littler guys."  Fight the Quinn Bill.  Re-establish your integrity.  Use the State House pulpit.  Get the support of the public, and all those cities and towns, and all the more legitimate beneficiaries of state aid who should be screaming at the unjustified $100 million.  The police unions may not be a weak player in state political circles; but we all know that they have a fantastically weak claim to the Quinn Bill funds.

Sincerely,
Marc G. Warner