"Elections are the way we have conversations about the direction the city is going in," Northampton Mayor Clare Higgins explained during her June 12 appearance on WHMP's The Bill Dwight Show.
She was announcing the launch of her reelection campaign and her first fund-raising effort in nearly five years. "I hope that there's a contested election… so we can have a conversation about the direction the city is going in. That's the way we have the conversation."
Unfortunately for Northampton residents, the actual election is about a year and a half away, so until that time, apparently, they will need to shut up and listen.
In the July 28 edition of MassLive's "Ask Mayor Higgins" podcast, the Mayor was asked for a response to the criticism that there hadn't been enough public dialog in the development on Hospital Hill. She responded, "I don't understand that at all, to be honest."
As the author of a great deal of that criticism, I can attest that at no point has the mayor made any attempt to gain clarity. When I met with her for an interview on June 22, she acknowledged that there were disagreements between us, but the only questions she asked me were what my goal was in interviewing her, where I lived in town, and how long I'd lived there.
During her podcast, she spent a minute and a half dismissing years of reporting, not by addressing the findings, but by describing how long the development process had been and the boards that reviewed her decisions. She concluded by pointing to the referendum question that voters had been presented in 2003 as evidence of public dialog.
Though the mayor described it as a vote deciding whether the historic buildings on the hill should have been saved, that was not the case. The question had been whether Northampton should spend approximately $150,000 to patch up holes in the roof to protect the most historically significant building from further decay until a developer could be found to save it. The question was put on the ballot by a grass-roots organization, who had spent months gathering signatures because they felt the city was dodging its responsibilities.
To defeat this question, which was non-binding and wouldn't have been enacted even if it passed, the mayor's supporters raised more money than was spent on her last two campaigns, and they presented obviously flawed reports (discredited by local architects) that inflated the cost of saving the buildings.
Still, the Higgins administration successfully convinced 60 percent of the voters that this was an unnecessary use of their tax dollars.
There was no such vote, however, three years later, when $5.5 million of taxpayer dollars were spent to demolish a nationally-recognized historic building the city had no plans to replace.
During the podcast, the mayor summarized: "I think there are people who don't like the results, but I don't think there hasn't been enough public dialog."
It's not simply the needless destruction of historic buildings that keeps me reporting on the development on Hospital Hill, but rather, I'm interested in the question of how a city that prides itself on being a nexus of learning, activism and progressive values could have stood by in silence and let this happen. What occurred on the hill was not an isolated incident, but a case study in how the Higgins administration does business: shoot first, deflect questions later.
