Last Friday, about 60 protesters took to the streets of Northampton to decry a proposed Business Improvement District in that city's downtown.
Brandishing signs and playing music, protestors railed against what they view as an overly restrictive, publicly unaccountable plan aimed at effectively gentrifying the city's downtown. They expressed suspicion of the BID's earlier umbilical attachment to an anti-panhandling measure that was suspended in February—a move by Mayor Mary Clare Higgins to, in her words, "take the solicitation [panhandling] ordinance discussion off the table so that the Business Improvement District discussion can proceed independently&"
Smith College students in particular objected to the timing of key decisions related to the BID. "President Carol Christ signed onto the BID during January, when most of us weren't here," said Smith student Geri Hubbe, "and now City Council plans to vote on the BID during spring break, when the college will be completely vacated."
The rally drew a strong response from Northampton police. More than a dozen officers, with five police cars and a van on hand, followed demonstrators throughout the event. Police arrested two protesters.
Will last week's protest have any influence on the City Council as it prepares to vote for a second time on the BID? Sadly, the likely answer is no.
The City Council has already given its blessing once, voting earlier this month by an 8-1 margin to establish the BID, which would be financed by a fee on participating property owners equal to .5 percent of their current property tax, collected by the city's tax collector. (Property owners within the proposed district would have one month to opt out of the BID; those that opt in will not be permitted to unilaterally withdraw and can expect the city to put a lien on their property if they refuse to pay the fee.)
Despite vociferous opposition, the City Council appears to be moving in lock step with Higgins, her planning director Wayne Feiden, her economic development coordinator Teri Anderson, the Northampton Chamber of Commerce and several downtown business people, including Dan Yacuzzo and Joe Blumenthal, who have served on various committees appointed by the mayor. The Higgins administration has taken an active role in promoting the BID, while at the same time overseeing the petition process by which support among property owners is measured.
The opposition, meanwhile, has not exactly presented itself as a unified front. While downtown business owners such as Eric Suher, owner of the Iron Horse Entertainment Group, may share some of the same views as the anti-BID activist group Poverty Is Not A Crime—it was PINAC that staged last Friday's protest in Northampton—there are significant differences between the two branches of opposition in both substance and style.
Suher has garnered a fair amount of media attention for opposing the BID, which proponents describe as "a contiguous geographic area in which property owners vote to initiate, manage, and finance supplemental services above and beyond the City's services in their district." Suher has challenged the need for a BID in Northampton and criticized what he sees as its "inequitable fee structure."
"I have approximately 20 buildings located within the BID," Suher told the City Council at a public hearing in January. "At last look I paid over $230,000 in taxes, and with this BID situation, my bill will go up 43.6 percent, which in layman's terms would add $89,000 to my present tax burden… I would have to pass that on to my tenants."
If Suher's polite, respectfully offered comments fell on deaf ears, there seems little chance that the City Council will heed the concerns of sign-wielding students and social activists who see the BID as a way to give unfair power to downtown property owners and to push "undesirables" out.
The City Council, however, makes a mistake not to weigh carefully the various criticisms leveled by opponents of the BID before rubber-stamping the plan. Beyond the business arguments against the BID, the views of social justice activists strike at the heart of Northampton's sense of identity.
"I think Northampton is forgetting its roots," said one demonstrator last week. "This used to be the town of social justice, with Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison fighting for the rights of people. It seems [the city] has done a 180. Now they don't want to fight for the rights of people."
