Opponents of the proposed downtown parking garage failed to collect enough signatures to call a town-wide referendum vote on the issue, despite having their deadline extended by a day.
One of the people collecting signatures, Alan Root of the Ann Whalen House on Kellogg Ave. said that despite the petitioner’s failure, the garage is far from a forgone conclusion.
“There is some question of legality that is being pursued,” said Root.
Root explained that there are at least three lawyers currently looking into legal issues surrounding the garage’s construction. He also explained that there are still access and public safety issues which need to be resolved, and that each one could theoretically be challenged in court.
Petition organizer, Vincent O’Connor of 179 Summer St. hinted to the Daily Hampshire Gazette that the fight was not over and legal avenues were being sought out.
“The proper people are looking at [legal] options,” he said.
The controversy over the signature deadline was a matter of Amherst town bylaws. According to the bylaws, opponents had five days from the Town Meeting’s Feb. 15 vote to submit their petition. Thereby, the deadline for collecting signatures was thought by the petitioners to be Friday Feb. 23. However, town officials said that Saturday Feb. 17 should count as an official day of town business. Therefore, the official deadline was set as Thursday Feb. 22 at 4:30 p.m.
However, the deadline turned out to be a moot point. Petitioners delivered 375 signatures on Thursday, the town’s deadline, and then an additional 178 on Friday. The 553 total names were still well short of the required 995, or five percent of Amherst’s registered voters.
O’Connor claimed that town officials had taken only three of the four necessary steps to change a 30-year-old town policy. The town policy, in its original form, states that only 200 signatures are needed to force a referendum. O’Connor contended that between 750 and 800 signatures were necessary.
“The right of petition is historically an important right, even within the Constitution,” Root said. “You can make the bar so high that you can’t meet it. You can also make it so low that it can be a nuisance. I would suggest that, at a time, it was too low. And now, they went in the opposite direction and it’s too high. It’s too high for anyone to have any right of petition.”
Now that the opponents’ petition drive has failed, town officials are ready to accept a March 15 bid of $3.85 million for the garage’s construction. Palladium Corp. of Wakefield, MA made the bid and construction is slated to start this spring.
Root said that the garage issue is still not clear-cut. He believes that town politics will continue playing a role right up to the actual construction.
“It might be that the garage will proceed in a matter of a few weeks, said Root, “but it also might be that it might not proceed at all. The financing could become difficult. There is also a land case to be heard on March 2.”
Root pointed out that the Ready Resource Grant, in the amount of $390,000, had not been given by the state. The Grant is designed to create jobs in and remove blight from a particular area. According to Root, the Amherst parking garage would accomplish neither of these tasks.
“If you go to the construction site, it’s obvious that jobs will be lost, not created, in the area,” said Root. “There is also not a single parking vacancy around the Boltwood Walk area. That is the yardstick for blight.”
Information from the Daily Hampshire Gazette was used in this article.
