NORTHAMPTON — The City Council this week voted down an order that would have required Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra to answer eight community-posed questions about the approximately $37 million downtown road revitalization project known as Picture Main Street.
At-Large City Councilor Meg Robbins and Ward 6 Councilor Christopher Stratton said they wrote the order in response to the public’s concerns about the project, just before city officials confirmed that the controversial project’s cost estimate had grown to $37 million, $10 million more than estimates from two years ago.
While most councilors spoke in support of the spirit of transparency urged by the questions, the majority agreed that not all of the questions could be properly answered, which Ward 3 Councilor Laurie Loisel suggested might falsely suggest that the mayor is hiding information.
“I have a problem with some of the specific questions. Some of the questions I feel like are really statements of criticism about the project that are dressed up as questions, and also they’re vague,” Loisel said. “It just sets up a situation where somebody can be accused of not giving us information … those questions are kind of trick questions.”
While some of the questions are straightforward, such as what federal and state funding is currently expected and what current activities on the project or design are taking place, others are more in-depth.
One asks the mayor to provide all past city expenditures by year on this project, including design services, marketing and public relations since its inception and planning “over two decades” including grants and ARPA monies, by funding source. Another asks for a projected increase in recurring expenses and staffing requirements for routine downtown maintenance and snow removal, including from planned bike lanes.
Robbins rejected the notion that the questions were about declaring support or lack of support for the project. She argued that the order’s passage, in her opinion, would simply provide clarity on the project’s current state and funding.
“This is about … answering financial questions about the project which are not in the FAQs. They’re not something that’s readily made available,” Robbins said. “It is about being straightforward, and is about not rising to assumptions.”
She said she thinks most people want Picture Main Street to be the best project it can be, but the redesign needs buy-in from people across the city to achieve that goal. “The best way to have buy-in across the city is that you advise the mayor to be ahead of the game, to be able to say, ‘This is what’s come up, this is what we’re going to pay, this is where we are on the project,'” Robbins said.
Other councilors, such as Ward 1 City Councilor Gwenevra Nabad, explained that she did not support the resolution because she doesn’t believe the mayor is hiding information. She did, however, agree that the city should enhance its efforts to be transparent about elements of the Picture Main Street project, including the challenges that arise from it.
“The public is calling for more information, and I think that it’s really important to have that good communication with the public,” Nabad said. “At the same time, I thought about this order a lot; I thought about the possibility of removing some of the questions, I thought about addressing my colleagues and saying, ‘How else can we do this without it being an order?'”
Nabad continued, “I don’t believe that the mayor is keeping any information from us. I’ve been a part of the city meetings, I’ve been a part of the focus groups that have been conducted. I have heard from people throughout the city as these plans have been being developed since I moved here, and pretty intensively too — there’s nothing that’s a surprise to me.”
The project’s $37 million price tag is based on an evaluation from the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission (PVPC), which met last week to assess numerous ongoing projects around the Valley, including Picture Main Street.
The city recently began digging about 20 “test pits” to identify the precise location of gas lines that had potentially been installed incorrectly, a discovery late last year that delayed the project’s start by more than six months.
In an email sent to the Gazette responding to the motion, which failed by a 7-2 vote, the mayor explained that she had planned to provide the council an update that the project was at 100% design phase with MassDOT, but was surprised by news that the “line work that Eversource had done over the summer perhaps might not match the plans they had submitted to the city.”
Sciarra also stated that she had told City Council President Rachel Maoire, Stratton and Robbins, prior to the order being brought up, that she would provide an update to the council once she had “more complete and accurate information” about the Eversource issue.
“In addition to a more general update on the project and the results of the test pits, I am also working with Councilor Jeremy Dubs on a presentation on the accessibility improvements and enhancements that the Main Street Redesign will bring to downtown, which we hope to give at a Community Resources Committee meeting,” the mayor wrote.
