AMHERST — Four September weekends of nighttime parties on Hobart Lane in Amherst have left frustrated residents to clean up the mess.
Kim Deasy, 20, lives in Gilreath Manor at 26 Hobart Lane with her roommate, Andrea Marchesini, also 20. They both attend the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“We actually don’t invite these people here,” Deasy said of the partyers. “They come and make a mess of our property and destroy things.”
The roommates’ townhouse is on one side of the open area most used for the parties. Deasy said her yard is covered with broken glass, crumpled beer cans, bottle caps and cigarette butts when the parties, also known as night rages, end.
Party-goers kicked in the screen of Marchesini’s basement bedroom window, prompting her to post a yellow sign that reads, “No Trespassing: Keep Out.”
“I don’t want something to happen to someone (from the party) and then have it be our problem,” Marchesini said.
Rey Mathiau, 23, works in a residential home for people with disabilities on the south end of Hobart Lane.
Mathiau said the parties are a continuing problem. During a daytime party last year, more than a dozen people were in the yard of the home at the same time, many of them urinating and vomiting on the property.
“We had the windows open. It was a nice day,” Mathiau said. “For my clients, it’s not OK having them look out the window and see people puking their brains out.”
Police every weekend this month have broken up large parties on Hobart Lane, which is north of the UMass campus. On Friday, police found a crowd of at least 500 people, and they left behind bottles, cans and other trash strewn on the ground.
William Laramee is the neighborhood liaison officer for the Amherst Police Department. Tuesday night, he was part of a meeting with several Hobart Lane property owners, representatives from the University of Massachusetts Police Department, other university and town officials and the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority.
Among the issues discussed was how students get from the campus to the parties.
“We invited these folks in and got a perspective from many different angles because they recognize and we recognize it’s not necessarily a police problem,” Laramee said. “We’re part of the solution, but it requires many different viewpoints and levels of experience.”
Laramee is co-leading the group with Eric Beal, neighborhood liaison for the Office of External Relations and University Events. They will use principles of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, for which Laramee and others in the group have particular training.
The idea is to change the environment to make it less attractive for night rages, Laramee said. An example would be adding more streetlights to the darker areas of the road.
The group will reconvene in two weeks to draft recommendations of environmental changes for the property owners, but Laramee said it will take time to implement them.
“We may employ some strategies this fall or next spring, but you may not see the impact for a couple of years,” he said. “It’s really long-range forecasting.”