I heard there was some sort of art gallery at Framed in Time, the frame shop in one of the old mill buildings in Saxonville. But I never went in. I didn't know ... Was it part of the framing store? Did they expect you to have something you wanted framed if you went in to see the art? Well yes and no -- yes to the first question, no to the second. I met the gallery's curator, Olga Shmuylovich, last night, and she made it clear that the community is invited to come see the art exhibits there.
Tower Gallery at Framed in Time wans to help showcase the work of community artists, and bring together artists, people who enjoy viewing art, and the community at large. "Sonja and Jessica," featuring art by Sonja Holzwarth Maneri and her granddaughter opens Monday, April 16 and runs through Saturday, May 5. That's followed by the father and daughter show Alex Belozersky and Eugenia starting Saturday May 12 (there's a reception with the artist on May 19 from 4 to 6 pm).
I do plan on stopping in soon!
Speaking of art, Framingham's annual "Spring into Arts" festival kicks off Patriots Day, Monday, April 16 with the multicultural fair at town hall from 11 am to 2 pm.
Other highlights include award-winning students from Berklee College of Music and New England Conservatory performing Israeli songs, Civil Leangue, April 23, 7 pm; Fountain Street & Tripp Street combined open studios, featuring more than 60 local artists, April 28-29 11 am to 5 pm, followed by Saxonville Open Studios May 5-6 noon to 5 pm; and the opening of Art Goes Wild at Garden in the Woods on May 19.
April 11, 2007
April 10, 2007
More Than Just Books: What Should a Library Be?
I was part of a focus group tonight to talk about ideas for the future of the Framingham library, part of a long-range planning process now underway. Despite the fact that I'm still bitter over Town Meeting's failure to approve rebuilding of the McAuliffe branch library, it was an interesting evening, offering a relatively rare opportunity to sit back and think about what we'd like for our community.
Ideas that came up repeatedly: Yes, it's important for the library to be a center of knowledge, where it can be stored, loaned out and shared. But people also want their 21st century library to be community centers, offering places to take classes, attend events, and even relax and socialize. We'd like it to be a "glue" stitching together disparate parts of the community, the one place where you could find out about other organizations' events. Several said they'd like the library more involved in the local arts community.
A great library would be a key "third place," that important additional public space so important in communities besides where people live and work.
I still think it's ridiculous we don't have a decent secondary library building in the northern half of Framingham, and wish we'd tried for an override to get the new branch built while we had a chance at 25% state funding....
April 9, 2007
Visioning Workshop For the Framingham Master Plan 2007
From a notice posted on a local e-mail list by Planning Board member Andrea Carr-Evans:
Please come share your vision with other community members.
Hosted by Framingham Council on Aging at the New Senior Center
Tuesday, April 17
Callahan Center
535 Union Avenue
Reception 6:00 PM
Enjoy light refreshments.
Workshop 7:00 - 9:30 PM
Door prize raffle at the end of the evening!
For more information please contact the Framingham Planning Board Office at 508-532-5450 or e-mail fram.masterplan@gmail.com
Please RSVP to the Framingham Planning Office so that we can accommodate everyone.
Please come share your vision with other community members.
Hosted by Framingham Council on Aging at the New Senior Center
Tuesday, April 17
Callahan Center
535 Union Avenue
Reception 6:00 PM
Enjoy light refreshments.
Workshop 7:00 - 9:30 PM
Door prize raffle at the end of the evening!
For more information please contact the Framingham Planning Board Office at 508-532-5450 or e-mail fram.masterplan@gmail.com
Please RSVP to the Framingham Planning Office so that we can accommodate everyone.
April 8, 2007
Energy Use and Suburban Living
"The bill for the last generation’s planning mistakes is now coming due," Benjamin Ross of Action Committee for Transit (Md.) writes in a New York Times letter to the editor. "Spread-out housing and scattered jobs require more driving and longer pipes. With suburbs already in place, we find that widening heavily traveled roads and laying utilities beneath them is much more expensive than building on empty farmland. . . .
"Buyers of new tract houses and office parks should pay for the longer highways, pipes and wires that spread-out development demands; they should no longer be subsidized by taxpayers and utility ratepayers who live in denser communities that are more economically and environmentally efficient."
It's a fair argument. Why should those living in smaller personal, private space help pay for the lifestyles of those who want more private property?
Some smaller, less densely populated communities are seeking help in bridging the rural divide and getting broadband Internet access in places where it's not currently economically feasible. But is it good policy for those living in more efficiently developed areas to be forced to subsidize that lifestyle? An interesting question.
There is a higher cost per person per person of exurban living in terms of energy use. New York City "turns out to be the most energy efficient place in America," according to a recent Boston Globe op-ed piece by Douglas Foy (former head of the Mass. Office of Commonwealth Development) and Robert Healy (Cambridge city manager). The scale of the city's energy use looks enormous; but when you calculate it per person, the city "uses dramatically less energy to serve each of its citizens than does a state like Massachusetts." In fact, NY city residents use less energy per person than any state's average. And that's despite another 750,000 commuters who work in the city, use energy during the day but don't count in the per-capita tallies!
"Cities are inherently the 'greenest' of all places. They are much more efficient in their use of energy, water, and land than suburbs. They provide transportation services in a remarkably equitable and democratic fashion. They may be the best of all places for seniors to grow old. . . .
"The old paradigm of the pollution-filled city as a blight on the landscape, and the leafy-green suburbs with pristine lawns as the ideal, is outdated."
It's not a coincidence that most of the states getting the highest number of federal dollars back vs. what they give to the federal treasury are relatively suburban or rural and not densely urban: Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia (the others are Virginia and Washington, D.C.) New Jersey gets the biggest shaft, getting just 55 cents back for every dollar it sends. In contrast, Montana gets $1,58 for every dollar, Alaska $1.87 and New Mexico $2. (All figures from the Tax Foundation for fiscal year 2004.)
Clearly we don't want to force everyone to live in densely populated urban areas. Hey, I like my house! But policymakers need to think seriously about who should be subsidizing whom as we struggle to curtail global warming and other negative consequences of our supersized energy thirst. Walkable communities have many positive benefits; suburban sprawl has a societal and global cost. We need to encourage better patterns of development.
April 5, 2007
Representative Town Meeting is Broken (in Framingham, anyway)
Last week's election offered stunning proof that Framingham's representative Town Meeting form of government is broken. And I'm not even talking about the 14% turnout rate.
What's truly frightening is that two-thirds of the town's precincts couldn't even field enough candidates to fill available openings.
People no longer want to serve.
This problem used to be mostly limited to a few South Side precincts which had a chronic lack of candidates. But it's growing, and spreading.
When I wrote an article last year about Town Meeting's woes, about half our precincts couldn't find enough people interested in putting their names on the ballot.
This year, the problem was critical. Twelve of 18 precincts couldn't get enough volunteers on the ballot even to fill available openings. In fact, voters in only 4 precincts had an actual choice -- that is, a contested race.
In my own Precinct 5, where I won election in the early '90s in a six-way race for four seats, we only had three names on the ballot (there are four openings per precinct each year). The declared winner for the final spot had just 6 write-in votes!
There was an unfilled vacancy on the ballot in Precinct 1, 9, 10, 12 and 14. Even worse, other precincts had only one or two names: 8, 13, 15, 16, 17 and 18.
Let's face it. If you get "elected" in a race where there are more openings than candidates, it's hard to claim you have support of the electorate. A greater sense of civic responsibility than your neighbors? Probably. But under such conditions, it's entirely possible to "represent" only yourself and your own interests.
Fortunately, many of Framingham's Town Meeting members are conscientious and care deeply about the community, and I admire their willingness to put in long hours and serve. But the fact is that they're not accountable unless they choose to be. And accountability solely at the discretion of our elected officials is no accountability at all.
Supporters of our current form of government argue that it allows people to be much closer to their government than a town council with just a few members. What they're missing is that when you have a local council of 15 or 20, it's a lot more likely you know how those councilors are voting than members of a body of 200+. Representative Town Meeting is not like Congress. We cannot read about our reps online or in the newspaper.
If you excluded people active in government, I'd wager that the vast majority of voters last week couldn't name even half of "their" Town Meeting representatives, or how those representatives have voted on just two issues of importance to them, or even their reps' general political philosophies. Nor is there anywhere you can go to research such information before an election, since almost no Town Meeting votes are recorded. Even if you choose to attend Town Meeting sessions it's almost impossible to see how "your" 12 reps vote amidst a sea of 100+ hands or chorus of yeas and nays.
As for vacancies, there are many reasons why people don't want to serve, and it's not all about laziness. Town Meeting is a major commitment of time on weekday evenings. Career responsibilities (long hours, evening hours, business travel) knock out some people. So do family responsibilities (child care, elder care, kids' evening activities), evening classes and other activities. And, frankly, many don't see the point in spending so much time to be one among 216 in a part-time legislature where authority is also spread out among so many other places (Selectmen, Town Manager, etc.) I heard there were many applicants for the most recent opening on the Finance Committee. Why? There, no doubt, people thought the much greater amount of time they put in would be worthwhile because of the effect their actions would have. Also, the number of openings was more reasonable for the size of the town.
Smaller units of government don't necessarily make for happier citizens. In a study comparing Long Island, N.Y. with two counties in Northern Virginia, "On Long Island, 36 percent of people feel it's 'very or somewhat easy to get help from an elected official.' In Northern Virginia, 45 percent of people felt that way," according to a report in the Long Island newspaper Newsday.
Yet Long Island (2.8 million people) has 439 units of local government; those Washington, D.C. suburbs (1.3 million) have just 17. For schools, there are 127 small local Long Island districts vs. just three much larger ones for the D.C. suburbs, so L.I. voters are in theory much closer to their representatives.
"More than 70 percent of Northern Virginians rated the value they get from property taxes as excellent, compared with fewer than 50 percent of Long Islanders," the study, by the Center for Government Research, concluded.
Talk to some people in Framingham about the need for change and they look at you like you want to evict their grandmother from her home. But "it's our history!" is not reason enough to keep a form of government that the town has outgrown. Representative Town Meeting no longer serves the large, complex community we've become. A precinct of 3,500-plus people is too large these days to be a "neighborhood" where everyone knows everyone else with a minimum of effort, yet way too small to have its own media following the activities of a dozen reps. It's the worst of all worlds.
A town council with both neighborhood and town-wide councilors makes much more sense. But if we can't get that passed, at least dramatically slash the number of Town Meeting members so that it's easy to keep track of each precinct's members and most voters have a choice at the polls. The idea of a representative legislature isn't supposed to be that anyone who wants to serve gets a seat. That's what open Town Meetings are for. It's supposed to be that reps actually represent the voters, which is impossible when most voters have no meaningful choice and no idea what their reps are doing.
How many more years are we going to watch participation decline before we acknowledge it's time for a change?
What's truly frightening is that two-thirds of the town's precincts couldn't even field enough candidates to fill available openings.
People no longer want to serve.
This problem used to be mostly limited to a few South Side precincts which had a chronic lack of candidates. But it's growing, and spreading.
When I wrote an article last year about Town Meeting's woes, about half our precincts couldn't find enough people interested in putting their names on the ballot.
This year, the problem was critical. Twelve of 18 precincts couldn't get enough volunteers on the ballot even to fill available openings. In fact, voters in only 4 precincts had an actual choice -- that is, a contested race.
In my own Precinct 5, where I won election in the early '90s in a six-way race for four seats, we only had three names on the ballot (there are four openings per precinct each year). The declared winner for the final spot had just 6 write-in votes!
There was an unfilled vacancy on the ballot in Precinct 1, 9, 10, 12 and 14. Even worse, other precincts had only one or two names: 8, 13, 15, 16, 17 and 18.
Let's face it. If you get "elected" in a race where there are more openings than candidates, it's hard to claim you have support of the electorate. A greater sense of civic responsibility than your neighbors? Probably. But under such conditions, it's entirely possible to "represent" only yourself and your own interests.
Fortunately, many of Framingham's Town Meeting members are conscientious and care deeply about the community, and I admire their willingness to put in long hours and serve. But the fact is that they're not accountable unless they choose to be. And accountability solely at the discretion of our elected officials is no accountability at all.
Supporters of our current form of government argue that it allows people to be much closer to their government than a town council with just a few members. What they're missing is that when you have a local council of 15 or 20, it's a lot more likely you know how those councilors are voting than members of a body of 200+. Representative Town Meeting is not like Congress. We cannot read about our reps online or in the newspaper.
If you excluded people active in government, I'd wager that the vast majority of voters last week couldn't name even half of "their" Town Meeting representatives, or how those representatives have voted on just two issues of importance to them, or even their reps' general political philosophies. Nor is there anywhere you can go to research such information before an election, since almost no Town Meeting votes are recorded. Even if you choose to attend Town Meeting sessions it's almost impossible to see how "your" 12 reps vote amidst a sea of 100+ hands or chorus of yeas and nays.
As for vacancies, there are many reasons why people don't want to serve, and it's not all about laziness. Town Meeting is a major commitment of time on weekday evenings. Career responsibilities (long hours, evening hours, business travel) knock out some people. So do family responsibilities (child care, elder care, kids' evening activities), evening classes and other activities. And, frankly, many don't see the point in spending so much time to be one among 216 in a part-time legislature where authority is also spread out among so many other places (Selectmen, Town Manager, etc.) I heard there were many applicants for the most recent opening on the Finance Committee. Why? There, no doubt, people thought the much greater amount of time they put in would be worthwhile because of the effect their actions would have. Also, the number of openings was more reasonable for the size of the town.
Smaller units of government don't necessarily make for happier citizens. In a study comparing Long Island, N.Y. with two counties in Northern Virginia, "On Long Island, 36 percent of people feel it's 'very or somewhat easy to get help from an elected official.' In Northern Virginia, 45 percent of people felt that way," according to a report in the Long Island newspaper Newsday.
Yet Long Island (2.8 million people) has 439 units of local government; those Washington, D.C. suburbs (1.3 million) have just 17. For schools, there are 127 small local Long Island districts vs. just three much larger ones for the D.C. suburbs, so L.I. voters are in theory much closer to their representatives.
"More than 70 percent of Northern Virginians rated the value they get from property taxes as excellent, compared with fewer than 50 percent of Long Islanders," the study, by the Center for Government Research, concluded.
Talk to some people in Framingham about the need for change and they look at you like you want to evict their grandmother from her home. But "it's our history!" is not reason enough to keep a form of government that the town has outgrown. Representative Town Meeting no longer serves the large, complex community we've become. A precinct of 3,500-plus people is too large these days to be a "neighborhood" where everyone knows everyone else with a minimum of effort, yet way too small to have its own media following the activities of a dozen reps. It's the worst of all worlds.
A town council with both neighborhood and town-wide councilors makes much more sense. But if we can't get that passed, at least dramatically slash the number of Town Meeting members so that it's easy to keep track of each precinct's members and most voters have a choice at the polls. The idea of a representative legislature isn't supposed to be that anyone who wants to serve gets a seat. That's what open Town Meetings are for. It's supposed to be that reps actually represent the voters, which is impossible when most voters have no meaningful choice and no idea what their reps are doing.
How many more years are we going to watch participation decline before we acknowledge it's time for a change?
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