By CHAD CAIN
Daily Hampshire Gazette
Staff Writer
NORTHAMPTON — Three months before the City Council approved a petition to create the Business Improvement District, City Clerk Wendy Mazza voiced misgivings about the signature-verification process used to establish the organization.
In a January 2009 email to three BID proponents, including a former economic development director for the city, Mazza sought to rescind her earlier certification that signatures OK’d by city assessors met or exceeded the required 60 percent of the real property owners within the BID. She based that opinion on the fact that assessors did not verify the signatures were those of the property owners.
“I believe the signatures need to be reviewed by the Assessors to make sure they are from the owners of record and the signatures that the Assessors cannot decipher should not be counted,” Mazza wrote. The email was sent to Teri Anderson, former economic development director, Jeffrey I. Fialky, a Springfield attorney representing BID proponents, and Ann Burke, of the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts who helped guide the creation of the BID.
Fialky responded within three hours, telling Mazza that there was “absolutely no requirement” in the statute that an assessor witness signatures, or that signatures contain evidence of other signatory authority.
“To do so would be so burdensome that it would be highly improbable to obtain the literally hundreds of signatures required to form any BID,” Fialky wrote. “Instead, the petitioners relied on the practices that have been used in obtaining signatures in the formation of the Springfield and Westfield BIDs.”
Each signature represented the ownership of record to the best knowledge of both the petitioners and the assessors, he said.
A month later, Mazza, who declined comment for this story, wrote another email to Anderson saying that she and the assessors office had been “taken to task” the previous evening for not certifying BID signatures properly — although it is not clear from Mazza’s Feb. 20 note in what forum or precisely by whom they had been “taken to task.”
Mazza complains that she was not instructed by anybody in city government on how they were to evaluate the signatures on the BID petition.
“This is really upsetting, when your integrity is taken to task,” Mazza wrote. “I would have thought that if this was so important to the City, someone would have made the effort to make sure the people who would eventually have to answer to the process or take the heat for it would actually understand the law and know what was expected of them by the City.”
Assessor Joan Sarafin also declined to comment for this story, referring questions to the office of Mayor David J. Narkewicz. The mayor was out of town yesterday with an ailing relative.
The wrangling inside City Hall about the signatures that led up to the City Council’s vote in March 2009 to create the BID became a focal point of Hampshire Superior Court Judge John A. Agostini’s ruling last week that the city erred when it created the BID.
The lawsuit was brought against the city and the BID by property owners and BID opponents Eric Suher and Alan Scheinman. Over the course of several weeks in early 2009, Scheinman repeatedly took issue with the signatures in the petition with Mazza.
Agostini ruled last week that the BID must be dissolved, saying it was in part because dozens of signatures on the petition to create the organization were not properly checked. He found that of the 305 signatures on the petition to create the BID, at least 63 were illegible and had no printed name nearby to verify the signer’s identity. He said these signatures should have been rejected by the assessors office, by the city clerk and by the City Council.
The judge was especially critical of Sarafin’s office, noting that assessors did not compare the signatures on the petition to their own records to ensure that the names matched. He said the assessors did not reject any of the signatures presented to them by the BID proponents, nor were they concerned about illegible or undated signatures or whether the signatories for corporate property owners had authority to sign the assents. They also didn’t ask for further information to verify some of the signatures, the judge said.
Some of the petitions in the court files show signatures that are impossible to read next to addresses designated as property owned, which are legible. For example, on one page, two signatures are difficult to read for units at the 43 Center St. building. Agostini notes that in the margin, BID proponents identified the signatures as those of Duke Corliss and Safe Passage. He found fault because there was no way of knowing whether that was accurate.
“I find, based on the credible testimony of Sarafin, that she was unable to read many of the signatures on the assents, but that nonetheless she did not determine the identity of those signatories or check the City’s records to find out if those signatories were the property owners or if they had authorization to sign for the owners,” the judge wrote.
Sarafin signed a so-called assessor certificate on Dec. 8, 2008, stating essentially that the signatures were reviewed and consistent with city parcel records and that they exceeded the requirements needed to establish a BID. Mazza issued a similar certification a short time later. The judge said she issued that certification without doing any of her own calculations, relying entirely upon the assessor certificate.
Mazza later began having doubts about the validity of the assents, as she explained in her email to Fialky, Burke and Anderson on Jan. 7, 2009.
“I’m becoming more and more concerned about the process used to reach the percentages needed and being put in the middle of this, not having very much knowledge on this issue,” Mazza wrote.
Agostini noted that after sending the email, Mazza never formally or expressly, in writing or verbally, communicated that she wanted to rescind the certification. Therefore, he noted, the certification went forward.
Chad Cain can be reached at [email protected].
