Photo courtesy of Noah Loving
Nate Therien, who once worked at Mount Holyoke, is currently running for public office in South Hadley. Elections will be held March 3.
South Hadley’s Nate Therien has been an academic his entire life. But, after recent retirement, he has decided to try his hand at an elected position on the town’s Planning Board. He is running unopposed as a write-in, and exudes the confidence that one might expect from someone nearly guaranteed a position. Nevertheless, he continues to drive home his goals and plans for the town.
South Hadley’s Planning Board is an elected group of townspeople, who “review proposals for development ... and then decide whether or not they are in compliance with the rules that exist,” according to Therien. “Those rules include attention often to character of the neighborhood, security [and] effects on traffic.”
Therien and his wife Susan arrived in South Hadley together for the first time 26 years ago, though they were already living in the Pioneer Valley because of his job as the Director of Academic Programs in the Five Colleges office in Amherst.
Therien’s relationship to South Hadley began before this arrival. During his time as a student at Harvard University, his first teaching job was at Mount Holyoke. “I came up here by bus once a week to do a seminar on Paris and London in the 19th Century,” he explained.
Mount Holyoke then came back into his life, when Therien was offered the position of Director of Academic Programs and took up residence on Park Street.
“We really liked it,” Therien said. “When [Susan] got up here, we started looking for a place in the valley, and decided we didn’t want to leave South Hadley because it had everything we needed.”
Nearly each day, Nate and Susan Therien had commuted back and forth between South Hadley and Amherst. “We always did that drive over the Notch,” he said, referencing the bend in the Connecticut River, “and we were always glad to be back here.”
His first town political engagement was around the Wetlands Protection Bylaw in 2002. “It was a major moment for South Hadley,” he said excitedly.
According to Therien, the bylaw became necessary after Chicopee Concrete created the plan for a development “projected for the Dry Ridge Area over the aquifer that provides water for the 6,000 residents in town.”
“Chicopee Concrete [had] been mining in that area for many years,” he said. They then tried to expand their mining, which could only be allowed by special permit from the Planning Board.
“A lot of ... citizens rejected it, that special permit,” he said. “I was among those people who were very concerned about the effect of more mining on Dry Ridge, because things can leach down into the aquifer and poison the water.”
“Chicopee Concrete came through with a plan to build a subdivision up there, [which] would have similar impacts on the aquifer as the mining operation,” he said. “I went to a lot of Planning Board meetings around that, and that process is still underway, but it certainly got me involved and thinking about the importance of a committee like the Planning Board.”
The wetlands protection by-law gives the Planning Board an argument and precedent to reject or counter developer propositions.
The excitement and community force around the wetlands issue inspired Therien, along with what he calls the “commitment of so many people.”
The 2010 Master Plan and its implementation committee got Therien involved in South Hadley’s political scene once more.
The Master Plan revolves around five key issues, including “South Hadley Falls revitalization, investing in the Route 116/Route 33 center, connecting and enhancing South Hadley’s community centers, securing open space: range, river, rural areas and updating regulations and standards for improved outcomes,” according to the comprehensive plan brochure on the town’s website.
After retirement, Therien became a member of the Master Plan Implementation Committee (MPIC), which he said works to help the town’s boards and other committees “implement the goals of the 2010 Master Plan.”
“So what we did,” he said, “is went around to the conservation committee and the sustainability committee, the health board, Planning Board and others to see how things were going and ask them what kinds of issues they had implementing some of the plans that have been set forward.”
“I figured the Planning Board has a lot of work and it’s not something that people who are working can have an easy time doing, but as a retired person, I can step up a bit,” Therien said.
Therien’s first plan to improve South Hadley life is to create space for the different committees to talk and work together to push forward the Master Plan. Therien hopes to help “people find common ground” by “listening to people and finding out where they were being thwarted and how to get around that,” he said. “I think I’m good at moving across divisions and across functional lines and I think that ... will be helpful on the Planning Board,” he added confidently.
The second plan is to open discussion to the public. “One of the things I learned ... is that there is a lot of eagerness for decisions to be more open and trans- parent, and people want to be engaged,” he explained.
Regarding MPIC, he said, “We had a lot of public forums and a lot of smaller neighborhood meetings, and members of the MPIC were going out and meeting citizens all over town ... we saw lots of citizens when we did that and learned about the sorts of things they wanted to see for the town, and it excited me that there were so many people engaged, but it also made me aware that, to get these things done, there’s going to have to be a lot of focused work and a lot of engaged work with the public.”
Therien’s campaign officially launched when Mark Cavanaugh, the current Chair of the Planning Board, did not return his papers to run for reelection. By then, it was too late for Therien to run as an official candidate, so in- stead, he is one of two declared write-ins for the 2020 town election. This means that Therien has notified the clerk that he will be running. Those “declared through the town clerk’s office may be asked to be a part of a forum to see why they are seeking this position,” Town Clerk Hamlin said. “They are given more clout because they have declared publicly.”
This publicity, according to Therien, is important for write-in candidates like himself, whereas the campaign is all about getting the name out to the community. For citizens less familiar with his name and story, Therien wrote up a short letter explaining the role of the Planning Board and his goals for its future. Each card starts with the greeting, “Dear Neighbor.”
To further circulate his name and campaign, Therien has been holding meetings with groups in town, such as the Democratic Town Committee and those at Know Your Town.
“It’s a lot of word-of-mouth,” he said.
Therien believes that his name has circulated so well because of the work he did with protecting the aquifer. Even so, he has been using all opportunities to speak and connect with members of the town, whether through emails or house parties.
Therien believes his qualifications for the job stem back to his time as the Director of Academic Programs. In this role, Therien said it was his “job to help faculty members across the five institutions find ways they can do things together that they can’t do at their own campuses, and that involved a lot of working through differences and discovery of commonalities,” he explained.
To further improve his skills and knowledge regarding town planning, Therien said that he plans to attend an upcoming conference specifically for Citizen Planners.
“It’s a whole association that helps citizens that get involved in town planning to learn more about what has to happen,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“I’ve been educating myself a lot, because town planning is complicated,” he added, laughing.
If he wins the position, Therien hopes to bring improvements to South Hadley. “One of the things we heard during the Master Plan discussion is that people are looking for more amenities, more shops and restaurants,” he said. “A lot of people in town complained about how they had to drive outside of town to get things.” A big wish, he said, was for small grocery stores in town.
What Therien advocates for most is open communication between the town’s government and South Hadley residents.
“We can’t have five members of the Planning Board and the town planner sort of cooking up solutions and then announcing them to the town ... it just won’t work,” he said. “I think I’ll be good at helping the Planning Board help facilitate discussions with people in town around possible ways of achieving some of the goals that people more or less agree on.”
Therien hopes to open discussion time in each Planning Board meeting for discussion, giving space for townspeople to bring up issues they find important. “If we have the right kind of conversation around ways of [meeting our goals], we can build trust,” he said.
South Hadley votes along with the rest of Massachusetts on Tuesday, March 3.