Speakers at the Somerville City Council Finance Committee meeting, Tuesday, expressed disappointment and frustration over the City’s long-awaited draft master plan for the Armory. The plan recommends the city maintain control of the building and form an Armory Advisory Committee to guide it until it transitions governance to a new nonprofit or quasi-municipal trust. Director of Economic Development Rachel Nadkarni called this a “short-term” measure, but a clear timeline remains elusive.
“There’s a want here to wrap up this process, get that buy-in, get everyone aligned on what this mission and vision of success for the building is quickly, so that we can move to a stage where we are stabilizing tenancies in the building. But we also want to keep the pathway to that independent governance progressing, which everyone identified they’d like to see us get to,” Nadkarni said Tuesday.
But with three years of planning gone by and no additional timeline in sight, attendees at Tuesday’s hearing demanded the city immediately issue leases to tenants, reconsider the “start-from-scratch” approach it is taking to envision the armory’s future, and expressed fears of losing the building’s anchor tenant, The Center for the Arts at the Armory (CAA), which provides a bulk of the building’s programming.
In November, CAA issued an ultimatum to the city, stating that if a master plan is not finished and approved by the City Council by the end of the year, it would leave. This plan arrived after the city missed an October deadline to produce a draft.
The CAA is responsible for producing over 750 events, serving about 250,000 people, annually. Several speakers expressed their gratitude for the CAA and the programming it offers to a diverse array of artists and vendors, reiterating a sentiment of “if it’s not broken, why fix it?”
Some speakers also pointed to the community-led research and collaborative planning that the CAA conducted during its formation nearly two decades ago, arguing it renders the city’s planning work redundant. Others noted that, despite a prolonged community listening period, the draft plan appears to progress counter to the recommendations made by community members and the contract project advisor.
The draft master plan released on November 25 states that the mission of the Armory is, “to protect and ensure the long-term vitality of the historic armory property as an affordable and accessible public center for art, community, and culture.”
The plan recommends focusing on seven key areas to achieve that mission: support for artists and the arts, nurturing collaboration and “synergy” in the building, inspiring community, supporting creativity at all levels and scales, making clear and community-based decisions, mitigating conflict amidst different needs, and ensuring financial stability.
The first action item that the city defines for itself in a section of the plan titled “roadmap for a public arts center”, is to develop a five-member Armory Advisory Board. Speakers at the hearing were quick to voice their concerns that the burden being placed on the—presumably unpaid—members of this board were too much for such a small committee and tha, in creating it, the city was offloading its own responsibilities onto the community.
“There are a lot of balancing acts that this master plan steps right into—trying to navigate different layers,” Nadkarni said, for example making sure the building meets a public purpose “without the city being in command of every event,” she said.
About half of the 70 attendees online spoke during the public comment period. A mix of Armory tenants, city residents, artists, and arts supporters expressed pride in the building’s current programming and confusion over the city’s perceived neglect of current tenants’ needs, successes, and knowledge during the planning process.
None of the Armory building’s tenants are mentioned in the context of planning within the draft, but photos of their programming and work appear throughout the master plan, representing the tension between the building’s institutional knowledge and success and the City’s reluctance to involve tenants directly in the planning process—outside of community meetings and focus groups—to prevent conflicts of interest.
“We repeatedly offered to help on an interim basis and we’re most often ignored. Nothing has improved over the last three and a half years to where we are now seeing a draft version of the armory, it’s actually gotten worse. Under city ownership the building and grounds have been neglected, there’s still no business building management, and we continue to be ignored by the city when we are trying to offer advice,” said CAA Co-Director and Chief Operations Officer Jess White.
Currently, the CAA is operating on a 30-day license agreement from the city, which the CAA says precludes it from operating effectively due to the long-term nature of booking and fundraising for events.
“How is the city going to administer this plan if they cannot even make a lease for their tenants?” Ivan Abarca-Torres, a member of the CAA board, asked Tuesday.
Sheher-Bano Ahmed expressed doubt in the current master plan’s paths to independent governance. “Creating a new nonprofit is not practical in the short term and I don’t have faith that running the space through a [quasi] municipal trust will soon become possible, given my experience with the slow-moving state legislature,” Ahmed said.
Stephanie Scherpf, CEO and Co-Director at the Center for the Arts at the Armory, said the city should abandon the nonprofit and cultural trust options altogether. Instead, Scherpf suggested a tenant-involved governance model. “I would like to request a legal statement from the City citing why a nonprofit organization cannot be involved in planning for the future of a city-owned building,” Scherpf said.
Councilor Willie Burnley Jr. shared in calls for greater urgency to enact independent governance at the Armory.
“It is incredibly frustrating to see this plan not try to move with pace toward an independent model after what I saw was a resounding desire for such a model from the community over the course of many meetings with the public and, of course, for the tenants who are already there,” Burnley Jr. said, before casting doubt on the viability of independence at all under this plan.
“It just doesn’t make sense to me to create a plan that says we’re going to create an advisory group that is going to create parameters for the future of this building until we can actually move to an independent body there. I think the city needs to move towards co-governance. It needs to figure out a way to actually empower the tenants and to let the folks who’ve made the Armory what it is today, not only an asset in the traditional financial sense, but a true home for the arts in the community.”
Following the hearing, the city will take the master plan under review, consider the latest public feedback, and decide how to proceed. The plan is expected to go before the City Council in early 2025. The city will accept written feedback until January 6.
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