Somerville’s inaction on its Armory arts building is about to drive away an organization producing 750 events for 250,000 people a year, said the nonprofit’s chief executive, Stephanie Scherpf.
If an Armory master plan is not finished and approved by the City Council by Dec. 31, the Center for Arts at the Armory will leave, Scherpf told city councilors Thursday as they passed a resolution calling for tenant leases.
“Three and a half years is a very long time for anybody, and especially nonprofit arts organization, to withstand the type of uncertainty and instability that we’ve been experiencing,” Scherpf said, recounting a history of missed municipal deadlines that has made it harder to apply for grants, sign contracts for shows and events and keep staff. “Enough is enough.”
If implementation of an approved plan is not “well underway” by the end of the fiscal year on June 30, “that would also be further cause for us to vacate,” Scherpf said. That would result in a locked building and “no more farmers market, no more cafe events, no more concerts.”
The city took the building at 191 Highland Ave., Spring Hill, through a $5 million eminent domain land seizure in May 2021 without a long-term plan, and Scherpf’s nonprofit and other tenants have been waiting for one since, as well as struggling with a lack of maintenance. A July meeting with mayor Katjana Ballantyne produced an agreement for a 30-day license agreement that arrived in November and was signed by tenants yet hasn’t been countersigned by the city, Scherpf said.
“Our business model and our financial model involves assigning contracts for events, weddings, et cetera, for up to two years in advance,” Scherpf told councilors. “You can understand how a 30-day license agreement is difficult for us.”
Most recently, an Armory plan was to be released for public comment in October, a goal that was changed to releasing the plan for comment internally at City Hall sometime this month for presentation to the council in December. “It keeps taking longer and longer to deliver the plan,” Scherpf said.
“Upward of 10 years”
That timeline was confirmed by Kimberley Hutter, a legislative liaison for the mayor, who said the urgency was understood, but that Somerville was working at “a much faster pace” than it might.
“Based on the example of our surrounding communities, those plans take upward of 10 years to get into place,” Hutter said.
The goal is to outline a governance structure with a community-based board that will decide on tenancy, one in which “current tenants have the ability to utilize the building,” Hutter said.
The vague language, including references to processes that included “engagement from our community” to look “very deeply in debates about governance,” didn’t comfort or satisfy councilors, who said their constituents suspected that some officials in City Hall were trying to drive out the Center for Arts at the Armory.
“I hope that there is no part or parcel of the city that is in any way trying to make that happen. And I would urge the administration to shout that from the rooftops,” council president Ben Ewen-Campen said. The city’s inaction was “getting increasingly hard to defend as a position to the public. The longer this goes on, it’s starting to feel ridiculous.”
Reflecting community input
Councilor Naima Sait echoed one of Scherpf’s observations: That the input the city was getting from the community – that the Armory was working well now and the nonprofit should stay – didn’t seem to be reflected in communications from the city. “My constituents are extremely concerned,” Sait said. “The administration had a lot of chances to fix this. This is the last chance.”
There have been “many, many meetings” where people express support for keeping the Center for Arts at the Armory in place as manager, councilor Willie Burnley Jr. said, calling it “really time that we become a city that honors the folks who make this place worth living.”
“It’s been a travesty of leadership,” Burnley said.
Councilor J.T. Scott pointed out that whether the city is purposefully trying to drive out the Center for Arts at the Armory or whether it happened due to inaction, it would be “a huge loss.” The city had recently evicted the Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers and Somerville Media Center from their longtime home in Union Square citing unsafe conditions, Scott noted.
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