CIVIC REFORM PETITION
Dissolve the Bridge of Flowers Committee and Replace It with Professional, Accountable Governance for a Public Landmark
Initiated by John F. Sendelbach — Shelburne Falls, MA
2026
To:
Shelburne Falls Fire District (bridge owner) · Shelburne Select Board · Buckland Select Board · Shelburne Falls Area Women’s Club (SFAWC) · Bridge of Flowers donors and supporters
The Bridge of Flowers belongs to the public. Its ownership is vested in the Shelburne Falls Fire District. Its visitors number in the tens of thousands every season. Its national recognition as a landmark of horticultural and community achievement is real and deserved. None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute — what has been in catastrophic failure for years and cannot be allowed to continue — is the governance structure that has turned a treasured public asset into the private project of an unelected, unaccountable, all-white, all-women subcommittee that has operated without transparency, without term limits, without professional horticultural oversight, and without the most basic democratic safeguards since 1929.
The Bridge of Flowers Committee is a subcommittee of the Shelburne Falls Area Women’s Club. It has never been elected. It has never been subject to open meetings law. It has never had term limits. In ninety-seven years of existence, it has never had a member who was not a white woman. It controls a $3.2 million publicly renovated landmark. It makes permanent horticultural, structural, and institutional decisions without public input, without professional consultation, and without accountability to the Fire District that legally owns the land it manages.
This petition calls for the immediate dissolution of the BOFC subcommittee structure and its replacement with a grant-funded professional steward accountable to the Shelburne Falls Fire District — along with three specific physical remedies the bridge urgently needs.
The documented record of failure
$60K — soil remediation cost — BOFC specified the soil
97 yrs — no person of color or man on the committee
12+ yrs — continuous committee member Joanne Soroka (still listed on the official 2026 BOFC roster and serving as Vice President of the Buckland Council on Aging)
6 yrs — zero contact with a legacy artist they publicly defamed
THE $60,000 SOIL DISASTER — CONFIRMED
In April 2026, the contractor performing the soil remediation confirmed on the job site — twice, unprompted — that the Bridge of Flowers Committee explicitly specified the soil type used in the $3.2 million renovation. Not the engineers. Not the contractor. The BOFC. The cost of correcting that decision: approximately $60,000. As of this petition, there has been zero public disclosure of who is paying for it. The Greenfield Recorder ran a quote from a volunteer saying the plants “weren’t thriving.” That is the full public accounting the community has received.
John Sendelbach holds a Cornell B.S. in Floriculture and Ornamental Horticulture and completed a full semester of Soil Science. He had active installations on the bridge. He was not consulted. The BOFC made a decision requiring professional horticultural expertise without consulting the most credentialed horticulturist in the community — the same person they had publicly endorsed a defamatory campaign against in 2020. The $60,000 hole is the direct cost of that governance model.
BEFORE ANY OF THIS BEGAN — A 12+ YEAR BRIDGE OF FLOWERS COMMITTEE MEMBER’S THREATS
Joanne Soroka has been a continuous member of the Bridge of Flowers Committee since at least 2014 (12+ years as of 2026) and remains prominently listed on the official Bridge of Flowers Committee roster for 2026. She also serves as Vice President of the Buckland Council on Aging (term through 2025). On August 26, 2019 — nearly a full year before the Iron Bridge incident — she sent me the following email:
“Get this through your head. I have not told anyone your personal information… If you slander me, mention me, accuse me or anything that resembles that, I CERTAINLY will get a restrain order against you… I have many many threads from you where you are threatening and ranting… You are the one slinging bad info around, not me… Keep hitting me and I will not hesitate. You don’t know who you are fucking with… You are dead to me. Only when you call my name out, will I reawaken and I promise it will get ugly. All on you.”
This is not the language of neutral public service from a long-serving committee insider and Council on Aging officer. This is the language of personal animus, issued well before any 2020 controversy. It reveals the committee’s culture of threat, secrecy, and personal vendetta years in advance.
The Greenfield Recorder published two front-page articles endorsing the 2020 petition that called me a racist disruptor full of hate.
On June 11, 2020, the Recorder ran “Artist’s work in question following petition” by Mary Byrne. The article amplified the petition’s narrative without contacting me. It front-loaded quotes from committee members endorsing the “anti-racism spirit” of the petition while burying the one accurate characterization — committee co-chair Carol Angus stating I had been “a great supporter of the bridge and very responsive to us when we’ve had particular needs” for fourteen years. The Recorder never reported that Change.org removed the petition for defamation and misinformation violations.
On June 18, 2020, the Recorder ran “Bridge of Flowers Committee installs anti-racism memorial.” Chair Annette Szpila was quoted saying the committee wanted to “honor the anti-racism spirit of the petition.” The article described the new plaque as a response to the petition while placing it three feet from the Pothole Fountain — the permanent installation I designed with mason Paul Forth, which includes the Black Stones of Africa embedded as a structural anti-racist tribute to his biracial daughters. The committee never publicly acknowledged those stones in nine years of the fountain’s existence. The Recorder cropped the published photo to exclude them.
These articles gave institutional legitimacy to a petition that falsely labeled me a racist disruptor. The committee endorsed that narrative without ever contacting me.
SIX YEARS OF NO CONTACT — A DOCUMENTED INSTITUTIONAL ABANDONMENT
From June 6, 2020 through the date of this petition: not one Bridge of Flowers Committee member has contacted John Sendelbach. Not an email. Not a phone call. Not a letter. During this period: he was falsely accused of racism in a petition the committee endorsed; he had his studio closed by the community pressure that followed; he sustained documented atrial fibrillation attributed by his physician to the harassment stress. Through all of it, the committee whose endorsement launched the cascade maintained total silence. This is not an oversight. It is a posture.
At the August 2025 ribbon-cutting for the $3.2 million renovation — a once-in-a-generation civic event — there was no PA system, so prepared speeches were lost to street noise. Chair Annette Szpila denied to my face — on video, in the presence of a witness — that she had ever made the quoted statements endorsing the petition. The archived Recorder articles contain her direct quotes. This is documented denial of the public record.
The structural case for dissolution — and the fiduciary breach
The BOFC is a subcommittee of the Shelburne Falls Area Women’s Club, a Massachusetts nonprofit corporation organized under M.G.L. Chapter 180. As members of a committee of that corporation, BOFC members owe clear fiduciary duties under M.G.L. c. 180 § 6C: the duty of care (to act with the prudence of an ordinarily careful person), the duty of loyalty (to act in good faith and in the best interests of the corporation), and the duty of obedience (to faithfully carry out the organization’s charitable mission).
The documented record raises serious questions about compliance with these duties:
A $60,000 soil remediation decision made without professional horticultural input violates the duty of care.
Secret Zoom meetings, threats from long-serving members (including Joanne Soroka’s 2019 email), and six years of total silence toward a legacy artist whose work remains permanently installed on the bridge raise duty-of-loyalty concerns.
The failure to acknowledge the Black Stones of Africa while installing a new plaque three feet away, and the refusal to correct the public record, suggest a breach of the duty of obedience to the charitable and public purpose of the asset they steward.
A private subcommittee exercising de facto control over a publicly owned landmark while claiming exemption from open-meetings and public-records laws cannot simultaneously evade the fiduciary obligations that come with managing charitable assets. This is not merely bad governance. It is a potential breach of the legal duties imposed on every director, officer, and committee member of a Commonwealth nonprofit.
The physical bridge — what needs to change
THE GUARDRAIL PROBLEM
The new guardrail installed during the $3.2 million renovation is black, dense, and visually impenetrable. Where the original structure had a nearly transparent railing that allowed the garden and the river below to read as a unified experience, the current rail functions more like a prison enclosure — dark, heavy, and visually separating the visitor from the landscape the bridge was built to celebrate. This should be corrected: either paint the existing rail green to blend with the garden environment, or replace it with a lighter, more historically appropriate option such as the chain-link style the bridge originally used — which, while not a typical recommendation for residential or commercial applications, is historically correct for this structure and from a distance reads as nearly transparent, exactly as the original did.
THE GHOST FRAME TROLLEY TRELLIS — A PROPOSAL READY TO BUILD
In place of the demolished vine supports, Sendelbach has proposed a Ghost Frame Trolley Trellis: a stainless steel structure built to the exact dimensions of one of the J.G. Brill trolley cars that crossed this bridge in its original life as a streetcar trestle. Light, delicate, and structurally integrated into the existing framework, the trellis would provide the shaded space the bridge currently lacks while making the trolley’s absence permanently present. Morning glories for seasonal coverage; perennial climbers for long-term structure. The design is grant-fundable, low-maintenance, and connects the bridge directly to the valley's transportation and industrial heritage — the heritage the Bridge of Flowers was literally built on top of.
What this petition demands
The Shelburne Falls Fire District immediately assume direct governance oversight of the Bridge of Flowers and begin a public process to dissolve the BOFC subcommittee structure.
Hire a part-time professional steward — grant-funded, credentialed in horticulture or landscape management, selected through an open application process, and accountable to the Fire District — to manage the bridge's day-to-day operations and horticultural decisions. The two paid gardeners stay. Their institutional knowledge and hands-in-the-ground expertise are the bridge's most valuable operational asset. Everyone else transitions.
Establish a formal advisory body with rotating membership, open public meetings, published minutes, term limits, and a requirement for local residency (Shelburne and Buckland only), replacing the current self-perpetuating SFAWC subcommittee model.
Require that the advisory body include representation by credentialed horticulturists, professional landscape practitioners, and community members with documented connections to the bridge's history — including its Indigenous, Black, and working-class heritage.
Commission an independent review of the $60,000 soil remediation: who specified it, who authorized it, and who is paying for it. Publish the findings.
Formally acknowledge the Black Stones of Africa embedded in the Pothole Fountain — the anti-racist installation placed by Paul Forth, Julie Petty, and John Sendelbach in 2011 — as a permanent anti-racist civic artwork, nine years prior to the committee's 2020 anti-racism plaque installation. Credit all contributors accordingly on bridgeofflowersmass.org.
Establish a formal attribution policy for permanent public art on the bridge that applies equally to all contributors, ending the decades-long prohibition on artist attribution while commercial signage (Valley Fence, Trout Unlimited) has been permitted without restriction.
Commission a structural engineering review of the guardrail installed during the 2025 renovation and issue a public recommendation on whether to repaint it green or replace it with a lighter, historically appropriate alternative. The goal is to restore the visual permeability between visitor, garden, and river that defined the bridge's experience before the current rail was installed.
Issue a formal call for design proposals for the Ghost Frame Trolley Trellis to replace the demolished vine supports, with Sendelbach's proposal included as a named submission. Evaluate on merit, horticulture, cost, and historical integrity.
The Greenfield Recorder: publish a correction acknowledging that the Change.org petition removed for defamation in June 2020 was the basis for the committee's institutional response — and that the petition's removal for defamatory content was never reported. Annotate the 2020 articles accordingly.
“The bridge belongs to everyone. The flowers belong to everyone. The governance must belong to everyone too.”
The volunteer spirit that has sustained this garden for nearly a century is real and deserves honor. This petition is not an attack on the people who love these flowers. It is a demand that an institution worthy of their love be built — one that can make a $60,000 soil decision without hiding the cost, one that can acknowledge contributions without erasing them, and one that can be held accountable when it fails.
The $60,000 soil disaster is the bill we are all paying for the current model.
It is time to change the model.
John F. Sendelbach, Shelburne Falls, MA 2026