DOSSIER: Andrew Baker
Executive Summary: The Teflon Gatekeeper
Andrew Baker has spent more than two decades accumulating overlapping civic roles in Shelburne Falls—arts, economic development, housing, sewer, school committee, and finally the Selectboard—cultivating the profile of a dedicated community servant while developing a precise institutional reflex for deflecting accountability downward and away from himself. As a Selectboard member, Baker holds direct oversight authority over the Shelburne Police Department. That authority obligates him to respond when constituents bring documented evidence of civil rights violations, selective enforcement, and officer misconduct.
The documented record shows he has not done so once. Not for a single complaint. Not in six years.
Instead, the record captures Baker using his official municipal email to accuse a constituent of criminal trespass without evidence, then being forced to issue a rapid retraction once it was proved no warning signs existed. It catches him executing physical and administrative retreats at the local post office, using shifting internal titles ("neither the Select Board chair nor the Police liaison") to insulate himself, and routing systemic police complaints back to the exact police chief under investigation. Baker is a long-tenured insider who has learned to navigate every complaint without ever engaging its substance, making institutional evasion the defining feature of his public service.
Core Identity: Selectboard Member, Town of Shelburne; Former Executive Director, Greater Shelburne Falls Area Business Association; Former Executive Director, Hilltown Community Development Corporation; Founder, Pothole Pictures Community Theater.
Local Association Matrix: Three-member Shelburne Selectboard (current term ends 2027); Shelburne Sewer Commission; oversight authority over Shelburne Police Department, including Chief Gregory Bardwell, Detective Tucker Jenkins, and Officer Christopher Pettengill; longtime civic anchor of the Shelburne Falls progressive establishment network.
Operational Pattern: Preemptive criminalization of critical citizens from official municipal capacity; rapid pivot to tone-policing and administrative evasion when factual claims collapse under scrutiny; exploitation of fluid title assignments to evade oversight obligations; systematic non-response to documented civil rights violations committed by the department he is elected to oversee; physical avoidance of accountability combined with written deflection to the very police command whose misconduct he is obligated to address.
Part I: The Biographical Profile — Decades of Overlapping Civic Infrastructure
Andrew Baker was born approximately 1959 and has lived in Shelburne Falls for over thirty years, residing at 38 Mechanic Street with his wife, Andrea Griswold. He holds a B.A. from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and has been a member of All Souls Church in Greenfield since 1994.
His professional career is a textbook study in western Massachusetts nonprofit and community development infrastructure. In 1995, he became the founding Executive Director of the Greater Shelburne Falls Area Business Association, managing a 225-member organization through downtown revitalization and arts promotion for seven years. He subsequently directed the Hilltown Community Development Corporation for approximately four years beginning around 2006. In the years following, he transitioned into regional workforce development, coordinating grant-funded training programs at Greenfield Community College and through the Franklin Hampshire Regional Employment Board—placing workers in green energy, precision machining, and manufacturing roles across the county.
In 1995, Baker also founded Pothole Pictures, the volunteer-run community movie theater in Shelburne Falls Memorial Hall, serving as its director for its initial five years and remaining a prominent volunteer fixture at screenings. In 2018, Baker launched a Democratic primary campaign for the 1st Franklin District State Representative seat vacated by Stephen Kulik, but dropped out in July before the primary, citing family considerations, and endorsed eventual winner Natalie Blais.
His Selectboard tenure dates back to at least 2015. Moving between rotations as Selectboard Chair and an ordinary member through multiple low-turnout election cycles, his current term runs through 2027. He concurrently serves on the Shelburne Sewer Commission. In a municipality of approximately 1,900 residents where local elections frequently see a mere 10–20% voter turnout, Baker’s multi-decade network of overlapping institutional presence represents a sustained, largely uncontested hold on the town's administrative infrastructure.
Part II: The Pocket Park Pavilion Trespass Fabrication — The False Accusation and Its Documented Collapse
The foundational sequence demonstrating Baker’s operational reflex occurred between February 8 and February 10, 2024, regarding a town-funded construction project on private commercial land belonging to local glass artist Josh Simpson—locally designated as the "pocket park" or pavilion site.
A local citizen had documented video evidence of structural vulnerabilities, a construction site in disarray with guard fences down, and engineering flaws on a newly installed handicap ramp railing. This represented a legitimate civic inquiry involving permit compliance, structural safety, and the deployment of public taxpayer money on a private commercial parcel. The video documentation was sent directly to Baker through official channels.
Baker's immediate response, issued from his official municipal email account at 5:50 PM on February 8, 2024, bypassed his procedural obligations to review citizen-submitted evidence and opted instead for preemptive criminalization:
"I am not going to watch your video, and I am extremely disappointed to learn that you have trespassed on a posted construction site while FC Tech students were actively engaged in building Shelburne's pavilion."
Baker explicitly paired this unverified criminal allegation with an attempt to suppress public digital documentation, stating that the internet "has not been your friend" and instructing the citizen to abandon public postings in favor of closed municipal channels.
The pushback to this administrative overreach occurred less than an hour later, at 6:37 PM, when the citizen formally countered his assertion by identifying the physical reality of the ground terrain and exposing the complete lack of physical warnings. The citizen notified Baker and copied administrators that leveling an unverified charge of trespassing on town-leased property without a single posted notice constituted libel, and that the site had just been revisited to video-document the complete absence of signage.
To systematically expose the regulatory gaps of the project, the citizen followed up at 7:24 PM with a direct public records demand:
"could you please either email copies of the plans and building permit, or direct me to where I may obtain them? Normally new construction sites have the permit posted on the site, but I was unable to locate one on site. Also, could you please tell me if the town-paid-for improvements will increase the tax assessment of the property? Will the owners be paying more in taxes since it is no longer an unimproved field?"
This precise query targeted the municipal core of the project: the absence of a visible building permit and the structural tax anomalies of funding improvements with public money on private land. This formal inquiry left the initial trespass accusation completely unanswered and legally exposed. Confronted with a documented counter-fact (video proof of zero signs) and a formal demand for building permits and tax assessments, Baker's fabricated narrative collapsed.
Two days later, on February 10, 2024, Baker was forced to issue an explicit written retraction:
"I apologize for my comment about you entering a posted site. We had talked about posting the site at our last Select Board meeting but apparently that has not yet been done."
The retraction exposed the mechanics of his governance: Baker had deployed an unverified criminal charge under the color of office based entirely on an internal board conversation rather than physical reality. Once caught, Baker immediately shifted his methodology from overt accusation to tone-policing. He used the remainder of his February 10 transmission to lecture the citizen on "small town naivete," "civility," and "manners," attempting to reframe his own documented administrative falsehood as a lesson in "direct democracy." The underlying concerns regarding the municipal project’s structural safety, lack of permits, and tax anomalies were left completely unanswered.
Part III: The Systematic Refusal to Exercise Police Oversight
Baker’s formal oversight obligations as an elected Selectboard member include direct accountability for the actions, policies, and personnel of the Shelburne Police Department. The documented record shows a consistent, multi-year pattern of total non-engagement with every formal complaint brought to that oversight mechanism.
Between 2020 and 2025, the Selectboard was formally notified of deep structural failures within the department, including:
The department's written "non-contact" policy (preserved in Sergeant Gilmore’s incident report 21-133-OF, stating he would not contact a resident because it "hasn't worked in the past").
Detective Tucker Jenkins and Officer Christopher Pettengill’s co-signing of criminal harassment charges against a citizen neither officer had ever met.
The subsequent finding of NO PROBABLE CAUSE by a Clerk-Magistrate at a June 2023 show-cause hearing, which recycled eight unverified claims by a hostile actor that had already been vacated by a district judge.
The department's continuous failure to preserve exculpatory video evidence across multiple reported incidents.
Baker and the Selectboard left every single one of these detailed notices entirely unanswered.
This vacuum of oversight extended to physical safety threats. In September 2024, a hostile third party sent Baker’s own landlord, Brad Walker, a letter predicting that "it's really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt." Walker forwarded the letter to the Shelburne Police Department. Detective Jenkins read it approximately twelve days late and took no documented action. Baker was formally notified of this security failure; he offered no response.
Furthermore, Baker’s oversight record includes active participation in shielding compromised personnel. In January 2025, an official investigation by the Berkshire District Attorney's Office determined that Detective Tucker Jenkins had engaged in a highly inappropriate relationship with an 18-year-old female student at Mohawk Trail Regional School, made twenty-five phone calls totaling sixty-seven minutes to her over a thirty-day period, deleted relevant text messages, and refused to cooperate with investigators. The school district terminated Jenkins' campus access immediately. Despite a community petition gathering 218 local signatures calling for Jenkins' removal from the force, Baker and the Selectboard conducted a closed, three-hour executive session and voted unanimously to retain Jenkins, publicly praising his "excellent record of performance."
On March 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge Mark G. Mastroianni officially denied qualified immunity to Detective Jenkins personally in the federal civil rights lawsuit Mlynick v. Town of Erving et al., finding it plausible that Jenkins had intentionally provided misleading information and ignored exculpatory facts to manufacture probable cause. Merely thirteen days later, Chief Bardwell submitted a merit raise request for his "fantastic crew." Baker and the Selectboard approved it without hesitation, with Chair Rick LaPierre publicly calling the raises "well worth it."
Part IV: The Post Office Avoidance and the Title-Shifting Mechanism
On January 27, 2025, when confronted directly on his way to work at the Shelburne Falls post office regarding systemic civil rights liabilities, selective law enforcement, and mounting federal lawsuit exposures facing the town, Baker's initial response was a physical and administrative retreat.
Baker formalized this insulation in writing on February 9, 2025, utilizing his municipal email account to officially dodge structural responsibility. His stated justification relied entirely on a fluid shifting of internal administrative titles:
"I am neither the Select Board chair nor the Police liaison..."
Based on this title-shift, Baker directed that all civil rights grievances and complaints of official police misconduct be routed away from the elected executive board and back into a recorded police interview with Chief Gregory Bardwell.
The architecture of this administrative deflection creates an intentional, closed bureaucratic loop: First, the citizen brings a formal grievance to Selectboard member Baker. Baker shifts his title to state he is not the current chair or liaison, routing the grievance downwards to Police Chief Bardwell. When pushed for tracking or final accountability, Chief Bardwell routes information flow back to the executive scope of the Selectboard. Neither entity engages the substance of the constitutional violation, leaving the citizen trapped in a perpetual administrative circle.
By sheltering behind fluid internal designations, Baker treats elected oversight as a part-time clerical assignment rather than a statutory obligation. Simultaneously, Chief Bardwell’s department was actively delaying public records requests by petitioning the Supervisor of Records for maximum extensions and aggressive fee assessments. Baker was directly copied on urgent correspondence documenting that these coordinated municipal delay tactics were triggering severe, chronic medical injuries (exacerbated atrial fibrillation and cardiac distress) to the citizen targeted by the records dispute. Baker maintained complete administrative silence.
Part V: The 49 Mechanic Street Question and the Opacity of Motive
A consistent element in the community's ambient concern regarding Baker is his opaque relationship to the physical redevelopment questions surrounding 49 Mechanic Street—the strategically vital parcel central to local infrastructure proposals, environmental daylighting plans, and regional design frameworks.
Baker has been described by multiple community members as maintaining an insulated, insider interest in the ultimate disposition and development potential of this parcel, without ever disclosing the exact nature of his professional networks or their intersection with his municipal votes. In a small town where an embedded official exercises multi-decade authority over sewer infrastructure, public works planning, zoning discussions, and tax assessments, this opacity represents a fundamental accountability failure. The documented pattern demonstrates that Baker's public-facing posture of civic neutrality and community service conceals an insular network of institutional loyalties, protecting private and commercial development interests from the active scrutiny of the working-class taxpayers who fund the municipality.
Dossier References and Master Index
All claims, timelines, and verbatim quotes compiled in this dossier are drawn directly from:
Certified Municipal Email Archives: Verbatim electronic exchanges dated February 8, February 10, 2024, and February 9, 2025.
Public Selectboard Records: Executive session logs, police department merit raise authorizations (March 2026), and municipal appointment rosters.
Franklin County District Court Dockets: Show-cause hearing transcripts and findings of No Probable Cause (June 2023).
Federal Court Filings: Mlynick v. Town of Erving et al., U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Case No. 3:24-cv-30108-MGM (Ruling on Qualified Immunity, March 12, 2026).
Regional Public Records Determinations: Massachusetts Public Records Division petition logs (August/September 2025).