The Ledger That Runs One Direction: A merchant's reckoning with the Shelburne Falls Alliance, the institutions behind it, and six years of now continued erasure & silence
John F. Sendelbach · Oct 15, 2026
so here is a screenshot they can't undo.
That's Virginia Ray, BOFC member and SF Alliance member,
just feet from my bench and fountain.
The Pitch
This fall the Shelburne Falls Alliance launched its "10 Great Reasons" campaign, asking at least two hundred people to sign up by the end of the year for a recurring donation of ten dollars a month, or twenty for businesses and anyone who wants to give "an extra boost." If every one of them stays for a full year, that is $24,000 at the base tier alone, before the business tier and the event sponsorships the Alliance also solicits. The money flows through a fiscal sponsor, the Franklin County Community Development Corporation, and the Alliance says it will fuel work across ten areas: events like Moonlight Magic and Porchfest, running the Visit Shelburne Falls social media accounts, assisting businesses, grant development, and more. The campaign describes itself as a cornerstone of a strategy to provide baseline funding, so that the Alliance can keep the village moving and create the "magic and whimsy" people speak of when they describe Shelburne Falls.
The Alliance's own website describes something larger than a fundraiser for festivals. It says the committee "sets priorities" for development and growth, advises on initiatives in business, arts, events and infrastructure, coordinates nonprofits, business owners and residents, monitors progress and reporting, guides the Regional Coordinator position, and manages the village's "digital identity" through ShelburneFalls.com. Its mission statement speaks of nurturing the village's artistic and cultural roots and fostering economic growth. Those are its words, not mine, and I take them at face value, because the question this essay asks is simple: if an organization claims the job of steering a village's economic and cultural future, and asks the public to fund it month after month, what does its record and the record of the institutions around it actually show?
I am in a position to answer that question that almost nobody else in town is in. I ran a business on State Street for nine years. I have permanent public work on the village's most visited landmark. I have argued in print for the merchants' calendar since before this Alliance existed. And for the last six years I have watched what this village's civic institutions do when the person asking them a question is someone they have decided not to hear. This is the record, laid out in full, as plainly as I can lay it.
Nine Years on State Street
From 2011 to 2020 I kept a studio and storefront at 44 State Street, on the Buckland side. In nine years I watched other businesses on that stretch come and go, and as far as I know no one on that part of the street held on longer. I was not there because it was easy. There were bad years, years when I was circling the drain, years when I slept in a corner of the studio with an electric heater and a shower rigged off the sink because the rent on the shop came before the rent on an apartment. I held on partly out of self-preservation, because the shop was my living, and partly because I understood something about streets that the landscape architecture literature confirms and every shopkeeper feels in their gut: a dark storefront is an invitation to the next one. Vacancy is contagious. Foot traffic reroutes around a dead window, the shops beside it lose the walk-by, and the block begins to die from the gap outward. Keeping one window lit, year after year, is a contribution to every other window on the block.
I was also, by the end of that stretch, someone people came back to see. Visitors who had bought a piece returned the next season to see what I had made since. Locals brought their out-of-town guests by. The work in the window was part of the reason that end of the street felt alive. I never went around telling other merchants what they should be doing, and I never asked anyone for a subscription to support the vitality of the village. I kept my nose to the grindstone and kept the lights on, and in doing so I did, unpaid and on my own dime, a good part of what the Alliance now asks the public to fund.
Alongside the storefront, I put permanent work into the village's public body. On the Bridge of Flowers I built the River Bench, the trolley gate, and the Pothole Fountain, whose pavement carries the polished black stones in the shape of Africa that mason Paul Forth set there in 2011 as a tribute to his mixed-race daughters, with my full support and the committee's approval. Those pieces were not commissioned by any business association. The Bridge of Flowers Committee's own records described me as a great supporter of the bridge and very responsive to its needs. That is the merchant and contributor this village had on June 6, 2020.
June 2020
June 6, 2020 fell in the opening weeks of the pandemic reopening, when the shops on State Street had spent a spring shut or reduced to curbside and every merchant in the village was starving for a normal Saturday. The Bridge of Flowers was already closed because of the pandemic, which had already cut the foot traffic between the two halves of the village. That morning the Iron Bridge, the only other crossing, was closed for a demonstration, and no one had told the businesses whose customers had to cross it. Anyone following the social distancing rules literally could not have walked across that bridge through the crowd, and nearly everyone on it was breaking those same rules, the rules I would later be so loudly criticized for ignoring. My shop sat about four hundred feet from the closure, and I heard the cacophony from my desk inside. So I walked down to the Iron Bridge with my camera, which until that day I had only ever used to take pictures of the village, and I objected. I said that closing the village's main crossing without notice, in a pandemic, on one of the first Saturdays merchants had any hope of, was hurting the people who make their living there. I also said that a charged political confrontation was no place to bring children. I was there as a merchant, and if I was an advocate for anyone that day, it was for the business community.
What the town saw was not that. An edited video of the encounter, which began after the part where I was surrounded and pressed against the railing, was viewed more than twenty thousand times. A Change.org petition demanding the removal of my public art followed within days, gathered hundreds of signatures from people who had not been on the bridge, and was then taken down by Change.org on June 9 for violating its policies. The Greenfield Recorder ran front-page coverage reporting the accusation without ever asking me what had happened, and never corrected it. In under three minutes of edited footage I was handed a label, racist and bigot, that I had not earned and could not return. It contradicted thirty years of my work, including a memorial set in the pavement of the very bridge where the demonstration took place.
The label made no sense against the record, and it still doesn't. In 2002 mason Paul Forth invited me to help install the Sojourner Truth Memorial in Florence; I aligned, drilled, and cemented the bronze plaques onto their slanted granite blocks, and spent the rest of the day carving and setting paving stones near her statue. I grew up half a mile from the Obadiah Baker Homestead, a stop on the Underground Railroad. A year or two before 2020 I collaborated with Mohammad Yaseen, a Jordanian refugee with family in Gaza, on a body of work, some of which is still in his shop, including a bench that sits outside on State Street about seventy-five feet from where I was later assaulted. And the polished black stones in the shape of Africa were already in the pavement of the Bridge of Flowers, nine years before anyone on that bridge decided what I was. I have never called any of this anti-racism. I call it being a normal person in a working community, which is what I was.
I want to be precise about what I am claiming. I am not asking anyone to relitigate every word said on that bridge, and I am not interested in naming the people who set the frame. My point is narrower and, for this essay, more important. I went onto that bridge as a merchant objecting to a closure that cost the business community a day it badly needed, which is the same argument I have been making about downtown events ever since. The village's response was not to weigh that argument. It was to decide what kind of man I was, and then to stop listening.
What the Brand Cost
The label did its work quickly and then kept working. Within three weeks of the bridge, one of the people involved told me to my face that I was now bad for business in this town. After nine years of keeping a storefront lit, that was the verdict, and within months I lost the State Street storefront I had held for nine years. Leaving it forced me to sell most of my professional inventory at scrap value. The Culinary Institute of America, where my cutlery Atlantic sturgeon stands at the admissions plaza, had been meant as the first piece of a campus fish tour of further commissions; that pipeline did not survive the summer of 2020. I stopped soliciting new work, because I knew that anyone who searched my name would find the petition among the first results, and there was no point asking a client to look past it. I cannot put a dollar figure on the work that never came, but the loss was real, along with legal fees and the expense of moving my work again and again. I took a workspace in the Mill, and in 2023 I spent more than a week building a three-hundred-square-foot brick patio and installing gates there, in trade for an outdoor welding area, and bought a generator and compressor to run it. In September 2024 a letter was sent to my landlord there urging him to evict me. To his lasting credit he refused, writing back that evicting a tenant over a personal conflict that had produced no criminal or civil judgment against me would tell every other tenant their workspace was not safe from community grievances. But the pressure did not stop, the welding arrangement collapsed before it began, and eventually I left. The generator is still in its box. For years I had no proper studio at all, until I moved into the old Shippee station at 119 State Street in October 2025.
The cost was not only financial. Before 2020 my heart gave me almost no trouble; I had no idea anything was wrong until I ended up in the emergency room not long after I moved into the Mill. Since then my atrial fibrillation has flared in episodes that line up, date for date, with the worst moments of the last six years, and my medical records document them. I do not put that here for sympathy. I put it here because it is part of the ledger, and because the people who talk easily about community wellbeing should understand what six years of being treated as a pariah in your own village does to a body.
Here is what I want a reader to hold onto. The man this village pushed off its main street was not a newcomer, a troublemaker with no stake, or a critic throwing stones from outside. He was one of the longest-running merchants on that block, a contributor of permanent public work, and someone who had kept a storefront lit through the years when keeping it lit was hardest. Whatever the Alliance means by supporting local businesses, the village already had a chance to support one, and it chose the brand over the record.
Six Years of Silence
In late June 2020 the Bridge of Flowers Committee met privately by Zoom to discuss removing my work from the bridge. Nobody called me. Nobody emailed me. nine years of collaboration ended without a single conversation, and a committee member later told me to my face that they had thrown me under the bus. The committee's public gesture that summer was a laminated anti-racism sign tacked to the fence about three feet from the black stones of Africa that had been set in the bridge's pavement nine years earlier, and the newspaper's photograph of the sign was framed so the stones did not appear. The permanent tribute was invisible on the same day the laminated one was celebrated.
Over the six years that followed I wrote to every organization with a hand in this: the committee, its parent Women's Club, the newspaper, the town boards, and the civic groups that say they speak for the village. I asked for conversations. I asked for corrections. I asked, more than once, simply to be heard. The answer from all of them was the same, which is to say there was no answer. Silence is the cheapest institutional choice there is. Once a person has been branded, answering him becomes a reputational risk for whoever answers, and so no one does, and because no single person ever refused, no single person ever has to own the refusal.
On February 10, 2026 the Greenfield Recorder published my op-ed, "Time to modernize, democratize, Bridge of Flowers governance." It laid out the structural problem in plain terms: a public landmark owned by the Fire District, governed for nearly a century by a subcommittee of a private membership club, with no public elections, no term limits, no open meetings, and no formal way for the public to be heard. It proposed a professional steward accountable to the Fire District, published minutes, term limits, and real pathways for participation. It also offered something concrete and fundable: the Ghost Frame Trolley Trellis, an exact-scale steel trellis of the historic trolley that once crossed the bridge, planted with vines, grant-fundable and low-maintenance. Not one person responded. Not the committee, not the Fire District, not a single member of any of the bodies now gathered in the Alliance.
The same silence holds at the state level. In June 2026 I posted a public petition asking the Attorney General, the POST Commission, the Northwestern District Attorney's Office, and both Select Boards for an independent review of how the police handled complaints involving me. It is built on report numbers, docket numbers, a federal ruling, and a public records request the department has never fulfilled, and it separates what is documented from what is my own account. On August 10, 2026 I hand-delivered formal claims to both towns and took a date-stamped receipt from each clerk. Beyond those stamps, not one of these bodies has responded to either the petition or the claims, or so much as acknowledged them.
Then there is the trolley gate. I built and installed it on the bridge in 2010, and it stood there for a decade. During the $3.2 million renovation the committee and its partners had a detailed plan for the plants. They had no plan for the gate. It was removed, replaced with stock railing, and ended up at a scrapyard, where a friend of mine found it and, with help, brought it home to me in September 2026. When I posted about its return, a committee member responded publicly that they had tried to find it and thought it was in someone's barn, and then suggested that, because of my "rancor," it might be better off at the Trolley Museum than back on the bridge. I have said myself that the Trolley Museum may well be a good home for it, and that the choice is not mine alone. The destination was never the problem. The problem is the reasoning: a public artwork lost on a public renovation, and the response is to attribute its fate to the artist's temperament, as though six years of silence and a gate sent to scrap leave a man no reason to be angry.
The Record Catches Up
For years the courts, when they looked at the evidence, saw what the village would not. In June 2023 a clerk-magistrate found no probable cause on a criminal harassment complaint against me that had been built without anyone ever interviewing me. On December 15, 2025 a petition for a harassment prevention order against me was denied after a judge reviewed the video evidence. None of that made the newspaper.
On November 30, 2025, outside Floodwater Brewing on State Street, I was assaulted on a public sidewalk, and my phone, which was recording, was taken and thrown into the Deerfield River. The Commonwealth charged two people. On July 28, 2026, in Greenfield District Court before Judge William Mazanec, the Northwestern District Attorney's office recorded the outcome, and I will state it exactly as the Victim/Witness letters state it. In Commonwealth v. Catherine Hennessey, docket 2641CR0158, the defendant submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on assault and battery; the charge was continued without a finding for six months, on conditions to stay fifty yards away from me and have no contact with me. A second charge, malicious destruction of property under $1,200, was continued generally under Chapter 276, Section 87, on a not-guilty plea, with restitution of $429.99, the price of the phone. In Commonwealth v. Henry W. Batteau, docket 2641CR0159, the defendant likewise submitted to facts sufficient on assault and battery, with the same six-month continuance, stay-away, and no-contact conditions. On August 7, 2026 the court issued me a check for the $429.99.
A continuance without a finding is not a conviction, and I will not pretend it is. But an admission that the Commonwealth's evidence is sufficient to warrant a guilty finding is the opposite of the story this village told itself about me for five years. The people whose account the town had accepted without question stood in a courtroom and conceded the facts of assaulting me. And after July 28, nothing changed in the village's institutions. There was no correction from the newspaper, no word from the committee, no outreach from any of the civic bodies that had gone silent in 2020. The silence had never depended on the facts, so the facts arriving did not end it.
The Ledger That Runs One Direction
The first thing the Alliance's donations are said to fund is events, and on events I can speak as a merchant who worked through dozens of them. Shelburne Falls is a seasonal town. A retailer here does not earn evenly across the year; the year turns on a short list of good weekends, and a day lost in August is not made up in November because there is no November to make it up in. Those few paying days are a merchant's scarcest asset. Call it calendar capital. Every street closure, every festival, every road race spends some of it, and the people who decide how it gets spent are almost never the people who pay the rent.
I learned what that looks like from the inside. One year PorchFest set a band about fifty feet from my office door inside the Mill, an enclosed building full of working tenants, and ran two loud acts back to back. The first floor cleared out for two hours. The merchants stood in the hallway looking at each other, and outside on the deck a six-piece band played to three people. This year's PorchFest schedule ran roughly seventy acts across more than forty porches, with fifteen of them booked into the same one o'clock hour. That is a format built for festivals ten times our size, laid over a village turnout, and it guarantees that most performers play to nearly empty lawns while the shops lose the day. The organizers' own fundraising page asks residents to house and feed performers who come from as far as Boston, which tells you how local the local celebration is.
Moonlight Magic was the one event I genuinely supported, because one special night is an occasion people plan around. It still cost me money: a hundred dollars of heating oil out a door the crowd never closed, a full day of my time, and a register that barely moved. Worse, outside vendors from out of town are set up in front of existing storefronts, taking sales on the best night of the year from the businesses behind them, and when those merchants complain they get the treatment I got: this is our thing, and you are being negative. The Bridge of Flowers Classic road race has closed the village center for forty-four years, and its organizers say it helps everybody, that day and every day after, without ever producing a number to show it. On race day in August 2024, when the closure boxed me onto my own block and I walked to the organizers' tent to object in person, the police chief threatened me with arrest for disorderly conduct three times without naming any element of the statute, while a sergeant positioned himself to block my camera from a man shouting threats at me, then shook that man's hand. It is all on my video. That is what happens in this village to a merchant who asks the people closing the streets to account for the cost.
There is a plain economic name for what these events do: leakage. Money spent at a locally owned shop stays and recirculates through local rent, local wages, and the next purchase down the street. Money spent at an out-of-town vendor's table leaves the same night. On an event day the pool of visitor spending is roughly fixed, so a dollar that goes to a pop-up from elsewhere is a dollar a year-round shop did not get. And there is a rule every merchant here learns: if you do not sell food or drink, events mostly fill your store with browsers who will not buy, the people the old-timers call be-backs, as in "I'll be back for it." They never are.
Now look at who the Alliance put in charge of events. Its events working group includes the founder of PorchFest and the treasurer of the organization behind Moonlight Magic, and its donation campaign names both events as what the money supports. PorchFest runs a five-tier sponsorship program that can tell a sponsor to the dollar what their money buys. The Alliance keeps a public, interactive list of who has donated. Neither has ever produced an accounting of what any of it costs or gains the businesses whose days are being spent. The ledger exists, it is careful and tiered and deadline-driven, and it only ever runs one direction.
The Precedent
The Alliance is not the village's first attempt at this. For more than two decades the Shelburne Falls Area Business Association, a 501(c)(6) business league, held the same role: promote the village, run events, support the businesses. In 2008 it hired a paid executive director. I ran my shop on State Street through most of the years that followed, and I can say plainly what that looked like from my side of the counter. The first executive director came into my shop exactly once, to tell me I owed a fee to join, and I told her I wasn't paying for something I had never signed up for. I never saw her again. Her successor never came in at all. In those same years the association decided that more events meant more vitality and ran six art walks in a single year, which thinned the crowds, watered down Moonlight Magic, and drew complaints from me and from other merchants. I never saw a tangible thing it achieved for my end of the street, and neither did the merchants I talked to.
Its own tax filings tell the rest. For a business league, program service revenue is largely dues and event income, the money the businesses themselves pay in because they think the organization is worth it.
In 2017 executive compensation of $46,961 was 41 percent of the association's total expenses, at the same time the money members paid in was collapsing and the organization leaned on donations to make up the difference. By the end of 2019 it reported $46,303 in liabilities against $4,521 in assets. It has since dropped off the IRS list of tax-exempt organizations. The members voted with their wallets long before the association faded, and I have never seen a public accounting of why. Now a new organization asks residents and visitors for the recurring baseline funding the old one could not sustain from the businesses it served. The fair question is what is structurally different this time, and who answers for it if it goes the same way.
Who Steers
Nobody in Shelburne Falls voted for the Alliance. Its own March 2025 notice says an "Ad Hoc Steering Formation Team" chose the committee through an application and nomination questionnaire with an April 5 deadline. That is not a crime, and the people on it may be entirely sincere. But it means a self-selected group now describes itself as setting priorities for the village's development, and its website publishes no bylaws, no meeting schedule, no minutes, no conflict-of-interest policy, no process for rotating or removing members, and no explanation of how community input becomes a decision. It is the same structure I criticized in the Bridge of Flowers Committee, a private group exercising influence over something public, scaled up from one bridge to the whole village's image and economy.
The Alliance's own posts show where it came from. In early 2025 the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, with the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce and the Franklin County CDC, presented a Rural Downtown District Management Study by Boston Consulting Group covering Shelburne Falls, Turners Falls, and Northfield. It concluded that separate staff for each village would be unsustainable, funded a one-year shared Regional Coordinator instead, and recommended that Shelburne Falls form a working group to collaborate with that coordinator and help set priorities. The Alliance's own summary of the Shelburne Falls meeting records that some residents and business owners strongly felt local business support should come before tourism. What emerged was a steering committee recruited through a Google Form with a Gmail contact address, which now describes its role as setting priorities for the village's development, and whose fundraising campaign leads with events and visitor experience. The fundraising effort that preceded it, the Shelburne Falls Initiative, was led by Whit Sanford, who is listed as secretary of the old business association in its final filed tax returns. A working group meant to help one shared coordinator has become a self-appointed governing voice for the village, with a monthly subscription attached, and a direct line of continuity to the organization that collapsed.
The word "development" deserves a hard look. Shelburne Falls is a built-out historic village with almost no developable land. There are no subdivisions to plan and no new roads to lay. In a place like this, development means control over the few things that do change: what kinds of businesses get courted and promoted to fill empty storefronts (the owners decide who rents, not any committee, but whoever markets the village and brokers its buildings shapes who comes looking), what happens to public parcels like 49 Mechanic Street, which was sold to a private party this month, what goes into public spaces, where grant money from programs like the Rural Downtown Revitalization pilot gets aimed. In other words, development here mostly means commercial real estate turnover. The Alliance's co-chairs are a commercial and residential realtor who also co-owns a State Street business, and a senior wealth advisor; a second realtor sits on the working group that manages the village's digital identity. I make no claim about anyone's motives. I only note that the people setting development priorities in a village where development means property turnover include people who earn their living from that turnover.
The realtor co-chair, Ted Hanna, is also a certified police officer. The state POST Commission's August 2025 list of certified officers shows Theodore A. Hanna as certified with the Shelburne Police Department, certification running through September 1, 2028, and a Theodore Hanna appears on the Buckland Police Department roster in that town's 2019 annual report, before Buckland's department merged into Shelburne's on July 1, 2023. The merged department is the one at the center of the claims I formally presented to both towns in August, and the subject of my public petition asking the Attorney General and the POST Commission for an independent review of how it handled complaints involving me. I do not claim he handled any complaint about me. The point is disclosure. A private group that asks the public for money to steer the village's future is co-chaired by an officer certified with the department whose conduct toward me is now the subject of a formal claim, and the Alliance's website, which lists his real estate and coworking roles, says nothing about it.
Then there is the overlap that matters most to me. The Alliance's roster lists Virginia Ray as a board member of the Bridge of Flowers Committee and a journalist. She sits on the Alliance's steering committee and on the working group that promotes the region and manages its digital identity through ShelburneFalls.com. Whatever she knows privately about the committee's history with one of its longest-serving artist contributors, she holds a seat on the board of the committee that held its meetings about me without me, lost my gate to scrap, never answered my emails, and never answered my op-ed. Now she helps shape how the whole village presents itself to the world, through a body with the same structural gaps. Nobody has to accept my account of 2020 to see the problem. The roster is public, the op-ed is public, and the silence is a matter of record. Another member of the Alliance's steering committee, Chad Flasinski, appears in the June 6, 2020 Facebook thread where the campaign against me began. While commenters were cataloging my public works so they could be petitioned for removal, and asking which business was mine so they could boycott it, he added to the list: work I had done for museums, the sculpture at the Culinary Institute of America, and the bench I made for Mo's Fudge Factor in town. His follow-up was "yup... tons of stuff." He did not ask whether what was being said about me was true, and in the six years since, he has never asked me.
Two more things are worth saying plainly. The website the Alliance runs is ShelburneFalls.com, a domain that reads to any visitor like an official village portal, but the Alliance is a private group, not the government of either town. The domain was registered in September 1996, the same autumn the old business association received its tax exemption, and it sat dormant for about four years before a 2024 relaunch. That relaunch grew out of a task force convened in 2022 by the Franklin Regional Council of Governments and was paid for with two grants awarded to the Franklin County Community Development Corporation, now the Alliance's fiscal sponsor. The new site was built by West County Arts and Culture with Locable and billed as a hub for all ten West County towns; West County Arts and Culture's treasurer, listed with Moonlight Magic, now sits on the Alliance's events working group. The Greenfield Recorder described it at the time as the village's website, and its coordinator, now the Cultural District Manager on the Alliance's steering committee, said the goal was a platform where everyone could come together and have a part. Today the domain's ownership is hidden behind a privacy service. It is also the same address the old business association used. In that June 2020 thread, commenters posted info@shelburnefalls.com and the association's phone number so people could call it about me; as far as the thread shows, the association, to its credit, did not act on it. And because the campaign is pitched to everyone who loves the postcard version of Shelburne Falls, a good share of those two hundred donors may well live somewhere else. If so, people from away will be funding a self-appointed group that steers the village, while the residents who live with the results have no vote and no window into the decisions. A monthly subscription makes that worse, not better. Recurring giving is the standard nonprofit playbook because it runs on inertia: people sign up once and forget to cancel. A one-time gift has to be re-earned every year by showing results. A subscription just keeps running.
Work Already Done
Read the Alliance's own descriptions and you would think the village was short of ideas. Its beautification working group exists to "maintain and elevate the village's signature beauty through coordinated flowers, lighting, and public-space enhancements." Its campaign lists grant development among the things your monthly donation powers. Yet nowhere does it name a single grant it intends to pursue or a single project that money would build. I have two, both written up in detail, both fundable, both sitting in the village with no one willing to pick up the phone.
The first is the Ghost Frame Trolley Trellis I proposed in the Recorder in February: an exact-scale steel trellis of the historic trolley that once crossed the Bridge of Flowers, placed partway across the span for shade and visual effect, planted with morning glories for quick cover and then perennial vines. It puts the bridge's transportation history back on the bridge without moving a single dahlia, it is low-maintenance, and it fits the arts and cultural heritage programs that fund exactly this kind of work. The second is the daylighting of Mechanic Street Brook, the buried stream that once ran from the hills above the village through the parcel at 49 Mechanic Street to the Deerfield below the falls. The proposal replaces a stagnant mosquito ditch with moving water, builds a greenway and an outdoor classroom five minutes' walk from the elementary school, adapts the historic barn as a watershed learning center, and produces the first accurate stormwater map of that corridor, which the town currently lacks. Its funding path runs through the state's Division of Ecological Restoration, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, EPA Section 319, the Community Preservation Act, and the NEA's Our Town program. I sent that proposal out by email and posted it publicly. On October 7, 2026 the parcel was sold to a private party anyway, and not one of the bodies that claim to steer the village's development said a word. Both projects are nodes in a larger reparative landscape framework I call Pocumtuck State of Mind, and both are exactly the public-space enhancement and grant development the Alliance says it exists to do.
Those two are not the whole of it. Nobody on the Alliance's published roster lists a credential in economic development, planning, or design, and I will be honest that I hold no economic development degree either. What I do hold is a Cornell degree in floriculture and ornamental horticulture, graduate study in landscape architecture at UMass Amherst in the METLAND tradition of Julius Fábos and Jack Ahern, thirty-five years of permanent public sculpture, and decades of landscape design and build. And on my own time, unpaid and without anyone asking, I have produced and published at johnsendelbach.com a written history of Shelburne Falls, a collection of the village's historic imagery and maps, a 2026 edition of the village's design guidelines, the Mechanic Street Brook daylighting and greenway proposal, the Pocumtuck State of Mind framework, a gateway sculpture proposal for Greenfield, and a field guide to reparative landscape design. The Pocumtuck State of Mind framework even contains a full economic development chapter: a plan for an aging, thinning region to hold onto its young people and restore its services by turning the valley's heritage into a routed, year-round visitor economy, bringing west the interpreted-trail model Boston built around the Freedom Trail, zoning for commerce around the heritage sites, and routing the revenue first to the descendant communities whose history it tells and then to the towns. It is, in plain terms, a development proposal: concrete opportunities for this village, for the towns around it, and for western Massachusetts as a whole, with a funding pathway attached to every piece. It is the biggest piece of pro bono work I have ever done, and it has been public for a year. In that year, not one of the bodies that now claim the job of setting this village's development priorities has responded to it. That is a body of concrete, buildable, fundable work for this village, not a list of things a committee hopes to do. It was made, all of it, by the person this community did its best to push off its main street.
That is the part I cannot get past. The village's civic machinery is asking the public to pay for work it has been handed, fully designed, by someone who has already put permanent work in the ground on its most visited landmark, and it will not answer him. Meanwhile it says donations will help pay for the Visit Shelburne Falls social media accounts. Running a Facebook page is a few minutes a day. If that is costing real money, donors deserve to know who is being paid to do it. A brand, it turns out, can outweigh a record that is literally set in stone.
What Accountability Would Look Like
I am not asking anyone to cancel anything, and I am not against people who love this village organizing to help it. I am asking the Alliance to meet the same standard I asked of the Bridge of Flowers Committee in February, the standard any body that wants a public mandate should meet before it asks the public for recurring money. Publish bylaws, a meeting schedule, and minutes. Publish a conflict-of-interest policy and say how members are chosen, rotated, and removed. Publish a budget showing what share of donations goes to the fiscal sponsor's fee, the website platform, any coordinator or staff costs, and the events themselves, and then publish an annual report of what the money actually did. Before collecting a single recurring donation for the events, commission a neutral merchant impact survey of the downtown businesses whose days those events spend, run by the fiscal sponsor or another third party, with the results made public. It would not be complicated: for each event day, each business reports its sales against a comparable ordinary Saturday that season, its foot traffic, whether it received advance notice, and whether it would want a say in scheduling. If the organizers are confident the events help everyone, it costs them little and proves their case. If they decline, they will have told the public they would rather not know.
Answer the people who have already offered the village real work. The Ghost Frame Trolley Trellis is still on the table, fully designed and fundable, the Mechanic Street Brook proposal still shows what a grant-funded greenway could do for this village, and the Alliance's own website invites anyone with an idea to let it know. I am letting it know. Whether it answers will say more about what the Alliance is than anything on its donation page. I have already had one answer. On the night of October 15, 2026, I posted these same questions, with a link to this essay, as a comment under the Alliance's "10 Great Reasons" video on the Visit Shelburne Falls Facebook page. By early the next morning the comment had been removed, without explanation, by an organization that lists community outreach and gathering input among the things it does.
And there is a simpler alternative that no one has to organize. The campaign's own pitch is that the money boosts the village economy. Two hundred people spending ten dollars a month directly in the shops on Bridge Street and State Street would put all $24,000 straight into merchants' registers, with no fiscal sponsor fee, no platform subscription, no undisclosed staff costs, and no committee deciding whose day gets spent. So if you love Shelburne Falls the way the campaign says you do, skip the subscription. Come into town on an ordinary Saturday, walk past the places with the lit windows, and spend twenty dollars at a shop. It is the most direct form of economic development there is, and it is exactly what I spent nine years on State Street trying to earn, one customer at a time.
The ledger in this village has run one direction for a long time: careful accounts for the people who fund the events, and silence for the people who pay for them. I kept my window lit through the worst of it. The work I put in the ground is still there. The record is still there. What the Alliance does with it is now up to the Alliance.
Sources
- Shelburne Falls Alliance, About page and "10 Great Reasons" donation campaign: ShelburneFalls.com and shelburnefalls.com/donate
- Shelburne Falls Area Business Association, Form 990 and 990-EZ filings 2011–2020, EIN 04-3322906: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer
- Town of Buckland, 2019 Annual Report, Buckland Police Department roster
- Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission, officers by last name, August 5, 2025, p. 321, Theodore A. Hanna, Shelburne Police Department (https://mapostcommission.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/65-OFFICERS-BY-LAST-NAME-080525.pdf)
- John F. Sendelbach, "Time to modernize, democratize, Bridge of Flowers governance," Greenfield Recorder, February 10, 2026
- John F. Sendelbach, Petition: Independent Investigation of the Shelburne Police Department (MA), Change.org, created June 24, 2026
- Northwestern District Attorney's Office, Victim/Witness disposition letters of July 30, 2026, Commonwealth v. Hennessey (2641CR0158) and Commonwealth v. Batteau (2641CR0159)
- John F. Sendelbach, Mechanic Street Brook Daylighting & Village Greenway, Pocumtuck State of Mind, and It's Not Your Time at johnsendelbach.com