Meet Vineeta Kumar, candidate for Select Board

LexObserver sat down with Vineeta Kumar, a candidate for Select Board, to learn why she’s running and how she feels about various town issues. 

Originally from India, Kumar moved her family to Lexington from California for a work opportunity. She and her husband chose to buy a house in Lexington so her son could go to its public schools. 

Kumar is a chair of the Town Meeting Members Association and has represented Precincts 3 and 9 in Town Meeting (due to redistricting). She’s also been a member of the LPS Parent Teacher Organization and became its president during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kumar is a management consultant for companies that are mainly in the banking and capital markets sector. She decided to take a break from her professional career to “rebalance her life” and connect with her community, which led her to run for Select Board. 

“I wanted to take the conversations I was having in my living room to where it matters,” said Kumar.

She wants to join the Board so she can apply her professional skills to planning the town’s capital expenditure projects, help diversify Lexington by focusing on affordability, and bring the town’s sustainability efforts to the next level. 

Younger generations can’t afford to live here and older generations can’t afford to age-in-place, Kumar said. She imagines that bringing more commercial revenue to town could take the burden of increasingly unaffordable taxes off residents. 

Bringing new businesses to Lexington would “bring a huge boost to commercial revenue” and more jobs for people who will move to the incoming MBTA Communities Act housing, Kumar said. 

“When you build more diverse housing, it brings more business to the community,” Kumar said. “It’s going to bring a lot of activity to our town that is going to be profitable for our small businesses and create more vibrancy — you can’t create vibrancy without people.”

She thinks there should be more multifamily housing in town to mitigate the state’s housing crisis, but not too much. In 2023, Lexington committed to bringing multifamily housing to over 200 acres of land in town — that’s four times as much as the state’s minimum of 50 acres for Lexington. 

Kumar supports reducing the town’s zoning bylaw so it can bring multifamily housing to Lexington at a manageable pace. She said implementing setbacks on land designated for multifamily housing is one way the town could amend its bylaw. 

“The more important thing is, what’s the combination that helps us pace it? It could be 50 acres…or it could be 100 acres but with other parameters like setbacks,” she said. “It’s not just the number of acres but it could be a combination of things.”

Many residents worry that bringing more housing to town could boost high school enrollment, rendering Bloom, the design for the new high school, too small before it’s even built. Kumar thinks that worry is premature.  

“There is obviously going to be impact on school enrollment…I think it’s a fair question to ask, but I don’t think it’s a reason to panic,” she said. “I’d like to tell our residents they should not be panicking, we’re not out of control.”  

She believes Lexington is “long overdue” for a new high school and supports the town in building Bloom. If elected, Kumar said she wants to be “the forensics for cost” on the high school building project. 

“I will be a strong advocate for keeping this cost as low as possible,” she said. “I want to be that voice that is going to say, well, why do we need this?”

Because Kumar is so aware of the cost of building the new high school, she is against a phased plan because the price of a second phase is difficult to predict. 

“At this point, I feel that even if there was a plan that was infallible in every possible way, it would still put us back in the queue with the [Massachusetts School Building Authority] and the loss of that time is not a good trade-off for our children,” she said, referencing how Lexington waited for several years for its need for a new high school to be accepted by the MSBA, the state program helping fund the school building project.  

She would love for the community “to really align and get excited about [Bloom] and move forward.”

Boosting sustainability efforts is another issue Kumar would like to focus on if elected. 

She thinks Lexington’s single-stream recycling is ineffective and separated recycling could be a better option for the town. She would also like to implement Extended Producer Responsibility which holds businesses accountable for the types of packing materials they use and manufacturing they practice. 

“I think we just need to get comfortable with not being comfortable,” she said. “Convenience is not everything.”

Ultimately, she hopes to increase communication and education about sustainable living. She noted that composting, or even recycling, can be daunting for people who have never prioritized sustainable living. But as the cost of disposing garbage increases due to landfills reaching their maximums, Kumar believes now is the time to commit to greener practices and learn it’s not as difficult as it seems. 

That’s often easier said than done. But Kumar said the lawn signs she uses to promote her candidacy are made of polycoated cardboard, making them recyclable. 

“As a leader I want to set an example,” she said. “I’m not just telling everybody to do it, I want to do it.”

In a time where there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the federal government, she believes Lexington could really benefit from all of its “immensely talented people” working together. 

“In our town, the head and heart are in the right place,” she said.