Tell us a little about yourself. You can include your personal background, family, outside interests that are important to who you are as a person and a candidate.
I was born and grew up in Paris to parents who fled Rumania in 1947 with two suitcases and $20. I attended public schools, including Paris’s equivalent of the Bronx High School of Science, and École Polytechnique, France’s equivalent of MIT, and became a technical civil servant, working in France’s Ministry of Industry on energy conservation.
I emigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1982 to join a strategy consulting firm specializing in energy, then worked at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) as a strategy consultant before starting my own practice, assisting technology-based and industrial firms with business development and market research.
In 1999, my wife, journalist and author Helen Epstein, and our two sons moved to Lexington for the schools, where they received a superb education: one was active on the LHS science and debate teams, the other in LHS’s music program.
I joined the Lexington Tree Committee in 1999 and co-wrote what was then the first Tree by-law in Massachusetts. I represented Precinct 3 in Town Meeting from 2000–2015, focusing on finding ways to operate more efficiently to save taxpayer money.
Why are you running for Town Meeting?
I am running for Town Meeting to be 1 of the 2/3 of Town Meeting members who must vote YES at the March 17 Special Town Meeting to fix the disaster of 228 acres zoned for MBTA developments.
Our Town leaders do no long-range financial planning of our budgets 5–15 years out using scenario analysis methods. Not doing this may destroy our schools and the character of our Town, without anyone even noticing. I developed such analyses (available here) for the Town to finally realize that zoning 228 acres for MBTA developments is financially unsustainable, as much as we all want more housing in Town.
Similarly, few people realize that Bloom, designed for FEWER students than we already have at LHS before any MBTA dwelling is occupied, yet is supposed to serve us for 70 years, is as senseless as rezoning 228 acres was in April 2023 (when I was tuned out of Town affairs). People don’t realize this because none of the School Building Committee, the School Committee, the Select Board and the Appropriation Committee do any long-range (5–15 years out) scenario planning and thinking.
If Bloom is not abandoned very soon, we will be in deep trouble in 5–6 years. There is a better plan for our new High School, a staged design which will address overcrowding at LHS sooner than Bloom, saves the fields and may be cheaper than Bloom, but the SBC has stubbornly ignored it: it is outlined at patrick4lex.org.
How has your past experience — whether in your professional life, elected office, or as a community leader — prepared you for a role in Town Meeting?
I joined the Lexington Tree Committee when I noticed that tear-downs in our Woodhaven came with the indiscriminate cutting of old but healthy trees. I joined Town Meeting in 2000 to get the Tree by-law passed and served as a Precinct 3 Town Meeting member for the following 15 years.
I also served on the Town’s Ad-Hoc Electric Utility Committee for many years, periodically inventorying double poles across our 160 miles of streets. Double poles are illegal after 90 days, yet Verizon and Eversource (each owns 50% of each pole in Lexington) keep them in place for years.
I also promoted the establishment of a Lexington Municipal Electric Utility, such as Concord has, to replace the under-performing and expensive Eversource. This effort has so far been squashed by the inability of our State legislators to successfully fight Eversource’s lobbying on Beacon Hill.
Puzzled by why our SBC proposes to build a new High School sized for fewer students than we now have at LHS, given that High School enrollments will evidently increase as a result of dense new housing in districts zoned for MBTA developments, I analyzed the financial impacts of these developments on our future Town budgets. I found that Town government had done no such analysis before the Town rezoned 228 acres, and unless Town Meeting approves Article 2 by a 2/3 vote on March 17, MBTA developments will have dramatic impacts, requiring huge tax increases and deep service cuts that will compromise the quality of our schools.
What is the most important issue in this election to you personally, and what ideas do you have about how to address this issue?
(1) that 2/3 of Town Meeting vote YES on Article 2 on March 17 to fix the disaster that 228 acres zoned for MBTA developments represents for Lexington’s schools, and finances more generally (but 80% of our budgets are the schools).
(2) that Town government do systematic long-range financial planning of our future budgets BEFORE any major decision, land use, schools or municipal, is taken. This was not done for the 228 acres, nor now for Bloom.
(3) that the SBC abandon the inadequate, too small, 2/3 of $1 billion Bloom design and finally design and professionally cost-estimate a flexible staged project with no design enrollment defined upfront, since nobody can know today how many High School students we will have in a mere five years, whom we will have to educate, therefore we will need appropriate space for. Bloom is simply too small, being designed for 2,395 students when we now have 2,405, yet slated to last for 70 years.
(4) to implement a Residential Exemption by a simple vote of the Select Board, to help keep our seniors in Town by reducing taxes on small houses.
(5) to significantly strengthen our Tree by-law so no majestic tree is ever cut for capricious reasons.
By sharing data- and fact-based analyses that everyone can check the assumptions of, the reasoning for, and the formulas used to derive the results of the analyses from the various inputs used.
The reflexive reaction to any new idea or analysis by some long-time Town Meeting members and their friends is to attack the person who offers the new idea or analysis — in short, the messenger.
This is counter-productive for at least 2 reasons:
(a) in my case—and I have very often been the “attacked” messenger because I happen to naturally often think of new ideas—it violates Lexington’s desire and loudly asserted philosophy to respect differences; I happen to be neuro-divergent, specifically an autistic “nerd” (my shorthand for being far more interested in, and good at, numbers and hard facts than in casual conversations), so people do not realize that attacking the messenger in my case is exactly like behaving in a racist way with a person of color, or in an antisemitic way towards a Jew (which I happen to also be), and
(b) it is very inefficient because the message is ignored—as famously happened at Town Meeting in 2004 when I and a handful of other Town Meeting members asserted that Avalon telling us their future 387 units off Concord Ave would produce just 60 kids in our schools was not credible; all Town leaders believed the 60 number, and basically made fun of, and ignored the messengers; the actual number of kids from Avalon is 212 +/- a few each year, so all Town leaders should have listened to the message in 2004 rather than vilify the messengers: they were wrong by a factor of 3.5 (212 = 3.5 x 60).