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.
My husband and I moved to Lexington five years ago to be near our family, which includes two grandchildren in Lexington Public Schools. Additionally, we spend time with family, including two more grandchildren, in Shrewsbury. My husband’s Parkinson’s Disease has led to my involvement with the Michael J Fox Foundation and the American Parkinson’s Association.
Since retiring from my psychotherapy practice, I have devoted much of my time to fighting climate change. Currently, I serve as chair of Brookhaven Residents’ Climate Change Committee (160+ members) and am a member of the LexCAN Advocacy Committee, Mass Power Forward, and Elder Climate Action.
Additionally, I chair one of the lecture committees at Brookhaven, and serve on the editorial board of our literary magazine The Voice. A group of us at Brookhaven are organizing immigrants—new families and from generations ago—to march in the Lex250 parade.
Outside of Brookhaven, I serve on the Noise Advisory Committee and enjoy quietly reading selections for the Cary Library’s Social Justice Book Club. As a diversion, I also enjoy murder mysteries, both novels and British TV series.
Why are you running for Town Meeting?
Lexington is facing difficult and contentious issues–zoning/construction, a new high school, and sustainability. These are issues of great importance to me, and I want to be able to weigh in on their outcome in Town Meeting. I support developing affordable housing to enable young families and Town employees to live in Lexington, but I recognize that the speed at which housing is being developed currently is problematic and a solution must be found. A new high school is essential to alleviate overcrowding and to enable a 21st Century education. I want to vote in favor of the Bloom design which meets those needs and is the least expensive alternative developed through the design process. Sustainability is pervasive, touching many other warrant articles and requires strong support in Town Meeting.
In some ways, Brookhaven is a world unto itself. One of the tasks I assumed when first elected to TM is providing summaries of the issues and the votes to the Brookhaven community, many of whom moved from outside of Lexington, to keep them informed and involved in our greater community.
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?
My commitment to civic engagement began decades ago in Belmont. I worked on multiple local campaigns for candidates and for debt exclusions. As a candidate for Town Meeting, serving several terms, I came to know my precinct well and was able to create consensus on difficult issues, particularly around the building of affordable housing in our precinct. As a candidate for the Belmont Housing Authority, I pledged to reform the Board of Trustees to be more responsive to the needs of the authority’s residents. Elected and serving as chair for multiple terms, I was able fulfill that promise and to bring new candidates onto the board who shared my values. My commitment to my values has served me well in the past, and I shall bring them to the issues before Town Meeting.
What is the most important issue in this election to you personally, and what ideas do you have about how to address this issue?
Most immediately, the high school and the zoning issues will be addressed. Both of these are of great importance to me. The high school project is well underway with a good design in place. Town Meeting approving this plan seems fairly sure. My commitment to quality public education is shared by the vast majority of Town Meeting members. More contentious is the MBTA overlay zoning. While initially supported by a large majority of Town Meeting members when the rezoning vote took place, none of us dreamed that so much construction resulting in so many new units of housing could happen so quickly. While I remain committed to creating housing projects large enough to trigger the requirement for affordable housing, we must find a way to slow the process but not eliminate it while remaining within the state mandate. Strong feelings exist on both sides. I believe that a vigorous debate in Town Meeting will yield a plan that I can support.
One of my hardest tasks was serving on the building committee for an outdoor athletic facility at Belmont High School. With many constituencies in play, consensus was not easily achieved. I became involved in a grassroots effort to build a new outdoor track to replace a crumbling asphalt track that was long past retirement. Once a building committee was appointed by the Select Board, our scope moved well beyond a track to a new football/soccer/lacrosse field and a new baseball field as other interest groups weighed in. The ice hockey group wanted to be included with plans for a new rink. The cost of the project sky-rocketed for the debt exclusion. Some of the Belmont community wanted lights for night games. Others wanted less light pollution in town. The process of negotiating all of these issues and collaborating on a building design and a successful debt exclusion was exhausting but taught me a lot about the process of consensus building.