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 wife and I have lived in Precinct 2 since 2011. We enjoy gardening and taking advantage of the easy access to the Minuteman Bikeway. We completed the ACROSS Lexington Challenge during the pandemic. Before moving to Lexington, I was an elected member of the Stow Housing Authority.
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?
As an Appropriation Committee Member since 2022, I have participated in Financial Summits, written a portion of the committee’s report to Town Meeting, and attended Town Meetings.
In 2024, I had the privilege of working with a great group of citizen volunteers as a Lowell Street Affordable Housing RFP Evaluation Team Member and as the Appropriations Committee Liaison to Town Manger Search Screening Committee.
Also, I am a licensed professional civil engineer who develops capital improvement plans, designs and permits infrastructure projects and conducts water and sewer rate studies for municipal clients.
What is the most important issue in this election to you personally, and what ideas do you have about how to address this issue?
Housing is a key issue for me. My three housing goals are to increase the supply of workforce housing, to better incorporate affordable housing into our community and to enforce the Fair Housing Act so that all protected classes, especially families with children and veterans, have equal access to market rate and subsidized housing.
My empathy for housing comes from growing up as the dependent child of a career Army officer. My parents and my older brother lived in graduate student housing, apartment buildings and single family housing on military installations in Europe and U.S. My parents also rented and purchased houses.
I am looking forward to working with Town staff and our elected officials to develop and support a Middlesex County agency that participates in the Fair Housing Assistance Program and with working with advocates and Housing Partnership Board to address housing for persons with low or moderate income, housing for older persons, and workforce housing.
One of the joys of volunteering in Lexington is that I’ve had the opportunity to work with passionate individuals who have strong opinions and are active listeners. And as an engineering consultant to several New England communities, I’ve had the joy of working with town and city staff with similar traits. Recently, a 40B developer disagreed with the construction requirements and fees recommended by my engineering firm. Working with my client and the municipalities legal counsel, we negotiated a design solution that met the current and future requirements of the municipality and the developer and we restructured the fees so that developer agreed with the original total amount requested.
I credit part of the success of this negotiation to my experience as a Veterans Mediation Trainer.
Since playing Santa Claus for special needs children when I was in high school, I have received more than I’ve given while participating and building community. While at Princeton University studying civil engineering, I was a residential advisor and sexual harassment and rape peer educator. After serving five years active duty with the U.S. Air Force, I served on the Board of Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries (CMM), Greater Boston’s oldest interfaith social justice network. And after serving on the Lexington Sidewalk Committee, I joined the Lexington Human Rights Committee. As LHRC chair, I worked with the Lexington Interfaith Clergy Association to bring Quabbin Mediation’s Training Active Bystanders (TAB) to Lexington and to train high schoolers and adults to be TAB trainers. In 2023, I initiated the Training Active Bystanders in Mandarin Course and worked with Quabbin Mediation staff and volunteers from CAAL and CALex to develop the course. A grant from the Community Endowment of Lexington, wonderful community building resource, supported this initiative.