Doug Lucente’s volunteer work in Lexington started when he was 8 years old, helping his father, John Lucente, at the town carnival.
“My dad was involved with that from the 1960s and I just really enjoyed giving back,” he told the Observer during an interview about his campaign for Select Board this year.
Lucente was born and raised in town, the youngest of nine children. His father was an avid volunteer — a member of the Lexington Lions Club since 1968 and a recipient of the White Tricorne Hat Award in 2014.
For Lucente, helping his dad at the carnival sparked a lifetime of volunteering in Lexington.
When he turned 14, he got involved with the Lexington Youth Commission, a committee made up of about 30 students who do community service alongside adults and board liaisons who oversee them.
“I’ve actually been involved with the Lexington Youth Commission since then, for about 36 years or so,” he said. “That was my first foray into town government.”
After graduating from Lexington High School, Lucente went to American University in Washington, D.C. While there, he interned at the White House under former President Bill Clinton’s administration, then got a job at the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, and stayed on for about 3.5 years.
“College wasn’t what I would call fun because I worked full-time,” he said. “It prepared me very well, though, for Select Board, because that’s essentially full-time and I have a full-time job.”
After graduating, Lucente moved home to Massachusetts, where he started his business, PROMEDICAL, a healthcare revenue cycle management company, which essentially helps hospitals get paid. At the same time, he started taking night classes at Suffolk Law School to get a law degree. He graduated from Suffolk in 2000 and is currently the CEO of PROMEDICAL.
He also dove back into volunteering in Lexington during that time.
Lucente first ran for Town Meeting in 1997 when he was 22. He said it was a competitive race — 13 people were running for seven seats in his precinct. He’s involved with the Lexington Lions Club, of which he has been the treasurer for over 20 years; he’s in charge of putting on the Patriots’ Day Road Race and carnival every year; and he’s remained involved with Lexington’s Youth Commission. Lucente first ran for Select Board in 2017 and has served ever since.
This year’s race is Lucente’s fourth for a seat on the Board. Asked why he is running again, Lucente said he thinks he brings a unique perspective and that having a range of opinions on the Board is important. He was famously the Select Board’s singular “no” vote on the new high school in December.
“It’s not fun being in the minority sometimes but it’s important that there’s a difference of opinion and that we are taking a look at all angles of whatever the issue is in front of us,” he said. “I look at my skillset and background, and I look at what would be missing if I had left, not that others can’t fill that, but I’m employed, I’m a small business owner, I own commercial property in town, I have family in town, so I’m coming at this from all these different angles and I think we need to hear that voice still.”
Lucente’s mother still lives in town. He said having that personal connection to the town’s older population gives him a unique grasp on all the variables that must be considered when making decisions.
“I often think about the residents that are in different phases of life and how they’re reacting to what’s going on in Lexington,” he explained. “It’s important when we put in new rules for, trash, let’s say, and we say, ‘okay, we want everybody to have a new trash barrel,’ it’s like, have we thought about the 90-year-old lady who lives alone and is trying to carry a 64-gallon trash barrel to the end of her driveway?”
Elders are one of the groups that are particularly worried about the cost of living increasing in town, especially since Lexington passed the debt exclusion to pay for the new high school at the end of last year.
“It’s a lot of money, no matter how you slice it,” he said. “When you look at the amount of increase for an elderly resident who’s on a fixed income, which we have lots of people that fall into that, on Social Security, getting a couple grand a month from the federal government, and when their tax bill goes up $2,000 a year, that’s like a month of Social Security gone.”
Mitigating affordability issues is one of Lucente’s goals if reelected.
He argued the Select Board has not done enough to bring costs down and has three main ideas for what the Board can do in the future. First, he thinks it could be fair to give people who have been in Lexington for a long time and have contributed to the town some sort of tax break; second, he plans to reevaluate how the town spends its money; and third, he wants to look at how the town can generate new revenue. He said Lexington could opt in for a local gas tax for gas stations, for example.
“We have the benefit of having a large gas station on Route 128,” Lucente noted. “We should be looking at that as, maybe it’s not millions of dollars, but let’s say it’s $100,000 a year. Well, that’s real money, and that’s important money that will take the burden off the residents.”
Another one of Lucente’s top priorities is transparency.
Lucente cited a lack of transparency as a reason for his “no” vote on the new high school. He stressed that he has a lot of respect for the team designing the project, but feels it was put on a track at an early stage and there wasn’t enough room for resident opinion to be considered afterward.
“There should have been more opportunity to say, ‘is this the right track?’ And there wasn’t enough pausing…I personally went through a number of exercises where I felt that I was speaking and didn’t feel like my voice was heard…I didn’t appreciate it when I heard that residents were also feeling that same way, people I don’t usually hear from who felt suppressed, and with any decision, that’s going to happen, but it was to the degree that I thought, ‘something’s not right to me here.’”
Lucente also believes the town should make it easier for residents to find information they need.
Right now, it takes time for town staff or board members to dig up answers to specific financial questions residents have. Or, residents have to file public records requests — “nobody likes those because that puts it into a legal category of ‘we have to respond by this time and this date with this level of information,’ and I think sometimes people just want an answer,’ Lucente remarked.
Some towns have Open Checkbook, a web-based tool used by governments to provide public access to spending data, including vendor payments, salaries, and pensions, Lucente noted. He thinks Lexington should adopt Open Checkbook to increase transparency.
“When you look at the other communities that have it, you can see every payment to everybody and what category it falls into,” he said. “To me, that is as transparent as you get…Open Checkbook would solve 50 percent of my transparency concerns.”
Lucente doesn’t see Open Checkbook coming to Lexington this year, however.
Another issue Lucente thinks Lexington can improve upon is what he referred to as, ‘where do I go when this thing happens?’
“When I first joined the Board, three streetlights outside my house went out, and I thought, ‘oh, that’s annoying,’ let me go tell someone. Nothing. I didn’t get a response,” Lucente recalled. “A neighbor said to me, ‘hey, what’s going on with the street lights?’ I said, ‘oh, yeah, I’ll take care of it.’ They put in their own request. It was probably a year before the streetlights got fixed.”
The online tool, See Click Fix, could be a solution Lexington could adopt, Lucente said. The tool allows residents to take a photo of an issue, upload it to See Click Fix, write what happened, and from there it goes into a database and becomes a work order. Residents can check on their request and see its status. That clears up the confusion of ‘what do I do or who do I call because of this issue?’
The last priority Lucente and the Observer spoke about was MBTA Communities Act planning. Lucente was also the only Select Board member to vote “no” on Article 34, which called for the town to zone 227 acres of land for MBTA Communities Act housing. He voted “yes” on the motion under Article 2, which called for scaling back that promise to about 90 acres of land.
Lucente thinks the town could do more to plan for how all the incoming housing could affect existing structures and emergency services. He said he has heard residents say, ‘let’s wait and see what the impact is when people move to town’ and others argue, ‘we have to plan now so we have structures in place when people move here.’ Lucente thinks Lexington needs to do a little more of the latter.
He also thinks prioritizing economic development and filling commercial spaces is hugely important so developers want to build in Lexington. He noted how some of the incoming MBTA Communities Act developments will fill existing commercial spaces, which is a loss to the town in terms of expanding commercial tax revenue.
“When we aren’t building up our commercial development and we’re not creating incentives for people to want to build here, we’re actually shifting a lot of the burden on the taxpayers again,” he said.
LexObserver asked every candidate running for local office, ‘who is a politician or leader, local or not, who you look up to?’ Lucente struggled to choose just one. He landed on John McCain and George Washington.
Lucente admires McCain’s respectful nature, unconventional background, the struggles he endured, and his ability to remain a credible politician.
“He’s sort of, of the modern era, someone I think would be fascinating to meet,” Lucente said. “He was someone I thought that had a lot of credibility, he had a resume that didn’t match a lot of other peoples’ resumes, and what he went through in his life — almost dying for the country, battling cancer, and battling when he ran for president — he would have done a lot for the country in a positive and respectful way.”
George Washington is someone he would like to meet because he was the first to lead America’s democracy, which Lucente deeply admires and would like to see continue.
“He did something right at the beginning of setting the country up for success and hopefully we keep it that way,” Lucente said. “Democracy is so important and I think this whole democratic experiment that we’ve been going through for 250 years is the right experiment and I want to see it survive and thrive.”
Leave a comment