Bob Creech learned to be frugal as a child.
In a conversation with the Observer about his candidacy for Planning Board, he recalled visiting his grandfather in Florida when he was young. When driving downhill, his grandfather would turn the engine of his car off.
“Save gas,” he recalled his grandfather saying.
“There’s a little bit of that in me, I hate waste,” Creech said.
Creech grew up in Quincy. He studied math at Boston College and worked in the Netherlands and France for about eight years.
After buying his house in Lexington, Creech took on various home renovation projects. He didn’t have much home-improvement experience, but was interested in construction and figured he could learn. He built a deck, put an addition onto his house to build a new kitchen, and he redid the bathrooms.
Asked how he figured out how to do those projects, he told the Observer, “you just figure it out.”
“There’s no magic,” he said. “If you don’t know how to do it, you just have to take more time. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it.”
Creech learned a lot about construction through those projects. That has given him the ability to speak developers’ and builders’ language over the past nine years as a Planning Board Member. He’s running for his fourth term this year.
“I can use terminology that they understand and they respect that more than if you ask them to do something that they know doesn’t make any sense,” Creech said.
Creech recalled a Planning Board hearing for an applicant who wanted to turn a property on Meriam Street into condos. Creech asked if they were going to insulate the development, to which they said, ‘no,’ he recalled.
“I said, ‘okay, you’re going to have a three-bedroom affordable unit in there, available for $368,000, which is unbelievable — so this is somebody for whom that was the affordable price — and you’re going to stick them with a $600-a-month electric bill?’ I wasn’t getting the yes I wanted, so I said, ‘what’s the big deal? Tear the ceiling down and insulate it.’ I know how that’s done and that helps,” he said, “I was talking his language. And they did it, by the way.”
Creech has no problem speaking up when he has a suggestion he thinks is fair. In another instance, a developer proposed building a four-story walk-up in town, which he thought was wrong.
“You have to walk up 34 steps to get to a 1,000 square foot condo?” Creech said. “You know, that’s not right.”
In response to that pushback, the developer said he would sue if the town didn’t accept their application.
Creech knows the only way to ensure an instance like that doesn’t happen again is by changing the town bylaw.
“The bylaw is too loose. It’s not his fault, it’s our fault,” Creech argued. “The bylaw should say something about the elevations, it should say something about how you access open space. The MBTA Communities is by right and there’s a limit to what we can do with special residential developments, but we can shape the town bylaw.”
Creech was part of the Planning Board when the group unanimously put forward Article 34, the town’s multi-family zoning proposal to comply with the MBTA Communities Act. He later voted in favor of the citizen petition known as Article 2, which scaled back the original plan in response to many residents’ concerns about the pace and scale of growth.
Creech vows to continue to speak up for residents’ interests. He’ll also work to be fair to developers.
“I’ve always seen my job as to work with the applicant with a goal to arrive at a good outcome for all the stakeholders,” he said. “Fairness to the applicant is part of what I think we owe them because they’re spending money, it’s in the bylaw, and they want to do something.”
One of Creech’s goals if elected is to ensure bylaws are written for a layperson to understand.
During a Town Meeting session in the past few years, members complained the zoning changes being submitted weren’t clear, he said.
“We had people standing up and saying, ‘if I don’t understand it, my vote is no’…It’s our obligation on the Planning Board to make all of this absolutely clear to Town Meeting,” he argued.
That’s because the bylaws are written in legalese, which no layperson would understand unless they work in the legal industry or as a municipal planner.
“It’s like looking at JavaScript without a specification,” Creech said.
“If we had first a plain English description of what we’re doing and how we’re going to do it,” Town Meeting members would better understand what they’re voting on and could maybe even pick up some of the legalese over time, Creech argued.
Sustainability is another topic Creech cares a lot about. By doing work on his own house, he has learned tricks that benefit the environment and save money. The main one? Insulation.
“Drafts are the enemy,” he said.
Most new houses are built with lots of insulation and have virtually no drafts, he noted. When a house is sufficiently insulated, less warm air escapes in the winter and less warm air gets inside in the summer. That means the heating and cooling systems don’t have to work as hard, which could bring bills down for residents. The systems working less hard also means less energy output into the environment, which is better for the climate.
“It’s win, win, win — the developer wins, the environment wins, and the new homeowner wins,” he said. “And the comfort level is much better.”
The cost of electric and gas bills is a significant stressor for many homeowners and tenants right now. In Massachusetts, temperatures have generally stayed below freezing for the past month or so. In times like this when bills spike, Creech thinks it could be helpful for there to be a system where residents publish — not necessarily under their name, but under their address and the cubic feet of their house — what their monthly electric and gas bills are.
“[The system could ask,] ‘What is your electric bill per month? And what kind of system do you have?’ And share that with all the residents. And when you find somebody saying, ‘why is that person’s bill so much less than mine?’ And somehow have those people be able to get in touch. I think there would be great benefit to that,” he said.
Creech hopes to take these ideas to the Planning Board as a member for one last term. He plans to step away from the Board after three more years to spend more time with his family and give someone else in town the opportunity to join the Board.
“I’m getting old, and it will be 12 years — I think that’s enough,” he said. “And my kids need more of my time now than they did 20 years ago.”
LexObserver asked every candidate running for local office, ‘who is a politician or leader, local or not, who you look up to?’ Creech said the late congressman and civil rights leader, John Lewis.
“He was the fairest, nicest person in Washington,” Creech said.
He looks up to Lewis because of his balanced view, his willingness to compromise, and his ability to get things done for the people in the country.
“This party system is really tricky. Personally, I think we should go to a parliamentary system with multiple parties because this is not working. And Congress has never worked really well. If you look through history and if you read McCullough’s book on John Adams, it’s never worked really well, except during times of war, when they do work together — well, we don’t want that,” Creech argued. “In a democratic environment, especially a two-party system, niceness and compromise are important, and John Lewis was that.”
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