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 family has lived at 26 Rindge since 2002, and before that my wife, Jennifer, and I rented half a duplex on Curve Street from a lovely family that we’re still friends with. We’ve got a 9th grader, Nico, at Minuteman Tech and twin 6th graders at Clarke, Cora and Karenna. Growing up and through college, I split time between Arkansas and Arizona. Now and then I’ll sit and ponder how it is I managed to transform into such a New Englander: working at Harvard, rowing on the Charles River, serving as a Town Meeting member in the “birthplace of American liberty.”
Why are you running for Town Meeting?
Not going to lie: I just really enjoy it. It can be challenging to keep a handle on everything that’s happening. My primary goal is to have a clue on how to vote on a pretty wide range of articles. The stretch goals are to take it to the next level of actually influencing the outcomes, or even shaping what comes before Town Meeting. You sort of have to pick some areas to zoom in and focus on, and take the time to engage with the processes, committees and boards that generate the articles. It helps that I’ve made friends and connections with other Town Meeting members, other elected officials, Town staff, etc.
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?
Haha, what? I’m a software developer. I spent 10 years working in online library systems and developing academic search engines, so I know my way around information retrieval. This comes in handy when trying to gather Town data and reports. Lexington’s digitized records archive is under-appreciated for the quality of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and its ability to find references to topics in old documents and meeting minutes.
I was elected captain of my masters rowing team a few years in a row. Does that count?
Most memorably, I’ve engaged with other Town Meeting members on the subject of economic inequality and systemic racism. In 2020, Town Meeting passed a resolution to work towards dismantling systemic racism, and examine our practices and decisions through the lens of racial equity. Last February there were email discussions amongst Town Meeting members having to do with differing tax assessment methods used for multi-family rental properties (apartments) and multi-family ownership properties (condos). It was pointed out that condos are more favorable to the Town from a tax revenue perspective. I chimed in with the observation that adopting any policies that incentivized or favored condos over apartments would run counter to our resolution against systemic racism. This generated a lot of engagement!
On the surface such a policy might sound like “responsible planning,” but renting is frequently the only option available to lower-income households, and people of color are greatly overrepresented among rental households. We should therefore consider that it would not further our goals of making Lexington economically accessible to historically marginalized racial groups. There’s nothing explicitly racist about this hypothetical policy, and I absolutely did not suggest anyone discussing it had racist intentions. That’s not how systemic racism works. I only meant to remind Town Meeting of the existence of the previously mentioned 2020 resolution and the purpose it was meant to achieve.
What is the most important issue in this election to you personally, and what ideas do you have about how to address this issue?
As a member of the Transportation Advisory Committee, I should probably say transportation and traffic safety, and I really do think about and engage with those topics quite a bit, but housing and our limited supply and variety of it is probably my key issue.
If there’s one thing I could wave a magic wand and have people understand is that we really can welcome more people to enjoy this wonderful town, without making things worse for existing residents. We can anticipate and plan for new growth in a sustainable and inclusive way that benefits Lexington. Despite what you may sometimes hear, the result won’t jeopardize our current way of life, compromise our values of environmental stewardship, or strain the capacity of infrastructure or budgets. It’s actually the opposite: new residents contribute to the community, further our climate goals, help pay for existing capital expenditures, and add only marginal costs while generating new tax revenue that is exempt from the 2.5% yearly limit.
Reflexively opposing new growth, on the other hand, is the more risky path. It’s easy to confuse stasis with stability, and a community is not something you’re ever finished building. Preventing more people from being able to join and build our community can and will make things worse. The median age of Lexington residents keeps going up, and school enrollment at the lowest grades has been plummeting. The last time we got a significant new building on Mass Ave in East Lexington was over 40 years ago. There are very negative impacts to continuing with the status quo. Rather than worrying about an overcrowded high school, we should be worried about empty elementary schools being paid for by fixed-income retirees.