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Housing is where I’d start. Let rural towns cluster houses on part of a parcel and leave the rest open, instead of forcing the same lot sizes everywhere. Let towns meet the state’s affordable housing law together as a region, so a town of 900 people isn’t solving it alone. And rewrite the state’s housing programs so they work in towns without water & sewer, because right now those programs assume a system most of our towns will never have. I also support rent stabilization bill HR 2328 and allowing towns to enact a real estate transfer fee on high end properties to fund affordable housing HR 3056.
Our wages don’t match our cost of living, which is why I support indexing the minimum wage with inflation and Medicare for All,
I spent the first two decades of my career on climate, including building the coalition that helped pass the state’s Global
Warming Solutions Act. Passing it was the hard part then. Hitting the targets without driving up people’s bills is the hard part
now.
Where we put things matters most. Put solar on rooftops, parking lots and land that’s already been developed, not on forests,
farms and open fields. Most of the fights that stall these projects are about siting, and most of them are avoidable.
Utilities need watching. Your electric bill should not be paying for a utility’s lobbying, advertising and trade association dues.
And the companies that call older people with confusing electricity offers that end up costing more must stop.
Greenfield’s health insurance premiums rose nearly 40 percent in two years. Proposition 2½ caps what we can raise, and
health insurance now eats most of it. Which means insurance premiums, not the town, are setting our school budget.
Towns across this district are in the same place.
That’s why I support single payer, and why I helped pass a Greenfield City Council resolution backing it.
In the meantime, here is how I work on this. When Greenfield moved onto the state’s insurance pool, I insisted we first adopt
the option that keeps our unions at the bargaining table, so the change would be negotiated rather than handed down. I
brought the mayor, the council and the unions together, the contract was signed within 24 hours, saving 1.2 million
I got into this when proposed budget cuts threatened staffing and arts programs in my kids’ schools. We organized, we spoke up, and funding was restored. Parents shouldn’t have to win that fight every year.
Two things push our towns toward overrides: the 1st is a state funding formula that assumes costs fall when enrollment does. They don’t. The smallest school still needs a principal and a nurse. More than 80% of districts are now frozen at old aid levels. The formula must keep up with inflation, rural aid needs a real increase, and the state should cover the full cost of busing kids across large districts.
The 2nd is health insurance, which takes up the allowable increase in most town budgets. We need increases in UGGA from the state,
MA runs its own elections, town by town, and it should stay that way. In most of our towns that means one clerk
doing the entire job, often part-time. So start there. Clerks need steady state funding for equipment, training and computer security, not one-time grants they have to write applications for. And they need backup. If a federal agency demands our voter rolls, that answer should come from the Secretary of the Commonwealth, not from a part-time clerk in a town of 700 standing alone. I would not hand Massachusetts voter files to a federal agency demanding them outside the law.
Election workers need protection from threats and harassment too.
I have advocated for same day voter registration for years to make it easier to vote.
Simply put, I am appalled by what is happening in this country. The federal government is dehumanizing our neighbors. MA just passed the PROTECT Act, which keeps federal immigration agents from making warrantless arrests at courthouses, schools, child care centers and hospitals, and stops state agencies from signing new agreements with ICE. I support it and I’d defend it. I’d go further and end the 1 agreement still in place, at the Department of Correction, the last of its kind in New England.
I’d fund lawyers, too. Nobody should face deportation alone.
Locally, I’ve talked with our police chief about the policies that keep Greenfield’s department out of this work, and the city is updating the safe city ordinance I supported 8 years ago.
