Sign up to receive Ward and political newsletters by email here.

Happy holiday season and best wishes for a new year. This is the final newsletter of my first term in office, in which I will be covering a few things the City Council worked on since Thanksgiving, as we wrapped up the year. On January 1, the Council will reconvene for a new term with the same 24 members and the same President and Vice President (Susan Albright and Rick Lipof), and so we will be continuing directly with much of the unfinished work we had been progressing on this term.

This week’s newsletter covers a “Safety Zone” on Beethoven Ave & Allen Ave, Braceland Playground & Fields, a resolution on school bus pass fees, Newton’s new Affordable Housing Trust, Council oversight of recent elections administration problems, and more.

Some Ward 5 Announcements

- Green Line: The D Line Track & Signal Replacement Project has been completed, the T announced on December 10, which will buy us some relief from the disruptions at least until the upcoming D Line station renovations at Waban, Eliot, and other locations.

- Traffic Council: Councilors Downs, Crossley, and I on behalf of numerous residents proposed to the Traffic Council the creation of two 20 MPH “safety zones” on either side of Richardson Field along Beethoven Ave and Allen Ave. Safety Zones are a new option for us and Newton has recently implemented six of them in other locations. The state category for this particular safety zone is the playground there and they will extend 500 feet past the playground in both directions on both streets. The proposals were unanimously approved in Traffic Council on December 16. (An appeals period will expire January 5. After that, signs would be posted.) The public has been overwhelmingly in favor of this effort to cut speeds on those two streets, and it is being undertaken in conjunction with other street calming approaches implemented there such as the Beethoven Ave raised intersection table and the Allen Ave bumpouts and stop signs.

- Braceland in Newton Upper Falls: Many Newton Upper Falls residents have been waiting for years to see the fields and park at Braceland get a renovation, and as their Ward Councilor I have been pushing for that as well this year, while the city looks at overhauling several of its field and park facilities. I’m pleased to report that we are taking the first steps now with Braceland, in recognition that this is a rapidly growing neighborhood in need of improved amenities. Here is an update from Parks & Rec Commissioner Nicole Banks:

“We have interviewed the design/engineer firms who have bid on our fields RFP. We anticipate awarding the contract soon. I am looking to schedule the Braceland community meeting [on Zoom] somewhere in the first 3 weeks of January. [...] Though the project is primarily about improving athletic fields, we are certainly listening to input about other park amenities including accessibility, trail connectivity, trees/shade, and lighting. [...] The field improvement projects are somewhat interrelated in that we must look at where we can accommodate displaced groups when we have a field under construction. Therefore, we probably wouldn’t be improving all fields at the same time but this won’t stop us from doing the planning work so a project is ready to go.”

School bus pass fees resolution

School bus pass fees, added when I was in middle school, are a hot-button issue in Newton. The City Council is often situated oddly when it comes to the education budget because we are required each year to approve or reject the bottom line number for the department, but we don’t actually have the authority to add money to it or make line item cuts to it. So, by the time we get to the end of the budget process, if we have a concern about spending, fees, or revenues on the Newton Public Schools side, it is effectively already too late for us to do anything about it. We had a tense exchange on this point last spring, and to try to avoid that problem in the next budget cycle, we decided to offer a resolution now, well ahead of time, asking for money to be moved from the City side to the NPS side specifically to cover the elimination of bus pass revenues, which represent several hundred thousand dollars each year.

The resolution – which I sponsored with the support of Councilors Bowman, Crossley, Danberg, Greenberg, Kalis, Krintzman, Laredo, Leary, Lipof, Lucas, Malakie, Markiewicz, Noel, Norton, Oliver, Ryan, and Wright – had the following text:

“Whereas, free public transportation to public schools promotes equity; and whereas free public transportation in general would advance our municipal climate action goals; and whereas reducing traffic congestion in Newton is a major desire of residents currently, therefore be it resolved that the sense of the Council is that the Mayor should make available additional funding to the Newton Public Schools in the next budget cycle for the purposes of school bus pass fees being eliminated, without adversely affecting other NPS budget items.”

We had a final discussion on December 8 in the Programs & Services Committee about this resolution, after many discussions on the issue over the course of the two-year term.

We certainly recognize the immense challenges in providing school bus service today. Often the requests for proposals only receive one bid, which is exorbitantly expensive and still requires finding a place to store the contractor’s buses when they are not in use, and the costs are rising dramatically every time. There are also significant driver shortages, especially after many drivers died in the pandemic or understandably sought and found other jobs that paid better as free-floating private sector wages begin to rise in contrast with public-sector and public contractor wages.

But we argue that the school bus system should be viewed not only as a fundamental supporting piece of our public education system but also as an integral part of our transportation network systems in Newton. For that reason, our goal should be to get as many students using our buses as possible, even though that would indeed make it more expensive to provide. Some of us, including me, also wonder whether we ought to be contemplating bringing the school bus system in-house instead of keeping it outsourced with so many factors beyond our control.

Ultimately, my resolution to the Mayor in favor of eliminating Newton School Bus Pass Fees passed the full City Council this week with 21 votes in support. A 22nd supporter from the co-sponsors list was absent. Opposing the resolution this week were Council President Susan Albright and Finance Committee Chair Becky Grossman, who have both cited their concern over the rapidly growing cost of the school bus contracts and argued that we had not offered or suggested an offset elsewhere in the budget to cover the lost revenue from eliminating bus passes, which is a fair difference of opinion, although I don’t believe that is our role in the budget process.

Election Oversight

One role of the City Council’s Programs & Services Committee is oversight of the administration of our city elections by the Clerk’s Office and the Election Commission. We felt (and our brand new City Clerk Carol Moore, who took over the office after the November election, agreed) that there had been some unacceptable problems in the administration of our three municipal elections in 2021, which needed to be rectified before our next election, and so we held a thorough committee discussion about that on December 8.

The biggest problem was that absentee/mail-in ballots did not get sent out early enough for the March, September, or November elections, and this effectively disenfranchised a number of voters who were out of town, especially students. A small handful of absentee ballots arrived back too late to be counted, and we’re not sure how many people didn’t bother to try sending them back. Some of this trouble is a result of a new process with a much greater volume of absentee ballots, without additional resources from the state, but some of it was due to scheduling problems or bottlenecks with the ballot printing vendor, and so on, and of course the biggest problem remains the unpredictably slower USPS service. Clearly, we will need to get the show on the road earlier in order to be sure that ballots arrive to voters outside of Newton with more than enough time to fill them out and return them by mail before 8 PM on our next Election Day.

We are also continuing to have staff shortages for Election Day itself, and our poll worker compensation will likely need to be increased to match surrounding peer communities. We are also moving forward on replacing our old and worn-out voting machines finally, too.

I want to emphasize that we do not at this time believe any of these problems with the election administration affected the outcomes of any races, because there were none close enough to have been swayed a different way by the problems, but the problems themselves cannot be allowed to happen again, and if the results had been closer, there would indeed have been questions about the legitimacy of the results.

There was also a problem with the release of the official final results due to the mishandling of an Excel spreadsheet, but this was a publication error and also did not affect any actual results and was swiftly corrected. Protocols for the process of preparing the final results sheet will be strengthened going forward.

Affordable Housing Trust Established

The City Council closed out the term with the formal establishment of an affordable Housing Trust, under the state framework for such an entity. It would be funded by dedicated housing funds from the Community Preservation Act revenues (and ideally in the future from a small real estate transaction fee). The Trust would allow the City of Newton to act more quickly to jump on properties as they become available and to help low-income housing developers manage the costs of a project.

Newton 4 Our Future Residential Climate Action

Newton’s Energy Coach Liora Silkes emailed me the following info to include in the newsletter.

“Together we can meet Newton’s goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2050. Because about 60% of the City’s greenhouse gas emissions come from residential buildings and vehicles, we encourage you to start by taking action in your own home. There’s something for everyone — renters, homeowners, students — to do, and the City is here to help you take your next step. We call this planning 4 Our Future because there are four key actions that make a huge impact: insulating, installing heat pumps, driving electric, and using renewable energy such as solar. Learn more about how to make your home climate-friendly, reduce energy costs, be more comfortable on the Climate and Sustainability website.”