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Highlands Village Day Office Hours Tomorrow
Tomorrow will be the Newton Highlands Village Day on Lincoln St from 11-4. I will be at my pushcart for office hours again. Come by to ask me things in person instead of having to type or call! It’s also a good opportunity to take a look around and think about suggestions you might wish to make to the Planning Department as part of its ongoing community input process on redesigning and beautifying the streetscape of the village center. (We held our first public session on that last week.)
Last month I attended the Waban Village Day for a similar office hours session with my cart, and it was a success despite the intense heat and resulting smaller turnout.
Temporary Changes to Waban Square
By now if you’ve gone through Waban Square in the past several weeks, you will have noticed that the Department of Public Works has added temporary “flexi-posts” to Beacon St around the intersections with Windsor Rd and Woodward St. This was undertaken in response to a community meeting that followed a near-miss of a vehicle attempting to pass a vehicle stopped at the crosswalk for an elementary school student to cross. This is hardly the first such incident there. The temporary posts now restrict the lane widths and the turn radius in several directions, so that drivers will be deterred from trying to pass unsafely in a heavily pedestrian area.
In the longer term, we all recognize that these intersections probably need to be substantially reconfigured in a major capital project, but this temporary step was a cost-effective interim fix to the situation and will provide the Department of Public Works with more information on how drivers use the intersection and what permanent changes would need to be made.
Similarly, we will also be holding a community meeting at the end of this month to discuss upcoming safety improvements on Chestnut St between Beacon and Commonwealth. Keep an eye out for that invitation going out soon.
Upcoming Political Events
I am promoting three upcoming progressive political events in Newton:
1. This Sunday (June 12) at 5 PM, State Auditor candidate Chris Dempsey will hold a fundraiser at Councilor Alicia Bowman’s house at 19 Chestnut Terrace in Newton Centre.
2. On Thursday June 16 at 5:30 PM, State Attorney General candidate Quentin Palfrey will be holding a meet and greet with Newton voters at the home of Councilor Vicki Danberg at 30 Chase St in Newton Centre. (You can also watch on zoom for this one.)
In both cases, I think these are the clear choices for the September Democratic primary.
3. Progressive Newton, recently reorganized, will be holding a social event and kick-off meeting on Sunday June 19 at 6 PM at 16 Wyoming Rd in Nonantum. (Please RSVP in advance here for planning purposes.) After some socializing, we'll be ratifying by-laws and electing officers. We also want to begin organizing for the Fair Share Amendment and against gig worker misclassification, two of the progressive ballot campaigns for the November statewide election. If you're a progressive Newton resident and prospective member (any supporter of Progressive Mass is welcome) looking to get involved in some meaningful issue advocacy, especially beyond the local level but below the federal level, we would be so happy if you could join us on 6/19! Snacks & drinks will be provided. Please bring masks.
FY23 Budget Recap
Last month, after extensive committee meetings with each department and after plenty of vigorous debate in the full City Council, our FY23 budget season process came to an end. Normally it would end with an affirmative vote on the Mayor’s proposed budget by the Council, rarely with some revisions downward. But in this case, although we were actually fairly happy with most departments' proposed budgets, we were unable to reach an affirmative vote at all, and it will take effect automatically at the start of the new fiscal year.
The Council is not empowered to add or move around money in the budget process, but I was one of 13 councilors at the end who cast a negative vote in symbolic protest over the insufficient allocation of funding to the Newton Public Schools, which will result in reductions of intervention staff at the middle school level for students struggling with literacy and math skills and in need of extra counseling.
While I agree that there is a longer-term structural challenge with the finances, I believed and argued that we should have been willing to spend more of the federal ARPA dollars on these vital intervention programs for a couple more years. The Mayor argued that this would be fiscally irresponsible because these are not long-term revenues, but I would simply respond that we were never suggesting they needed to be permanently maintained; instead, we believed that there was an acute, short-term crisis related to the recent learning disruptions of the pandemic period – and additionally that there will be a reduced enrollment coming through the schools pretty soon anyway – and therefore it would be possible to reduce the level of intervention staffing safely in a couple years after we have contained and reduced the crisis.
Unfortunately, some of the city’s politicians have made clear that they believed it was time to impose “fiscal discipline” arbitrarily on the school system as a form of leverage in future negotiations with the unions representing educators and other workers in the schools. They have not been very quiet about articulating this belief. It boggles the mind that such discipline would be imposed on the backs of struggling and vulnerable middle schoolers, not only when there is a remaining pot of federal emergency money specifically intended to deal with the lingering fallout of the pandemic including learning loss, but also when we all know that leaving such learning delays unaddressed can only balloon into substantially more expensive Individualized Education Programs for those students as required by law.
I am outraged on behalf of these students, their parents, and their educators, and I only wish I could have had the power to do more than cast a protest vote against this decision.
Recent events
Here is a roundup of a few of the events I’ve attended in the past few months around Ward 5 or Newton as a whole:
Congratulations to the NSHS Class of 2022 grads this week. It was great to attend the ceremony with some of my fellow City Councilors including two parents of newly minted alums, Councilors Brenda Noel and David Kalis! (Also congratulations to the Newton North grads, of course, but I did not make it to that event.)
Last weekend I attended the reopening of the Martin Poetry Path in Upper Falls and dropped by a couple of the many Porchfest concerts happening in Waban. Last month, there were other similar events I was able to attend including the Newton Upper Falls Walking Tour (which was a smash hit, drawing residents from all over Newton) and the Newton Multicultural Festival at the Suzuki School of Newton in Waban Square.
Last month, I participated in two organized labor activities. The Waban Starbucks in Ward 5 had a unanimous victory for their union election at the National Labor Relations Board, making them the first unionized Starbucks in Newton during the nationwide wave of Starbucks shops unionizing themselves. I joined my City Council colleagues Holly Ryan and Andreae Downs for a quick victory celebration in Cold Spring Park with the Waban Starbucks organizers after the vote count was completed on the live stream. It was great to hear about their process. One of the organizers grew up right here in Waban and I have known her since elementary school; so, this is certainly a homegrown union drive. Congratulations to all of them!
Earlier in the month, the Greater Boston Labor Council organized a regional breakfast in Waltham for municipal elected officials to meet with various unions and talk about how we can support worker rights and local jobs, fight wage theft and worker misclassification, and more. I attended the event with Councilors Alicia Bowman, Holly Ryan, and Emily Norton. We talked to and heard from unionists (including some working in Newton) representing plumbers, building trades, insulators, food and commercial workers, DPW crews, and more. Many also said they were trying to internally build progressive change inside their unions, too.
I’m also a proud supporter of the Newton Community Farm and it was a pleasure to attend the spring seedling sale this year, even if nearly all my purchases were instantly eaten by rabbits, except for my official Farm supporter t-shirt.
And finally, it was also a privilege and an honor to attend two events for respected Ward 5 elders: a going-away party for Bob Burke and his sister Joanne (two legendary political organizers from Newton Highlands who are moving to an independent living facility) and a 100th Birthday party for family friend Percy Nelson of Waban. These kinds of events are the real fun of being a City Councilor!