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Tomorrow marks 150 years of Newton being a city! This final newsletter of the year and the City Council term offers some reflections on things I learned this year, but first I have some announcements about city matters.
Announcements
Thank you to the Newton Fire Department for your work on the morning of December 13th at the scene of a tragic 2-alarm fire in Ward 5. My thoughts are with the brother and other loved ones of the resident who succumbed to injuries after an initial rescue. Our Fire Chief Gregory Gentile has reminded residents to double-check that smoke alarms are working on every floor, especially if anyone in the home has mobility challenges, because extra seconds and minutes count in being able to evacuate safely.
Due to the volume of organic material chaos left behind from recent storms and in view of the reality of residents’ holiday travels, the Department of Public has extended yard waste pickup through January 12th. (That’s a nice easy perk of having brought the service back in-house instead of contracting it out.)
Earlier this month, I spoke to NBC 10 Boston about Newton’s water bills crisis. I have been raising concerns in writing since the beginning of the year with the City and the Fuller Administration about the potential problems with water bills going uncollected (except for estimate payments) for years. As new meters and transponders are gradually installed, back billing is occurring and bringing the problem unavoidably to the foreground. I recognize that the city has already paid the MWRA for the used water, but I think we might have to accept at some point that it is the responsibility of the city to be regularly billing people all along and that after a certain span of time it doesn't really work to hit people with surprise bills and say that they should have been paying the whole time and submitting corrections. This is starting to feel like a fairly significant breakdown in process, which isn't the fault of the water users. I know 12 months is Newton’s standard period for a zero-interest payment plan to smooth out an unexpected bill, but the city was failing to collect actual readings and send actual bills for much longer than 12 months. It might make more sense to extend the payment plan period for a comparable length of time. We might also need to look at some forgiveness in some (or maybe many) cases.
It was also great to speak to WBZ-4 earlier this month about bringing back economic vitality and new housing to Newton's village centers. The City Council eventually voted through a significant (compromise) rezoning proposal around Newton Centre, Newton Highlands, Eliot, Waban, Newtonville, West Newton, and Auburndale.
Congratulations to the 9th ballot winner of our Newton City Council President election, former and now returning President Marc Laredo. Thank you to my 11 other colleagues who cast votes for me on 3 different ballots at the December caucus for City Council President! Three tied ballots for President with half the Council's support in the middle there for me was pretty neat, especially because I didn't expect to run on any ballots until earlier in the week and I didn't campaign for it. (I also was not on the final ballot.) I am pleased to be appointed Vice Chair of the City Council's Programs & Services Committee for the coming term, and I will also continue to serve on the Finance Committee.
Great work on December 15th by the Newton Upper Falls Area Council and Community Development Corporation on the first Caroling, Cocoa, and Cookies event outside the former train station!
Reflections on 2023
The year 2023 was a particularly reflective year for me, now four years into my City Council tenure. I wanted to share a few of those reflections, observations, conclusions, and experiences.
1. The importance of political vision
To my mind, there are currently three basic genres of politician, regardless of their affiliations, backgrounds, or beliefs.
There is the politician who always defaults to saying no. They are not trying to get to yes, and they are not offering an alternative, and they have to be persuaded that any move other than saying no is a worthwhile idea. Plenty of voters find this compelling, especially if they’re really upset with how things are going. But this politician struggles to govern when in power. Everything tends to grind to a halt until they lose again.
There is the politician who says nothing will ever get better and we should just make the best of a permanently bad situation. The default or baseline assumption is that we probably can’t do much and that all plans should be geared around slowing and managing decline. Looking around at the state of the world, that’s a seductive offer to many voters, despite how deeply pessimistic it is. (I myself sometimes find this outlook tempting, but that kind of hopelessness posing as seriousness is just not who I am in the end.)
Finally, there is the politician who believes in and offers voters a vision for the future. Sometimes it’s a vision that some of us might find alarming depending on our personal beliefs about society and the economy, and sometimes it is a classically upbeat platform for a better world and less pain, but either way that politician promises to do something new and wants to find a way to tell the voters yes instead of no to something they are asking for. The pitch is not about pure opposition, and it is also not about slowing the rate of descent.
I think lately many people who would like to run for office with a positive message have found the hostility in politics to be daunting and deterring, but we would be better off with more of them as candidates and leaders, and it’s probably the only thing that can stop the acrimony. Hope and kindness are a good cure for anger and despair.
2. We have to actively tell voters what we are doing and why
It is as much a false promise to offer policy without politics as it is to offer politics completely unencumbered by policy. Good policy and political vision go hand in hand, and to attempt either one without the other is doomed to failure.
In Newton, I often hear concern about political demonization and demagoguery, whether here at home or federally, and I hear the expression of a desire to “get the politics out” of good governance and wonky policymaking. This is just as foolhardy as pure politics without a scrap of policy.
First, in a space with finite resources (whether the local limits of revenue collection or the planetary limits of our ecology), there will always be a contest over the allocation of resources to competing priorities, and without a political vision or idea of how a community (or beyond) should look, the best case scenario is a haphazard and chaotic distribution, while the worst case scenario is egregious misuse of resources that fuels an eventual political backlash.
Second, there is simply no such thing as “just the facts” or “the numbers are the numbers” or “data-driven” with no politicization. Virtually any number or datapoint can be twisted to suit any agenda, good or bad, and even the collection of data itself to solve a policy problem includes implicit or explicit bias in the decision-making on what questions to ask to collect the data being used. And blasting too much unfiltered, raw data to the public is not the solution either because that lacks any coherence and becomes overwhelming.
And third, even the best, most creative, most ingenious policy ever devised cannot be successfully implemented if those in power do not know how to explain it to the public and obtain their consent. Worse, with the collapse of local media coverage, unexplained policy work comes to be viewed with a skepticism verging on conspiracy theory, which is the fault of the political leaders who fail to communicate and articulate the bigger ideas underlying their choices, not the fault of the public trying to piece things together from fragmentary information.
3. On leadership, consultation, and compromise
Prolonged indecision, self-doubt, and over-consultation do not lend themselves to good governance, but equally true is the reality that too much self-confidence, a closed bubble, and inflexibility are ineffective as well. Whether you are sure your view is correct, or you are afraid there is no alternative, there is always a choice. Ask around and you’ll hear new ones.
Decision-making processes for big choices and major proposals should consult a wide enough circle to get fresh ideas, hear dissenting voices, and get consent from the stakeholders and power blocs that can either thwart or implement a decision – but those decisions and consultations also need to be made in a timely and firm manner. It cannot be drawn out, which hardens minor differences of opinion into true animosity, and it cannot be constantly back and forth, which creates destabilizing and often expensive uncertainty for everyone. Nor can everything be decided by committee, if it is the responsibility of a single office. For the big things, one person has to be the final decider. (The situation differs for a legislative body.) And if the situation changes or the plan goes wrong when implemented, a good leader is adaptable enough and sufficiently open to (and hearing) criticism to adjust course and take responsibility for the mistakes.
If it becomes clear through the process of consultation on a key decision that there is enough disagreement to require a significant compromise (or that refusal to compromise in one area might generate lingering ill feeling in an unrelated area where obtaining consent could be more difficult), the best and most strategic version of a compromise is one that gives everyone some of what they want – but the most dangerous and alienating compromise is to give some people everything of what they wanted while giving others nothing that they wanted. It is always easier to go back and work on an issue again if everyone in a coalition agrees that there is more to be done and that they have a self-interest in continued work. It is very difficult to return to work on an issue where some people got all the things they hoped for and then checked out of the process.
4. Incrementalism is a result, not a process or purpose
Progress by increments might be the reality of politics and governance, and it often does help to persuade and reassure skeptics and doubters of the merits of wider change, but incrementalism is not itself the goal. Political vision develops a view of the destination we are trying to reach with policies we propose. Incremental, intermediate steps we reach on that journey via compromise can be minor victories that we celebrate to recruit new converts to the broader political vision by demonstrating forward momentum, but they should be lauded for the good they do and not for the process by which they were reached. There is nothing inherently noble or aspirational in consensus, even if it is sometimes necessary to manage competing power centers, and voters prefer real forward momentum on solutions more than they are eager for a unanimous vote. Additionally, these compromise measures should not be dead ends for years or decades at a time. Incremental policy reforms should ideally open the way to continue making more improvements and not cut them off or forestall them.
Choices we make now should clear future obstacles, not add more of them. It is better to do nothing today than to restrict the possibilities of future leaders, unless that is explicitly the objective of a policy choice rather than the byproduct of expedience or desperation in the present. But I also have a great deal of confidence in future leaders to make good decisions if we give them flexibility instead of foreclosing some possibilities for lack of faith today.
We should always be striving to set ourselves (as a community) up for future success and not constraining our future out of a gloomy conviction that it would be irresponsible to imagine a brighter future with more resources available. Because local resources are in no small part a direct function of public confidence in the community’s future and its government, fiscal austerity is not synonymous with fiscal prudence. Disinvestment creates its own decline in future revenues. Although we cannot allocate funds to everything we want to support or provide – that is why political prioritization of policies is unavoidable – and we will sometimes have to make cuts, we should be careful not to prune back too far the core services (e.g. public works, public schools, and public safety) whose reliable functioning undergird long-term public confidence and in turn decides our fiscal outlook. It is better to do the important things well first than to try to fund everything a little bit but not enough to meet expectations.
Major expansions to programs and services cannot and should not be a purely top-down process, even when elected officials are advancing a cause, because securing adequate and permanent resources to support them requires neighbor-to-neighbor organizing to convince a majority of the voting public that it is in the community’s broad self-interest to fund and sustain these services. Without that, they are vulnerable to future cuts.
5. A community for everyone, with continuity to the past and culture for the many
An effective political vision shows a path forward that bridges the past to the future with an appropriate balance between familiar continuity and the growth and change necessary to adapt to life in an ever-evolving economy and society. As a fifth-generation Newtonian, I am for historic preservation of the things that make this community feel uniquely like home, and I am also for growing and diversifying our local economic activity and population to provide us with new revenues for services and more users for the expensive but under-capacity fixed-assets we already have. I want people who already live here in Newton to be excited to live here, and I also want new people to feel just as excited about getting the chance to live here.
Some of the impediments to that growth and change are more mundane facets of economic opportunity, some of which are difficult to control within a wider society and some of which can be ameliorated through policy adjustments if that is a political value we want to address. Others are cultural obstacles, which also flow from policy. Do we have a welcoming culture? An engaging culture? An accessible culture? Are the community’s amenities and features for everyone or only for a few?
And though I have noted the importance of adequately funding core services to fortify public trust and strengthen future revenues, I also believe that supporting arts, recreation, and culture will always be a crucial component of strengthening a sense of community and a sense of place. For many of us, these are the things that give our lives meaning and fulfillment. Investing in them is not only economic activity itself, as well as making our community an attractive place to live, but it also provides an intangible revitalization to our spirits and an immeasurable harmony between people.
I hope these reflections give you something to contemplate, too, and I wish you all a happy, hopeful, fulfilling, and peaceful new year in 2024.